"Self-acting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gradually and without a shock, that which should decline declines, and what should grow old grows old; wrinkles appear upon things condemned, on castes, on codes, on institutions, and on religions. This work of decrepitude is, in some sort, self-acting. A fruitful decrepitude, under which germinates the new life. Little by little the ruin progresses; deep crevices, which are not visible, ramify in the darkness, and internally reduce to powder the ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... world where the student has more liberty. At St. Sulpice in Paris, a student might pass his three years without having any close communication with a single one of the superiors. It is assumed that the regime of the establishment will be self-acting. The superiors lead just the same life as the students, and intervene as little as possible. A student who is anxious to work has the greatest of facilities for doing so. On the other hand, those who are inclined to be idle have no compulsion to work put upon them; and there are very ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Darwin, or a Spencer. It is a history that begins with vitalism and ends with mechanism. We commence with a world in which there exists a chaotic assemblage of independent personal forces, and end with a universe that is self-acting, self-adjusting, self-contained, and in which science makes no allowance for the operation of intelligence save such as ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... joke. The head of each hammer so used is a magnet, and is used to pick the tacks from the mouth of the banner man. The tack sticks to the head of the hammer and is thus ready to be driven. An expert banner man will drive tacks almost as rapidly as you could fire a self-acting revolver." ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... of view the cases that are to be ascribed to the self-acting system of propagation, it would seem that the disease must be far from common. Mr. White of Manchester says, "Out of the whole number of lying-in patients whom I have delivered (and I may safely call it a great one), I have never lost one, nor to the best of my recollection has one been ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... EVANS'S SELF-ACTING KITCHEN RANGES continue to maintain their superiority over all others, for roasting, boiling, steaming, and baking, in the best and most economical manner, and yield a constant supply of hot water, with the addition of a HOT PLATE over the whole ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... in 1764, the water-frame of Richard Arkwright in 1769, and the mule of Samuel Crompton ten years later, machines were provided which could spin any quantity of fiber likely to be offered. And when, in 1787, Edmund Cartwright, clergyman and poet, invented the self-acting loom to which power might be applied, the series was complete. These inventions, supplementing the steam engine of James Watt, made the Industrial Revolution. They destroyed the system of cottage manufactures in England and gave birth to the great ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... use? This A stands for alarm, When pressed in case of fire or threatened harm, A large alarum placed above the roof, Soon to the neighbours gives convincing proof; We won't try that just now as its sound, would Undoubtedly alarm the neighbourhood. But see, in this recess with curtained way Is a self-acting shower-bath that you may Try in the morning if you're so inclined. There's just one more contrivance yet I find That I must show you; by your bed side stands A nest of speaking tubes; this one commands My bedroom, number two, my sister's, and The third, Jane's room; ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... age than that of the Grecian epic had arrived, and with Aeschylus, philosophy passed into poetry. The dark doctrine of fatality imparted its stern and awful interest to the narration of events—men were delineated, not as mere self-acting and self-willed mortals, but as the agents of a destiny inevitable and unseen—the gods themselves are no longer the gods of Homer, entering into the sphere of human action for petty motives and for individual purposes—drawing their grandeur, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... use of in his 'Reign of Law,' 1867. Mr. Wallace replied ('Quarterly Journal of Science,' October 1867. Republished in 'Natural Selection,' 1871.) to the Duke's criticisms, making some specially good remarks on those which refer to orchids. He shows how, by a "beautiful self-acting adjustment," the nectary of the orchid Angraecum (from 10 to 14 inches in length), and the proboscis of a moth sufficiently long to reach the nectar, might be developed by natural selection. He goes on to point out that on any other theory ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the eau-de-Cologne, for Rosalind, with a self-acting instinct that explanation might be called for, had picked up the bottle on her return journey. You see, she was always practising wicked deceits and falsehoods, all to save that little chit being made miserable on her ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... study or research he undertook, were indeed indomitable, and serve to prove how far they will carry the mind, and how much surer tests they are of ultimate usefulness and attainment, than the most dazzling genius without these moral props. Self-dependent, self-acting, and self-taught, it is apprehended that few men, with so little means and few advantages, have been in so peculiar a sense the architect of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft |
