"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who for various reasons desire to adopt a vegetarian diet I would say, do not substitute bread and vegetables for meat. Do not spend your energy making new and complex dishes as advocated in fashionable vegetarian cook books. Compounds containing several soft proteins such as beans, nuts, eggs and cream, besides starches, are a burden to the liver and alimentary canal and lay the ...
— Food for the Traveler - What to Eat and Why • Dora Cathrine Cristine Liebel Roper
... 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
... and into the station followed by the shouts of the young roughs. He did not venture out again, and when his train was ready, got aboard and went gladly out of the great complex dwelling-place ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... variables such as population densities and distribution characteristics; land-use patterns and construction techniques; geographical configurations; vulnerability of transportation; communications and other lifeline systems; complex response operations; long-term physical, social, and economic recovery policies. These factors, together with the realization that an earthquake has the potential for being the greatest single-event ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various
... certain piper named Antigenidas, whose every note made honeyed harmony. He had skill, too, to make music in every mode, choose which you would, the simple Aeolian or the complex Ionian, the mournful Lydian, the solemn Phrygian, or the warlike Dorian. Being therefore the most famous of all that played upon the pipe, he said that nothing so tormented him, nothing so vexed his heart and ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... list may be found cathartic, alterative, diuretic and tonic waters of varied shade and differing strength. The cathartic waters are the most numerous and the most extensively used. The curative agents prepared in the vast and mysterious laboratories of Nature are very complex in constitution and different in temperature, and on that account do not, like iron, opium, quinia, etc., exhibit single effects; they exercise rather, with rare exceptions, combined effects, and these are again modified by various modes of employment and ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... that hero should have owned anything to this villain, and that the letter of change drawn from the depths of the tomb by his father upon him, Marius, had been protested up to that day. It also seemed to him, in the complex state of his mind towards Thenardier, that there was occasion to avenge the Colonel for the misfortune of having been saved by such a rascal. In any case, he was content. He was about to deliver the Colonel's shade from this unworthy ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... statesman aiming at a practical effect, not of a man of letters creating a work of imaginative art. The creative form is quite subsidiary and subordinate. It would be unreasonable to expect in them elaborate drawing of character, complex plot, or subtle types of contemporary life. Their aim is to paint the actual political world, to trace its origin, and to idealise its possible development. And this is done, not by an outside man of letters, but by the very ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... difficulty though great is never complex but very simple. And so the statement of His purpose is ever exquisitely simple. Listen again: "Call unto Me, and I will answer thee and shew thee great things and difficult which thou knowest not." If a man call he has already turned his face towards God. His will has acted, ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... constitutions of America are on one general principle, yet no two of them are exactly alike in their component parts, or in the distribution of the powers which they give to the actual governments. Some are more, and others less complex. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... fully employed upon external objects; intent upon experiments, they will not be very inquisitive about theories. Let us then take care that their simple ideas be accurate, and when these are compounded, their complex notions, their principles, opinions, and tastes, will necessarily be just; their language will then be as accurate as their ideas are distinct; and hence they will be enabled to reason with precision, and to invent with facility. We may observe, that the ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... benefit of the act-commonly called "an act for the relief of poor debtors." But before he can reach this boon, ten days must elapse. Generous-minded legislators, no doubt, intended well when they constructed this act, but so complex are its provisions that any legal gentleman may make it a very convenient means of oppression. And in a community where laws not only have their origin in the passions of men, but are made to serve popular prejudices-where the quality of justice obtained ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... 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
... self-sufficing in the vital 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 ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... 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 ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... affecting any class, that the questions involved appear to be simple, and easily repeated formulas ample to secure desired rights. Further agitation, however, and more mature reflection always show that what looks like a simple social problem is a complex one. ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... 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. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Partners didn't care much about the human minds with which they were paired for the journey. The Partners seemed to take the attitude that human minds were complex and fouled up beyond belief, anyhow. No Partner ever questioned the superiority of the human mind, though very few of the Partners were ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... by which Sir Frederic Leighton finds it convenient to build up his pictures. The labour entailed by such a system as this is, of course, enormous, more especially when the composition to be worked out is of so complex a character as the Captive Andromache of last year, every figure and group of which were treated with the same completeness and detail as we have seen to attend the production of so simple a picture as The Sibyl. Deliberateness of workmanship ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... on, heedless of time, to trace the ramifications of his idea in the complex beauty of the scene, but for the longing to share his mood with Undine. For the last few months every thought and sensation had been instantly transmuted into such emotional impulses and, though the currents ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... furnished. Mysterious voices had always a share in producing the catastrophe; but they were always to be explained on some known principles, either as reflected into a focus or communicated through a tube. I could not but remark that his narratives, however complex or marvelous, contained no instance sufficiently parallel to those that had befallen ourselves, and in which the solution was applicable to ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the gland is absorbed into the general circulation through the veins; it consists of a complex colloid substance which contains an iodine-albumin—iodothyrin—and plays an important part in maintaining the normal metabolism of the body, particularly of the central nervous and cutaneous tissues in adults, and of the bones in children. Disturbance of the function of ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... develop men, to require their best efforts, to make them come forward and upward. Thus, in this interplay of economic forces, wealth, or money, or profits stands out as a primary object of attainment, and becomes the incentive to the complex efforts which tend to benefit the individual, the ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... no one and the same thing is invariably pleasant is that our nature is, not simple, but complex, involving something different from itself (so far as we are corruptible beings). Suppose then that one part of this nature be doing something, this something is, to the other part, unnatural: but, if there be an equilibrium of the two natures, then ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... in almost endless cycles. On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic beings; but, to the best of my judgment, it is explained through inheritance and the complex action of natural selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character, as we have seen illustrated in ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... of affairs the former special objects of their zeal fall into new environments, a better and truer perspective; seem no longer so susceptible to separate and radical change. The real nature of the complex stuff of life they were seeking to work in is revealed to them—its intricate and delicate fiber, and the subtle, secret interrelationship of its parts—and they work circumspectly, lest they should mar more than they mend. Moral enthusiasm is not, uninstructed ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... rite of ratification of the covenant. The ceremonial is complex and significant. We need not stay on the mere picture, impressive and, to our eyes, strange as it is, but rather seek to bring out the meaning of these smoking offerings, and that blood flung on the altar and on ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... was an almost complete lack of knowledge of human nature, and her struggle to fill in the gaps—gaps she was only just beginning to realize existed—was a difficult one. The stronger emotions of hate and fear were no strangers to her; but for the first time she was discovering how difficult and complex was this unusual feeling of love. She let Jason go because she was incapable of any other action. Of course she could stop him by force, but if she had learned anything in the past few weeks, it was the discovery that this was one area where he ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... Socialism if the race has at last evolved the faculty of coordinating the functions of a society too crowded and complex to be worked any longer on the old haphazard private-property system. Unless we reorganize our society socialistically—humanly a most arduous and magnificent enterprise, economically a most simple and sound one—Free Trade by itself ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... nature that readers like Mr. Bailey are unable to find in Racine—they miss in him no less suggestions of the mysterious and the infinite. No doubt this is partly due to our English habit of associating these qualities with expressions which are complex and unfamiliar. When we come across the mysterious accent of fatality and remote terror in a ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... there no other considerations which swayed him from the cloisters towards the world? So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action. Yet to Alleyne had been opened now a side of life of which he had been as innocent as a child, but one which was ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... intention of the seer. It produces and retains more readily in that form the various images communicated to it from the soul of man. And the soul, in this connection, must be regarded as the repository of all that complex mass of emotions, thoughts, impressions, perceptions, feelings, etc., included in the inner life of man; for the soul of man is not the less a scientific fact because there are those who bandy words ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... great deep," yet still, as the Psalmist adds, it is the same mercy, the same justice as that which we know in ourselves. "Thou preservest both man and beast; how exalted is thy mercy, O Lord; therefore the children of men take refuge under the shadow of thy wings." That mercy which we see in the complex arrangements of the animal creation, extending down to the minutest portions of their frames—that same Divine mercy it is which we are bid to imitate. He whose soul burns with indignation against the brutal ruffian who misuses ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... must pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that the duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security against ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... bed stood a table covered with glasses and bottles and pill-boxes, and also a telephone. Every few minutes this telephone would ring, and Peter would wait patiently while Mr. Ackerman settled some complex problem of business. "I've told them my terms," he would say with irritation, and then be would cough; and Peter, who was sharply watching every detail of the conduct of the rich, noted that he was too ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... which soon began to crowd in upon me. So normal did I appear while talking to my brother that he thought I should be able to return home in a few weeks; and, needless to say, I agreed with him. But the pendulum, as it were, had swung too far. The human brain is too complex a mechanism to admit of any such complete readjustment in an instant. It is said to be composed of several million cells; and, that fact granted, it seems safe to say that every day, perhaps every hour, hundreds of thousands of ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... an object is the world of common sense. Its concreteness is ignorance. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by common sense. Its work-a-day world is not even a faint reflex of the vast and complex universe. It sees but the immediate, the obvious, the superficial. So instead of being concrete, it is, in truth, the very opposite. Nor is empirical science with its predilection for "facts" better off. Every science able to cope with a mere fragmentary aspect of the world ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... up the complex life of nations and give them their distinctive features. They form that moral atmosphere which makes one period of history responsible and tributary to another. And indeed, in every human problem there is an ethical element. This imponderable ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... thoughts that filled my soul—thoughts which, in depths within myself I had never dreamed of, found and swept a string that ere long broke its sweet harmonies on my spirit. I seemed, all at once, to develop in spiritual stature and to have become complex ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... and biblical phraseology. Some of them were curious reveries, dwelling much upon the perception of natural things through scent. He complained, I remember, that life was so much less interesting in winter because scents were so much less sweet and less complex than in summer. But the whole of the writings showed a serene exaltation of mind. There was not a touch of repining or resignation about them. He spoke much of the aesthetic pleasure that he received from an increased power of disentangling the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... were not vague so much as vast. But I knew that I could not make Isabel comprehend it, and (so complex a creature is man) I do not know that I wanted her to comprehend it. These were the only ones in the whole collection that I would have shown her, and I was rather glad that she did not like even these. Not that poor Aaronna's ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... the single elements of our subject, then each branch or part, and, last of all, the whole, in all its relations—therefore to advance from the simple to the complex. But it is necessary for us to commence with a glance at the nature of the whole, because it is particularly necessary that in the consideration of any of the parts their relation to the whole should be kept constantly ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... them were quickly chained to the wall, but the third was thrown on his back, and a complex chain was put on his neck and limbs, in such a way that, when drawn tight, it forced his body into a position that must have caused him severe pain. No word or cry escaped him, however, only an irrepressible groan when he was thrust into a corner and left ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... have decided to do," continued Schafroff, moving nearer to Lialia, as if the matter were becoming much more complex, "we mean to ask Lida Sanina and Sina Karsavina to sing. Each a solo, first of all, and afterwards a duet. One is a contralto, and the other, a soprano, so that will do nicely. Then I shall play the violin, and afterwards Sarudine ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... and fancy, though inferior in skill and expression, was Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld (d. 1522). His "King Hart" and "Palace of Honor" are complex allegories; and his translation of the Aeneid is the earliest attempt to render classical poetry into the living ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... situation is very complex. You see, I have a respectable lover, and I live every day in hopes of some time joining him. Should our band get into disrepute, which it surely would do if discovered here, I should feel disgraced. Besides"—and she looked very serious—"there ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... found in vol. lxix. page 10 of the "Archives" preserved at the State House in Boston. It will be seen that what the surgeon wanted consisted chiefly of opiates, stimulants, cathartics, plasters, and materials for bandages. The complex and varied formulae have given place to simpler and often more effective forms of the same remedies; but the list and