"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appearance. That is an interesting problem when the materials are accessible. But every man is also an organ of the society in which he has been brought up. The material upon which he works is the whole complex of conceptions, religious, imaginative and ethical, which forms his mental atmosphere. That suggests problems for the historian of philosophy. He is also dependent upon what in modern phrase we call his 'environment'—the social structure of which he forms a part, and which gives a special ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... with Him. 'The body exists,' says a philosophical biologist of our day, 'to furnish the cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food. The higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but it is just this that is most precious and significant—all of which shows His unrolling purpose. It is the last that alone explains all that went before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the present. God before all, through all, foreseeing all, and still ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... bred a Westerner, wedded to the mistress of a Southern plantation, Douglas represented a Commonwealth whose population was made up of elements from all sections. The influences that shaped his career were extraordinarily complex. No account of his subsequent public life would be complete, without reference to the peculiar social and political characteristics of ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... lover of his kind, and the music life played to him was of a varied and complex nature. But, looking back, it was easy to see how there had been, running through all the variations, a dominant motive in ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... Benares, and for the Hindu the sacred capital on the Ganges has a significance similar to that of Mecca for the Mohammedan, and a greater attracting power than Jerusalem has for the Christian. Benares is the home and shrine of the complex religion that binds the Hindu nations, and is the very soul and ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... all the rest. We came, soft stepping into the scene, and Nature, which moves continuously, harmoniously, did in the same moment build a throne and take us in it. At once the life from us flowed out, and the life about flowed in. Surely these were days of large orchestras, and of wonderful and complex melodies. Zenobia moved like a queen over the scene, her rich garments sweeping over the soft grass, her graceful arms swinging as with secret blessings. All the living things of the day seemed eager ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... the two they had watched were even now stealing, tense with the weight of their daring and their crime. In a moment they would reach her, enter her, actuate machinery that was miraculous in its complex simplicity, and be gone then on the wings it gave them into the concealing ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... the midst of the crowd where Vogotzine's loud laugh alternated with the little cries of the Baroness, felt a complex sentiment: he wished his friends to enjoy themselves and yet he longed to be alone with Marsa, and to take her away. They were to go first to his hotel in Paris; and then to some obscure corner, probably to ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... conceptions of atoms and molecules had not been as yet generally established. Now, this want of comprehensive views of chemical reactions, their why and wherefore, was bad enough as it affected the study of inorganic and metallic compounds, but what must have been the conditions for studying the complex compounds of carbon, so widely spread in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Their number is so enormous that, in the absence of any established relationships, not much more than a mere enumeration was possible ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... Stabilization and Association agreement with the European Union in anticipation of eventual membership. Severe unemployment remains a key political and economic problem for this entire region. Montenegro has privatized its large aluminum complex - the dominant industry - as well as most of its financial sector, and has begun to attract foreign direct ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... abominable thing. Poor old Logan! Poor, faithful old chap! Oh!" He whirled and looked over at Cleek, who still stood inactive, staring at the flour-dusted floor. "And they said that no mystery was too great for you to get at the bottom of it, no riddle too complex for you to find the answer? Can't you do something? Can't you suggest something? Can't you see any glimmer ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... so new, so complex and artificial, was to be consolidated, in the midst of difficulties at home, and of dangers abroad. The constitution had been adopted only upon convictions of absolute necessity, and with evanescent dispositions of compromise. By nearly half of the people it was thought ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... Playfulness, and illustrates a side of her character undiscovered by the visitor who only sees the Owlet sitting on her perch with serious, watchful, unblinking eyes, regarding the intruder. But most babies are complex characters, and are not known ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... that exist between the words and word groups (phrases and clauses) that compose it. If the thought is simple, and expressed in straightforward terms, we grasp it readily and without any conscious effort to determine these relations. If the thought is complex, the relations become more complicated, and before we are sure that we know what the writer intends to say it may be necessary to note with care which is the main clause and which are the subordinate clauses. In either case our acquiring the thought ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... to, or that lay out of our Sight when we first beheld it. As we look on any Object, our Idea of it is, perhaps, made up of two or three simple Ideas; but when the Poet represents it, he may either give us a more complex Idea of it, or only raise in us such Ideas as are most apt ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Over this complex situation the mind of Keggs, the butler, played like a searchlight. Keggs was a man of discernment and sagacity. He had instinct and reasoning power. Instinct told him that Maud, all unsuspecting the change that had taken place in Albert's attitude toward her romance, would have continued ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... used in an automobile, and the like. A systematic, if not rigorous, approach to the design of gears and cams also is usually presented in such a course. Until recently, however, no serious attempt was made to apply the principles developed in kinematic analysis to the more complex problem of kinematic synthesis of linkages. By kinematic synthesis is meant the designing of a linkage to produce a given series of ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... presides over a very interesting lot of pictures, mostly French. This academic canvas, of Darius' family at the feet of Alexander, has not the simplicity and decorative quality of the Italian pictures of that period, and it is entirely too complex to be enjoyable. The beautiful Courbet on the left, while suggestive of Ribera in its severe disposal of light and shadow, has also a quality of its own, a wonderful mellowness which gives it a unity of expression ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and which at the same time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of which it is the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as human relations grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life undergo a process of elaboration and selection; and in this process of elaboration the use of trophies develops into a system of rank, titles, degrees and insignia, typical examples ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... so renowned a man as Stephen A. Douglas would give him a kind of reflected glory. But in addition to that, he had the better side of the question. His course was simple; he was seeking the support of anti-slavery people; Douglas's task was much more complex, for he wished to offend neither northern nor southern Democrats, and he soon found himself offending both. To carry water on both shoulders is always a risky thing to attempt, and Douglas soon found himself fettered by the awkward position he was forced ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... were read to him as if he were hearing the work of another man. Apparently the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary memory, were in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex faculty—imagination in its supreme form—was absolutely unimpaired. It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over. It gives some support to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way from ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of modern society is so infinitely more complex than in ancient times, that the subdivision of human faculty is the result. The great men of the days of old were perforce universal geniuses, appearing at rare intervals like lighted torches in an antique world. In the course ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... darker than the hair, and the rich brown of the sable cloak where it touched the white, gave accent and force to the ethereal pallor, the supreme refinement, of the rest—face, dress, hands. Nothing but civilisation in its most complex workings could have produced such a type; that was what prevailed dimly in Fenwick's mind as he wrestled with his picture. Sometimes his day's work left him exultant, sometimes in ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his possible failure received consideration, or I thought of the business explosion which would follow any open breach between Jim and Cornish (though this seemed too remote for serious consideration), I began to ponder on the enormously complex system of credits ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... gathered and elaborated. In the hive it works the wax with its paws and feelers into an hexagonal cell with a rhomboidal bottom, the three plates of which form such angles with each other as require the least wax and space in the construction of the cell. All these complex operations the bee performs as adroitly, on the first morning of its life, as the most experienced workman in the hive. The tyro gatherer sought the flowery fields upon untried wings, and returned to its home from this first expedition with unerring flight by the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... different from his ancestors, though inheriting their physical peculiarities. They were mostly splendid animals, with faces radiant with courage and high spirits and high health. Antony's face was clearer and more refined, more complex, more suggestive. His form, equally tall, was slighter, not hampered with superfluous flesh, not so aggressively erect. One felt that the older Hallams would have walked straight up to the object of their ambition and ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... seemed to have made as little impression on him as its speech. He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual curiosities, to remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris, while preserving, perhaps the more strikingly from his very detachment, that odd American astuteness which seems the fruit of innocence rather than of experience. His nationality revealed itself again in a mild interest in the political problems of his adopted country, ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... because it was invented by a Pope, and the singular decision to pronounce Latin as if it were something else, making it not a dead language but a new language. Later, the part played by particular royalties is complex and accidental; "the furious German" came and passed; the much less interesting Germans came and stayed. Their influence was negative but not negligible; they kept England out of that current of European life into which the Gallophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only one ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... big and complex a thought to hold all together in his tired brain now. In the morning he would tackle it with some zest, with an inner eye washed clean by a long sleep. Just now he felt the need of relaxation, and as ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... spectrum. We can hardly doubt that the physical constitution of these stars is very similar to that of our sun. This cannot be the case with the stars of the second subdivision (II.b), the spectra of which are very complex, each consisting of a continuous spectrum crossed by numerous dark lines, on which is superposed a second spectrum of bright lines. Upwards of seventy stars are known to possess this extraordinary spectrum, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... ever had, she took in the nutriment that was given her, to a soul that recognized it, and never troubled itself with questions as to one truth differing from another, or no. Indeed, no single form or theory could have contained the "credo" of her simple, yet complex, thought. The old Catholic reverence clung about her still, that had come with her all the way from her infancy, when her mother and grandmother had taught her the prayers of their Church; and across the long interval of ignorance and neglect ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... each other on the staircases; they thronged the alleys and swards. The men were negligible beside them. And they were not only fashionably and very fashionably attired—all their frocks and all their hats and all their parasols and all their boots were new, glittering, spick-and-span; were complex and expensive; not one feared the sun. The conception of what those innumerable chromatic toilettes had cost in the toil, stitch by stitch, of malodorous workrooms and in the fatigue of pale, industrious creatures was really formidable. But it could ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... told her that she could read his soul like an open book, but she did not conceal from herself that there were certain sides of that complex structure whose meaning she was incapable of comprehending. And strange to say, she ever and again came upon these incomprehensible phases of his soul, when the images of the gods, and the idolatrous ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... published under his supervision. {48} But subject-matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period in his career to which each play may be referred. In his early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy appears in its simplicity; as his powers gradually matured he depicted life in its most complex involutions, and portrayed with masterly insight the subtle gradations of human sentiment and the mysterious workings of human passion. Comedy and tragedy are gradually blended; and his work finally developed a pathos such as could only come of ripe ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... She attacked a complex tangle of ropes vigorously. Miss Rutherford, with Frank leaning on her shoulder, staggered up the beach. Just as they reached the tents the head of a young man appeared under the flapping canvas. Then his ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... moment she was amazed at what seemed to her to be the great exuberance of her life. She had the impression that she was existing in the midst of such complex relations as no other woman did. And this feeling also contributed to ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... domesticity of marriage. It is his rigorous transvaluation of all moral values and conventionalities that proclaims this Hamlet a man of the future. No half-way treaties with the obvious in life, no crooking the pregnant hinges of his opinions to the powers that be. An anarch, pure and complex, he despises all methods. What soliloquies, replete with the biting, cynical wisdom ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... for instance. Malloy ran his finger down the columns of complex symbolism that showed the complete psychological analysis of the man. Psychopathic paranoia. The man wasn't technically insane; he could be as lucid as the next man most of the time. But he was morbidly suspicious that every man's hand ...
— In Case of Fire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... a general enlightenment. He took hardly more heed of the new Lutheranism. His mind had no religious turn, and the quarrel of faiths was with him simply one factor in the political game which he was carrying on and which at this moment became more complex and absorbing than ever. The victory of Pavia had ruined that system of balance which Henry the Seventh and in his earlier days Henry the Eighth had striven to preserve. But the ruin had not been to England's profit, but to the profit of its ally. ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... but not bitter—from "The Captain's Vices," which suggests at once George Eliot's Silas Marner and Mr. Austin Dobson's Tale of Polypheme, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk, who are prone to overact ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Christian admiral. His fleet, now straggling for miles along the coast, had to close up, issue from the channel, round Cape Scropha, and form in battle array in the open water to the eastward. If the Turks, who had the wind to help them, came up before this complex operation was completed, he ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... friend Aubrey had imbued me thoroughly with the love of incessant hard work; there was no disgrace, he said, in digging the soil, if the brain were kept working as well as the hands. And I did keep my brain working; I allowed it also to lie fallow, and to absorb everything of nature that was complex, grand and beautiful,—and from such studies I learnt the goodness and the majesty of the Creator as they are never found in human expositions of Him made by the preachers of creeds. At eighteen I made my first public address,—and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... has the effect of restoring them to parallelism. The large cylindrical beam which poured down on the object-glass has been thus condensed into a small one, which can enter the pupil. It should, however, be added that the composite nature of light requires a more complex form of object-glass than the simple lens here shown. In a refracting telescope we have to employ what is known as the achromatic combination, consisting of one lens of flint glass and one of crown glass, adjusted to suit ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... toward creating Centers of Energy, or Units of activity, which then manifested itself, as the evolutionary movement continued, from electrons to atoms; from atoms to man. The gross matter was used as material for the formation of finer and more complex forms; and these in turn combined, and formed higher, and so on, and on. And the forms of Energy operated in the same way. And the manifestations of centers of Mind or consciousness in the same way. But all in connection. Matter, Energy and Mind formed a Trinity of Principles, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... according to Hadow, is no "builder of the lofty rhyme," but the poet of the single line, the maker of the phrase exquisite. This is hardly comprehensive. With the more complex, classical types of the musical organism Chopin had little sympathy, but he contrived nevertheless to write two movements of a piano sonata that are excellent—the first half of the B flat minor Sonata. The idealized dance forms he preferred; ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... were mingled with more complex combinations, and with half-imitations, as of the Blue-Bird, so that it seemed almost impossible to doubt that there was some specific meaning, to him and his peers, in this endless vocabulary. Yet other birds, as quick-witted as the Robins, possess but one or two chirping notes, to which they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... musket-balls, as they rushed screaming past his head; and ever the river fleeted by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun. The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul, and he sank away into a still daydream, too passive for imagination, too deep for ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Philip of Mezieres, chancellor of Cyprus under Peter of Lusignan, was a true knight, who one day conceived the idea of reforming chivalry. Now the way he found most feasible in accomplishing his object, in arriving at such a difficult and complex reform, was to found a new order of chivalry himself, to which he gave the high-sounding title of "the Chivalry of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... here upon what we have had frequent occasion to remark, the manner in which our Lord here represents the complex whole of His death and ascension as being His own voluntary act. He 'goes.' He is neither taken away by death nor rapt up to heaven in a whirlwind, but of His own exuberant power and by His own will He goes into the region of the grave and thence to the throne. Contrast ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... raining all day, dull, dismal. Yet coming out of that place, out of that brown crumbly darkness, what was not the interest of the wet grey sky! How great the beauty, the movements of the lazy clouds! How complex and lovely the bare lane of wattled dry reeds—the ineffable exquisiteness of patches of green corn, of a few scant pink blossoms, of the shoots of elder! I remember the solemnity of the subterranean tombs at Perugia; the grisliness of the Beauchamp ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Besides you are the brother of a person who greatly interested me, and from that person I had in the past heard a very great deal about you, from which I gathered that you had a great influence over her; isn't that enough? Ha-ha-ha! Still I must admit that your question is rather complex, and is difficult for me to answer. Here, you, for instance, have come to me not only for a definite object, but for the sake of hearing something new. Isn't that so? Isn't that so?" persisted Svidrigailov with a sly smile. "Well, can't you fancy then that I, too, on my way here in the train ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dancing one kind imitates musical recitation and aims at stateliness and freedom; another kind is concerned with the training of the body, and produces health, agility, and beauty. There is no military use in the complex systems of wrestling which pass under the names of Antaeus and Cercyon, or in the tricks of boxing, which are attributed to Amycus and Epeius; but good wrestling and the habit of extricating the neck, hands, and ...
— Laws • Plato
... Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the same great music, and a translator who should strive ambitiously to represent the complex effect of the original would clog his own powers of expression and strain his instrument to breaking. But, apart from the diction in this narrower sense, there is a quality of atmosphere surrounding the Agamemnon ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... The complex problems now confronting America as the result of the practice of reckless procreation are fast threatening to grow beyond ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... The hypothesis that Seth had imagined that they were Cressy's letters, and had thrown them down without reading them when he had found out his mistake, seemed natural. For if he had read them he would undoubtedly have kept them to show to Cressy. The complex emotions that had disturbed the master on the discovery of Uncle Ben's relationship to the writer of the letters were resolving themselves into a furious rage at Seth. But before he dared revenge himself he must be first assured that Seth was ignorant of their contents. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... The complex nature of the problems facing the army commander can be readily seen. He was an indefatigable worker and an unsurpassed organizer. The only criticism I ever heard was that he attended too much to the details himself and did not take his subordinates ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... informed him that the major and Miss Grace were "po'ful tired" and had withdrawn to their rooms. He trembled to find how deep was his disappointment, and understood as never before that his old self had ceased to exist. A month since no one was essential to him; now his being had become complex. Then he could have crossed the ocean with a few easily spoken farewells; now he could not go away for a few hours without feeling that he must see one who was then a stranger. The meaning of this was all too plain, ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... according to size, built up either of steel disks, each in one piece, or of steel forgings, so as to give high magnetic permeability and great strength. The coils are placed in radial slots, thereby avoiding side pressure on the slot insulation and the complex stresses resulting from centrifugal force, which, in these rotors, acts normal to the flat surface ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... is the state of intellectual and manual performances. Long calculations or complex diagrams affright the timorous and unexperienced from a second view; but if we have skill sufficient to analyze them into simple principles, it will be discovered that our fear was groundless. Divide and conquer, is a principle equally just in science as in policy. Complication is a species ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... She is as far from prudery as from the least note of vulgarity. Passion, perhaps, is replaced by a great capacity for friendliness, and she was never more a real woman than in these mellow and reflective days. And how interesting she is—adding so much knowledge of life to the complex interest that inheres in her sex! Knowledge of life, yes, and of affairs; for it must be said of these ladies we have in mind that they keep up with the current thought, that they are readers of books, even of newspapers—for even the newspaper can be helpful and not harmful in the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... understand it yet. This case of yours is very complex, Sir Henry. When taken in conjunction with your uncle's death I am not sure that of all the five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled there is one which cuts so deep. But we hold ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... of you," she half whispered, shuddering. To be in his power and to have rejected him! It all seemed very terrible and confused to Leam, to whom things complex and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... mind on the Sunday morning was too complex for complete analysis: he did not attempt the task. He preferred to believe that he had told God the whole truth without any attempt at reservation. He had thereby placed himself in His hands, and was no longer chiefly responsible. He would not even think of what he was ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... hardship and every danger, demanding of others an equal constancy joined to an implicit deference, heeding no counsel but his own, attempting the impossible and grasping at what was too vast to hold—he contained in his own complex and painful nature the chief springs of his triumphs, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... was free from it all. He could feel within himself that his approach to his problem was better than it had been before. Perhaps he had made the mistake of the others of looking at it as something fearfully complex, something it would be the hardest thing in all the world for any man to do. It all looked more simple now. It was as if muscles strained to the point of tenseness had relaxed, and in an easy and natural way he foresaw victory as a logical ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... this time that they began to play that favorite game of Greenbank, which seems to be unknown almost everywhere else. It is called "king's base," and is full of all manner of complex happenings, sudden surprises, ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... disputes: involved in a complex dispute over the Spratly Islands with China, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, and possibly Brunei; State of Sabah claimed by the Philippines; Brunei may wish to purchase the Malaysian salient that divides Brunei into two parts; two islands in dispute with Singapore; two islands in dispute ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... the car swayed for a moment and then buck-jumped and kicked him. Also he saw the boots of the lady and the right leg of the gentleman describing arcs through the air, preparatory to vanishing over the side of the car. His impressions were complex, but they also comprehended the fact that he had lost his balance, and was going to stand on his head inside this creaking basket. He spread out clutching arms. He did stand on his head, more or less, his tow-beard came off and got in his mouth, and his cheek slid along ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies, is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits—the Vius of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... in the last chapter, and the greater ones as far as I could with little trouble. I damped the opening passage about the eye (in my bigger work I show the gradations in structure of the eye) by putting merely "complex organs." But you are a pretty Lord Chancellor to tell the barrister on one side how best to win the cause! The omission of "living" before eminent naturalists was ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... provinces): Brabant Wallon (Walloon Brabant), Hainaut, Liege, Luxembourg, Namur note: as a result of the 1993 constitutional revision that furthered devolution into a federal state, there are now three levels of government (federal, regional, and linguistic community) with a complex division of responsibilities ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... There was no question that our ranks were demoralised and heartsick. Commandant-General Joubert had made Dannhauser Station his headquarters and thither we wended our way. But though we approached our general with hearts weighed down with sorrow, so strange and complex a character is the Boers', that by the time we reached him we had gathered together 120 stragglers, and had recovered our spirits and our courage. I enjoyed a most refreshing rest on an unoccupied farm and sent a messenger to Joubert asking him for an appointment for the following ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... beneficial thoughts. You can be sure that the constant repetition will have its effect. Hasn't the mind, in the past, accepted the individual's diagnosis when he said, "I'm sick," "I have an inferiority complex," "I can't stop smoking," "I can't lose weight," "I can't concentrate," "I can remember a person's face, but I can't remember names," "I have a difficult time falling asleep," "I just can't seem to relax." Isn't such an individual, ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... with horror, and this again with contempt, very largely because the thing has always been put to us in this light or that. The more emancipated we think ourselves the more subtle are our bonds. The disentanglement of what is inherent in these feelings from what is acquired is an extraordinary complex undertaking. Probably all men and women have a more or less powerful disposition to jealousy, but what exactly they will be jealous about and what exactly they will suffer seems part of the superposed factor. Probably all men and women are capable of ideal emotions ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... too, how many of those argosies she sent out seeking the golden fleece returned to her? It's a fine point for speculation. If one only knew.... ah, but it's pitiful how much one doesn't, and can't, know in this hard and complex world! Or was it merely that she tired of them and wanted to be rid of them? Or again, do I wrong her there, and were there no more than the two of them, and did she simply suffer a solitary revulsion of feeling, as Harber did? But no, I'm sure I'm right ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life. Among the Molic peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. Its technique was exact, complex, extremely elaborate, minutely regulated; yet the essential fires of sincerity, spontaneity, imagination and passion were flaming with undiminished heat behind the fixed forms and restricted measures. ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... false. In the Mathematics, the basic truths, being of a simple character, were arrived at by easy and instinctive mental processes, and the Method achieved in this department great success. But the other domains of human knowledge being more complex, involving more qualities or characteristics than mere Number and Form and Force, which are all that come within the scope of Mathematics, their fundamental bases or truths were not so easily attainable. Hence, when Principles ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... on her palms and considered the matter. Even with her habit of dealing with facts rather than fancies, she still found life a most perplexing and complex affair. The only help she gained toward understanding it was that clew taught her by her mother of matching the days and the events as one matches a fascinating puzzle. Out of this thought she spoke at last, though quite to the bewilderment of ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... Numerius Aproniarius remains of the older experts, and he is afflicted by an incurable and loathsome disease which he cannot long survive. Of the younger men only Calvaster has displayed any aptitude for learning this delicate and complex art, only he has attained any reputation. He is, in the circumstances, indispensable, I cannot banish him merely to please you. You will have to ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... generally realized that the Interstate Commerce legislation has not fulfilled the expectation of its friends. But this is a frequent trait of tentative legislation. It is not reasonable to expect that the first efforts to solve a problem the factors of which are so hidden and complex will be followed by ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... the impression upon my readers that this complex body of documentary evidences has been searched and appraised by myself. Frankly I acknowledge that, on the sole occasion when any opportunity offered itself for such a labor, I shrank from it as too fatiguing—and also as superfluous; since, if the proofs had satisfied ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Hope's only historical novel. It deals with the Court of Charles II., and gives a brilliant picture of that complex age, relieved ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. But, if you wish, let us stay here. Yes, let us stay here. The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde
... and uniform remedy like punishment is not adequate to cure such a natural and social phenomenon as crime, which has its own natural and social causes. The measures for the preservation of society against criminality must be manifold, complex and varied, and must be the outcome of persevering and systematic work on the part of legislators and citizens on the solid foundation of a systematic ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... Assume as the first postulate, and lay it down as the last proposition of your "philosophy of life," that a man is neither a brute, nor a god nor an angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN. Furthermore, as man is not only a very comprehensive and complex, but also, (to appearance at least,) in many points, a very contrary and contradictory creature, see that you take the whole man along with you into your metaphysical chamber; for if there be one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... keep his day at Wesel; indeed this 24th was not the first day, but the last of several, he had appointed to himself for finis to that Journey in the Cleve Countries; Journey rather complex to arrange. He has several businesses ahead in those parts; and, as usual, will group them with good judgment, and thrift of time. Not inspections merely, but amusements, meetings with friends, especially French friends: the question ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... statements in a compound or complex sentence are called clauses. In a complex sentence the independent statement is called the main clause and the dependent ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... the experience of sixty years, still needs improvement, and that it was at first far more defective than it now is. But whoever seriously considers what it is to construct from the beginning the whole of a machine so vast and complex as a government, will allow that what Hastings effected deserves high admiration. To compare the most celebrated European ministers to him seems to us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London with ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... charge of being laudator temporis acti in her description of the present as compared with the past social life of the colonies, though I am quite prepared to agree with her remark, that 'in proportion as the conditions of life become more complex, they should be met by more ingenuity, more culture, and a deeper sense of duty;' and that 'the suddenness of our accumulation of wealth has scarcely prepared our little community for some necessary modifications of our social arrangements.' ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... scientific train of reasoning, is nevertheless able to point to a fact which, in his opinion, lies without that train of reasoning. For he declares that it is beyond his powers of conception to regard the complex harmony of nature otherwise than as a product of some one integrating cause; and that the only cause of which he is able to conceive as adequate to produce such an effect is that of a conscious Intelligence. Pointing, therefore, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... to ask why, if this free hybridization takes place in nature among the hickories, you do not have a perfect complex of trees showing all possible variations in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... persons, reciprocally influence each other; and by this course of juridical discipline they add to the readiness and sagacity of those who are called to plead or to judge. But as human affairs and human actions are not of a metaphysical nature, but the subject is concrete, complex, and moral, they cannot be subjected (without exceptions which reduce it almost to nothing) to any certain rule. Their rules with regard to competence were many and strict, and our lawyers have mentioned it to their reproach. "The ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and Kenilworth, both of which castles the poet had seen before, but now reexamined with particular curiosity. They spent a night at Sheffield; and early next morning Scott sallied forth to provide himself with a planter's knife of the most complex contrivance and finished workmanship. Having secured one to his mind, and which for many years after was his constant pocket-companion, he wrote his name on a card, "Walter Scott, Abbotsford," and directed it to be engraved on the handle. On his mentioning this acquisition ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... contraction and expansion. The ceiling of the audience room was of iron. The ornamental work of the proscenium, the tier balustrades, and the frames of the partitions between the boxes were all of metal. The stage was supported by a complex iron system of about four thousand light pieces so adjusted as to be removable in sections when it was desired to open the stage floor. Theater fires almost invariably originate on the stage, and, as an additional safeguard, Mr. Cady contrived an apparatus for flooding ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gathered from the dry details of his Annals, seems to have been very complex. He was as ambitious, resolute, and active as any prince in the world; yet he refrained from offensive warfare as soon as his victories had brought under his rule the majority of the countries formerly subject to Tiglath-pileser I. He knew the crucial moment ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... one would imagine it to be—what it really is—one of the simplest pieces of mechanism possible, yet the actions performed by it are complex and beautiful in the extreme. Later on, these actions of the ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... license, and daring nothing to repress it; eager to abuse their momentary authority against the weak in order to acquire titles to popularity in the future; incapable of maintaining order except at the expense of public safety and tranquility; entangled in the reins of their new and complex administration, adding the fury of passion to incapacity and inexperience; such are, for the most part, the men sprung from nothing, void of ideas and drunk with pretension, on whom now rests responsibility for public powers ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... enough, nor could all of Epictetus teach me calm philosophy, distracted as I was over this situation, complex as it was. As to the fortune of the long boat, we knew nothing until, at three of the afternoon, I saw a white speck of a sail round the bend of our bayou, and saw that was hoisted, spirit fashion, over our boat, which now, with following wind, ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... attracting to itself humanity instead of timidly withdrawing into itself. Strength attracts and weakness repels in the long run here as elsewhere. The Clarks, who had never been considerable or numerous, had in the course of three generations gradually lost their hold upon the complex threads of life, shiftlessly shedding relationships as the Veteran had done, or proudly refusing inferior connections as Addie had, until the family was left solitary in the person of this one fifteen-year-old girl, in whom the social habit ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... so it fell out that there was no witness to that burn-side encounter. It was a complex fight and it lasted for more than a second. Two of the men had the grace to feel ashamed of themselves half-way through, and retired from the contest with shaky limbs and aching faces. The third had to be assisted to his feet in the end by ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... many reasons we must be brief upon the political intrigue in which the scheming spirit of Lord Vargrave was employed. It would, indeed, be scarcely possible to preserve the necessary medium between too plain a revelation and too complex a disguise. It suffices, therefore, very shortly to repeat what the reader has already gathered from what has gone before; namely, that the question at issue was one which has happened often enough in all governments,—one on which the Cabinet was divided, and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Gospel blend with the picture of his Lord which Luke portrays. The character of Jesus is so subtle and complex as to defy exact analysis, and yet it is evident that certain of its features, common to all, are emphasized successively by each one of the Gospel writers. Matthew depicts its majesty, Mark its strength, and John its sublimity; ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... not complex, is many-sided and in some respects contradictory. The face and figure that look out upon us from the best portraits of Luther tell us a great deal about the man. Strong, massive, not at all elegant; he stands there, firm and resolute, on his own legs, grasping a Bible ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... 26th and left on the 28th. Winston Churchill had been for several years one of my most intimate friends. I saw much of him during the South African War, but it was not until about 1905 or 1906 that I really got to know him well. His complex character is as difficult to describe as it is to analyse. To those who do not understand him, the impetuous disposition, which is one of his strongest characteristics, is apt to throw into shadow the indomitable courage, tireless energy, marvellous perspicuity and quick virile ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... clear from the experience of other countries who have adopted it on a large scale that it is not—neither is free trade by itself a remedy for unemployment. The evil lies deeper, the causes are more complex than any within the reach of import duties or of no import duties, and its treatment requires special measures of a social, not less than of an economic character which are going to carry us into altogether new and ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... bequeath in the way of spiritual possessions fell to the share of the classic nations of the West, the Greeks and the Romans. They greatly increased the heritage by their own spiritual achievements, and so produced a much more complex and diversified civilization, which has served as the substratum for the further development of the better part of mankind. Even the classic nations had to step aside as soon as their historical mission was fulfilled. They left the field free for the younger nations, with greater ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... 1825, addressed to the people of his Congressional district, in Kentucky, Mr. Clay more fully illustrated the motives for his vote: "I did not believe General Jackson so competent to discharge the various intricate and complex duties of the office of chief magistrate as his competitor. If he has exhibited, either in the councils of the Union, or in those of his own state or territory, the qualities of a statesman, the evidence of the fact has escaped my observation."—"It ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... hint of a prototype in the actual. We have already noted that the best of the Clarinda poems were written in absence, and that they drop the Arcadian names which typified the make-believe element in that complex affair. So a number of his most charming songs are addressed to girls of whom he had had but a glimpse. But that glimpse sufficed to kindle him, and for the poetry it was all advantage that it was ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... frontier and free land. It alone can reveal how much of the courageous, creative American spirit, and how large a part of the historic American ideals are to be carried over into that new age which is replacing the era of free lands and of measurable isolation by consolidated and complex industrial development and by increasing resemblances and connections between the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... be an allegorical story; a story branching out into twelve separate stories, which themselves would branch out again and involve endless other stories. It is a complex scheme to keep well in hand, and Spenser's art in doing so has been praised by some of his critics. But the art, if there is any, is so subtle that it fails to save the reader from perplexity. The truth is that the power ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Bourlamaque was not less perplexed by the mysterious movements of Holmes's squadron and the army transports. Up and down the river they sailed, now threatening to land at Pointe-aux-Trembles, now at Sillery, and greatly confusing the right wing of the French army by their complex movements. ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... be brought into verse too often. For any more abstract theories he had neither tolerance nor need. Poetry as a philosophy did not exist for him; it existed solely as the loveliest of the arts. He loved the elegance of Horace, all that was most complex in the simplicity of Poe, most birdlike in the human melodies of Verlaine. He had the pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any other quality of mind or emotion; and a song, for him, was music first, and then whatever you please afterwards, so long as it suggested, never told, ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... "so-called." I repeat once again that this book is not a "materialistic" or a "spiritualistic" book—it is a study of "Man" and therefore does and should include materialistic as well as spiritual phenomena because only the complex of these phenomena constitutes the complex ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... of the cause of Suzanna's listlessness, spoke no word. She wondered why the child had lost interest in the festival, indeed in all things pertaining to the occasion. It was difficult, she finally decided, to know how to cope with a child so complex, so changeable. She determined to treat the new mood with indifference, as being the most potent method. So she asked of Suzanna the performance of daily duties just as usual. When she discovered Suzanna gazing at her, Maizie close ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... involved in complex dispute with China, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and possibly Brunei over the Spratly Islands; the 2002 "Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea" has eased tensions but falls short of a legally ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Javanese are remarkable for their veracity and love of music: their ear is so delicate, that they readily learn to play the most difficult and complex airs on any instrument. They are remarkable also for their superstition, and people their forests, caves, and mountains with numerous invisible beings of their own creation. I will quote two instances of whimsical ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... to master the secret of her curious physical being, he has been forced to stop short of his purpose, dumb and blind in the presence of that wondrous complexity that no science of his own can master; and no casuist has yet solved the why of her equally wonderful and complex mental and spiritual being. They have made Reason, cold, critical, judge, the test; but the fine, delicate essence of her real being has always eluded it. When Love seeks the solution—the large, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... distended with artificial ashes, dead dry protections against the exposures he so unaccountably fears. Will he go on shrinking, I wonder?—become at last a mere lurking atomy in his own recesses, a kind of hermit crab, the bulk of him a complex mechanism, a thing of rags and tatters and papier-mache, stolen from the earth and the plant-world and his fellow beasts? And at last may he not disappear altogether, none missing him, and a democracy of honest machinery, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... following its natural, musical instinct. Notation and keyboards are simply symbols of music—cages in which the beautiful bird is caught. They are not music any more than the alphabet is literature. Unfortunately, our system of musical symbols and the keyboard itself are very complex. For the young child it is as difficult as are Calculus and Algebra for his older brother. As a matter of fact, the keys of F sharp, B, and D flat major, etc., are only difficult because fate has made them so. It would have served the musical purpose just as well if the pitch of the instruments ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... strange and complex, and we understand very little of it, ourselves. The time for the council has come though, for our talk has dwindled away the afternoon. Perhaps some of your questions will there be answered. But come, let ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... granted. It has surely been amply demonstrated and illustrated by writers as widely separated in their interpretation of social evolution as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. But with the further thought in mind that, alike in the lowliest physical organism or in the most complex social organism, life itself is change, we view every problem of life from another angle. To see life steadily and see it whole is one stage. Bergson bids us see life on the move, ever changing, growing, evolving, a creation ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... accept its beauty as if it had grown by a natural process like a flower. This, perhaps, is the best compliment we could pay the poet; but if the poet is one who boldly essays a most difficult and complex form, in a language which for him is foreign, then we should pause a moment to consider what it is that he has set out ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... Telegram," at the little Madison Square Theater, but did not prove to be a worthy successor. It was from the pen of Mr. Willis Steell, who rushed in where angels fear to tread; or, in other words, invented a couple of complex ladies, and then tried to explain them plausibly. There is no more difficult task. One lady was a skittish matron, addicted to betting on the races and to allowing a nice looking boy to kiss her; the other was a white-muslin girl from ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Japan as a first-class power, conscious of achievement and eager to enter on a great career, introduced a new and disturbing element into world politics. Our diplomacy, which had hitherto been comparatively simple, now became exceedingly complex. Formerly the United States was the only great power outside the European balance. The existence of a second detached power greatly complicated the international situation and presented opportunities ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... Hawthorne's conscious thought would confine it; the human element in it threatens from time to time to break the mould of thought and escape from bondage, because, simple as the moral scheme is, human life is too complex to be solved by it even in this small world of the three guilty ones and the child. This weakness of the moral scheme, this rude strength of human nature, this sense of a larger solution, are most felt when ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, from the outer to the inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and from decoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for the greater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the last threshold he finds this mid-most sanctuary to be a hypaethral temple, and in its custody and care a simple earth ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... still, and must always be, the high vocation of the poet; on this ground of universal humanity, of ancient and now almost forgotten nobleness, to take his stand, even in these trivial, jeering, withered, unbelieving days; and through all their complex, dispiriting, mean, yet tumultuous influences, to 'make his light shine before them,' that it might beautify even our 'rag- gathering age' with some beams of that mild, divine splendour, which had long left us, the very possibility of which ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... to assume that the same law of vital force governs in the appearance and geographical distribution of fungi, as universally obtains in the higher and more complex vegetal growths. And although it may be difficult, in some instances, to draw the precise line between certain low mycological forms and the amoeboid and some other primitive manifestations of animal life, yet all vegetable ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... northern and southern types of house structure, the peculiar conditions here are exceptionally valuable to the study of the principles and methods of pueblo building. Here remains of large villages with elaborate and complex ground plan, indicating a long period of occupancy, are found, and within a short distance there are ruins of small villages with very simple ground plan, both produced under the same environment; and comparative study of the two may indicate some ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... factors of a productive and progressive civilization—food, raw materials, machinery, fuel, transport, finance, and adequate supplies of skilled labor. The services which countries near or distant rendered to one another were becoming constantly more numerous, more complex, and more urgent. The obstructions and stoppages of war has driven home the lesson painfully to the inhabitants of every European country, belligerent or neutral. What lesson? That we have erred in permitting ourselves to grow dependent on the industry, goodwill, and intercourse of other ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... mean conjugial love because spiritual heat, which proceeds from the sun of that world, in its essence is love, and with women it is love conjoining itself with intelligence and wisdom in men; which love in its complex is called conjugial love, and by determination becomes that love. It is called elevation into superior light and heat, because it is elevation into the light and heat which the angels of the superior heavens enjoy: it is also an actual elevation, as from a thick mist into pure air, and from an ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of inanition if fed on but one kind of food, however congenial, yet lives if he has all in succession, so is it with complex man. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... the human body is now admitted by physiologists to be a person with an intelligent soul, differing from our own more complex soul in degree and not in kind, and, like ourselves, being born, living, and dying. It would appear, then, as though 'we,' 'our souls,' or 'selves,' or 'personalities,' or by whatever name we may prefer to be called, are but the ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... convenient pigeon-holes as soon as 'Judge and Co.' were abolished. It was a characteristic error to exaggerate the simplicity of their problem, and to fail to see that 'judge-made' law corresponds to a necessary inductive process by which the complex and subtle differences have to be gradually ascertained and fitted into a systematic statement. One other remark suggests itself. The Utilitarians saw in the dogged obstructiveness of Eldon and his like ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... in fact oftentimes at the very period of birth, is exposed to many dangerous and troublesome affections, the result of causes not less complex and multifarious than those that exert an influence over the human organization. Many diseases are the consequence of their domesticity and the hereditary defects of their progenitors, others are dependent upon accidental circumstances, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... accelerated rapidity to overcome the problems that confront humanity by substituting human inquiry for divine revelation. Thus this attitude of man to proceed through life dependent only on his own resources will expand and strengthen his mentality by doing away with the inferiority complex of the God-idea. This vision of man, the master of his own destinies, the searcher for truth and the shaper of a better life for the only existence that he knows anything about, this reliance of man upon man, and without the supposed interference ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... interpreted by a philosophy less exclusive than his own. In urging his one social panacea, "Simplify, I say, simplify," he failed to see that all steps in moral or material organization are really efforts after the same process he recommends. The sewing-machine is a more complex affair than the needle, but it simplifies every woman's life, and helps her to that same comparative freedom from care which Thoreau would seek only by reverting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... every song sting that evening; but the performers had counted on this. After the third song there was a hornpipe, in the performance of which the dancer's chief aim seemed to be, to shew in what a variety of complex ways he could shake himself to pieces if he chose. Then there was another trio, and then a short pause, in order duly to prepare the public mind for the reception of the great cantatrice Mademoiselle Nelina. When she was led to the foot-lights ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... mean when He spoke of the kingdom of God? The idea as set forth in the Gospels is so complex, the phrase is used to cover so many and different conceptions, that it is practically impossible to frame a definition within which all the sayings of Jesus concerning the kingdom can be included. The nearest approach ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... a character so complex as Mr. Gladstone's requires the grasp of genius. We speak of "the duality of the human mind," but here are half a dozen spirits in one. They rule in turn, and occasionally several of them struggle ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... mentions this story as one that presents "people and events and circumstances, blended into an artistic whole that defies analysis." It illustrates dramatic incident, local color, and complex character analysis. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... the case is once ascertained, then it is proper at once to consider whether the argument be a simple or a complex one, and if it be a complex one, whether it is made up of many subjects of inquiry, or of some comparison. That is a simple statement which contains in itself one plain question, in this way—"Shall we ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... arose, in the distribution of gratuitous supplies of food, from the routine of the public offices. So complex were the details which the under-officials were obliged to observe, that men actually perished while a useless routine correspondence was being conducted. It was satirically said by an English observer, "the delivery of a few quarters of English corn to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... social order. Mine stands free from everything artificial. They are bound in all sorts of conventions. They depend on life, which, in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex organised fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... abrupt as you think, Master Jack," said Wolston; "those who take the trouble to study Nature, observe an admirable gradation and easy progression from a simple to a complex organization. There is no race or species that is not connected by a perceptible link with that which precedes and ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... method:—(1) Truth requires a clear and distinct conception of its object, excluding all doubt; (2) the objects of knowledge naturally fall into series or groups; (3) in these groups investigation must begin with a simple and indecomposable element, and pass from it to the more complex and relative elements; (4) an exhaustive and immediate grasp of the relations and interconnexion of these elements is necessary for knowledge in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... morals, but which had decidedly influenced his artistic sensibility. The brilliant city had not smirched his soul, but it had helped to form his taste. That was very modern, and very un-British. Alston had a sort of innocent love for the strange and the complex in music. He shrank from anything banal, and disliked the obvious, though his contact with French people had saved him from love of the cloudy. As he intended to make his career upon the stage, and as he was too young, and far ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... neglected its might and its tragic powers. Where is the piano-piece since Beethoven that has the depth, the breadth, the height of this huge solemnity? Chopin's sensuous wailing does not afford it. Schumann's complex eccentricities have not given it out. Brahms is too passionless. Wagner neglected the piano. It remained for a Yankee to find the austere peak again! and that, too, when the sonata was supposed to be a form as exhausted as ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... of the chariot consisted of upwards of ten thousand springs, formed so as to give the greater impetuosity to the vehicle, and were more complex than a dozen clocks like that of Strasburgh. The external of the chariot was adorned with banners, and a superb festoon of laurel that formerly shaded me on horseback. And now, having given you a very concise description of my machine for travelling into ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... her voice became more ugly, less like hers, as if the emotion that governed her just then made a crescendo, became more vital and more complex. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens |
