"Cosmic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... learn the will of God laid down as a rule of conduct for the Universe; and when we feel disinterested love, we should know that we partake the feeling of the Infinite God. Then, when we reverence the mighty cosmic force, it will not be a blind Fate in an Atheistic or Pantheistic world, but the Infinite God, that we shall confront and feel and know. Then we shall be mindful of the mind of God, conscious of God's conscience, sensible of His sentiments, and our own existence will be in the infinite ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... there nothing to contradict, nothing to supplement the indifference of her words. There was no lurking sparkle of humour, no acknowledgment of kindness. There was a something, but he could not understand it, for his poor shapeless soul might not read the cosmic mystery embodied in their depths. He stammered—who had never known himself stammer before, broke the joints of an ill-fitted answer, swept the tiles with the long feather in his hat, and found ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... silence of truth; learning little by little what the deepest sincerity means, and what clean hearts and minds and what crystal-clear sight it demands. Such intercommunication of spirit with spirit is at the beginning of all true understanding. It is the beginning of silent cosmic wisdom: it may lead to knowing the ways of that ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... to the dim horizon: the gentle wind blowing through the molten darkness; overhead, the great vault without arch or keystone, of dim liquid blue, and sown with worlds so far removed they could only shine; and, on the shore, the centre of all the cosmic order, a misshapen heap of man, a tumulus in which lay buried a live and lovely soul! The one pillar of its chapter house had given way, and the downrushing ruin had so crushed and distorted it, that thenceforth until some resurrection should arrive, disorder ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... no respect a graceful or romantic figure such as Leonardo was. He reminds us rather, by the weird and cosmic nature of his speculations and inventions, of some one of the beings created by the Norse mythologists: a nineteenth century gnome, rough, shaggy, uncouth, wholly absorbed in his search among the secrets of nature, and, while working always for the good of mankind, dwelling in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... newspaper to Mrs. Ware. But her interest in his hobby for once failed to awaken his enthusiasm. The dull jealousy of Austin, against which his honest soul had struggled successfully all his life long, had passed beyond his control. These few days of Austin's Whitsun visit had changed his cosmic view. Petty rebuffs, such as the matters of the stables and the Rural District Council, which formerly he would have regarded in the twilight of his mind as part of the unchangeable order of things in which Austin was destined to shine resplendently ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... England's social conditions. Exerting to the full his gift of mental discipline, he rejected the promptings of prejudice and of sentiment, and brought his sense of analysis to bear on his subject with the cold, callous detachment of a scientist studying some cosmic phenomenon. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... that the sun is parent, not daughter, of the earth, and despite all these deductions, the cosmogonic guess of Anaxagoras remains, as it seems to us, one of the most marvellous feats of human intelligence. It was the first explanation of the cosmic bodies that could be called, in any sense, an anticipation of what the science of our own day accepts as a true explanation of cosmic origins. Moreover, let us urge again that this was no mere accidental flight of the imagination; it was a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... for ourselves, but for the people living in it, and to put this burden upon our consciences not to think that this thing is ours for our use, but to regard ourselves as trustees of the great business for those to whom it does really belong, trustees ready to hand over the cosmic trust at any time when the business seems to make that possible and feasible. That is what I mean by saying ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Truth, it is thine!"? If ever a God and a man were ill-advised, they are this Straussian God, whose hobby is to err and to fail, and this Straussian man, who must atone for this erring and failing. Here, indeed, one hears "a faint ring of infinite import"; here flows Strauss's cosmic soothing oil; here one has a notion of the rationale of all becoming and all natural laws. Really? Is not our universe rather the work of an inferior being, as Lichtenberg suggests?—of an inferior being who did not quite understand his business; therefore an experiment, an attempt, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... profitable lesson from the highly unscientific region of public life. There a man does not take long to find out that he is opposed by some who are abler and better than himself. And, in order to understand the cosmic force and the true connection of ideas, it is a source of power, and an excellent school of principle, not to rest until, by excluding the fallacies, the prejudices, the exaggerations which perpetual contention and the consequent precautions breed, we have ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... there drew down a strong blast of fresh air which suggested that somewhere, however far away, it must open on to the upper world. For the rest its bottom and walls seemed to be smooth as though they had been planed in the past ages by the action of cosmic forces. Bickley noticed this the first and pointed it out to me. We had little time to observe, however, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... play of mighty cosmic forces arrests his thought. Everything in the material universe is changing, transient; all is in a state of flux, of motion, of perpetual disintegration or re-integration. But there is one thing fixed and abiding—that which we call ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... his essay on Evolution and Ethics. The gradual strengthening of the social bond by the practise of self-restraint in the interests of society he called the ethical process, and he showed that social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution of this ethical process. This action he compares to that of a gardener in clearing a patch of waste ground. If he relaxes his efforts to maintain the state of ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... no great harm in this. Some solemn form for the expression of cosmic, and even of mundane or political, emotion would doubtless be useful; and if the "modern religion" could be saved from degenerating into a hysterical superstition on the one hand, or a petrified, persecuting orthodoxy on the other, it would certainly ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... half with those dreadful children. They WERE funny to be sure—I found myself laughing in spite of my indignation. Still, if they were to monopolize my time as they had already done, when was I to do my reading? Taking Fiske's "Cosmic Philosophy" from my trunk I descended to the back parlor, lit a cigar and a student-lamp, and began to read. I had not fairly commenced when I heard a patter of small feet, and saw my elder nephew before me. There was sorrowful protestation ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... Wenus approached opposition, Dr. Jelli of Guava set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the intelligence of a huge explosion of laughing gas moving risibly towards the earth. He compared it to a colossal cosmic cachinnation. And, in the light of subsequent events, the justice of the comparison will commend itself to all but the most ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... I perceive from an analysis of the brain-content of your professor, began its unfoldment in somewhat the same manner as our own. But in your smaller system, less perfectly adjusted than our own to the cosmic mechanism, a series of cataclysms occurred. In fact, your planetary system was itself the result of a catastrophe, or of what might have been a catastrophe, had the two great suns collided whose near ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... cosmic evolution—the theory which in former times was generally known as the nebular hypothesis—that the heavenly bodies were formed by the slow contraction of heated nebulous masses, is indicated by so many facts that ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... bothered themselves to imagine how on earth she lives. The old creature—for she is over seventy—is counted in statistics among the proud population of this Seat of Empire, and she is as much subject to the cosmic laws and as much a member of the human family as the tallest and most swaggering Lifeguards-man who ever had "Cook's Son!" shouted at ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... hated and rose and fell, and there were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as to their race. And of their minds, or their philosophy of life, we know absolutely nothing. We are able, as Clifford has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands with these ancients of Britain—or Albion, seeing that we are on the chalk. To our souls they are as ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... peace might well seem a malevolent inspiration from the Lords of Death and Darkness. All life that feels and thinks has been, and can continue to be, only as the product of struggle and pain,— only as the outcome of endless battle with the Powers of the Universe. And cosmic law is uncompromising. Whatever organ ceases to know pain,—whatever faculty ceases to be used under the stimulus of pain,—must also cease to exist. Let pain and its effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... best to begin on, I should say," he replied. "He's easy reading on account of his style. And then I should advise you to read Fiske's 'Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy' before you tackle Herbert Spencer ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Indian myths embodying cosmic ideas have passages told in song, tribal legends have their milestones of song, folk-tales at dramatic points break into song; but into these rich fields I have not here entered. This collection reveals something of the wealth of musical and dramatic material that ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... growth according to a necessary order of sequence, this is the Law of Life of which the whole universe is the outcome, alike in the one great solidarity of cosmic being, as in the separate individualities of its minutest organisms. This great principle is the key to the whole riddle of Life, upon whatever plane we contemplate it; and without this key the door from the outer to the inner side of things ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... What will cosmic rays do to a living organism? Will they destroy life, or produce immortality? The eminent Dr. Blair Gaddon ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... also Fiske's Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 2 vols., 1874. Numerous critiques and discussions of Spencer's views have been given in various journals and reviews; among more extended works reference may be made to Bowne, The Philoesophy of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... work in the modern literature of any language that carries with it the wealth of associations which the Inspector-General does to the educated Russian. The Germans have their Faust; but Faust is a tragedy with a cosmic philosophic theme. In England it takes nearly all that is implied in the comprehensive name of Shakespeare to give the same sense of bigness that a Russian gets from ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... reason this arrangement did not appeal to you, and you accordingly go forth daily to the office and return therefrom with money. The theory of your daily excursion is firmly based in the inherent nature of things. The theory is the fundamental cosmic one that money is made in order that money may be spent—either at once or later. Even the miser conforms to this theory, for he only saves in obedience to the argument that the need of spending in the ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... somewhere beyond this earth. Not that scientists themselves have ever achieved positiveness, in its aspect of unitedness, among themselves—because Nordenskiold, before 1883, wrote a great deal upon his theory of cosmic dust, and Prof. Cleveland Abbe contended against the Krakatoan explanation—but that this is the orthodoxy of the main body ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... soul of man," he says again, "has come out from the eternal Father, out from the Divine Centre, but this soul—with this high origin and this noble mark—stands always at the opening of two gates."[36] Two worlds, two mighty cosmic principles, make their appeal to his will. Two kingdoms wrestle in him, two natures strive for the mastery in his life, and he makes his world, his nature, his life, his eternal destiny by his choices: "Whatsoever thou buildest and sowest here in thy spirit, be it words, works, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... faded now almost to nothing, to what you call cosmic rays. And these are too weak to maintain my life. No, I must die. And then my poor robot will be alone." I sensed elfin amusement in that last thought. "It seems absurd to you that I should think affectionately of a machine. But in our world there is a rapport—a mental symbiosis—between ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... all right, but it was nothing they'd had to do in order to live. It gave them nothing their incredible metabolism couldn't scrounge up out of rock or cosmic rays or interstellar gas or simply do without for a few thousand years. If the human body is a furnace, then the Zen body is a feeder pile. Maybe that, I thought, was what ...
— Zen • Jerome Bixby
... first note we make of the gospel of Spinoza. But if any one thinks that the sacred word "gospel" is here misused, and that such teaching is fatal to piety, let him turn to the 104th Psalm and read, from Spinoza's point of view, the cosmic vision of the Hebrew seer. True, we can think no longer of the supernatural carpenter who works on "the beams of his chambers" above, or of the mythical engineer who digs deep in the darkness to "lay the foundations of the earth." For that is poetry, appealing by concrete images to the emotions. ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... cosmic dust continuously, but the earth now never parts with a particle of its mass. The consequence is inevitable; the mass of the earth must be growing, and though the change may be a small one, yet to those who have studied Darwin's treatise on "Earth-worms," or to those who are acquainted ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale negation of all morals. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... stand us in little stead if we were threatened with a second Armada. It will conduce little to the valour, "virtues," manhood of any Englishman to be informed by any poet, even in the most melodious verse, illustrated by the most startling and pan-cosmic metaphors, "See what a highly organised and peculiar stomach-ache I have had! Does it not prove indisputably that I am not as other men are?" What gospel there can be in such a message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a railroad, colonise Australia, or ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... consciousness. Once in the heat of things we heard him say: "One may not really compare or contrast the literary emanations of Tolstoy and Kipling except as to the net human residuum. Difference in environment would preclude any cosmic psychology of interrelationship." ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... nations of the world are now trying in a cosmic form and under similar conditions to do that which the founders of the American Republic in 1787 did in a microcosmic form, a short narration of that earlier achievement may not be unprofitable in this day and generation, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... that he burns yonder, in the midst of the pale cosmic cloud we term the Milky Way. Let us approach him, now that we have visited the Isles of Light in the Celestial Ocean; let us traverse the vast plains strewn with the burning gold of the Suns of ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... necessitate straightforward flight from all that was positive. He seemed, if one may say so, in love with death; preferring winter to summer; finding only a tranquillising influence in the thought of the earth beneath our feet cooling down for ever from its old cosmic heat; watching pleasurably how their colours fled out of things, and the long sand-bank in the sea, which had been the rampart of a town, was washed down in its turn. One of his acquaintance, a penurious young poet, who, having nothing in his pockets but the imaginative or ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... the Duke, belonging as they did to that wealthy middle class which has made France what she is. His indifference to the doings of the old friends of his family saddened them; and they were unable to understand his airy and persistent trifling. It seemed to them a discord in the cosmic tune. ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions, reaching back and back, and on and ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... astronomy makes much of the three cosmic laws. Our earth, by a form of self-love called molecular attraction, ceases to be scattered dust, and takes on the shape of a rich and beautiful planet. But self-loved, our earth is also sun-loved, and drawn by invisible bands it is swept forward out of winter into ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... all such reasoning the Kantians and humanists reply that these notions of an objective and eternal beauty, of a transcendent and actual Cosmic Being exist within the mind. They are purely subjective ideas, they are bounded by the inexorable circle of our experience, hence they offer no proof of any objective reality which may in greater or less ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... ceremonies attended the arrival of the fleet at Honolulu, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Manila. A despatch to a London paper said: "It is beyond question that the United States is no longer a Western but a cosmic power. America is now a force in the world, speaking with authoritative accent, and wielding a dominant influence such as ought to belong to her vast wealth, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... called himself "Archbishop of the Newthot Church," and gathered about him a harem of devoted females in San Francisco, and was landed in jail for using the mails to defraud. Or there is "Oahspe, the Cosmic Bible," a work of brand-new revelation with a brand-new view of the universe ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... it was more than she did. She preferred not to believe in him, after the things that had been done to Papa. Her arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... isolated, I had no sense of smallness or of utter insignificance in face of the Universe. I did not feel myself a miserable, fortuitous atom, a grain of cosmic dust. I felt, though, again, I am interpreting rather than recording, that I was fully equal to my fate. As a human being I was not only immortal, but capax imperii,—a creature worthy of ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Devil), and dizzying him, taking away his breath with Truth, that Nobel had in mind. He wanted to spend eight thousand pounds a year on providing for the world one more book which would give the ordinary man the personal feeling of being with a genius, cold, lonely, cosmic genius, the sense of a chill wind of All Space Outside blowing through—a book which is a sort of God's Wilderness, in which ordinary men with their ordinary plain senses round them move about dazed a little and as trees walking—a ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... strictly adapts to those purposes, by the attainment of which, on the one hand, the creature itself subsists, but, on the other, the world continues. The artist leads a similar dream life, naturally only as an artist, and probably from the same cause; for the cosmic laws hardly come any more clearly into his field of vision than the organic laws come into that of the beast, and yet he cannot round off and complete any of his images without going back to them. Why then should nature not do for him what she does for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may see intellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this condition that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the neck of his soul. This ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... kind of transformation which fills the dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that has been the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled from the slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. In the long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. It has not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism were opened to-morrow, there are but few ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... of the scientist touched with an idealism such as is only known to the poet's soul! A friend, writing me of "The Summit of the Years," spoke of "its splendid ascent by a rapid crescendo from the personal to the cosmic," and of how gratifying it is to see our author putting forth such fine work in his advancing years. Another friend called it "a beautiful record of a beautiful life." I recall the September morning ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... looking up I beheld the walls fretted in great panels into the utmost splendour of sculpture, encircling the stories of the Gods amid a twining and under-weaving of leaves and flowers. It was more like a temple than a dwelling. Siva, as Nataraja the Cosmic Dancer, the Rhythm of the Universe, danced before me, flinging out his arms in the passion of creation. Kama, the Indian Eros, bore his bow strung with honey-sweet black bees that typify the heart's desire. Krishna the Beloved smiled above the herd-maidens adoring ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... ceremonies for good or for bad, moral or immoral (for there were many kinds of sacrifices which were performed for injuring one's enemies or gaining worldly prosperity or supremacy at the cost of others) were destined to produce their effects. It is well to note here that the first recognition of a cosmic order or law prevailing in nature under the guardianship of the highest gods is to be found in the use of the word @Rta (literally the course of things). This word was also used, as Macdonell observes, to denote the "'order' in the moral world as truth and 'right' ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the friction of our atmosphere, and reached the surface of our planet, if at all, as cosmic dust. But where were the rest of the assets of these bankrupt comets? They were probably scattered around in space, disjecta membra, floating hither and thither, in one place a stream of stones, in another a volume of gas; while the two heads had ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... them, Immermann tried to embody the dominant moral and intellectual tendencies, as he saw them in history and his own times. Satan, the demiurgos, is to him no theological devil, but a princely character, the "Lord of Necessity," the non-moral, irresistible, cosmic force of physical creation. He demands, expressing the faith ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of view, suppose a mind-stuff—logos—-a noumenal cosmic light such as is shadowed in the fourth gospel. The brain of a dog will convert it into one set of phenomenal pictures, and the brain of a man into another. But in both cases the result is the consequence of the way in which the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... many people will temporarily suffer, and a few people will be annihilated. But things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why, therefore, should we deceive ourselves? I quite expect to suffer myself. I shall not, however, complain of the cosmic movement. The auctorial report (which, by the way, is full of common sense) envisages immense changes in the book market. I agree. And I am sure that these changes will come about in the teeth of violent opposition from both publishers ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense of splendour has justified itself by what it has produced. The worst of it is that so much human nature is used up in the process. If we're all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak. And a society like ours wastes such good material in producing its little patch of purple! Look at a boy like Ned Silverton—he's really too good to be used to refurbish anybody's social ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... a nebulous mass; that it gradually condensed, that it broke up into that wonderful group of harmoniously rolling balls we call planets and satellites, and that then each of these underwent its appointed metamorphosis, until at last our own share of the cosmic vapour passed into that condition in which we first meet with definite records of its state, and in which it has since, ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... blase, matter-of-fact attitude he had for all of nature's phenomena; he found himself admiring the majestic buttes that fringed it; there was a glint of appreciation in his eyes for the colossal bigness of it—for the gigantic, sweeping curves which seemed to make of it an oblong bowl, a cosmic hollow, boundless, hinting of the infinite power ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... "common to all and special to each," as one Christian mystic has it. The need felt by Kabr for both these ways of describing Reality is a proof of the richness and balance of his spiritual experience; which neither cosmic nor anthropomorphic symbols, taken alone, could express. More absolute than the Absolute, more personal than the human mind, Brahma therefore exceeds whilst He includes all the concepts of philosophy, all the passionate ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... long, his elbow on his knees, his chin in his hand, his wings drooping behind, along the perpendicular smoothness of the rock, and pondered his happiness. A profound satisfaction was within him; it was as if his blood, at last, were flowing submissively along a great cosmic stream, to some eternal behest. After a time, he rose a-tip-toe, like a diver above a gleaming sheet, ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is always associated with one idea, recurrent ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Smithy, and became instantly sorry when his friend's face began to redden. Possy didn't believe in cosmic rays, obviously. ...
— When I Grow Up • Richard E. Lowe
... roads, by me possessed, He shambles forth in cosmic guise; He is the Jester and the Jest, And ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... cleaning rod dry; select a clean patch of cloth and smear it well with sperm or warmed cosmic oil, being sure that the cosmic has soaked into the patch well; scrub the bore with patch, finally drawing the patch smoothly from the muzzle to the breech, allowing the cleaning rod to turn with the rifling. The bore ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... the gods regaining the ambrosia from the Asouras or demons that had stolen it. We may also observe that Hercules, the conqueror of the dragon of the Hesperides, is also the liberator of Prometheus, him who first, despite the divine prohibition, gathered fire, the fruit of the celestial and cosmic tree. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... impoliteness," I replied. "Men of his class are too stirred by cosmic problems to say ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... through the Phoenicians. In the minds of Ionians like Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most clearly developed: the first of these conceiving of the visible universe as the result of processes of evolution, and the latter pressing further the same mode of reasoning, and dwelling on agencies in cosmic development ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... she is taxed with being the ruin of her lover's ambition. Because of her the 'giant has shriveled to a dwarf'. She has 'blown away the mountains', that he had 'rolled up' to the sunny heights of glory. In another poem, 'Mystery of Reminiscence', we hear of a cosmic golden age in which Laura, one with her poet, was a part of the Godhead. One and yet two, they swept through space in unimaginable ecstasy. Somehow,—the point is not made very clear,—there came a great cataclysm and separated them. Now they are beautiful fragments ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... blood and breath, with vigour and variety, which not merely informed but transformed it. David and Bethsabe, Doctor Faustus, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, are chaotic enough, but they are of the chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to the really comic which ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... all beliefs that are not grossly utilitarian and material, promising houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting or a cosmic mortgage. The Peace of God passeth understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven within us and without can be presented only by parables. But the unapproachable distance and vagueness of these things makes them ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... fruitful under its application is that of astronomy. Here, progress has been great. A measuring-rod has been provided for the depths of space by the ascertainment of the sun's distance within a three-hundredth part of that body's diameter. The existence of a cosmic ether, a resisting medium, has been established, and its retarding influence calculated. Many of the nebulae have been reduced, and others proved to be in a gaseous condition, like comets. The latter bodies have been chained ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... an almost awestruck whisper, as her eyes travelled over immense spaces; for she thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. The colour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Sahara throbbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep, vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had not risen high enough yet to deserve ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... matter; from the cause to the origin, and the process of metaphysics, which, from the finite world of sense rises to the intelligent, passing through the intermediate numbers of infinite substance to active being and cosmic reason. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... was the transformation of the former conceptions of the nature and meaning of the world and life, through the discoveries of science. Geology and astronomy now gradually compelled all thinking people to realize the unthinkable duration of the cosmic processes and the comparative littleness of our earth in the vast extent of the universe. Absolutely revolutionary for almost all lines if thought was the gradual adoption by almost all thinkers of the theory of Evolution, which, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... to the Rig-Veda, the goddess, by whom all things are created by her union with Brahma. She is the cosmic egg, the golden uterus, the Hiramyagarbha. We see an image of it, represented floating amidst the water, in the sculptures that adorn the panel over the door of the east facade of the monument, called by me palace and museum at Chichen-Itza. ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... was formerly carried on by man against nature, against animals, and especially against other men. Nature and animals (excepting the cosmic forces and microbes) are nowadays conquered by the human brain, and wars are seldom waged except between great empires, a fact which will sooner or later reduce them to absurdity. For this reason the morality of the god of war and of patriotic chauvinism has had his day and loses more ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary, the story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plain that the Pauline scheme—I mean the argumentative processes of Paul's scheme of salvation—had lost its ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... 2nd and 9th of June, there came a new series of facts which could not possibly be explained by the unaided existence of a cosmic phenomenon. ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... probably as inevitably their creed, as optimism is for the more fortunate mortals who enjoy the mens sana in corpore sano." [5] However, there are some pessimists for whom indigestion can plead no excuse, [6] but for whose intellectual perversity some other cosmic influence must be sought "behind the veil, behind the veil,"—to borrow Mr. Laing's favourite line from his favourite poem. These are not only "social swells, would-be superior persons and orthodox theologians, but even a man of light and learning like Mr. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... girls, herself included, alarmed her. Was there some external will that drove them all, in hordes, to their fate? Were all the intricacies of event and circumstance, of their very emotion, merely the workings of that ruthless cosmic will by which the individual ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... air around us, a peal of sound that might have been the shouting of some playful god hurling great suns through the net of stars. It was like the deepest notes of all the organs in the world combined in one; summoning, majestic, cosmic! ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... short time ago a remarkable opinion from Carl Spitteler. He asserts that he is guided in his choice of definite styles and definite forms by an absolutely clear purpose; that he has, for example, essayed every kind of metre which could possibly be suited to his "cosmic" epic, or that he has written a novelette solely in order to have once written a novelette. Although in these confessions, as well as in Edgar Allen Poe's celebrated Poet's Art, self-delusion and pleasure in the paradoxical may very likely be mingled, it still remains true that such dicta as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the appearance of the man is always changed. Men grow by throes and throbs, by leaps and bounds. The idea of "Cosmic Consciousness"—being born again—is not without its foundation in fact: the soul is in process of gestation, and when the time is ripe the new birth occurs, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the forces (I should now like to substitute the word powers for "forces.") possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... at once, as if they were natural to us. His communication of the most subtle states of mind is complete. But in a Kipling we cannot pretend that there is infinite subtlety and elusiveness, that there is a cosmic condensing of a whole nebula of spiritual experience. His task was ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... harmony of his earlier verse, and are full of delightful imagery. He fancied that there was a huge wheel of fire revolving with furious haste in his head, and his sufferings were terrific. The following fragment from the notes of his attendant, who kept a record of his ravings, has a cosmic magnificence: ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... country there is a visible, tangible repository of power to whom you can apply. If the repository is in the humour you will get whatever you want done, in the way of justice or injustice. Now in a free country justice is absorbed into the great cosmic forces, and it is apt to be an expensive incantation that wakes the lost elementary spirit. In Russia justice shines by contrast with the surrounding corruption, but there is no mistake about it when you get it. In America it is taken for ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... of God, directly, immediately wrought upon the soul. Salvation must be a supernatural event. Through this act of God from above there results within the soul an experience which in every respect is a new creation. It is a cataclysmic event of the same order as the fiat lux of cosmic creation, a rebirth through which the man who has it once again comes into the condition Adam ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... There was nothing. Then, in an instant, the blackness vanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunning splendor that ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... excellence: she knew there was no future for a hesitating talent. What perplexed her was Keniston's satisfaction in his achievement. She had always imagined that the true artist must regard himself as the imperfect vehicle of the cosmic emotion—that beneath every difficulty overcome a new one lurked, the vision widening as the scope enlarged. To be initiated into these creative struggles, to shed on the toiler's path the consolatory ray of faith and encouragement, had seemed the chief privilege ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... similar, a reflex action takes place; and thus is explained the phenomenon which often takes place, the sudden sense of a friend's personality, if that friend, in absence, writes one a letter, or bends his mind intently upon one. It also explains the way in which some national or cosmic emotion suddenly gains simultaneous force, and vibrates in thousands of minds at ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is. Of course "Polly's." "Polly's" is Greenwich Village in little; it is, in a fashion, cosmic and symbolic. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... manifestation of an infinite God who is without variableness or shadow of turning, but quite incompatible with the fitful behaviour of the anthropomorphic deities of the old mythologies. By thus abstaining from all appeal to agencies that are extra-cosmic, or not involved in the orderly system of events that we see occurring around us, we have at last succeeded in eliminating from philosophic speculation the character of random guesswork which at first of necessity belonged to it. Modern scientific hypothesis is so far from ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... theirs, that we humans send forth our thoughts, exploring every region of the world—be this "of use" or not! And in thus probing the depths of our own subject do we not come up against those weightier questions which are of Cosmic importance? Does not Nature here fix man's eye with her own gaze—granting him new riches? For rich, indeed, is this gift that proves to him that not he alone is dowered with a soul[25]—nor dwelling in a world ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... this latter subject, for obvious reasons, Herbert Spencer has remained silent; but the reader may ponder a remarkable paragraph in the final sixth edition of the "First Principles,"—a paragraph dealing with the hypothesis that consciousness may belong to the cosmic ether. This hypothesis has not been lightly dismissed by him; and even while proving its inadequacy, he seems to intimate that it may represent imperfectly some truth yet inapprehensible by ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... Neuchatel in the following summer, the young president, from whom the members had expected to hear new tidings of fossil fishes, startled them by the presentation of a glacial theory, in which the local erratic phenomena of the Swiss valleys assumed a cosmic significance. It is worthy of remark here that the first large outlines in which Agassiz, when a young man, planned his intellectual work gave the key-note to all that followed. As the generalizations on which all his future zoological researches were based, are sketched in the Preface ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... an enormous spot on September 9, 1898, synchronised with a sharp magnetic disturbance and brilliant aurora;[479] and the coincidence was substantially repeated in March, 1899,[480] when it was emphasised by the prevalent cosmic calm. The theory of the connection is indeed far from clear. Lord Kelvin, in 1892,[481] pronounced against the possibility of any direct magnetic action by the sun upon the earth, on the ground of its involving an extravagant output ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to the doer, come back as thine own exhalations Into thy bosom return, weepings of mountain and vale; Man with the cosmic fortunes and starry vicissitudes tangled, Chained to the wheel of the world, blind with the dust of its speed, Even as thou, O giant, whom trailed in the wake of her conquests Night's sweet despot draws, bound to her ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... wise spirits have fed. Indeed, you can hardly say they were ever absent. They are of those flaming thoughts the soul projects, splendid prophecies that become the light of all our science and all our day. Plato formulated these laws. Two thousand years after him, the cosmic brain of Swedenborg traced their working throughout the universal economies of matter and spirit, and Fourier endeavored to translate them into axioms of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... obviously presents itself to us; and in this universe strife and sternness play as big a part as love and tenderness, and cannot be shirked by one whose will it is to rule his life in accordance with the cosmic forces he sees in play about him. I hope you see the thing as I do, and think that I have done well, being without responsibilities and with no one to suffer materially by my decision, in taking upon my shoulders, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... all right, a long, long way inside a rusty freighter without a single porthole, to a planet out on the rim of the Galaxy that was as barren and dreary as a cosmic slag heap. Five years on the rock pile, five years of knocking yourself out trying to explain history and Shakespeare and geometry to a bunch of grubby little miners' kids in a tin schoolhouse at the edge of a cluster ...
— The Passenger • Kenneth Harmon
... with her fear more than he would have admitted either to himself or her. Anything seemed possible to him now. He had looked upon a miracle. He had seen those immutable peaks, as stable as Time, bend and bow in their strange, cosmic dance, for the change in the position of one had created the illusory effect of a change ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine the cosmic mechanism we should see the demonstrable necessity of every complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind: for it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than to endow it with ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing in that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which many, like myself, must have put in this ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... attempts having been discontinued, she, desperate with slights and insults, had put forth some efforts of her own. But it was as though one had been placed in a boat without oars and told to row for life: the little boat under the influence of cosmic tides had merely drifted into shallows and now ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... such a wall of division is quite admissible, for no object of which we have observation is without its limit. Were this wall of division to {220} break, everything contained within it would tumble out. We may conceive that there are an infinite number of such Cosmic systems, with inter-cosmic intervals throughout the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... a class of such great beings, to bestow on them a common title, not only one but several progressive common titles, each expressing a deeper reflection than the last. Thus did they reflect on the nature of the cosmic powers, taken as a class. This, evidently, is not the beginning of religion. It is the religion of a comparatively lofty civilisation; lower stages of civilisation, and of religion also, must have preceded this one. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... about England in the nineteenth century is this—that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads; they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright, great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a demagogue of fiction, a man without education ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Mars does once, hence it rises in the west and sets in the east, making one day of Mars equal three of its months. This moon changes every two hours, passing all phases in a single martial night; is anomalous in the solar system, and tends to subvert that theory of cosmic evolution wherein a rotating gaseous sun cast off concentric rings, afterward becoming planets. Astronomers were not satisfied with the telescope; true, they beheld the phenomena of the solar system; planets rotating on axes, and satellites revolving about them. They saw sunspots, faculae, and solar ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... early inventions, was a photographic device which worked on fluorescent principles. It was amazingly sensitive to any form of radioactivity—and the missile, of course, would be "hot" from exposure to cosmic rays. ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... willing to admit that it would be both a blameworthy and foolish action, did it not correspond to a mysterious impulse of Nature herself—to that so-called spiritual element—which persists in its eternal antagonism to the carnal instinct, in obedience to a cosmic law. Unconscious collaborators of Him who governs the universe, these heroes of supreme renunciation imagine that only through their sacrifice are they honouring Him, while in reality they incarnate, according to the Divine design, the progressive energy of the ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... the world as a whole. Does an elephant or an eagle perhaps, viewing some immense landscape, catch any glimpse of the universe, as an object of contemplation, apart from the satisfaction of his own sensual needs? Probably not. But Whitman, as has been said a hundred times, was "cosmic." He had an unequalled sense of the bigness of creation and of "these States." He owned a panoramic eye and a large passive imagination, and did well to loaf and let the tides of sensation flow over his soul, drawing out ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... rate," he says, "what is certainly meant is that the artist must pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to seize and himself to be possessed by that great cosmic rhythm of the spirit which sets the currents of life in motion. We should say in Europe that he must seize ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... high sense American and saw in the young genius a good ally. The chance was embraced and John Fiske after that dipped only fitfully into philosophical themes, writing, however, The Destiny of Man, The Idea of God, Cosmic Roots of Loveland Self-sacrifice, and Life Everlasting. He gave his main strength, to a thing worth while, the establishment in America of Anglo-Saxon freedom. Would he have served the world better had he adhered to profound speculations? As the patriarch in a household into ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was typical: the course of cosmic life is divided into cycles, each seventy-two thousand solar years in length; during the first half of each cycle, when creation newly comes from the hands of Deity, mankind's estate is happily ideal, but then decay begins and ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... cosmic ray, imprisoned and adapted for human use. It was a million times more powerful than the highest known voltage of electricity. Beneath it, even the diamond, the hardest substance known, dissolved into a puff of dust; and yet the most fragile ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... none of these explanations are satisfactory, and science has yet to find any cause which accounts for all the phenomena connected with it. It seems, however, unquestionable that since the opening of the Tertiary age a cosmic summer and winter have succeeded each other, during which a Tropical heat and an Arctic cold have alternately prevailed over a great portion of the globe. In the so-called drift (a superficial deposit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... integrator chambers, in which atomic hydrogen was integrated to form atomic iron and calcium (sometimes called the Michelson effect), had sprung a leak. The heat escaping into the little room was not the comparatively negligible heat of burning hydrogen, but the cosmic energy of matter in creation. Sime slammed the door. The radiated light was so intense that it stung ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... had a couple of clues that you and Alice didn't," he said. "I knew there was a very sick woman involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They've had a lot of trouble with it, I believe—some say its spores come from outside the world with the cosmic dust—and now it seems to have been carried to Atla-Hi. Let's hope they've found the answer this time. Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... science, as yet we are but on the verge of the continents of discovery. Where is the wizard who can tell what lies in the womb of time? Just as our conceptions of many things have been revolutionized in the past, those which we hold to-day of the cosmic processes may have to be remodeled in the future. The men of fifty years hence may laugh at the circumscribed knowledge of the present and shake their wise heads in contemplation of what they will term ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing |
