War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans. Niccolo Machiavelli
A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute. Edward Gibbon
Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion. Daniel Clowes
When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make. James Weldon Johnson
The Chinese, by their favourite system of dwarfing, contrive to make it, when only a foot and a half or two feet high, have all the characters of an aged cedar of Lebanon. Robert Fortune
