"Chaos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... collapse had cost the Allies a glimpse of destruction and a million lives, was a new plague spot, the center of the world's dread. While the people in Russia starved or slew one another their terrible missionaries went about the world preaching chaos as the new gospel and fanning the always smoldering discontent of ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... the mental habits of the assembly of young women who gathered here, was even more evident in their physical habits, and the effort to counteract the results of injudicious food, dress, social excitement, etc., seemed for a time almost hopeless. But, as order began to be evolved from the original chaos of the educational elements, a corresponding improvement was seen in the hygienic morale; and year by year this has made steady advance, keeping pace with the constantly improved standard ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... York in his book, The American Scene, speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated 'business-man' face ... the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights ... the universal will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... last has broken. What a night Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven! Though varied with a transitory storm, More beautiful in that variety:[7] How hideous upon earth! where peace, and hope, And love, and revel, in an hour were trampled By human passions to a human chaos, Not yet resolved to separate elements:— 'T is warring still! And can the sun so rise, So bright, so rolling back the clouds into Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky, With golden pinnacles, and snowy mountains, And billows purpler ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... apparitions, there are some which fade away and reenter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no longer with the horrors of this present chaos; but there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and alive, to say: 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we, we do not ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... God, and which receives its more general growth from the training bestowed in the tillage of childhood, shot a pang to his heart. For a minute, the mind of this creature equally of civilization and of barbarism, was a sort of chaos as to feeling, not knowing what to think of its own act; and then the obstinacy and pride of one of his habits, interposed to assert their usual ascendency. He struck the butt of his rifle on the bottom of the scow, with ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... sudden bewilderment, looking blankly, questioningly at the faces about him. Then out of the first chaos came the sense of having awakened from some long, quiet sleep—of having suddenly opened his eyes upon a world from which the morning mists had lifted, to see himself—and the woman who stood always at the end of that upward path—face to face for the first time. One by one his outer sensations ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... I felt! Bertie was only a lip-deep scoffer. Her heart was open to conviction yet, and, when the time came, I believed that the seed sown in old days would germinate and bear good harvest. All was chaos now! ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... much worse than disfigurements and broken bones has sprung forth from chaos, and has almost stared them out of countenance since. It is the wolf that is at the door, and the howling and prowling of their particular wolf is not to be sneezed at, let me tell you. To put a modern political face upon an ancient ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... understand her now, though it was no consecutive tale that he heard, but a very chaos of excuses and extenuations, regrets, suppositions, and not always revelant recollections, of which he had to make what he could in his own mind. What he made was a narrative so natural that he could not believe it was the life-story ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... environment, or profounder realm of tradition and nature, may have any degree of unity from chaos to cosmos. For religion its significance lies in the idea of original and far-reaching power rather than in the idea of totality. But that which is at first only "beyond," is practically the same object as that which ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... at her brother. There was one lying ready to her hand, and his glistening shirt-front offered an admirable mark; but she restrained herself. After all, if a hostess yields to her primitive impulses, what happens? Chaos. She had just frowned down the exuberance of the rebellious Murphys, and she felt that if, even with the highest motives, she began throwing fruit, her influence for good in that ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... progressive elements in the social chaos into a regular developing force is one that has had a great attraction for me. I have written upon it elsewhere, and I make no apology for returning to it here and examining it in the light of various afterthoughts and with ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... bricklayers, was surrounded with all the dirt and disorderly discomfort inseparable from the process of house-building. The room they sat in was in the roughest condition which admitted of their occupying it, at all; the raw, new chimney smoked intolerably. Out-of-doors the whole place was one chaos of bricks, mortar, scaffolding, tiles, and slates. A heavy mist shrouded the whole landscape of lovely Tweed side, and distilled in a cold, persistent, and dumb drizzle. Maida, the well-beloved staghound, kept fidgeting in and out of the room, Walter Scott ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a city; and that the great fundamental idea of the modern republican-constitutional state, viz. the expression of the sovereignty of the people by a representative assembly—an idea without which a free state would be a chaos—is wholly modern. Even the Italian polity, although in its somewhat representative senates and in the diminished importance of the comitia it approximated to a free state, never was able in the case either of Rome or of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... along in its impetuous bound of victory. And now it could do what it pleased with us. We gave ourselves up. We went downstream with frightful rapidity. Great clouds, dirty tattered rags hung about the sky; when the moon was hidden there came lugubrious obscurity. Then we rolled in chaos. Enormous billows as black as ink, resembling the backs of fish, bore us along, spinning us round. I could no longer see either Babet or the children. I already ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... but vague ideas of chronology; not a book of any kind was to be found at Roche-Mauprat, except, I should say, the History of the Sons of Aymon, and a few chronicles of the same class brought by our servants from country fairs. Three names, and only three, stood clear in the chaos of my ignorance—Charlemagne, Louis XI, and Louis XIV; because my grandfather would frequently introduce these into dissertations on the unrecognised rights of the nobles. In truth, I was so ignorant that I scarcely knew the difference between a reign and a race; and I was by no means sure that ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... something like consciousness. We had struck a rock, and were now spinning along the edge of a mighty abyss on one wheel, the other performing a sort of balance in the air. I looked ahead, but there was neither shape nor meaning in the country. It was all a wild chaos of destructive elements—trees, precipices, red stockings, and whirling petticoats—toward ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Oxford and its life was somewhat chaotic. Out of that chaos, as I shall show later, I achieved both good and evil. But I must first explain how the chaos arose. By the time I had reached seventeen it had become obvious to my father—or, rather, to the people at the University, who so advised him—that if I was to be able to matriculate at Balliol I ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Education, is in a satisfactory condition. Nothing, in point of fact, could be further from the truth, and perhaps the strongest indictment against the present Executive system in the country is to be found in the chaos which ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... while the interior is filled with vast forests and great mountain ranges, almost trackless to any but native feet. Besides, the absence of all just and stable government has reduced society to a state of chaos. And to all this must be added piracy, from time immemorial sweeping the sea and ravaging the land. Under such circumstances, if there were little opportunity for commerce, there was none for scientific investigations; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... direction of affairs, and a disgraceful chaos in the military operations. But as always, so this time, it ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... terrible flash and roar—a chaos of unimaginable sound. It seemed as though the whole world had split into fragments and were rocketing off into space; and, in quick succession, came the rumble of falling beams and masonry, and the dense dust ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of ice, That closed on it, held it as in a vice, Ice was around us mountains high Its dazzling spear points pierced the sky, In every shape of vast and wild, Heaps upon heaps were tossed and hurled, Mountain on mountain roughly piled, The chaos of ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... mankind has decided, that certain acts are wrong in themselves; that to kill is an act abhorrent to the soul of man, and as it is also a violation of natural right, the murderer shall die—that in his death an element of chaos and destruction, in him, is annihilated—and the principle or element of murder in the wicked be thereby repressed. Here is an instance wherein the right is asserted, to take, not only the liberty, but the life of an individual. ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... Slovaks joined the closely related Czechs to form Czechoslovakia. Following the chaos of World War II, Czechoslovakia became a Communist nation within Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe. Soviet influence collapsed in 1989 and Czechoslovakia once more became free. The Slovaks and the Czechs ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... how interpreted, the fact is what we have described; absolute confusion, the "anarch old" of Milton, is the one deity whose sceptre is there paramount; and yet there it was, in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built his throne. That he must have looked with trepidation and perplexity upon his wild empire and its "dark foundations," may be supposed. The tenure was uncertain to him as regarded its duration; to us it is equally uncertain, and in fact mysterious, as regards its origin. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Barbed wire entanglements with their supporting posts had been rooted from the ground. Guns had been torn from their carriages. "Pill boxes" had been smashed to bits. Horses and men and wagons and camp kitchens were mingled together in wildest chaos. ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... is merely an arbitrary selection made by ourselves of certain among natural processes. The discussion would not be affected by this view, because the argument is really based upon the existence of a cosmos as distinguished from a chaos; and therefore it would be rather an intensification of the argument than otherwise to point out that, for the maintenance of a cosmos, natural laws, as conceived by us, would be inadequate. And this seems a fitting place to make the almost superfluous remark, that throughout this present essay ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... United States vessel to reach the lagoon found only charred remains of a landing stage and several buildings and, at the bottom of the lagoon, an incoherent mass of wreckage, a twisted and shattered chaos of steel plates and framework that might possibly have been a perfectly sound submarine, though sunken, had somebody not been warned in ample time to permit its destruction through the agency of trinitrotoluene, that enormously efficient ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... so?" What would be the condition of the world if all our minds lay dormant? If men did not think, reason and act, our undisturbed, slumbering intellects would not excel the imbecility of the brute; we would live in chaos, hardly aware of our existence. And yet with all our activity of mind, we daily pass by unobserved that which would be wonderful if philosophised and reasoned upon, and with the same inconsistency wonder at that which a little consideration, reason and philosophy ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... one who beheld the chaos would have turned away discouraged. But not so Ted! The disorder was of no consequence in his eyes. Through all its dinginess and confusion he saw that the roof was tight, the windows whole, and the interior quite capable of being swept out, ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... Niagara's abyss of blackness, Into its cavernous chaos, I saw birds wing. Sweeping down Through the mist Of its mighty waters, Undaunted by the roar, Unmindful of the churning, Of the terror of its power, On sure pinions And happy in flight They dipped ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... ways in which the true scale of life can be restored; either these institutions will continue, growing greater and more unwieldy with increasing speed until they burst in anarchy and chaos, and after ruin and long rest we begin all over again (as once before after the bursting of Roman imperialism), or we shall repeat history (as we always do) only after another fashion and, learning as ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... impassioned life: How sweetly comes thy presence ending strife, Thou god of peace and Heaven's undying joy, Oh, hast thou ever left one pain or cloy Upon this beauteous world to us so dear? To all mankind thou art their goddess here. To thee we sing, our holiest, fairest god, The One who in that awful chaos trod And woke the Elements by Law of Love To teeming worlds in harmony to move. From chaos thou hast led us by thy hand, [5]Thus spoke to man upon that budding land: "The Queen of Heaven, of the dawn am I, The goddess of all wide immensity, For thee ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... nature, but antecedes nature, and is above it as sovereign, being of the very essence of that spirit which breathed on the face of the waters, and whose song, flowing from the silence as an incantation, summoned the stars into being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual consciousness, with its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every mystic. That ecstasy is the poetic passion.... The act which is inspired by the Holy Breath must needs speak of things which have no sensuous existence, of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... "Confounded Chaos roar'd And felt ten-fold confusion in their fall Through his wild anarchy; so huge a rout Incumbered ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... lost by this compromise, her state geologist, Douglass Houghton, soon found a splendid jewel in the toad's head of defeat, for the report of his survey of 1840 confirmed the story of the existence of large copper deposits, and the first rush to El Dorado followed. Amid the usual chaos, conflict, and failure incident to such stampedes, order and system at last triumphed and the richest copper mines of the New World were uncovered. Then came the unexpected finding of the mammoth iron-ore beds by William A. Burt, inventor of the solar compass. The circumstance of this ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... more than breath we drew Delighted with our world's embrace: The moss-root smell where beeches grew, And watered grass in breezy space; The silken heights, of ghostly bloom Among their folds, by distance draped. 'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume, That cried to have its chaos shaped: Absorbing, little noting, still Enriched, and thinking it bestowed; With wistful looks on each far hill For something hidden, something owed. Unto his mantled sister, Day Had given the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be in a great difficulty, if I were forced to describe exactly what passed within me in the course of the week after my unsuccessful midnight expedition. It was a strange feverish time, a sort of chaos, in which the most violently opposed feelings, thoughts, suspicions, hopes, joys, and sufferings, whirled together in a kind of hurricane. I was afraid to look into myself, if a boy of sixteen ever can look into himself; I was afraid to take stock of anything; I simply hastened to live through ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... lyre, and sang of Chaos, and the making of the wondrous World, and how all things sprang from Love, who could not live alone in the Abyss. And as he sang, his voice rose from the cave, above the crags, and through the tree tops, and the glens ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... been sick; you do not know how things have sped in this past month. Atterbury holds, and he is right, I dare swear—he holds that never will there be such another opportunity. The finances of the country are still in chaos, in spite of all Walpole's efforts and fine promises. The South Sea bubble has sapped the confidence in the government of all men of weight. The very Whigs themselves are shaken. 'Tis to King James, England begins ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... communicated somewhat relating to the transmutation of Metals. Indeed all men well skilled in the Chymical Science, have a necessity of assenting to me in this, viz. that Pyrotechny is the Mother, and Nurse of various noble Sciences and Arts. For they can easily judge from the Colours of the Chaos of Metals in the Fire, what Metallic body is therein. Even so dayly in the bowels of the Earth are procreated Metals, and Perspicuous Stones, from a proper noble vaporous Seed, from a Spiritual tinging Sulphureous Seed, in their diverse Saline Matrixes. For the ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... island into a state of chaos. The vast majority of the population of the western colony were slaves, and the number of free blacks and mulattoes were nearly equal to the number of whites. "The news of the Revolution had encouraged each class of the colonial population to expect the realization of its ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... And another thing is, I think, clear too, that our Evangelist meant to lay stress on the preceding act as the human condition of such communication. So if we would have the heavens opened over our heads, and the dove of God descending to fold its white wings, and brood over the chaos of our hearts till order and light come there, we must do what the Son of Man did—pray. And if we would have the fashion of our countenances altered, the wrinkles of care wiped out, the traces of tears ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... towards the close of his life, pronounced stiff and pedantic by the wits of the rising generation. In Westminster Hall he is still mentioned with respect as the man who first educed out of the chaos anciently called by the name of equity a new system of jurisprudence, as regular and complete as that which is administered by the judges of the Common Law. [267] A considerable part of the moral and intellectual character of this ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my feet all was ludicrous confusion on board. Hath still stood by his throne—an island in a sea of disorder—staring at me; all else was chaos. The rowers and courtiers were kicking and wallowing in the "waist" of the ship like fish newly shot out of a trawl net, but the princess was gone. Where was she? I brushed the spray from my eyes, and stared overboard. She was not in the bubbling blue water alongside. Then I glanced ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... things we feel very sure: that matter was once without form and void, and darkness rested on the face of the mighty deeps; that, instead of chaos, we have now cosmos and beauty; and that there is some process by which matter has been brought from one state to the other. Whether, however, the nebular hypothesis lays down the road travelled to this transfiguration, we are not sure. Some of it seems ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... defies or not The failure of an angry task That relegates him out of time To chaos, I can only ask. But as I knew him, so he was; And somewhere among men to-day Those old, unyielding eyes may flash, And flinch — and look the ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... thunderstorm that had certainly a weird and eerie effect; but it was not necessary to tell the spectator that these had been got in moments of impatience when, after laborious trials at brilliant-hued scenes, the angry artist had taken up a big brush and washed the whole thing into chaos—thereby, to her astonishment, reaching something, she did not know exactly what, that was at all events mysterious ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... crop up suddenly at one spot like this. Imagine what would happen if this had occurred in a city, in a crowded street. Hundreds would have been stricken blind, then hundreds would have been suffocated. Vehicles would have run amok, and the result would have been an indescribable chaos of the maimed, mangled and distraught. A flash like this green ray (which blinded Miss McLeod and her dog, deluded the General, and nearly suffocated us) at the mouth of a harbour, say, the entrance to a great port—Liverpool, London, or Glasgow—would be responsible for ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... clear between God and his world and all is order and discrimination. Obliterate that boundary and all is pathless morass, black chaos and on the mind the phantasms which belong to ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... this more true than herself. Left, to a certain extent, without compass or guide, without any positive or effective religious training, this was the first great moral revelation of her life. We can easily realize the chaos and ferment of an over-stimulated brain, steeped in romantic literature, and given over to the wayward leadings of the imagination. Who can tell what is true, what is false, in a world where fantasy is as real as fact? Emerson's word fell like truth itself, "a ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... chaos, as he stood looking at them with his mouth open, came the word "bans," and smote him like a ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... reader,—if you were today a man of some education and knowledge, but born a Japanese or a Chinaman, an East Indian or a Negro, what would you do and think? What would be in the present chaos your outlook and plan for the future? Manifestly, you would want freedom for your people,—freedom from insult, from segregation, from poverty, from physical slavery. If the attitude of the European and American worlds ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... end of a mighty struggle, he had philosophically accepted this hopeless passion which Fate had thrust upon him. Yet he whose world was a chaos outwardly ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... unwholesome company on misery and sensuousness, in tales so utterly unpleasant that we are ready to welcome any disaster as a relief; and then—the latest and finest touch of modern art—to leave the whole weltering mass in a chaos, without conclusion and without possible issue. And this is called a picture of real life! Heavens! Is it true that in England, where a great proportion of the fiction we describe and loathe is produced; is it true that in our New England society there is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... human motives, the fine problems of temperament, the delicate interplay of masculine logic and feminine intuition, what are these compared to blood, thunder, plots, counter-plots, earthquakes and, from the final chaos, the salvage of the "sweetest woman on earth" effected in the nick of time by a herculean and always imperturbable hero? Mr. FRANK SAVILE is not out to analyse souls. The opening chapter of The Red Wall (NELSON) plunges us into a fray, irrelevant to the narrative save in so far as it introduces ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... nation's guide in the struggle which, under his leadership, was brought to a successful conclusion. For the equally difficult task of reconstruction he was likewise admirably qualified, and his death was followed by a civil chaos almost as deplorable as armed disunion. From that chaos the American people gradually emerged by force of their native character and their fundamental sense of justice and of right. The South, for some years subjected to the rule of camp-followers ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... room; and now, with a gurgling sigh, the Wowzer's arms, that had been wound around Jimmie Dale's back and shoulders, relaxed, and, from the blow on his head the man, lay back inert and stunned. And then it seemed to Jimmie Dale as though pandemonium, unreality, and chaos at the touch of some devil's hand reigned around him. It was dark—no, not dark—a spurt of flame was leaping along the line of trickling oil from the broken lamp on the floor. It threw into ghastly relief the sprawled form of Dago Jim. Outside, from along the passageway, came a confused ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... sitting there, watching, thinking, striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations, but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos, grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... and continually realises its function. Though a spiritual man may perfectly well go through intricate processes of thought and attend to very complex affairs, his single eye, fixed on a rational purpose, will simplify morally the natural chaos it looks upon and will remain free. This spiritual mastery is, of course, no slashing and forced synthesis of things into a system of philosophy which, even if it were thinkable, would leave the conceived logical ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... was called First Consul. But he already swayed a scepter more mighty than that of the Caesars. But sixteen months had now elapsed since Napoleon landed at Frejus. In that time he had attained the throne of France. He had caused order and prosperity to emerge from the chaos of revolution. By his magnanimity he had disarmed Russia, by his armies had humbled Austria, and had compelled continental Europe to accept an honorable peace. He merited the gratitude of his countrymen, and he received ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... dead! then let the world return To its first chaos, mufled in its urn; The stars and elements together lye, Drench'd in perpetual obscurity, And the whole machine in confusion be, As immethodick as an anarchie. May the great eye of day weep out his ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... my inmost being I feel I never could be. I am too impulsive, too unrestrained, too shapeless in mind. If I wrote a book it might be interesting, human, heart-felt, true to life, I hope, not stupid, I believe; but it would be a chaos. You—how it would shock your critical mind! I could never select and prune and blend and graft. I should have to throw my mind and heart down on the paper and just leave ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... firmly planted in three continents and our task is rather to diffuse it further and to develop its good qualities than to defend it. But the Roman Empire was the civilized world; the safety of Rome was the safety of all civilization. Outside was the wild chaos of barbarism. Rome kept it back from end to end of Europe and across a thousand miles of western Asia. Through all the storms of barbarian onset, through the carnage of uncounted wars, through plagues which struck whole multitudes down to a disastrous death, through civil ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... with deft fingers created order out of chaos. Soon the trunk, portmanteau and hat box were ready. Then she took ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... countries wars, domestic and foreign, factions and heresies which will profane all things human and divine; famines, plagues, and floods; the universe approaching an end, world-wide confusion, and the return of things to their original chaos." [Footnote: It is characteristic of the age that in the last sentence the author goes beyond the issue and contemplates the possibility which still haunted men's minds that the end of the world might not be ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Chief had had a demoralizing effect upon the Cherokees; for, when his restraining influence was removed, likewise the Federal support, political factions, the Pins, or full-bloods, and the Secessionists, mostly half-breeds, had been able to indulge their thirst for vengeance uninterruptedly.[521] Chaos had ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Renaissance ended in the Classic. The fate of all that exuberance was to find order, and that chaos of generation settled down to the obedience of unchanging laws. This transition, which fixed, perhaps for ever, the nature of the French tongue, is bound up with the name ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... all his energies and all his means to its realization. Since the downfall of the Roman Empire no such preponderating power had existed in the world. During the mediaeval centuries the chief European kingdoms were slowly moulding themselves out of the feudal chaos; and though the wars with each other were numerous and desperate, and several of their respective kings figured for a time as mighty conquerors, none of them in those times acquired the consistency and perfect organization which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... persecutions against Protestants, they thought their own interest deeply concerned, and regarded their neutrality as a base desertion of the cause of God, and of his holy religion. In such a quarrel they would gladly have marched to the opposite extremity of Europe, have plunged themselves into a chaos of German politics, and have expended all the blood and treasure of the nation, by maintaining a contest with the whole house of Austria, at the very time and in the very place in which it was the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... we chose for our escape looked smooth in the distance; but we found it bristling with obstructions, dead balsams set thickly together, slashes of fallen timber, and every manner of woody chaos; and when at length we swung and tumbled off the ledge to the general slope, we exchanged only for more disagreeable going. The slope for a couple of thousand feet was steep enough; but it was formed of granite rocks all moss-covered, so that the footing could not be determined, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... cheat a little, to eat not over-much and to "drink" scarce at all, to beget annual children by chaste wives (disallowed them half the year), and to rear them not over-well, to study the Law and the Prophets and to reverence the Rabbinical tradition and the chaos of commentaries expounding it, to abase themselves before the "Life of Man" and Joseph Cam's "Prepared Table" as though the authors had presided at the foundation of the earth, to wear phylacteries and fringes, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... pretenders to the throne, who did not scruple to invoke the interference of the neighbouring monarchs, and even of the heathen Wends, who established themselves for a time on the southern islands. Yet, throughout this chaos, one thing made for future stability, and that was the growth and consolidation of a national church, which culminated in the erection of the archbishopric of Lund (c. 1104) and the consequent ecclesiastical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... purpose. Through good report or through evil report he kept the faith, and pressed onward to the high calling of God. The twelfth and the thirteenth centuries had been a period of religious unrest and chaos. As Archdeacon Wilberforce has so impressively said in the words quoted from him, a life lived with no sense of the invisible is blind and impoverished. The movement initiated by St. Francis proclaimed anew the ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... utterly overwhelmed, wandered to the nearest grove and threw himself on the ground. Thus, in a miserable chaos of emotion, unable to grasp any fixed thought, the hours passed away. Towards evening, he heard a footstep approaching, and ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... grand reverberations Through space rolled on the mighty music-tide; While to its low, majestic modulations The clouds of chaos slowly swept aside. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... This chaos still exists in our house to-day. Mother says I encourage it. Perhaps I do. I know that I dread the coming day when the home shall become neat and orderly and silent and precise. What is more, I live in horror of the ...
— Making the House a Home • Edgar A. Guest
... actuality of which hath not its origin in God: Chaos spirituale:- [Greek text which cannot ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... mighty passion that now raged in the heart of Ferdinand Armine, as, pale and trembling, he withdrew a few paces from the overwhelming spectacle, and leant against a tree in a chaos of emotion. What had he seen? What ravishing vision had risen upon his sight? What did he feel? What wild, what delicious, what maddening impulse now pervaded his frame? A storm seemed raging in his soul, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... cattle, supplied with all necessary equipment. By these gifts to the neglected gods, Horemheb was striving to bring Egypt back to its natural condition and with a strong hand he was guiding the country from chaos to order, from fantastic Utopia to the solid Egypt of the past. He was, in fact, the preacher of sanity, the chief apostle ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... abroad. It looked as if in many parts of the earth a time of financial disillusionment was dawning, the probable result of which would have been a strong reaction in favour of investment at home. Then came the war with a short sharp spell of financial chaos followed by a halcyon period for young countries, which enabled them to sell their products at greatly increased prices to the warring powers and so to meet their debt charges with an ease that they had never dreamt of, and even to find themselves ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... with glory be graced, On its prisms will light streaked with darkness be placed, The morn its echoes greet; Like a torrent it falls on the ocean of life, Like Chaos unformed, with the sea-stormy strife, When ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... characteristic picture of this volcanic region of mountains and streams, furnished by the journal of Mr. Wyeth, which lies before us; who ascended a peak in the neighborhood we are describing. From this summit, the country, he says, appears an indescribable chaos; the tops of the hills exhibit the same strata as far as the eye can reach; and appear to have once formed the level of the country; and the valleys to be formed by the sinking of the earth, rather than the rising of the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the peaceful olive grove through which we passed and hushed the song of nightingales was to be our last glimpse of peace. Beyond that silver barrier lay chaos, a chaos of wild mountains, deep chasms, and grim steppes, solitary, unpeopled, forbidding under ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... though with little effect. Kur-Sachsen's objects in the adventure were of the earth, earthy; but on George's part it was pure adoration of Pragmatic Sanction, anxiety for the Keystone of Nature, and lest Chaos come again. In comparison with such transcendent divings, what is a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of jealousy and hatred that for a space held reason, conscience, every power of mind and soul in subjection. One wild desire to kill his rival, to tear him limb from limb, seemed all that had any definite form in that fearful chaos of passion. It was well for Lycidas that he did not then cross ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,—that he should not be wise for himself;—it must even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... ill-defined, if it were imperfect or even false, it is clear that all our legislative applications would be wrong, our institutions vicious, our politics erroneous: consequently there would be disorder and social chaos. ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... truth to embellishment. In fact, to embellish my story I have neither leisure nor ability; I shall, therefore, do no more than give a simple narration of events. They are the labours of my evenings, and will come to you an unformed mass, to receive its shape from your hands, or as a chaos on which you have already thrown light. Mine is a history most assuredly worthy to come from a man of honour, one who is a true Frenchman, born of illustrious parents, brought up in the Court of the Kings my father and brothers, allied in blood and friendship to the most virtuous and accomplished ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... tastes displayed in these collections, and the artistic chaos they represent, we can, when we examine them closely, detect an influence which abides though it fluctuates, and this influence is that of our discredited Academy. The Manchester and Liverpool collection are merely weak reflections ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... But for force the two fellows would have killed me, but it so happened that the police came up and saved me, and a policeman represents force, both moral and physical. No, force may not be a remedy, but without it, while society is as it is, everything would be chaos and mad confusion." ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... energy and mingled tempest and forlorn calm which belonged to the original reality. The essential futility of the many moods which went to make up all this, ought not to blind us to the enormous power that was needed for the reproduction of a turbulent and not quite aimless chaos of the soul, in which man seemed to be divorced alike from his brother-men in the present, and from all the long succession and endeavour of men in the past. It was no small feat to rise to a height that should command so much, and to exhibit with all the force of life a world that had broken ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Chaos! Anarchy! It means Ruin! Black Ruin for the rich, and consequently, of course, Blacker ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... wonderful experience. The Daltons had never moved before, and it took many days to bring even a semblance of order out of the chaos into which the six small rooms were thrown by the unpacking of the boxes and barrels. The delay worried Sarah more than did ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... the folded hangings which opened no one knew whither. He parted them and passed out. While his hand still clung to the hangings there came a flash of lightning which revealed the chaos of nothingness without. Thunder rumbled. Then the hangings fell back into place and the prince was ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... study—and, in the hot noons, often my sleeping chamber, and my house of dreams. If the wind blew cold on the hillside, a hollow of lulling warmth was there, scooped as it were out of the body of the blast, which, sweeping around, whistled keen and thin through the cracks and crannies of the rocky chaos that lay all about; in which confusion of rocks the wind plunged, and flowed, and eddied, and withdrew, as the sea-waves on the cliffy shores or the unknown rugged bottoms. Here I would often lie, as the sun ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... of Carlyle to which FitzGerald refers is perhaps in 'Anti-Dryasdust,' in the Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches. 'By very nature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that we call Human History; an abatis of trees and brushwood, a world-wide jungle, at once growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of To-day, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... which may be added that large and important interests peculiar to the State existed—mines, ditches, etc.—for which the courts were compelled to frame the law, and make a system out of what was little better than chaos. ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... sang in his ears, a song of death, and for an instant all was black around him. He groped in black chaos where there was neither light nor hope, and dully he was conscious of the Chancellor's voice saying, "Your Majesty, if you are satisfied, would you not ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... He made his way out of the courtyard and back to the promenade. Some of the lights were already extinguished, and a slight drizzling rain was falling. He walked at once to the further wall, and stood leaning over, looking into the chaos of darkness. The key, round which his fingers were still tightly clenched, seemed almost ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... catastrophe can probably never be taken. The summary cannot be made amid the panic, the confusion, the removal of ancient landmarks, the complete subversion of the ordinary machinery of society. When chaos comes, as it did in San Francisco, and all the channels of familiar life are closed, and human anguish grows to be intolerable, compilation of statistics is impossible, even if it were not repugnant to the feelings. And when order is once more restored, after the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... perfection of Nature: were the World now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a Chaos: Nature hath made one World, and Art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... us, who believe in God and His Son and the Mother of God on quite other grounds—because our intellect is satisfied, our heart kindled, our will braced by the belief; and because without that belief all life falls into chaos, and human evidence is nullified, and all noble motive and emotion cease—for us, who have received the gift of faith, in however small a measure, Lourdes is enough. Christ and His Mother are with us. Jesus Christ is ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... a yard when we came on an awesome sight—the dead body of a Gaucho! It lay on its back with the arms spread out, the face hacked to pieces, and gashes in the neck. The interior of the hut was a chaos of wild confusion, the little furniture there was smashed, and evidently everything of value had been carried away. Half buried in the debris was the body of a woman, and near it that of a child. Both ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would be no one to hear them if they cried out; there would be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning—when they would go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, a little ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... we have a very just pity and contempt for all the unhappy victims of the effete despotisms and hoary empires of the older world—not that we believe the other continents to be actually older, for our own favored continent doubtless emerged first from chaos, but it is an expression which, with the generosity of our institutions, we are ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... political chaos that occurred in California after Mexico became independent of Spain, San Gabriel felt occasional waves. When the people of San Diego and the southern part of the State rebelled against Governor Victoria, and the latter confident chief came to arrange ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... 'Oneness with the mighty All is the one end of life—God or chaos is the only alternative.' We say God works through man to will and to do, and implicitly trust the divine Intelligence that guides ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... saying to them, and the clear crystal ring of the sonorous Tuscan reaches to the farthest corner of the square. Nay?—oh, for shame! Well, then, it was in this fashion; long, long ago, when the world was but just called from chaos, the Dominiddio was tired, as you all know, and took his rest on the seventh day; and four of the saints, George and Denis and Jago and Michael, stood round him with their wings folded and their ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... ordinary way Anstice would have deemed it his duty to scoff at such superstition; but to-night, his nerves unstrung, by the happenings of the last few days, his bodily vigour at a low ebb, his mind a chaos of miserable, hopeless memories and fears, Chloe's words woke a quite unexpected ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... histories, of many shattered hopes. Fierce waves of adventurers swept away the simple early folk. Lawless license, flaunting vice, and social disorganization made its early life as a State, one mad chaos. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... conservation and regular working of a political system, they are, nevertheless, however wise, essentially artificial, and hence are ill adapted to a transition state,—to a period in which order is evolving out of chaos, where the result is durable exactly in proportion to the freedom with which the natural forces are allowed to act, and to reach their own equilibrium without extraneous interference. Nor are such periods confined to the early days of mere ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... the companion as in a sentry-box, with my eyes just above the cover. Nothing was to be seen but sheets of ghostly white water sweeping up the blackness on the vessel's lee, or breaking and boiling to windward. It was sheer blind chaos to the sight, and you might have supposed that the brig was in the midst of some enormous vaporous turmoil, so illusive and indefinable were the shadows of the storm-tormented night—one block of ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... with the utmost ease and speed, from tar-water to the Trinity, from a mole-heap to the thrones of the Godhead." His sentences are microcosms—real, though imperfect wholes. It is as if he dreaded that earth would end, and chaos come again, ere each prodigious period were done. This practice, so far from being ashamed of, he often and elaborately defends—contrasting it with the "short-winded and asthmatic" style of writing which abounds in modern times, and particularly among French authors. We humbly think that the truth ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... heavens; that, independently of an oscillatory motion, the planes of their orbits experienced a displacement in virtue of which their intersections with the plane of the terrestrial orbit are each year directed towards different stars. In the midst of this apparent chaos there is one element which remains constant or is merely subject to small periodic changes; namely, the major axis of each orbit, and consequently the time of revolution of each planet. This is the element which ought to ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... sunset, like a dome Against the glory of a world on fire, Now burned a sudden hill, Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher, With nothing on it for the flame to kill Save one who moved and was alone up there To loom before the chaos and the glare As if he were the last god going home Unto his last desire. Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on Till down the fiery distance he was gone,— Like one of those eternal, remote things That range across a man's imaginings When a sure music fills him and he ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... action. Every progress is conditioned on a permanence; every permanence lives but in and through progress. Where all, and with equal and simultaneous impulse, strives to move, nothing can move, but chaos is come; where all refuses to move, and therefore stagnates, decay supervenes, which is motion, though a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... proud spirit writhed. Before those innocent eyes her soul lay bare, offering to the gaze an ineffaceable scar. For the first time she saw her schemes in their true light. Had any served her unselfishly? Aye, there was one. And strangely enough, the first thought which formed in her mind when chaos was ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... silently collapsed into an order of things so vicious, growing also so hopelessly worse, that all honest patriots invoked a purifying revolution, even though bought at the heavy price of a tyranny, rather than face the chaos of murderous distractions to which the tide of feuds and frenzies ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... had got safely away, were only too well founded. In the affairs of Herr Brazovics there figured so many investments apparently sound but really unprofitable, such false calculations, unsecured debts, and imaginary securities, that when order was brought into this chaos, the whole property did not suffice to satisfy the creditors. Besides, it came to light that he had used moneys intrusted to his honor: orphans' capital, church endowments, hospital funds, the deposits of his ship captains. The floods ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... resulting from that day, not one of which advantages the first consul had not made up his mind to destroy. Of all the collections that were ever made, that of the proclamations of this man is the most singular: it is a complete encyclopedia of contradictions; and if chaos itself were employed to instruct the earth, it would doubtless, in a similar way, throw at the heads of mankind, eulogiums of peace and war, of knowledge and prejudices, of liberty and despotism, praises and insults upon all governments and ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... strumpets,—the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... storms of night and darkness, flung In blackening chaos o'er the world, When thunderpeals are dreadly rung, Mid clouds in sightless fury hurl'd, Types of a mightier power, impearl'd With mercy's soft, redeeming ray, Still at His voice your wings are furl'd, Ye wake to own and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... was a farm only in name. There was no wall more than three feet high left standing; the whole place was shapeless, stark, blasted into nothingness. In the very centre of the mournful chaos lay three disembowelled horses and an overturned Boche ammunition waggon. The shells were still on the shelves. They were Yellow Cross, the deadliest of the ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... preceded by chaos. The youthful architect's mind was confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in upon it, and which he had not yet had time or developed mature strength sufficient to reduce to order. The young American of any freshness of intellect is stimulated to dangerous excess ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... person of great design and improvement in affairs of devotion, having introduced a new deity, who has since met with a vast number of worshippers, by some called Babel, by others Chaos, who had an ancient temple of Gothic structure upon Salisbury plain, famous for its shrine and celebration ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... and joy from the insects that danced in the trembling air; and it all meant nothing to her; like a picture when the page is turned over it. Five minutes ago she was regarding her life and seeing how the Grace of God was slowly sorting out its elements from chaos to order—the road was unwinding itself before her eyes as she trod on it day by day—now a hand had swept all back into disorder, and the path was hidden by ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... trade, not the most honest. For it is the purchaser who suffers from the want of thought bestowed on the materials, the sloppy manipulation, the careless compounding; sins of omission and commission that cause him, on finding his picture becoming chaos, to join the detractors of modern pigments. In classifying colours therefore, those also should be classified who use them:—into artists, whose love for art would render it more lasting than themselves; ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... Thou calledst chaos into existence, Before time, from the abyss of eternity, And eternity, existing prior to all ages, Thou foundedst within thyself. Constituting thyself of thyself, By means of thyself shining from thyself, Thou art the light from which light first flowed; Creating all things by a single ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors
... without what is called education, (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name)—an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness—this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... impossibility of obtaining peace, and the exhaustion of the realm, threw, the King into the most cruel anguish, and Desmarets into the saddest embarrassment. The paper of all kinds with which trade was inundated, and which had all more or less lost credit, made a chaos for which no remedy could be perceived. State-bills, bank-bills, receiver- general's-bills, title-bills, utensil-bills, were the ruin of private people, who were forced by the King to take them in payment, and who ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... it to be. "Tvorimaya Legenda" actually means "The legend in the course of creation." The legend that Sologub has in mind is the active, eternally changing process of life, orderly and structural in spite of the external confusion. The author makes an effort to bring order out of apparent chaos by stripping life of its complex modern detail and reducing it to a few significant symbols, as in a rather more subtle "morality play." The modern novel is perhaps over-psychologized; eternal truths and eternal passions are perhaps too often lost sight ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... he thought, shouting his name and calling "Sumidero! Sumidero!" He did not understand, and kept right on. Others were shouting at Tula with as little result, the clatter of the horses and the rumble of the breaking storm made all a formless chaos of sound. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... sorry you did not hear all Monsieur do Lally Tollendal's(804) tragedy, of which I have had a good account. I like his tribute to his father's memory.(805) Of French politics you must be tired; and so am I. Nothing appears to me to promise their chaos duration; consequently, I expect more chaos, the sediment of which is commonly despotism. Poland ought to make the French blush-but that, they are not apt to do on any occasion. Let us return to Strawberry. The house of Sebright breakfasted there with ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... stage-coach and the tinder-box. There were seventy-seven thousand miles of railway, but poorly built and in short lengths. There were manufacturing industries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, but every trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, each at war with all the others. There were energy and enterprise in the highest degree, but not efficiency or organization. Little as we knew it, in 1876 we were mainly gathering together the plans and the raw ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... resigned the Receivership, having brought an honourable amount of order out of chaos and laid down the law for the guidance of future officials. November came, and he set off for Philadelphia philosophically, though by no means with a light heart. The baby was too young to travel; he was obliged to send his little family ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... based upon the sanction of the governed. It unites in a terrible synthesis all the worst agencies and methods of tsarism and of militarism. To persuade the people of this or any other civilized country that Bolshevism is essentially a Jewish movement, part of a conspiracy to reduce civilization to chaos, and so prepare the way for a Jewish supergovernment of the world, would mean the rapid organization of the rest of the population against the Jews in every phase of life—politics, commerce, industry, education, social intercourse, and ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... in the Jehovist text. Thus it is evident that two versions of the Creation are given in Genesis. But there are traces in the Old Testament of a third legend, akin to that of the Babylonians, in which Marduk creates the world by virtue of a victory over the waters of chaos (Tiamat). This conception of a conflict between the creator and hostile forces was contrary to the monotheistic thesis, and has disappeared from our two versions of Genesis; but the suppression sufficiently proves that it was ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... order. All was howling chaos. Each gun-captain fought his own gun, regardless of the rest. Billows of smoke drifted to and fro; shadowy forms flitted; guns bounded and bellowed; here and there a red ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... their fate, while the mate engaged a fresh crew and took in a cargo of flax and timber. When he was ready to sail, he reshipped his old crew in irons, returned with them to the Tamar, and delivered them to the police to be dealt with according to law. For a long time the law was in a state of chaos. Major Abbott was sent from England in 1814 as the first judge. The proceedings in his court were conducted in the style of a drum-head court martial, the accusation, sentences, and execution following one another with military ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life, which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of void brought fulness, and out of chaos ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... under the same law, elemental, regardless of waste and ruin and delays—not the result of human will or design, but of forces we wot not of. They are of the same order as floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, a release of human forces that have slumbered. The chaos of Europe to-day shows the play of such elemental forces, unorganized, at cross-purposes, antagonistic, fighting it out in the attempt to find an equilibrium. The pain, the suffering, the waste, the delays, do not trouble the gods at all. Since man ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... in her own particular arm-chair, close to her husband's sofa—they were seldom seen far apart—with a large basket of crewel-work beside her, containing sundry squares of kitchen towelling and a chaos of many-coloured wools, which never seemed to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... do absolutely nothing. The boy had tied my tongue by the pledge. Besides, had I been unsworn, I am sure the idea of exposure would never have come to me. It was late before I retired that night. And I recall with terrible distinctness the chaos of brain and faculty which ushered in a restless sleep ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... successful in their art. The man of dashing expediency without judgment or knowledge is a great peril in any responsible position. When either a ship or nation or anything else is in trouble, it is the cool, calculating, orderly administrator, who never makes chaos or destructive fuss, that succeeds. That is essential, and it is only this type of person that so often saves both ships, armies, and nations from inevitable destruction. The Duke of Wellington used to say that "In ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... differed from it to an incomprehensible degree."[8] And the veteran Prince de Ligne remarked to the Comte de la Garde: "From every side come cries of Peace, Justice, Equilibrium, Indemnity.... Who will evolve order from this chaos and set a dam to the stream of claims?" How often have the same cries and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... observant traveler he might have found some compensation for his disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elementary upheaval than the work of man; while, halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... that seemed awful, we looked down upon a troubled, rolling, restless mass of waters, each wave seeming to buffet its neighbour with an angry determination to put it down. In the midst of all this chaos, one monster wave rose superior to all the rest, and rolling forward with giant strength and resistless impetuosity, threatened instant destruction to the vessel. A cry, a terrific roll, a shudder through the ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... his essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification—of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... of a large factory equipped with elaborate machinery, but so complete was the destruction that I could not discover what had been made there. There was a large gas engine and extensive shafting, all hanging in dismal chaos, and I recognized the remains of machines for making tin boxes, in which the products of the factory had, I suppose, been packed. A large pile of glass stoppers in one corner was fused up into a solid mass, and I chipped a ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... have to learn about the religion of the Greeks is that it included nothing of the kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were no articles; there was no doctrine even, unless we are so to call a chaos of legends orally handed down and in continual process of transformation by the poets. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials, appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction between cleric and layman, as ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... scenery of a more striking and beautiful character than he had yet seen of its kind. In many places the trees formed long aisles and vaulted colonnades and arches so regular that it seemed as though they had been planted by the hand of man. Elsewhere the chaos of tree and shrub, flower and fern and twining root was so indescribable, that it seemed as if chance and haphazard had originated it all; but the mind of our hero was cast, if we may say so, in too logical a mould to accept such an absurd ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... treatment of the early Greek thinkers affords the readiest illustration of his meaning in conceiving all philosophy under the form of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought. Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form which was at first simply a material element, the most ...
— Sophist • Plato
... politics, and labelled "Parliamentary" or "Local Government Board." Trunks containing Court suits, yeomanry uniforms, and the like; a medley of old account books, photographs, worthless volumes, and broken ornaments: all the refuse that our too complex life piles about us was represented in the chaos of the room. Roger pulled and pushed as cautiously as he could, but making, inevitably, some noise in the process. At last! He caught sight of some belongings of his own and was soon joyfully detaching the old Eton ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the mementos of saints divine; there lay, pell mell and huddled, skeleton and mummy—the dry dark skin, the white gleaming bones of the dead, mockingly cased in gold, and decked with rubies; there, grim fingers protruded through the hideous chaos, and pointed towards the living man ensnared; there, the skull grinned scoff under the holy mitre;—and suddenly rushed back, luminous and searing upon Harold's memory, the dream long forgotten, or but dimly remembered ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Satan in his place—Satan who is The father of the gods—lures on your hearts Unto an idol in the untrodden skies, That, while ye dream oblivious in the void, The earth may crumble. Or if God there be, He is the God of dying hearts and spent— A deity of chaos, for whose ends One thing alone is mete—ruin of life, Of loathings and of longings that on earth Restlessly grapple with the powers of Hell. I know not if in regions yet unguessed Some gods may dwell, of nature fit to guide Us, the adventurers of an earthly fight. ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... justice the taste was sweet and satisfying. Poor nations! What have politics become? What filth we are obliged to swallow! What scandal to the people; what a lesson of immorality is this fashion of outraging every principle of right, with sword, tongue and pen! In this chaos, blessed be Providence, there is one free voice left, the voice of St Peter, which is raised in defence of justice, despised and disregarded." Hereupon M confesses, "on the faith of a Moderate," that the refusal of the Pope to accept the advice of the Emperor was "an act worthy ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... sons, Pepin, Carloman, and Griffo. Of the elder of these, we shall hear more anon. Charles Martel is the first hero who succeeded in stamping his image upon the surface of European history, after the chaos of the broken Roman empire had in some measure yielded to the spirit of order. He was chieftain of an unruly tribe, rather than king of a settled state. In this light we must regard him if we would judge his character fairly; and thus considered, he may be said to have governed France wisely and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... in Chaos, and still keep The awful secrets of that ancient dearth, Before the briny fountains of the deep Brimm'd up the hollow cavities of earth;— I saw each trickling Sea-God at his birth, Each pearly ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... who built cloud-castles of happiness, and, when the inevitable winds rent the castles asunder, turned pessimists—to those ineffectual Endymions, Alastors and Werthers, this Scots peasant, man of dreams in the hard, practical world, cried aloud his creed of labor. "Be no longer a Chaos, but a World. Produce! produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! whatsoever thy hand ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... candle to light her down the stairs, but after she had gone he did not return to the office. Instead, he went slowly up to his own room, glancing first into Crailey's—the doors of neither were often locked—to behold a chaos of disorder and unfinished packing. In his own chamber it only remained for him to close the lids of a few big boxes, and to pack a small trunk which he meant to take with him to the camp of the State troops, and he would be ready for departure. He set about this task, ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington |
