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Static   /stˈætɪk/   Listen
Static

adjective
1.
Not in physical motion.  Synonyms: inactive, motionless, still.
2.
Concerned with or producing or caused by static electricity.  Synonym: electrostatic.
3.
Showing little if any change.  Synonyms: stable, unchanging.



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"Static" Quotes from Famous Books



... keyed to the highest pitch of hysterical excitement. They needed little to release the accumulated pressure of static nerve force which the terrorizing mummery of the ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... respectively, and do not in any orthodox way develop their themes. But the effect obtained is, very roughly speaking, that of the symphony, or symphonic poem. Granted that one has chosen a theme—or been chosen by a theme!—which will permit rapid changes of tone, which will not insist on a tone too static, it will be seen that there is no limit to the variety of effects obtainable: for not only can one use all the simpler poetic tones...; but, since one is using them as parts of a larger design, one can also obtain novel effects by placing them ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert

... kept moving, so that his body did not offer a static target. He concentrated his attention on Dave, throwing shot after shot at him. That he would kill his enemy Clanton never had a doubt. It was firmly fixed in his mind that he had been sent as the ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine

... the present mode of knowledge, with whose help so much insight into the natural world has been won, is the only one possible, given once for all to man in a form never to be changed. But is there any need, I asked myself, to cling to this purely static notion of man's capacity for gaining knowledge? Among the greatest achievements of modern science, does not the conception of evolution take a foremost place? And does not this teach us that the condition of a living organism at any time is the result of the one preceding it, and ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... unmoving, static in everything. Jim took him by the arm affectionately. The stranger looked at the flickering tree, with ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... his philosophy deliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy, that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He dreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in Auseinandersein. This would be a real death and petrifaction of consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite void. What is warm and desirable is rather the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... creative wilfulness and the more static obstinacy of these former, there is an instinctive bond; whereas the tolerant and colourless cleverness of the latter ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... easy reach of her. To move seemed impossible to me. Such a sudden transition from warm, vigorous life to cold, impassive death seems to chill the dynamic rivers of being into a horrible winter, static and eternal. Though death puts all things in the past tense, even we physicians cannot but be strangely moved when the soul thus hastily deserts the body without the usual ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... and call it static instead of noise since we've all become radio experts," smirked Cub with ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield

... against terrorism. Our Western Hemispheric neighbors invoked the Rio Treaty and have shown a commitment to combat terrorism through a new Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism adopted in June 2002. But these alliances cannot be taken for granted or remain static. We will strive to help them evolve to meet the demands ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States

... the home world which received Damaris after those many months of continental travel, on the eve of her twenty-first birthday. To pass from the dynamic to the static mode must be always something of an embarrassment and trial, especially to the young with whom sensation is almost disconcertingly direct and lively. Damaris suffered the change of conditions not without a measure or doubt and wonder. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... Mr. James Wimshurst.—A London Royal Institution lecture, of great value as giving a full account of the recent forms of generators of static electricity.—14 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various

... between the two—between a rock and a tree, between a man and the soil he cultivates. Grant that the physical and the chemical forces are the same in both, yet they work to such different ends in each. In one case they are tending always to a deadlock, to the slumber of a static equilibrium; in the other they are ceaselessly striving to reach a state of dynamic activity—to build up a body that hangs forever between a state of integration and disintegration. What is it that determines this new mode and end ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... likewise aware that even strong economies, when they become static, do not guarantee safety. On the contrary, they seem likely to induce a ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics

... life of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to Mrs. Peniston she had, to some degree, to assume that lady's passive attitude. She had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt into the whirl of her own activities, but there was a static force in Mrs. Peniston against which her niece's efforts spent themselves in vain. To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor. She did not, indeed, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... prearranged course of Italian instruction, place the residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate a series of static semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues, places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident in the same place), the Ship hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street (W. and E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10 Kildare street, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... aspiration. They cannot deny that this quality is an essential element in the spiritual composition of every well-conditioned child as well as of every rightly constituted man and woman. For aspiration means life, and the lack of aspiration means death. The man who lacks aspiration is static, dormant, lifeless, inert; the man who has aspiration is dynamic, forceful, potent, regnant. Aspiration is the animating power that gives wings to the forces of life. It is the motive power that induces the currents of life. The man who has aspiration ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... inner centre outward. As within, so without. As we think we become. Which means simply this: our prevailing thoughts and emotions are never static, but dynamic. Thoughts are forces—like creates like, and like attracts like. It is therefore for us to choose whether we shall be interested primarily in the great spiritual forces and powers of life, or whether we shall be interested ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... most frequently sought; it is also a common complication of other disabilities of the foot and of the lower extremity. It is usually bilateral, and is about twice as common in the male as in the female. Various types are met with; they are known according to their cause, as static, congenital, traumatic, paralytic, rachitic, rheumatic, arthritic, gonorrhoeal, ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... in the other end of his work, not for any individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... be more or less stable or stationary, save at the times when volition or intense, active conscious operations are in progress—when, in short, effort is exerted. At such times, it is surely conceivable that what was static becomes dynamic; something is set into motion which in turn brings into activity some more "physical" energy, and so on, until sufficient material momentum has been gained to affect that most unstable and mobile substance, nervous tissue. It is certainly ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... replied, "static objects mustn't be confused with dynamic ones, or we'll be open to serious error. Comparatively little effort is spent in reaching the ocean's lower regions, because all objects have a tendency to become ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... we can see, the beginning of the chain in China (as indeed in the West) was the making of simple static models of the celestial sphere. An armillary sphere was used to represent the chief imaginary circles (e.g., equator, ecliptic, meridians, etc.), or a solid celestial globe on which such circles could be drawn, together with the constellations ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, happy, and entirely ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... and they thought the contact was lost. Then a voice came whispering through the static. "Where is your ship now? Are ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse

... to his older curios. They were fully as interesting, in their way, as brasswork and leatherwork, those products of peasant natures and peasant hands. But these youths ran past one's eye, ran through one's fingers. They were not static, not even stable. They were restless birds of passage who fidgeted through their years, and even through the days of which the years were made: intent on their own affairs and their own companions; thankless for small favors and kind attentions— even ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... brain. Whether or not the consequent functional depression and the morphologic alterations seen in the brain-cells may be due to the low blood-pressure which follows excessive trauma is shown by the following experiments: The circulation of animals was first rendered STATIC by over-transfusion, and was controlled by a continuous blood-pressure record on a drum, the factor of anemia being thereby wholly excluded during the application of the trauma and during the removal of a specimen of brain tissue for histologic study. In each instance, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... the industrial awakening of the South, she (who was but the embodied spirit of her race) stood firmly rooted in all that was static, in all that was obsolete and outgrown in the Virginia of the eighties. Though she felt as yet merely the vague uneasiness with which her mind recoiled from the first stirrings of change, she was beginning dimly to realize that the car of progress would ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... moving in different directions, as for example in a ball-room or conversazione—must be of a nature to task the angularity of the most intellectual, and amply justify the rich endowments of the Learned Professors of Geometry, both Static and Kinetic, in the illustrious University of Wentbridge, where the Science and Art of Sight Recognition are regularly taught to large classes of the ELITE ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

... if you are in earnest—not at the middle. Only ignorance measures art in terms of skill, for there are no degrees in art. None has transcended Giotto, because technique and draughtsmanship are accidents of time; they lie outside the soul of the matter. Art is in fact a static thing. It changes as the face of the sea changes, from hour to hour; but it does not progress. There are great and small artists and great and small movements, as there are great and small waves, brisk breezes and terrific tempests; but all are moulded ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... lock, and about 125 feet from the edge of the bank, to cut off the first quicksand stratum. About 150 feet further in, when the excavation was well advanced, a second ring of sheet piling was driven, to cut off the second stratum, which carried a static pressure of 55 feet and was just a foot or so below where the floor of the lock would be. It was not thought necessary to ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney

... and ingenuity in establishing a catena of patristic and orthodox authority for their principles, reaching back to the earliest times, and handed down in this country by a series of Anglo-Catholic divines. This unbroken tradition was conceived of as purely static, a 'mechanical unpacking,' as Father Tyrrell puts it, of the doctrine once delivered to the Apostles. The Church, according to their theory, was supernaturally guided by the Holy Ghost, and its decisions were consequently infallible, as long as ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... ambiguous sense of a sort of permanent illusion. But as soon as the complex vision, in its totality, contemplates the situation, the thing takes on a very different aspect. The pure reason may be as sceptical as it pleases about the static solidity of what is popularly called "matter." It may use the term energy, or movement, or ether, or force, or electricity, or any other name to describe that permanent sensation of outward reality ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... it seemed to him, for an incredible length of time. It was like a prairie fire that spread and blazed up, higher and brighter. And there was no escape. He had a queer conviction that his was the only static spirit in the whole theatre, that secretly, in their hearts, the audience had flung themselves into the riot with her, the oldest and staidest of them, as perhaps they had often wanted to do when they heard a jolly tune like that. It was artless, graceless. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... Mohammedan religions, between the forces representing order on the one side and destruction on the other, and between races destined to succeed to the civilization of Greece and Rome and a race representing oriental despotism and static conditions. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... the airway levels, and still our receivers failed to pick up a signal of any sort—not even a whisper of static. And strangely, our radarscopes failed to record even a blip from ...
— Lost in the Future • John Victor Peterson

... will, in general, be classified on the basis of structure, either of special or general application, the essential functions and effects of static structures being resistive or the ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office

... in the stateroom was unmoving, static. There was none of the faint breeze of moving air. Something had gone wrong with ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... Bickerton worked every night from 8 P.M. until 1 A.M., calling at short intervals and listening attentively at the receiver. In fact, notes were kept of the intensity of the signals, the presence of local atmospheric electrical discharges—"static"—or intermittent sounds due to discharges from snow particles—St. Elmo's fire—and, lastly, of interference in the signals transmitted. The latter phenomenon should lead to interesting deductions, for we had frequent evidence to show that the wireless waves ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... seemed like hours he was ready. Using one of the intercom relays he began tapping out a message in Morse code on an exposed wire from the scanner. He looked at the radar scanner and watched it flash white static lines each time he touched the wires. Carefully he ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell

... should have been destined to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may prosper in a static world, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... kinetic theory of gases is a step so important in the way of explaining seemingly static properties of matter by motion, that it is scarcely possible to help anticipating in idea the arrival at a complete theory of matter, in which all its properties will be seen to be merely attributes of motion. If we are to look for the origin of this idea we must go ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various

... outstanding phenomenon of life is the adaptation of living things to the real and significant conditions of their existence. Furthermore, as these conditions are not static, particularly in the case of humans, organisms must not merely be adapted, but must continue thereafter to be adaptable. Now learning is only a special case under living, and education a special case under life. Its purposes are the purposes of life. It is an artificial ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... bodies or through space we know not; whether the result is merely action at a distance, as in the case of gravity; or by some intermediate agency, as in the case of light, heat, the electric current, and (as I believe) static electric action. The idea of magnetic fluids, as applied by some, or of Magnetic centres of action, does not include that of the latter kind of transmission, but the idea of lines of force does.' And he continues ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall

... artists about him. He was renowned as a graver, found much to do with the chisel, introducing many a fine after-thought, when the rough-casting of his work was over. He studied human form under such conditions as would bring out its natural features, its static laws, in their entirety, their harmony; and in an academic work, so to speak, no longer to be clearly identified in what may be derivations from it, he claimed to have fixed the canon, the common measure, of perfect man. Yet with Polycleitus certainly the measure of man was not yet "the measure ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... gyroscopic aberrancy one minute 29," he called. "Discharge static electricity from hull. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... God is an abstract vacuity; in the Greek, a static intellect; in the Christian, a dynamic will. As is the conception of God, so is the conception and character of man. The two are so intimately interdependent that it is useless at this time to discuss which is the cause and which the result. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... of early Interlingua, Captain," Mannion said. "After I taped it, I compensated it to take out the rise-and-fall tone, and then filtered out the static. There were a few sound substitutions to figure out, but I finally caught on. It still doesn't make much sense, but that's what ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer

... London, the saintly, the high-collared, the stiff; London, the serious, the practical, the kid-gloved; London, the arctic, the methodical, the fixed, the ceremonious, the starched, the precise, the punctilious, the conservative, the static; London, the God-fearing, the episcopal, the nice, the careful, the scrupulous, the aloof, the decorous, the proper, the dignified—who would have thought that London would loosen up and relax and partake of the ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... days, without knowledge of the natural sciences, we accepted life as static. If, being born in China, we grew up with foot-bound women, we assumed that women were such, and must so remain. Born in India, we accepted the child-wife, the pitiful child-widow, the ecstatic suttee, as natural ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... led to study this subject in looking to see what had become of my first permanent investment, a small venture, made about thirty-five years ago, in the "Sawyer and Gwynne static pressure engine." This was the high-sounding name of the Keely motor of that day, an imposition made possible by the confused ideas prevalent on this very subject ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... sense of a static, detailed delineation of various qualities of objects, has no place in the child's story, for it bores the child, who is very persistent in wanting the main theme uninterrupted. But description that has touches of movement and action or that lays emphasis ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... independence. Unity is the principle which tends to order; Individuality to freedom. The desire of order is the animating sentiment of conservatism. The love of freedom is the vital essence of progress. Unity is the static, and Individuality the motic force of human society. Both are inherent in the nature of things, and equally important as elements of a true social organization. Unity is allied to the affections, which are synthetic in their character; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... the baldest fakery, yet he had something. He had something, but how was I to get hold of it? Just what kind of turns with what around what did you make to generate a psi force? It took two thousand years for man to move from the concept that amber was a stone with a soul to the concept of static electricity. Was there any chance I could find some shortcuts in reducing the laws governing psi? The one bright spot of my morning was that Auerbach hadn't denied seeing the evidence of the ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton

... in kinetic, calorific and electrical phenomena. In this respect it holds a position analogous to the argon of the atmosphere, and is capable of taking up the vibrations of those bodies to which it is related and which it invests. It would perhaps not be amiss to regard it as static ether. Of itself it has no active properties, but in its still, well-like depths, it holds the potentiality ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... of transformation and of unceasing movement. This perpetuum mobile gives its peculiar colour to Nicolai's reflections. In general, we who are advocates or opponents of the war tend to pass judgment on it almost exclusively in abstracto. We conceive it as static and absolute. It may almost be said that as soon as a thinker concentrates upon a subject in order to study it, his first step is to kill it. To a great biologist all is movement, and movement is the material of his ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... static character of village life leaves the boy with little inspiration in his primary interests of play and his serious ideals of the noblest manhood. Idle hours work demoralization and the ever-present example of the village loafer is not good. A disproportionate ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben



Words linked to "Static" :   nonmoving, radio noise, disturbance, interference, unfavorable judgment, unchangeable, noise, unmoving, criticism



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