the manner in which it is made out are proofs of the good sense and schooling of the surgeon, who, it may be noted, was in such haste ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of an audion-bulb is quite complex, but a simpler explanation, though one which may not be exactly correct from a purely technical point of view, is as follows, referring to ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... Pines, by reason of relatively more and smaller scales and of a more conical form, attain a higher phyllotaxis and a more complex condition, two or even three orders being represented on a single cone; while the cones of Soft Pines, by reason of relatively fewer and larger scales and a more cylindrical form, are of lower phyllotaxis, with one order only more or less definitely ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... imports, this History will primarily deal with politics, with the History of England and, after the date of the union with Scotland, Great Britain, as a state or body politic; but as the life of a nation is complex, and its condition at any given time cannot be understood without taking into account the various forces acting upon it, notices of religious matters and of intellectual, social, and economic progress will also find place in these volumes. The footnotes will, so far as is ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... impulse—a noble impulse. But he patently meant what he said, this boy stigmatised by Jane as "all in the clouds," and needing a "tight hand." Here was one of those "whimsical and perilous moments of daily life" that pass in a breath; light as thistledown, heavy with complex issues. To Nevil it seemed as if the gods, with ironical gesture, handed him the wish of his heart, saying: "It is yours—if you are fool enough to take it." Stress of thought so warred in him that he came to himself with a fear of having hurt the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... reduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt these new facilities did greatly help the steam engine in its invasion of the field of common life, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. It was, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented series of causes, that set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, and in another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisive factor. One peculiar condition of its production in England seems to have supplied just one ingredient that had been missing for ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... measures could be based only on estimates and calculations. Furthermore, scientists were reasonably confident that the gun-type uranium-fueled device could be successfully detonated, but they did not know if the more complex firing technology required in an implosion device would work. Successful detonation of the TRINITY device showed that implosion would work, that a nuclear chain reaction would result in a powerful detonation, and that effective ...
— Project Trinity 1945-1946 • Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer
... however, for Chicago and the year 1894 to present one of the most far-reaching, costly and complex labor upheavals that has ever disturbed industrial relations in America. So ill understood at the time were the real facts of the controversy that it is doubtful whether it is possible even now to distinguish between truth and rumor in regard ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... safeguarding of wealth after it was secured, could be such dolts as to allow themselves to be robbed of all their accumulated wealth by a device as simple as that by which children play at blindman's buff. The process was no more complex than that employed by the robber of old, who took the pebbles from the beach, marked them money, and with the money bought the labour of his fellows, and by the manipulation of that labour and by turning pebbles into money he took away from the labourer the money which he had paid them for ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... all the contradictory sentiments of fear, remorse, vexation, love, and jealousy, Clemence's head was so turned, at times, that she did not know what she did want. She found herself in one of those situations when a woman of a complex and mobile character whom all sensations impress, passes, with surprising facility, from one resolve to another entirely opposed to it. After being frightened beyond measure by her lover's presence in her husband's ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of the world Pierre was a great gentleman, the rather blind and absurd husband of a distinguished wife, a clever crank who did nothing but harmed nobody and was a first-rate, good-natured fellow. But a complex and difficult process of internal development was taking place all this time in Pierre's soul, revealing much to him and causing him ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... arises late in the course of evolution and only in connection with adjustments that are relatively complex. When the same or similar conditions in the environment are repeatedly presented to the organism so that it is called upon to react in a similar and almost identical way each time, there tends to be organized a mechanism of reaction which becomes ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... unfold themselves in choice of Color: if the Cut betoken Intellect and Talent, so does the Color betoken Temper and Heart. In all which, among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant, indubitable, though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect: every snip of the Scissors has been regulated and prescribed by ever-active Influences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a superior order are neither ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... failures served to stimulate Mr. Taggett; it required a complex case to stir his ingenuity and sagacity. That the present was not a complex case he was still convinced, after four days' futile labor upon it. Mr. Shackford had been killed—either with malice prepense or on the spur of the moment—for ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... silent room, Weaves upon the upright loom, Weaves a mantle rich and dark, Purpled over-deep. But mark How she scatters o'er the wool Woven shapes, till it is full Of men that struggle close, complex; Short-clipp'd steeds with wrinkled necks Arching high; spear, shield, and all The panoply that doth recall Mighty war, such war as e'en For Helen's sake is waged, I ween. Purple is the groundwork: good! All the field is stained with ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... as I sit in the silence of this old brown room in a low-built and timbered Surrey farmhouse, with pen and paper before me, I feel that it is only by a miracle that I have been spared to narrate one of the most complex and ingenious plots which the human mind, with ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... which was called for by a true spirit of economy or by a system of accountability rigidly enforced. This is in some degree apparent from the fact that the Government has sustained no loss by the default of any of its agents. In the complex, but at the same time beautiful, machinery of our system of government, it is not a matter of surprise that some remote agency may have failed for an instant to fulfill its desired office; but I feel confident in the assertion that nothing has occurred ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was finished, there came the laborious work of installing the power plant and the tremendous power leads, the connectors, the circuits to the relays—a thousand complex circuits. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... judgment on each in turn, and dismissed the visionary ones. At last the deep brow began to relax, and the eye to kindle; and when he rose to ring the bell his face was a sign-post with Eureka written on it in Nature's vivid handwriting. In that hour he had hatched a plot worthy of Machiavel—-a plot complex yet clear. A servant-girl ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental and emotional life, transcending the individual's conscious experience, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual's conscious participation. The clearest symbol by which this fact may be figured to the imagination is the one already presented: the comparison of the subjective field to a plane, in which the conscious experience of the individual is represented ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... echoed the doctor. "I'd like to tell McClintock that if people would expect more health, they'd get more. The ordinary person expects ill-ness. They have a 'disease complex'—that's in your line, Benis. But just supposing they could change the idea—Eh? Supposing everybody began to look for health—just take it, you know, as a God-intended right? I'd lose half my living in ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... 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 several threads in our hands, and ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... singing her angel-donation to sleep; Clancy, thundering forth something concerning his broken heart, whilst tailing up the stringing cattle; the canary in its cage; the magpie on the fence—are each setting in motion the complex machinery of music, and with about equal scientific knowledge of what they are doing. To the philosophic mind, however, they are not playing or singing; they are producing and controlling sound-vibrations, arbitrarily varied in duration and quality; a series of such pulsations ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Ford's mind. 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 ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... showing how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings which have to struggle together in the same country. I will give only a single instance, which though a simple one interested me. In Staffordshire, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and a thin but proportionally large agricultural population. To-day it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... noble Hyrsts in the reign of Henry I., and the period since then elapsed had afforded time for numerous bridals. Lady Walderhurst was overcome at moments by her reflections upon what lay behind and before her, but not being a complex person or of fervid imagination, she was spared by nature the fevers of ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the Peruvian code may be thought to infer a state of society but little advanced; which had few of those complex interests and relations that grow up in a civilized community, and which had not proceeded far enough in the science of legislation to economize human suffering by proportioning penalties to crimes. ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... this system, after all the improvements suggested by 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 Robinson Crusoe, who, before he could bake ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from its heights of calm seclusion and grapple with the actual difficulties of men, not indeed by assuming a political role or acting as a divider and judge amid conflicting secular aims, but by revealing the mind of Christ and bringing the principles of the gospel to bear upon the complex ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... be sad or happy? The answer is complex and hard to find, for it depends on many contingencies. The husband—what will he be? He is not of Meenachi's choosing. Did she choose her father and mother, and the house in which she was born? Were they not chosen for her, "written upon her forehead" by her Karma, her inscrutable fate? ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... 