Quotes About Contrivance

All praise of Civilization, or Art, or Contrivance, is so much dispraise of Nature ; an admission of imperfection, which it is man's business, and merit, to be always endeavouring to correct or mitigate.

And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as it should be.

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.

He who contrives, defeats his purpose; and he who is grasping, loses. The sage does not contrive to win, and therefore is not defeated; he is not grasping, so does not lose.

The telephone," he wrote, "may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker's voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.… The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.

Look, I don't mind summoning some demon and asking it," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "That's normal. But building some mechanical contrivance to do your thinking for you, that's … against Nature.

The critical part of herself could well have sneered at the contrivance, as if the only genuine gestures were the small ones, the ones devoid of an audience. As if true honesty belonged to solitude, since to be witnessed was to perform, and performance was inherently false since it invited expectation.

I don't think we were anti-commercial. But we were anti-contrivance, and like Zeppelin, we found dignity through the music we were playing.

If time and space were in fact entwined along the loop of relativity, how then could anyone ever reach a point of no return? Were not all such points contrivance? Therefore meaningless? So, again, what was the point? Not to return.

For me, marriage is a grotesque, unforgiving, clunky contrivance. Yet society pushes it as a shimmering ideal.

An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total of impotence.

Human Intelligence means little for most of us but Beaver Contrivance, which produces spinning-mules, cheap cotton, and large fortunes. Wisdom, unless it give us railway scrip, is not wise.

Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement.

The evidences of our religion are like the religion itself, infinitely superior to any thing ever contrived by human wisdom. And it is an opinion in which I am the more confirmed, the more I examine it, that if the wisest set of philosophers which ever lived on earth had been a council to contrive a method by which Christianity could have been perpetuated in the world, that scheme which they would have projected, would of itself defeated the object.

canoe is the most graceful, the most sensitive, the most inexplicable contrivance of man. With its paddle you may dip up stars along quiet shores or steal into the very harbor of dreams. I

Down at the end, alone, detached from all the other mountains soared up K2, the indisputable sovereign of the region, gigantic and solitary, hidden from human sight by innumerable ranges, jealously defended by a vast throng of vassal peaks, protected from invasion by miles and miles of glaciers. Even to get within sight of it demands so much contrivance, so much marching, such a sum of labour.