"Distort" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wire-drawing and over-refining; from of old we have been familiar with his tendency to Mysticism and Religiosity, whereby in everything he was still scenting-out Religion: but never perhaps did these amaurosis-suffusions so cloud and distort his otherwise most piercing vision, as in this of the Dandiacal Body! Or was there something of intended satire; is the Professor and Seer not quite the blinkard he affects to be? Of an ordinary mortal we should have decisively answered in the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... powers of its creator. And so, to our modern imagination, the neglected and misunderstood genius has become the very type of the great artist, and we have allowed our belief in him to color and distort our vision of the history of art. We have come to look upon the great artists of all times as an unhappy race struggling against the inappreciation of a stupid public, starving in garrets and waiting long for ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... leave them no ambition but that of avarice," replied Almamen; "and as the plant will crook and distort its trunk, to raise its head through every obstacle to the sun, so the mind of man twists and perverts itself, if legitimate openings are denied it, to find its natural element in the gale of power, or the sunshine of esteem. These Hebrews were ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... daie, Onne Algars sheelde the arrowe dyd assaie, 285 There throghe dyd peerse, and stycke into his groine; In grypynge torments on the feelde he laie, Tille welcome dethe came in and clos'd his eyne; Distort with peyne he laie upon the borne, Lyke sturdie elms by stormes in uncothe ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... blood. Take all the archeological facts of the last fifty years and read them up or down, across or diagonally, inside and out, and this fact rises into your mind like a Banquo that will not down. Historians may distort truth and rob the African race of its historical position, but facts are everywhere throwing open the secret closets of nations and exposing ethnic skeletons that laugh and jest at our racial vanities. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... conduct will command. Those who are most pleasing will receive the most attention, and those who desire more should aspire to acquire more by cultivating those graces and virtues which ennoble woman, but no lady should lower or distort her own true ideal, or smother and crucify her conscience, in order to please any living man. A good man will admire a good woman, and deceptions cannot long be concealed. Her show of dry goods or glitter of jewels cannot long cover ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... village of the first century. Although they are still retained in the text by some editors, this is done to give some measure of continuity to an otherwise interrupted narrative, but they can only serve to distort the author and obscure whatever view of him the reader might otherwise have reached. They are generally printed between brackets ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... all. Another officer told me that before I came the officers of the garrison assembled to consider whether or not they should recognize me. The unanimous vote was "yes." Was all this official? No. It is the white people, the disappointed tyrants of Georgia, who try to distort social courtesies in official ones. The "many white" people were some half-dozen newspaper reporters, whose articles doubtless were partly written when they came. "Old Si" in his spectacles ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... majority, when I and all that I possess will become his own. And these words I force myself to speak, your honor, both in justice to my dear lost father and his friend, Traverse Rocke, and also to myself, that hereafter no one may venture to accuse me of clandestine proceedings, or distort my actions into improprieties, or in any manner call in question the conduct of my father's daughter." And, with another gentle bow, Clara retired to the side ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... such as are accessible to the common normal perception. In this process much must be disfigured, although Buddha's doctrine of the migration of souls expresses the truth with almost perfect precision. The normal vulgarity of man and the license of general egoism further distort the image until it becomes a caricature. And I pity the poet who undertakes to restore the original image from this caricature. It seems to me that Dante, especially in the "Paradise," has not succeeded in this; and in his explanation ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... image only so Formed of the sand, and fit to shift and break. It is that distant years which did not take Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow, Have forced my swimming brain to undergo Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake Thy purity of likeness and distort Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit. As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, His guardian sea-god to commemorate, Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort And vibrant ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... recognizing the two, bids them sit down. He dictates the marriage contract, in which Grilletta is said to marry Sempronio by her own free will besides making over her whole fortune to him. This scene, in which the two false notaries distort every word of old Sempronio's, and put each his own name instead of the guardian's, is overwhelmingly comical. When the contract is written, Sempronio takes one copy, Grilletta the other and the whole fraud is discovered.—Volpino vanishes, but Mengone promises Grilletta to do his ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... kindred art without becoming romance'. And he succeeded. In reading him it is easy to see that the poetic habit of conceiving his characters to fit a preconceived scheme, his vivid imagination, his love of sharp contrasts, telling analogies and broad generalizations, occasionally distort the true relation of things. He was an artist rather than a scholar, and one must e'en accept him as such. A letter to Karoline von Beulwitz ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... ill-natured English journalist, T. W. H. Crosland, not long ago wrote a book "knocking" us, in which he says "that having inherited, borrowed or stolen a beautiful language, they (that is, we Americans) wilfully and of set purpose distort and misspell it." Crosland's ignorance of all things American, ingeniously revealed in this lively bit of writing, is interesting in a person of, presumably, ordinary intelligence, and his credulity in the matter of what he has heard about us ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... feeblest lines that they shall seem but the doggerel of a street ballad monger! I will give so bald an epitome of this sickly love-tale that it shall appeal to all who read my commentary the veriest trash that ever poet penned! ... Moreover, I can most admirably misquote thee, and distort thy meanings with such excellent bitter jesting, that thou thyself shall scarcely recognize thine own production! By Nagaya's Shrine! what a feast 'twill be for my delectation!"—and he rubbed his hands gleefully—"With ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... is, to be worthy of being well served. All nature and all humanity will serve a good master and rebel against an ignoble one. And there is no surer test of the quality of a nation than the quality of its servants, for they are their masters' shadows and distort their faults in a flattened mimicry. A wise nation will have philosophers in its servants'-hall, a knavish nation will have knaves there, and a kindly nation will have friends there. Only let it be remembered that 'kindness' ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... explanation of the religious phenomena of the world may be summed up as follows: The first and second theories we have rejected as utterly false. Instead of being faithful to and adequately explaining the facts, they pervert, and maltreat, and distort the facts of religious history. The last three each contain a precious element of truth which must not be undervalued, and which can not be omitted in an explanation which can be pronounced complete. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of | "cause/prediction"science. He was seeking | hidden, "unwritten" "laws" of nature, | more on the model of Pasteur than of | Newton. | | Any treatment that tries to interpret | Bacon's Logic Machine in the light of what | classical physics called "science" will | distort Bacon's meaning and achievement. | | Note: if a scholar's interpretation of | Bacon's Science does not square with the | detailed description of the application of | Bacon's science in "Salomon's House" in | NEW ATLANTIS, it should be viewed with | scepticism. | | Bacon's science is more applicable ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... are then mixed together. Copal resin may be substituted for the amber, but it is not so durable. Oil varnish made from amber is highly elastic. If it is used to protect tin-plate printing, when the plates after stoving have been subsequently rolled so as to distort the letters, the varnish has in no way suffered, ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... nations—to feel them, as it were, from their proper central point, and, what ennobles human nature, to recognise and duly appreciate whatever is beautiful and grand under the external accessories which were necessary to its embodying, even though occasionally they may seem to disguise and distort it. There is no monopoly of poetry for particular ages and nations; and consequently that despotism in taste, which would seek to invest with universal authority the rules which at first, perhaps, were but arbitrarily ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... I answered slowly, "they do just wring and distort them and deform them for life. But I intend to see that Nell's has no such torturous operation performed on it if I can appeal to you or ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... surmounted this difficulty, and was able to reflect upon its great truths with higher relish than I had ever before done. This, in me, did not give rise to the least tendency to moroseness or superstition, nothing being more apt than misdirected devotion to weaken and distort the mind. With the love of God and mankind, it inspired me also with a veneration for justice, and an abhorrence of wickedness, along with a desire of pardoning the wicked. Christianity, instead of militating ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... still more glad could I share your belief. But I know better, dearest witch—know that you are mistaken. This is no case of desertion—put that out of your precious mind once and for all—but of discretion. My being in attendance, far from simplifying, would embroil and distort your position. An ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... bless me: Say thou didst not drink it! Say Inis did not—While I speak, the blood Fades from thy cheek! Thine eyes close! Dying pangs Distort thy features; pangs like those which shortened His life, whose angry ghost, grim, fierce, and ghastly, Comes gliding yonder. See his livid finger Points to the poisoned cup! He frowns and threatens. Pray for me, angel! Pray for me! I ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... things and reject bad ones; full of the desire for knowledge and the excitement of discovery. The joy to him is to see things as they are and to judge them normally. He is not bored by the sight of normal, healthy muscles in a healthy, well-shaped body; he is delighted. If you distort the muscles for emotional effect, he would say with disappointment: 'But that is ugly!' or 'But a man's muscles do not go like that!' He will have noted that tears are salt and rather warm; but if you say like a modern poet that your heroine's tears are 'more hot than fire, more salt than the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... crossed to him, seated herself on his knee and put an arm about his neck. Before she had spoken another word, Tarrant understood; the smile on his face lost its spontaneity; a bitter taste seemed to distort his lips. ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... and antic, Gesture and shape distort, Like mockery of a demon dumb Out of the hell-din whence they come That dogs them ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... have something to relate when we return to Greenland, and we must all learn to tell our saga in the same words, for that is the only way in which truth can be handed down to future generations, seeing that when men are careless in learning the truth they are apt to distort it so that honest men are led into telling lies unwittingly. They say that the nations of the south have invented a process whereby with a sharp-pointed tool they fashion marks on skins to represent words, so that once put down in this way a saga never changes. Would that we ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... failed to do, owing, perhaps, to his love-making being wanting in conviction on account of her shaved head. At last Irala and his friends determined to send the Governor a prisoner to Spain, taking care, of course, to despatch a messenger beforehand to distort the facts and prejudice the King. The friends of Nunez, however, managed to secrete a box of papers, stating the true facts, on board the ship. At dead of night a band of harquebusiers dragged him from his bed (after a captivity of eleven months), as he says, 'almost with the candle in his hand' ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... adherents, while opposition were not ashamed of exhibiting a glowing exultation at their triumph. So marked was this exultation in several of his opponents, that Burke, more generous, and more noble, exhorted them to guard against those passions which distort the human mind, and severely censured them for their ill-timed and misplaced joy. He also pointed out to them the great expectations which the nation had aright to expect from them after their manifold declarations, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... when it does not offer itself naturally, degenerates into tinsel or pertness. Pertness is the mistaken affectation of grace, as pedantry produces erroneous dignity: the familiarity of the one, and the clumsiness of the other, distort or prevent grace. Nature, that furnishes samples of all qualities ', and on the scale of gradation exhibits all possible shades, affords us types that are more apposite than words. The eagle is sublime, the lion majestic, the swan graceful, the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... speak also the same language; and as these are less susceptible of a false coloring than the features of a general character, we find this poet of liberty, in the midst of one continuous effort to distort the truth, and to dress up two scenical heroes, forced by the mere necessities of history into a reluctant homage to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... prince must be the centre of attraction. Nevertheless, no graver injury can be done the play as an acting drama than by treating it as a one-part piece. The accepted method of shortening the tragedy by reducing every part, except that of Hamlet, is to distort Shakespeare's whole scheme, to dislocate or obscure the whole action. The predominance of Hamlet is exaggerated at the expense of the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the Universe, and the human mind resembles these uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... man trying to distort the proper meaning of words, and, presenting a garbled statement of the views of an opponent, I take it as conclusive evidence that he has a bad cause; more when he is constantly at it, and manifests in all that he does a feeling of uneasiness and hostility towards those ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... industry. The time is, I hope, at hand, when those who are most in earnest will feel that therefore they are most bound to be just—when they will confess the exceeding wickedness of the desire to distort or suppress a fact, or misrepresent a character—when they will ask as solemnly to be delivered from the temptation to this, as to any crime which is ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... with all his tendency to shed his privileges, still clings to this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bare of all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in which any hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, would simply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the story of the Princesse de Cleves, floating serenely in the void, without a sign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, no doubt, nothing would ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... for Strickland that was peculiar to himself. He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself. It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and were ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... That's a good deal for one short life. I've seen industry revolutionized—leaving the homes of the people, and herding into the great factories. I've seen steam revolutionize the daily habits of men, and distort their thoughts; one man can't run a steam engine; it takes more than one man to own one. So have I seen capital rise in the world until it is greater than kings, greater than courts, greater than governments—greater than God ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... a work on the "Antiquity of the Anglo-Saxon Church," wrote a "History of England from the Roman Invasion to the Reign of William III.," the first written that shows anything like scholarly accuracy, and fairly impartial, though the author's religious views as a Roman Catholic, it is alleged, distort the facts a ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... marquis," or "a privy councillor"—that he is simply naming a rank or class, not a phrase for a good man. And this perennial temptation to a shameful admiration, must, and, I think, does, constantly come in and distort and poison ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... whenever a sacrifice must be made, sacrifice the musical value and emphasize the emotion, the meaning, the poetry, the dramatic or narrative significance of the words. Phrase with this end in view; sacrifice anything except tone-production to this end. Do not distort the rhythm, but bend it sufficiently to emphasize important words and syllables, by holding them a little, at the expense of unimportant words or syllables. Finally, remember that misguided enthusiasm is ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... such as his will abide to the end, Do what you will, distort your ways you may wend, Hardships and knocks but insure him your friend Shown by the ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... thus, do you continue to dissemble or to distort the truth? The shreds are become a cable for the faithful. That they were miraculously turned into one entire garment who shall gainsay? How many hath it already clothed with righteousness? Happy men, casting their doubts away before ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... justify itself verbally. Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ's suffering for every sinner, are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth everywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate, although they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression. The same myths, in cruel hands, become goads to fanaticism. That natural sensitiveness in which charity consists has many degrees and many inequalities; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Incidental circumstances determine its phases and attachments ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... This was so grossly unjust that Elmore merely shrugged his shoulders and remained silent. When it finally appeared that he was not going to ask anything more, his wife added: "If you could listen, like any one else, and not interrupt with remarks that distort all one's ideas"—Then, as he persisted in his silence, she relented still further. "Why, of course, as you say, you will have to know it in the end. But I can tell you, to begin with, Owen, that it's nothing you can do ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... have been unjust. If I had other friends like you, who dared to tell me the truth as it is, and not distort it out of all recognition—if there were others here who dared to defy me when defiance alone will make me see things in their right light, Russia would be the better for it. Go to Zara d'Echeveria. ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... hateful before Bel. May she bring about the downfall of his country, the loss of his people, the efflux of his life like water, by the order of the Bel, the king. May Ea, the grand prince, whose destiny takes premier rank, the messenger of the gods, who knows all, who has prolonged my life, distort his understanding and intellect, curse him with forgetfulness, dam up his rivers at their source. In his land may Ashnan (the deity of wheat), the life of the people, not grow. May Shamash, great judge of heaven ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... word, Russ reached for the power controls. A sudden roar of thunderous fury and the beams leaped at the sphere ... but this time the sphere did not materialize again. Again the wrench shuddered through the laboratory, a wrench that seemed to distort space and time. ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... you!" laughed Leslie, "to distort my reasoning like that! I don't ask you to think up all the little things that have massed into one big grievance against him; I mean stop that for to-day, out here in the country where everything is so lovely, and go ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Grant. "I suppose that no lie becomes prevalent in the world for evil without some fault on the part of somebody. Even though it may not have been expressed in exact terms, some false person has intentionally spread it abroad. And then a man in his wrath, when he hears the lie will distort it, and twist it, and aggravate it,—to his own wrong and to that ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... cum Tryphonte, p. 143, 144. See Le Clerc, Hist. Eccles. p. 615. Bull and his editor Grabe (Judicium Eccles. Cathol. c. 7, and Appendix) attempt to distort either the sentiments or the words of Justin; but their violent correction of the text is rejected even by ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in its own nature, and so barren of product, that it will be impossible for even the genius of Promethean fire to warm it; or else, like existing physiology, the very point of view from which the mental eye surveys the theme, will blight the fair prospect of truth, distort induction, and clog up the paces of ratiocination. The physiologist of the present day is too little of a comparative anatomist, and far too closely enveloped in the absurd jargon of the anthropotomist, ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... because it seems to reverse the theoretical instinct itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of the thinker himself is recognized as that which is likely to distort truth rather than that which conditions it. When the wise man, the devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is acknowledged because he has renounced himself. As witness of the universal being he purges himself of whatever is peculiar to his own individuality, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... is nothing, so long as my motives in coming are known. But people talk so cruelly, and will distort the facts so gladly, and we have always held our heads so high. And now the ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... the barrel to secure the right adjustment. The barrel looks solid, but, as a matter of fact, it is hollow and much more frail than it appears. For that reason it should not be turned by seizing it with pliers, as that may distort it and spoil the bore within it. The best method is to pass a piece of wire through the hole in its centre, and to use that as a lever. When the correct adjustment has been secured, the turnbuckle must be locked to prevent it from unscrewing. ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... enlarge so much that it may extend up into the bladder and block the opening into the urethra; the side lobes may compress the urethra into a mere slit, or may lengthen it so that the prostatic portion measures three or four inches, or may twist and distort it so that the most flexible instrument can only be made to pass through ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... running through the ice and the fog. No, it is mere theory, but I have an idea that the ultraviolet light—the actinic rays beyond the violet end of the spectrum, you know—will penetrate fog to a great distance, and in spite of its higher refractive power, which would distort and magnify an object, it is better ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... few prejudiced writers have vainly endeavoured to exaggerate the racial or linguistic factor, and contended that, in the eyes of science, Belgian nationality could not exist. The duty of a scientist is not to distort the manifestations of natural phenomena in the light of some more or less popular idea. His duty is to explain facts. The development and permanence of Belgian nationality, in spite of the most adverse conditions, is one of these facts. The existence ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... was a dangerous exaltation; one that in a desert will distort the brain, and in the world where the idol dwells will put him, should he come nigh, to its own furnace-test, and get a clear brain out of a burnt heart. She was frequently at the Hall, helping to nurse Lady Patterne. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mission of the poet is "to see life steadily and see it whole," a feat which is impossible if the worship of one figure out of the multitude is allowed to distort relative values, and to throw his view ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... they? Spawned neither of God nor Satan—what could they be? Black-skinned—or was it skin?—like rubber, with round bodies, like black basket balls inflated to triple size; bodies that seemed to ripple, distort, swell and contract with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... heart is set upon peace, and that it is one of my dearest wishes to live on the best of terms with England. Have I ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature. My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you listen not to them but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult which I feel and resent. To be forever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinized with jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I have ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... in my maternal grasp.' She was terrible. At first, I had seen her as an angel of goodness. Now, although she had not changed, she was like an angel of mercilessness and vengeance. I saw a sort of hatred for those who would trouble him distort her face, resplendent with superhuman maternity. Her cruel heart was full of one heart only. It foresaw sin and shame. It hated men and settled accounts with them like a destroying angel. She was the mother with fearful nails, standing erect, and ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... the facts. When we are engaged in a sensation, or when we perceive something, a phenomenon occurs which simply consists in having consciousness of a thing. If to this we add the idea of the subject, which has consciousness, we distort the event. At the very moment when it is taking place, it is not so complicated; we complicate it by adding to it the work of reflection. It is reflection which constructs the notion of the subject, and it is this which afterwards introduces this construction into the states ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... upon which all revelations should rest. The purer the intention and motive of the seer, the more lucid will be the visions accorded. No reliable vision can be obtained by one whose nature is not inherently truthful. Any selfish desire dominanting the mind in regard to any thing or person will distort the visions and render them misleading, while a persistent self-seeking spirit will effectually shut the doors upon all visions whatsoever. Therefore, above all things it is essential for the investigator to have an unflinching love of truth, to be resigned to the will of Heaven, ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... is unadventurous, he seems to say, there is still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through pathless space. Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort human spirits into grotesque forms. The inhabitants of Winesburg tend toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse. They see visions which in some wider world might become wholesome realities ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... mistress, got into that box, I put it to you, for the deliberate purpose of making the case against her as black as she could. In reality her evidence was strongly in the prisoner's favour, as I shall point out to you. But she, too, was instructed, or was taught by her own evil nature, to so distort the facts as to make them bear an appearance against the unhappy girl who is on ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... a huntsman! see, his limbs The pangs of death distort! 'Lay there and rot: no caitiff's death Shall mar ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... perfectly original method of arriving at the truth, by intimate conversations with Mormon husbands and wives, as well as with the most intelligent of the "Gentiles." She discarded from her mind pre-conceptions and all prejudices which discolor and distort objects which should be rigidly investigated, and looked at the mass of facts before her in what Bacon calls "dry light." Cornelius Vanderbilt, the elder, was accustomed to account for the failures and ruin of the brilliant young ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... of Hampden was preeminently the English spirit—the spirit which has given distinction to the Anglo-Saxon race—and he and Shakespeare were contemporaries, and yet of this spirit not a vestige is to be found in the English historical plays and no opportunities lost to obliterate or distort its manifestations. Only in Brutus and his fellow-conspirators—of all Shakespearian characters—do we find the least consideration for liberty, and even then he makes the common, and perhaps in his time the unavoidable, mistake of overlooking the genuinely ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... trained all the little muscles in my face—muscles you others don't even know you have. Started when I was a kid, then made a good living at it, acting. Comes in handy now, damn handy. I can make anything of my face, and hold it forever if I have to. Chink, Russ—anything. Distort my limbs too, and change my voice. That won't be necessary now. Simple, but it takes a ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... all his armour in a haze of blue. He held no sword, bare was his hand and clenched, As if to hide the inextinguishable blood Murder had painted there. And his wild mouth Seemed spouting echoes of deluded thoughts. Around his head, like vipers all distort, His locks shook, heavy-laden, at each stride. If fire may burn invisible to the eye; O, if despair strive everlastingly; Then haunted here the creature of despair, Fanning and fanning flame to lick upon A soul still childish ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... is necessary to aid, by its stiffness, in preventing the very ductile iron from giving back to such an extent as to distort the steel face and thus tear or separate the parts of the plate. The ductile iron gives a very low resisting power, its duty being to hold the steel face up to its work. If now we substitute a soft steel plate in the place of the ductile iron, we will get greater resisting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... or a wag, he is little else than a buffoon, who will distort his mouth and his eyes to make people laugh. Be assured, no one person ever demeaned himself to please the rest, unless he wished to be thought the Merry-Andrew of the company, and whether this character is respectable, I ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... stammered, "Mr. Renfrew—I—I—" His throat abruptly ached and choked. He felt his face distort in a spasm of uncontrollable grief. He turned quickly from this strange old man with a remote sarcasm in his eyes and a remote affection in his tones. Peter clenched his jaws, his nostrils spread in his effort stoically to bottle ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Company, Chicago, Ill.] This is known as a solid back transmitter and is the standard commercial type used on all long distance Bell telephone lines. It articulates sharply and distinctly and there are no current variations to distort the wave form of the voice and it will not buzz or sizzle. It is shown in Fig. 84 and costs $2.00. Any other good microphone transmitter ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... Spring-water mixed, be trampled to the full; The moisture, mark you, will ooze all away, In big drops issuing through the osier-withes, But plainly will its taste the secret tell, And with a harsh twang ruefully distort The mouths of them that try it. Rich soil again We learn on this wise: tossed from hand to hand Yet cracks it never, but pitch-like, as we hold, Clings to the fingers. A land with moisture rife Breeds lustier herbage, and is more than meet ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... to Ulpius. It is a peculiarity observable in the characters of men living under the ascendancy of one ruling idea, that they intuitively distort whatever attracts their attention in the outer world, into a connection more or less intimate with the single object of their mental contemplation. Since the time when he had been exiled from the Temple, the Pagan's ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... But all appearances are strong. Yet whence proceeds this weight we lay On what detracting people say! For let mankind discharge their tongues In venom, till they burst their lungs, Their utmost malice cannot make Your head, or tooth, or finger ache; Nor spoil your shape, distort your face, Or put one feature out of place; Nor will you find your fortune sink By what they speak or what they think; Nor can ten hundred thousand lies Make you less virtuous, learn'd, or wise. The most effectual way to balk Their malice, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... brought out the truth more forcibly when they defended a good cause. They had no hostility to truth; they only doubted whether it could be reached in the realm of psychological inquiries, and sought to apply it to their own purposes, or rather to distort it in order to gain a case. They are not a class of men whom I admire, as I do the old sages they ridiculed, but they were not without their use in the development of philosophy. [Footnote: Grote has a fine chapter on the Sophists (part ii. ch. 67).] ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... We give back words of tepid greeting, without improvement. We talk to our fellows in the phrases we learn from them, which come to mean less and less as they grow worn with use. Then we exaggerate and distort, heaping epithet upon epithet in the endeavour to get a little warmth out of the smouldering pile. The quiet cynicism of our everyday demeanour is open and shameless, we callously anticipate objections founded on the well-known vacuity of our seeming ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... relating to Holland, it was impossible for a man of his temperament, convictions, and purpose to write a calm, dispassionate history. He is not the cool judge, but the earnest advocate, and yet he does not distort facts. He is just and can be coldly critical, even of his heroes, but he is always on one side, the side of liberty and justice, pleading their cause. His temperament gives warmth, eloquence, and dramatic passion to his style. Individual incidents and characters stand forth sharply defined. ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... fails at velocities far below that of fifth-order rays. At only a very small fraction of that speed the tracers I am following are so badly distorted that they disappear altogether, and I have to distort them backwards. That wouldn't be too bad, but when I get up to about one per cent of the velocity I want to use, I can't calculate a force that will operate to distort them back into recognizable wave-forms. That's another problem for Rovol ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... gives us little pictures of bird-life, which are pleasant proofs that he is, like M. Fabre, a master of the new science that will not select the facts or distort them ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... wealth, it was, perhaps, from economy of her charms that she hid the ankle in such flowing sables, that she bound the black locks straightly under a little widow's-cap, seldom parted the fine lips above the treasured pearls beneath, disdained to distort the classic features, and graved no wrinkles on the smooth, rich skin with any lavish smiling. She went about the house, a self-contained, silent, unpleasant little vial of wrath, and there was ever between her and Eloise a tacit feud, waiting, perhaps, only for occasion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... obvious in the architecture and other things, seems to be underestimated, and where nature should dominate, I have been shocked on every road that I have travelled by the huge billboards and advertisements of the most flamboyant kind, which irritate the eye and distort the vision of what otherwise would be unforgettable and inspiring. It is much the same everywhere. In Chicago the Michigan Boulevard, with the lovely lake on one side and grand buildings on the other, running at enormous width for a long distance, is one of the finest ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... Livy, who was a man of fine imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Bergson calls it, though practically useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less than the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we distort what we knew originally: furthermore just in so far as we make a selection among the facts, attending to some and passing over others, we limit the field of direct knowledge which we might otherwise have enjoyed. For these two reasons Bergson insists that it is the business of ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... be gradually drifting the wrong way, and it won't get any better 'til all people put their belief—and I mean by that—simple faith, in the Bible. What they like of it they are in the habit of quoting, but they distort it and try to make it appear to mean whatever will suit their wicked convenience. They have got to take the whole Bible and live by it, and they must remember they cannot leave out those wise old laws of the Old ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... limits of his chair to regard her in a sort of incredulous horror, she did not fall at his feet as everyone expected her to, and as she herself had thought to do. Instead, she flung up her head with a spirit that sent the long locks flying. Even when anger began to distort his face,—anger headlong and terrible as Eric's,—her glance crossed his like ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... equino-varus is comparatively rare. The plantar flexors and invertors distort the foot into the equino-varus attitude. The heel is drawn up, the anterior part of the foot is adducted and inverted at the mid-tarsal joint. The muscles are tense and rigid, and the reflexes exaggerated. The ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... town; and therefore, take myself to be as well informed as most men, in the dispositions of each people toward the other. By the people, I understand here, only the bulk of the common people; and I desire no lawyer may distort or extend ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... who trimmed their shrubbery into pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to feel dissatisfied. But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom of it. They seek the general effect. We distort a dozen sickly trees into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room, and then surely they look absurd enough. But here they take two hundred thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... spirits do lurk in shrines, in roods, in crosses, in images: and first of all pervert the priests, which are easiest to be caught with bait of a little gain. Then work they miracles. They appear to men in divers shapes; disquiet them when they are awake; trouble them in their sleeps; distort their members; take away their health; afflict them with diseases; only to bring them to some idolatry. Thus, when they have obtained their purpose that a lewd affiance is reposed where it should not, they enter (as it were) into a new league, and trouble them no more. What do the ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... permanence. Free will is a glorious but a dangerous prerogative. All experience leads towards the belief that a human will may so distort itself as to grow incapable of good. Even a character not hardened into permanent evil may grow incapable of the highest good. A soul even forgiven through the mercy of God may "enter into life halt and maimed" like a consumptive patient cured of his disease but going through ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... thou: go mad, And be ennobled far above thyself. Her brain was ill, her heart was well: she loved. It was the unbroken cord between the twain That drew her ever to the ocean marge; Though to her feverous phantasy, unfit, 'Mid the tumultuous brood of shapes distort, To see one simple form, it was the fear Of fixed destiny, unavoidable, And not the longing for the well-known face, That drew her, drew her to the urgent sea. Better to die, better to rave for love, Than to recover ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Classification of all departments of Human Knowledge, which occupies a portion of his treatise "On the Advancement of Learning." Imperfect and erroneous as his scheme may be allowed to be, D'Alembert and his coadjutors in the last century were able to do no more than to copy and distort it. In his "Novum Organum" he undertakes to supply certain deficiencies of the Aristotelian system of logic, and expounds his mode of philosophizing; he was the first to unfold the inductive method, which he ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... determine her choice of details? Which sense impressions—sight, sound, taste, smell, touch—does she most frequently and successfully suggest? Note instances where her figures of speech sharpen the imagery and others where they seem to distort it. In what ways is the influence of Keats perceptible ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing what are believed ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... looked and was desolate. On the other hand, no poet has so planted our literature with gorgeous gardens from which generations of lesser laborers will be enriched and prospered. The figures in which Tennyson uses Nature are not, moreover, strained or artificial; they do not distort or cover the inner meaning, but bloom from it, revealing its beauty and its sweetness. All bear the mark of loving thought,—now so delicate that its very faintness thrills and holds us, now strong and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... nations be judged thus? Is not a full indulgence of its natural tendencies essential to a people's greatness? Force the manners, dress, language, and constitution of Russia, or Italy, or Norway, or America, and you instantly stunt and distort the whole mind ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... to duty and decency. I have been asked: "Do you not think it cowardly when a man leaves his family unprovided for, to end his life, because he is dissatisfied with life in general?" No, I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not that enough to say of it? Must we distort words from their true meaning in order more effectually to damn the act and cover its author with a greater infamy? A word means something; despite the maunderings of the lexicographers, it does not mean whatever you want it to mean. "Cowardice" means the fear of danger, not the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... however, that love is a mystery, inexplicable, profound. With all the chains, with all the pains, and I may even say, with all the disgust with which the world has surrounded it, buried as it is under a mountain of prejudices which distort and deprave it, in spite of all the ordure through which it has been dragged, love, eternal and fatal love, is none the less a celestial law as powerful and as incomprehensible as that which suspends the sun ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... another fellow, and tried to run off with him. Of course not. Very well. Now, you see, my dear fellow, all I've got to say is this, that I'm not a novelist. I'm an historian, an autobiographer, or any thing else you choose. I've no imagination whatever. I rely on facts. I can't distort them. And, what's more, if I could do so, I wouldn't, no matter what the taste or fashion of the ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... rains, it had been cut down and sloped into those beautiful hills and dales which now so much pleased the eye; for there were none of those quartz dykes I had seen protruding through the same kink of aqueous formations in Usui and Karague; nor were there any other sorts of volcanic disturbance to distort the calm quiet ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... revelation of soul. Human feet cannot enter past the threshold of the soul's abode. The very means of self-revelation is a self-concealment. The medium, by which alone we know, darkens, if it does not distort, the object. Words obscure thought, by the very process through which alone thought is possible for us; and the fleshly wrappings of the soul hide it, at the same time ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... celestial music, these Are paranoics. And whether it be they rise Enough above the earth to look along A longer arc and see realities, Or see strange things through atmospheric strata Which build up or distort the things they see Remains the question. Let us ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... neighbor. Egotism, vanity, prejudice, pride of opinion, conceit of excellence, a mean delight in recognizing inferiority in others, a meaner delight in refusing to recognize the superiority of others, all the honest and all the base forms of self-assertion, cloud and distort the vision when one mind directs its glance at another. For one person who is mentally conscientious there are thousands who are morally honest. The result is a vast massacre of character, which would move the observer's compassion were it not that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... become obstructions. Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror. Old creeds end in being dead formulas, which no longer aid but distort and arrest the general mind; while the State-churches administering them, come to be instruments for subsidising conservatism and repressing progress. Old schemes of education, incarnated in public schools and colleges, continue filling the heads of new generations with ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Fair and just Is his award, against these brainless creatures. 'Tis not the wholesome sharp morality, Or modest anger of a satiric spirit, That hurts or wounds the body of the state; But the sinister application Of the malicious, ignorant, and base Interpreter; who will distort, and strain The general scope and purpose of an author To his particular ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... are more distinct. An inked impression in such an instance may show a pattern larger in area than a print made from the same finger when the person was alive. Also, if the skin is on the finger but is loose, inking and rolling could distort the impression so that some of the ridge formations would seem to be in a different alignment from corresponding details in a print made during life. When decomposition commences, what are really solid ridges may be broken, giving rise to the possibility that there appear to be more characteristics ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... selfish. If you do not think this, then there is only the other extreme of austere abnegation of self for any cause however trivial. Nature is the only guide and I don't believe Nature is bad. Of course the curse of freedom will allow one for a long time to distort and vilely modify natural instincts, but at least one can fly from the too palpable artificial. Dear Poodie, don't sigh. I only let off steam in words—that is safe. I am still a slave to this disgusting civilization and always your very devoted 'Perfect One', that is to be, or ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... way. As Diego Estenega had discerned, under the thick Old-World shell of inherited impressions was a plastic being of all womanly possibilities. But so little did she know of herself, so futile was her struggle in the dark with only sudden flashes to blind her and distort all she saw, that with nothing to shape that moulding kernel it would shrink and wither, and in a few years she would be but a polished shell, perfect of ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... does not so much hide as distort the truth. The enemy are seldom altogether hidden from view, the trouble is rather to tell whether one is observing a cavalry patrol or an infantry regiment, or if the object moving forward is not in reality a sandhill or a bunch of reeds. The mirage here has certainly a strange ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... speak thus! Give me no word which my folly can distort into a ray of hope, unless you wish to drive me mad. No! it is impossible; and, were it possible, what but ruin to my soul? I should live for you, and not for my work. I should become a schemer, ambitious, intriguing, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... abysses among the pearls and corals of her eternal seas," then said the priest, solemnly extending his hands. "When for some holy and sublime purpose man may need you, God will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom of the waves. Meanwhile, there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, you will not ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... to do the same in many. An invidious and inquisitorial scrutiny into the personal dispositions of public officers will creep through the whole Union, and the most selfish and sordid passions will be kindled into activity to distort the conduct and misrepresent the feelings of men whose places may become the ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... difficult to distort the story enough to reverse the roles he and the officer had played, and, when he had finished, Pierce was loud in his praise ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the amazing influence of the place, and now in the silence round the fire they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind. The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect—as it existed across the border to that other ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... marries a girl who has been earning her own living, the newspapers always distort it," he whispered aside to me a few minutes later. "Jameson, you're a newspaperman—I depend on you to get ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... sufficiently to control. The involuntary imagination intrudes upon intellectual operations only to vitiate them; its part is to fill up the gaps of memory by conjecture, to magnify and attenuate realities, and to confuse them with the products of pure invention. Most children distort everything by inexactitude of this kind, and it is only after a hard struggle that they ever attain to a scrupulous accuracy—that is, learn to master their imagination. Many men remain children, in this respect, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... procedure for separating posterior adhesions of the iris to the lens. In it the surgeon hopes to act, not on the iris, as in the operations for artificial pupil, but only on the bands of false membrane which distort the pupil. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... out laughing? Such is the fate of men of genius: every one holds that he has understood them better than his neighbor, and restores them in his own way. They are like a beautiful theme given by God which men distort into a thousand different meanings—a canvas upon which the imagination of man paints and ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... vomiting, pains in the back and limbs, and fever. There is pain in the swelling which is increased by movement of the jaws and by pressure. The degree of the swelling varies with the severity of the attack. It may be very little or it may be so great as to completely distort, and render unrecognizable, the face. It must be remembered that, though mumps is not regarded as an important or dangerous disease, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... fairest blossoms to droop and wither in her crowded rooms. To wax compassionate over a bird, and remain hard as flint to a beast, is possible only to humanity. The cat, following her predatory instincts, is at once more logical and less ruthless, because the question of property does not distort her vision. She has none of the vices ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... caprice of the individual, of character, action, or of incident and plot, assume likewise the character they had in symbolic art. The external side of things is surrendered to accident and committed to the excesses of the imagination, whose caprice now mirrors existence as it is, now chooses to distort the objects of the outer world into a bizarre and grotesque medley, for the external form no longer possesses a meaning and significance, as in classical art, on its own account and for it own sake. Feeling is now everything. It finds its artistic reflection, not in the world of external ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... nearly approaches to madness; they speak many things at an abrupt and incoherent rate, as if they were actuated by some possessing demon; they make an inarticulate noise, without any distinguishable sense or meaning; they sometimes screw and distort their faces to uncouth and antic looks; at one time beyond measure cheerful, then as immoderately sullen; now sobbing, then laughing, and soon after sighing, as if they were perfectly distracted, and out of their senses. ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... lay among my birth-day presents a beautiful engraving of Albert Durer. A harnessed knight, with an oldish countenance, is riding upon his high steed, attended by his dog, through a fearful valley, where fragments of rock and roots of trees distort themselves into loathsome forms; and poisonous weeds rankle along the ground. Evil vermin are creeping along through them. Beside him Death is riding on a wasted pony; from behind the form of a devil stretches over its clawed arm toward him. Both horse and dog look strangely, as it were infected ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... matter per se—matter minus perception. Now, matter per se, or minus perception, is a thing which no belief will countenance. Reid, however, could not admit this. Having appealed to the belief, he was compelled to distort its evidence in his own favour, and to force it, in spite of itself, to bear testimony to the fact which he wished it to establish. Thus Dr Reid's appeal not only came to naught, but being premature, it drove him, as has been said and shown, to falsify the primitive convictions of our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... deep spiritual wants, which, unless we supply them with the good food which God has made for them, will supply themselves with poison— indications of spiritual faculties, which it is as wicked to stunt or distort by mis-education as it is to maim our own limbs or stupefy our understanding. Our humanity is an awful and divine gift; our business is to educate it throughout—God alone must judge which part of it shall preponderate over the rest. But ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... they are sincerely anxious that their children should grow up high-minded and affectionate. One of the darkest shadows of my present condition is the fear that any revelation of my own weakness and emptiness may discourage and distort my children's characters; and the watchfulness which this requires increases the strain under which I suffer, because it is a hard fact that an example set for a noble and an unselfish motive is not nearly ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... desire for the largest of your planets, would indicate that. Their own world was probably even larger—they were forced to wear pressure suits even on that large world, and could jump all over, you said. On so huge a sphere as their native world seems to be, the gravity would be so intense as to distort space. Geometry, such as yours seems to be, and such as ours was, could never be developed, for you assume the existence of a straight line, and of an absolute plane surface. These things cannot exist in space, but on small worlds, far from ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... were the case with the capital at the corner of a building, the result would be that on the side of the building all the capitals would present their bolsters instead of their volutes to the spectator. The only way to prevent this was to distort the corner capital into the form shown by Fig. 64; cf. also Figs. 61 ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... spirits now supplies With cordials in her hands and eyes, Now with a soft and silent tread Unheard she moves about my bed. I see her taste each nauseous draught And so obligingly am caught, I bless the hand from whence they came, Nor dare distort my ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... terrible issues hang upon our acts, perhaps upon our words, let us control our fancies and distinguish realities from fictions. There hangs over every great struggle, and especially over every civil war, a hot and hazy atmosphere of excited feeling which is too apt to distort all objects to the view. In the French Revolution, men were suspected of being objects of suspicion, and sent to the guillotine for that offence. The same feverish and delirious fancies prevailed as to the conduct of other nations. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... anthropoid apes the surer we may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a familiar round-game testifies. The greatest of all the epochs in human history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of preceding years were substantially sterile just because the educational acquirements ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... thing. By one simple sentence he opens the door of everlasting hope. He says He will draw all men to Himself; but He does not tell us how or when. Those are matters for faith, not for revelation. We can take no smaller meaning from this glorious promise, distort it as men will, to make it fit into some ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... and a species of burbot. This last is one of the most voracious of the finny tribe, and preys upon all others that it is able to swallow. It devours whole quantities of cray-fish, until its stomach becomes crammed to such a degree as to distort the shape of its whole body. When this kind was drawn out, it was treated very rudely by the boys—because its flesh was known to be extremely unsavoury, and none of them cared to eat it. Marengo, however, had no such scruples, and he was wont to make several hearty meals each day ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... real object of that strange expedition? Chinese authors assert that it was sent in search of the "elixir of life," but do they not distort everything in the history of the First Hwang-ti? The great monarch was, in fact, a devout believer in the fables of Taoism, among which were stories of the Islands of [Page 104] the Blest, and of a fountain of immortality, such as eighteen centuries later stimulated the researches ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... seeks to create and exploit a division between the Muslim and non-Muslim world and within the Muslim world itself. The terrorists distort the idea of jihad into a call for violence and murder against those they regard as apostates or unbelievers, including all those who disagree with them. Most of the terrorist attacks since September 11 have occurred in Muslim ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... exaggerate, you distort; you forget so many things—the sentiments, the affections, the thousand details that hallow that crude foundation which you see only bare ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... never have any doubts about them, under penalty of thereby forfeiting eternal salvation; propositions, I mean, which affect the foundation of all our other knowledge and accordingly determine for ever, and, if they are false, distort for ever, the point of view from which our knowledge starts; and as, further, the corollaries of these propositions touch the entire system of our intellectual attainments at every point, the whole of human knowledge is thoroughly adulterated by them. Evidence of this is afforded by ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... passionate embraces will not seem out of place then. If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death. The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are gone away forever, and the features settle back into a marble calm, which is the man's truest image. Then the most affected look sincere, the most volatile, serious—all noble, more or less. And nature will ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... magnetic shield had been completed two days later, and set up in Buck's own laboratory. On the bench was the powerful, but small, little projector of the straight magnetic field, simply a specially designed accumulator, a super-condenser, and the peculiar apparatus Devin had designed to distort the electric field through ninety degrees to a magnetic field. Behind this was a curious, paraboloid projector made up of hundreds of tiny, carefully orientated coils. This was Buck's own contribution. They were ready ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear— and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the universal ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Zealand. I think that the people of Indeni (the native name for Santa Cruz) are also more than half Polynesians; but I don't know a single sentence of their language properly. I can say nothing about it. They destroy and distort their organs of pronunciation by excessive use of the betel-nut and pepper leaf and lime, so that no word is articulately pronounced. It is very hard to catch the sounds they make amidst the hubbub on deck or the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brother man's biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things he saw; in short, know his course and him, as few "Historians" are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-piled perversions which distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try to represent them so; in sequence, as they were; not in the lump, as they are thrown ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... by this government on May 29 of a statement regarding the nationalist aspirations for freedom of the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugoslavs, German and Austrian officials have sought to misinterpret and distort its manifest interpretation. In order, therefore, that there may be no misunderstanding concerning the meaning of this statement, the Secretary of State to-day further announces the position of the United States Government to be that all branches of the Slav race should be ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... this genial liquor all its power of stimulating the palate. Conversation would become dull and vapid, if negligence were not sometimes roused, and sluggishness quickened, by due severity of reprehension. But acids unmixed will distort the face and torture the palate; and he that has no other qualities than penetration and asperity, he whose constant employment is detection and censure, who looks only to find faults, and speaks only to punish them, will soon be dreaded, hated ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... acceptance so far as I discern. Various Newspaper reviews of it have come athwart me: all favorable, but all too shallow for sending to you. I myself consider it a truly excellent utterance; one of the best words you have ever spoken. Speak many more such. And whosoever will distort them into any "vegetable" or other crotchet,—let it be at his own peril; for the word itself is true; and will have to make itself a fact therefore; though not a distracted abortive fact, I hope! Words of that kind ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... throughout every artery of the commercial world; and San Francisco will then stand the second city of America.... The responsibility rests upon us whether this first American State of the Pacific shall in youth and ripe manhood realize the promise of infancy. We may cramp her energies and distort her form, or we may make her a rival even of the Empire State of the Atlantic. The best wishes of Americans are with us. They expect that the Herculean youth will grow to a ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... history and associations, it is unpoetical and unsuited to render the finer shades of thought and feeling. It will, therefore, degrade and distort the monuments of national literatures which may be translated ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... the end, the interior of the loop being pierced with minute holes, and by making a circular flame burn within the loop so that the non-luminous zone of the flame just touched the inside of the loop, and then by aspiration so gentle as not to distort the shape of the flame, withdrawing the gases escaping from the outer zone. On analyzing these by a delicate process, which will be described elsewhere, I arrived at the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... human sacrifice as represented by the Spanish chroniclers, also by the letters and despatches of Cortez, we do not credit, though undoubtedly they had some foundation in truth. It is the characteristic of all these records to persistently distort facts so as to further the purposes of the writers, and as to correctness where figures are concerned, they are scarcely ever to be relied upon. Though forced to admit this want of veracity, Prescott has relied almost entirely upon these sources for the material of his popular ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... of this possibility entered 'Lige Curtis's alcoholized consciousness, part of whose morbid phantasy it was to distort or exaggerate all natural phenomena. He had a vague idea that he could not go back to Harkutt's; already his visit seemed to have happened long, long ago, and could not be repeated. He would walk on, enwrapped in this uncompromising ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... has lost all relationship with his natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason, instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... that through thine arm The sons of earth had conquer'd, now vouchsafe To place us down beneath, where numbing cold Locks up Cocytus. Force not that we crave Or Tityus' help or Typhon's. Here is one Can give what in this realm ye covet. Stoop Therefore, nor scornfully distort thy lip. He in the upper world can yet bestow Renown on thee, for he doth live, and looks For life yet longer, if before the time Grace call him not unto herself." Thus spake The teacher. He in haste forth stretch'd his hands, And caught my guide. Alcides ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri |
