The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of sel...f-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your... desk in midair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A worm on the ear-of-wheat, I am yet unrepentant,... for I know how the Lord God is about to manifest, when I, the industrious worm, spin my own shroud.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit.... An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture of a house founded on the sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sebastian: Angel was like cognac, all fire in a glass. But you, you are like champagne. Sparkling, tantalizing, you make a man's h...ead spin. Holly: Pheww ... you've got a terrific line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well it doesn'...t, Mr. Potter. In the whole vast configuration of things I'd say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, an...d does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »