"Distortion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in purpose, it was trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all closely into its history, at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a wide difference between folk-lore of the so-called Old World and that of America. Transmitted orally through countless generations, the folk-stories of our ancestors show many evidences of distortion and of change in material particulars; but the Indian seems to have been too fond of nature and too proud of tradition to have forgotten or changed the teachings of his forefathers. Childlike in simplicity, beginning with creation itself, and reaching to the whys and wherefores of nature's ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... Narayan Chandavarkar and others dissuading the people from joining the non co-operation movement. I had expected to find some solid argument against non-co-operation, but to my great regret I have found in it nothing but distortion (no doubt unconscious) of the great religions and history. The manifesto says that 'non-co-operation is deprecated by the religious tenets and traditions of our motherland, nay, of all the religions that have saved and elevated the ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... power, for the conserving of energy, for the insuring of endurance and ease of operation. This is the end in the training of the voice. It is to avoid friction. It is to prevent nervous strain, muscular distortion, and failing power, and to secure easy response to the will of the speaker. The point not wholly understood or heeded is that, as a rule, the unpleasing voice is an indication of ill adjustment and friction. It denotes a mechanism wearing on itself—it ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... familiar with him—now made his way among the guests, and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man was dead! Dead, in his new house! ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sometimes he is especially attracted to some one division and rarely travels beyond its influences. His recollection of what he has seen may vary according to the degree of his development through all the stages from perfect clearness to utter distortion or blank oblivion. He will appear always in the astral body, since by the hypothesis he does not know how to ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... ran about till she had taken hold of one of the others, whose business it then became to take her station in the centre, so that almost every woman in her turn occupied this post, and in her own peculiar way, either by distortion of countenance or other gestures, performed her part in the game. This continued three-quarters of an hour, and, from the precaution of placing a look-out, who was withdrawn when it was over, as well as from some very expressive signs which need ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... elsewhere I could have learnt; it was the cynical manner in which he conveyed his information. He had a way of telling me of monstrous things as if they were purely normal and natural to a properly focussed eye, and as if any monstrousness they might present to me were due to some distortion imparted to them solely by the imperfection of my ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... wreathed a garland of ivy round his head, and, seated on the ground, is labouring to draw on his hose, hindered by his limbs being wet. Hearing the sound of the drums and the cries of the soldiers he struggles violently to get on one of his stockings; the action of the muscles and distortion of the mouth evince the zeal of his efforts. Drummers and others hasten to the camp with their clothes in their arms, all in the most singular attitudes; some standing, others kneeling or stooping; some falling, others springing ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... finding his bars are made of iron, ceases to bite them. The Crown-Prince there, in his horror, indignation and despair, had a lucid human judgment in him, too; loyal to facts, and well knowing their inexorable nature, Just sentiments are in this young man, not capable of permanent distortion into spasm by any form of injustice laid on them. It is not long till he begins to discern, athwart this terrible, quasi-infernal element, that so the facts are; and that nothing but destruction, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... allowance for native exaggeration and laughed at his own former fears. If the men-of-war should come to Oa, were they likely to bombard an undefended village full of women and children, or burn, pillage, and destroy as mercilessly as he had been told? Bah! a pack of Kanaka lies, the gradual distortion of the truth as it passed along the line, until one burned house became a hundred and one village the whole coast of Atua! He went back to his neglected plantation, now overgrown with weeds, and set to work again with a determination not to borrow trouble. But, in spite of himself, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... the reading of the narrative had left its mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation labored more and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was emphatically a terrible one. After a moment more of hesitation, Mr. Neal made ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... been made with the purpose to attain to holiness, or a higher realization of religious ideals. The ideals are necessarily arbitrary and are very sure to be extravagant. They do not have good effect on character, and they produce moral distortion. They are, however, an outflow of honest ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... away. And when her Uncle Tom was in the house again, grave and very quiet, so that he seemed almost to affect gravity, to pretend grief, she watched his still, handsome face, imagining it again in its distortion. But she saw the nose was rather thick, rather Russian, under its transparent skin, she remembered the teeth under the carefully cut moustache were small and sharp and spaced. She could see him, in all ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... masses of Neocomian, modified by their pressure. More complex forms of harder rock were wrought by the streams and rains into fantastic outlines; and the transverse gorges were cut deep where they had been first traced by fault or distortion. The analysis of this aqueous action would alone require a series of discourses; but the sum of the facts was that the best and most interesting portions of the mountains were just those which were finally left, the centers and joints, as it were, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the shuddering figure beneath him suddenly dropped—the ghastly uncovered face looked up at him, with such a panic stare in the eyes, such a fearful quivering and distortion of all the features, that it tried even his firmness of nerve to look at it steadily. In spite of himself; he went back to his chair, and sat down doggedly by the table, ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... an inexhaustible surprise and delight. The utter lack of congeniality, the barrier of caste that divided them, was indescribably sad. Rapturous admiration, gentle amazement, blind idolatry, meek bewilderment, the one twisted by brutality to a living distortion, the other lifted by refinement to the embodiment of womanly grace; and yet they were father and daughter. To do her justice, she strove in every way to testify her love and gratitude for her strange ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... of the country is generally limestone, sometimes slate which presents every variety of distortion, the strata being often vertical and wavy, no dykes were observed. The older rocks are generally completely covered by sand and shingle, or stones; but as we approach the boundaries of the valleys, they protrude into ridges, often of considerable size and height. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... since elsewhere they call attention to what appears to be a caricature of the human face, as well as to the disproportionate size of the heads of many of the animal carvings. Not only are the heads of many of the carvings of disproportionate size, which, in instances has the effect of actual distortion, but in not a few of the sculptures nature, instead of being copied, has been trifled with and birds and animals show peculiarities unknown to science and which go far to prove that the Mound-Builders, however else endowed, possessed lively imaginations ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... placing a lamp behind them. At the same time he moves the arms with wires in order to produce the effect of action. The wayang dolls are singularly grotesque. There is an interesting tradition which ascribes this distortion to a deliberate purpose. According to this account, after the Mohammedan conquest and the subsequent conversion of the Javanese to Islamism, it became necessary to reconcile the continued enjoyment of the national ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... that the allusions of Indian authors to Ceylon, an island of such magnitude, and so close to their own country, are pre-eminent for absurdity and ignorance. Their "Lanka" and its inhabitants are but the distortion of a reality into a myth. ALBYROUNI, the Arabian geographer, writing in the eleventh century, says that the Hindus at that day thought the island haunted; their ships sailing past it, kept at a distance from its shores; and even within the present century, it was the popular belief on ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... swept over his house, and blasted all his worldly prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man who had the entire sanction and support of the Head of the Christian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... of the familiar devices of rhetoricians, who lure their hearers to keener interest by such judicious pauses in the course of their exposition. The listening ruffians were as attentive as babes at a day-school, and AEsop, with a hideous distortion of his features, which he intended for a pleased smile, went ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... him sixpence-worth of anything. He cannot even get a glass for his watch, for the watch-maker no more than anybody else dare serve him. Every feature of his extraordinary situation depicted in my first letter on "Disturbed Ireland" is exaggerated almost to distortion. ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... N. obliquity, inclination, slope, slant, crookedness &c adj.; slopeness^; leaning &c v.; bevel, tilt; bias, list, twist, swag, cant, lurch; distortion &c 243; bend &c (curve) 245; tower of Pisa. acclivity, rise, ascent, gradient, khudd^, rising ground, hill, bank, declivity, downhill, dip, fall, devexity^; gentle slope, rapid slope, easy ascent, easy descent; shelving beach; talus; monagne Russe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... can tell you what they did. They empathize—that is, see through our eyes, feel with our fingertips—so that they perceive what we do. Second, they can control those perceptions; hang on a distortion circuit, as Ives would put it, between the sense organ and the brain. For example, you'll find all our fingerprints all around the port control, where, one after the other, we punched the wall and thought we were punching ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... of 1919, the Prince declared that the civil war then in progress in Russia was "accompanied by a spiritual conflict no less determined and portentous," and pointed out that the doctrine of Bolshevism was a deliberate distortion of Marxism, immediate revolution having been substituted by the Bolshevists for the evolution preached by Marx. He went on to say that one of the most striking characteristics of Bolshevism was its pronounced hatred of religion, and especially of Christianity, the ideal of a life beyond death ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... appearance was, to say the least of it, extremely odd; he was low in stature; and this defect was enhanced by a distortion of the spine, so considerable as almost to amount to a hunch; his features, too, had all that sharpness and sickliness of hue which generally accompany deformity; he wore his hair, which was black as soot, in heavy neglected ringlets ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... standard cast-iron lining, cast-steel rings of the same dimensions were provided for use in a short stretch of the tunnel, when passing from a rock to a soft ground foundation, where it was anticipated that unequal settlement and consequent distortion and increase in stress might occur, but, aside from the small regular drop of the lining as it passed out of the tail of the shield, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... from these actual facts to the general laws which explain them, falls into four stages, and at each stage, according to Bergson, as we go further and further from the original fact directly known, the two vices of the intellectual method, limitation and distortion of the actual fact, become more ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... in feature (the next to it was a grinning monkey), but it was not the features that were the most striking part. There was a half-open mouth, not in any way distorted out of its exquisite beauty by the intense expression of suffering it conveyed. Any distortion of the face by mental agony implies that a struggle with circumstance is going on. But in this face, if such struggle had been, it was over now. Circumstance had conquered; and there was no hope from mortal endeavour, or help from mortal creature ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... in it and in the bottom there is an adapter, or frame, with a set screw in it so that you can fit in one of your headphones and this is all there is to it. The construction is rigid enough to prevent overtones, or distortion of speech or music. It is shown ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... charts for every parallel of latitude in which they can be used. It is well to remember, however, that since a mile or minute of latitude has a different value in every latitude, there is an appearance of distortion in every Mercator chart which covers any large extent of surface. For instance, an island near the pole, will be represented as being much larger than one of the same size near the equator, due to the different scale used to preserve the ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... and with boldness of hope as great as its frankness teaches the weakest to aspire, and the most sinful to expect perfect likeness to a perfect Lord, It is a plane mirror, giving back all images without distortion. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Wahlstatt, erected in memory of that heroic day,[3] was still standing. Blucher was rewarded with the title of Prince von der Wahlstatt, but his soldiers surnamed him Marshal Vorwarts. On the decline of the floods, the banks of the rivers were strewn with corpses sticking in horrid distortion out of the mud. A part of the French fled for a couple of days in terrible disorder along the right bank and were then taken prisoner together with their general, Puthod.[4] The French lost one hundred and three guns, eighteen thousand prisoners, and a still greater number in killed; ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... her mind are far inferior to those of a child of four years. The eight-year-old Margaret speaks only the word Mama; no other articulate sound has been learned by her. She makes known her need of food by plaints, by sounds of weeping, and by distortion of countenance; she laughs when presented with something to eat or with toys. It is only within the last two years that she has become cleanly; since then her appetite has improved. Her nutrition has gained, in comparison with the first years of life, and with it ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... the slight distortion left by her stroke. She merely looked paler, with darker shadows in the folds and recesses of her obesity; and, in the fluted mob-cap tied by a starched bow between her first two chins, and the muslin kerchief crossed over her billowing purple dressing-gown, she seemed like ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... contradict the root-ideas of spiritual despotism, for they teach us to think of our fellow-Christians, as if—for purposes of the conscience—He who is their Master and ours was, for them, another Master than ours.[14] Yet the ideas of spiritual despotism are only the distortion or parody of ideas which are as true and sacred as the Gospel can make them; the ideas of self-abnegation for the good of others, and of resolute denial of the miserable spirit which prefers self to others and talks about rights when we should be intent on duties. The Christian man, and ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... which is towards the end of the summer, the mouth of the cell opens and the insects fly off to inflict a similar injury upon the nascent buds of the year. In some instances the leaves of only a portion of the circumference of a shoot are affected, in which case, though a slight distortion may take place, the branch is not prevented from elongating; but in others, where the whole of the leaves around the shoot are converted into nidi, elongation is prevented and distortion to a ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... refuses to have it, unless the condition of strangeness be first fulfilled. Its desire is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by a profound alchemy, by a difficult initiation, by the charm which wrings it even out of terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of the grotesque, may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression, about its [248] ultimate grace. Its eager, excited spirit will have strength, the grotesque, first of all—the trees shrieking as you tear off the leaves; for Jean Valjean, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... He saw that she was crying at last. Tears stained her cheeks. Her lips were strange to him in the distortion of a grief that seeks to control itself. He slackened his pace and let her walk ahead. He followed with a sort of awe that there should have been grief for Silas Blackburn after all. He blamed himself because his own eyes ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left marks ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Mandeville's indebtedness to Pierre Bayle. There is not the space here to elaborate, but it could be shown, I believe, that Mandeville was also indebted greatly, both indirectly through Bayle and directly, to the Jansenist, Pierre Nicole, and that Mandeville's rigorism was a gross distortion of, while Bayle's was essentially faithful to, Nicole's system.[16] Nicole insisted that "true virtue" in the rigorist sense was necessary for salvation, but at the same time expounded the usefulness for ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... College chimney-pieces with the photographic portraits of all the owner's College friends, had just then come into fashion, Mr. Verdant Green's beaming countenance and spectacles were daguerreotyped in every variety of Ethiopian distortion; and, being enclosed in miniature frames, were distributed as souvenirs among ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Their steps were noiseless. The odor of the cedars and the temple-like stillness brought to Peter's mind the night of his mother's death. It seemed to him a long time since he had come running through the glade after a doctor, and yet, by a queer distortion of his sense of time, his mother's death and burial bulked in his past as ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... defended and excused himself by return of post. He implored her to pay no attention to the calumnious distortion of a friendship which had already served Aileen's interests no less than his own. It was largely to Miss Le Breton's influence that he owed the appointment which was to advance him so materially in his career. At the same time he thought it would be wise if Lady Blanche kept not only ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to focus on what was wrong he could find nothing that looked any different, yet the total effect was completely wrong. He decided that it must be the mirror, some subtle distortion of the reflection. The old one must have been broken in cleaning and a new one ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... immediately averted my head, I should certainly become insane. Of course I was myself a party to this strange fascination of terror, and must, no doubt, have exercised some power of volition in the assumption of the expression that my face gradually presented, and which was in no sense a distortion or grimace, but a terrible look suggestive of despair and desperate wickedness, the memory of which even now affects me painfully. But though in some measure voluntary, I do not think I was conscious at the time that the process was so; and I have never been able to determine the precise nature ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... scene or scenery; an optical device which gave a distortion to the picture unless seen from a particular point; a relief, modelled to produce ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... posterior margin of the M2 of KU no. 11210 is convex posterior to the metacone. The anterior edge of the base of the zygomatic arch of KU no. 11210 was dorsal to M2. The shallow oval depression in the maxillary dorsal to M1 might be the result of post-mortem distortion. ...
— Records of the Fossil Mammal Sinclairella, Family Apatemyidae, From the Chadronian and Orellan • William A. Clemens
... scene would it not have been wicked to have delivered ourselves over to any cranky, miserly economy or to any distortion or affectation of thrift? Had fortune smiled, her gifts would have been sanely appreciated, for our ideas of comfort and the niceties of life are not cramped, neither are they to be gauged by the narrow gape of our purse. Our ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... contributing reciprocally to the entertainment of the company. Merriment, extorted by sallies of imagination, sprightliness of remark, or quickness of reply, is too often what the Latins call, the Sardinian laughter, a distortion of the face without gladness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... professor was really a very wise man, in spite of his occasional blindness; and he refrained from showing Sophie the exaggeration and distortion which marked the view she took of her conduct. He saw it would involve lowering the high integrity of her ideal conceptions respecting delicacy and honor—hardly worth while, merely for the sake of explaining the distinction between a trifling piece of self-deception ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... saw a large lump of coal hit him square on the head, and a rush of blood follow it that made me hustle him off to surgery. Scalp wounds are not so dangerous as they are bloody to heads as thick as ours. His explanation that he had fallen down was too obvious a distortion of truth to deceive even our kindly old doctor. But he asked no further question, seeing that it was a point of honour. The matter, however, forced an estrangement between myself and some of my fellows that I realized afterwards was excellent for me. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... tragedy, "William Ratcliff." The different psychological phases of the tragedy are presented by characteristic motives which war among themselves. The Scottish locale is indicated vividly, and the despair of the lovers presented in one place by the distortion and rending of all the principal motives. A dirge with bells and a final musing upon, and resignation before, implacable Fate give a dignified close to a work in which passion is ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the broadly intelligent of its citizens hardy, makes the others hard—and between the hardy and hard, between sense and cynicism, yawns a gulf like that between Absalom and Dives. Susan, a New Yorker now, had got the habit—in thought, at least—of seeing things with somewhat less distortion from the actual. She no longer exaggerated the importance of the Rod-Susan episode. She saw that in New York, where life is crowded with events, everything in one's life, except death, becomes incident, becomes episode, where in regions offering ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... hours in the centre, close to her hot and almost naked breast, might take their turn in the cooler space just under her wings. By this means each egg got its fair share of heat, properly distributed, and the little life taking shape within escaped the distortion which might have been caused by lying too long in one position. Whenever the wary brown mother left the nest, she covered the eggs with down, now, which kept the warmth in better than leaves could. And whenever she came back ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... abundantly. Ridicule would be added to the scandal of the story. He imagined the adorned tale making its way through the garrison of the town, through the whole army on the frontier, with every possible distortion of motive and sentiment and circumstance, spreading a doubt upon the sanity of his conduct and the distinction of his taste even to the very ears of his honourable family. It was all very well for that fellow Feraud, who had no connections, no family to speak of, and no quality ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... is true to a certain degree with regard to the passions. If you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty in its most perfect state, you cannot express the passions, which produce (all of them) distortion and deformity, more or less, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... without mathematical language. You might say that we are looking through a hole in space. The new force in the meteorite, amplified by the X-rays and the magnetic field, is causing a distortion of space-time coordinates. You know that a gravitational field bends light; the light of a star is deflected in passing the sun. The field of this meteorite bends light through space-time, through the four-dimensional continuum. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... and indeed were obsolete before they were dead, is a warning to authors who intend similar extravagances. Strangeness and exoticism are not lasting wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost" they had become nothing more than matter for laughter, and it is only through their reflection and distortion in Shakespeare's pages ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... nightmare on thee, nor until Thy soul hath caught the morning's early gleam Seek thou to analyze the monstrous dream By painful introversion; rather fill Thine eye with forms thou knowest to be truth: But see thou cherish higher hope than this; A hope hereafter that thou shalt be fit Calm-eyed to face distortion, and to sit Transparent among other forms of youth Who own no impulse save ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... of distant psychic influence is at the bottom of all the wonderful tales, stories and legends of supernatural powers, witchcraft, sorcery, etc., with which the pages of history are filled. There is of course always to be found much distortion and exaggeration in these legends and tales, but they have truth at the bottom of them. In this connection, let me call your attention to a very important psychic principle involved. I have told you that by denying the power of any person over you, you practically ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... writings in the language is there more spilt treasure—a more lavish loss of beautiful, original, and striking things than in the poems of Donne. Every second line, indeed, is either bad, or unintelligible, or twisted into unnatural distortion, but even the worst passages discover a great, though trammelled and tasteless mind; and we question if Dr Johnson himself, who has, in his 'Life of Cowley,' criticised the school of poets to which ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... almost a contemporary of Washington and of the Revolutionary fathers. The immensity of the history which has been crowded into those forty-five years has distorted our mental vision, as ordinary objects are sometimes distorted by refraction. Yet when we reflect, the distortion disappears. But the wonder still remains. The years during which the deeds of Lincoln have been a memory to us do not carry us back to the early days of our own country. They do not carry us back even to the time of Jackson, Webster, Clay, or Calhoun; ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... when otherwise manifesting themselves in celestial splendour. The third is the Nirmana-kaya, or the body of transformation, that is to say the human form worn by Sakyamuni or any other Buddha and regarded as a transformation of his true nature and almost a distortion, because it is so partial and inadequate an expression of it. Later theology regards Amitabha, Amitayus and Sakyamuni as a series corresponding to the three bodies. Amitabha does not really express the whole Dharma-kaya, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... merrily. I can yet recall the individual shapes of certain hawthorn trees we passed, whose extreme age had found expression in a wild grotesqueness which would have been ridiculous but for a dim, painful resemblance to the distortion of old age ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... gloomy, barbaric cults capable of checking primitive humanity in its progress, forcing it to its knees with emotion as if at a meeting with divinity. In the calm of this frenzied, but motionless distortion, in the solitude of these fields peopled by startling and eternal specters, birds were singing, wild flowers crept to the foot of the worm-eaten trunks, and ants came and went, an infinite rosary, burrowing in the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... his attacks that his attention was fixed on the windowpane on which he spat because there was a flower there. During an attack he was heard to say something about the struggle of men against being raped by ions and flowers. In these primitive elaborations we find an effort at distortion, a getting away from the absolutely crude and that the added elements which cause this distortion are in the form of ideas which imply a certain degree of philosophizing. The truly constructive delusions appear when he has ceased to dramatize these theories with ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Rome: abundat dulcibus vitiis. Dryden and Pope are the standards of excellence in this species of writing in our language; and when young minds are rightly instituted in their works, they may, without much danger, read such glittering verses as Dr. Darwin's. They will then perceive the distortion of the sentiment, and the harlotry of the ornaments." To the short-lived popularity of Dr. Darwin, the admirable poem of "The Loves of the Triangles'" the joint production of Mr. Canning and Mr. Frere, in no small ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the stage micrometer, and to observe the number of stage micrometer divisions occupying the space in the eyepiece micrometer formerly occupied by the thread. It is essential that both thread and stage micrometer should occupy the same position in the field, for errors due to unequal distortion may otherwise become of importance. For this reason it is best to utilise the centre of the ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... him, in other circumstances, from attempting to make a friend of this boy. The countenance of the latter immediately impressed a beholder disagreeably, but it required some examination to discover that the cause was a very slight distortion of the mouth, and the irregular, broken line and near approach of the eyebrows. Analogous, perhaps, to these trifling deformities was an almost imperceptible twist of every joint, and the uneven prominence of the breast; forming a body, regular in its general outline, ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... 1500 feet from X high quality steel frame buildings were not completely collapsed, but the entire buildings suffered mass distortion and all panels and roofs were ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... ever granted, I would rest My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast, Pressing the brain, which too much thought expands, 25 Back to its proper size again, and smoothing Distortion down till every nerve had soothing, And all lay ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... not jump to the conclusion that we are teaching that there is a male and female God, or Creator. That idea is merely a distortion of the ancient teachings on the subject. The true teaching is that THE ALL, in itself, is above Gender, as it is above every other Law, including those of Time and Space. It is the Law, from which the Laws proceed, and it is not subject to them. But when THE ALL manifests on the plane of generation ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... attention to the instructions which are to be found at the end of this book. Twenty years have now rolled away since I first began to examine the specimens of zoology in our museums. As the system of preparation is founded in error, nothing but deformity, distortion and disproportion will be the result of the best intentions and utmost exertions of the workman. Canova's education, taste and genius enabled him to present to the world statues so correct and beautiful that they are worthy of universal admiration. Had a common stonecutter tried his hand ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... operation of the headright system resulted in the distortion, if not destruction, of its original concepts. The system continued to bring immigrants into the colony which had been a very important purpose when inaugurated. But the abuses threw out of balance the relation ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... life are constantly going through the process of absorption and reconstruction. They are easily modified in their growth. Thus the continued pressure of some morbid deposit, as a tumor or cancer, or an enlargement of an artery, may cause the absorption or distortion of bones as readily as of one of the softer tissues. The distortion resulting from tight lacing is a familiar illustration of the facility with which the bones may be modified ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... excited, and generally overwrought. My head felt empty. What were the appearances of unhappiness? I was still naive enough to associate them with tears, lamentations, extraordinary attitudes of the body and some sort of facial distortion, all very dreadful to behold. I didn't know what I should see; but in what I did see there was nothing startling, at any rate from that nursery point of view which apparently I had ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... of confusion or uncertainty as to the exact whereabouts of things on the atomic level, which cannot be rendered more exact due to disturbance caused by the investigation of its whereabouts. My humble attempt is to secure a sufficiently statistical sample of aligned protons to obtain data on the distortion of the electron orbits caused by an external electrostatic field, thus rendering my own uncertainties more susceptible of analysis in a ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... was printed at public expense and sent out to all Government offices to serve as a guide for Russian officials and enable them to fight the "Inner enemy." It was in vain that Brafman's ignorance of rabbinic lore and his entire distortion of the role played by the Kahal in days gone-by was exposed by Jewish writers in articles and monographs; it was in vain that the Jewish members of the commission appointed by the governor-general of Vilna protested against the barbarous proposals ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... his protracted convalescence, holding him in my hand one whole Sunday afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and being rewarded at last by seeing animation and activity come back to his poor sickly little body. He will never be a robust chicken. He seems to have a permanent distortion of the spine, and his crop is one-sided; and if there is any such thing as blind staggers, he has them. Besides, he has a strong and increasing tendency not to grow. This, however, I reckon a beauty rather than a blemish. It is the one fatal defect in chickens ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass: the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that (owing to the distortion introduced by the prism) the maximum ordinate representing the heat in the prismatic spectrum is, as observed by Tyndall, below the red, while upon the normal scale this maximum ordinate is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... they tend to adhere, thus obliterating the joint, cavity, and resulting in fibrous or bony ankylosis. The changes progress slowly and, before they result in ankylosis, various sub-luxations and dislocations may occur with distortion and deformity which, in the case of the fingers, is extremely disabling and unsightly ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... laurels for their crown of glory. The Russian arms were marching steadfastly toward their goal, assured of final victory against an enemy who, blinded by the hope of an easy victory, was making desperate efforts, having recourse to all kinds of subterfuges, even the distortion ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... set forth with candor and precision, they have no cause for complaint if it is assumed that their aims are practically identical with those of the British anti-Jewish propagandists whose arguments they repeat in detail, including every grotesque stupidity and every clumsy distortion ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... and returned, weary and out of breath. He had been a very fine man in life, of beauty too, as was to be seen in the shape of his features and the particular elegance of his chin, despite the distortion of his last unspeakable dismay; and with his clothes I guessed his weight came hard upon two hundred pounds, no mean burden to haul ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... speaks very strongly against Paley's distortion of Justin Martyr's testimony, complaining: "The works of Justin Martyr do not fall in the way of one in a hundred thousand of our countrymen. How is it, then, to be deprecated that erroneous statements should ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favour. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it. He ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... vision. Fueled by a radical ideology and a false belief that the United States is the cause of most problems affecting Muslims today, our enemies seek to expel Western power and influence from the Muslim world and establish regimes that rule according to a violent and intolerant distortion of Islam. As illustrated by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, such regimes would deny all political and religious freedoms and serve as sanctuaries for extremists to launch additional attacks against not only the United States, its allies and partners, but the Muslim world itself. Some among ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... philosophic of readers, who hates philosophy 'as toad or asp,' must yet be aware, that, where new growths are not germinating, it is no sort of praise to be free from the throes of growth. Where expansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor is it any blame that the rich fermentation of grapes should disturb the transparency of their golden fluids. Fox had nothing new to tell us, nor did he hold a position amongst men that required or would even have allowed him to tell anything new. He was helmsman to a party; what he had to ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... referred to the God of repressions and denials, and now must speak a little more freely of this travesty on "the Father," as expressed to us in Jesus Christ. Of all the obstacles to the rooting out of fear the lingering belief in such a distortion of Divine Love is to my mind ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... having egregiously invented the chocolates "for the sole purpose of throwing her testimony into ridicule.... What do you, Sir, think of such methods as that?" And he concluded by declaring that I wallowed in a "truly Balkan slough of distortion and calumny." Well, on referring to Mrs. Re-Bartlett's article I find that there is no mention of chocolates, and I apologize; presumably the children were crowding round their adored Capitano in order to thank him for the bridges and waterworks ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... certainly the hot light falling through the rice-paper had a wonderfully beautiful effect on her creamy skin and soft yellow silk clothing. She walked easily, only with rather short steps. As she was of the lower class, there had been no question of the "golden lilies" or distortion of the feet for her, and they were small and prettily shaped, bare, save for a sort of sandal, or as the Indians call them, "guaraches," bound under ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... brilliance of enormous suns concentrated into mathematical points, dimensionless. Sirius blazed in blue-white splendor, dominating the lesser members of his constellation, a minute but intensely brilliant diamond upon a field of black velvet—his refulgence unmarred by any trace of scintillation or distortion. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... Father in heaven is perfect.' The Stoic maxim, 'Nothing in excess,' is inadequate in reference to moral excellence, and Aristotle's doctrine of the 'Mean' can hardly be applied without considerable distortion of facts. The only virtue which with truth can be described as a form of moderation is Temperance. It has been objected that by his doctrine of the 'Mean' Aristotle 'obliterates the awful and absolute difference between ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... it act on the atoms themselves, or on molecules, or sometimes on one and sometimes on the other? In soft iron, for instance, are the internal arrangements of the chemical atom forcibly distorted, and do they elastically return to their original relations when released? and in steel is the distortion permanent? In all the diagrams the heart-shaped body, exaggerated to show the depression caused by the inflow and the point caused by the outflow, is a ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... this knowledge, man may know many things, but nothing truly; for all such knowledge stays with outward shows. It is love alone that puts man in the right relation to his fellows and to the world, and removes the distortion which fills life ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the same time that it vindicates the glory of the divine mercy, it rectifies the frightful distortion of the divine justice, which is exhibited in the scheme of Calvinism. According to this scheme, all those who are not elected to eternal life are set apart as the objects on which the Almighty intends to manifest the glory of his justice. But how is this glory, or his justice, manifested? ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... his arms and strove to raise herself. The bloodless lips, the choked voice, meant dread of him, but the distortion of her features was hatred and the ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... credit as was his due. It is certain that he was considered a youth of extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native critic (in the Quarterly Review) ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the heart of a reformer, and especially towards women; he sees what they need, and what causes are injuring them. From the histories of Fleur de Marie and La Louve, from the lovely and independent character of Rigolette, from the distortion given to Matilda's mind, by the present views of marriage, and from the truly noble and immortal character of the "hump-backed Sempstress" in the "Wandering Jew," may be gathered much that shall elucidate doubt ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... ownership of elevators, the tariff, control of public service corporations and so forth. The farmer was getting information which he had never been able to obtain before and he was getting it without distortion, uncolored by convenient imagination, ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... ocean tides, by studies of the tides in the Earth's surface strata made by Hecker, Paschwitz and others, and by Michelson's recent extremely accurate comparison of land and water tides. Michelson's results establish further that the Earth is highly elastic: though distortion is resisted, there is yielding, but the original form is recovered quickly, almost as quickly as a perfectly ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... all those who died, died of starvation would, on the other hand, be a distortion. Food deficiencies did not always lead directly to death but in many cases to dietary disease. These dietary diseases often terminated in death, but their courses might well not have been fatal if proper medical attention could have been given. In other cases ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... Indian War. The banished Missourians have, however, as yet found no Longfellow to sentimentalize over them or to idealize, in a story of Evangeline, their misfortunes and their character. History has been spared the consequent and inevitable distortion.] ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Newtonian reflector, in average condition, the percentage seldom exceeds fifty per cent, and more frequently is lower than higher." The superiority of the refractor in regard to definition arises from the fact that any distortion at the surface of a mirror affects the direction of a ray of light three times as much as the same distortion would do at the surface of a lens. And this applies equally both to permanent errors of curvature and to temporary distortions produced ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... for lamps, and such a look of newness about everything! I was taken along to Mrs. Gurrage's "budwar," as she called it. That was a room to remember! It had a "suite" in it like the one at the cottage, only with Louis XV. legs and Louis XVI. backs, and a general expression of distortion, and all of the newest gilt-and-crimson satin brocade. And under a glass case in the corner was the top of a wedding-cake and a bunch of ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... fraud, that we are all embarked upon an absurd wild-goose chase and that we are likely to reap nothing but disappointment and danger in South America, and corresponding ridicule in England. Such are the views which, with much passionate distortion of his thin features and wagging of his thin, goat-like beard, he poured into our ears all the way from Southampton to Manaos. Since landing from the boat he has obtained some consolation from the beauty and variety of the insect and bird life around him, for he is absolutely ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ancient Persia." Unfortunately the so-called genuine monuments of ancient Persia were nothing more than recent Persian compilations or refacimenti. But notwithstanding this defect, which could hardly be avoided then, and a distortion of critical acumen, the book of Thomas Hyde was the first complete and true picture of modern Parsiism, and it made inquiry into its history the order of the day. A warm appeal made by him to the zeal of travellers, to seek ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... answer. Her head was thrown back. Her open eyes were fixed intently on his face. Suddenly she smiled. It was a smile that chilled his blood with its hideous distortion. And yet behind it lurked the possibility of a ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... singularity, for there does not seem to be anything of use or value in the unusual characteristics which distinguish them; thus, the bow-bill duck, as shown in the engraving, called by some writers the hook-bill, is remarkable for the peculiarly strange distortion of its beak, and the tuft on the top of its head. The penguin duck, again, waddles in an upright position, like the penguin, on account of the unnatural situation of its legs. These odd peculiarities add nothing of value to the various breeds, and may be set down as only the result of accidental ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... saying of the high priest differs from other words of our Lord's antagonists, which we have been considering in recent pages, in that it is no distortion of our Lord's characteristics or meaning. It correctly understands, but it fatally rejects, His claims; and does not hesitate to take the further step, on the ground of these, of branding Him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... L. GEORGE in Caliban (METHUEN), you can begin by mentioning all the well-known figures in the journalistic world by way of easy camouflage, so as to evade the law of libel, call your hero-villain Bulmer, attach to him all the legends about actual newspaper kings, add some malicious distortion to make them more exciting and impossible, and thoroughly let yourself go. Good taste alone will decide which is the cleaner sport, and good taste does not happen to be the fashion in certain literary circles at the moment. Of course Mr. GEORGE, being a novelist of some skill, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... by strong mental agony, the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness,—yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to them in this face. Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. This is high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare the honors of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth with the serious business of his plays, as refuse to ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... (1) torture, tortoise, retort, contort, distortion, extortionate, torch, (apple) tart, truss, nasturtium; (2) tort, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... family government, growing out of wrong principles, too great reliance upon future conversion, and the neglect of that moral training which is essential to the best development of religious character, and, indeed, without which religious character is often a melancholy distortion, or sadly defective, may be followed by their natural consequences; and we cannot complain,—for God works no miracle, nor turns aside any great law, in favor of our misconduct; yet it remains true that all who love and serve him, and command their children ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... till it formed a sharp but irregular point; part of the muscles of the chin were contracted, and it was drawn in with unnatural seams and puckers. He was tall, gaunt, and thin, seldom smiled, and when he did, the smile produced a still further distortion. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism. The monstrous distortion of the patriotic sentiment, which is increasing, is killing off humanity. Mankind is committing suicide, and our age ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... impressions had so much the more importance in the life of Chopin that they manifested themselves distinctly in his last works. They little by little attained a kind of sickly irascibility, reaching the point of feverish tremulousness. This latter reveals itself in some of his last writings by a distortion of his thought which one is sometimes rather pained than surprised to meet. Suffocating almost under the oppression of his repressed transports of passion, making no longer use of the art except to rehearse to himself his own tragedy, he began, after having sung his ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... drawn out the weapon so sharply that there was scarce a drop of blood on it; then there came from the throat a jet of blood which Mrs. Drabdump, conscious only of the horrid gash, saw but vaguely. I covered up the face quickly with a handkerchief to hide any convulsive distortion. But as the medical evidence (in this detail accurate) testified, death was instantaneous. I pocketed the razor and the empty sulfonal phial. With a woman like Mrs. Drabdump to watch me, I could do anything I pleased. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the clerical body fostered also the degeneration of popular religious conceptions. The actual teaching of the clergy was a grotesque distortion of the doctrines they professed to expound. The intelligible doctrine of absolution following on repentance and confession, and accompanied by penance, had been transformed into that of absolution purchasable ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... it lies here?—methinks that I should know him, But for the fierce distortion of ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... him steadfastly refuse the comparative comfort of our meagre infirmary, and it is his wish to die, where he has spent so many nights in penitential prayer. For several days, the paralysis of years has been gradually loosening its fetters, and this morning, the distressing and ghastly distortion of one side of his face almost disappeared. Though his voice is well nigh gone, it returns fitfully, and his strength seems supernatural. Fearing that you might not arrive in time, I have written down his last confession, and here commit it ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... from her knees, the painful smile had vanished from Henry's lips; his face was calm and peaceful; the distortion had ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... at the end of this, Since you blame so much the power for distortion and for ill residing in our great towns, in our system of primary education and in our papers and in our books, what remedy can you propose? Why, none, either immediate or mechanical. The best and the greatest remedy is a true philosophy, which ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... eyes. I raised the light above my head to get a better view of the painting. As I did this, it seemed to me that the countenance of the figure changed, or rather that a Thing came between me and it. It was a momentary distortion, as though a gust of wind had passed across the portrait and disturbed the outline of the features; the how and the why I know not, but the face changed; nor shall I ever forget the sudden horror of the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... fame should ne'er be over nice, Some slight distortion pays the market price. If haply lam'd by some propitious chance, Instruct in attitude, or teach to dance; Be still extravagant in deed, or word; If new, enough, no matter ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... repression once fixed, together with the distortion of the dream in relation to repressed psychical matter, we are in a position to give a general exposition of the principal results which the analysis of dreams supplies. We learnt that the most intelligible and meaningful ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... goes the original Torah may have been either oral or written, and the scribes have falsified it, by amplification or distortion,(293) either when reducing it for the first time to writing or when copying and editing it from an already written form. This leaves open these further questions. If written was the Torah the very Book of the Torah discovered in the Temple ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... is no wonder that she should have shuddered at the tremendous thought. And yet, in the distortion of her reasoning, the sin would be upon Beatrice who did the act, and not upon herself who commanded it. There was no diminution of her own faith in the sacredness of the place and the holiness of the consecrated object—had she been one whit less sure of that, her vengeance would ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... no cry escaped him. He stooped once more and closely looked at the body, but without touching it. There was no sign of violence, no blood, no disfigurement, no distortion, only a look of sleep—a pale, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stating a false syllogism. Your opponent makes a proposition, and by false inference and distortion of his ideas you force from it other propositions which it does not contain and he does not in the least mean; nay, which are absurd or dangerous. It then looks as if his proposition gave rise to others which are inconsistent either ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the antique, they studied it; they obtained through the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is modern; ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... season of thoughtless, reckless merriment was done, and I mourned for it. There came over me a sorrow for her, but I made no attempt to express what she certainly would not have understood. To feel for others what they do not feel for themselves is a distortion of sympathy which often afflicts me. Her discomfort was purely childish, a sudden fear of the dark night, the dark world, the ways of fortune so dark and unknowable. No self-questioning and no sting ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in! I did not cry; nor I did not pray but could have done both. No such spell shall get itself fixed on me for some while to come! A beggarly Distortion; that will please no mortal, not even myself; of which I know not whether the fire were not after all the due place! And yet I ought not to say so: there is a great blessing in a man's doing what he ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... attack, by blowing their muscle horns. The adverse forces approached; but instead of the battle began a comic dance, in which the two armies emulated each other in grimaces, furious gesticulations, and a distortion of the eyes, which left only the whites visible, while the women shrieked a war-song, which, if their opponents had been lovers of harmony, would assuredly have put them to flight. The leaders on each side took no share in these violent exertions, ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... to observe about Criticism is, that with just the same temptation to personal partiality and even injustice in extremity, it offers a much wider latitude to the distortion of things, facts, grounds, and inferences. In fact, with the very same motives to a personal bias swerving from the equatorial truth, it makes a much wider opening for giving effect to those motives. Insincerity in short, and ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey |
