"Perpetual motion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mountains of Georgia, the neighborhood of Constantinople, the holy city of Jerusalem, and the spicy groves of Arabia Felix. Instead of resigning himself to the luxury of his harem, the shepherd king, both in peace and war, was in action and in the field. By the perpetual motion of the royal camp, each province was successively blessed with his presence; and he is said to have perambulated twelve times the wide extent of his dominions, which surpassed the Asiatic reign of Cyrus and the caliphs. Of these expeditions, the most pious and splendid was the pilgrimage ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... traveled hard, and had heaps of negroes all contracted for, and everything going along just right, he couldn't get the laws passed and down the whole thing tumbled. And there in Kentucky, when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business, why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and hammered us out of bed and told the whole thing in a whisper with the doors bolted ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... rose quickly, as if to take note of the tapestries and count the rafters, but gained the door before anyone else, and relaxing his sphincter in advance, he hummed a tune on his way to the retreat; arrived there he was compelled, like La Balue, to murmur words of excuse to this student of perpetual motion, shutting the door with as promptitude as he opened it; and he came back burdened with an accumulation which seriously impeded his private channels. And in the same way went to guests one after the other, without being able to unburden themselves of their sauces, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... behavior; for everything used to be so plain among them. She would even have tried for some comfort from Willie, whose mind was very large upon all social questions. But Willie had solved at last the problem of perpetual motion, according to his own conviction, and locked himself up with his model all day; and the world might stand still, so long as that went on. "Oh, what would I give ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... branches, jerking their tiny bodies from twig to twig in the shrubbery, hanging head downward, like a nuthatch, and most industriously feeding every second upon the tiny insects and larvae hidden beneath the bark and leaves. They seem to be the feathered expression of perpetual motion. And how dainty and charming these tiny sprites are! They are not at all shy; you may approach them quite close if you will, for the birds are simply too intent on their business to be ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... kept her temper, under such provocation as this, may be found when the mathematician is found who can square the circle, or the inventor who can discover perpetual motion. With a furious look, Mrs. Westerfield expressed her opinion of the philosopher in two words: "You brute!" She failed to produce the ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... the green plant may be said to be the only living worker whose labour directly results in the production of that vital capital which is the necessary antecedent of human labour.* Nor is this statement a paradox involving perpetual motion, because the energy by which the plant does its work is supplied by the sun—the primordial capitalist so far as we are concerned. But [156] it cannot be too strongly impressed upon the mind that sunshine, air, water, the best soil that is to be found on the surface ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... remembered that he had not eaten, discovered that he was hungry, and ordered some sandwiches and beer. Still staring, the figures began to differentiate themselves, although they all appeared, somehow, in perpetual motion; hurrying, though seated. It was like gazing at a quivering cinematograph. Here and there ribbons of smoke curled upward, adding volume to the blue cloud that hung over the tables, which in turn was dissipated in spots by ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... so mercifully between the Saturday and Monday) beside the enisled Marble Arch, I spent half an hour in listening to the astonishing oratory that was going on there. Although I had not done this for many, many years, there was so little change in the proceedings that I gained a new impression of perpetual motion. The same—or to all intents and purposes the same—leather lungs were still at it, either arraigning the Deity or commending His blessed benefactions. As invariably of old, a Hindu was present; but whether he was the Hindu of the Middle Ages or a new ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... at the time, but I know that we had only to walk through the perpetual motion of Paris, across a bridge, and down a few steps on the other side, to find the little steamer that took us by the river to the Tower. We might have gone by omnibus or by fiacre, but if we had we should never have known what a street the Seine is, sliding through Paris, brown in ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... prepared to witness their violation at any moment and to remain unastonished. For see, if the compass lied and the sun did not keep its engagements, why should not objects lose their mutual attraction and why should not a few bushel baskets of force be annihilated? Even perpetual motion became possible, and I was in a frame of mind prone to purchase Keeley- Motor stock from the first enterprising agent that landed on the Snark's deck. And when I discovered that the earth really rotated on its axis 366 times a year, while there ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... with her eternal dancing; but let us keep her in perpetual motion to-night, just to teach her a lesson, until she herself ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... disprove the truth of immediate states of feeling. But this leads us to the doctrine of the universal flux, about which a battle-royal is always going on in the cities of Ionia. 'Yes; the Ephesians are downright mad about the flux; they cannot stop to argue with you, but are in perpetual motion, obedient to their text-books. Their restlessness is beyond expression, and if you ask any of them a question, they will not answer, but dart at you some unintelligible saying, and another and ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... gloom and glamour of the old South Middle dining-hall, we had going the usual number of students' stories about rewards offered by the Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter,— stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of the longitude, it was reserved for Q.[1] to make the happy hit and to explain it to the ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... of Lady Circe's Piggy-wigs. And weazels at their slumbers They'll trepan; To get sunbeams from cucumbers They've a plan. They've a firmly rooted notion They can cross the Polar Ocean, And they'll find Perpetual Motion ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... the same. Yet the ray has a seeming identity, though even the very ripples of light that cause it are themselves ever changing, ever renewed. Could not the soul be such a ray, illuminating the atoms that pass through it, and itself a perpetual motion, a constant renewal?" ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and every woman Eve. We are still marching bravely on, conquering Nature, but how weary and sad we are getting! The old joy in life and gaiety of heart have vanished, though we do sometimes pause for a few moments in our long forced march to watch the labours of some pale mechanician, seeking after perpetual motion, and indulge in a little, dry, cackling laugh at his expense." And again: "For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shamefaced to hide itself in dim churches flourishes greatly, filling the soul with ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... strain me a fair tarpauling, and in that I stick my onions, cut in halves: the other Is full of loop-holes, out at which I thrust The noses of my bellows; and those bellows I keep, with water-works, in perpetual motion, Which is the easiest matter of a hundred. Now, sir, your onion, which doth naturally Attract the infection, and your bellows blowing The air upon him, will show, instantly, By his changed colour, if there be contagion; Or else remain as fair ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... what I'll do. You go out there and look over his setup. If you can't find his gimmick in half a day, I'll come out and show it to you. But I warn you, some of these things are very tricky—like the old perpetual motion machines. You've got to have your wits about you. Is ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... lines of what you have here," the colonel said dryly, "except that Keely at least had an explanation for where he was getting his power. Back around 1874, a man named John Keely claimed he had invented a wonderful new power source. He called it a breakthrough in the field of perpetual motion. An undiscovered source of power, he said, controlled by harmony. He had a machine in his lab which would begin to turn a flywheel when he blew a chord on a harmonica. He could stop it by blowing a sour note. He claimed that this power was all around, but that it was ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)
... FROM USE OF LEVER.—This lack of knowledge of first principles, has bred and is now breeding, so-called perpetual motion inventors (?) all over the civilized world. It is surprising how many men, to say nothing of boys, actually believe that power can be made without the expenditure of something which ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... facility. There was, however, but a limited supply of heads willing to be fingered, and Maurice returned to the most abiding of his tastes, and in an empty room at the Old Court laboured assiduously to find the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there is more heat and less pressure. To this Opinion I was somewhat the more induced by the relations I have met with in Geographical Writers, of drawing fresh Water from the bottom of the Sea, which is salt above. I cannot now stand to examine, whether this natural perpetual motion may not artificially be imitated: Nor can I stand to answer the Objections which may be made against this my Supposition: As, First, How it comes to pass, that there are sometimes salt Springs much higher then the Superficies of the Water? ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... water) as it is. There can't a drowned-out mine peep its head out but I'm thrust upon it. Well, well, it always was the trick of my countrymen to make a good thing too common. Better rust to death than be scoured to nothing by this perpetual motion." ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... and looks upon Discretion and good House-Wifery, as little domestick Virtues, unbecoming a Woman of Quality. She thinks Life lost in her own Family, and fancies herself out of the World, when she is not in the Ring, the Play-House, or the Drawing-Room: She lives in a perpetual Motion of Body and Restlessness of Thought, and is never easie in any one Place, when she thinks there is more Company in another. The missing of an Opera the first Night, would be more afflicting to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... must necessarily be finite; and consequently, that Power which is in Body is finite too. If therefore we can find any Power, which produces an Infinite Effect, 'tis plain that it is not in Body. Now we find, that the Heav'n is mov'd about with a Perpetual Motion, without any Cessation. Therefore if we affirm the Eternity of the World, it necessarily follows that the Power which moves it, is not in its own Body, nor in the other Exterior Body; but proceeds from something altogether abstracted from Body, and which cannot ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... more agreeably. In the curio hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it—they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars' caps and gowns—there was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very high-class. There was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another. On a platform at the end of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... like the search after perpetual motion or the attempt to square the circle. All we should aim at is the most convenient way of looking at a thing—the way that most sensible people are likely to find give them least trouble for some time ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... at something which is in its nature impracticable; and in order to represent it to themselves and others as practicable, they must necessarily ignore or fail to understand something which, in actual life, stands in the way of its being so. The perpetual-motionist believes that a perpetual motion is practicable, because he fails to see that out of no machine whatever is it possible to get more force than is put into it, and that one pound-weight will not wind up another. The system-monger sees that if a succession of similar stakes are placed on red or black, or any one of the thirty-six ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... Now, in this perpetual motion, this conflict, these great thrills of movement, we are to find the source of the clays which cover a large part of our globe to a depth of hundreds of feet. Where are those exposures of granite on the face of the earth from which ice or water ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... hours, without stopping a minute.—Sir Neil Campbell, "Napoleon at Fontainebleau and at Elbe," p.243. "Journal de Sir Neil Campbell a' l'ile d'Elbe": I never saw any man, in any station in life, so personally active and so persistent in his activity. He seems to take pleasure in perpetual motion and in seeing those who accompany him completely tired out, which frequently happened in my case when I accompanied him.. . Yesterday, after having been on his legs from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a trick of dropping his eyes to his boots. When he raised them, the effect was to alter his whole expression. His eyes, well-open, keenly observant, in perpetual motion, lent an air of alertness, of shrewdness, to his ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... man is destined never to solve—perpetual motion, the square of the circle, and the heart of a woman. Yet he may go a little way into the labyrinth with the thread of love, which his Ariadne will gladly give ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... hear nothin' but the shadders of 'em. And then he wouldn't let the old pianner go. He for'ard two'd, he crost over first gentleman, he chassade right and left, back to your places, he all hands'd aroun', ladies to the right, promenade all, in and out, here and there, back and forth, up and down, perpetual motion, double twisted and turned and tacked and tangled ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... sat upon his stool of office in the doctor's consulting room, swinging his legs. Would-be discoverers of perpetual motion might have received many hints from Bubble, though he himself would have scorned to consider the swinging of legs as motion. He was under the delusion that he was sitting perfectly still. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... globe, wherein he blew or made a perpetual motion by the power of the four elements. For every thing which (by the force of the elements) passes, in a year, on the surface of the earth (sic!) could be seen to pass in this cylindrical wonder in the shorter lapse of twenty-four hours. Thus ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various
... change. The waste of the body produced in muscular action, perspiration, and various secretions, is made up for by the constant supply of nutritive matter to the blood by the absorbents, and by the action of the heart the blood is preserved in perpetual motion through every part of the body. In the lungs, or bronchia, the venous blood is exposed to the influence of air and undergoes a remarkable change, being converted into arterial blood. The obvious chemical alteration of the air ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... not liable to any diminution, they are indestructible, nor is it possible for them to receive any transformation of parts, or admit of any alterations; of these reason is only the discoverer; they are in a perpetual motion in vacuity, and by means of the empty space; for the vacuum itself is infinite, and the bodies that move in it are infinite. Those bodies acknowledge these three accidents, figure, magnitude, and gravity. Democritus acknowledged ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... women with their long light hair hanging in one thickly plaited tail behind them, and the waists of their short woolen gowns inserted modestly in the region of their shoulder-blades. Round the outer edge of the assemblage thus formed, flying detachments of plump white-headed children careered in perpetual motion; while, mysteriously apart from the rest of the inhabitants, the musicians of the Baths stood collected in one lost corner, waiting the appearance of the first visitors to play the first tune of the season in the form of a serenade. The light of a May evening was ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... contrary," remarked Reginald, "it would be strange if they were still to know us. In fact, it would be unnatural. The skies above us and the earth underfoot are in perpetual motion. Each atom of our physical nature is vibrating with unimaginable rapidity. Change ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... school. He was a bright boy, though he was not so much inclined to study books. He preferred mechanical tools, with which he exhibited considerable ingenuity in constructing various articles, particularly rough drafts of machinery. Among other things he sought to produce a model of perpetual motion. He was sure he could do it, and he set to work with a resolution worthy of a nobler enterprise. When one attempt failed, he tried again, and yet again, until his friends and neighbors called him a "simpleton," and openly rebuked ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... If perpetual motion is still a dream of the physicist, he might get an idea by carefully examining the way the body of till-top is balanced on its needle legs. If till-tops have not been tilting forever, and shall not go ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... capable of disordering the intellects as an intense application to any one of these six things: the Quadrature of the Circle; the Multiplication of the Cube; the Perpetual Motion; the Philosophical Stone; Magic; and Judicial Astrology. "It is proper, however," Fontenelle remarks, "to apply one's self to these inquiries; because we find, as we proceed, many valuable discoveries of which we were before ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... but her chief attribute is her tongue, which has solved the secret of perpetual motion. Had it kept silent even for a few seconds at lunch time today, that sharp-eyed and rabbit-eared detective would never have known of the second picture—your picture—because I can eke out my exhibits by a half finished sketch of the lake and a pencil note of the gates. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile. Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of endless torments and perpetual motion. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... most ponderous star that exists in the universe, we have running through them all the principle of the conservation of motion, which is to matter the source of all its activities, energies, and powers. Motion, therefore, might almost be said to be eternal. We have heard from time to time of the term perpetual motion. Philosophers have from time to time endeavoured to discover some application of this perpetual motion, but all efforts in this direction up to the present have proved futile. In one sense there is no such thing as perpetual ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... fierce eyes burning bright with gleaming flashes between the gloom of the jungle. Once I had seen him, I could follow with ease his sinuous path among the tangled bamboos, a waving line of beauty in perpetual motion. The Maharajah followed him too, with his keen eyes, and pointed his rifle hastily. But, quick as he was, Lord Southminster was before him. I had half expected to find the pea-green young man turn coward at the last moment; but in that I was mistaken: I will do him ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... no such change would do more than touch the superficial evils, unless it had also some tendency to call out the higher and repress the lower impulses. Unless we can to some extent change "human nature," we shall be weaving ropes of sand, or devising schemes for perpetual motion, for driving our machinery more effectively without applying fresh energy. We shall be falling into the old blunders; approving Jack Cade's proposal—as recorded by Shakespeare—that the three-hooped pot should have seven hoops; ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... situation—anything, no matter how abstract, that arouses their curiosity or appeals to their love of mastery offers enough of a problem. Sometimes children are vitally interested in working geometrical problems, translating difficult passages in Latin, striving to invent the perpetual motion machine, even though there is no evident and useful result. It is not the particular type of situation that is the thing to be considered, but the attitude that it arouses in the individual concerned. Educators ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... spirits. The lungs are like great covers, which being spongy, easily dilate and contract themselves, and as they incessantly take in and blow out a great deal of air, they form a kind of bellows that are in perpetual motion. The stomach has a dissolvent that causes hunger, and puts man in mind of his want of food. That dissolvent, which stimulates and pricks the stomach, does, by that very uneasiness, prepare for it a very lively pleasure, when its craving is satisfied ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... and there see for himself the many beautiful species of sea-weeds which have appeared spontaneously in the tanks from unsuspected spores floating in the sea-water. On the other hand, Mr. Lloyd lays much stress on the necessity of arating the water, by keeping it in perpetual motion; a process not easy to be carried out in small aquaria; at least to that perfection which has been attained at the Crystal Palace, where the water is kept in continual circulation by steam-power. For a jar-aquarium, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... observe the return of the fresh-faced youngster, and the latter's words cut their communion short, much as the sudden rasp of curtain-rings scatters the rear of slumber. It was providential that the world was moving again. The suspension of perpetual motion would have been bound to excite remark. As it was, the new-comer was upon the very ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... suffering, anger, pain or sorrow; I do not expect disease to be forever banished from life in the Socialist regime. Still less do I expect that mechanical genius will have been so perfected that human labor will be no longer necessary; that perpetual motion will have been harnessed to great indestructible machines and work become a thing of the past. That dream of the German dreamer, Etzler, will never be ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... private letter gives, perhaps, the best possible explanation of his own heart in this perpetual motion towards the Cross. Who that saw him in some grand demonstration could imagine that he had been feeling just before ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... hour some visits a score; Though, since first on the wheels, I've been every day At the 'Change, at a raffling, at church, or a play; And the fops of the town are pleased with the notion Of calling your slave the perpetual motion;— Though oft at your door I have whined [out] my love As my Knight does grin his at your Lady above; Yet, ne'er before this, though I used all my care, I e'er was so happy to meet my dear Chair; And since we're so near, like birds ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... discovered about fifteen years ago by Professor and Mme. Curie. It possesses the wonderful property of giving out inexhaustible stores of energy. It virtually possesses the property of perpetual motion. Professor Becquerel was the first one to suggest that it might possess therapeutic or healing powers. The suggestion came to him in a curious way. He carried a tube of radium in his vest pocket and was severely burnt as a consequence. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... bear testimony to the early and constant uniformity of my sentiments. It will indeed be replied, that I am not a competent judge; that pleasure is incompatible with pain; that joy is excluded from sickness; and that the felicity of a schoolboy consists in the perpetual motion of thoughtless and playful agility, in which I was never qualified to excel. My name, it is most true, could never be enrolled among the sprightly race, the idle progeny of ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... like them, exist, he thinks, in none of those first four kinds: on such account he adds a fifth kind, which has no name, and so by a new name he calls the soul [Greek: endelecheia], as if it were a certain continued and perpetual motion. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... saw-dust." This is no doubt intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to shew that dozens of schemes, hardly a whit more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... apprehension of our personal helplessness will be that we shall no longer waste our time over the impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory state of things must be to find a new source of energy. Following Nature, only one course is open to us. We must refer to Environment. The natural life owes all to Environment, so must ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... did you get this teetotum? We might sell her for a mechanical top—warranted perpetual motion. When the legs give ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... Astronomical Society a Paper about deducing the mass of the Moon from observations of Venus: on Nov. 16th a Paper to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on a correction to the length of a ball-pendulum: and on Dec. 14th a Paper on certain conditions under which perpetual motion is possible.—The engravings for my Figure of the Earth in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana were dispatched at the end of the year. Some of the Paper (perhaps much) was written after my return from the Continent.—I began, but never ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... there! The other evening Miss Hosmer—female rival of Mr. Story in the sculpturing line—was the lion of the occasion, and was three-quarters of an hour late, her excuse being that she was studying the problem of perpetual motion. Mr. Story, who is a wit, said he wished the motion had been perpetuated in a botta (which ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... the chronometer that timed his race. The dust atoms that a hundred years ago had been exalted to make a man now clamored for their humble rehabilitation. Man shall never, in this mortal body we use, exemplify perpetual motion. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and sometimes spent an evening with him at his dwelling. The more Wiseacre saw of him, and the more he heard him converse, the higher did he rise in his opinion. At length Redding, in a moment of confidence, imparted his secret. He had discovered perpetual motion! This announcement was made after a long and learned disquisition on mechanical laws, in which the balancing of and the reproduction of forces, and all that, was opened to the wondering ears of Wiseacre, who, although he pretended to comprehend every thing clearly, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... announcements that he's the Angel Gabriel. Another poor sufferer shows his first symptom by having his wife's relations come and live with him. One ends in the asylum and t'other in the poorhouse; that's the main difference in them cases. Jim Jones fiddles with perpetual motion and Sam Smith develops a sure plan for busting Wall Street and getting rich sudden. I take summer boarders maybe, and you collect postage stamps. Oh, we're all looney, more or ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... word expressive of Ensal's bewildered state of mind is a problem to be handed over to the type of man engaged in the search for perpetual motion and does not come within the purview of a simple author. Man who tames the lion, harnesses the winds, makes a whimperer of steam and cowers the lightning—this same vainglorious, triumphant man is simply helpless in the presence of a woman's tears! Ensal stole quietly ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... effect—Where are they? We repeat it—if the consent of the people of the District be necessary, the consent of every one is necessary—and universal consent will come only with the Greek Kalends and a "perpetual motion." A single individual might thus perpetuate slavery in defiance of the expressed will of a whole people. The most common form of this fallacy is given by Mr. Wise, of Virginia, in his speech, February 16, 1835, in which he denied the power of Congress ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... take steps to make known that yesterday I completed my invention which will give motion to every country on the Earth;—to move Machinery!—the long sought in vain 'Perpetual Motion'!!—I was supported at the time by the Queen and H.R.H. Prince Albert. If, Gentlemen, you can advise me how to proceed to claim the reward, if any is offered by the Government, or how to secure the PATENT for the machine, or in any way assist me by advice ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... navigation seems at present to be agitating as many pseudo-scientific minds as did that of perpetual motion not many years ago, or the philosopher's stone at a more remote period. It possesses perhaps a still stronger attraction in the danger connected with the experiments—the source, we suppose, of the eagerness shown by Professor Wise and his associates ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Saxon say, "and then let go. That was his idea. Well! Only it seems to me there's been especial pains taken to show us it can't be done. Or else, why don't they find out perpetual motion? Everything stops after a while, unless—I can't talk theologically, but I mean all ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... which these laws are to act; a selection of the arbitrary quantities which they are to involve; a primitive cause which shall dispose the elements in due relation to each other, in order that regular recurrence may accompany constant change, and that perpetual motion may be combined with ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the noise, confusion, and perpetual motion, are bewildering. Crowds on clattering clogs pass in and out; pigeons, of which hundreds live in the porch, fly over your head, and the whirring of their wings mingles with the tinkling of bells, the beating of drums and gongs, the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Italian, (being glad of coming out of little Barbary, and a universal tippling-house,) I would take no notice of it; being well satisfied, that the mathematicians of our times can no where find out the perpetual motion so well as here, where the goblets of Germans are an evident demonstration of its possibility—they think they cannot make good cheer, nor permit friendship or fraternity, as they call it, with any, without giving the seal brimful of wine, ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... described. In addition, the child is restless, fretful and feverish. The disease makes rapid strides. Finally the cough ceases to be loud and barking, and is very much suppressed; the voice is almost gone; the face is very pale; the head thrown back; the nostrils dilated and in perpetual motion, the pulse at the wrist very feeble, great exhaustion, more or less delirium, and, finally, death comes to the relief of the little sufferer. Convulsions sometimes occur in the last stages, and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... that we can only take pleasure in a thing on condition of being annoyed if it turn out ill, as a thousand things can do, and do every hour. He who should find the secret of rejoicing in the good, without troubling himself with its contrary evil, would have hit the mark. It is perpetual motion. ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... was, and like one be began his antics on the shore. He frisked and danced around along the sand playing all sorts of antics. He walked on his hind feet, turned somersaults in quick succession, and acted as though possessed with perpetual motion, but not one yelp or bark or any sound ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... stones do not fall; there are no thunders of avalanches; no sudden and awful crash of an ice-fall. Even when the sun is hot and the mountains waken a little these motions seem accidents. And the perpetual motion of a glacier has something about it which is cruelly inevitable, bestial, diabolic. No, upon the mountains one is swung clear of one's fellow-creatures; one is adrift; it is another world; it gives fresh views of the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, when his very legs seemed drunk beneath him; his attempt to set down the keg would stagger the disbelievers of perpetual motion. Again, who did not relish the richness of his voice, and the arch crispness which he gave to some words, while others came not trippingly off his tongue, but lingered and jarred with an effect which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... the general march toward recklessness and unrestraint. Young as she was, he felt that she had already solved the problems which he had evaded or pushed aside. She had learned the secret of transition—a perpetual motion that went in circles and was never still. Here, he realized, was where he had lost connection, where he had failed to hold his place in the turmoil. He had tried to stand off and reach a point of view, to become a spectator, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... their gay hues and graceful outlines added the rare charm of fluttering in perpetual motion. It was a kaleidoscope without angles. To me, niched in the embrasure of an old upper window, the scene, it seemed, might have stepped out of the Oriental splendor of Arabian Nights. I never saw so many well-dressed people together in my life before. That seems a rather tame fact to buttress ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... from Northampton to London I can again hardly call a journey, but rather a perpetual motion, or removal from one place to another, in a close box; during your conveyance you may, perhaps, if you are in luck, converse with two or three people shut up ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... of independence, some such combination of hopeless pessimism about all that has been done, with confident optimism about what is just to be done, one finds in men of every art, craft, and calling. We are to have perpetual motion. We are to square the circle. We are to abandon our present political and religious and educational institutions and get new and perfect ones. Above all, the children must grow up free from the whole array of social orthodoxies. We are to escape from the whole wretched ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... by the sea of the divine judgments, unfathomable and shoreless. The mountains and the sea are the two grandest things in nature, and in their combination sublime; the one the home of calm and silence, the other in perpetual motion. But the mountain's roots are deeper than the depths of the sea, and though the judgments are a mighty deep, the righteousness is deeper, and is the bed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... go there, nor anywhere else, Benjy, except where the wind carries it, for a balloon cannot be steered. It's impossible in the nature of things—as much so as that dream of the visionary, perpetual motion." ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... blood formative organic particles with appetencies to unite, and the other formative organic particles with propensities to be united. These probably undergo some change by a kind of digestion in their respective glands; but could not otherwise unite previously in the mass of blood from its perpetual motion. ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... thought; it proceeds often from the consciousness of uncommon powers, from the confidence of those, who having already done much, are easily persuaded that they can do more. When Rowley had completed the orrery, he attempted the perpetual motion; when Boyle had exhausted the secrets of vulgar chymistry, he turned his thoughts ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... 'ridiculed,' and so on, like the early observers of palaeolithic axes, and similar prehistoric remains. This is true, of course, but, because some correct ideas were laughed at, it does not follow that whatever is laughed at is correct. The squarers of the circle, the discoverers of perpetual motion, the inquirers into the origin of language, have all been ridiculed, and ruled out of court, the two former classes, at least, justly enough. Now official science apparently regards all the long and universally rumoured abnormal occurrences as in the same category with Keely's Motor, and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... gods, while others have been so superstitious as to worship wood, stones, and irrational creatures. And as to the knowledge of natural things, some have confessed but one only being; others have admitted an infinite number: some have believed that all things are in a perpetual motion; others that nothing moves: some have held the world to be full of continual generations and corruptions; others maintain that nothing is engendered or destroyed. He said besides that he should be glad to know of those persons whether ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... but there is on the whole a general tendency for the denser matter to settle towards the centre. The conditions are much like those which obtain in a bucket of water which contains in suspension a number of kinds of matter of different degrees of density. Since the water is kept in perpetual motion, the different kinds of matter are diffused through it; but in spite of that, the densest matter is found in greatest quantity nearest to the bottom. So that though we must not at all think of the various ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... in fitting the mind to grasp the idea of the Oneness of All. Each step is important, and renders the next higher one more easily attained. In this mental drill, it will be well to mentally picture the Universe in perpetual motion—everything is in motion—all matter is moving and changing its forms, and manifesting the Energy within it. Suns and worlds rush through space, their particles constantly changing and moving. Chemical composition ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... regard capital as a kind of labour, so that things may be produced by capital alone, 'without the co-operation of any immediate labour'[372]—a result which can hardly be realised with the discovery of a perpetual motion. So, again, the value of a joint product is the 'sum' of these two values.[373] All value, therefore, can be regarded as proportioned to labour in one of its two states. M'Culloch advanced to an unfortunate conclusion, which excited some ridicule. Though Ricardo and Torrens[374] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... worn by a Bath chairman. His face was rather inclined to be handsome; the features regular, a pleasant smile upon his lips, and a deep dimple in his chin. But his most remarkable feature was his eye; it was small, but piercing, and seemed to possess that long-sought desideratum of the perpetual motion, since it was utterly impossible to fix it for one moment on any object: and there was in it a lurking expression, which, though something of a physiognomist, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of History, whatever one sage asserted another sage was sure to contradict. In fact, it was a maxim in that age, that the human reason could only be sustained aloft by being tossed to and fro in the perpetual motion of contradiction; and therefore another sect of philosophers maintained the doctrine that the An was not the descendant of the Frog, but that the Frog was clearly the improved development of the An. The shape of the Frog, taken generally, was much more symmetrical than that of ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... opposite, resembling a vast rolling cylinder of light flashing through clouds of silvery mist, and casting from it long rays of indescribable brightness. I never could realize in this perfect image of a living and perpetual motion, a fall of waters; it always had to my eyes this majestic, solemn, rotatory movement, when seen from the bank above. The Horse-shoe Fall is further on to the right, and you only get a side view ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... but little, and TALKERS who are not even savants in the science of speech. Thus a philosopher is no longer a savant: he is a talker. Legislators and poets were once profound and sublime characters: now they are talkers. A talker is a sonorous bell, whom the least shock suffices to set in perpetual motion. With the talker, the flow of speech is always directly proportional to the poverty of thought. Talkers govern the world; they stun us, they bore us, they worry us, they suck our blood, and laugh at us. As for the savants, they keep silence: if ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... organic unit. The cell is molecularly perishable. It possesses its entity much as a top keeps erect, by the continual inflow of energy. Metabolism is always taking place within it. Any other condition would, probably, involve the difficulties of perpetual motion. ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... for the conceit that learning should dispose men to leisure and privateness, and make men slothful: it were a strange thing if that which accustometh the mind to a perpetual motion and agitation should induce slothfulness, whereas, contrariwise, it may be truly affirmed that no kind of men love business for itself but those that are learned; for other persons love it for profit, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... were cherished of a golden age about to dawn upon Austria. "His toilet," writes one of his eulogists, "is that of a common soldier, his wardrobe that of a sergeant, business his recreation, and his life perpetual motion." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... place, we note that the Russian Socialist tyrants give the workmen, in exchange for their labor, pieces of paper run off from printing presses which seem almost to have solved the problem of perpetual motion. The workmen are wise if they spend this fiat money daily for whatever it will bring in food, for its value will collapse utterly when the dictatorship bursts, leaving the country financially prostrate, without credit or means of ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... flattered, and those who were not called were grossly insulted and wondered what disqualified them. They danced the "tango," and the "bango," and the "flango," and all the "light fantastics" until their feet went on strike, and their ear drums had become phonographic and reproduced the music with a perpetual motion which could not be stopped. Every lady was eager to reveal the dancing secrets to mine host, and before the evening was over he could waltz, tango, and do many ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... sun as a globe of gas in a state of combustion, burning at high temperature, and giving off a prodigious amount of heat and light. The dazzling surface of this globe is called a photosphere (light sphere). It is in perpetual motion, like the waves of an ocean of fire, whose roseate and transparent flames measure some 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles) in height. This stratum of rose-colored flames has received the name of chromosphere (color ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... behold Nature's great display from the half submerged conning-tower of a U-boat, and to dive through the mountainous breakers until they close gurgling over our heads and hide us from all curious glances. Our little nutshell, in perpetual motion, is drawn down into the deep valleys of the ocean waves, or tossed upwards on the comb of the following breaker. We are soaked to the skin, and the spray covers us like a silvery veil; our boat as well as ourselves is daubed with a salt crust, our eyes smart and our lips ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... in palsies is, that when the limbs of one side are disabled, those of the other are in perpetual motion. This can only be explained from conceiving that the power of motion, whatever it is, or wherever it resides, and which is capable of being exhausted by fatigue, and accumulated in rest, is now less expended, whilst one half of the body is capable of receiving its usual proportion ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... have not seen anything striking, except the remains of an immense heiau in the centre of the desert tableland, said to have been built in a day by the compulsory labour of 25,000 people: a lonely white man who lives among the lava, and believes he has discovered the secret of perpetual motion: and the lava-flow from Mauna Loa, which reached the sea 40 miles from its ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... wonder?" "My! but wasn't that a nobby traveling suit, and such a fit!" "Katherine Minturn—pretty name, isn't it?" "Does anybody know anything more about her?" were some of the comments and queries that slipped from those supple instruments with a tendency towards perpetual motion, which, sometimes, are described as organs that are hung in the middle and wag at ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon |
