"Focus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a check. A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Servia, which had hoped to gain these territories, once ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... as though we were playing checkers instead of the game of life. He made no reply, but the spell was broken. I believe that both sides had been bluffing. In attempting to use my kodak while continuing the bluff, I brought matters to a focus. "What a picture you fellows will make," I said aloud, as my right hand slowly worked the kodak out of the case which hung under my left arm. Still keeping up a steady fire of looks, I brought the kodak in front of me ready to focus, and then touched the spring ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip, though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love. The aged are terrible—mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... friend; and here, think's we, if there is anything important or business like on the man's mind, he must be near to its focus. But he started again— ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... reading, and easily take in its meaning. The act of will, the effort of attention, the intending of the mind on each word and line of the page, just as the eyes are focussed on each word and line, is the power here contemplated. It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge. Atten. tion to spiritual things is the ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... Budlong felt amazement that she could have so ignored the very focus of her former ambition. Then she felt shame at her unpreparedness. She caught the evening paper out of her husband's lap to find the date. November ninth and not a Christmas thing begun. Yet a few days and the news-stands would have apprised her that Christmas ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... but no one could say what a day might bring forth. The young doctor looked back over the past; he bowed beneath the burden that he felt upon him. However, due credit must be given to his friend Samuel O'Neill for assisting him to bring his sober meditations to a focus. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to some metal uprights and struggling to focus his mind on what he was doing enough to forget that Delight Hathaway was on the other side of the partition when from the window above the bench he saw Cynthia Galbraith come rolling up to the gate in her runabout, accompanied by a ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... at Berlin University and physician to the imperial household, found himself, when the war broke out, in the very focus of the madness which seized the flower of his nation. Not merely did he refuse to share that madness. Yet more daring, he openly resisted it. In reply to the manifesto of the 93 intellectuals, published in the beginning of October, 1914, he wrote a counter-manifesto, An Appeal to ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... the top, it may be more easily flattened. After the glass is properly mounted in front of the camera, the lights are placed behind it and light is directed through the skin. The ridge detail is brought into focus on the ground glass. Before the picture is actually taken it is suggested that the ground glass be checked by first using one light and then two lights to ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... sentiment will be more decisively declared. I wish you were here at present, to take your choice of the two governments of Orleans and Louisiana, in either of which I could now place you; and I verily believe it would be to your advantage to be just that much withdrawn from the focus of the ensuing contest, until its event should be known. The one has a salary of five thousand dollars, the other of two thousand dollars; both with excellent hotels for the Governor. The latter at St. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Always the child of impulse, and careless of appearance and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution. She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... the better to focus an opera-glass on the box. The gong solemnly announced the second act, and Alice moved her chair to face the stage. Once more Montani scanned the party with his glass. As the lights faded Alice, with the pretty languorous gesture I so well remembered, opened her fan—the fan of ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised an outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new focus. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... course, by no means all. Its making and its binding must be accompanied by a vivid, methodically directed attention, which turns all the mental light gettable in a focus upon the subject passing across the mind's screen. Before Loisette was thought of this was known. In the old times in England, in order to impress upon the minds of the rising generation the parish boundaries in the rural districts, the ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... but by the time he could focus it to fit his eyes, the man had re-mounted, riding south, and there was only the dead girl left there where she fell, an Indian girl they both knew, Anita, daughter of Miguel, the major-domo of Mesa Blanca, whose own little rancheria was ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia,—short-sightedness,—so ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... their love had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun, save itself. But the passion of Nina and her lover was that of more complicated natures and more mature years: it was made up of a thousand feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories they made themselves a home and altar; their ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... produced many changes in the Stock Exchange. The share market, which previously had been occupied by only four or five brokers and a number of small jobbers, now became a focus of vast business. Certain brokers, it is said, made L3,000 or L4,000 a day by their business. One fortunate man outside the house, who held largely of Churnett Valley scrip before the sanction of the Board of Trade was procured, sold at the best price directly the announcement was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the theory that a stream or group of innumerable bodies, comparatively small, but of various dimensions, is sweeping around the solar focus in an orbit, which periodically cuts the orbit of the earth, thus explaining the actual cause of shooting stars, aerolites, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... loom in the distant future, like the cloud-castle in Cole's Voyage of Life. It may possibly be essayed in a generation or two, when Ekaterinenborg, built up into a great city by the copper, iron, gold, and, above all, the lately-opened coal-mines of the Ural, shall have become the focus of the Yenisei, Amour, Yang-tse and Indus system of railways. But here, again, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... than just the words each used. Talking aloud helped focus the thoughts more, but at the same time, thousands of little, personal, fringe ideas were present with the main idea transmitted in words. Houston had talked telepathically to Dorrine hundreds of times, but never before had so much fine detail ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... than gathering, appears to have been the focus of much ritual activity. This suggests that for the Washo the importance of ritual may have increased in proportion to the element of chance inherent in the activity undertaken. Gathering was a surety, assuming of course that there was a harvest ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... of all is that of the Greyhounds, which evolves in gigantic spirals round a dazzling focus, and then loses itself far off in the recesses of space. Fig. 24 ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... up into his face anxiously, her vivid childish beauty seeming to catch all the brightness of the place and focus it upon him. The two men had passed out of the further door and on to the recitation rooms. The girl and boy ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... collectedness, relieved by a certain touch of suspicious severity, as becomes the arbiter in a literary and philosophic matter." "And so," begins our author, "you wish to know, my dear Theophilus, WHERE I LOCATE GOD? I locate him in the centre of the universe, or, in better phrase, at the central focus, which must exist somewhere, of all the stars that make the universe, and which, borne onward in a common movement, gravitate together around ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... outset of World War II, but was nonetheless occupied for five-years by Nazi Germany (1940-45). In 1949, neutrality was abandoned and Norway became a member of NATO. Discovery of oil and gas in adjacent waters in the late 1960s boosted Norway's economic fortunes. The current focus is on containing spending on the extensive welfare system and planning for the time when petroleum reserves are depleted. In referenda held in 1972 and 1994, Norway rejected ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... his meals on the wing, as it were, to run for trains, to snatch two hours' sleep anywhere between midnight and morning, and to be jostled by rude crowds that failed to recognize his superiority. The full-backed light overcoat, during its brief existence the focus of so much attention, was lost in a dinner rush and never reappeared. But, above all, Mr. Heathcote had upon his hands the care of the helpless, miserable lackey, and never did a sick baby require more attention. John was lost amid his strange and terrible ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... it was the only sort of capital which could not fly the country in times of need. Stanley himself, though—as became a host—he spoke little and argued not at all, was distinctly of this faction; and Clara sometimes felt uneasy lest her efforts to focus at Becket all interest in the land question should not quite succeed in outweighing the passivity of her husband's attitude. But, knowing that it is bad policy to raise the whip too soon, she trusted to her genius to bring him 'with one run at the finish,' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... French chansons. Both playing and singing were perfect of their kind. Rorie did not understand Chopin, and thought there was a good deal of unnecessary hopping about the piano in that sort of thing—nothing concrete, or that came to a focus; a succession of airy meanderings, a fairy dance in the treble, a goblin hunt in the bass. But the French chansons, the dainty little melodies with words of infantile innocence, all about leaves and buds, and birds'-nests and butterflies, pleased him infinitely. He hung over the piano with ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the military capital. Kamakura was then only a fishing hamlet, but at the zenith of its prosperity it had grown to be a city of at least a quarter of a million of inhabitants. During a period of one hundred and fifty years it remained the centre of military society and the focus of a civilization radically different from that of Kyoto. The Taira had invited their own ruin by assimilating the ways of the Fujiwara and of the courtiers; the Minamoto aimed at preserving and developing at Kamakura the special ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... ST. MARK, VENICE, ITALY.—Facing the piazza of St. Mark, which is in the heart of Venice and the grand focus of attraction, rises the magnificent Cathedral of St. Mark, decorated with almost oriental splendor. The building dates back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and portions of the materials used in its construction have been brought from almost ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... credulous, and inconsiderately generous to be a successful editor. If a paper could be conducted on purely altruistic principles, and without reference to profits, there would be no man fitter to occupy an editorial chair. For as an inspiring force, as a radiating focus of influence, his equal is not to be encountered "in seven kingdoms round." However, this inspiring force could reach a far larger public through published books than through the columns of a newspaper. It was therefore by no means in a regretful frame ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... as brother and king I denounce to you, generally meet at a little chateau called Loignac, the pretext being generally the chase. This chateau is, besides, the focus for intrigues to which the Guises are not strangers, and you know the strange love with which my sister pursued Henri de Guise. I embrace you, and am ever ready to aid you in all, and for all; meanwhile aid yourself by the advice ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... our friends when they are absent. Even in married life love is not diminished by distance. A man, like a burning-glass, should be placed at a certain distance from the object he wishes to dissolve, in order that the proper focus ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... color. He was always impatient of criticism which made him feel that there was any lack of technique in his works. "He has it all in him, but lacks 'school,'" was the verdict of the critics. Undoubtedly, wishing to do all that man has done, Dore would have liked to focus his powers on marvels of refinement and exactness, like Meissonier's; but he was proud of his distinctive characteristics, and wanted the least block he touched to show ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... shore. I told Charlie, therefore, to try and occupy his attention by showing him some of the other articles which we had brought. What interested him most was a telescope, through which, having adjusted the focus, we made him look at his friends. He almost let it drop in his astonishment at seeing them so near, and had not Charlie held it, it would have fallen overboard. He looked through it again and again, each time expressing by signs his wonder, and of course utterly unable to comprehend how the objects ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... the Polish nation should retain an independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... delegates are not intent only on money-getting. And yet the Clarendon Press makes money, and the University can depend upon it for handsome subsidies. It may well depend upon it for much more. As the Bank of England—to which in its system of government it may be likened—is the focus of all the other banks, private or joint-stock, in the kingdom, and the treasure-house, not only of the nation's gold, but of its commercial honor, so the Clarendon Press—traditionally careful in its selections ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... through the gardens and pavilions of the casino on the rock, where with the coming of darkness the gayety of the town began to focus ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... appendix axis datum erratum focus formula genus larva medium memorandum nebula radius series ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... and very drunk. Very drunk or very sick. It was the middle of the day and the day was hot, but the old man had on a suit, and a sweater under the suit. He stopped walking and stood still, swaying gently on widespread legs, and tried to focus his eyes. He lived here ... around here ... somewhere around here. He continued ...
— The Circuit Riders • R. C. FitzPatrick
... good look at his old possessions, Mark made a sweep of the horizon with the glass, in order to ascertain if any other land were visible, from the great elevation on which he now stood. While arranging the focus of the instrument, an object first met his eye that caused his heart almost to leap into his mouth. Land was looming up, in the western board, so distinctly as to admit of no cavil about its presence. It was an island, mountainous, and Mark supposed it must be fully a ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one—well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... the Bacteriologist; "perhaps the microscope is out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... seen on the cornea of the eye, when we face a window, which is much attended to by portrait painters; this is the light reflected from the spherical surface of the polished cornea, and brought to a focus; if the observer is placed in this focus, he sees the image of the window; if he is placed before or behind the focus, he only sees a luminous spot, which is more luminous and of less extent, the nearer he approaches to the focus. The luminous appearance of the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... by the landlord into a room which had been turned into a salon, felt himself instantly under the focus of an eyeglass held in the most impertinent manner by ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... heartening whirl of new popularity. To the candidate it seemed that his star had changed with stunning swiftness. His advance to the door had been a Roman progress; and when he finally reached the lobby he was still the focus of a coterie of enthusiasts who would not be shaken off. Here a new halt was made: new people surrounded him; more hand-shakings and back-slappings took place; and everything seemed merry as ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the window, came out to sketch too. She addressed gracious and yet humble remarks to them: "I see you are painting my sweet little home. May I look? Oh, what a lovely little sketch!" Once, on a never-to-be-forgotten day, she observed one of them take a camera from his pocket and rapidly focus her as she stood on the top step. She turned full-faced and smiling to the camera just in time to catch the click of the shutter, but then it was too late to hide her face, and perhaps the picture might appear in ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... and the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her perception that an African, in his best clothes, under conviction of sin, was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus itself upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his voice. It was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up his hat, got ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... man who has obtained some idea of social progress. We are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... he dragged at the strap across his breast, took a little field-glass from the case, adjusted the focus, and levelled it at ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... Solano was not spared, she comprehended the situation instantly. To Dashboard's surprise she drew a chair to her side, made the Man from Solano sit down, quietly turned her back on Dashboard, and in full view of the brilliant audience and the focus of a hundred lorgnettes, entered into conversation ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... bring the whole argument into focus, as it were," the professor went on. "It was a settlement day on the Stock Exchange. I believe a point was made three years ago that it was curious no one had seen Farrell return, since many people who knew him would be about Austin Friars late that night. ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... industrial competitiveness through labor market and tax reforms and increased research and development funds; and improved welfare services for the neediest while cutting paperwork and delays. Prime Minister RASMUSSEN's reforms focus on adapting Denmark to the criteria for European integration by 1999; Copenhagen has won from the European Union (EU) the right to opt out of the European Monetary Union (EMU). Denmark is, in fact, one of the few EU countries likely to fit into the EMU on time. Growth ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... such snatches of time that Felix could give to home affairs, for his hands were full of arrears of business, and the excitement respecting Mr. Smith necessarily occupied him. Pending the arrival of letters from the Rector, every tongue was in commotion, and the reading-room was a focus of debate and centre of intelligence. So many letters, either in assault or defence, were addressed to the editor of the Pursuivant, that only a supplement as big as the Times could have contained them. Every poor person who ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ever attain to understand and find his proper place in this Universe, this great sweeping harmonious circle of which nevertheless he feels himself to be the diminutive focus? His senses are absurdly imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music the spheres make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as Blanco White's famous sonnet reminds us) he ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... be persuaded. He was already beginning to see about how the cat jumped and to understand how much depended upon the gentle patronage of the luminaries of society. There was one little star, surely, whose light he should be glad to focus on himself once more—nor be indebted to another's kindness for the privilege. He had indeed ventured to call on Preciosa once or twice at her own home—in particular there was the evening on which, defying ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Jerry-Jo stood up, turned and twisted his lithe body into such a grotesque distortion that he was quite awful to look upon, and left no doubt in the girl's mind as to whom he referred. He brought the Far Hill people into focus, sharply and suddenly. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... photography to the study of the stars. The first photographic image of a star was obtained in 1850, by George P. Bond, with the assistance of Mr. J.A. Whipple, at the Harvard College Observatory. A daguerreotype plate was placed at the focus of the 15-inch equatorial, at that time one of the two largest refracting telescopes in the world. An image of [Greek: alpha] Lyrae was thus obtained, and for this Mr. Bond received a gold medal at the first international exhibition, ...
— The Future of Astronomy • Edward C. Pickering
... life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy bristles ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... of democracy of crime, contended for by Mr. Freeman, that has its charms to the ears of the groundlings. He is opposed to a law that punishes one class of gamblers only, instead of bringing all, within the focus of its penalties! There is much truth in this. Laws ought to be equal in their operation—but if they cannot be equal, this is no reason why there ought to be no laws at all. This conclusion is not warranted by any rule in ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... sacred fire of the State is kept ever burning by its guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look at, constituted the religious focus of the oldest Rome.[31] A little farther again to the left is the temple of Castor and the spring of Juturna, lately excavated, where the Twins watered their steeds after the battle of the lake Regillus. In front of ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... women and children of our present factory towns. By fixing our attention on people instead of things, we should almost certainly secure more and better things; but, regardless of cost, we must change the focus of our attention. ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... None of these can be said to be matters of local, as distinguished from national importance. It would not be a matter personally indifferent to the rest of the country if any part of it became a nest of robbers or a focus of demoralization, owing to the maladministration of its police; or if, through the bad regulations of its jail, the punishment which the courts of justice intended to inflict on the criminals confined therein ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... for my final performance and several Tri-D video cameras stared down at me. Pupils, lights and lenses, all came to a glittering focus on me. I slowly closed my eyes to ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... The first method for this purpose is due to Dr Priestley, who exposes the metal to be calcined in a porcelain cup N, Pl. IV. Fig. 11. placed upon the stand IK, under a jar A, in the bason BCDE, full of water; the water is made to rise up to GH, by sucking out the air with a syphon, and the focus of a burning glass is made to fall upon the metal. In a few minutes the oxydation takes place, a part of the oxygen contained in the air combines with the metal, and a proportional diminution of the volume of air is produced; what remains is nothing more than azotic gas, still however mixed with ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... below him was breath-taking: Earth seemed almost to hit him in the face. He had not realized it was so close. The sheer, mighty stretch of the globe filled his eyes, and for seconds he could not focus on anything else, so overwhelming to his vision was the colossal map. It reached away to left and right, before and behind, and he was so near that it seemed almost flat, a sun-gleaming plain on which stood out in sharp outline the continent ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... bearded face shot into focus abruptly, waving a hypodermic needle. It spoke English and observed passionately either to Johnny or itself that: "Name of a Spanish cow! What is it in men that they must abuse themselves so? Now here is one ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... food and to everybody and everything that presented itself before him was a riddle that I never solved. A materialistic friend suggested that he was adjusting the focus of his wonderful eyes, and the action was certainly like that of an optician examining a lens; but I feel that there was something more ceremonial about it. This punctiliousness cost him his dinner once. I was curious to know ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... some more central body of water. Having however gained a position so much higher to the north, and almost on the same meridian, and having crossed so remarkable a feature as the Stony Desert (which, as I suppose, was once the focus of a mighty current, to judge from its direction passing to the westward), I no longer encouraged hopes which, if realized, would have been of great advantage to me, or regretted the circumstances by which I was ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... contrary, since I began collecting data for this study at the time of the first general war, I have watched the unfolding political struggle for economic and cultural objectives with the increasing conviction that politics is the primary focus, with economic forces always in play, but usually in the background, leaving the center ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... of the physical history of the universe, for in the present day these are too well understood to be contested, but likewise to prove how, without detriment to the stability of special studies, we may be enabled to generalize our ideas by concentrating them in one common focus, and thus arrive at a point of view from which all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as one living active whole, animated by one sole impulse. "Nature," as Schelling remarks in his poetic discourse on art, "is not an inert mass; and to him who can comprehend her ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. Our present research appears to be a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here'; when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... also at the Charite, was admitted with adynamic fever; a few days after admission the prepuce was observed to be somewhat inflamed; in spite of all treatment this progressed so rapidly that the purple discoloration presaged a gangrene, which was not slow in following; the focus seemed to be at the superior and back portion of the prepuce; an incision evacuated a quantity of purulent, serous fluid; the disease, however, extended up the organ as far as its middle before its actions ceased; the sloughs were then cast off, when it was found that part of the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... opens his eyes under water, he can see nothing distinctly; but everything is as much out of focus, as if he looked, in air, through a pair of powerful spectacles that were utterly unsuited to him. He cannot distinguish the letters of the largest print in a newspaper advertisement; he cannot see the spaces between the outstretched fingers, at arm's length, in clear water; nor at a ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... "I'm just at the beginning of the business. I've learned the projecting end of it so far. Almost anyone can put the film in the machine, switch on the light, get the right focus and turn the handle. But it's harder to film a real drama with lots of excitement in it—outdoor stuff—cattle stampeded—the sports of cowboys—a fake Indian fight; it takes lots of grit to stand up in front of an oncoming troop of horsemen, and snap them until they get so close you can see the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... with narrowness of custom. What is true of the metropolis at that time is of course doubly true of the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety. Even then, however, the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of the castle to dream himself back into good-humor in. They would effectually have transported him beyond all waning or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... experience. The conception of unchanging spatial relations in the fundamental lines of perspective vision receives constant reinforcement from the facts of daily experience. The influence of the above-described changes in experimental conditions is mediated through their effect upon the location of the focus of the limiting and perspective lines of vision. As the plane of the upper boundaries of the enclosing walls was elevated and depressed the intersection of the two systems of lines was correspondingly raised and lowered, and in dependence upon the location of this imaginary point the determination ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentered all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in naught else around me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... this type, the care which should be exercised by the school authorities in the matter of favourable conditions of light, avoidance of visual fatigue, proper distance-adjustments in all visual application as regards focus, symmetry, size of objects, copies, prints, etc., becomes at once sufficiently evident to the thoughtful teacher, as it should be still earlier to the parent. There should be a medical examination, by a competent oculist, before the child ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well linked; Tell not as new what everybody knows, And new or old still hasten to a close; There centring in a focus round and neat, Let all your rays of information meet. What neither yields us profit nor delight Is like a nurse's lullaby at night; Guy Earl of Warwick and fair Elenore, Or giant-killing Jack ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward, to one common focus. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of glasses for "Boy's Telescope" refers to the focus, not to the size of glass. Any reliable optician will supply ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... these are what my labels symbolised and recalled to me. That lost collection was a running record of all my happiest hours; a focus, a monument, a diary. It was my humble Odyssey, wrought in coloured paper on pig-skin, and the one work I never, never was weary of. If the distinguished Ithacan had travelled with a hat-box, how finely and minutely Homer would have ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... good. But they preferred doing it to boys, MacNab. Listen to me, the lot of you. Don't mind the aeroplane. Number Two in the rear rank. They're like gooseberries out here." Number Two's eyes would abruptly come to earth again and focus themselves on the man in front. "I want you to think," Jimmy would go on quietly, "of the dirty, lousy crowd of German waiters you remember at home in the days before the war. Do you remember their greasy-looking clothes, and their greasy-looking faces, and the way ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... individuality, we cannot do better than regard man in his several mundane relations, supposing that either of these might become the central, actuating focus of his being—his "ruling love," as Swedenborg would call it—displacing his mere egoism, or self-love, thrusting that more to the circumference, and identifying him, so to speak, with that circle of interests to which all his energies and affections relate. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... white mutch stands at the door of a farmhouse in a Scottish glen. Her face is wrinkled, and her dim eyes are peering down the track which leads from the steading to the pasture. Being apparently unable to focus what she wants to see she ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... despair flashed into rage; I leapt erect, and cried: "Could I but grasp my life as sculptors grasp the clay And knead and thrust it into shape again!— If all the scorn of Heaven were but thrown Into the focus of some creature I could clutch!— If something tangible were but vouchsafed me By the cold, far gods!— If they but sent a Reason for the failure of my life I'd answer it; If they but sent ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... place was utterly transformed for him. He saw it now as she would see it when she came, even while at the same time his own eyes retained their point of view. It was as though he had lengthened the focus of a glass, and looked beyond at what was beautiful and picturesque, instead of what was near at hand and practicable. He found himself smiling with anticipation of her pleasure in the orchids hanging from the dead trees, high above the ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... inconveniences, which increases in proportion as it makes itself looked for. Athos had no longer his son to induce him to walk firmly, with his head erect, as a good example; he had no longer, in those brilliant eyes of the young man, an ever-ardent focus at which to regenerate the fire of his looks. And then, must it be said, that nature, exquisite in its tenderness and its reserve, no longer finding anything that comprehended its feelings, gave itself up to grief with all ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... from Catalonia and Valencia. Farther up is seen the bridge of boats which traverses the water. The principal object of this prospect, however, is the Golden Tower, where the beams of the setting sun seem to be concentrated as in the focus, so that it appears built of pure gold, and probably from that circumstance received the name which it now bears. Cold, cold must the heart be which can remain insensible to the beauties of this magic scene, to do justice to which ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... that the Amadis series differs from its predecessors—the Arthurian romances, and those of the paladins of Charlemagne, which are detached adventures, each complete in itself, and not bearing to any common focus.—Amadis de Gaul (fourteenth century). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... moved it cautiously up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that over-topped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... at the times as they are, and see how the business of life is transacted. Manhattan Island has something over 2,500,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a belt of population, several miles wide, of 12,000,000 more, of which it is the focus, so that the entire city contains more than 14,500,000 souls. The several hundred square miles of land and water forming greater New York are perfectly united by numerous bridges, tunnels, and electric ferries, while the city's great ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... were adapters, he fitted the camera to the eyepiece of the telescope. "That's all there is to it. You focus the 'scope eyepiece by turning this knurled knob. Then you set the camera to infinity, adjust the iris for the proper light, and put the ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... beautiful woman of equally good repute who happens to be a prominent figure in the most exclusive circles of this country and the favourite sister of a leader on the Administration side in the United States Senate. Of course since the developments began to focus suspicion upon them, they have been watched. Yesterday at church Miss Ballister's wrist bag was picked. Along with things of no apparent significance, it contained a note received by her the day before from Goldsborough—Geltmann rather—reminding ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... your left!" Belle's thought drove in as he had never before felt it driven. Being a Prime, she did not need a focus spot and appeared the veriest instant later than ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found the best—placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective—though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... depend. A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... was not irritation he appeared to express, but the slight strain of an effort to get into relation with the subject. Better to focus the image he closed his ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Whence had he come? What interests were bound up in his life? Why was his body the focus of plot and counterplot, and its possession disputed with a fierce earnestness that stopped at no crime? Perhaps, could he be got to talk, the key of the mystery might be put in my hands. Out of the mouth of the ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... Africa and Spain? And with this religious outbreak, this great revival of monotheism in Asia, there came also as remarkable a renaissance of learning, which made the Arabs the teachers of philosophy and art to Europe during a long period. Arab Spain was a focus of light while Christian Europe lay in mediaeval darkness. And still more interesting and perplexing is the character of Mohammed himself. What was he,—an impostor or a prophet? Did his work advance ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... if you are to be a Christian, you must have your whole life concentrated on, and consecrated to, one thing; and, just as the vagrant rays of sunshine have to be collected into a focus before they burn, so the wandering manifoldnesses of our aims and purposes have all to be brought to a point, 'This one thing I do,' and whatsoever we do we have to do it as in God, and for God, and by God, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... whether Hume or Buckle will weigh heavier on his page. Or if one of them looks up from his desk in a blurred near-sighted manner, it is because his eyes have been so stretched upon the distant centuries, that they can hardly focus on a room. If a scholar chances to sneeze because of the infection, let it be his consolation that the dust arises from the most ancient and respected authors! Pages move silently about with tall dingy tomes in their arms. Other tomes, whose use is past, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... was closed off by a road barrier quite some distance away and tightly parked cars testified to the attraction of the expanding grass. Scorning these idle sightseers, I pushed and shoved my way forward to what had now become the focus of all ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... above said, that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the "mezzo del cammin" of the life of Dante. Now, therefore, to Giotto, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... preserved, pure and untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, and good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me out a half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for a quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remember ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his countenance or soften his heart to be assured that that withered husk of womanhood ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... again made the motion, as though he desired to take the glass. The savage took the loop from his neck, and handed the instrument to George. The latter put it to his eyes and pointed them to the east, carefully adjusting them to get the proper focus. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... excellent polish it is capable of. The diamond had nevertheless been placed at the head of crystals or precious stones by the mineralogists, till Bergman ranged it of late in the combustible class of bodies, because by the focus of Villette's burning mirror it was evaporated by a heat not much greater than will melt silver, and gave out light. Mr. Hoepfner however thinks the dispersion of the diamond by this great heat should be called a phosphorescent ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... see? They've nat'rally got a focus, an' w'en I 'appen to be standin' on a sunny day in front of 'em, contemplatin' the face o' natur', as it wor, through the lantern panes, if I gits into the focus by haccident, d'ye see, it just ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... things of the post and the woods crept into her heart, that seemed to her to be opening to a vague knowledge, to be looking down sweet vistas of which she had never dreamed among her other dreams of forest and lake and plain, and, at each distant focus where appeared a new glory of light, there was always the figure of the young factor with his anxious eyes. Strange new thrills raced hotly through her heart and dyed her cheeks in the darkness. She tingled from head ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... the Western diplomatists that the proceedings of the Poles was a violation of the treaty of Vienna, and that it was necessary to the integrity and peace of the Austrian empire that Cracow should be no longer a focus of rebellion. The Western governments satisfied themselves with protests, and the last green spot of Polish independence had its life stamped out by the foot ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... may call attention to the attempts made to receive the luminous impression upon a band prepared with gelatino-bromide of silver. In practice this band would unwind uniformly at the focus of the receiving telescope, which would be placed in a box, forming a camera obscura. The velocity of this band prepared for photographing the signals would be regulated by clockwork. The experiments that have been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... if the subject can be completely rendered by showing it as it appears to a single one of the figures in the book, then there is no reason to range further. Haphazard and unnecessary plunges into the inner life of the characters only confuse the effect, changing the focus without compensating gain. But which is the centre, which is the mind that really commands the subject? The answer is not always evident at once, nor does it seem to be always correctly divined in the novels that we read. But of course in plenty of stories there can be ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... This new gold-camp has not reached the blood-spilling stage yet. It hadn't, I should say. The news of this killing will fly. It'll focus minds on this claim-buyer, Blight. His deed rings true—like that of an honest man with a daughter to protect. He'll win sympathy. Then he talks as if he were prosperous. Soon he'll be represented in this changing, growing population ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... comes because it has been in the habit of coming from one's earliest childhood. The star divided into two, and all its beams swam about while his gaze remained fixed, and nothing seemed quite in the focus of ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... engineer (section D of the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further without my ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his ideas of art than a Beethoven or a Mozart. But it is not so. As too much light may blind the vision, so too much intellect may hinder the understanding. Berlioz's mind spent itself in details; it reflected light from too many facets, and did not focus itself in one strong beam which would have made known his power. He did not know how to dominate either his life or his work; he did not even try to dominate them. He was the incarnation of romantic genius, an unrestrained ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the thirteenth of December to find everywhere the peculiar flatness that always follows a day which for weeks has been the focus of one's ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... fiercely that the yacht stopped dead, unable to make headway against it. For a full minute or more it seemed as though half a dozen separate and distinct winds were battling together for the mastery, the yacht being the centre and focus round which the battle raged. We on the poop were buffeted helplessly this way and that, so that it was only with the utmost difficulty we could keep our feet; indeed, Mrs Vansittart was literally lifted off her feet for ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... of insisting on a maintenance of the old Constitution, went into alternative proposals—including the adoption of the Referendum. This was their constructive line; the destructive resolved itself largely into an endeavour to focus resistance on the question of Ireland—the purpose for which alone, they said, abolition of the veto was demanded. As has often happened, action taken by the Vatican gave the opponents of Home Rule a useful weapon. The Ne Temere decree, promulgated in the year 1908, laid down ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... together by stout copper wire, the shape being exactly that of the printing frame. The other end of the bamboos are tied with stout string to a piece of cardboard tube, postal tube, which slips over the lens. The length of the bamboos depends upon the focus of the lens and the amount of reduction. It will sometimes be found convenient to have the bamboo in two lengths; thus, supposing we want as a general rule 36 inches, two pieces, 24 inches each, should be obtained, and by fastening these together in the middle by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various |
