"Complexity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... complexity are extremely rare in Norway, where human nature, as everything else, is of the large-lettered, easily legible type; and even Tharald Ormgrass, who, in spite of his good opinion of himself, was not an acute observer, had a lively sense ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... magnitude of the suffering. But it may also challenge a comparison with similar events under another relation, viz., as to its dramatic capabilities. Few cases, perhaps, in romance or history, can sustain a close collation with this as to the complexity of its separate interests. The great outline of the enterprise, taken in connection with the operative motives, hidden or avowed, and the religious sanctions under which it was pursued, give to the case ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... morality, like politics, is a matter in which, owing to the complexity of circumstances and motives, one can not establish any principles (p. 563), and in this he agrees with Bacon and Aristotle—there are no positive religious and moral laws which may create principles for correct moral conduct suitable ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... denoting the presence of unmeasured animal spirits, and perhaps, too, the surprising health and vitality of the engine of his life. They were keen eyes, alert, fiery with a zealot's fire: evidently the eyes of a steadfast, headstrong, purposeful man. Some complexity of lines about them, hard to trace, indicated a recklessness, too; a willingness to risk all that he had ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... party at once a civil litigant against me in a point of right and a culprit before me, while I sit as criminal judge on acts of his whose moral quality is to be decided upon the merits of that very litigation. Men are every now and then put, by the complexity of human affairs, into strange situations; but justice is the same, let the judge be ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... experimental. Several thousand years, during which civilizations have appeared, disappeared and reappeared, have been too brief to establish and stabilize a hard and fast social pattern. As the complexity of civilizations has increased, variations and deviations have grown in number and intensity. With the advent of western civilization a culture pattern is being put together which differs ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... and what are the leading features which determine its form and general characteristics. Such a chart a "theory of war" alone can provide. It is for this reason that in the study of war we must get our theory clear before we can venture in search of practical conclusions. So great is the complexity of war that without such a guide we are sure to go astray amidst the bewildering multiplicity of tracks and obstacles that meet us at every step. If for continental strategy its value has been proved abundantly, then for maritime strategy, where the conditions are far more complex, the ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... the citizen of a state whose activities were thus habitually symbolised in the cult of its patron deity. Religion to him, clearly, could hardly be a thing apart, dwelling in the internal region of the soul and leaving outside, untouched by the light of the ideal, the whole business and complexity of the material side of life; to him it was the vividly present and active soul of his corporate existence, representing in the symbolic forms of ritual the actual facts of his experience. What he re-enacted periodically, in ordered ceremony, was but the drama of his daily life; so that, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... my last publications on the subject), were the mathematical prodigies performed by Krall's horses, and the first "philosophic" manifestations of Rolf. I accordingly thought that I should be able to interpret the new (and, in its complexity, rather modest) canine "knowledge" by the animal's memory of words which it had heard. But since then the educators have taken pleasure in raising the whole level of these wonders. Rolf's "philosophy" was developed; and in the end they went so far as to make him compose poetry, as ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... for similar reasons, may also prescribe the action to be taken, in considerable detail. Examples occur during operations of unusual complexity, or when the personnel factors call for special care in coordination ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... which puzzle us at first in Milton, and which distinguish him from other poets in our remembrance afterwards. We have a superficial complexity in illustration and imagery and metaphor; and in contrast with it we observe a latent simplicity of idea, an almost rude strength of conception. The underlying thoughts are few, though the flowers on the surface are so many. We have likewise the perpetual ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easily detect the fact of such treasons. Almost in the first germinal impulse the inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes the essential simplicity or complexity of the motive. There will be a prophetic subdivision into a variety of motives and a multiplication of characters and incidents and situations; or the original motive will be divined indivisible, and there will ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military zone had been declared, ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... nothing more familiar to a novel-reader of to-day than the difficulty of discovering what the novel in his hand is about. What was the novelist's intention, in a phrase? If it cannot be put into a phrase it is no subject for a novel; and the size or the complexity of a subject is in no way limited by that assertion. It may be the simplest anecdote or the most elaborate concatenation of events, it may be a solitary figure or the widest network of relationships; it is anyhow expressible in ten words that reveal its unity. The form ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... conceive its beginning any more than we can conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all the characters of all ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... we commit to memory the letters of the alphabet, but with the difference that whereas the alphabet consists of but twenty-six simple letters, Chinese caligraphy contains almost a hundred thousand characters of extreme complexity. ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... projectors to split a single and presumed faculty into a variety of subdivisions. To the acute and patient observer, it will appear that the operations of Nature are contrived with admirable simplicity; but man, in his endeavours to explain them, has generally resorted to a mysterious and discouraging complexity. Thus, as might be expected, the same faculty, according to different authorities, has dissimilar energies,—one is detected to encroach on the boundary of another, and when the mechanism of mind, fabricated ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... we cannot experimentally measure the magnetic action at a point within the molecule, this hypothesis cannot be disproved in the same way that we can disprove the hypothesis of sensible currents within the magnet. In spite of its apparent complexity, Ampere's theory greatly extends our mathematical vision into the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... said Baker, recovering with a smile now. "But it's hardly an accurate or applicable one. The human mind is not a piece of precious metal found in a mountain of ore. Rather, it's an intricate device capable of producing computations of unbelievable complexity. And we know how such devices that are superior in function are produced, and we know what their characteristics are. We also know that such a device does not 'play out'. If it is superior in function, it can remain ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... and source of all real inquiries after truth, holiness, and heaven. It leads to personal examination of God's Word, which leads us from the complexity of human inventions to the simplicity of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... nerve of Change, Then of Earth you have the clue; Then her two-sexed meanings melt Through you, wed the thought and felt. Sameness locks no scurfy pond Here for Custom, crazy-fond: Change is on the wing to bud Rose in brain from rose in blood. Wisdom throbbing shall you see Central in complexity; From her pasture 'mid the beasts Rise to her ethereal feasts, Not, though lightnings track your wit Starward, scorning them you quit: For be sure the bravest wing Preens it in our common spring, Thence along the vault to soar, You with others, gathering more, Glad of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of Fox Trail, like the Single Rim game, is distinctively a snow game, but may be used anywhere that a large diagram may be marked on the ground or floor. This game differs from the Single Rim in the size and complexity of the diagram, there being two rims to the wheel instead of one. It also differs in the fact that there is one more player than the number of dens for the foxes, and in the methods by which the foxes may run ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... Herophilus to Haller, from Galen to Helmholtz. England, Germany, Italy, France yielded up their tribute to my excited curiosity. And the theme, shifted, refracted from intellect to intellect, multiplied itself to bewildering complexity. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... only to emphasize the one office of the one column, they are strictly subordinate to the main form, are in fact merely a kind of decorative treatment of it in accordance with its function. In the Gothic pier the object is to express complexity of function, and the pier, instead of being a single fluted column, is broken up into a variety of connected columnar forms, each expressive of its own function in the design. It may be observed also that the Gothic building, like the Greek, falls into certain main divisions ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... only general principles, however, and the details of phrasing in instrumental music cannot be treated adequately in writing because of their too great complexity. It is only through practice, reinforced by the intelligent criticism of a real musician, that skill and taste in the art of phrasing can be acquired. A few concrete suggestions are offered, and these may be of ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... of two individual groups by Charles Harley, of New York, of decidedly archaeological character "The Triumph of the Field" and "Abundance." They are most serious pieces of work, possibly too serious, and they are in great danger of remaining caviar to the masses on account of the complexity of their symbolism and the intellectual character of their motives. Their setting is most attractive, amongst ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... 1 (elementary education) comprised on the part of the United States the exhibit of public education as organized in 34 States and Territories, in 6 cities (presented as separate units), and in 15 foreign countries. In number, extent, and complexity these exhibits surpassed all previous collections of the kind; the separate entries ran up into the thousands, representing for the most part such important collections as the exhibits of cities, counties, and groups of rural schools, all ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... particular but constantly changing arrangements of the same identical particles, stable groups of which are the atoms of the elements, has been firmly established. One result of the establishment of the electronic conception of atomic structure would be an increase of our wonder at the complexity of nature's ways, and an increase of our wonder that it should be possible to substitute a simple, almost rigid, mechanical machinery for the ever-changing flow of experience, and, by the use of that mental mechanism, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its gradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One is that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined agnostics who are utter strangers to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... men dream at that time of the wealth of other discoveries that was soon to increase enormously the complexity of their problems; or of the inferences that would be drawn from them with an ingenuity and an assurance that would task to the utmost the ability and the patience of the defenders of the ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... white roses in a blue pot, the pale sunshine lying on the polished floor of wood, the small breeze coming in almost affectionately between snowy curtains. Purity—everything seemed to whisper of that, to imply that; simplicity ruling, complexity ruled out. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... would certainly greatly alter (as indeed I have observed in parts of South America) the vegetation; this, again, would largely affect the insects; and this, as we have just seen in Staffordshire, the insectivorous birds, and so onward in ever-increasing circles of complexity. We began this series by insectivorous birds, and we had ended with them. Not that in Nature the relations can ever be as simple as this. Battle within battle must ever be recurring with varying success; and yet in the long-run the forces ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... the slaves in all things else as personal chattels led to such legal and popular confusion that the Virginia assembly often observed that they were "real estate in some respects, personal in others, and both in others." Regardless of such legal complexity it was not until 1793 that it was enacted that "all negro and mulatto slaves in all courts of judicature shall be held and adjudged to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... Alaskan Eskimo is a rhythmic pantomime—the story in gesture and song of the lives of the various Arctic animals on which they subsist and from whom they believe their ancient clans are sprung. The dances vary in complexity from the ordinary social dance, in which all share promiscuously and in which individual action is subordinated to rhythm, to the pantomime totem dances performed by especially trained actors who hold their positions ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... he thought, could have kept them straight. They were absurdly simple. But out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile, elementary innocence, Jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion, of intricate complexity. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... The complexity of our life appears in the number of our material needs. It is a fact universally conceded, that our needs have grown with our resources. This is not an evil in itself; for the birth of certain needs is often a mark of progress. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... and subtler ones residing in such superior organisms as it may be brought into relation with, as those of man when he is fashioning it into an instrument of his will. It absorbs something of his intelligence and purpose—more of them in proportion to the complexity of the resulting machine ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn something of the mystery and complexity of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... complexity of his thought, his decision did not take an instant. There was no waiting to offer the sporting opportunity to Harold. Virginia was not aware of a lapse in time between the instant that Bill caught sight of the bear and that in which his gun came leaping to his shoulder. He ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... the government of a planet like Marduk would have to be something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the Sword-Worlds. Maybe this Goldberg-ocracy of theirs had been forced upon them by the sheer complexity of the population ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... So, in the infinite complexity of events, do not let us worry ourselves by forecasting, but let us trust, and be sure that the Hand which is pushing us is pushing us in the right direction, and that He will bring us, by a right, though a roundabout way, to the City of Habitation. It seems to me that we poor, blind creatures ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Frazer's Golden Bough are now in possession of facts which it would take a very long time to explain. They see that side by side with agricultural economics is agricultural religion, of great rudeness and barbarity, of considerable complexity, and bearing the stamp of immense antiquity. The same villagers who were the observers of those rules of economics which are thought to be due to Roman origin were also observers of ritual and usages which are known to be ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... are made to modify each other; for, the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid succession of sentences; and, because some limitation is necessary to the length and complexity of sentences, in order to make this interdependency felt, hence it is that the Germans have no eloquence. The construction of German prose tends to such immoderate length of sentences, that no effect of intermodification can ever be apparent. Each ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... devotion to her husband, the marriage vow sat but lightly on her in the early days of their separation. Her husband appears to have been for a short time more constant, but, convinced of her fickleness, to have become as unfaithful as she. And yet the complexity of emotions—ambition, self-interest, and physical attraction—which seems to have been present in both, although in widely different degree, sustained something like genuine ardor in him, and an affection ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... assumed by certain of the strata, we at least know that it must have been in similarly humble forms that life, if it existed at all, did then exist. We can scarcely, therefore, expect that the vegetable world had made any great advance in complexity of organism at this time, otherwise the supplies of graphite or plumbago which are found in the formation, would be attributed to dense forest growths, acted upon, after death, in a similar manner to that which ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... basket tray shown in Fig. 287 has a somewhat more decided claim upon esthetic attention than the preceding, as the curves exhibited mark a step of progress in complexity and grace. How much of this is due to intention and how much to technical perfection must remain in doubt. In work so perfect we are wont, however unwarrantably, to recognize the ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... harmonise with these constantly repeated assertions that Christ has done all for us, and that we have nothing to do, and can do nothing? To answer this question, we have to remember that that scriptural expression, 'salvation,' is used with considerable width and complexity of signification. It sometimes means the whole of the process, from the beginning to the end, by which we are delivered from sin in all its aspects, and are set safe and stable at the right hand of God. It sometimes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... which the threads still remained untangled. In this respect there was change. The old Mary Louise had been as open as a wild rose, as freshly and sweetly receptive to whatever wind came along. She had gathered complexity, was more serious, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... that labor with axe and saw wrung from his body, and for the directing power of his brain, he would be rewarded with money which would enable him to satisfy his needs. For the first time in his life Hollister perceived both the complexity and the simplicity of that vast machine into which modern industry has grown. In distant towns other men made machinery, textiles, boots, furniture. On inland plains where no trees grew, men sowed and reaped ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... familiarizing the mind with forms which will assist us in conceiving or expressing the complex or contrary aspects of life and nature. The danger is that they may be too much for us, and obscure our appreciation of facts. As the complexity of mechanics cannot be understood without mathematics, so neither can the many-sidedness of the mental and moral world be truly apprehended without the assistance of new forms of thought. One of these forms is the unity of opposites. Abstractions ...
— Sophist • Plato
... any one can paint anything in the minute manner with a little practice, but it takes an exceedingly able man to paint so much as an egg broadly and simply. Bearing in mind the shortness of life and the complexity of affairs, it stands to reason that we owe most to him who packs our trunks for us, so to speak, most intelligently, neither omitting what we are likely to want, nor including what we can dispense with, and who, at the same time, arranges things so that they will travel most safely and be ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... rites, dramas, and symbols used in their teaching. They taught faith in the unity and spirituality of God, the sovereign authority of the moral law, heroic purity of soul, austere discipline of character, and the hope of a life beyond the tomb. Thus in ages of darkness, of complexity, of conflicting peoples, tongues, and faiths, these great orders toiled in behalf of friendship, bringing men together under a banner of faith, and training them for a nobler moral life. Tender and tolerant of all faiths, they formed ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... and eyes see little. Considering its complexity, the fineness and delicacy of its mechanism, the results attainable by the human eye seem far from adequate to the expenditure put upon it. We have flattered ourselves by inventing proverbs of comparison in matter of blindness,—"blind ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... what is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the converted idolater is dead against complexity in worship, and for simplicity. He does not want something as like his own old religion as possible, but as different as possible from it; and so we have good building material ready to hand, and a foundation ready laid. "But let ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... and attaches itself to a shell or wooden pier by means of suckers, and remains for the rest of its life fixed. Instead of going on and developing into a fishlike creature, it loses its notochord, its special sense organs, and other organs; it loses its complexity and high organization, and becomes a "mere rooted bag with a double neck," a ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... moving toward local autonomy under United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and is dependent on the international community for financial and technical assistance. The euro and the Yugoslav dinar are official currencies, and UNMIK collects taxes and manages the budget. The complexity of Serbia and Montenegro political relationships, slow progress in privatization, and stagnation in the European economy are holding back the economy. Arrangements with the IMF, especially requirements for fiscal discipline, are an important element in ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and Brunel; and great poets, like Wordsworth and Byron. And as regards literature, an able critic remarks: "We have recovered in this century the Elizabethan magic and passion, a more than Elizabethan sense of the beauty and complexity of nature, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... such a pass, that in two years all nerves would sink before it. But for this periodic reaction, the modern business which draws so cruelly on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in all but those of coarse organization. Dinner it is,—meaning by dinner the whole complexity of attendant circumstances,—which saves the modern brain-working men from ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... he began its elaboration. Pattern after pattern of graceful foliation emerged till the design assumed the intricate complexity of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... hard work, uphill work; hard task, Herculean task, Augean task[obs3]; task of Sisyphus, Sisyphean labor, tough job, teaser, rasper[obs3], dead lift. dilemma, embarrassment; deadlock; perplexity &c. (uncertainty) 475; intricacy; entanglement, complexity &c. 59; cross fire; awkwardness, delicacy, ticklish card to play, knot, Gordian knot, dignus vindice nodus[Lat], net, meshes, maze; coil &c. (convolution) 248; crooked path; involvement. nice point, delicate point, subtle point, knotty point; vexed question, vexata quaestio[Lat], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... among physical phenomena, that is, as fixed relations among variable forces. Human society has in it another element than mechanical causation or physical necessity, namely, the psychic factor, and this so increases the complexity of social phenomena that it is doubtful if we can formulate any such hard and fixed laws of social phenomena as of physical phenomena. This is not saying, however, that social phenomena cannot be understood and that there are not principles which are at work with relative uniformity ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... not tell how deeply he was moved, how every desire had awakened into fierce, cruel longing as the subtle scheme of sensuous dreaming had unfolded itself before his eyes. He began to wonder whether there were really any complexity or any mystery at all about her, whether she were not very simple ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... with unhesitating decision, for a minute's hesitation may lose the battle and ruin his force. In short, the general plays a vast game which makes the complications of chess seem simple. The editor, in his peaceful way, has to perform daily a mental feat almost equal in complexity to that of the warrior. Public opinion usually has strong general tendencies; but there are hundreds of cross-currents, and the editor must allow for all. Suppose that a public agitation is begun, and that a great ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... them as stone columns of like character are erected. Metal forms of various patterns are made by firms manufacturing concrete block molds and can be purchased from stock or made to order. Where the column is to be molded in place form construction becomes a matter of pattern making, the complexity and cost of which depends entirely upon the architectural form and ornament to be reproduced. The molding of ornament and architectural forms in concrete is discussed in Chapter XXIII, and the two examples of ornamental column form work given here from ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable. Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us. A painter shows us masses; the stereoscopic figure spares us nothing,—all must be there, every stick, straw, scratch, as faithfully as the dome of St. Peter's, or the summit of Mont Blanc, or the ever-moving stillness of Niagara. The sun is no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity Introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization—the sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon-strings—what a ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... between its most popular and essential creations, and those of any other faith; but because, even all that it borrowed it rapidly remodelled and naturalized, growing yet more individual from its very complexity, yet more original from the plagiarisms which it embraced; Secondly, that it differed in many details in the different states, but under the development of a general intercourse, assisted by a common language, the plastic and tolerant genius of the people harmonized all discords ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he and the palm-tree are alike little children. In other words, he is intelligent enough to believe in God; and the Moslem, the man of the desert, is intelligent enough to believe in God. But his belief is lacking in that humane complexity that comes from comparison. The man looking at the palm-tree does realise the simple fact that God made it; while the man looking at the lamp-post in a large modern city can be persuaded by a hundred sophistical circumlocutions that he made it ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... emancipating literature from provinciality of theme, while the modes of his romantic treatment, the way he felt about his subjects, still owed much to his American birth. In all this literature by the three writers there was little complexity, and there was no strangeness in their personalities. Irving was more genially human, Cooper more vitally intense; Bryant was the more careful artist in the severe limits of his art, which was simple and plain. Simplicity and plainness characterize all three; they were, in truth, simple ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the most perfect or divine natures not only all the complexity of form of which human nature is capable had to be united, but moreover the union must be such as may be conceived to exist in the system of the Universe itself—the lower forms, or those relating to inferior ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... each known nation that has risen to prominence, glory and power, and you will find that so long as they kept in close contact with the soil they flourished. With the advance of civilization the peoples change their mode of life from simplicity to luxuriousness and complexity. Thus individuals decay and in the end there is enough individual decay to result in national degeneration. When this process has advanced far enough these people are unable to hold their own. In the severe competitition of nations the strain is too great and ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... MONEY.—"The complexity of modern finance makes New York dependent on London, London upon Paris, Paris upon Berlin, to a greater degree than has ever yet been the case ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... system contained in the Vedas, the oldest sacred books of the Hindus, its almost entire freedom from the use of images, its gradual deterioration in the later hymns, its gradual multiplication of gods, the advance of sacerdotalism, and the increasing complexity of its ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... the valley ends, was seen by Olaf, and tacitly by the Bonders as well, to be the natural place for offering battle. There Olaf issued out from the hills one morning: drew himself up according to the best rules of Norse tactics, rules of little complexity, but perspicuously true to the facts. I think he had a clear open ground still rather raised above the plain in front; he could see how the Bonder army had not yet quite arrived, but was pouring forward, in spontaneous rows or groups, copiously by every path. This was thought to be ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... for us to undertake to write upon this subject. "It is to paint the sun with charcoal," for the most scholastic divine to give his reflections on the Word of God. With the most devout feeling of the infinite value of such an article or the great evil which might result from the complexity of its appearance, we have concluded that nothing but the most reverential feeling of the sacredness of the subject can secure us from falling into dangers not to be lightly regarded, not merely in regard to facts, but in ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the rat or rabbit-like skull of a rodent for that of any other creature. The peculiar pincer-like form of the jaws, with their curved chisel-shaped teeth in front, mark the order at a glance. There is no complexity in their dentition. There are the cutters or incisors, and the grinders; and of the cutters there are never more than two in each jaw, that is to say efficient and visible teeth, for there are in some species rudimentary incisors, especially in the ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... was unable to translate his works because of their great volume. But one of my friends has translated the twenty-two books [i.e. the Antiquities and the two books of the Apology], in spite of their difficulty and complexity, into the Latin tongue. He also wrote seven books of extreme brilliancy on the Conquest of the Jews, the translation of which some ascribe to Jerome, others to Ambrose, and ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... Orchids also occasionally present great complexity in the arrangement of their parts. An instance of this kind was described by myself from specimens furnished by Dr. Moore, of Glasnevin, in the 'Journal of the Linnean Society,' vol. ix, p. 349, tabs. x, xi, and from which the following summary ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... roof may be ascertained by the weather moulding still remaining on the side of the tower or steeple. The interior vaulting of stone roofs was composed of fewer parts and ribs, which were often not more numerous than those of Norman vaulting, and does not present that complexity of arrangement which occurs in the vaulting-ribs of subsequent styles. In the cathedral of Salisbury also in the nave of Wells Cathedral are simple and good examples of Early English vaulting. A curious groined roof, in which the ribs ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... upon the much admired sentence of Tacitus, in corruptissima republica plurimae leges, that not merely the multitude of transgressions, but the very complexity of a highly developed civilization, requires to be kept in order by a vast ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... make the mountain country accessible. Only those who have had the fortune to travel through this country can realize how difficult this endeavor has been and must continue to be, chiefly because of the great local complexity of the mountain system, but also because of the severely destructive storms of this region, with consequent torrential violence of the streams affected. But little money, too, can be, or has been, ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... have already given as to rents, wages, and prices in general, you will have gathered that the cost of living is, broadly speaking, cheaper than in England as regards the necessities of existence, but dearer in proportion to the complexity of the article. Anything that requires much labour, or that cannot readily be produced in the colony, is, dearer; but, on the other hand, it should be remembered that money is more easily obtainable. Protectionist duties and heavy freights form an effectual sumptuary ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... grows older life will become more largely mental. The increasing complexity of human relations and the more delicate adjustments that these relations require will bring a new and finer social order that will ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... I wish you to notice specially in these statues —the way in which the floral moulding is associated with the vertical lines of the figure. You have thus the utmost complexity and richness of curvature set side by side with the pure and delicate parallel lines, and both the characters gain in interest and beauty; but there is deeper significance in the thing than that of mere effect in composition; significance not intended on the part ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... is the picture which was stolen in 1911, but quickly recovered. It is part of the strange complexity of this world that it should equally contain artists such as Fra Angelico and thieves such as those who planned and carried out this robbery: nominally custodians of the museum. To repeat one of Vasari's sentences: "Some say that ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... and being, I confess, somewhat bewildered by the variety and complexity of these ingenious projects, I felt disposed to take my leave; but Vindar insisted on conducting us into an inner apartment, to see his poetry box. This was a large piece of furniture, profusely decorated with metals of various colours, curiously and fantastically ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... really be such fun to take Claude away from that silly Charmian creature in the very hour of a triumph. Yet she did not wish to see Charmian even the neglected wife of a great celebrity. Her feelings were rather complex. But she had always been at home with complexity. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... arguments on such subjects are to be found in books, magazines, and official reports. The good you will get from arguments on such subjects lies largely in finding out how to look up material. The difficulty with them lies in their size and their complexity. When it is remembered that a column of an ordinary newspaper has somewhere about fifteen hundred words, and that an editorial article such as on page 268, which is thirty-eight hundred words long, is in these days of hurry apt to be repellent, because of its length, and on the other hand ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... others. From this cause there is in complex metal deposits a rearrangement of horizontal sequence, in addition to enrichment at certain horizons and impoverishment at others. The whole subject is one of too great complexity for adequate consideration in this discussion. No engineer is properly equipped to give judgment on extension in depth without a thorough grasp of the great principles laid down by Van Hise, Emmons, Lindgren, Weed, and others. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... marvellous complexity of our bodily organization, it seems a miracle that we should live at all; much more that the innumerable organs and processes should continue day after day and year after year with so much regularity and so little friction that we are sometimes scarcely conscious ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... danger of such feverish and opportunistic activity that our grave postwar problems may be neglected. We need to act now with full regard for pitfalls; we need to act with foresight and balance. We should not be lulled by the immediate alluring prospects into forgetting the fundamental complexity of modern affairs, the catastrophe that can come in this complexity, or the values that can ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures: the wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn to draw rents and revenues from the immense patrimony of the old and recent ages. Goethe teaches courage, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... all this time in what would be regarded in the eyes of Heaven (and, still worse, the county of Bucks) as sin. However, a trifling formality at a registry-office can rectify this and nobody need be any the wiser. This at least is Marden's attitude, always free from any suspicion of complexity. But his wife (if that is the word for her), being of a more subtle nature, determines to make profit out of the situation. She points out to him that she is at present the widow Tellworthy and that she must be wooed all over again, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... British and American coins are recognized by law, though I believe that the shilling is taken at twenty-four cents, which is less than its value; in Newfoundland, {14} Peruvian, Mexican, Columbian, old Spanish dollars, are all equally legal; whilst in Prince Edward's Island the complexity of currencies and of their relative value is even greater.' When the Reciprocity Treaty was negotiated at Washington in 1854, Nova Scotia felt, with some reason, that she had not been adequately consulted in the granting to foreign fishermen of her inshore fisheries. In a word, the chief ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... to think very differently, not as believing in the cow jumping over the moon more than he used to, or more, probably, than nine-tenths of the clergy themselves—who know as well as he does that their outward and visible symbols are out of date—but because he knows the baffling complexity of the problem when it comes to deciding what is actually to be done. Also, now that he has seen them more closely, he knows better the nature of those wolves in sheep's clothing, who are thirsting for the blood of their victim, and exulting so clamorously over its anticipated early ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... fortuitously assembling around a given epoch and making it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certain places and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.)—to be radically vicious. I hardly think, however, that he does justice to the great complexity of the conditions of effective greatness, and to the way in which the physiological averages of production may be masked entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of geniuses in infancy, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... appearance of the surface of water is affected; to describe them all would require a separate essay, even if I possessed the requisite knowledge, which I do not. The accidental modifications under which general laws come into play are innumerable, and often, in their extreme complexity, inexplicable, I suppose, even by men of the most extended optical knowledge. What I shall here state are a few only of the broadest laws verifiable by the reader's immediate observation, but of which nevertheless, I have found artists frequently ignorant; owing ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... she seemed the perfection of honesty and integrity, without the slightest affectation of interest or artificiality of manner, and it was this fresh complexity of her character that utterly baffled me. I could not determine whether, or not, ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... tired him. The time for dinner came; Mr. Best now turned certain hand-wheels and moved certain levers. They shut off the power and gradually the din lessened, the pulsing and throbbing slowed until the whole great complexity came to a stand-still. The drone of the overhead wheels ceased, the crash of the draw-heads stopped. A startling silence seemed to grow out of the noise and quell it, while a new activity manifested itself among the workers. As ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... According to the latter writer, "the Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics; it has no mythology, no epic poetry, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts, no civil life; everywhere it shows absence of complexity; absence of combination; an exclusive sentiment of unity."[35] It is not very easy to reconcile these two views, and not very satisfactory to regard a race as "characterised by negatives." Agreement ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... but he believed that she had paid homage to the complexity of life. For her, at all events, the expedition was neither easy nor jolly. Beauty, evil, charm, vulgarity, mystery—she also acknowledged this tangle, in spite of herself. And her voice thrilled him when she broke silence with "Mr. Herriton—come ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... in the land. Sannazzaro's "Arcadia" was the inspiration of Sir Philip Sidney's. It was a natural outburst of the time and it conveys perfectly the spirit of Italian imaginative thought in a period almost baffling in the complexity of ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... after the other, and with an eagerness chastened by the most refined delicacy for the feelings of her victim, and with the air of Velpeau redivivus, drives through crushed and bleeding capillaries, shrinking nerves and injured tissues, a many-bladed lancet of marvellous fineness, of wonderful complexity and fitness. While engorging herself with our blood, we will examine under the microscope the mosquito's mouth. The head (Fig. 61) is rounded, with the two eyes occupying a large part of the surface, and nearly meeting on the top ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard |
