"Knife-edge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... new education, which promised to be by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction. They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... it was needful to shake mankind loose from gossip and pink teas, and sword-worship, and Saturday night drunks, and self-seeking politics and theological quibbles—to wake them up and make them realise that they stand upon a narrow knife-edge between two awful eternities, and that, here and now, they have to finish with make-beliefs, and with real earnestness and courage face those truths which have always been palpable where indolence, or cowardice, or vested interests have not obscured the vision. Let us try to appreciate what ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I'm satisfied with knowing that I know. But if you want me to furnish a theory, let's say that all these things really do exist, in the past or in the future, and that the present is just a moving knife-edge that separates the two. You can't even indicate the present. By the time you make up your mind to say, 'Now!' and transmit the impulse to your vocal organs, and utter the word, the original present moment is part of the past. The knife-edge has gone over it. Most people ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... tier of big vessels, going cautiously, not with the speed and knife-edge accuracy with which the old man had been wont to take her out, but groping safely through the craft about them. Arthur swayed and smiled and slackened, his head nodding as though in response to the friends on the dock who never abated their farewell clamor. The grip on his arm held him up, for ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life. The thought of mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment of opposition, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... transported to the amphitheater of Mauna-wili, a valley separated from Waimanalo only by a rampart of hills. At one's back are the abrupt walls of Konahuanui; at the right, and encroaching so as almost to shut in the front, stands the knife-edge of Olomana; to the left range the furzy hills of Ulamawao; while directly to the front, looking north, winds the green valley, whose waters, before reaching the ocean, spread out into the fish-ponds and duck swamps of Kailua. It would seem as if this must have been the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... all the vitality and life-love of him beaten down in a flashing instant by a shuddering perception of right and wrong, he brought the knife-edge across the rope, saw the strands part, felt himself slide more rapidly, and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... along the piece. The try-square is also of great use in scribing lines across boards, Fig. 204. A good method is to put the point of the knife at the beginning of the desired line, slide the square, along until it touches the knife-edge; then, resting the head of the square firmly against the edge, draw the knife along, pressing it lightly against the blade, holding it perpendicularly. To prevent the knife from running away from the blade of the try-square, turn its edge ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... jumping again that crevasse which I dreaded, or venturing ahead across the giant crevasse by the very worst of the sliver bridges I had ever seen. It was so badly weathered and melted down that it formed a knife-edge, and extended across from side to side in a low, drooping curve like that made by a loose rope attached at each end at the same height. But the worst difficulty was that the ends of the down-curving sliver were attached to ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... the gorge, amazingly distinct in the pellucid atmosphere, rose the high mountains, the undefiled, untrodden and eternal snows. Azure shadow, transparent, ethereal, haunted them, bringing into evidence enormous rounded shoulder, cirque, crinkled glacier, knife-edge ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... there were little fields of wheat or peas. The fog was too dense for us to know whether we lost fine scenery. We saw nothing of the little villages through which we passed. On and on we plunged along the trail, until it began an ascent of a ridge, almost like a knife-edge, with steep slopes on both sides. When we had reached the summit of this ridge, we found the trail level, through a growth of oak trees which were loaded with bromelias and orchids. Though still dim, the light had brightened as we rose to higher levels. Graceful ferns and sprays ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... was no coward. Yet was he undecided. He gazed into the gulf on either side and ran his eyes along the knife-edge he must travel. Then he made ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London |
