"Focussing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that they may be used either as a hand machine or on a tripod for view work. They can also be adapted either to films or plates and be operated with the ground glass for focussing, or if desired, the focussing scale and view ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... abominable regions, about here." He laid a finger upon his stomach, and Glass felt a darting pain at precisely the same spot. It was as agonizing as if Willie's spectacles were huge burning-glasses focussing the rays of a tropic sun upon his bare flesh. He folded protecting hands over the threatened region and backed toward the prayer-rug, mumbling "Allah! Allah!" No matter whither he shifted, the eyes bored ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... in his hammock; he had found time to tell her that, for the first time, he had held temptation literally in his hand and been able to conquer it. And she felt that Castle Lashcairn was not big enough to hold all the kindliness and happiness that seemed to be focussing upon it from all the round horizon. Faith in the logical inevitability of good had changed to certainty: it seemed to her, now, that faith was only an old coward afraid to face fact. She was looking at the world from her mountaintop that night; it seemed ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... retained a perennial fountain of enjoyment and inspiration. A particular kind of rock, therefore, has helped to make them sluggish and incurious. The insularity of their citadel has worked in the same direction, by focussing their interests upon the purely human. That inland sea, again: were it not an ideal breeding-place for shell-fish, the Tarentines would long ago have learnt to vary their diet. Thirty centuries of mussel-eating cannot but impair the physical ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning to apprehend our existence as two queer and inexplicable parties disturbing the fine order of its field of vision, the eye that will presently be focussing itself upon us with a growing astonishment and interrogation. "Who in the name of Galton and Bertillon," one fancies ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... with pain, feeling on his right temple a contused tumescence: with attention, focussing his gaze on a large dull passive and a slender bright active: with solicitation, bending and downturning the upturned rugfringe: with amusement, remembering Dr Malachi Mulligan's scheme of colour ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... is the way you aim. I do believe he relied altogether on that spot about the middle of the focussing screen. I've been trying it against the window, and where that spot comes the pistol's pointing every time. It's a fixed focus, about ten to fifteen feet, I fancy, and the spot isn't quite in the middle of the screen, but just enough to the left ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... falling front gives a power of modifying the field of view in a vertical direction. The swing back preserves the verticality of architectural subjects. In some cases, when used with the pivots vertical, it is a help in focussing the subject. The possible extension of the distance between the lens stop and the ground glass to twice the focal length (which is as a rule the distance between the same points, when a distant object is in focus) enables a small subject to ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... stir as his wife came in. His eyes only moved, resting upon her for a moment, focussing her with difficulty, as if withdrawn from something at a great distance, and then they turned once more to ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... always aware of this constant and silent surge, whether he makes the effort to understand it or not. He is like a man glancing across the open pages of a tableful of books. He can see that the type, words, paragraphs, thoughts are there, even without focusing his attention to ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... his face. Her dress is of rich white satin, and, with the delicate green and gold sheen of her rival's robe—she with whom the Prodigal's right hand toys in caress—makes up a wonderfully brilliant prismatic chord, having the effect of focusing the richer, but not less gorgeous, pigments spread everywhere on the canvas. The faces of the women are very beautiful, and are made voluptuous by a subtle art which, through all their beauty, tells a story of unrestrained ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... focusing the binoculars on it, and after a little as we drew fairly near Tommy, with ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... begins by gratifying her desire for fellowship, her thirst for knowledge; by training her in business and parliamentary methods; and gradually develops in her the power of expressing her own ideas, of concentrating her faculties and focusing them upon the object to be attained, the purpose to be accomplished. At the same time she finds that a more subtle process has been going on in her own mind. An insensible alchemy has been widening her horizon, getting rid of prejudice, obliterating old, ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... Focusing attention on its application to man, one sees that the race must represent an immense network of lines of descent, running back through a vast number of different forms of gradually diminishing specialization, until it comes to a point ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... consciousness is moving too slowly. We do not gather up all our mental forces and mass them on the subject before us in a way that means victory. Our thoughts may be sufficiently focused, but they fail to "set fire." It is like focusing the sun's rays while an eclipse is on. They lack energy. They will not kindle the paper after they have passed through the lens. This kind of attention means mental dawdling. It means inefficiency. For the individual it means defeat in life's battles; for the nation ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... sink in the spirit... lie germinal... housed in the soul as a seed in the earth... to break forth at spring with the crocuses into young smiles on the mouth. Or glancing off buoyantly, radiate notes in one key with the sparkle of rain-drops on the petal of a cactus flower focusing the just-out sun. ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... whole formed a kind of pyramidal altar. On the top of this pyramid he placed some fumigating candles, the burning of which was to represent the 'upward yearning of the soul for its God'. In order to give nature herself an active part in the ritual, he contrived to kindle the candles by focusing upon them through a magnifying-glass the light of the rising sun. Before this symbol of the unity of the soul with the divine in nature the boy then ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... running out with the telescope, pulling shiny brass lengths to their limit before focusing it. ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... midst of this titanic battle a huge disc appeared, carried by the gaseous clouds. It was a concave lens, like some powerful optical instrument. But instead of focusing beams of light, it reflected, not only light but all forms of energy. As the spheres attacked they were shattered into spores and ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... serums and specifics, the judgment of Dr. Karl F. Meyer, of the Hooper Institute of Medical Research of the University of California, may be accepted as focusing the consensus of unbiased opinion on the subject. It was as follows: "Serums have not yet been introduced which produce immunity from Spanish Influenza. The serums now employed are of no use whatsoever. You have no idea how really and truly helpless we are. As an example, ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... different distinct functions of the human mind. The active function performs the volitional, voluntary thinking. It is the conscious focusing of the mind on some mental problem. Banishing from the mind all thoughts and ideas not in harmony with your special subject of study implies Active Mentation. This function is used by the active, wide-awake man in his busy and energetic moments. It is the key to the development of Will-Power ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... Self's case and Robert Goddard's," Voss said, his voice bitter. "Although his story has a better ending. Christofilos invented the strong-focusing principle that made possible the multi-billion-volt particle accelerators currently so widely used in nuclear physics experimentation. However, he was nothing but a Greek elevator electrical system engineer and the supposed experts turned him down on the grounds that his math was faulty. ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Blake. For two desolate hours, it is true, he wandered about the streets of the city, struggling to medicine his depression of the mind by sheer weariness of the body. Then the habit of a lifetime of activity reasserted itself. He felt the need of focusing his resentment on something tangible and material. And as a comparative clarity of vision returned to him there also came back those tendencies of the instinctive fighter, the innate protest against injustice, the revolt against ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... daylight, too, but it was north light, and the winter days were dull. Also the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. The outlines of that vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day—a picture ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... is to plant the camera perfectly upright, and place in front of it, at exactly fifteen feet from the center of the lens, a two foot rule, also perfectly upright and with its center the same height from the floor as the lens, and then, after focusing accurately with as large a diaphragm as will give sharpness, to note the size of the image and refer it to the diagram. The focus of the lens employed will be marked under the line corresponding to the size of the image of the rule on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... pleasant-faced square little trudges with shiny black hair and round myopic eyes. This near-sightedness when they approached the unclassified, resulted in their simultaneously making up the most horrible faces, the mere effort of focusing. Mary Nellen—for family affection, recognising their complete twin-ship, always blended them—were aware of this disfiguring habit, but relegated the curing of it to the day of their future prosperity. They couldn't afford glasses ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... certainly focusing around Fordham spur, there was no doubt of it. That point of the road was a decided point of interest to Ralph every time the Overland Express neared the spur on succeeding trips. He could only conjecture that Zeph and the Canaries and others ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... the undulating woodland. Mavis turned her eyes toward the point where North Ride Cottage shyly concealed itself, and then she glanced back at Dale. He was staring straight in front, not looking to left or right, as if focusing the ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... impute it even to inanimate objects. We hear the ticking of the clock as tick-tock, tick-tock, or else tick-tock, tick-tock, although psychologists assure us that the clock's wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates the impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm in the wheels of the train, and in the purring of the motor-engine, knowing all the while that it is we who impose or make-up ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... uneasily out over the tumbling ocean, focusing his gaze on a section of the horizon that for want of something more definite than mere hope lay in a direct line with the City ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... works hard all day uses his brain a large part of the night, doing his work over and over again, he gets up in the morning weary, jaded. Instead of having a clear, vigorous brain capable of powerfully focusing his mind, he approaches his work with all his standards down, and with about as much chance of winning as a race horse who has been driven all night before a contest would have. Not even a man with the will of a Napoleon could win ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... surveying instruments, and satchel of the almost microscopic notes which he kept fully and precisely every night by the camp-fire (even when I had to crouch over him and the precious paper with my water-proof focusing cloth) somehow bestowed about him. Up and down pathless cliffs, through tangled canons, fording icy streams and ankle-deep sands, we travailed; no blankets, overcoats, or other shelter; and the only commissary a few cakes of sweet chocolate, and a ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... beneath the surface of Tav, where the light-motes shone ghostly in the gloom, they came into a place of ceaseless activity, where there were tables crowded with instruments, coils of glass and metal tubing, and other equipment and supplies. These were the focusing point for ceaseless streams of the Folk. On a platform at the far end, Garin saw the tall son of the Ancient Ones working on a framework of metal ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... played the greatest game of all, when all his energies were fiercely centered upon preservation for himself and certain destruction for other men. Perhaps because he had come back clean, having never wasted himself in complaisant liaisons overseas, the inevitable focusing of passion stirred him more profoundly. He was neither a varietist nor a male prude. He was aware of sex. He knew desire. But the flame Betty Gower had kindled in him made him look at women out of different eyes. Desire had been revealed to him ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... turn, and as they went around the curve in the wall the sound smote on their ears with increased violence. Tom raced forward, focusing his electric lamp down on the stone corridor. The next ...
— Tom Swift in the City of Gold, or, Marvelous Adventures Underground • Victor Appleton |
