Quotes about brass
A collection of quotes on the topic of brass, people, down, other.
Quotes about brass

"Notes on Professor Robison's Dissertation on Steam-engines" (1769)
Context: In the winter of 1763-4, having occasion to repair a model of Newcomen's engine belonging to the Natural Philosophy class of the University of Glasgow, my mind was again directed to it. At that period my knowledge was derived principally from Desaguliers, and partly from Belidor. I set about repairing it as a mere mechanician; and when that was done, and it was set to work, I was surprised to find that its boiler could not supply it with steam, though apparently quite large enough... By blowing the fire it was made to take a few strokes, but required an enormous quantity of injection water, though it was very lightly loaded by the column of water in the pump. It soon occurred that this was caused by the little cylinder exposing a greater surface to condense the steam, than the cylinders of larger engines did in proportion to their respective contents. It was found that by shortening the column of water in the pump, the boiler could supply the cylinder with steam, and that the engine would work regularly with a moderate quantity of injection. It now appeared that the cylinder of the model, being of brass, would conduct heat much better than the cast-iron cylinders of larger engines, (generally covered on the inside with a stony crust), and that considerable advantage could be gained by making the cylinders of some substance that would receive and give out heat slowly. Of these, wood seemed to be the most likely, provided it should prove sufficiently durable. A small engine was, therefore, constructed... made of wood, soaked in linseed oil, and baked to dryness. With this engine many experiments were made; but it was soon found that the wooden cylinder was not likely to prove durable, and that the steam condensed in filling it still exceeded the proportion of that required for large engines, according to the statements of Desaguliers. It was also found that all attempts to produce a better exhaustion by throwing in more injection, caused a disproportionate waste of steam. On reflection, the cause of this seemed to be the boiling of water in vacuo at low heats, a discovery lately made by Dr. Cullen and some other philosophers... and consequently at greater heats, the water in the cylinder would, produce a steam which would in part resist the pressure of the atmosphere.

opening lines, I Corinthians xiii (adapted)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
Context: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. … And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

Source: Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 269

“If you think that the brass is not blowing hard enough, tone it down another shade or two.”
Recollections and Reflections

Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

“Brass shines as fair to the ignorant as gold to the goldsmiths.”
Letter (1581).

In revised edition, chapter 78, p. 401, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 1959, Charles Neider, Harper & Row
Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

Interview with Cathleen Decker (5 September 2008) "Before Sarah Palin, the GOP had Dan Quayle", Los Angeles Times

Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Journey's End: The Burning Bush (1911)
Context: God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night. But the night is limitless, and the Divine struggle will never cease: and none can know how it will end. It was a heroic symphony wherein the very discords clashed together and mingled and grew into a serene whole! Just as the beech-forest in silence furiously wages war, so Life carries war into the eternal peace.
The wars and the peace rang echoing through Christophe. He was like a shell wherein the ocean roars. Epic shouts passed, and trumpet calls, and tempestuous sounds borne upon sovereign rhythms. For in that sonorous soul everything took shape in sound. It sang of light. It sang of darkness, sang of life and death. It sang for those who were victorious in battle. It sang for himself who was conquered and laid low. It sang. All was song. It was nothing but song.

The Victoria Cross: For Valour (2003)

"The Alternative to Torture" http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/the_alternative.html The Daily Dish (30 May 2007)

1 Corinthians 13:1.
Tyndale's translations

Address Delivered by the Hon. Daniel Webster in Faneuil Hall (22 May 1852), at the Request of the City Council of Boston; City Document No. 31. Boston: J.H. Eastburn (1852)

“In the army it takes an eight-man working party to help a brass hat blow his nose.”
Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 30 (p. 153)

Book 4, “Hell’s Blue Burning Seas” Chapter 15 (p. 208)
The Storm Lord (1976)

Source: The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 2

“Braying of arrogant brass, whimper of querulous reeds.”
Hymn to the Sea, Part iii, 8, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Sultãn Ibrãhîm Lodî (AD 1517-1526) Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

Barley 1986, Orlikowski 1992, DeSanctis and Poole 1994
Source: "Using technology and constituting structures", 2000, p. 404

Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh). Tabqat-i-Nasiri, translated into English by Major H.G. Reverty, New Delhi Reprint, 1970, Vol. I, pp. 622-23

Dijeron que antiguamente
se fue la verdad al cielo;
tal la pusieron los hombres,
que desde entonces no ha vuelto.
En dos edades vivimos
los propios y los ajenos:
la de plata los estraños,
y la de cobre los nuestros.
Act I, sc. iv. Translation from Alan S. Trueblood and Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.) La Dorotea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985) p. 23.
La Dorotea (1632)
Source: God Lived with Them, p.434

~ L. Sprague de Camp, Conan of the Isles, "Introduction", 1968
About

Speech to his army officers (23 March 1649)
A Short History of Chemistry (1937)

Anticipation (2008)
Sultãn Shamsu’d-Dîn Iltutmish (AD 1210-1236) Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

pg. 250
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

“Lay, lady, lay. Lay across my big, brass bed.”
Song lyrics, Nashville Skyline (1969), Lay Lady Lay

About Sultan Jalalu’d -Din Khalji (AD 1290-1296) in Jhain (Rajasthan) Translated from the Hindi version by S.A.A. Rizvi included in Khalji Kalina Bharata, Aligarh, 1955, pp. 153-54.
Miftahu'l-Futuh
2005
Lyrics

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1776) l’"Art de l’Épinglier" (The Art of the Pin-Maker). Introduction

Quotes 2000s, 2004, 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action, 2004
Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

314.
Aes Triplex (1878)

Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part I: Iceland's Bell

Akhbarat. Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Volume III, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1972 reprint, pp. 185–89., quoted from Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1670s
Sultãn Shamsu’d-Dîn Iltutmish (AD 1210-1236) Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

as quoted in "Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music", January, 1996; ISBN 0819563110
1990s

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, June 1885; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 410) p. 31
1880s, 1885

17 March 1870
Source: Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Sultãn Jalãu’d-Dîn Khaljî (AD 1290-1296) Vidisha (Madhya Pradesh)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

'A complex fate', The Spectator (6 April 1974), p. 12
1970s
Wood, Christopher. Make It Happen To Me. London: Constable. 1969 (chapter 8)

Source: https://frederickdouglass.infoset.io/islandora/object/islandora%3A2333 "Negroes and the National War Effort"]
speech in Philadelphia (6 July 1863): Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army? (1863)

“His lockèd, lettered, braw brass collar
Showed him the gentleman an' scholar.”
The Twa Dogs, st. 3 (1786)
Reviewing Mendes' recording of Michel Legrand's '"Watch What Happens," from the album Equinox; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#2nmgk677qzm4cnu
Sultan Shamsu’d-Din Iltutmish (AD 1210~1236) Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh)
Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

Original Italian text:
Avevamo vegliato tutta la notte — i miei amici ed io — sotto lampade di moschea dalle cupole di ottone traforato, stellate come le nostre anime, perchè come queste irradiate dal chiuso fulgòre di un cuore elettrico. Avevamo lungamente calpestata su opulenti tappeti orientali la nostra atavica accidia, discutendo davanti ai confini estremi della logica ed annerendo molta carta di frenetiche scritture.
Source: 1900's, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism' 1909, p. 49 Lead paragraph