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 ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... work out an organization instead of men whose experience and common sense will tell them not to attempt anything which will not work. The scheme ought to be simple and practical. If the federation, or whatever it may be called, is given too much power or if its machinery is complex, my belief is that it will be unable to function or else will be defied. I can see lots of trouble ahead unless impractical enthusiasts and fanatics are suppressed. This is a time when sober thought, caution, ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... complicated; in either case, a check, though but of short duration, is irretrievable. This is a great oversight, and, at least, greatly augments the chances against the durability of a government. In proportion as the machine is unmanageable and complex, the embarrassment of those who have the conduct of it will be great, and the enemies will be proportionately bold and audacious. In all such conflicts, much depends on the spirit of the combatants, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... eyes must have mirrored their amazement: an amazement which was entirely natural, and which concerned not only the revelation of wealth in itself, but more complex things as well. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... thought from savagery to civilization. The enquiry is beset with difficulties of many kinds, for the record of man's mental development is even more imperfect than the record of his physical development, and it is harder to read, not only by reason of the incomparably more subtle and complex nature of the subject, but because the reader's eyes are apt to be dimmed by thick mists of passion and prejudice, which cloud in a far less degree the fields of comparative anatomy and geology. My contribution to the history of the human mind consists of little ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Wagner (1811-1883) could be considered to be one of the ideological fathers of early 20th century German nationalism. He was well-suited for this role. Highly intelligent, sophisticated, complex, capable of imagining whole systems of humanistic philosophy, and with an intense need to communicate his ideas, he created great operas which, in addition to their artistic merits, served the peculiar role of promoting a jingoistic, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Rome, places of recreation, exhibitions of wild beasts and gladiators, the schools of the rhetoricians, as well as studies of the authors, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, each reflecting in his own way the sentiments of the Augustan age. It is a complex and important period of history, and nobly treated by our author. Brutus and Cassius evoke no false sympathy. The character of Augustus is closely analyzed, and the sketch of the Roman dominion, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... face, the frank mouth, which disclosed teeth as white as milk, was enhanced by the fact that every line, every tint spoke of flawless health and a mind attuned to the simple, gracious things of life rather than those which are complex and hard ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... is so much more complex," replied Cortlandt, "than that of the crystal, that it requires great continuity. So far we certainly have seen no men, or anything like them, not even so much as a monkey, though I suppose, according to your reasoning, Jupiter has not advanced far enough to produce ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... situated on each side of the mouth. They are variously toothed, so as to tear the food, and move horizontally instead of up and down as in the horse. The act of taking the food, especially if the insect be carnivorous in its habits, is quite complex, as not only the true jaws, but the accessory jaws (maxillae, Fig. 5, a, upper, b, under side of the head of a young beetle; at, antennae, md, mandible, mx, maxillae, mx[1], labium) and the feelers (palpi) attached to the maxillae, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... garden wall, Talked with me from fall to fall; Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond, Mine the walnut slopes beyond, Mine, on bending orchard trees, Apples of Hesperides! Still, as my horizon grew, Larger grew my riches too; All the world I saw or knew Seemed a complex Chinese toy, Fashioned ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of this oil is one of great importance and interest, affording, as it does, one of the examples where the progress of modern chemistry has succeeded in producing artificially a complex organic body, previously only known as the ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... the world, he is not prepared to meet many situations; only a few of the neural connections are made and he is able to perform only a meagre number of simple acts, such as breathing, crying, digestion. The pathways for complex acts, such as speaking English or French, or writing, are not formed at birth but must be built up within the life-time of the individual. It is the process of building them up that we call education. This process is a physical feat involving the production of changes in physical material ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... long one, as given by Mr. Spedding (iii. 511), of the instances which show that he was ill-informed about the advances of knowledge in his own time. And his mind was often not clear when he came to deal with complex phenomena. Thus, though he constructed a table of specific gravities—"the only collection," says Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we find in his works," and "wonderfully accurate considering the manner ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... thought of Alma. Intruded; for he neither sought nor welcomed his wife's companionship at such a moment, and he was disturbed by a perception of the little claim she had to be present with him in spirit. He could no longer pretend to himself that he loved Alma; whatever the right name for his complex of feelings—interest, regard, admiration, sexual attachment—assuredly it must be another word than that sacred to the memory of his parents, to the desires and hopes centring in his child. For all that, he had no sense of a hopeless discord in his wedded life; he suffered from no disillusion, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... crowd is a strange complex thing. It doesn't know itself. It's easily swept along to do as a crowd what would never be done by each one off by himself. And this works in good ways as well as in bad. Jesus drew the crowds and was drawn by them. He couldn't withstand ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... given the logician's power to strip a subject bare of all superfluous and concealing verbiage, and to exhibit the gleaming jewels of truth and reality in splendid simplicity. This supreme quality, this ability to make the complex simple, the power to subordinate the non-essential, gave to his conversation, to his lectures, to his writings, and in no less degree to his personality, a direct and charming naivete that at once challenged attention and compelled confidence ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... directions—like the opposition of the thumb and fingers in the human hand, which makes of it such a wonderful servant of the thought. They belong to the group of sisterly powers which the Creator has placed in the human soul—varied, complex, like and unlike. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... face with cruelty and barbaric indulgence, while yet there was an intensity in the eyes that showed the man was possessed of an idea which mastered him —a root-thought. David was at once conscious of a complex personality, of a man in whom two natures fought. He understood it. By instinct the man was a Mahdi, by heredity he was a voluptuary, that strange commingling of the religious and the evil found in so many criminals. In some far corner of his nature David felt something ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... mentioned as living in Sikyatki, and yet the two pueblos are said to have been kindred. The indications are that the inhabitants of both came from the east—possibly were intruders, which may have been the cause of the hostility entertained by both toward the Walpians. The problem is too complex to be solved with our present limited knowledge in this direction, and archeology seems not to afford very satisfactory evidence one way or the other. We may never know whether the Sikyatki refugees founded Awatobi or simply fled to that ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... from the Countess's chamber door, the knot of Evan's resolution began to slacken. The clear light of his simple duty grew cloudy and complex. His pride would not let him think that he was shrinking, but cried out in him, 'Will you be believed?' and whispered that few would believe him guilty of such an act. Yet, while something said that full ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cannon alone can pass over any piece; indeed, a cannon can take only when there is a piece between it and the piece it takes,—which intervening piece may belong to either player. The king must not be opposite the other king without a piece between. All this certainly sounds very complex and awkward to the English or American player; and our game has the preferable tendency of increasing the power of the pieces, (as distinct from pawns,) rather than, with theirs, limiting their powers and multiplying their number. However, it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... passages on it scattered through his works, though no one treatise is devoted to it. He held that the systems of his predecessors were not philosophical enough. He dreamed of a logic of thought applicable to all ideas. All complex ideas are compounds of simple ideas, as non-primary numbers are of primary numbers. Numbers can be compounded ad infinitum. So if numbers are translated into pronouncible words, these words can be combined so as to represent ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... been made to sink as I have gone through the South and into the homes of people, and found women who could converse intelligently on Grecian history, who had studied geometry, could analyse the most complex sentences, and yet could not analyse the poorly cooked and still more poorly served corn bread and fat meat that they and their families were eating three times a day! It is little trouble to find girls who can locate Pekin or the Desert ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... contrast between those ideas brought out by the other stories, many in number, into which those powers of darkness enter. It is evident that the traditions from which the popular conception of the ghostly enemy has been evolved must have been of a complex and ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... distinction between the various parts—no differentiation into root, stem, or crown. Often the lower forms of animal and vegetable life are so similar that one cannot discriminate between them. But as we ascend in the scale, the various plant forms become more and more complex until we reach the tree, which is the largest and highest form of all plants. The tree is a living organism composed of cells like any other living organism. It has many parts, every one of which has a definite purpose. The three principal parts are: the stem, the crown, ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... and hawked above the pool; the swift's wings whirred like 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 ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... at last. If I could have plunged into a light wave and been transported instantaneously to Dona Rita's door it would no doubt have saved me an infinity of pangs too complex for analysis; but as this was impossible I elected to walk from end to end of that long way. My emotions and sensations were childlike and chaotic inasmuch that they were very intense and primitive, and that I lay very helpless ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad |
