"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mind; words which such as the specksioneer used as counters to beguile and lead astray silly women. It was for him to prove his constancy by action; and the chances of his giving such proof were infinitesimal in Philip's estimation. But should the latter mention the bare fact of Kinraid's impressment to Robson? That would have been the natural course of things, remembering that the last time Philip had seen either, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... "every variation even the slightest," "every grade of constitutional difference," occur, and these have led to errors such as Mivart's, I say all this because I feel sure that Mivart would be the last to intentionally misrepresent you, and he has told me that he was sorry the word "infinitesimal," as applied to variations used by Natural Selection, got into his book, and that he would alter it, as no doubt he has done, in his ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... authors would fill as many pages as Johnson has filled lines, with the biographies of some of his heroes. By industriously sweeping together all the rubbish which is in any way connected with the great man, by elaborately discussing the possible significance of infinitesimal bits of evidence, and by disquisition upon general principles or the whole mass of contemporary literature, it is easy to swell volumes to any desired extent. The result is sometimes highly interesting and valuable, as it ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... as she pondered over her fear, analysing it as scrupulously as she always did those feelings which she felt it behoved her to understand once for all, she half discovered in it an element which only severe self-judgment would allow; it seemed to her that the fear was, in an infinitesimal degree, of herself, that, under other conditions, she might have known what it was to respond to the love thus offered her. For she neither scorned nor loathed the man, notwithstanding her abhorrence of ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... so placed at one end of the room that it looked a part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... the clouds of spray. Two things especially struck the observers: the water made but little curve or sweep on passing over the edge, and then rushed down to the abyss at almost lightning speed, shivering itself to infinitesimal particles on striking any rock or projection at the side. Its behaviour was, of course, due to its weight, and to the fact that on Jupiter bodies fall 40.98 feet the first second, instead of sixteen feet, as on earth, and at correspondingly increasing speed. Finding that ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... studied intently the dark wall of the east, and presently his eyes picked out a dot against its background, infinitesimal like the light of a firefly, but not to be ignored ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... yellows, and the vivid greens. Beyond were the mountains in their glory of volcanic rocks, rich as the tapestry of a Florentine palace. And, modifying all the others, the tinted atmosphere of the south-west, refracting the sun through the infinitesimal earth motes thrown up constantly by the wind devils of the desert, drew before the scene a delicate and gauzy veil of lilac, of rose, of saffron, of amethyst, or of mauve, according to the time of day. Senor Johnson discovered ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... each individual produces every year an infinite number of seeds, and an infinitesimal number of these survive. In the animals, the number of young of each individual diminishes and the number of those who survive continues on the contrary, to increase. Finally, for the human species, the number of individuals ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... power of concentration was gone again. He simply paced on mechanically, listening to a Babel of questions, a conflicting medley of answers. But above all the confusion and turmoil of his brain, as a boatswain's whistle rises above a storm, so sounded that same infinitesimal voice, incessantly repeating another question now, 'What are you going to do? What ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... spire, quite too heavy for the twig delicacy below; undisturbed by the mare's hoofs or the creaking of saddle leather, he let us pass, absorbed in his world of tranquil turtledoves. The mist had thickened to a white, infinitesimal rain-dust, and in it the trees began to look strange, as though they had lost one another. The world seemed inhabited only by quick, soundless ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of universal suffrage is the infinitesimal subdivision of personal responsibility. The guilt of every national sin comes back to the voter in a fraction the denominator of which is several millions. It is idle to talk of the responsibility of officials to their constituencies or to the people. The President of the United States, during his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, "Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in quiet rambles with Angela, in the midst of a landscape transfigured by that vernal beauty which begins with the waning of April, and is past and vanished before the end of May, Denzil loved to expound the wonders of the infinitesimal; the insect life that sparkled and hummed in the balmy air, or flashed like living light among the dewy grasses; the life of plant and flower, which seemed almost as personal and conscious a form ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... boys were to be landed at Su'u and with wild gesticulations and cries they began to recognize and point out the infinitesimal details of the landfall of the only spot they had known on earth prior to the day, three years before, when they had been sold into slavery by ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... It hit me right between the eyes. I knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period and ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... pretensions, it is but fair to look in both directions. And then what we lose above we gain below. The revelations of the microscope balance those of the telescope. The animalcula magnify man as much as the nebulsa belittle him. We cannot help believing that He who frames and provides for those infinitesimal animals quadrillions of whom might inhabit a drop of water or a leaf and have ample room and verge enough, and whose vital and muscular organization is as complicated and perfect as that of an elephant, will much more take care of man, no matter how numerous the constellations ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... madame, is named Gabriel Jean Anne Victor Benjamin George Ferdinand Charles Edward Rusticoli, Comte de la Palferine. The Rusticolis came to France with Catherine de Medici, having been ousted about that time from their infinitesimal Tuscan sovereignty. They are distantly related to the house of Este, and connected by marriage to the Guises. On the day of Saint-Bartholomew they slew a goodly number of Protestants, and Charles IX. ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... breathed into matter under one or a few forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian—are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of the ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... hands and the features, surprises and startles the spectator. "By nature and by education," says M. Paul Bourget, "M. Ed. de Goncourt possesses an intelligence, the overacuteness of which verges on disease in its comprehension of infinitesimal gradations and of the infinitely subtle creature." Mr. Rothenstein has made this intelligence flash from every ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... especially interesting with relation to the Winter Journey and the tragedy of the Polar Party. The general tend of friction set up by a sledge-runner upon snow of ordinary temperature may be called true sliding friction: it is probable that the runners melt to an infinitesimal degree the millions of crystal points over which they glide: the sledge is running upon water. Crystals in such temperatures are larger and softer than those encountered in low temperatures. It is now that halos may be seen in the snow, almost reaching ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... even thought. The things which are great, which have significance, which have meaning to the human mind are lost in such a world. Life itself becomes infinitesimal. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... vicissitudes and fluctuations. Mindful of this permanent lesson, some members of the trade originated this society, which affords them assistance in time of sickness and indigence. The subscription is infinitesimal. It amounts annually to five shillings. Looking at the returns before me, the progress of the society would seem to be slow, but it has only been slow for the best of all reasons, that it has been sure. The pensions granted are all obtained from the interest on the funded ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... having been cast, in the same infinitesimal whispers we made our arrangements, which were few and simple. They amounted to this—that we were to creep on to the men and each of us to kill that one who was opposite to him, I with the axe and Hans with his knife, remembering that it must be done with a single stroke—that ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... and customs, and arts, and institutions, and literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... were all in the high barn, feeding the greedy maw of the threshing machine; a business which strained muscles and backs, and choked noses and throats with infinitesimal particles of oil and the fine flying chaff. He watched Rachel a few minutes as she lifted and pitched—a typical figure of a New Labour, which is also a New Beauty, on this old earth. Then he drew her away, flung off his tunic, and took her place, while she, ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and braces and hove the vessel to so as to steady her as they worked, but she still labored heavily in the sea, and beneath them they could hear the leaden swish of water in the floor of the hold beneath. Their labor was having its effect, and by infinitesimal gradations they were counteracting the list and getting the ship upright; but the wind was worsening, and it seemed to them also that the water was getting deeper under their feet, and that the vessel ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... lustily as they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the bride in the Canticles. "Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee." She was killingly dressed in the rural-simplicity style. All her robes and sashes were of purest white; and a knot of field-daisies and grasses, with French dew-drops on them, twinkled in an infinitesimal bonnet on her little head, and her hair was all creped into a filmy golden aureole round her face. In short, dear reader, she was a perfectly got-up angel, and wanted only some tulle clouds and an opening heaven to have gone up at once, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the solitude of Nature. I felt free and happy; I sank into the state of bliss in which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surely this is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp; surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Our consciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: let us then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony of being at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaks and my moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields and slums, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... scores of thousands of individuals among some forty million people, who were rich. These indeed had incredible accumulations, but the remainder of the forty millions—the whole people, in fact, save an infinitesimal fraction—were sunk in poverty. It is said that England had a larger and more hopeless pauper problem than any other civilized nation. The condition of her working masses was not only more wretched than that of many contemporary people, but was worse, as proved by ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... facts as they are. The cabinet will fall amid a general outcry, there will be a few riots, but we shall have peace ... and peace, as you, monsieur, were saying a moment ago, peace without dishonour, at the price of an infinitesimal sacrifice of self-esteem, which will ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... faith be false, the temple of human thought falls to wreck, and behold! we know not anything and have no way of learning. But the fact that the universe is intelligible, that we can follow its forces, trace its laws, and make a map of it, finding the infinite even in the infinitesimal, shows that the mind of man is akin to the Mind that made it. Also, there are two aspects of the nature of man which lift him above the brute and bespeak his divine heredity. They are reason and conscience, both of ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... me. I mean that when you see a Woman, you ought—besides inferring her breadth—to see her length, and to SEE what we call her HEIGHT; although the last Dimension is infinitesimal in your country. If a Line were mere length without "height," it would cease to occupy Space and would become invisible. Surely you must ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... frequent use of the whole tone "scale" which can have no other rationale than a violent extension of the enharmonic principle.[A] With a certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the harmonic manner of Cesar Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the French are perhaps most prone,—an originality ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... fortress; each foe has his special tactics, contrived with appalling skill. See, an egg is inserted by means of a probe beside the torpid larva; or else, in the absence of such an implement, an infinitesimal grub, an atom, comes creeping and crawling, slips in and reaches the sleeper, who will never wake again, already a succulent morsel for her ferocious visitor. The interloper makes the victim's cell and cocoon ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... infinitesimal space of time, Burnett stood in the sunshine of Tessibel's smile, his austere churlishness was slipping from him like a loosened garment. As if forced by an unseen hand, he took one ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... she sobbed so; it must be given up, and she must just carry her baby in her arms, and take him with her to the office, for it was long past dinner-time. So she pared the mutton carefully, although by so doing she reduced the meat to an infinitesimal quantity, and taking the baked potatoes out of the oven, she popped them piping hot into her basket with the et-caeteras of plate, butter, salt, and ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... It was not because my hand got moist, for it did not. No evaporation was going on there, nor any condensation either. Nor did noticeable bubbles form because there was no motion in the mass which might have caused the infinitesimal droplets to collide and to coalesce into something perceivable to ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... quilts that have been made expressly for display in exhibitions at state fairs in the Middle West. One such collection, worthy of special notice, consists of seven quilts: three of elaborate designs in patchwork and four made up of infinitesimal pieces. Every stitch, both on the handsome tops and in the perfect quilting, was wrought with careful patience by an old-time quilt maker. The aggregate amount of stitching upon these seven quilts seems enough to constitute the work of a ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... plant down, fluffy bits from cat-tails, and the fronds of fern, felting the material into a circle that an elm-leaf amply roofs over. Outside, lichens or bits of bark blend the nest so harmoniously with its surroundings that one may look long and thoroughly before discovering it. Two infinitesimal, white eggs tax the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... literature for what it is and no more. It is, at best, only a description of an infinitesimal bit of reality. The more minutely accurate it is, the more limited it must be in its field. You must not expect to get a comprehensive view through a high-powered microscope. The author is severely ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... prodigality which seems well-nigh inexhaustible. No doubt the earth does intercept a fair supply of sunbeams for conversion to our many needs; but the share of sun-heat that the dwelling-place of mankind is able to capture and employ forms only an infinitesimal fraction of what the sun actually pours forth. It would seem, indeed, very presumptuous for us to assume that the great sun has come into existence solely for the benefit of poor humanity. The heat and light daily lavished by that orb of incomparable splendor would suffice to warm and ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... Samstag, even in her lovely pink night-dress, a crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed, unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with the cunning born ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was to be educated were four young girls from Philadelphia, older than the newcomer by two years, and who, also, had left America for the first time. They brought with them the unconquerable aversion to negro blood and that wonderful keenness in discovering it, even in the most infinitesimal degree, which distinguishes real Yankees. Little Lydia Chapron, having been entered as French, they at first hesitated in the face of a suspicion speedily converted into a certainty and that certainty into an aversion, which they could not conceal. They would not have been children had they ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... Jonathan Scott, Lane and Payne, "the whole being blended by a callida junctura into a homogeneous mass." But as a matter of fact his obligations to Scott and Lane, both of whom left much of the Nights untranslated, and whose versions of it were extremely clumsy and incorrect, were infinitesimal; whereas, as we shall presently prove, practically the whole of Burton is founded on the whole of Payne. We trust, however, that it will continually be borne in mind that the warm friendship which existed between Burton and Payne was never for a moment interrupted. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... they come down to the East End as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... only in military but also in civil life, and generally are not unfamiliar with orderly or court-room proceedings. Is it right that all should be condemned because of the capricious behaviour of an infinitesimal section? Is it Christ-like to condemn those whose actions are called into question? Even they are not beyond the pale of reformation and ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... a counter, an infinitesimal atom. It was considered simply the property of the parent. Its father had power of life and death over it. The homeless dog that roams the streets to-day is more effectively shielded from cruelty than was the friendless child ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... each three feet ten inches in height. They were pages at Court, and Charles I. gave away the female infinitesimal. ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... new life:—cleaning pans, washing jars, sorting herbs, scouring pails, running numberless infinitesimal errands, doing everything that nobody else liked, hard-worked from morning to night, and called up from her hard pallet to recommence her toil before she had realised that she was asleep. Ursula's temper, too, did not improve with time; and Parnel, the associate and contemporary of Maude, was ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... speak of the savage Andamanese in his wild state, and not of the specimens to be seen at Port Blair, who have become in an infinitesimal degree civilised—that is to say, to the extent of holding intercourse with foreigners, making some slight additions to their argillaceous dress-suits, and understanding the principles of exchange and ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... became engaged, and suddenly poured out everything to his love, but for the present he and Harold were content to go through life never saying anything about themselves to anybody. In fact, they hardly ever thought of Henrietta. She would have been astonished if she had known what an infinitesimal difference she made ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... pinch of powder, or a few drops from a vial in his pocket The contents of this vial were never the same, for the doctor made new scientific discoveries each week, but in general bicarbonate, alkalies, and arsenic (in infinitesimal doses fortunately) made the base of these medicaments. Jack submitted to these preventives, and did not venture to say that he thought they tasted very badly. Occasionally the other professors were invited, and everybody drank the health of the little De Barancy, every one was enthusiastic ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... demonstration to prove, that in the highest departments, no less than in the lowest, something more than knowledge is needed in order to teach. An understanding of how to communicate one's knowledge, and practical skill in doing it, are as necessary in teaching theology, metaphysics, languages, infinitesimal analysis, or chemistry, as they are in teaching the alphabet. If there are bunglers, who know not how to go to work to teach a child its letters, or to open its young mind and heart to the reception of truth, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the ministry of symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation which the eye of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it about. Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Bengali schoolboys, who appreciated his manners, and sent him with urbanity flat baskets of mangoes and nuts and oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round boxes of white grapes in ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... authorities tell us that in running for a harbour on a tempestuous night, or in other critical emergencies, even a yard of sea-room is often of great consequence, so it may conceivably happen that to the infinitesimal influence of the transit of Venus on the "Nautical Almanac" is due the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... unquestionably wished to fight; but that numerical majority included perhaps a minority of the native-born Americans, a small minority certainly of the richer or more well-to-do among them, and an almost infinitesimal proportion of the best educated of the native-born. This is what ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Mr. Dillon, by the fact that in the classic case—Adams v. Dunseath—tried out in accordance with Mr. Gladstone's panacea, Adams, after repeated lawsuits, improved his financial position by an infinitesimal sum per annum without becoming an owner of his farm. It was also agreed that the Estates Commissioners appointed to administer the Act, should be administrative officials under the Government, and not amateur ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... to me that the amount of genuine interest in the sport and the animals was infinitesimal compared with the fictitious excitement worked up ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reason why it should be made the best of. I don't know (I think I have observed, my name is Bull) that a Parisian of the lowest order is particularly delicate, or that his nature is remarkable for an infinitesimal infusion of ferocity; but, I do know, my potent, grave, and common counselling Signors, that he is forced, when at this work, to submit himself to a thoroughly good system, and to make an Englishman very heartily ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... been previously shown that an impacted colon is neither more nor less than a prolific hot-bed for the wholesale breeding of disease germs—microbes—those infinitesimal organisms which science has demonstrated to be the cause of many phases of disease, or rather, the toxins (poisons) they produce, cause disease. Of course, there are harmless micro-organisms as well as hurtful ones; in fact, a large proportion of them are ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... plans of ours this dashed away. But our disappointment is truly an infinitesimal drop in the great waves of triumph and despair surging to-night in thousands ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Quarter. There was a tiny gas range, a convenience not often enjoyed as gas was a luxury not as a rule afforded in Bohemia. The floor was of octagonal, terra cotta tiles and there was a high mullioned window over the infinitesimal sink. Long-handled copper skillets and stew pans were ranged along the walls, suspended from hooks; and a strangely colored china press filled with an odd assortment of dishes was ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... He had no experience of children of that early age. His own daughters had been some years older before he began to notice them. He could but wonder at this quick and eager brain animating so infinitesimal a body. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... alloying or compounding of the parts of these three together. In this theory of the threefold division of the primitive elements lies the earliest germ of the later distinction (especially in the Sa@mkhya school) of pure infinitesimal substances (tanmatra) and gross elements, and the theory that each gross substance is composed of the atoms of the primary elements. And in Pras'na IV. 8 we find the gross elements distinguished ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... were so appropriated as to better enable them to pay the large general tax for the aggregate sum. No one hears any complaint regarding the sum necessary to support the General Government, except by those in remote districts, who have but an infinitesimal interest involved, but an imaginary part of the sum to pay, and who, producing but little, and having nothing to do, assume the right to manage the affairs of those who really have something at stake. The American people are willing and anxious that their money shall be expended for their ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... ten paces in front of it. In fact this sort of shooting is extremely difficult till the sportsman understands it. The inexperienced hand firing across a line of buck will not kill once in twenty shots, as an infinitesimal difference in elevation, or the slightest error in judging distance—in itself no easy art on those great plains—will spoil his aim. A Boer almost invariably gets immediately behind a herd of running buck, and fires at ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... on if it be cold, in our shirtsleeves if it be sultry.... I'll not demand either green socks or scarlet ornaments. I'll even try and be serious for the space of two minutes, sir, and confine my whole attention—the product of my infinitesimal brain—to thinking out some pleasant detail for this duel, which might be acceptable to you. Thus, sir, the thought of weapons springs to my mind.... Swords you said, I think. Sir! I will e'en restrict my choice of conditions to ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... immediate danger. The poison has evidently been administered in infinitesimal doses. But you cannot too soon withdraw yourself from all those who now surround you. Life is not to be tampered with. The poisoner may take it into his head to increase ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Lane could grasp some infinitesimal truth of the sublime and horrible change war had wrought in the souls of soldiers. That change was too great for any mind but the omniscient to grasp in its entirety. War had killed in some soldiers a belief ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... plants might not be further exhibited by means of visible mechanical response, thus fully removing the distinction commonly assumed to exist between the 'sensitive' and supposed 'non-sensitive.' Dr. Bose invented 'special apparatus of extreme delicacy,' which detected infinitesimal tremors, and showed that ordinary plants, usually regarded as insensitive, gave motile responses, which had hitherto passed unnoticed. His later investigation shows that "all plants, even the trees, are fully alive to ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... principle before the year 1895, but few, if any, during the past fifteen years. The experience of Massachusetts, where sentiment was strongly for it, shows that the women take very little interest in the matter; an infinitesimal percentage of the total female population voting upon election day, even when a prominent woman was the leading candidate for the ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... gives results of most amazing accuracy, and is such a simple affair that, if its mere name did not inspire terror, any fourth-form schoolboy could easily be made to understand it, and even taught to use it. What we call the soul may be infinite or infinitesimal, or finite, or it may be the Hegelian Nothing, which is Pure Being under another name; whatever it is, our acquaintance with it is not knowledge of it, since whatever we can find out about it is based on the Criticism exercised by Pure Reason and not on experience; and the information which ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... August in the Congressman's home across the big river. This fact alone was enough to stir the Crow establishment to its most infinitesimal roots. Rosalie was to be one of the guests at the house party, but her foster-sisters were not the kind to be envious. They revelled with her in the preparations for ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... in. The others followed, then the man who had bounced out. He closed the door and shut us in, where we stood in solemn silence. About a quarter of an hour afterwards I thought I saw something through the glass moving slowly downward, and then an infinitesimal thrill in the soles of my feet led ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... window, it gave no light. And illusions came to Lieutenant Fevrier, such as will come to the bravest man so long as he listens hard enough in the dark—illusions of stealthy footsteps on the floor, of hands scraping and feeling along the walls, of a man's breathing upon his neck, of many infinitesimal ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... go to pieces nervously if you are obliged to repeat a remark to some one who did not understand you? I have known a home to be ruined by just such infinitesimal annoyances. It is a habit, like the ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with a very dull one. Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of "Sandy's Mull," preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apparitions come in an infinitesimal moment of sleep, while a man is conscious of his surroundings and believes himself to be awake was the current explanation of ghosts in the eighteenth century. Any educated man who "saw a ghost" or "had a hallucination" called it a "dream," as Lord Brougham ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... the spring-bearing segment, and situated on the median line of the body. It consists (Fig. 163) of two squarish valves, from between which projects a pair of minute tubercles, or blades, with four rounded teeth on the under side. This pair of infinitesimal saws reminds one of the blades of the saw-fly, and I am at a loss what their use can be unless to cut and pierce so as to scoop out a shallow place in which to deposit an egg. It is homologous in situation with the middle pair of blades which composes the ovipositor of ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... me with some severity, he declared: "There are nine hundred and ninety-nine chances in a thousand that my next word to you will be to prepare yourself for Mr. Durand's arraignment and trial. But an infinitesimal chance remains to the contrary. If you choose to trust to it, I can only admire your pluck and the great confidence you show in your ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... conservatism, even of the great tacit corporation of lawyers, would have to yield. The supremacy of Eldon was beginning to be shaken. Sir Robert Peel began to reform the criminal law about 1827, taking up the work upon which Bentham's friend and disciple, Romilly, had laboured for years with infinitesimal results. Commissions were appointed to work upon legal reforms. With parliamentary reform an era of rapid and far-reaching changes set in, though Bentham died on the eve of entering the land ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... head to foot the little body in his arms stiffened suddenly. As one who saw the supreme achievement of a life-time swept away by some one careless joggle of an infinitesimal part, the Little Girl stared up agonizingly into her father's face. "Oh, I don't think—'buzzed' was the word!" she began convulsively. "Oh, ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... local word for 'truck'—paying in kind instead of in money. You see, the butties and the owners between them used to own the public-houses and the provision-shops, and the amount of coin of the realm the men got in wages in the bad old times was infinitesimal. They were expected to drink the butty's beer, and consume the butty's provisions—at the butty's prices, of course—and the butty kept the accounts. Oh! it was an abomination! but of course it was done away with ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... approaching the door, when he saw an unwelcome sight which brought him to a sudden stop. That sight was a long feathery tail, waving above a clump of ferns to the left. Was it possible that the monster was loose? The gate was between Mr Bastian and that tail, in an infinitesimal space of time. Ignorant of the presence of the enemy, the wind being in the wrong direction, Jack finished at leisure his inspection of the ferns, ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... investigation back upon scholastic methods. Again reappears the old system of solving the riddle by phrases. In 1733, Dr. Theodore Arnold urged the theory of "models," and insisted that fossils result from "infinitesimal particles brought together in the creation to form the outline of all the creatures and objects upon and within the earth"; and Arnold's work gained ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... flap, addressed to David Drexley, Esq., in a handwriting distinctly feminine. He singled it out from the rest, held it for a moment between his thumb and broad forefinger, and then turned his chair round, abandoning the rest of his correspondence as a matter of infinitesimal consequence. A letter from her was by no means an everyday affair, for she was a woman of caprices, as who should know better than he? There were weeks during which it was her pleasure to hold herself aloof from him—and others—when the servants ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... far as manifested by the Creative Thought. To compare littleness with infinity,—Arkwright, as inventor of the spinning-jenny, and not the man Arkwright otherwise and beyond that. All we can know of the Very God is, compared to His Wholeness, only as an infinitesimal fraction of a unit, compared with an infinity ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... cycle of incarnation realises only an infinitesimal fraction of the total progress made, each being advances only one step at a time along this interminable series; but then, are not these minor "cycles" in the course of which brings grow and advance towards the final Goal, the visible, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Consumptive people are apt to take a somewhat hectic view of life in every way; they lack the common-sense ballast that makes most of us able to value the lives of a few hundred poor distant savages at their proper infinitesimal figure. At any rate, Ernest Le Breton, as a matter of fact, rightly or wrongly, did take this curious standpoint about things in general; and did then and there turn back through the deep snow, all his soul burning within him, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... we will try and avoid personalities altogether in talk, won't we? We will range the fields of science, dear madam, and communicate to each other the pleasing results of our studies. We will, if you please, examine the infinitesimal wonders of nature through the microscope. We will cultivate entomology. We will sit with our arms round each other's waists on the pons asinorum, and see the stream of mathematics flow beneath. We will take refuge in cards, and play at "beggar my neighbour", not abuse my neighbour. We will ...
— English Satires • Various
... was the question of contraband. Orders were very precise on the subject; the Cabinet had limitless power since the opening of the war; if there was any smuggling it was infinitesimal, and, as to foodstuffs, Switzerland regretted she could not import more for her own needs. The Government had established a monopoly and forbidden re-exportation, but supplies were not up to the normal. The route by the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... hand, and that every intellectual impulse, whether it pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickmaker, goes, with whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic influences, and tells with some operative power, however imperceptible and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that everything tells on everything, and there is no one specific cause, primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists say, but to common apprehensions ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... interested in Lurcher for his own miserable sake, too. He had lived by himself in this wretched lodging for years. How he lived he did not say; but it was evident that his income was both infinitesimal and uncertain. ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... it took not very long, proceeded by infinitesimal gradations. His faculties decayed together steadily; the power of his limbs was almost gone, he was extremely deaf, his speech had sunk into mere mumblings; and yet to the end he managed to discover something of his former ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doing this thing, of effecting this creation, this separation from himself such that will in the creature shall be possible—I imagine, I say, the difficulty of such creation so great, that for it God must begin inconceivably far back in the infinitesimal regions of beginnings—not to say before anything in the least resembling man, but eternal miles beyond the last farthest-pushed discovery in protoplasm—to set in motion that division from himself which in ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... a conscience, and a peculiarly delicate one too. Without any fault of his own, he had behaved dishonourably to Vincent; and apart from the blow to his own honour, it was evident that what stung him now was remorse for his infinitesimal share in the causes that ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... dapper, pocket; portative[obs3], portable; duodecimo[obs3]; dumpy, squat; short &c. 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen|!, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c. (narrow) 203; granular &c. (powdery) 330; shrunk &c. 195; brevipennate[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... course, absolutely black and devoid of any form of light save the faint twinklings of the far-off stars. Without the surface of some globe to reflect the sun's rays, no light of any kind would be possible; so that if life were conveyed across space, from star to star, upon infinitesimal specks of dust, under the influence of light pressure, as postulated by Arrhenius (Worlds in the Making, pp. 212-30), this life must exist, and in a sense originate, in the blackness of inter-stellar space.[10] And, finally, if life on our globe ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... piece-bag and produced an infinitesimal scrap of green voile. Young Mrs. Thompson accepted ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... men to sit with their heads bare in our churches, while women must wear bonnets, is based on this ancient custom of the Nazarine. But as fashion is gradually reducing the bonnet to an infinitesimal fraction it will probably in the near future be dispensed with altogether. A lady in England made the experiment of going to the established church without her bonnet, but it created such an agitation in the congregation that the Bishop wrote her a letter on the impropriety ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... her hands for ever; then, too, no doubt would come horror, remorse and the malediction of the gods. Then so be it. That would she take upon herself. What must be suffered, that she would suffer: the torments of remorse would be infinitesimal compared with the awful sacrilege which the Caesar's hand would perpetrate, were he allowed access to the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... however, had no idea of leaving the window just yet, although he knew—yes, knew—that his presence there was a wrong done to Madelon Frehlter; but a wrong so small, so infinitesimal, that it ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... times to pull the house down, by her violence in this condition. She had strength like a lion, and no man could manage her. I saw the same thing in the hospital later. This aunt is now healthy; not cured by her own prescriptions or the magnetic or infinitesimal doses of Dr. Arthur Lutze, but by a strong emotion which took possession of her at the time of my great-aunt's death. She is not sorry that she has lost all these strange powers, but heartily glad of it. When she afterwards visited us in Berlin, she could speak calmly and ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... made plausible by adding the hypothesis that the accumulating mud of centuries has filled up the lakes, so that they now are only shallow ponds. But this by no means removes the difficulty, for then, as now, the waters of the southern laguna flowed into Tezcuco, conveying with them the infinitesimal infusion of tequisquite that had instilled itself into the Chalco. Had the volume of Chalco and Xochimulco been increased several feet, then the slight Indian barriers and the long grass would no longer have been able to retard ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... or immoral the cosmic process, as measured by infinitesimal human emotion, one conviction remained with him that no logic could impair: the certainty that man should pursue the highest moral ideal with all his power to the unknown end, even though the suns ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... social existence, it may be proper to say that "Providence," operating through men, has generated morality. Within the limits of a fraction of a fraction of the living world, therefore, there is a "moral" providence. Through this small plot of an infinitesimal fragment of the universe there runs a "stream of tendency towards righteousness." But outside the very rudimentary germ of a garden of Eden, thus watered, I am unable to discover any "moral" purpose, or anything but a stream of purpose towards the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... study, he paused for an infinitesimal length of time on the threshold, as if conscious of something being amiss, then went into the room beyond, and, without a glance in the direction of the rug, which had been carefully relaid on the spot where his master had fallen, began to make such arrangements for the night ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... and to seek perfect passionless tranquillity. Then we may hope to die. Meditation, if it be deep, and long, and frequent enough, will teach even our practical Western mind to understand the Hindu mind in its yearning for Nirvana. One infinitesimal atom of the great conglomerate of humanity, who enjoys the temporal, sensual life, with its gratifications and excitements, as much as most, will testify with unaffected sincerity that he would rather be annihilated altogether ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... conditions of marriage and divorce in the eugenic sense, and will serve the cause of what I have elsewhere called "preventive eugenics," which strives to protect healthy stocks from the "racial poisons," such as venereal disease, alcohol, and, in a relatively infinitesimal degree, lead. These are ends good and necessary in themselves, whether attained by a special dispensation from on high, or by decree of an earthly autocrat or a democracy of either sex or both. For these ends we must work, and for all the means whereby to attain them; ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... moreover, is not altogether negative, as Dr. Osler implies. The discovery of the minute cell as the basis of the human organism on the one hand and of the unlimited divisibility of matter on the other hand explains the rationality of the infinitesimal dose. Health and disease are resident in the cell; therefore, the homeopath doctors the cell, and the size of the dose has to be apportioned to the size of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... are used, as is generally the case in cheddar making, the number of bacteria added is so infinitesimal ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... outposts of the forest high above the plain, and to our right the whole panorama lay snoozing in haze. The path by which we had turned our backs on Monty and Kagig went winding away and away below, here and there an infinitesimal thin line of slightly lighter color, but more often suggested by the contour of the hills. Our Zeitoonli in their zeal to return to their leader had been evidently cutting corners. If the smudge of smoke to the right front overhung Marash, then we were ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... the order of my going. I rocked perilously, and my crutches made a furious clatter, but I was outside in a truly infinitesimal space of time. Yes; there they were, chatting with Dunny, who had hurried to meet them. And at sight of me the Firefly of France ran forward with hands extended, greeting me as if I were his oldest friend, his brother, his dearest ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... by the pressure of two keys, and when the ribbon is transferred to the casting machine these space perforations so govern the casting that the line of type delivered at the "galley" complete shall be of exactly the proper length, and the spaces between the words be equal to the infinitesimal fraction of ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... here, or whither he is going, man feels himself of supreme importance, and certainly is of interest—to himself. Let us hope that he has indeed a potency and importance out of all proportion to his somatic insignificance. We know of toxins of such strength that an amount too infinitesimal to be gauged may kill; and we know that "the unit adopted in certain scientific work is the amount of emanation produced by one million-millionth of a grain of radium, a quantity which itself has a ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... of our watches. The merchant, with his lens, examines the separate threads of woolen and silk fabrics to determine the strength and value of the material. The physician, with his invaluable microscope, counts the number of infinitesimal corpuscles in the blood and bases his prescription on that count; he examines the sputum of a patient to determine whether tuberculosis wastes the system. The bacteriologist with the same instrument scrutinizes the drinking water and learns whether the dangerous typhoid germs are present. The ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... no work, no added income for either of them, saving two trifles, for five long months. Once Lewisham won twelve shillings in the prize competition of a penny weekly, and three times came infinitesimal portions of typewriting from a poet who had apparently seen the Athenaeum advertisement. His name was Edwin Peak Baynes and his handwriting was sprawling and unformed. He sent her several short lyrics on scraps of paper with instructions that he desired "three copies of ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... the work he wished me to perform. He was inexorable, unyielding. I pointed out that my service was not worth what he offered. I showed him that he could get experienced and expert men to do the work for an infinitesimal part of what he proposed to give me. He asserted that he was not giving me this merely for my labor, but on account of past favors and things I had done for him which could not be paid for in money. Even though I did not permit him to force me into consenting to take this share of his mine, I finally ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... that side of the river there was no mountain stream to flume, no possibility of bringing it, even from a long distance, through a ditch, so the slow and laborious process he was employing seemed the only method of recovering the gold that was but an infinitesimal proportion of what he ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... of free will to the infinitesimal, that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... that, it must be confessed, are of almost no importance to the welfare of mankind? Why should we be so easily awed by artistic genius and exalt men whose works we know only by name, perhaps, and whose influence upon society has been infinitesimal, like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while we regard great merchants and inventors as ignoble creatures in comparison? Why should we smile at the inscription in Westminster Abbey which calls the inventor of the spinning-jenny one of the true benefactors of mankind? Is it ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... us always of the suffering and misery entailed, from which no country in Europe will escape by abstention, and from which no neutrality will save us. The amount of harm that can be done by an enemy ship to our trade is infinitesimal, compared with the amount of harm that must be done by the economic condition that is ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... is usually eaten about 7 or 7.30 o'clock, on the earth floor, as is the breakfast. A light is used, a bright, smoking blaze of the pitch pine. It burns on a flat stone kept ready in every house — it is certainly the first and crudest house lamp, being removed in development only one infinitesimal step from the Stationary fire. This light is also sometimes employed at breakfast time, if the morning meal is ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... because he moves among people most of whom have an affection for England almost as deep as his own, while all are courteous enough to respect his prejudices. This class is large in actual numbers, no doubt, but in proportion to the whole American people it is infinitesimal, and would be a mere featherweight in the scale at any moment of crisis. Its voice is clearly audible in literature and even in journalism, but at the polls it would be as a whisper to the thunder of Niagara. The traveller who ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grunewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nobler serpent without his venom,— poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag. Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably experience a certain gratification in this infinitesimal sense of danger. It was noted that the old people retained their hearing longer than in other places. Some said it was the softened climate, but others believed it was owing to the habit of keeping their ears open whenever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... faith, a religion that gets its good vicariously and shifts its sins and responsibilities on to the past, is a religion that can never elevate character; it simply makes a man more intensely what he was before. It is all self, self, self. Think of the infinitesimal smallness, the irredeemable worthlessness, the unutterable meanness of a soul that could forsake those it had loved, and be happy believing that they were suffering ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... even languish to any perceptible degree. Nevertheless, the detriment was there, a steadily cumulative factor, and at the end of any given period of pressing the commerce of the nation, emasculated by these continuous if infinitesimal abstractions from its vitality, was substantially less in bulk, substantially less in pounds sterling, than if it had been allowed to run ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... doubt—in favour of taking risks which the smaller liners would never take. The demand on the skipper of a boat like the Californian, for example, which lay hove-to nineteen miles away with her engines stopped, is infinitesimal compared with that on Captain Smith. An old traveller told me on the Carpathia that he has often grumbled to the officers for what he called absurd precautions in lying to and wasting his time, which he regarded as very valuable; but after hearing of the Titanic's loss he recognized ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley |