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231

“And yet it is hard to believe that anything
in nature could stand revealed as solid matter.
The lightning of heaven goes through the walls of houses,
like shouts and speech; iron glows white in fire;
red-hot rocks are shattered by savage steam;
hard gold is softened and melted down by heat;
chilly brass, defeated by heat, turns liquid;
heat seeps through silver, so does piercing cold;
by custom raising the cup, we feel them both
as water is poured in, drop by drop, above.”
Etsi difficiile esse videtur credere quicquam
in rebus solido reperiri corpore posse.
transit enim fulmen caeli per saepta domorum,
clamor ut ad voces; flamen candescit in igni
dissiliuntque ferre ferventi saxa vapore.
tum labefactatus rigor auri solvitur aestu;
tum glacies aeris flamma devicta liquescit;
permanat calor argentum penetraleque frigus
quando utrumque manu retinentes pocula rite
sensimus infuso lympharum rore superne.
Book I, lines 487–496 (Frank O. Copley)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 21.
Context: I first met George S. Patton, Jr., before World War II when he was a lieutenant colonel at Fort Sill, and in North Africa, when he was a general, I saw him often. Almost every day he would head for the front, standing erect in his jeep, helmet and brass shining, a pistol on each hip, a siren blaring. For the return trip, either a light plane would pick him up or he would sit huddled, unrecognizable, in the jeep in his raincoat. His image with the troops was foremost with General Patton, and that meant always going forward, never backward. General Patton had two fetishes that to my mind did little for his image with the troops. First, he apparently loathed the olive drab wool cap that the soldier wore under his helmet for warmth and insisted that it be covered; woe be the soldier whom the general caught wearing the cap without the helmet. Second, he insisted that every soldier under his command always wear a necktie with shirt collar buttoned, even in combat action.
" Fanfare http://englishatheist.org/mencken/Rascoe-Mencken.htm", in H. L. Mencken (1920) http://www.archive.org/details/hlmencken00newyrich
Context: When H. L. Mencken unpacks his idiomatic brasses, tunes up his verbal strings, and gets in readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue in damnation or in praise of man, god or book, his all too meagre audience cancels all other engagements to be on hand at the initial presentation. The result, that audience knows, will be an experience of pure enjoyment. His musicianship is unfailing. His program is unsatisfactory only in its impermanence. Though the theme he proposes is invariably Mencken — Mencken apropos of this or that — he gives it infinite and intricate variations.

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)
Context: I utterly deny, that we are originally, or naturally, or practically, or in any way, or in any important sense, inferior to anybody on this globe. This charge of inferiority is an old dodge. It has been made available for oppression on many occasions. It is only about six centuries since the blue-eyed and fair-haired Anglo Saxons were considered inferior by the haughty Normans, who once trampled upon them. If you read the history of the Norman Conquest, you will find that this proud Anglo-Saxon was once looked upon as of coarser clay than his Norman master, and might be found in the highways and byways of Old England laboring with a brass collar on his neck, and the name of his master marked upon it were down then! You are up now. I am glad you are up, and I want you to be glad to help us up also.

In a letter dated August 1, 1918
Context: Getting down to brass tacks, how in the Hell are you going to explain general American n- 'I' except genetically? It's disturbing, I know, but (more) non-committal conservatism is only dodging, after all, isn't it? Great simplifications are in store for us. … It seems to me that only now that is American linguistics becoming really interesting, at least in its ethnological bearings.

I Corinthians Ch. 13 (KJV) The word "Charity" is here used as a translation of the Latin Caritas, and the original Greek Agape, which were words for "Love", and used to denote the highest and most self-transcending forms of Love.
Variants: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
I Corinthians Ch. 13 (NKJV)
If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophesy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes in all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tounges, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing. For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. At present, we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians Ch. 13 (NASB)
Now, there remain faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13, New World Translation http://www.watchtower.org/e/bible/1co/chapter_013.htm
First Epistle to the Corinthians
Context: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Tãrîkh-i-Firishta by Firishta. Sultãn Shamsu’d-Dîn Iltutmish (AD 1210-1236) Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh)

LATE P.C.N. RAJA, RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE OF TIPU SULTAN (This is the English translation of the Malayalam article by P.C.N. Raja first published in Kesari Annual of 1964. The late Raja was a senior member of the Zamorin Royal Family.) in Tipu Sultan: Villain or hero? : an anthology. (1993).
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