"Infinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... climbed up on to the heights of the Sahara. It had pleased Margaret to feel that her feet were pressing the sands of the great African desert. She had never dreamed that their valley was actually a rift in the rocks of the Sahara, that ocean of sand which travels on and on to infinity. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... tried, but with hilariously futile results. Nature had endowed him, as he told his loyal comrade, Butch Brewster, with "the Herculean build of a Jersey mosquito," and his athletic powers neared zero infinity. In his Freshman year, he inaugurated his athletic career by running the wrong way in the Sophomore-Freshman football game, scoring a touchdown that won for the enemy, and naturally, after that performance, every athletic effort was greeted with jeers ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... generations. Now, the reviewer declares that such indefinite succession of ages is "virtually infinite," "lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name," at least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether upon that idea of the infinite' ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... sleep's dear death (it seemed) I rose and strolled along the sea Down silver distances that faintly gleamed On to infinity. ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... progress of a day in the future, must exceed that of a century in the past. Knowledge is enthroned as a king, and grand truths and new ideas are his ministers. Science takes the diameter of the earth's orbit as a base line and unit of measurement, and with it spans infinity, and triangulates the nebulous systems amid the shadowy verges of receding space. Its researches are cosmical upon the earth and the heavens, and all the elements minister to its progress. Sink to the lowest mine, or fathom the ocean's depth, or climb the loftiest mountains, or career through ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pursue their nightly march across the heavens, cruel day would follow pitiless night, and the careless earth follow its accustomed orbit as though the race were not writhing in its death agony. Gazing into the infinity of space human existence seemed but the scum upon a rainpool, human warfare but the frenzy of insectivora. Unmindful of the starving hordes of Paris and Berlin, of plague-swept Russia, or of the drowned thousands of the North Baltic ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... to be attended to—suffrage conventions, council meetings, the great Woman's Congress at the World's Fair, State campaigns, Industrial School matters, lecture engagements—the list seemed to stretch out into infinity, and it is no wonder that it appalled ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... dream?" I said to myself. "Surely not. The earth is not the only home of life in the universe. Urania, the celestial muse, is now unfolding before our astonished eyes the panoramas of infinity, and we know at last that we are not the children of the earth, but citizens of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... mirrors, Stark and brilliant in the sunshine, Blank as the desert, Blank as the Sphinx, Winking golden eyes in the twinkles of light, Silent, immutable, vacuous infinity, Illimitable capacity for ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... wove a network round my wakeful life for many years past. The outlook is endless, for the goal is at infinity. The realisation cannot be through one life or one fortune but through the co-operation of many lives and many fortunes. The possibility of a fuller expansion will depend on very large endowments. But a beginning must be made, ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... their nearly inaccessible lairs, and outlying battlements, and ridges of grey rock with hardly six feet of level on their sinuous tops, and cedars in masses giving deep shadow, and sprays of scarlet maple or festoons of a crimson vine lighting the gloom. The inland view suggested infinity. There seemed no limit to the forest-covered mountains and the unlighted ravines. The wealth of vegetation was equal in luxuriance and entanglement to that of the tropics, primeval vegetation, on which the lumberer's axe has never rung. ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... swept over the land of the Five Rivers. Even Islam did not break the power of caste, and very distinct traces of caste still survive amongst the Mahomedan community itself. But nowhere has caste been so much shaken as in the Punjab, for the infinity of sub-castes into which each caste has resolved itself gives the measure of its disintegration. Sikhism still represents the most successful revolt against its tyranny in the later history of Hinduism. Hence the relatively slight ascendency enjoyed by the Brahmans ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... their existence primarily, with all the energies and powers they possess, from God. Look where we will, or at what we will, from the smallest atom or molecule up to the most stupendous world, or myriads of worlds that roll and sparkle in the blue infinity, in each and all we see the indisputable evidence of the existence of a mysterious spirit, or power, that controls and governs them. A spirit or power that we cannot see, but which is so indisputably evidenced that its existence ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... Miscellanies, i. 291.] for it is only by so doing that he can show us some aspect of nature or of man's heart that was hidden from us before. The originality of the poet, the impossibility of binding him by the example of his forerunners, is the necessary consequence of the infinity of truth. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... gazing upon a magnificent crimson ground through which rivers of yellow meandered, carrying with them in their streams an infinity of blue flowers. And as she spoke she held her head gracefully on one side, and looked down upon the carpet doubtingly. Lady Amelia poked it with her parasol at though to test its durability, and whispered something about ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... is no use in thinking or in taking heed. Enjoy the moment, then, and march. Enjoy the contrast between this circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful sense of insecurity beneath. Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature? A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal things, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these crystals, trodden underfoot, or melted by the Foehn-wind into dew, flash, in some lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars! ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal considerations! Let me continue to the end, as I began, without further digressions or anticipations, pursuing the plain path of dispassionate History. The exact facts, ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... of collecting it was more than it was worth. There wheat is the chief crop, and as the lands become cleared and cultivation spreads itself, the amount coming down the Mississippi will be increased almost to infinity. The price of wheat in Europe will soon depend, not upon the value of the wheat in the country which grows it, but on the power and cheapness of the modes which may exist for transporting it. I have not been able to obtain the exact ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... numbers, probably countless numbers, of stars is so long in coming to us that they could be blotted out of existence and we would remain unconscious of the fact for years, for hundreds of years, for thousands of years, nay to infinity. Thus if Sirius were to collide with some other space traveler and be knocked into smithereens as an Irishman would say, we would not know about it for eight years. In fact if all the stars were blotted out and only ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... in the dying light of day, a man comes slowly, painfully into the picture. What an atom in that infinity of awful grandeur. One little life in all that desert of snow and ice. And what a life. The poor wretch was swathed in furs; snow-shoes on his feet, and a long staff lent his drooping figure support. His whole attitude told its own tale of exhaustion. But a closer inspection, one glance into the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... feeling of awe to equal that of a stranger approaching for the first time a huge city. The thought of a human multitude is ever appalling as that of infinity itself, a human multitude with its infinity of despairs and joys, disgraces and honours, each small unit with all the world in its own brain, and all the world out of it! Each intent upon his own business or pleasure, and striving the while ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk and clatter. This the Toll House?—with its city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post- bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all these strangers' eyes. They ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... species as it really is, as a parcel of insects devouring one another on a little atom of clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own being, and of that of Babylon. His soul launched out into infinity, and, detached from the senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when afterwards, returning to himself, and entering into his own heart, he considered that Astarte had perhaps died for him, the universe vanished from his sight, and he beheld ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... no matter of mine. God, the great conservative power of the Universe, when he established the right, saw to it that it should always be the safest and best. He never laid upon a poor finite worm the staggering load of following out into infinity the complex results of his actions. We may rest on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom, confident that it is enough for us to do justice, he will see to it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... draw distinctions between 'grace' and 'glory,' and think that the latter applies mainly to what I might call the physical and the metaphysical, and less to the moral, attributes of the divine nature. We adore power, and when it is expanded to infinity we think that it is the glory of God. But my text delivers us from all such misconceptions. If we rightly understand it, then we learn this, that the true heart of the glory is tenderness and love. Of power ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... craving within me to distinguish myself? Surely it does not occur fortuitously, but is intended to rouse and call into exercise certain latent powers that I possess? and then with infinite eagerness I set about attempting to discover these latent powers. I tried an infinity of pursuits, botany and geology amongst the rest, but in vain; I was fitted for none of them. I became very sorrowful and despondent, and at one time I had almost resolved to plunge again into the whirlpool of dissipation; it was a dreadful ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... listening to the celestial harmonies of a great orchestra. In proportion as one conceives, or can imagine, the fineness of the musical endowment of a Bach or Beethoven, and in proportion as he can realize in his own mind the infinity of training and preparation which has contributed to the development of such a master musician—in such proportion may he comprehend and appreciate the unusual qualities and achievements of a man like Muir. He will realize to some degree—indistinctly to be sure, "seeing ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... still more marvelous: that the same touch renders the individual negative to the inflowing currents from all of the baser elements. With this awareness comes the conviction that the Empire of Love is boundless and limitless; that it permeates and glorifies the vast ocean of infinity! On the strong, swift tide of this shoreless ocean, the lover floats, secure, serene and confident, on his voyage ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... "Tracts on Practical Agriculture, and Gardening," 1762, 8vo. a Catalogue of English Authors on Agriculture, Gardening, &c. There is another edition in 1773, with additions. His intelligent Catalogue is brought down to the end of the year 1772. This volume of Tracts contains an infinity of ingenious and curious articles. One of the chapters contains "A Plan for Planting all the Turnpike Roads in England with Timber Trees."[53] He most zealously wishes to encourage planting. "I ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... is by nature as true to her rightful lord as the needle to the magnetic north,—as faithful to her marriage vows as the stars to their appointed courses. When a wife "goes astray" the chances are as one to infinity that the misstep is her husband's fault. Love is the very life of woman. She can no more exist without it than the vine can climb heavenward without support,—than it can blossom and bear fruit without the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a little square of seats about the whole; and sending out formal invitations to his friends and acquaintances to come and sit there, and hear Mass: which is performed at the principal Altar, decorated with an infinity of candles for ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... valley, the wind tearing the cliffs, the rushing of the stream. Soon all was darkness; she knew that she had lost herself; and was alone with rock and storm. Still she moved; but nerve and strength ebbed; and at last there came a step into infinity—a sharp pain—and the ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... theology, Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt,—the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic formula of infinity,—the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to unity beyond space; the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the energy, intelligence, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... earth begins with the close of the dim Archean era. It is the lapse from then till now, a few hundred million years at most out of all infinity, which ever can greatly concern man, for during this time were laid the only rocks whose reading was assisted by the presence of fossils. During this time the continents attained their final shape, the mountains rose, and valleys, plains, and rivers formed and re-formed many times ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... be considered by the philosopher as equally false and equally useful? Is there nothing more cheerful for us to contemplate than what the old Pagan philosophy holds out,—man destined to live like brutes or butterflies, and pass away into the infinity of time and space, like inert matter, decomposed, absorbed, and entering into new and everlasting combinations? Is America to become like Europe and Asia in all essential elements of life? Has she no other mission than to add to perishable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... raod the view off was superb. Nothing bordered one side of the way and the mountain bordered the other. Far below lay the sea, stretching away into blue infinity, a vast semicircle of ultramarine domed by a hemisphere of azure; and it was noticeable how much vaster the sea looked than the sky. We were so high above it that the heavings of its longer swells were ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... themselves condemned to discharge uncongenial duties in unsympathetic society, turned instinctively to Mr. Locker for a consolation, so softly administered that it was hard to say it was intended. He had friends everywhere, in all ranks of life, who found in him an infinity of solace, and for his friends there was nothing he would not do. It seemed as if he could not spare himself. I remember his calling at my chambers one hot day in July, when he happened to have with him some presents he was in course of delivering. Among them I noticed a bust of ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... morning, O thou smitten child, Scorned, scourged and persecuted and reviled— Athirst and famishing, none pitying thee, Crowned with the twisted thorns of agony— No faintest gleam of sunlight through the dense Infinity of gloom to lead thee thence— Wait for the morning:—It will come, indeed, As surely as the night ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... light through the sky; this likewise has a system supplied with living beings and their existence derives its enjoyment from the diversity of circumstances to which they are exposed; passing as it were through the infinity of space they are continually gratified by the sight of new systems and worlds, and you can imagine the unbounded nature of the circle of their knowledge. My power extends so far as to afford you a glimpse ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... it comes hard. It seems that I'm frightfully rich. In fact, nobody seems to know how rich I am. I've got millions and millions, twenty—thirty perhaps. So much that it staggers me. It's like the idea of infinity or perpetuity. I can't grasp it at all. It's piling up in new investments, just piling up and nothing ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... skew their own dreams into their comment, and blame us for not writing what they once wanted to. You we can trust, for you have looked at life largely and without pettifogging qualms. The parallel lines of our eager pages meet at Infinity—that is, in the infinite understanding and judgment ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... build thee a statue that will be To the astonished future evidence Of my love and thy beauty and the sense That beauty giveth of infinity, Though death with subtle uncovering hands remove The apparel of life and empire from our love, Yet its nude statue-soul of lust made spirit All future times, whether they will't or not, Shall, like a curse-seeming ...
— Antinous: A Poem • Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
... as you observe,' I continued. 'He did an infinity of good, and through all the Terror kept himself from the guillotine. He brought me up, and gave me such education as I have. It was in his house in the country at Dammarie, near Melun, that I made the acquaintance of your agent, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Which softens the sharp extremes of things, And connects by its subtle, invisible stair The lowest and the highest. She interwreathed Her mortal obscureness with so much light Of the world unrisen, that angel's wings Could hardly have given her greater right To float in the winds of the Infinity." Edmund Ollier. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... to be looking into infinity. At each breath her breast was ready to burst with a loud cry. It choked her, but for some reason she restrained it. Her hands clutched at her bosom. She staggered from repeated thrusts. She walked onward without thought, almost without consciousness. She felt that behind ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... like a cup; it holds but one fixed quantity of life's essential liquor, be the latter sweet or bitter. An infinity of little sips or one deep draught, what does it matter? The vessel is empty in either case. Yet, as time went on, I grew to endure existence; afterwards, when my Esmay was born, I valued it again for her sake. Moreover, she was his daughter as well as mine, and so I came ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... or physical ease of life. It consists, on the contrary, in the discovery of the real nature of man. He is no mere animal, living in the realm of things and pleasures, limited by the now and the here. He is a person, a rational being. His thoughts and desires can only be expressed in terms of infinity. Nothing short of the infinite can satisfy either his reason or his heart Though living in nature and dependent on it, he is above it, and may and should understand it and rule it. His thoughts embrace all time and all being. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... sponger much, to do with Pleasure—I will soon show you. I take it that Pleasure means, first, bodily tranquillity, and secondly, an untroubled soul. Well, the sponger attains both, Epicurus neither. A man who is busy inquiring into the earth's shape, the infinity of worlds, the sun's size, astronomic distances, the elements, the existence or non-existence of Gods, and who is engaged in incessant controversies about the end—he is a prey not merely to human, but to cosmic perturbations. Whereas the sponger, convinced ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... occasion I asked him, knowing what subject he would like best to talk upon, how his opinion stood towards the question between Paschal and Soame Jennings about number and numeration? as the French philosopher observes that infinity, though on all sides astonishing, appears most so when the idea is connected with the idea of number; for the notion of infinite number—and infinite number we know there is—stretches one's capacity still more than the idea of infinite space. "Such a notion, indeed," adds he, ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... seeks help from the indefinite, because it is nearer and more like the infinite, of which he is made the image:—for even we are infinite, even in our finiteness infinite, as the Father in his infinity. In many caterpillars there is a large empty space in the head, the destined room for the pushing forth of the 'antennae' of its ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ecclesiastical law. It was a mistake to include it in the Code because it was antagonistic to many French customs, and, in many ways, to the national temperament. The result is what might have been expected, namely, that it has only been carried out in rare instances, and with an infinity of trouble. It might have been made the subject of an edict without being included in the Code. The State might have given a holiday on Sunday to all its officials, employees and workmen. It might have been made quite clear simply by a circular from ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... of God, St. John Chrysostom, deplores with infinite compassion in some part of his works the disaster and calamity of his century, in which not only was the memory of an infinity of illustrious persons cut off from among mankind, but, what is more, their writings, by which the rich conceptions of their souls and the divine ornaments of their minds were to have been consecrated ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... as I, thou finally shalt seek some precipice from which to cast thyself; shalt halt, panting before the mysterious ocean of infinity; and then, with foaming mouth, dilated nostrils, and extended neck turned towards the horizon, thou shalt, as I, pray for eternal sleep; for repose for thy fiery feet; for a bed of green leaves, whereon reclining thou canst close thy burning eyes forever. There, waiting motionless ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... thou hast shown me those Mighty Pre-Adamites who walked the earth Of which ours is the wreck: thou hast pointed out 360 Myriads of starry worlds, of which our own Is the dim and remote companion, in Infinity of life: thou hast shown me shadows Of that existence with the dreaded name Which my sire brought us—Death;[cj] thou hast shown me much But not all: show me where Jehovah dwells, In his especial Paradise—or thine: Where ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... What woman question? I know no more of woman questions than of man questions, I am afraid. There is an infinity of questions you may ask about all human beings. People ask them all the time. Personally, I don't; it is less trouble not to. There people are; you can take them or leave them, for what they're worth. Why ask questions about them? There is never a ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... then, is the spirit within me, which, if it once get fairly on the ladder, will mount from step to step into infinity? What are ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... shews us how an innumerable Multitude of Angels fell from their State of Bliss, and were cast into Hell upon their Disobedience. Besides this great Moral, which may be looked upon as the Soul of the Fable, there are an Infinity of Under-Morals which are to be drawn from the several parts of the Poem, and which makes this Work more useful and Instructive than any ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... pustules stand out like ebony teats, full of myriads of tiny sacs, each containing eight pretty seeds. A glance through the microscope at the contents of one of these teats, a speck only just visible to the eye, reveals an astounding world: an infinity of procreative wealth in an atom. Ah, what a beautiful thing life is, even on a chip of rotten bark no bigger than a finger-nail! What ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... so true!—true as the Tenth of Juvenal himself. The lapse of ages changes all things—time—language— the earth—the bounds of the sea—the stars of the sky, and everything "about, around, and underneath" man, except man himself. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment.' Byron, vol. v. p. 66. WRIGHT. Sir Walter Scott said 'that he had more pleasure in reading London, and The Vanity of Human Wishes than any other poetical composition he could mention.' Lockhart's Scott, iii. 269. Mr. Lockhart ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... secondly, from inferences drawn from the obvious direction of the steps which we see to have been previously taken. The goal of this particular cycle is in sight, though still far above us but it would seem that, even when that has been attained, an infinity of progress still lies before everyone who ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. One sees, therefore, the mistake ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... that enabled her to hit the target against odds of almost infinity to one; not just once, but time after time. By definition, intuition. What quality did you use just now in getting me off the hook? Intuition. What makes Teddy Blake such an unerring performer? Intuition again. My hunches—they're intuition, too. Intuition, hell! Labels—based on utterly ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... the passage 'The True, knowledge, infinite is Brahman' intimates certain qualities of Brahman, viz. true being, knowledge, infinity!—Not so, we reply. From the circumstance that all the terms of the sentence stand in co-ordination, it follows that they convey the idea of one matter (sense) only. If against this you urge that the sentence may convey the idea of one matter only, even if directly ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... system that we perceive the object, all the properties capable of being perceived are communicated to our nervous system and inscribed in the nerve wave. The effect produced therefore is the measure of our perception of the cause. This is absolutely certain. All bodies possess an infinity of properties which escape our cognitions; because, as excitants of our organism, these properties are wanting in the intensity or the quality necessary to make it vibrate; they have not been tuned in unison with our nervous chords. And, inversely, all we perceive of the mechanical, physical, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... Inner Lands had ever beholden. They say that the Sea is a river heading towards Hercules, and they say that he touches against the edge of the world, and that Poltarnees looks upon him. They say that all the worlds of heaven go bobbing on this river and are swept down with the stream, and that Infinity is thick and furry with forests through which the river in his course sweeps on with all the worlds of heaven. Among the colossal trunks of those dark trees, the smallest fronds of whose branches are man nights, there walk the gods. And whenever its thirst, glowing ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... rustic Milton has passed by, Stifling the speechless longings of his heart, In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled 140 His energies, no longer tameless then, To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail! How many a Newton, to whose passive ken Those mighty spheres that gem infinity Were only specks of tinsel, fixed in Heaven 145 To light the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... uplands of pahoehoe which ground away the animals' feet, a horrid waste, extending upwards for 7000 feet. For miles and miles, above and around, great billowy masses, tossed and twisted into an infinity of fantastic shapes, arrest and weary the eye, lava in all its forms, from a compact phonolite, to the lightest pumice stone, the mere froth of the volcano, exceeding in wildness and confusion the most extravagant nightmare ever inflicted ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the mountain through the open door of the church when the sun was in a certain position, I could see an infinity of insect life swarming throughout the air. No one could have suspected its existence, till the sun's rays fell on the wings of these small creatures at a proper angle; on this they became revealed against the darkness of the mountain behind them. The swallows that ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... subdivided into an infinity of tribes, which, bearing a cruel hatred toward each other, form no intermarriages, even when their languages spring from the same root, and when only a small arm of a river, or a group ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in the pursuit of it. No. We are complicated machines: and though we have one main-spring, that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometimes stop that motion. Let us exemplify. I will suppose ambition to be (as it commonly is) the predominant passion of a minister ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... armour after the manner of the late Mr Richardson's heroes, and as most of the ladies had probably been without previous opportunity of seeing such delights, they had their effect. When they had made their twenty-first procession the thing certainly grew stale, and as they brought with them an infinity of dirt, they were no doubt a nuisance. But no one would have been inclined to judge these amateur actors with harshness who knew how much they themselves were called on to endure, who could appreciate the disgusting misery of a hot summer afternoon spent ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... that its cultivation was in a great measure confined to Arabia and the Caribbean Archipelago. Its extreme scarcity during the war enhanced its price so enormously, that on the first announcement of peace in 1814, the plants were multiplied to infinity, and coffee plantations were formed in every possible situation—on the Coste Firme of South America, along the Brazilian shores of that continent, and even at some points on the coast of Southern Africa. To show the extreme rapidity with which ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... himself was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Scotland, and Alick's leave of absence was felt to be due to Mr. Clare, and thus it was that the first real family gathering took place on occasion of the opening of the institution that had grown out of the Burnaby Bargain. This work had cost Colonel Keith and Mr. Mitchell an infinity of labour and perseverance before even the preliminaries could be arranged, but they contrived at length to carry it out, and by the fourth spring after the downfall of the F. U. E. E. a house had been erected for the convalescents, whose wants were to be attended ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been erroneously supposed that a certain woman who refused a most desirable heirloom left her by a man, must have known of some great crime committed by him. But we need no other motive for this action than her infinite love, and the reason of that infinity we find in the nature of that love. It is, in fact, woman's life, whereas it is an episode in the life of man. Of course, we are not here speaking of transitory inclinations, or flirtations, but of that great and profound love which all women of all classes ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... by Aristotle, such as the expression of desires, are not properly logical judgments. They are either purely aesthetic propositions or historical propositions. "Peter is passing; it is raining to-day; I am sleepy; I want to read": these and an infinity of propositions of the same kind, are nothing but either a mere enclosing, in words the impression of the fact that Peter is passing, of the falling rain, of my organism inclining to sleep, and of my will directed to reading, or they are existential affirmation ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... really the last, and as it were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that One Eternal, of whom it is written, that God is a Spirit. Still less could they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular preacher (whose very name, perhaps, Ulfilas ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... beside the sea; let its infinity bring him wisdom. The eternal rioting of the surges against the rocks is as the agitation of impostures against the truth. It is a vain convulsion; the foam gains nothing by it, the granite loses nothing, and only sparkles the more bravely in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... We reach infinity through the love of one, and loving this one, we are in love with all. And this condition of mutual sympathy, trust, reverence, forbearance and gentleness that can exist between a man and a woman, gives the only ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... harassed at the present moment by an infinity of troubles of my own that I am almost callous to those of other people. They say that prosperity makes a man selfish. I have never tried that, but I am quite sure that adversity does so. Nevertheless I am anxious about ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... ray of lamp-light through the key-hole. If there is dust in the room it will be observed that light goes in straight lines. Because of this men are able to arrange houses and trees in rows, the hunter aims his rifle correctly, and the astronomer projects straight lines to infinity. Take a hand-mirror, or better, a piece of glass coated on one side with black varnish, and you can send your ray anywhere. By using two mirrors, or having an assistant and using several, you can cause a ray of light to turn as many corners as you please. I once saw Mr. Tyndall send a ray into ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... with honor, she ingeniously remarks that the remedies classed as "an old woman's recipe" are those oftenest prescribed, to the glory of her sex, who by patience, humanity and observation have invented without the help of Galen and Hippocrates an infinity of reliefs for the sick which their adherents can neither improve nor disapprove. She makes her final point on the question of moral superiority. It is sometimes stated "that some women have been more flagitious than any men, but that in nowise ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... or imperfect reality—God as action. Soulless matter, which only exists as a logical abstraction, is arrived at by looking at things "in disconnexion, dull and spiritless." It is the sphere of the "merely many," and is zero, as "the One who is not" is Infinity. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... through profound, enigmatic moments of a fearful yet pleasurable dread. There was the ocean, on which an apparently abandoned vessel, a small spot in infinity, was staggering forward with no visible goal ahead and no visible starting-point behind. There were the heavens lying heavily upon it, grey and dismal. There was Frederick himself, alone. Every animate creature ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... The contemporary wash of colour passes, as it should, into something "fast"; you are in the Paris of the Regency, but you are at the same time in general human time and place, if not in eternity and infinity. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... What thinks in me must be, as it were, a nothing of corporeal nature. How was I able to know beings that have by nature no relation with my thinking being? Certainly a being superior to those two natures, so very different, and which comprehends them both in its infinity, must have joined them in my soul, and given me an idea of a nature entirely different from that which thinks ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... M. de Vervillin himself was a man of respectable birth, of a scientific education, and of great familiarity with ships, so far as a knowledge of their general powers and principles was concerned; but here his professional excellence ceased, all that infinity of detail which composes the distinctive merit of the practical seaman being, in a great degree, unknown to him, rendering it necessary for him to think in moments of emergency; periods when the really prime mariner seems ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... morning. This was Christmas Day. We were going to the trenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospect of straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, in an inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into my northerly ear, and the A.S.C. motor-car driver, who was mad, kept missing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint. One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but whose father was the ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... firesides books, paintings, and statuary, by which we learn something of the world as it is and as it was. It gives us the telescope and the microscope, by whose agency we are able to appreciate, even though but imperfectly, the immensity of creation on the one hand, and its infinity on the other. The teacher is not to labour without money, nor to despise it more than other men; and the public might as well expect the free services of the minister, lawyer, physician, or farmer, as to expect the gratuitous or ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... Still there is an infinity of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... is called war. The great industrial centers show us what ruthlessness may mean, more cruel and more dangerous than the worst deeds of our border fighting men. As for the criminal records of our great cities, they surpass by infinity those of the rudest wilderness anarchy. Their nature at times would cause a hardened desperado of the West to blush ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... the accepted sense of the term. He was a lyric poet who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain the poetic mood. In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian hymn to life against the melancholy products of German learning and against those Nihilistic snares which he thought lurked in Christian doctrine. There he worked out the mystic idea of "Eternal ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... from this arise those pseudo-conceptions which we call the infinitely extended and the infinitely lasting. Under our present limitations it is impossible for us to grasp the whole of any Truth, if we could do that, there would be no such mystery of Infinity to puzzle us; we could, as it were, see all around it, but that is again looking through another window. We are now considering relativity. If we cut off the very end of the point of the finest needle, we get so minute a particle of steel that it is hardly visible to the naked ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... the Incas—to behold the expanse of the Pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine, the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling of infinity rushed upon her. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ourselves we felt as if the Log of Infinity carried us to ground higher than what we ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... large window, wide open, through which the sun of midsummer, at midday, was showering down torrents of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold, or for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of life and the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... social scout looked a dusty bypath may prove to be the highway of progress for the hoboing millions. Side issues are constantly cropping up to knock out the main issues of the stump orator; so let us be humble. For this reason I refuse to discuss possibilities in infinity. You and I cannot have become products of an environment which is not in existence. It is safe to suppose that our needs are like those of the race and that in us nothing is vestigial that is active in others. You cannot have become too rational to ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... poetry will be while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth, especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... round for Nancy Smallwood. He saw her almost at once, looking a little worried. Incidentally she always did look worried, with that sort of helpless pathetic air with which very small women compel very big men to go to an infinity of trouble over things which bore ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... adequate exponent. The religion awakened by the aesthetic S. Francis, who loved all kinds of beauty, was of the kind to be fed by pictures. But when Savonarola had aroused the fervour of the nation to its highest point, when beauty was nothing, the world nothing, in comparison to the infinity of God;—then art, finding itself powerless to express this overwhelming infinity, fell back on more earthly founts of inspiration, the ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this year of 1817 ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... moment, the different regiments began wheeling to and fro in long lines, and open columns of troops, and performing an infinity of manoeuvres, which, though I of course did not in the least degree comprehend them, were very fine and beautiful to look at, from the rapidity of the movements, the high spirit of the horses, and ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... is revealed in the corroding etchings of Laforgue is germane to men in whom irony and pity are perpetually disputing. We think of Heine and his bitter-sweetness. Again with Zarathustra, Laforgue could say: "I do not give alms. I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the sixth sense of infinity. A cosmical jester, his badinage is well-nigh dolorous. His verse and prose form a series of personal variations. The lyric in him is through some temperamental twist reversed. Fantastic dreams overflow his reality, and he always dreams with wide-open eyes. Watteau's l'Indifferent! ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... for slain. The Savoyard Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop thus:—"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt? By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself known the Sparta, the Athens, the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... lovers, who are known to have no eyes for anything except for the contemplation, actual or inward, of one human form which for them contains the soul of the whole world in all its beauty, perfection, variety and infinity. It must be extremely pleasant. But felicity was denied to Roderick Anthony's contemplation. He was not a common sort of lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... again when she leaned on the white wall and gazed out over the shining fastnesses of the sun. He was there like an enemy, like something determined, egoistical, that said to her, "You would look at the greatness of the desert, at immensity, infinity, God!—Look at me." And she could not turn her eyes away. Each time the man had, as if without effort, conquered the great competing power, fastened her thoughts upon himself, set her imagination working about his life, even made ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... long thereafter, the present State of West Virginia was a part of Virginia. Virginia, in the old days, used to have no western borders to her most westerly counties, which, in theory, ran out to infinity. As the western part of the State became settled, county lines were drawn, and new counties were started farther back from the coast. For this reason, towns which are now in Jefferson County, West Virginia, used to be in that county of Virginia which lies to the east of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, found all ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... he ought to be; that he carries about with him, in most cases, a body more or less diseased and decrepit, incapable of doing all the work which he feels that he himself could do, or expressing all the emotions which he himself longs to express; a dull brain and dull senses, which cramp the eager infinity within him; as—so Goethe once said with pity—the horse's single hoof cramps the fine intelligence and generosity of his nature, and forbids him even to grasp an object, like the more stupid cat, and baser monkey. And man has a self, too, within, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... who is tied to his desk sometimes thinks everything would be right if only he could travel. But many a man has done the Grand Tour and come back no better contented. You cannot fool your soul with Mont Blanc or even the Himalayas. So many thousand feet, did you say?—but what is that to infinity! The cure for the fretful soul is not to go round the world; it ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... as far as his conduct is concerned, if it be mysterious, as you say, you have only yourself to blame for it." Porthos pronounced these words with an amount of confidence which, for a man who was unaccustomed to his ways, must have revealed an infinity ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... despot in the midst of splendors rivaling the Arabian Nights. Now they saw him! And the amazement can scarcely be described. He dined with the Great Electress Sophia, afterwards first Queen of Prussia, and she wrote of him: "Nature has given him an infinity of wit. With advantages he might have been an accomplished man. What a pity his manners are ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... few moments in which they stood silent, facing each other, in spite of her efforts to keep it out, in spite of really conscientious efforts, a great calm came in and spread over her spirit. Yet she had no reason to feel calm she thought, struggling. Was there not rather cause for an infinity of shame? What had he come for? He of all people. The scandalously jilted, the affronted, the run away from. Was it because she had been looking so long at Fritzing that this man seemed so nicely groomed? Or at Tussie, that ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... appearances Affections warm despite absence, and years, and interest Ever been my nature to turn forward instead of back Genius honored but never encouraged God bless their backs, which is the only part I ever care to see He was our macaroni of Annapolis Human multitude with its infinity of despairs and joys It is sorrow which lifts us nearest to heaven No real prosperity comes out of double-dealing Shaped his politics according to the company he was in Sight of happiness is often a pleasure for those who are sad Sir, I have not yet begun to fight The worse the disease, the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a conception of these famous Landes, it is only necessary to run down by the South-Western Railway, through the moors of Woking or Ascot; spread them out flat, and multiply them to seeming infinity. The same sea of brown heather, broken only by the same dark pignadas, or fir plantations, extends for nigh a hundred miles; and when the traveller northward has lost sight, first of the Spanish mountains, and then of the Pyrenean snows, he seems to be rushing along a brown ocean, without ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... twilight green Ambushed with unknown perils, one endless day I travel down the beetle-trail between Huge glossy boles through green infinity ... Till flashes a glimpse of blue sea through the bracken asway, And my world is again a ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... in a grain of sand And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... the spectral northern lights, and the moon sailing through the profound silence. It is like a dream, like a glimpse into the realms of fantasy. There are no forms, no cumbrous reality—only a vision woven of silver and violet ether, rising up from earth and floating out into infinity.... But this eternal day, with its oppressive actuality, interests me no longer—does not entice me out of my lair. Life is one incessant hurrying from one task to another; everything must be done and nothing ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Calamianes consists of an infinity and indeterminate number of islands, large and small, and most of them very fertile. [72] Those best known and best supplied with the products of commerce which might make them rich are [here] set down. But their lack ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... Pacific; and nearer, the snow-born Thompson bursts forth from the ice to begin its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Nature, rioting in her grandest mood, exclaimed with voices of grandeur, solitude, sublimity, beauty, and infinity, 'Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... vapor lay along the horizon; the first sunbeam would dissipate it; to the maiden it exhibited that aspect of the sea which seems to blend it with the sky. Her view was now enlarged, without producing the impression of the boundless infinity of ocean. ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... (alpha 1), the second one A2 (alpha 2), the third one A3 (alpha 3), we may suppose that a genius appears who has the faculty to surpass all the other relative truths A1, A2, A3, ... An and gives us an absolute or final truth, VALID IN INFINITY (Ainfinity) say a final definition, that lightning is so ... and so ..., a kind of energy which flows, let us say, through a glass tube filled with charcoal. Then of course this definition would immediately make ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... noticed the fire on the other shore blaze up, dilating the circle of its glow like an amazed stare, and contract suddenly to a red pin-point. I only knew how close to me she had been when I felt the clutch of her fingers on my forearm. Without raising her voice, she threw into it an infinity of scathing contempt, bitterness, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... The former is the external quality of bodies which typifies some divine attribute. The latter consists in "the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living things.'' The forms of typical beauty are:—(1) infinity, the type of the divine incomprehensibility; (2) unity, the type of the divine comprehensiveness; (3) repose, the type of the divine permanence; (4) symmetry, the type of the divine justice; (5) purity, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... The endeavor, therefore, to judge of the relative beauty or interest of the sciences is utterly hopeless. Let the astronomer boast of the magnificence of his speculations, the mathematician of the immutability of his facts, the chemist of the infinity of his combinations, and we will admit that they all have equal ground for their enthusiasm. But the highest standard of estimation is that of utility. The far greater proportion of mankind, the uninformed, who are unable to perceive the beauty ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... could hear his low, uneven breathing and the faint, regular ticking of his watch. They seemed enclosed in a silence vast as space, and sweeter than thought could fathom. A great ocean of contentment flowed about them, stretching into infinity. Neither could have thought of anything to wish for. They seemed in absolute possession of ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... continual growth. They go back beyond the common ancestor, into the unfathomable strata of the races that have lived, to the first being; and they will put forth new shoots without end, they will spread and ramify to infinity, through future ages. Look at our tree; it counts only five generations. It has not so much importance as a blade of grass, even, in the human forest, vast and dark, of which the peoples are the great secular oaks. Think only of the immense roots ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Besides these are an infinity of trees covered with the brightest blossoms; one, with large scarlet flowers, most gorgeous in their colouring, and one whose blossoms are so like large pink silk tassels, that if hung to the cushions of a sofa, you could not discover them to be flowers. What prodigality of nature ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... accuracy, as, from the amount of ramming to get the ball to its place, it has become so misshapen that it is a mere lump of lead, and no longer a rifle-ball. My double-barreled No. 10 rifles are two-grooved, and an infinity of trouble they gave me for the first two years. Many a time I have been giving my whole weight to the loading rod, with a ball stuck half-way down the barrel, while wounded elephants lay struggling upon ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met with the CRITIQUE OF THE PURE REASON, a certain guiding light. If the mere intellect could make ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Please to bear in mind that the direction of the lines of force emitted from the spiral is such that, starting from any point on one of its faces, a circle is described extending to a similar point on the opposite side. The diameter of the circles described decreases from infinity as the points from which they start recede from the center toward the circumference. From points near the circumference these circles or curves are very small. To illustrate this to you, the reverser now in circuit ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... from which living water will spring up. Sight and sight again the aim which thou hast failed to hit throughout the ages; try to struggle through the scarcely perceptible opening which leads to another firmament. Thou hast the infinity of time and space to try the experiment. He who can commit blunders with impunity is ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... happiness, and graciously receiving the crowds of visitors who came to see the presents, dictating orders to the call-boys and scene-shifters regarding the proper setting of the scene, and multiplying his smiles and hand-shakings to the point of infinity. Clotilde also seemed more beautiful than ever, and her expressive face revealed the tender emotion which possessed her, as well as her deep anxiety to win laurels for ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... this do I love thee, but Because Infinity upon thee broods; And thou are full of whispers and of shadows. Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say So long, and yearned up the cliffs to tell; Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, What the still night suggesteth to the heart. Thy voice is like ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... such as cows, buffaloes, and sheep; also of birds, both those belonging to the hills and those reared at home, and this in greater abundance than in our tracts. The land has plenty of rice and Indian-corn, grains, beans, and other kind of crops which are not sown in our parts; also an infinity of cotton. Of the grains there is a great quantity, because, besides being used as food for men, it is also used for horses, since there is no other kind of barley; and this country has also much wheat, and that good. The ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... her or loved her enough or understood that she is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it. Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and in her, beauty grows up suddenly out of life and ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... idle one, and yet it obtrudes itself upon everybody. Our eyesight teaches that the egg comes from the hen, but at the same time also that the hen is developed from the egg, and if we go farther back we are lost in infinity. The theological view that God put into the world all that exists, all animals from the smallest seen by the microscope to the largest gigantic creatures in pairs and fully grown, seems to solve the problem of the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... spirits were also fractionally estimated, but this as a class, and not as individuals: the priests would not have known how to have solved the problem if they had been obliged to ascribe values to the infinity of existences.* As the Heliopolitans were obliged to eliminate from the Ennead many feudal divinities, so the Chaldaeans had left out of account many of their sovereign deities, especially goddesses, Bau of Uru, Nana of Uruk, and Allat; or if they did introduce them into their calculations, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... is an eternity. As a lightning flash in a dark night reveals, for a dazzling instant, a world concealed before, so the electric interchange of two hearts charged with love's lightning seems to open the very doors of infinity; and it is the glory of heaven ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... started a new train of thought. Certainly, infinity, omnipresence, could neither be limited nor outlined; those were ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... as, after a long night on a calm sea, when one nears the harbour again, one welcomes the sound of the children's voices and the stir of life about the quay, as a relief from the utter blank, and feels oneself no longer a bubble afloat on an infinity which knows one not, and cares nothing for one's existence. For in the dead stillness of mid-day, when not only the deer, and the agoutis, and the armadillos, but the birds and insects likewise, are all asleep, the crack of a falling branch was ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley |
