"Atom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disposed to believe that such a thing could be permitted. But we must at the same time remember, that our sense of what is important and consequential has a regard to the earth alone, which is but a trifling atom in the universe. Who can tell what are the limits which the Master of worlds has set to mundane calamity? And assuredly, even though a whole solar system were here and there, now and then, to be remodelled in respect of all such ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... of court and prison can touch nothing more than my body—my spirit is unscathed. It is the ancient consolation, coming down through poetry and history even to me. The Government—the Nation—can destroy my life, separate me from my people, throw mud on my name; but they cannot take away one atom of my consciousness of the truth. And it is better to have that consciousness than to retain all the rest without it. Blessed ethical truisms, which come to our succor when all ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... fathers thought they understood has become a world of subtle forces moving with inconceivable velocity; nothing is inert, all things are transformed into other and more elusive shapes precisely as the makers of the fairy tales foresaw and predicted; the world lives in every atom just as their world lived; forces lie just outside the range of physical sight, but entirely within the range of spiritual vision, precisely as the tellers of these old stories divined; mystery and wonder enfold all things, and not only evoke the full play of the mind, ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... then proceed to buy a quantity of the very first articles which came to hand—horse-collars, cigar-lighters, dresses for his nursemaid, foals, raisins, silver ewers, lengths of holland, wheatmeal, tobacco, revolvers, dried herrings, pictures, whetstones, crockery, boots, and so forth, until every atom of his money was exhausted. Yet seldom were these articles conveyed home, since, as a rule, the same day saw them lost to some more skilful gambler, in addition to his pipe, his tobacco-pouch, his mouthpiece, his four-horsed turn-out, and his coachman: with the result that, stripped ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Particularly drink. Every atom in Percy's body, every corpuscle in his blood, seemed to be crying out for water. It did not seem as if he could endure it. He was almost desperate enough to quench his thirst from the sea. But, no! Men who did that went crazy. He moistened ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... her own forces and advantages. She knew she was beautiful and charming; she knew she was kind and generous and extremely "cute," as her old father said. She knew that literature and art did not interest her one atom in themselves, that most music bored her, and that she had a rather imperfect memory; but during her brief visits to England, when she was making up her mind that this country would be the field for ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... bequeath to us a single new material atom. The race is ever in old clothes. Nor can we hand down to others one atom which was not long ere we were born. Yet the vitality of the universe is being constantly increased, and this increase is also ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... say, was even more patient. Yes, but James did not brood. His work was active analysis, cutting finer and finer until the atom was reached. His mind was Occidental. He wished to know why the wheels went round. Conrad's, in this respect, is Oriental. He wants to see what things essentially are. Henry James refines but seldom ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... over the domestics. Besides this, it was he who tasted the macaroni, to maintain the pure flavor of the ancient tradition; and it must be allowed that he never permitted a grain of pepper too much, or an atom of parmesan too little. His joy was at its height on that day when called upon to share the secret of Cropoli the younger, and to ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... complete, in fact, that schoolteachers all over the galaxy would have gotten the textbook they had always wanted—a concise chronicle of everything that had ever happened since the explosion of the primeval atom, a history textbook that no other history textbook could contradict for the simple reason that there were no other ...
— Collector's Item • Robert F. Young
... is not solved; it is simply removed farther back. The Nebular Hypothesis throws no light on the origin of diffused matter; and diffused matter as much needs accounting for as concrete matter. The genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the genesis of a planet. Nay, indeed, so far from making the universe a less mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery. Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... I could feel One atom of thy faith so real, Then might I bow and be as one In whose heart many currents run Of joyful confidence and cheer, Making each earthly moment dear With sunshine and the sound of bells On the green hills and in ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... these souls remain in their Kama Rupic envelopes, and are irresistibly drawn to the earth amid elements congenial to their gross natures. Their stay in the Kamaloka varies as to its duration; but ends invariably in disintegration, dissolving like a column of mist, atom by atom, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... sufficient to show that the great artist was in her true place again, and that the mature woman had lost but little of the artistic fascinations of the gifted girl. Of course, time had robbed her of one or two upper notes, but the skill, grace, and precision with which she utilized every atom of her power, the incomparable steadiness and finish with which she wrought out the composer's intentions, the marvelous flexibility of her execution, she retained in all their pristine excellence. The loss of youthful freshness was atoned for by the deeper passion ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... skull-jarring, and not to be endured. So One-Eye thrust his head between Big Tom's spraddled legs; then, calling upon every atom of his strength, he forced his shoulders to follow his head, loosening the longshoreman's clutch; and with a grunt, down came the giant, falling upon the cowboy (which accounted for another grunt), and pinning him ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... happened, and the character and constitution of the pack had undergone notable changes. The six whelps had disappeared, old Tufter and the oldest of the mothers of the pack were no more, and neither the carrion-crows nor the ants had profited one atom by these deaths. The pack had not wittingly hastened the end of these weaker ones, but it had left only their bones behind upon the trail. And, now, when one or other of the gaunt, dry-lipped survivors ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... dear," was her mother's answer. "It was powerless to move Captain Armitage. He scouted the idea of your guilt from the moment he set eyes on you, and never rested until he had overturned the last atom of evidence. Even I had to explain," said her mother "simply to confirm his theory of the light Captain Chester had seen and the shadows and the form at the window. It was just exactly as Armitage reasoned it out. I ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... but what different rooms! She sent for a painter, and had the walls painted black. She had everything with an atom of colour in it taken away; and in these black rooms she lived, and in them she died. She wept so much—partly that, and partly the want of light—that her eyes became abnormally sensitive, and she could ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... such a rapid change took place in her feelings, that ere long she began to confess to herself that if the puritans could have known what the king was, their conduct would not have been so unintelligible—not that she thought they had an atom of right on their side, or in the least feared she might ever be brought to think in the matter as they did; she confessed only that she ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... this changing I, This ever altering thing which yet persists, Keeping the features it is reckoned by, While each component atom breaks or twists; If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms, Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work, Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms, I might attain to where the Rulers lurk; If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates, The brain's most folded, intertwisted ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... me: I'm a beast, I know. 270 But see, now—why, I see as certainly As that the morning-star's about to shine, What will hap some day. We've a youngster here Comes to our convent, studies what I do, Slouches and stares and lets no atom drop: His name is Guidi—he'll not mind the monks— They call him Hulking Tom, he lets them talk— He picks my practice up—he'll paint apace, I hope so—though I never live so long, I know what's sure to follow. You be judge! ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... even the weight of a pismire could not escape him either in earth or heaven; but he would perceive the creeping of the black pismire in the dark night upon the hard stone, and discern the motion of an atom in the open air. He knows what is secret and conceals it, and views the conceptions of the minds, and the motions of the thoughts, and the inmost recesses of secrets, by a knowledge ancient and eternal, that never ceased to be his attribute from eternal eternity, and not by any ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... How still and quiet it was! The Helper had come. Not to the snow-covered old earth, falling asleep in the crimson sunset mist: it did not need Him. Not an atom of its living body, from the granite mountain to the dust on the red sea-fern, had failed to perform its work: taking time, too, to break forth in a wild luxuriance of beauty as a psalm of thanksgiving. The Holy Spirit you talk of in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... am quite sure there were few British seamen who would not have gladly volunteered to serve in the Danish navy against the Prussians, so universal was their bitter dislike to the Hun bullies who had set themselves to steal by force the possessions to which they had not an atom of right. The sight of these fine frigates and line-of-battle ships manoeuvring to come to grips with their cowardly antagonists who were assailing their national rights has been revivified during a long course of study of Nelson's naval ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... us greatly honour the Atom, so lively, so wise, and so small; The Atomists, too, let us honour—Epicurus, Lucretius, and all. Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms combined To form that remarkable structure which it pleased him to call his mind. Next praise ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... one-sidedness in their theories, seeing only that which fits in with their theories, and ignoring the rest. The Materialist talks about Infinite and Eternal Matter, although the latest scientific investigations have shown us Matter fading into Nothingness—the Eternal Atom being split into countless particles called Corpuscles or Electrons, which at the last seem to be nothing but a unit of Electricity, tied up in a "knot in the Ether"—although just what the Ether is, Science does not dare to guess. And Energy, also seems ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the Mistral Rock,' said Pierre. 'Good! she will be in pieces in an hour, and every atom ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... expression could be discovered by the hungry minds which focussed unanimously upon its almost stern contours. The deep furrows in the cardboardlike cheeks (furrows which resembled slightly the gills of some extraordinary fish, some unbreathing fish) moved not an atom. The moustache drooped in something like mechanical tranquillity. The lips closed occasionally with a gesture at once abstracted and sensitive upon the lightly and carefully held cigarette; whose curling smoke accentuated the poise of the head, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... never put herself before Anne, and so we got in the way of me being the one to do most for mums. I told you at the beginning—didn't I?—that some people might think me rather a girl-y boy, but I don't mind one scrap of an atom if they do. I have my own ideas. I know the splendidest cricketer and footballer you ever saw is a fellow whose sister's a cripple, and she can't bear any one to lift her but him, because he's so gentle. And I've seen a young doctor in our village doing up a baby that was burnt nearly to death, ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion; but, as the boy gradually found his surroundings change, and felt himself no longer an isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish, he began to learn the first and easier lessons of practical politics. Thus far he had seen nothing but eighteenth-century statesmanship. America and he began, at the same time, to become aware ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... shoulder. "I've been having some doubts about your methods, sir, but now I'm with you, shoulder to shoulder, to save this situation. Pay no attention to those telegrams. There's no telling what that idiot has wired to the justices. This man has not an atom of authority. You cannot legally share your authority with him. To defer to one of his demands will be breaking your oath to preserve order and ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... there had been no G, and no you, the universe would have had an atom less pain in it, and no one have ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... screams which could be heard from the fifth floor, where he lay, to the street. Death made his approaches like some skilful engineer against some impregnable fortress: fibre by fibre, vein by vein, atom by atom, was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... a cross old thing. Don't you remember how she was going to have Bertrand beaten, when that kind old nun stopped her? You're not a bit like her, dear little mamma,—not a scrap, not an atom! But oh, mamma, when will you be able to read us all those famous stories about heroes? They're the only things I ever remember, and I'm pining for one ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... jewelry and things to Bess's baby!" I found strength to call back. What with the wallowing of the steamer and the natural instability of rope-ladders I seemed a mere atom tossed about in a swaying, reeling universe. What will Aunt Jane do? flashed through my mind, and I wished I had waited to see. Then the arms of the Honorable Mr. Vane received me. The strong rowers bent their backs, and the boat shot out over the mile or two of bright water between ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... garish and extravagant. Besides, there is a restlessness and a buz no human being, at least no sensible human being, can endure. Everything is on the stir. Every creature, however paltry and insignificant, whether moth, mote, or atom, seems busy. Whereas, one serene soft gaze of the moon appears to allay nature's universal disquiet. The calm and mellow placidity of her look, so heavenly and undisturbed, lulls the soul, and subdues ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... analogous to that existing between benzol, C{6}H{6}, and naphthalene, C{10}H{8}; and the theory generally accepted by those chemists who have been occupying themselves with these bases and their derivatives is that pyridine is simply benzol, in which an atom of nitrogen replaces the triad group, CH, and quinoline, the naphthalene molecule with a similar change. Indeed, Ladenberg has recently succeeded in obtaining benzol as an alteration product from pyridine, in certain reactions. Moreover, from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... trees during heavy rain. Indeed that was the appearance of the whole scene—a country-side being drenched and rendered vague by a heavy downpour; but it was sheer heat that was descending, with never an atom of moisture ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... it blowing upon him. All at once it seemed to him that he had ceased to be afraid,—that he did not care what might happen. He thought about a cricket he had one day watched in the harbor,—drifting out with the tide, on an atom of dead bark.—and he wondered what had become of it Then he understood that he himself was the cricket,—still alive. But some boy had found him and pulled off his legs. There they were,—his own legs, pressing against him: he could ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... call out of the mystery of being to travel the difficult road of the generations of mankind. Nor is this inherited tendency toward partial affection a sign of undeveloped or selfish quality in the woman of to-day. It is a provision of nature still supremely useful in helping each tiny atom of the social whole to find and keep its own place in a world of struggle and hardship. The fear of defeat handicaps many a purpose before it is put to the test. The sense of loneliness drives many to lower companionship ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... was to survive; Simonds was not. In what respects Simonds was inferior to Freke, the Divine Mind alone could say. When that convulsive face shot past Isabelle in Lane's office, it was merely the tragic moment when the conscious atom was realizing fully that he was not to be the one to survive! The moment when ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... water-hole. And when the sun stuck a glowing rim over the desert's horizon, to resume his rule over the baked and blighted land, the big black horse and his rider were traveling steadily, the only life visible in the wide area of desolation—a moving blot, an atom behind which was death and the ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... or her mere quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea of her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on which it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses, persuade itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly a "heavenly body" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the "world" that carried them obstructing ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... animal eyes up to the little beauty in the window, muttering some inarticulate thanks, while the stolid Indian's eyes glittered hopefully, though the muscles of his mask-like countenance changed not an atom. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... the floor; many of the books on natural history which he had recently consulted lay open among uncorrected proof-sheets. The subject in hand, and from which he had suddenly broken off, related to birds. "Do you know anything about birds?" asked Dr. Percy, smiling. "Not an atom," replied Cradock; "do you?" "Not I! I scarcely know a goose from a swan: however, let us try what we can do." They set to work and completed their friendly task. Goldsmith, however, when he came to revise it, made such alterations that ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Wisdom, and Wonders of the Work of Creation, that he was swallow'd up with Admiration, and fully assur'd that these things could not proceed from any other, than a Voluntary Agent of infinite Perfection, nay, that was above all Perfection; such an one, to whom the Weight of the least Atom was not unknown, whether in Heaven or Earth; no, nor any other thing, whether ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... and acted upon by the solemn influences of Nature! As a patient on whom, slowly and by degrees, the agencies of mesmerism are brought to bear, he acknowledged to his heart the growing force of that vast and universal magnetism which is the life of creation, and binds the atom to the whole. A strange and ineffable consciousness of power, of the something great within the perishable clay, appealed to feelings at once dim and glorious,—rather faintly recognized than all unknown. An impulse that he could not resist led him to seek the mystic. He would demand, that ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... letters I wept till every atom of my body writhed with agonized emotion. I was aroused by Mrs M'Swat hammering at ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... strove for light on the central mystery, collecting from my diary, my memory, my imagination, from the map, the time-table, and Davies's grubby jottings, every elusive atom of material. Sometimes I issued from a reverie with a start, to find a phlegmatic Dutch peasant staring strangely at me over his china pipe. I was more careful over the German border. Davies's paper I soon knew by heart. I pictured him writing it with his cramped ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... our earthly garment, the body, have ceased; the matter composing it, which even during life was ever being changed, has entered into new chemical combinations, and the earth enters into possession of all that is her due. Not an atom is lost. Scripture promises us the resurrection of a glorified body, and indeed a separate existence without limitation in space is unthinkable; yet it may be that this promise implies nothing more than the continued existence of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... What could the atom mean, with her big eyes looking right into her? Alice never had understood her: it were indeed strange if the less should comprehend the greater! She was not yet, capable of recognising the word of the Lord in the mouth of ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... enjoyed examining it minutely had he dared. His hands itched for it, and its weak, strangling gurgles sent indescribable thrills through him. The easy dexterity with which the nurse handled it— as if the precious atom were a bundle of rags—excited Bob's liveliest apprehension, and at such times he hovered near by, poised upon tiptoe for fear she might drop it. He felt that it should be borne on silken cushions while heads were bowed and backs bent rather than upon the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... water cress and then dry them in a cloth, pressing out every atom of moisture as far as possible; then mix with the cress hard-boiled eggs chopped fine, and seasoned with salt and pepper. Have a stale loaf and some fresh butter, and with a sharp knife cut as many thin ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... dauntless Bobby had accepted the humble role of stage hand rather than have no part in the play, and she trundled scenery with right good will and acted as Miss Anderson's right hand in a mood of unfailing good humor. There was not an atom of envy in Bobby's character, and she thought Betty the most wonderful actress she ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... material body altogether. Identity, in some mysterious way, there evidently is; but there is no resisting the scientific fact that the actual material usable for physical bodies has been used over and over again—so that each atom would have several owners. The mere solitary fact of the existence of cannibalism is to my mind a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of the theory that the particular set of atoms I shall happen to own at death (changed every seven years, they say) will be mine in the next life—and ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... figure out the meaning of this movement. Just then he really had no time to give it a thought, no matter if a dozen wheels were concerned. The fire demanded every atom of ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... make no mystery of it, nor attempt to screen you from her ladyship's just reproaches, by concealing one atom of the truth. The fact is, madam, that sir Willoughby not only in my hearing, gave Miss Helen his unrestricted permission to throw herself into my arms, but actually forced her into the room where ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... plant-material which is now ready to be carried from the leaves to all parts of the plant or tree, to nourish it and continue its growth. Such is the important and wonderful work of the leaf, the tender, delicate leaf, which we crumple so easily in our fingers. It builds up, atom by atom, the tree and the great forests which beautify the world and provide for us a thousand comforts and conveniences. Our houses and the furniture in them, our boats and ships, the cars in which we fly so swiftly, the many beautiful and useful ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... do that, it would be quite possible that one of the prisoners walking in the yard might see it, and would as likely as not report the circumstance to one of the warders in order to curry favour and perhaps obtain a remission of his sentence. Scrape it inside and pour every atom down the crevices in the floor. That done, we are safe ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... unit poured out beneath the sky—or what would have been a sky had not incarnate fiends usurped it—Jeb found himself moving next to Bonsecours. Even in this strain, when men were thinking in terms of armies, the famous surgeon with infinite tact went about supporting the props of one human atom. After all, he had been trained to mend one man at a time! He spoke no word until they had climbed the sloping roadway and laid flat, peeping over; then, with his lips close to ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... his way, almost as fine a fellow as Timothy Told-you-so, and if Timothy would but stoop to have more of Newton's spirit, he might in time come to possess an atom or two of ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... to go up-stairs for something, and on her return she found that Ruth, during her absence, had set fire to a large linen rag, which she held on a shovel and was carrying about the bedroom, as if to purify it from every atom of negro atmosphere which might remain. Polly was quick-witted, and instantly comprehending the truth, she struck the shovel from the hands of Ruth, exclaiming, "You spalpeen, is it because my skin ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... well!' The reader should understand that the late Mrs Winterfield and Lady Aylmer had never been able to agree with each other on religious subjects. 'Remember that they are married. Why should we remember anything of the kind? It does not make an atom of difference to the woman's character. Repented! How can Clara say whether she has repented or not? But that has nothing to do with it. Not quarrel with her as she calls it! Not give her up! Then, Frederic, of course it must be all over, as far as you are ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... droned out the most tedious and empty tale one ever heard, and neither he nor Papa D'Arc ever gave a thought to the badness of the etiquette of it, or ever suspected that that foolish tale was anything but dignified and valuable history. There was not an atom of value in it; and whilst they thought it distressing and pathetic, it was in fact not pathetic at all, but actually ridiculous. At least it seemed so to me, and it seems so yet. Indeed, I know it was, because it made Joan laugh; and the more sorrowful it got the more it made her laugh; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... shedding its warm blush over all the reflective powers: suddenly an overcast, for that marplot, Disappointment, has obtruded a most vexatiously reiterated morsel of lamp-black: again Hope's little bit of blue paint makes azure rainbows all about the firmament of man's own inner world; and at last an atom of gold-dust specks all the glasses with its lurid yellow, and haply leaves the old miser to his master-passion. So, ever changing day by day, every man's life is but a kaleidoscope. Stay; this simile is somewhat of the longest, but the whim is upon me, and I must have ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... rose, brilliantly illuminated by the moon, the main tower. Upon a solitary crag, that started from the deeps, it stood with a boldness that seemed to proclaim defiance on the part of man to nature—and victorious efforts of his hands over all her opposition. Round about it every atom of the connecting masonry had mouldered away and sunk into heaps of rubbish below—so that all possibility of reaching the tower seemed to be cut off. But beyond this tower Gothic fretwork and imperfect windows rose from the surrounding crags; and in many places were seen pillars springing ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... as those who read will see, to look upon smoking with my wife's eyes. My old bachelor friends complain because I do not allow smoking in the house, but I am always ready to explain my position, and I have not an atom of pity for them. If I cannot smoke here neither shall they. When I visit them in the old inn they take a poor revenge by blowing rings of smoke almost in my face. This ambition to blow rings is the most ignoble known to man. Once I was a member of a club for smokers, where we practised blowing ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... systems of particulars that constitute the material units of physics. This fundamental science would cause physics to become derivative, in the sort of way in which theories of the constitution of the atom make chemistry derivative from physics; it would also cause psychology to appear less singular and isolated among sciences. If we are right in this, it is a wrong philosophy of matter which has caused many of the difficulties in the ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... will as well as mine. Try to bring them to a level with the whites by a wrench, and you'll waken out of your dream to a sharp reality. Your Northern philosophy ought to be old enough to teach you that spasms in the body-politic shake off no atom of disease,—that reform, to be enduring, must be patient, gradual, inflexible as the Great Reformer. 'The mills of God,' the old proverb says, 'grind surely.' But, Dorr, they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... grasped only by the reason, but by their various combinations and arrangements they brought about the apparent multiplicity of objects which the senses perceived. Such was the foundation of the atomic theory of Democritus. He conceived the atom as a centre of force, and not as a particle having weight and material qualities. As, however, his hypothesis was purely a metaphysical one, it did not lead to any of the discoveries which have followed ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... sea-fogs which swept up, and made the Tor so dangerous, Mrs. Grant affirmed; but Oscar always said "Fudge!" to this—a pet word of his, as he did on that fair March morning, when not a cloud or an atom of fog was to be seen anywhere, but all was cold and brilliant, as some ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... Analogously the atoms also must be held to originate binary compounds in the way of combining by means of their six sides; for if the atoms possessed no distinction of parts (and hence filled no space), a group of even a thousand atoms would not differ in extension from a single atom, and the different kinds of extension—minuteness, shortness, bigness, length, &c.—would never emerge. If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the atoms also have distinct sides, they have parts and are made up of those ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... oak, but the chairs and couches were covered with faded tapestry and tarnished gilding, apparently the superannuated members of the general household of seats. I could give an individual description of each, for every atom in that room, large enough for discernable shape or colour, seems branded into my brain. If I happen to have the least feverishness on me, the moment I fall asleep, I ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... of Cuckoo then contains a soul that's cankered with disease, moth-eaten with corruption, worn away to an atom not bigger than a grain of dust. I would not call ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the Boulevards. He was stupid with grief. He watched the passers-by and the stream of traffic, and felt that he was alone, and a very small atom in this seething whirlpool of Paris, churned by the strife of innumerable interests. His thoughts went back to the banks of his Charente; a craving for happiness and home awoke in him; and with the craving, came one of the sudden ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... but to the entire world, occurred in our Alvarez County yesterday. Visitors on the early morning tour through Alvarez Caverns, came upon an astonishing spectacle. Two men and a young girl of indescribable strangeness of manner and dress were seated on the floor of Atom Cave. All were in the last stages of exhaustion and exposure, and even the little light from the electric hand lamps seemed to blind them. Fortunately, in the tour was Dr. and Mrs. Ferguson of New Washington, and Dr. Ferguson, ...
— Out of the Earth • George Edrich
... were prepared at the street ends leading out of town, ready to be put up at any moment. Information was then so slow in its journeyings that falsehood became as strong-looking as truth, and it was easy to keep up a ferment for some time. Any atom of news became a mountain, until the fresh air of truth melted it away. We were therefore kept for days in a state of great excitement, and it certainly was some time before our warlike spirit subsided, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... multitude of forms, can never die, will the imperial spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit like a royal guest to this tenement of clay? No, He who, notwithstanding His apparent prodigality, created nothing without a purpose, and wasted not a single atom in all His creation, has made provision for a future life in which man's universal longing for immortality will find its realization. I am as sure that we shall live again as I am ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... present in a free condition in metallic conductors. Each electron carries an electric charge of electrostatic units and produces a magnetic field in a plane perpendicular to the direction of its motion. This brings us to the atom, which may be described as a number of electrons positive and negative in stable equilibrium, this condition being brought about by the mutual repulsion of the like and attraction for the opposite electrification so arranged as ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... gentles, none know better than yourselves that many Zaporozhtzi have run in debt to the Jew ale-house keepers and to their brethren, so that now they have not an atom of credit. Again, touching the matter in question, there are many young fellows who have no idea of what war is like, although you know, gentles, that without war a young man cannot exist. How make a Zaporozhetz out of him if he has ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... drinking to you. You haven't an appetite that cannot be checked, but you will have if you stick to it much longer. Why not quit and take a chance at a new mode of living, especially when you know absolutely that every health reason, every future-prospect reason, every atom of good sense in you, tells you there is nothing to be gained by keeping at it, and that all ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... considerable, then. Do you suppose a water-wave is like a harp-string? Vibration is the movement of a body in a state of tension,—undulation, that of a body absolutely lax. In vibration, not an atom of the body changes its place in relation to another,—in undulation, not an atom of the body remains in the same place with regard to another. In vibration, every particle of the body ignores gravitation, or defies it,—in undulation, every particle of the body is slavishly submitted ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... made slower progress; and always the goal she had set herself, the end of that jutting hill, thrust itself out, nosed forward, sliding down to the plain. It began to darken, but Joan thought that her sight was failing. The enormous efforts she was making took every atom of her will. At last her muscles refused obedience, her laboring heart stopped. She stood a moment, swayed, fell, and this time she made no effort to rise. She had become a dark spot on the snow, a lifeless part of the ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... scientific power, progress and spiritual exaltation. Marriage is here as with us, and love holds its deathless sway among the white and noble Martians as on earth, while the affection of friendship seems to weave every atom of society to every other atom in a social texture over which only moves the refining powers of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... nearest shelter to find our way to it, with a deep creek to cross. F—— was fifty yards off, with his back to me, searching for some indispensable buckle; so there was no help to be got from him at the moment. I exerted every atom of my remaining strength to slip the bridle over my left arm, which I pressed against my waist; then I sat down as quietly as I could, not to alarm the horse, bent forward so as to keep my left arm under me lest the bridle should slip off, and fainted away in great peace and comfort. The ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... biggest prize!' Or. . .parodying Pyramus' sighs. . . 'Behold the nose that mars the harmony Of its master's phiz! blushing its treachery!' —Such, my dear sir, is what you might have said, Had you of wit or letters the least jot: But, O most lamentable man!—of wit You never had an atom, and of letters You have three letters only!—they spell Ass! And—had you had the necessary wit, To serve me all the pleasantries I quote Before this noble audience. . .e'en so, You would not have been let to utter one— Nay, not the half or ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... fellow—every inch a man," said the major carelessly. "Voice orotund, magnetic. Easy manners. Good figure;" and he walked up and down complacently, slapping his own shrunk shank. There had been a well-shaped leg inside of the ragged linen trousers once, and the conscious merit which infused every atom of his lean little body still ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... we attach to the luminiferous ether. When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihility. The only consideration which restrains us is our conception of its atomic constitution; and here, even, we have to seek aid from our notion of an atom, as something possessing in infinite minuteness, solidity, palpability, weight. Destroy the idea of the atomic constitution and we should no longer be able to regard the ether as an entity, or at least as matter. For want of a better word we might term it spirit. Take, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... its height, and, as I listened, rain and wind and thunder became merged and blended into awful music—a symphony of Life and Death played by the hands of God; and I was an atom—a grain of dust an insect, to be crushed by God's little finger. And yet needs must this insect still think upon its little self for half drowned, deafened, blind, and half stunned though I was, still the voice within me cried: "Why? ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... I arrived, I kissed her when I left, each day was the same. She would put her arms round my neck and look long and deeply into my eyes, then she would gently kiss my lips. Not an atom of emotion! not a spark from the fires which I feel must be raging beneath that diabolically [1] extraordinary [1] amazingly ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... any reference to the chickadee,—I admit no possibility of exaggeration in his case,—but as leading to a mention of the golden-crested kinglet. He is the least of all our winter birds, and one of the most engaging. Emerson's "atom in full breath" and "scrap of valor" would apply to him even better than to the titmouse. He says little,—zee, zee, zee is nearly the limit of his vocabulary; but his lively demeanor and the grace and agility of his movements are in themselves an excellent ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Ache, and the mattress, Run into boulders and hummocks, Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes - Tumbling, importunate, daft - Ramble and roll, and the gas, Screwed to its lowermost, An inevitable atom of light, Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper Snores me to ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather frightened girl, and that every atom of her ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... me with looks of apprehension and rebuke which seemed to ask why I was abroad at that late hour, leaving my wife under such circumstances. I could not meet his glance with a manly eye. They brought me the dead infant—poor atom of mortality—no longer mortal; but I turned away from the spectacle. I dared not look upon it. It was the form of a perished hope, ended in a dream! And such a dream! The physician gave me a brief explanation of ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... atom from my loins Against my kingly power rebel? Though heaven itself to aid him joins, His end is death—the infidel! I warn thee yet,—bow down, thou slave, And worship me, or thou shalt die! We'll see what ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... which holds the planets in their orbits is universal gravitation. In 1800, Laplace and Herschel are honored for teaching that gravitation built up the system which it still controls; that our universe is but a minor nebula, our sun but a minor star, our earth a mere atom of matter, our race only one of myriad races peopling an infinity of worlds. Doctrines which but the span of two human lives before would have brought their enunciators to the stake were now ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... her! A queen in her own self sufficiency and condescension, she could not suspect how little of real queendom, noble and self sustaining, there was in her being; for not a soul of man or woman whose every atom leans not upon its father fact in God, can sustain itself when the outer wall of things begins to tumble towards the centre, crushing ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... sight to be deserted, for not a soul was to be seen in any direction; but the low wail of an infant, suddenly breaking in upon the silence, and issuing from one of the huts, betrayed the fact that at least one small atom of humanity still lingered about the place; and where so small a baby was, the mother would probably ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... it would only profit your master, who would not even thank you for it, and leave you to die on the flags in your old age. So all my fire was damped, and I said to myself: 'What's the use of doing more than I just need? If I gain heaps of gold for M. Tripeaud, shall I get an atom of it?' Therefore, finding neither pride nor profit in my work, I took a disgust for it—just did barely enough to earn my wages—became an idler and a rake—and said to myself: 'When I get too tired of labor, I can always follow the example of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... was numbing in its vastness. This was the concave, inner surface, doubtless deep within the atom of some material substance. A little empty Space here, ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... therefore, is a necessary and indispensable element in any great human character. There is no living without it. Religion is the tie that connects man with his Creator, and holds him to his throne. If that tie be all sundered, all broken, he floats away, a worthless atom in the universe; its proper attractions all gone, its destiny thwarted, and its whole future nothing but darkness, desolation, and death. A man with no sense of religious duty is he whom the Scriptures describe, in such terse ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... creative word of God? To assign eternity to it is to invest it with an attribute that is Divine, and Pantheists carry such an explanation to its logical conclusion when they affirm that the universe is God. The existence of a single atom is an unfathomable mystery. Man cannot create or destroy even a particle of matter. How overwhelming, then, if we reject the simple statement of the Bible, is the mystery of the great universe, in whose ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... total darkness was broken in one place, and one only, by a plateful of light proceeding from a tiny bulb of incandescence in its centre. This blinding atom of white heat lit up a hand hardly moving, a pen continually poised, over a disc of snowy paper; and on the other side, something that lay handy on the table, reflecting the light in its plated parts. It was Raffles at his latest deviltry. He had not heard me, and he could ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... revealed for human thought and speculation. We learned that our globe was not, as we had supposed, the centre of the universe. It was assigned its place far from that centre, and was known to be no more than a mere atom, lost amid an incalculable number of other globes. The revelations of the telescope proved that those who formerly were considered wise actually knew nothing. Quickly following these discoveries, extraordinary narratives of excursions through ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... I tell you he is the most contemptible blockhead that the universe can furnish! Courage perhaps he possesses, but of brains not an atom. ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... centre of stillness, to be alone in a vast space, either crushes one with loneliness or gives him an unbounded exhilaration. To-night Bob felt the latter sensation. It seemed instead of being a small, lost atom in a swirling world, he was a part of all this lambent starlight; this whispering ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... that in which you believe. But can I imagine Infinity setting itself to work out such trivialities? What is even a world? A mere grain of dust in endless space! It cannot be. A God who could take interest in man, in such an atom as I, would be no God at all. What avails me to have risen unto more knowledge, more clearness in the sense of the divine, if it is to plunge me into such an abyss as this? Would I had never been awakened from my sleep—the dull stupor of materialism into which I ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... it is in practical results, the kinetic theory of gases, as hitherto developed, stops absolutely short at the atom or molecule, and gives not even a suggestion toward explaining the properties in virtue of which the atoms or molecules mutually influence one another. For some guidance toward a deeper and more comprehensive theory of matter, we may look ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... soprano compass—swell, diminish, and keep it exactly to the same pitch for an incredible space of time. She can burst forth a torrent of sound expressive of our strongest passions, without losing an atom of tone, and she can diminish it to a whisper, in sotto voce, as distinct as it is thrilling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various
... made to feel our immense superiority in power and resources; they must be shown in unmistakable colors the unconquerable might of nationality in strong contrast with the weakness of sectionalism, as well as their own dependence upon the North; in a word, every atom of resistance must be utterly and forever crushed out by brute force. To no other argument will they listen, as experience has proved; and this 'last resort of kings' must be exerted in all its strength and proclaimed in thunder tones, even though ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... openly declares, 'the end and term of NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, in the intention of MAN.' His science included the humblest and least agreeable of nature's performances; his Novum Organum was able to take up the smallest conceivable atom of existence, whether animate or not, and make a study of it. He has no disrespect for caterpillars or any kind of worm or insect; but he is not a caterpillar himself, or an insect of any kind, or ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... passion, and said that if anything was the matter with his wife it was my fault, as I must have brought the contagion or neglected to take the usual antiseptic precautions. I told him that he should not make such statements without an atom of proof, but, interrupting me, he declared that, fever or no fever, he would attend upon Lady Colford, as he could not afford to throw away the best chance he had ever had. I said, 'My dear fellow, don't be mad. Why, if anything happened ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... through many difficulties, through many diversities of opinion, they have at last arrived at these conclusions, and sent them to us. Shall any Senator stand upon the little consideration, "this changes my resolution," and shall he compare that little atom of his production with the great end and object proposed to be attained for a whole nation? No, sir; not a moment. I believe our best hope of preservation is in adopting the resolutions proposed by this Convention, and I adhere to ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... struggled honestly, perhaps, but, as was his wont, obstinately, proudly, and offensively, against the growing power of the Commons. He was for allowing them their old authority, and not one atom more. He would never have claimed for the Crown a right to levy taxes from the people without the consent of Parliament. But when the Parliament, in the first Dutch war, most properly insisted on knowing how it was that the money which they had voted had produced so ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... drearier prose. For these artistic materials had not only to be preached and prayed to,—they had to be in a measure lived with, listened to, personally studied, and individually considered. Each was an atom to be set in vibration, and each needed to be set or kept going in his own way. All this prose had to be made help in the poetry. How skilful you had to be to rouse the interest you needed and escape the many interests you did not need, to awaken the single gift without ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... which seemed inseparable from his doings, Comus had always flung away a portion of his borrowings in some ostentatious piece of glaring and utterly profitless extravagance, which outraged all the canons of her upbringing without bringing him an atom of understandable satisfaction. Under these repeated discouragements it was not surprising that some small part of her affection should have slipped away, but she had come to the Park that morning with an unconfessed expectation of being gently wooed back to the ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... thing, of course, to have to decide on the spur of the moment. I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven't the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke and himself ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... make himself cry. with his own fiddle. David had a touch of this witchcraft. Though a sound musician and reasonably master of his instrument, he could not fly in a second up and down it, tickling the fingerboard and scratching the strings without an atom of tone, as the mechanical monkeys do that ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... shadows—yea, Living or dead all things were bodiless, Or but the mutual mockeries of body, Till that same star summoned me back again. Now I could laugh till my ribs ached. Fool! To let a creed, built in the heart of things, Dissolve before a twinkling atom!—Oswald, I could fetch lessons out of wiser schools Than you have entered, were it worth the pains. Young as I am, I might go forth a teacher, And you should see how deeply I could reason Of love in ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... he, rehearsing his exclamation of astonishment and delight at meeting her, 'by the most miraculous piece of good fortune conceivable, dear madam. And now comes the question, since you have condescended to notice a solitary atom of your acquaintance on the public highroad, whether I am to have the honour of doubling the freight of your carriage, or you will deign to embark in mine? But the direction of the horses' heads must be reversed, absolutely it must, if your Highness would repose in a bed to-night. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... duration—for us so impossible to calculate or to conceive! Nowhere so much as here does one suffer from the dismay of knowing that all our miserable little human effervescence is only a sort of fermentation round an atom emanated from that sinister ball of fire, and that that fire itself, the wonderful sun, is no more than an ephemeral meteor, a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the innumerable cosmic transformations, in the course of times ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... or principles in man. In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a progression from this to that point in time;—in Greek Tragedy you have a cross-section of time—a cutting through the atom of time that glimpses may be caught of eternity. There was no unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood. In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively. The ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the principles that adhere in atom, molecule and mass, still hold in worlds and solar systems? Is not this precisely what is meant by "The Reign of Law"? If man were built upon some other scheme or plan than the rest of nature, how could he apprehend or adjust himself to Nature? The very concept of miracle ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... possess'd but an atom of sense, He ne'er would have woman from Paradise driven, But instead of his Houris a flimsy pretence, With woman alone, he had ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... ice-tables with quiet but irresistible momentum. For two days the war of ice continued to rage, and sometimes the contending forces, in the shape of huge tongues and corners of bergs, were forced into the Bay of Mercy, and threatened swift destruction to the little craft, which was a mere atom that might have been crushed and sunk and scarcely missed in ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... lose the powers originally inherent in them, when they unite to form that molecule, the properties of which express those forces of the whole aggregation which are not neutralized and balanced by one another. Each atom has given up something, in order that the atomic society, or molecule, may subsist. And as soon as any one or more of the atoms thus associated resumes the freedom which it has renounced, and follows some external attraction, the molecule is broken ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... I would neither accept nor permit a divorce, for, in my estimation, it was not worth the paper that framed it, and was a species of sacrilegious trifling; but I would never live as the wife of a man who had repeatedly declared he had not an atom of affection for me. Under some circumstances I deemed separation a woman's duty, and while I fully comprehended the awful import of the vow 'Till death us do part,' and denied that human legislators could ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... seen him stand and lose his all without a sign of feeling. But now he raved and cursed and prayed and plead with his "Girlie!"—his "Baby Doll!", and with the last atom of her strength ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... that seemed to its proposer a reasonable and equitable means of remedying a grave injustice and restoring rather than giving rights to the poor. He might, if he would, have insisted on simple restitution. Had he pressed the letter of the law, not an atom of the public domain need have been left to its present occupiers. The possessor had no rights against the State; he held on sufferance, and technically he might be supposed to be always waiting for his summons to ejectment. To give such people something over and above the limit that the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... but a moment of rest and happiness; for Christopher the scene is soon changed, and he must set forth upon a voyage again, while Philippa is left, with a new light in her eyes, to watch over the atom that wakes and weeps and twists and struggles and mews, and sleeps again, in her charge. Sleep well, little son! Yet a little while, and you too shall make voyages and conquests; new worlds lie waiting for you, who are so greatly astonished at this ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... paper angrily in his hand, and muttered a curse as he flung it into the fire. He felt little enough gratitude to Wren for describing him merely as resigned, and not, as was actually the case, dismissed. Yet, even in his wretchedness, there was an atom of relief in knowing that at least a shred of his good ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... them, only parts of the infinite whole of things; and experience cannot possibly afford any justification for supposing that they affect the Universe itself. Thus, the matter or energy of which we think we consist, was in existence, every atom of it, and every element of force, before we were born, and will survive our apparent death. And the same thing, at least on the Pantheistic view, is true of every other mode of apparently separate or finite existence. ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... recognizes in all about seventy of these elements each with its peculiar affinities; but the more advanced physical science of the present day finds that they are all composed of one and the same ultimate substance to which the name of Ether has been given, and that the difference between an atom of iron and an atom of oxygen results only from the difference in the number of etheric particles of which each is composed and the rate of their motion within the sphere of the atom, thus curiously coming back to the dictum ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... determined that Halpen should not do this. He was a strong swimmer and spurred by both the desire to recapture his enemy and to save the cause to which he was bound—the capture of Ticonderoga—he put forth every atom of his strength to overtake the canoe. The paddle flashed first upon one side, then on the other of the craft, which fairly darted through the water. But suddenly a hand and arm rose from the lake and seized the paddle just back of the blade. Enoch had ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... globe well knew. They made the special effects, indeed, wrought in the fluid by special impulses, the subject of exact calculation—so that it became easy to determine in what precise period an impulse of given extent would engirdle the orb, and impress (forever) every atom of the atmosphere circumambient. Retrograding, they found no difficulty; from a given effect, under given conditions, in determining the value of the original impulse. Now the mathematicians who saw that the results of any given impulse were absolutely endless—and who saw that ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... explain what passes in that interior heaven, for the subject is too sublime to come within the reach of weak, defective human language. She is so elevated above the world, that all its combined splendours appear to her but as a contemptible atom of dust. Thus does the Almighty 'raise the needy from the earth, to place them with the princes of his people,' and in doing so, He only exalts His own glory, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... my ears that he could compel me to live with him. But I know now that the best friends in the world could not have saved me from him in any other way than the one I took. He kept within the letter of the law. He forfeited no atom of ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... miles emeritus, to the bosom of his family. Quantum mutatus! The good Father of us all had doubtless entrusted to the keeping of this child of his certain faculties of a constructive kind. He had put in him a share of that vital force, the nicest economy of every minute atom of which is necessary to the perfect development of Humanity. He had given him a brain and heart, and so had equipped his soul with the two strong wings of knowledge and love, whereby it can mount to hang its nest under the eaves of heaven. And this child, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... which it tosses up into foam, and breaks against every rock in its vast circumference; for it carries in its bosom, with perfect calm and composure, the incontrollable ocean and the peopled earth, like an atom of ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... rapidity and skill stripped off the hides and pegged them out preparatory to treating them in the native fashion, afterwards removing the heads and carefully depositing each in the near vicinity of an ants' nest, in order that the insects might remove—as they very speedily would—every atom of flesh from the bones. Then, having rendered this service to the champions who had delivered them from their formidable enemies, they departed, dancing, to the village, singing a triumphant song to the glory of the white men, in which ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... A nameless atom. Weary of life in mean and paltry times, Of smoking pipes and dreaming of ideals. Who am I? How do I know? That's my trouble. Am I at all?—It's very hard to "be." I study Victor Hugo; spout his odes— I tell you this, because this sort of thing Is all contemporary youth. I spend ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... dressed in a gown of plain black silk, and her brown, withered face seemed one of those which defy alike time and its reckoning. Her white hair was drawn back from her forehead, and tied in a loose knot at the back of her head. Her mouth was cruel. Her eyes were hard and brilliant. There was not an atom of softness, or of human weakness of any sort, to be traced in any one of her features. Around her neck she wore a scarf of brilliant red, the ends of which were fastened with ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cripple of himself In his pursuit of me, though I have heard His condescension honors me with parts. Parts make a whole, if we've enough of them; And once I figured a sufficiency To be at least an atom in the annals Of your republic. But I ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... congesting of veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one of the circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because she was tired of being painted "sweetly"—and yet not to lose an atom of the sweetness. ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... grotesque. Blake, by training and vocation an engraver, was primarily an artist; but, partly under Swedenborgian influences, he had grasped the innermost character of sentimentalism, perceived all its implications, and carried them fearlessly to their utmost bounds. To him every atom of the cosmos was literally spiritual and holy; the divine and the human, the soul and the flesh, were absolutely one; God and Man were only two aspects of pervasive "mercy, pity, peace, and love." Nothing else had genuine reality. The child, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... his thoughts are drawn aside from this intense study of his own immediate wants, wishes, and plans, even once in the twenty-four hours, to contemplate the majesty, mercy, truth, and justice, of the Divine Being that has set him, as an atom, amid the myriads of the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... a present vision. I followed Phineas Tate, perhaps using some excuse with myself—indeed, I feared that he would attack her rudely and be cruelly plain with her—yet knowing in my heart that I went because I could do nothing else, and that when she called, every atom of life in me answered to her summons. So in I went, to find Phineas standing bolt upright in the parlour of the tavern, turning the leaves of his book with eager fingers, as though he sought some text that was ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... dazzle and blind them. Part of my equipment was the power to convince them without effort of my superior usefulness; there was no time to lose. I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called Earth. Now the part ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... seems, in the eyes of some of its interpreters, to point to a close connection, if not of being, at least of influence, between soul and soul, such as binds each atom of matter to every other; a connection which increases as we descend from the above-ground level of full consciousness, through ever lower strata of subconsciousness, to those hidden depths of unconscious operation ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... electricity; and as such globules may be identical with living and reproductive cells, we have the earliest germ of organic life, the first cause of all the species of animated nature which people the earth, the ocean, and the air. Born of electricity and albumen, the simple monad is the first living atom; the microscopic animalcules, the snail, the worm, the reptile, the fish, the bird, and the quadruped, all spring from its invisible loins. The human similitude at last appears in the character of the monkey; the monkey rises into the baboon, the baboon is exalted to the ourang-outang, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... his eye. For a time the stream of omnibuses, cabs, heavy wagons, and light carts, completely bewildered him, as did the throng of people who hastened along the footway. He was depressed rather than exhilarated at the sight of this busy multitude. He seemed such a solitary atom in the midst of this great moving crowd. Presently, however, the thought that where so many millions gained their living there must be room for one boy more, somewhat cheered him. He was a long time making his way to his place of destination, for he stared into every ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... goodly frame, this World, Of Heaven and Earth consisting, and compute Their magnitudes—this Earth, a spot, a grain, An atom, with the Firmament compared And all her numbered stars, that seem to roll Spaces incomprehensible (for such Their distance argues, and their swift return Diurnal) merely to officiate light Round this opacous Earth, this punctual spot, One day and night, in all her vast survey Useless ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... middle of August (Monday, 16th) I had announcement that he was coming up for special purposes: "I sit down to write to you without an atom of news to communicate. Yes, I have,—something that will surprise you, who are pent up in dark and dismal Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and the fishing-boats are ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of its contents, and devours it bit by bit; for a long time she chews and rechews the gummy morsel and ends by swallowing it all down. In less than half a day, the milky burden has disappeared, consumed with zest down to the last atom. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the doctor; "above all, when they have reached this age; for, now, thanks to the progress of the science, idiot children receive a kind of education which develops, at least, the atom of imperfect intelligence with which they are sometimes endowed. We have a school here, directed with as much perseverance as enlightened patience, which already offers the most satisfactory results; by a very ingenious ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... without the aid of philosophy, would be led to entertain upon the subject. The INFINITE DIVISIBILITY of matter, or, in other words, the INFINITE divisibility of a FINITE thing, extending even to the minutest atom, is a point agreed among geometricians, though not less incomprehensible to common-sense than any of those mysteries in religion, against which the batteries of infidelity have been ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... tearful, lying, pitiful letter he had sent to Gemma, that never received an answer.... See her again, go back to her, after such falsehood, such treachery, no! no! he could not, so much conscience and honesty was left in him. Moreover, he had lost every trace of confidence in himself, every atom of self-respect; he dared not rely on himself for anything. Sanin recollected too how he had later on—oh, ignominy!—sent the Polozovs' footman to Frankfort for his things, what cowardly terror he had felt, how he had had one thought only, to get away as soon as might be to Paris—to ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... difficult to estimate the impact of mind upon mind it becomes bewilderingly impossible to weigh, in such a movement as Distributism, the actual practical effects. Partly because, while Distributism leads naturally to co-operation (an individual, says Chesterton, is only the Latin word for an atom and to reduce society to individuals is to smash it to atoms), still the movement is essentially local, the groups ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... prayed that she might ever be spared a trial, or that a greater strength would be hers, than had been her mother's. As she has grown older, I have been grieved and troubled, beyond expression, to watch the growth of that spirit, and of a selfishness, that must have been her father's, as not an atom of it belonged to her mother, and many times I would have been discouraged utterly, if I had not had the faith that God would do all things for the best, and that all He wanted was for me to do all in my power, and trust the rest ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... played it! Surely no one deserved success more than Dick. And it is a consolation to know he had more than fifty years of just what he wanted. He had health, a great talent, and personal charm. There never was a more loyal or unselfish friend. There wasn't an atom of envy in him. He had unbounded mental and physical courage, and with it all he was sensitive and sometimes shy. He often tried to conceal these last two qualities, but never succeeded in doing so from those of us who were privileged really ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... best of its art schools. To make a long story short, after I had expended some five thousand dollars on her, including traveling expenses and other incidentals, the net result was an elongated thumb. I was forced to the conclusion that she had not an atom of real talent, merely the treacherous American facility. Moreover, she lost all her interest in "art" when it meant hard work and persistent application. I was wondering what on earth I was to do with her when she solved the problem herself. She announced with unusual decision that ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... this old atom of a metropolis had lately had an increase of population, which was nearly as great a wonder as Sarah having a son when she was "well stricken in years." A couple of new-comers—not a man nor woman less than a couple—now ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... proud, with none of the cunning humility of the rustics described by Balzac, too simple, too, to be puffed up by wealth. Her only pride was to show her son with what painstaking zeal she had acquitted herself of her duties as care-taker. Not an atom of dust, not a trace of dampness on the walls. The whole magnificent ground-floor, the salons with the silk draperies and upholstery of changing hue, taken at the last moment from their coverings; the long summer galleries, with cool, resonant inlaid floors, which ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... poor in health and spirit, but vindictive, powerful, and dangerous to an extreme degree, his morals—the mean white has high and exacting standards—are indescribable even in whispers in a saloon, and so on, and so on. There is really not an atom of evidence an unprejudiced mind would accept to sustain any belief of the sort. There is nothing to show that the children of racial admixture are, as a class, inherently either better or worse in any respect ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... that only a red glow in the sky above marked the spot. The stars shone in calm, mocking serenity on the wide scene of human distress and fear. "Alas," he thought, "what atoms we are; and what an atom is this earth itself! It would seem that faith is the simplest, yet mightiest effort of the mind at such a time," and he paused till Aun' Sheba should be more free to ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... to remorseless fire! Watch till the last faint spark expire; Then strew its ashes on the wind, Nor leave one atom wreck behind." ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... declared to Huxley that he had watched the entire development of a leaf of Sphagnum. He must have worked with very impure materials in some cases, as plenty of organisms appeared in a saline solution not containing an atom of nitrogen. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant |
