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More "Distort" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cannot understand, because you are ready to believe all evil of it, and unprepared to perceive its good. Therefore surrender all grudges, jealousies, and feelings of contempt. Emotions of enmity distort one's vision and impel one toward actions and words that are not wise. When one person feels resentment against another, the other is likely to feel resentment in return. This intensifies the first resentment, and so the hatred grows. Someone has to break the vicious cycle. Don't wait ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... with anxious eyes, scans the length and breadth of the world, and, as the occasion demands, boldly, and fearlessly, and categorically condemns and anathematises all who, through pride or cunning, or personal interest and ambition, or love of novelty, attempt to falsify or to minimise or to distort the teaching of Our Divine Master. Without respect of persons, without regard to temporal consequences, without either hesitancy or ambiguity, he speaks "as one having power" (Matt. vii. 29). And while, on the one hand, every true ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... veil of the hypocrite. Each passion has its specific expressions, its peculiar dialect, so to speak, by which one knows it. And, indeed, it is an admirable law of Supreme Wisdom, that every passion which is noble and generous beautifies the body, while those that are mean and hateful distort it into animal forms. The more the mind departs from the likeness of the Deity, the nearer does the outward form seem to approach the animal, and always that animal which has a kindred proclivity. Thus, the mild expression of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... swelling which is increased by movement of the jaws and by pressure. The degree of the swelling varies with the severity of the attack. It may be very little or it may be so great as to completely distort, and render unrecognizable, the face. It must be remembered that, though mumps is not regarded as an important or dangerous disease, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... equanimity, but its cheerful associations are overlooked and the commonest objects tinged with the colour of your subjective states. Autosuggestion cannot change a post into a spectre, but if you are very impressionable it will so distort your sensory impressions that common sounds seem charged with supernatural significance and every-day objects ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... wealth, it was, perhaps, from economy of her charms that she hid the ankle in such flowing sables, that she bound the black locks straightly under a little widow's-cap, seldom parted the fine lips above the treasured pearls beneath, disdained to distort the classic features, and graved no wrinkles on the smooth, rich skin with any lavish smiling. She went about the house, a self-contained, silent, unpleasant little vial of wrath, and there was ever between her and Eloise a tacit feud, waiting, perhaps, only for occasion to fling down the gage in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... reason of this is, that the AVERAGE given by the observations of the trimmer is the same, whether they are trimmed or untrimmed. His object is to gain a reputation for extreme accuracy in making observations; but from respect for truth, or from a prudent foresight, he does not distort the position of the fact he gets from nature, and it is usually difficult to detect him. He has more sense or less adventure ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... me that before I came the officers of the garrison assembled to consider whether or not they should recognize me. The unanimous vote was "yes." Was all this official? No. It is the white people, the disappointed tyrants of Georgia, who try to distort social courtesies in official ones. The "many white" people were some half-dozen newspaper reporters, whose articles doubtless were partly written when they came. "Old Si" in his spectacles ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death. The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are gone away forever, and the features settle back into a marble calm, which is the man's truest image. Then the most affected look sincere, the most volatile, serious—all noble, more or less. And nature will not be surprised into ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... accomplished by the use of prisms, as follows: Secure from an optician or leaded-glass establishment, two glass prisms, slightly wider than the lens mount. The flatter they are the less they will distort. About 20. deg. is a satisfactory angle. Secure them as shown by the sectional sketch, using strawboard and black paper. Then make a ring to fit over the lens mount and connect it with the prisms in such a way as to exclude all ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... not prevented the growth of Labour parties in Australia and in England, or why numerous parties and single-member constituencies go hand in hand both in France and Germany. Single-member constituencies may distort and falsify the representation of parties, but they cannot prevent the coming of a new party if that party is the outcome, the expression, of a new ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that same Satanic working, which, if it could, would burn your body, will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... attitudes and costumes. It was a young man of Cope's own age—or perhaps two or three years older. He was of Cope's own height, but slightly heavier, with a possible tendency to plumpness. The best of the photographs made him dark, with black, wavy hair; and in some cases (where sunlight did not distort his expression) he indulged a determined sort of smile. He figured once, all by himself, in choir vestments; again, all by himself, in rowing toggery; a third time, still by himself, in a costume whose vague inaccuracy suggested a character ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... under-flouncings. (Let us hope that fashion never comes back!) Don't wear too much jewelry; it is in bad taste in the first place, and in the second, is a temptation to a thief. And don't under any circumstances, distort your figure into a ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... see these eyes— Yes, see the eyes, the body, neck, and form! God made them verily with master hand; 'Twas she herself the image did distort. Let us revere in her, then, God's own work, And not destroy what ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... decimal coinage of July 12, 1855, Mr. Lowe,[298] then member for Kidderminster, an effective speaker and a smart man, exhibited himself in a speech on which I wrote a comment for the Decimal Association. I have seldom seen a more wretched attempt to distort the points of a public question than the whole of this speech. Looking at the intelligence shown by the speaker on other occasions, {170} it is clear that if charity, instead of believing all things, believed only all things but one, he might tremble for his political character; for ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... or sceptic that ever lived: though, to tell the truth, such men are generally very shallow and weak, as well as wicked; generally know only a little, pervert what they know, assume false principles, and distort or suppress facts: but were they as accomplished as the very author of evil, the humblest Christian, armed with sling and stone, and supported by God's unseen might, is, as far as his own faith is concerned, a match for them. And, on the other hand, the most acute of reasoners and ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... can't expect every one to understand on the spot the uselessness of intellect 'seething in vain activity' ... and so we get again one monster the more in the world, one more of those worthless creatures in whom habits of self-ccnsciousness distort the very striving for truth, and a ludicrous simplicity exists side by side with a pitiful duplicity ... one of those beings of impotent, restless thought who all their lives know neither the satisfaction of natural activity, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the Board again mounted his invisible rostrum. "Do you mean to intimate that we are to falsify the record?" he declaimed. "To try to make liars out of hundreds of eyewitnesses? You ask us to distort the truth, to ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... to take to task the translator who gave occasion for this error by rendering the words so as to say, not that the imagination of man's heart is evil, but that it is inclined to evil. Upon this authority the quibblers distort or set aside those passages of Paul where he says that all are children of wrath (Eph 2, 3) that all have sinned (Rom 5, 12) and are under sin (Rom 3, 9). They argue from our passage as follows: Moses ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... of reasoning or inferring incorrectly. And logicians have generally felt that unless, in the very first stage, they removed this source of error; unless they taught their pupil to put away the glasses which distort the object, and to use those which are adapted to his purpose in such a manner as to assist, not perplex, his vision; he would not be in a condition to practice the remaining part of their discipline with any prospect of advantage. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... cultivated intellect will form, apart from religious principle. They are seen within the pale of the Church and without it, in holy men, and in profligate; they form the beau-ideal of the world; they partly assist and partly distort the development of the Catholic. They may subserve the education of a St. Francis de Sales or a Cardinal Pole; they may be the limits of the contemplation of a Shaftesbury or a Gibbon. Basil and Julian were fellow-students at the schools of Athens; and one became the Saint and Doctor of the Church, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within - or sometimes only maim him and distort him! ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... very slowly, as though aware of the necessity for haste and yet afraid to hasten. "Do what I say. Stay by my side, but do not touch me. I must be very quiet, but you must not go away." His jaw began to set and his face to quiver and distort with the fore- running pangs, but he gulped and struggled to master them. "Do not got away. And do not let Amos go away. Understand! Amos ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... the estimated size of home range may result from the use of different methods and from insufficient data. The data obtained from live-trapping are not fully adequate because traps cannot sample, in time and space, the entire home range of an individual. Also, "trap habit" or "trap shyness" may distort the apparent shape of the home range. In order to compare these methods I have calculated home range from my data by each of five different methods. The results are shown in ...
— Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in Kansas • Donald W. Janes
... let that evil land, with fresh Spring-water mixed, be trampled to the full; The moisture, mark you, will ooze all away, In big drops issuing through the osier-withes, But plainly will its taste the secret tell, And with a harsh twang ruefully distort The mouths of them that try it. Rich soil again We learn on this wise: tossed from hand to hand Yet cracks it never, but pitch-like, as we hold, Clings to the fingers. A land with moisture rife Breeds lustier ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... to encounter that which was on its way to meet him. He is a fool who stands and lets life move past him like a panorama. He also is a fool who would lay hands on its motion, and change its pictures. He can but distort and injure, if he does not ruin them, and come upon awful shadows ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... powers until the day of the supreme love, as if, till then, we had only seen ourselves in pocket-mirrors which never reflect more than a morsel of our lives, a movement, a gesture ... and which always distort it!" ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... either this devotion to ideas or the ideas themselves have been derived from philosophical interests and from philosophies that have played any important part in the history of thought we may well doubt. We should suspect that the same practical interest that works unceasingly to distort and popularize philosophy would help to ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... Pageant was extremely silly. Yet, as it progressed, Brother Copas was not alone in feeling his heart lift with the total effect of it. Here, after all, thousands of people were met in a common pride of England and her history. Distort it as the performers might, and vain, inadequate, as might be the words they declaimed, an idea lay behind it all. These thousands of people were met for a purpose in itself ennobling because unselfish. As often happens ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of this discovery we can at last explain the curious conversation recorded by Pepys, which, wrongly interpreted, has done so much to distort the early history of tactics. The circumstances of Monck's great action must first be recalled. At the end of May, he and Rupert, with a fleet of about eighty sail, had put to sea to seek the Dutch, ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... a circular loop on the end, the interior of the loop being pierced with minute holes, and by making a circular flame burn within the loop so that the non-luminous zone of the flame just touched the inside of the loop, and then by aspiration so gentle as not to distort the shape of the flame, withdrawing the gases escaping from the outer zone. On analyzing these by a delicate process, which will be described elsewhere, I ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... been spoken of as a "naif and horrible" production, in which one will find "a bizarre mixture of Druidic practice and Christian superstition." It describes Heloise as a sorceress of ferocious and sanguinary temper. Thus can legend magnify and distort human failing! As its presentation is important in the study of Breton folk-lore, I give a very free translation of this ballad, in which, at the same time, I have endeavoured to preserve the atmosphere of ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Justin Martyr, Dialog. cum Tryphonte, p. 143, 144. See Le Clerc, Hist. Eccles. p. 615. Bull and his editor Grabe (Judicium Eccles. Cathol. c. 7, and Appendix) attempt to distort either the sentiments or the words of Justin; but their violent correction of the text is rejected ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... that it may extend up into the bladder and block the opening into the urethra; the side lobes may compress the urethra into a mere slit, or may lengthen it so that the prostatic portion measures three or four inches, or may twist and distort it so that the most flexible instrument can only be made to pass ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... But his friends saw with regret that his eyes were still seeking through English clouds the blue skies of the East; and that he was kept in perpetual agitation by the fair ones who would cast themselves athwart his path, throwing themselves at his head when not at his feet. Vainly did he distort himself, give himself out to the public as a true "Childe Harold," malign himself; his friends knew that his heart was overflowing with tenderness, and they could not thus be duped. If he had wished to cull some flowers idly, for the sake of scattering ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Formed of the sand, and fit to shift and break. It is that distant years which did not take Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow, Have forced my swimming brain to undergo Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake Thy purity of likeness and distort Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit: As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, His guardian sea-god to commemorate, Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort And vibrant ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Mike, with a grin, 'I know one person who'll jolly well distort your motives, as you ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... source or receiver. However, that relationship fails at velocities far below that of fifth-order rays. At only a very small fraction of that speed the tracers I am following are so badly distorted that they disappear altogether, and I have to distort them backwards. That wouldn't be too bad, but when I get up to about one per cent of the velocity I want to use, I can't calculate a force that will operate to distort them back into recognizable wave-forms. That's another problem for Rovol ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... trying to distort the proper meaning of words, and, presenting a garbled statement of the views of an opponent, I take it as conclusive evidence that he has a bad cause; more when he is constantly at it, and manifests in all that he does a feeling of uneasiness and hostility towards those ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... a composer with inspiration for expression which, MacDowell felt, could not be clearly demonstrated in a small space, and that the music therefore is apt to distort the words if they are harnessed to it in song form. Most of MacDowell's finest pianoforte pieces bear verses in addition to titles, thus definitely indicating what the music is intended to suggest. His verses are of an ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... at home who trimmed their shrubbery into pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to feel dissatisfied. But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom of it. They seek the general effect. We distort a dozen sickly trees into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room, and then surely they look absurd enough. But here they take two hundred thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of leaf ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... honor now that I am not going to distort or discolor the facts of this miserable trial. No, I will give them to you honestly, detail by detail, just as Manchon and I set them down daily in the official record of the court, and just as one may read them in ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... could realize this, how much the quicker would others be to attach the blame to him! how much the more necessary must it be to lose no time in diverting suspicion elsewhere! The fatal propensity to distort or disobey, which perhaps he could have downed had Tintop or Riggs been there, he could not resist with Warren,—an envied contemporary, presumably new to his idiosyncrasies. Nor would he, of course, even with him, have disobeyed could he have foreseen ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... subtle and far-reaching significance, according as they are good or evil. If she is taught, implicitly or explicitly, contempt for the characteristics of her own sex, she naturally develops masculine ideals which may permanently discolor her vision of life and distort her practical activities; it has been found that as many as fifty per cent. of American school girls have masculine ideals, while fifteen per cent. American and no fewer than thirty-four per cent. English school girls wished to be men, though scarcely ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... when attention is called to, or attack is made on specific misuses of capital, there has been a deliberate purpose on the part of the condemned minority to distort the criticism into an attack on all capital. That is wilful deception but it ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of his art, whether he would not burst out laughing? Such is the fate of men of genius: every one holds that he has understood them better than his neighbor, and restores them in his own way. They are like a beautiful theme given by God which men distort into a thousand different meanings—a canvas upon which the imagination of man paints and ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... human or artificial organizations are built upon the principle of crystallization; they fix the conditions of society; they seek to daguerreotype themselves, not on the present age only, but on future generations; hence, they fetter and distort the expanding mind. Organizations do not protect the sacredness of the individual; their tendency is to sink the individual in the mass, to sacrifice his rights, and immolate him on the altar ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... have the pleasure of helping young men. But beware how you do this, saying in your heart, "I will help this young man, and when he succeeds I will reap my reward." Such a selfish thought will utterly poison your advice, deflect your moral vision, distort your intellectual perceptions. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... friend to a house who calumniates the husband to the wife. Is it the part of a friend to distort dear Ernest's kindliness and gayety into ill morals; to pervert his love of poetry and plays into an unworthy attachment to actors and—oh!" and the tears would come. But she dried them, for now she hated this ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... sick-bay, and the doctor had done his best to make him comfortable. He was slumbering, so I did not speak. I stood for some minutes watching his youthful countenance. It was almost feminine in its beauty—so clear, so fair, so free from the effects of the evil passions which distort and disfigure so often the features of those of older years. His long light-brown hair had fallen off his clear broad forehead, and his lips were parted, and moved slightly, as if he were speaking to himself. A sickly gleam of light from the ship's lanthorn, which hung from ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... intention of falsehood, seem incapable of speaking the truth. If they relate a circumstance that has passed under their own observation, or describe anything that they have seen, they add here and diminish there, distort this and give a new color to that, in such a manner that the hearer receives an impression of nothing as it really is. If there seem to be no malicious or evil design in all this, such persons are commonly ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... mixed together. Copal resin may be substituted for the amber, but it is not so durable. Oil varnish made from amber is highly elastic. If it is used to protect tin-plate printing, when the plates after stoving have been subsequently rolled so as to distort the letters, the varnish has in no way suffered, and ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... would correspond exactly with the deformity named chicken-breast. That any force is ever used capable of inducing speedily such a change, is in the highest degree improbable; but that reiterated pressure of this kind, however slight, would in a weakly child have power to impress and distort the chest, few, we ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... of speech that belong to one earlier still. For the N.T. Greek, even in the writings of Luke, contains a large number of Hebrew idioms; and a literal rendering into English cannot but partially veil, and in some degree distort, the true sense, even if it does not totally obscure it (and that too where perfect clearness should be attained, if possible), by this admixture of Hebrew as well as ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... excellence, a mean delight in recognizing inferiority in others, a meaner delight in refusing to recognize the superiority of others, all the honest and all the base forms of self-assertion, cloud and distort the vision when one mind directs its glance at another. For one person who is mentally conscientious there are thousands who are morally honest. The result is a vast massacre of character, which would move the observer's compassion were it not that the victims are also the culprits, and that pity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... of the world may be summed up as follows: The first and second theories we have rejected as utterly false. Instead of being faithful to and adequately explaining the facts, they pervert, and maltreat, and distort the facts of religious history. The last three each contain a precious element of truth which must not be undervalued, and which can not be omitted in an explanation which can be pronounced complete. Each theory, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... others—a cruel recreancy to duty and decency. I have been asked: "Do you not think it cowardly when a man leaves his family unprovided for, to end his life, because he is dissatisfied with life in general?" No, I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not that enough to say of it? Must we distort words from their true meaning in order more effectually to damn the act and cover its author with a greater infamy? A word means something; despite the maunderings of the lexicographers, it does not mean whatever you want it to mean. "Cowardice" means the fear of ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... a sort of incredulous horror, she did not fall at his feet as everyone expected her to, and as she herself had thought to do. Instead, she flung up her head with a spirit that sent the long locks flying. Even when anger began to distort his face,—anger headlong and terrible as Eric's,—her glance crossed his ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... were deficient not only in judgment, but also in candor. For whereas we, with a simple mind, desired, in passing, to recount those things which original sin embraces, these men, by framing an invidious interpretation, artfully distort a proposition that has in it nothing which of itself is wrong. Thus they say: "To be without the fear of God, to be without faith, is actual guilt"; and therefore they deny ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... as his will abide to the end, Do what you will, distort your ways you may wend, Hardships and knocks but insure him your friend Shown by the ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... to defects of her own character, and limitations of her outlook. The same defects which corrupted her policy in the past distort her vision ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... may be all well enough for married people, who, from the mere fact of being married, are always entitled to certain consideration, put—par exemple—into a bed-room, a little larger than a dog kennel, and accommodated with a looking-glass, that does not distort one's features like a paralytic stroke. But we single men suffer a plurality of evils and hard-ships, in entrusting ourselves to the casualties of rural hospitality. We are thrust up into any attic repository—exposed to the mercy of rats, and the incursions of swallows. Our ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... visions have of God or archangels, Hear voices or celestial music, these Are paranoics. And whether it be they rise Enough above the earth to look along A longer arc and see realities, Or see strange things through atmospheric strata Which build up or distort the things they see Remains the question. Let us ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... English journalist, T. W. H. Crosland, not long ago wrote a book "knocking" us, in which he says "that having inherited, borrowed or stolen a beautiful language, they (that is, we Americans) wilfully and of set purpose distort and misspell it." Crosland's ignorance of all things American, ingeniously revealed in this lively bit of writing, is interesting in a person of, presumably, ordinary intelligence, and his credulity in the matter of what he has heard about us ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... history, still continued to spread grotesquely false accounts of Israel's origin and Israel's religious teachings; and he wrote here with more spirit and with more conviction than in his earlier elaborate works. He has no longer to accommodate himself to the vanity of a Roman Emperor, or to distort events so as to glorify his nation or to excuse his own conduct. He is able for once to set out his idea wholeheartedly, and he shows that, if he had few of the qualities required for a great historian, he had several of the talents of an apologist. His own calculated misrepresentation ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side with this vulgar prose; more than this, it must distort its natural style and limits, put songs, poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera, as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves and meadows; compel the gods to descend ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... policy of talking and talking about sexual matters with those whose minds were still untouched by the lure. It means to fill the atmosphere in which the growing adolescent moves with sultry ideas, it means to distort the view of the social surroundings, it means to stir up the sexual desires and to teach children how to indulge in them without immediate punishment. Just as in a community of graft and corruption the individual soon loses ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... vigour and delight performed; My sinking spirits now supplies With cordials in her hands and eyes, Now with a soft and silent tread Unheard she moves about my bed. I see her taste each nauseous draught And so obligingly am caught, I bless the hand from whence they came, Nor dare distort my ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... EUCRITES. You distort my thought, Nicias, and change a beautiful young girl into a hideous Gorgon. I am sorry for you, if you are so ignorant of the nature of the gods, of justice, and of ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... members of the public to speak on a variety of subjects and viewpoints, the more vulnerable is the state's decision selectively to exclude certain speech on the basis of its disfavored content, as such exclusions distort the marketplace of ideas that the state has created in establishing the forum. Cf. Velazquez, 531 U.S. at 544 ("Restricting LSC attorneys in advising their clients and in presenting arguments and analyses to the courts distorts the legal system by ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... beauty, nor worth, nor credibility. Some teach only a very small portion of Christianity, and the portion they teach they often teach amiss. Some doctrines they exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an antiquated ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... of the Catholic Church is the most famous of Cyprian's works. As the theory there developed is opposed to that which became dominant, and as Cyprian was regarded as the great upholder of the Church's constitution, interpolations were early made in the text which seriously distort the sense. These interpolations are to-day abandoned by all scholars. The best critical edition of the works of Cyprian is by W. von Hartel in the CSEL, but critical texts of the following passage with references ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... latter the ideal situation is, as stated before, an hour from house to office. That is the ideal but, in all honesty, we must admit that few attain it. The average country commuter is a born optimist on this point and will unblushingly distort facts in a manner to put the most ardent fisherman to shame. But figures don't lie. If the time table, say between Stamford, Connecticut, and the Grand Central, New York, gives its fastest running time as fifty minutes, it means exactly that. You ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... double refractions of the glass and water represent them, when moving, in a shifting and changeable variety of dimensions, shades, and colours; while the two mediums, assisted by the concavo-convex shape of the vessel, magnify and distort them vastly; not to mention that the introduction of another element and its inhabitants into our parlours engages the fancy in ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... crossed to him, seated herself on his knee and put an arm about his neck. Before she had spoken another word, Tarrant understood; the smile on his face lost its spontaneity; a bitter taste seemed to distort his lips. ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... like all the rest. Are you going to have the courage of your convictions—which I think I can surmise, though you haven't as yet confided them to me—or are you going to wear the slave-chains of your fellows, and distort, and misrepresent, and truckle and kow-tow to the policy of the most venal ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... impression upon their minds; for whatever is brought under the frequent observation of the young must have its influence upon their susceptible natures for good or evil. Shabby school-houses induce slovenly habits. Ill-constructed benches may not only distort the body, but, by reflex influence, the mind as well. Conditions like these seldom fail to disgust the learner with his school, and neutralize the best efforts of his teachers. On the other hand, neat, comfortable places for study ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... imitation of the illustrious, for the ennoblement of their own lives. No book has sold more largely than the Imitation of Christ. But was it not often a blind struggle in the dark, an attempt to reach a goal never clearly seen. Wandering in a labyrinth of fanaticism, agonizing in the effort to distort nature, the biographical record of religious aspiration serves to show how nearly multitudes may approach the boundary line of insanity in their protracted periods of causeless mental agony and in their fierce hostility ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... does not so much hide as distort the truth. The enemy are seldom altogether hidden from view, the trouble is rather to tell whether one is observing a cavalry patrol or an infantry regiment, or if the object moving forward is not in reality a sandhill or a bunch ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... love-making being wanting in conviction on account of her shaved head. At last Irala and his friends determined to send the Governor a prisoner to Spain, taking care, of course, to despatch a messenger beforehand to distort the facts and prejudice the King. The friends of Nunez, however, managed to secrete a box of papers, stating the true facts, on board the ship. At dead of night a band of harquebusiers dragged him from his bed ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... Church," wrote a "History of England from the Roman Invasion to the Reign of William III.," the first written that shows anything like scholarly accuracy, and fairly impartial, though the author's religious views as a Roman Catholic, it is alleged, distort the facts a ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sentimental interest, I say, for rarely, if ever, does genius repeat itself, nor do different environing circumstances weld and mould genius in the same way. Its nature is very easy to kill, or dwarf, or distort, but it is our excuse for being concerned with those who bear ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... whenever a sacrifice must be made, sacrifice the musical value and emphasize the emotion, the meaning, the poetry, the dramatic or narrative significance of the words. Phrase with this end in view; sacrifice anything except tone-production to this end. Do not distort the rhythm, but bend it sufficiently to emphasize important words and syllables, by holding them a little, at the expense of unimportant words or syllables. Finally, remember that ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... the grave to prove thine innocence, Francisco!' said a deep, hollow voice, which startled the whole court, and most of all Hawkhurst and the prisoners at the bar. Still more did fear and horror distort their countenances when into the witness-box stalked the giant ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... thickness of steel is necessary to aid, by its stiffness, in preventing the very ductile iron from giving back to such an extent as to distort the steel face and thus tear or separate the parts of the plate. The ductile iron gives a very low resisting power, its duty being to hold the steel face up to its work. If now we substitute a soft steel plate in the place of the ductile iron, we ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... England, however misguided or mistaken. I want to do the work for her that's easiest and that comes to me. I am on Selingman's roll. What do you think he'll get from me? Nothing that isn't false, no information that won't mislead him, no facts save those I shall distort until they may seem so near the truth that he will build and count upon them. Every minute of my time will be spent to foil his schemes. They don't believe me in Whitehall, or Selingman would be at Bow Street to-morrow morning. That's why I am going my own way. Tell him, ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he has given the divergent views it was certain to create, as constituting a part of its history. He reminds us that two sets of persons equally acquainted with the facts, equally free from any wish to distort them, might be led into opposite judgments through the mere action of some impalpable bias in one direction or the other, which third, more critical or more indifferent, would adopt a compromise between the two; and he closes his introductory chapter with a tribute to that mystery of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... when we return to Greenland, and we must all learn to tell our saga in the same words, for that is the only way in which truth can be handed down to future generations, seeing that when men are careless in learning the truth they are apt to distort it so that honest men are led into telling lies unwittingly. They say that the nations of the south have invented a process whereby with a sharp-pointed tool they fashion marks on skins to represent words, so that once put down in this way a saga never changes. Would that we Norsemen ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... law-giver" of Israel was Duty. Her supreme authority, which enjoined with absolute command the most unpleasant action, was—"I ought." She saw that "laws mighty and brazen" bind man to a right, which he may distort or deny, but cannot destroy—his Saviour or his Judge. Mystic in its sacredness, Conscience sat shrined within the soul of the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost; her voice the very voice ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... tiny breath, this little one that I am holding in my maternal grasp.' She was terrible. At first, I had seen her as an angel of goodness. Now, although she had not changed, she was like an angel of mercilessness and vengeance. I saw a sort of hatred for those who would trouble him distort her face, resplendent with superhuman maternity. Her cruel heart was full of one heart only. It foresaw sin and shame. It hated men and settled accounts with them like a destroying angel. She was the mother with ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... this government on May 29 of a statement regarding the nationalist aspirations for freedom of the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugoslavs, German and Austrian officials have sought to misinterpret and distort its manifest interpretation. In order, therefore, that there may be no misunderstanding concerning the meaning of this statement, the Secretary of State to-day further announces the position of the United States Government to be that all branches of the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... said Donovan, sighing. "But I can well believe that in another world the barriers which he allowed to distort his vision will be removed; the very continuance of existence would ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... connected with the Maori of New Zealand. I think that the people of Indeni (the native name for Santa Cruz) are also more than half Polynesians; but I don't know a single sentence of their language properly. I can say nothing about it. They destroy and distort their organs of pronunciation by excessive use of the betel-nut and pepper leaf and lime, so that no word is articulately pronounced. It is very hard to catch the sounds they make amidst the hubbub on deck or the crowds on shore; yet I think that if we had two or three lads quietly with us ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I don't care what actually happened or did not happen. Damn actual facts. They distort the truth. They are at the bottom of every injustice. What actually happened never matters. It is the picture which sticks in one's brain. True or false, it sticks just the same; and suddenly or ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... centre of attraction. Nevertheless, no graver injury can be done the play as an acting drama than by treating it as a one-part piece. The accepted method of shortening the tragedy by reducing every part, except that of Hamlet, is to distort Shakespeare's whole scheme, to dislocate or obscure the whole action. The predominance of Hamlet is exaggerated at the expense ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... was suggested, of ill-treatment by the authorities of the gaol. The governor had been tried and punished in consequence. Fitzjames gives the actual facts to show how Reade had allowed himself, as a writer of fiction, to exaggerate and distort them, and had at the same time taken the airs of an historian of facts and bragged of his resolution to brand all judges who should dare to follow the precedent which he denounced. This article, I may notice, included an injudicious ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... modern princes. A few prejudiced writers have vainly endeavoured to exaggerate the racial or linguistic factor, and contended that, in the eyes of science, Belgian nationality could not exist. The duty of a scientist is not to distort the manifestations of natural phenomena in the light of some more or less popular idea. His duty is to explain facts. The development and permanence of Belgian nationality, in spite of the most adverse conditions, is one of these facts. The existence of the Swiss nation, far more deeply divided than ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... separate existence gives a dead man clearer notions of metaphysics than all the treatises which in his state of casual entanglement the least immersed spirit can out-spin. It is good to leave such subjects to that period when we shall have no Heads to ache, no brains to distort, no faces to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... sacrifice as represented by the Spanish chroniclers, also by the letters and despatches of Cortez, we do not credit, though undoubtedly they had some foundation in truth. It is the characteristic of all these records to persistently distort facts so as to further the purposes of the writers, and as to correctness where figures are concerned, they are scarcely ever to be relied upon. Though forced to admit this want of veracity, Prescott has relied almost ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... but I have an idea that the ultraviolet light—the actinic rays beyond the violet end of the spectrum, you know—will penetrate fog to a great distance, and in spite of its higher refractive power, which would distort and magnify an object, it is better ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... involuntary imagination intrudes upon intellectual operations only to vitiate them; its part is to fill up the gaps of memory by conjecture, to magnify and attenuate realities, and to confuse them with the products of pure invention. Most children distort everything by inexactitude of this kind, and it is only after a hard struggle that they ever attain to a scrupulous accuracy—that is, learn to master their imagination. Many men remain children, in this respect, the whole of ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... you are right," I answered slowly, "they do just wring and distort them and deform them for life. But I intend to see that Nell's has no such torturous operation performed on it if I can appeal to ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... chains, he was afraid and denied Him; but he was not brought so low as to offer his services as executioner. He, Clerambault, had not only deserted the cause of human brotherhood, he had debased it; he had continued to talk of fraternity, while he was stirring up hatred. Like those lying priests who distort the Scriptures to serve their wicked purposes, he had knowingly altered the most generous ideas to ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... individual has lost all relationship with his natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason, instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and as time goes on, he loses complete control ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... passed away before we were aware by a slight rustle that Mr Francis was back, looming up out of the darkness like some giant, so strangely did the obscurity distort ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... conditional clauses in vii and xxvi to be later insertions (e.g. Skinner, 169 f.). But it was natural to the malice of his foes to distort Jeremiah's conditional, into an absolute, threat, and in xxvi. 13 he corrects them. My translation follows the Greek version, and omits the Hebrew additions which are found in ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... proverbial. At least, then, we may give our life-effort to some grand principle which shall redeem society from its misery and sin? Quite impossible! The contemplation of one idea, however noble, is sure to produce a morbid condition of the mind and distort its healthy proportions. Still there is a last refuge. By fresh air and vigorous exercise a man may surely keep his wits. We will labor steadily upon the soil, and never raise our thoughts from the clod we are turning! Even here the Doctor is too quick for us, and cries, "Checkmate!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... much as a casual purpose. The acts of Csar speak also the same language; and as these are less susceptible of a false coloring than the features of a general character, we find this poet of liberty, in the midst of one continuous effort to distort the truth, and to dress up two scenical heroes, forced by the mere necessities of history into a reluctant homage to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... positive truths, they were useful in the method they created. They had no hostility to truth, as such; they only doubted whether it could be reached in the realm of psychological inquiries, and sought to apply knowledge to their own purposes, or rather to distort it in order to gain a case. They are not a class of men whom I admire, as I do the old sages they ridiculed, but they were not without their use in the development of philosophy. The Sophists also rendered a service to literature ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... ambition but that of avarice," replied Almamen; "and as the plant will crook and distort its trunk, to raise its head through every obstacle to the sun, so the mind of man twists and perverts itself, if legitimate openings are denied it, to find its natural element in the gale of power, or the sunshine of esteem. These Hebrews were not traffickers and misers in their own sacred ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... stain, imbue, tint, tincture, variegate; falsify, pervert, garble, palliate, gloss, distort; blush, flush. Antonyms: decolor, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... I looked intently into my opponent's face, and measured him carefully with my eye, that I might have his height and figure explicit and exact; for I know how moonlight and fire distort, how the eye may be deceived. I looked for every button; for the spot in his lean, healthy body where I could disable him, spit him, and yet not kill him—for this was the thing furthest from my wishes, God knows. Now ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Thus, the mind may often be used as a therapeutic agent, and clever physicians never fail to employ this kind of Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy is therefore no more the discoverer of the "malade imaginaire" than Moliere. When you' distort this truth and write books proclaiming the fact that all ills are of this sort, then you have Eddyism up to date. Mrs. Eddy gathers her skirts in her hand and leaps over the abyss between "some ills" and ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... guest, sat now Helen Mainwaring; against the balustrade where had lounged Charles Vernon, leaned Percival St. John; and in the same place where he had stationed himself that eventful evening, to distort, in his malignant sketch, the features of his father, Gabriel Varney, with almost the same smile of irony upon his lips, was engaged in transferring to his canvas a more faithful likeness of the heir's intended bride. Helen's countenance, indeed, exhibited ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... line, no sapper was required to show them how to throw a suspension bridge above the flood from tree to cliff. It was characteristic of the Regiment that they carried out in war their peace training, never allowing the atmosphere of excitement to distort their actions. ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... passion that made his face drip with sweat and distort into savage fury of defeat ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... twists this body? Yes, but it shall not Distort my soul, by all the gods that be! And when it's done its worst, Pain's victory Shall be an empty one! Whate'er my lot, My banner, ragged, but nailed to the mast, Shall fly triumphant ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... species of burbot. This last is one of the most voracious of the finny tribe, and preys upon all others that it is able to swallow. It devours whole quantities of cray-fish, until its stomach becomes crammed to such a degree as to distort the shape of its whole body. When this kind was drawn out, it was treated very rudely by the boys—because its flesh was known to be extremely unsavoury, and none of them cared to eat it. Marengo, however, had no such scruples, and he was wont to make several hearty meals each ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... iron sash cramps are used to apply pressure to the joint. As this method is in some cases apt to bend and distort thin boards it is wise practice to fix (as a temporary measure) a stout piece of straight wood on to the board to be joined by using two handscrews as shown at the left hand of the illustration. At the right hand of the sketch a wooden cramping arrangement of the box type ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... ridges become broader and are more distinct. An inked impression in such an instance may show a pattern larger in area than a print made from the same finger when the person was alive. Also, if the skin is on the finger but is loose, inking and rolling could distort the impression so that some of the ridge formations would seem to be in a different alignment from corresponding details in a print made during life. When decomposition commences, what are really solid ridges may be broken, giving rise to the possibility that there appear ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... been completed two days later, and set up in Buck's own laboratory. On the bench was the powerful, but small, little projector of the straight magnetic field, simply a specially designed accumulator, a super-condenser, and the peculiar apparatus Devin had designed to distort the electric field through ninety degrees to a magnetic field. Behind this was a curious, paraboloid projector made up of hundreds of tiny, carefully orientated coils. This was Buck's own contribution. They were ready for ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... Distance interspaco. Distant malproksima. Distaste tedo, nauxzo. Distend plilargxigi, sxveli. [Error in book: sxvelo] Distil distili. Distinct (clear) klara. Distinct neta, klara. Distinctive distingiga. Distinguish distingi. Distort tordigi. Distortion (grimace) grimaco. Distract distri. Distraction distreco. Distress cxagrenigi. Distress mizerigo. Distribute (scatter) dissxuti. Distribute (to share) disdoni. District kvartalo. Distrust malfidi. Distrust malfido. Distrustful ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... then said the priest, solemnly extending his hands. "When for some holy and sublime purpose man may need you, God will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom of the waves. Meanwhile, there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... of Jerome Cardan, Paracelsus, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Sir Thomas Browne. Cellini doubtless believed in them; but they warn us to be cautious in accepting what he says about his exploits, since imagination and self-conceit could so far distort ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... off, but which may be grafted in again, for the Jews. Thus to this theory of interpretation the whole Bible responds easily and reasonably. With this kind of interpretation one need not twist and distort the sacred Word in order to understand it. I trust the day is near when men will expound the sacred Scriptures by the rules of ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... partially crippled the powers of its creator. And so, to our modern imagination, the neglected and misunderstood genius has become the very type of the great artist, and we have allowed our belief in him to color and distort our vision of the history of art. We have come to look upon the great artists of all times as an unhappy race struggling against the inappreciation of a stupid public, starving in garrets and waiting long ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... melancholy state of his wife and three children, all dying of scarlatina; but such is too often the case: too often, while the player is tortured with physical pain, or sinking under moral distress, he is obliged in his vocation to wear the face of mirth, and distort his features into the extremes of grimace. The actress, writhing under the pangs of ingratitude in man, or insult from woman, is similarly driven to strain her lungs to charm the ears of an audience, or exhibit her graceful figure to the best advantage in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... habit of wire-drawing and over-refining; from of old we have been familiar with his tendency to Mysticism and Religiosity, whereby in everything he was still scenting out Religion: but never perhaps did these amaurosis-suffusions so cloud and distort his otherwise most piercing vision, as in this of the Dandiacal Body! Or was there something of intended satire; is the Professor and Seer not quite the blinkard he affects to be? Of an ordinary mortal we should have decisively answered in the affirmative; but with a Teufelsdrockh there ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... especially the various groups within the parties, are generally known by the names of their leaders, these denominations not implying any definite political principle or Government programme. It is, moreover, far from edifying that the personal element should so frequently distort political discussion. 'The introduction of modern forms of state organization has not been followed by the democratization of all social institutions.... The masses of the people have remained all but completely outside political life. Not only are we yet far from government ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... create worlds, we direct and domineer over nature, we will have it that all things are as in our folly we think they should be, not as seems fittest to the Divine wisdom, or as they are found to be in fact; and I know not whether we more distort the facts of nature or of our own wits; but we clearly impress the stamp of our own image on the creatures and works of God, instead of carefully examining and recognising in them the stamp of the Creator himself. Wherefore our dominion ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... testified to the amazing influence of the place, and now in the silence round the fire they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind. The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect—as it existed across the border to that other region. And this changed aspect ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... larger—they were forced to wear pressure suits even on that large world, and could jump all over, you said. On so huge a sphere as their native world seems to be, the gravity would be so intense as to distort space. Geometry, such as yours seems to be, and such as ours was, could never be developed, for you assume the existence of a straight line, and of an absolute plane surface. These things cannot exist in space, but on small worlds, far from the central sun's mass, the conditions approach that without ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... daie, Onne Algars sheelde the arrowe dyd assaie, 285 There throghe dyd peerse, and stycke into his groine; In grypynge torments on the feelde he laie, Tille welcome dethe came in and clos'd his eyne; Distort with peyne he laie upon the borne, Lyke sturdie elms by stormes in uncothe wrythynges ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... steamers, however, constantly descend these tumultuous waters, and not unfrequently are lost in the dangerous attempt. The most beautiful and formidable of these rapids is called the Cedars, from the rich groves of that fragrant tree covering numerous and intricate islands, which distort the rushing stream into narrow and perilous channels: the water is not more than ten feet deep in some places, and flows at the rate of twelve miles an hour. The river there widens into Lake St. Francis, and again into Lake St. Louis, which drains a large branch of the Ottawa at its south-western ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... curious reckoning which, in face of such a catena as this, stretching its links over the whole period, maintains that England wanted Germans to teach her how to admire the writer whom Germans have done more to mystify and distort than even ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... gradually drifting the wrong way, and it won't get any better 'til all people put their belief—and I mean by that—simple faith, in the Bible. What they like of it they are in the habit of quoting, but they distort it and try to make it appear to mean whatever will suit their wicked convenience. They have got to take the whole Bible and live by it, and they must remember they cannot leave out those wise old laws of the Old Testament that God gave for men ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... lay among my birth-day presents a beautiful engraving of Albert Durer. A harnessed knight, with an oldish countenance, is riding upon his high steed, attended by his dog, through a fearful valley, where fragments of rock and roots of trees distort themselves into loathsome forms; and poisonous weeds rankle along the ground. Evil vermin are creeping along through them. Beside him Death is riding on a wasted pony; from behind the form of a devil stretches ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... Will, if stripped of unsuitable phraseology, are not very difficult questions. They are about as easy to comprehend as the air-pump, the law of refraction of light, or the atomic theory of chemistry. Distort them by inapposite metaphors, view them in perplexing attitudes, and you may make them more abstruse than the hardest proposition of the "Principia". What is far worse, by involving a simple fact in inextricable contradictions, they have led people gravely to recognise self-contradiction as the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... the Britons have not distinguished themselves in anything, if we are not to take into consideration the fact that being thoroughly incapable of creating their own language, they have by their talent to distort languages given to the present English people a repulsive Judeo-Carthaginian imprint through their shameless ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... necessity of the absolute subjection of the mind to God's written Word—making churches, creeds, ministers, books, religious opinion, all subordinate and subservient to this—"How readest thou?" rebuking the philosophy, falsely so called, that would distort the plain statements of Revelation, and bring them to the bar ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... defence, to see truth disgraced by unworthy weapons employed in her name. It would have been quite impossible for Mr. Clapp to prove half his bold assertions, to justify half his sweeping denunciations. Still, in spite of the fanatical character of some of the advocates of Temperance, who distort her just proportions as a virtue—lovely in her own true character—yet drunkenness is a vice so hateful, that one would never wish to oppose any society, however imperfectly managed, whose object is to oppose that dangerous and common ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... common things of life, such as dressing and undressing, and the numberless every-day duties. It is possible to distort them to perfect monstrosities by the manner of dwelling upon them. Taken as a matter of course, they are the very triviality of trivialities, and assume their place without ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... to be driven or violated into something which is not oneself, surely it is better than anything. He thought of Lottie, and knew how much more truly herself she was when she was alone, with no man to distort her. And he was thankful for the division between them. Such scenes as the last were ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... exactly, I think, to the facts. When we are engaged in a sensation, or when we perceive something, a phenomenon occurs which simply consists in having consciousness of a thing. If to this we add the idea of the subject, which has consciousness, we distort the event. At the very moment when it is taking place, it is not so complicated; we complicate it by adding to it the work of reflection. It is reflection which constructs the notion of the subject, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... because they dominate the heart, from which all life must spring, but they do not answer all questions about all the subordinate provinces of life. The arts in their narrow sense, philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by. Man will not neglect the one or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of Christ, but at times the urgency of his Master's business will seem to shut ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... character. It is a single story, told without variations; whereas myths are fluctuating and multiform: it is blended inextricably with the civil history of the times, which it everywhere reports with extraordinary accuracy; whereas myths distort or supersede civil history: it is full of prosaic detail, which myths studiously eschew: it abounds with practical instruction of the simplest and purest kind; whereas myths teach by allegory. Even in its miraculous element it stands to some extent ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... exactly?" asked Catharine. "Did you keep within them with respect to Anne Askew? No! I say; for the king had not ordered you to torture her; he had not bidden you to lacerate in blasphemous wrath a noble human form, and distort that likeness of God into a horrible caricature. And that, my lord, you did! Before God and your king, I accuse you of it—I, the queen! For you know, my lord and husband, I was there when Anne Askew was racked. I saw her agony, and John Heywood ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... stability, is unable sufficiently to control. The involuntary imagination intrudes upon intellectual operations only to vitiate them; its part is to fill up the gaps of memory by conjecture, to magnify and attenuate realities, and to confuse them with the products of pure invention. Most children distort everything by inexactitude of this kind, and it is only after a hard struggle that they ever attain to a scrupulous accuracy—that is, learn to master their imagination. Many men remain children, in this respect, the whole ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... and fit to shift and break. It is that distant years which did not take Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow, Have forced my swimming brain to undergo Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake Thy purity of likeness and distort Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit. As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, His guardian sea-god to commemorate, Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort And vibrant tail, ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... He is no friend to a house who calumniates the husband to the wife. Is it the part of a friend to distort dear Ernest's kindliness and gayety into ill morals; to pervert his love of poetry and plays into an unworthy attachment to actors and—oh!" and the tears would come. But she dried them, for now she hated this man; with ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... vomiting, pains in the back and limbs, and fever. There is pain in the swelling which is increased by movement of the jaws and by pressure. The degree of the swelling varies with the severity of the attack. It may be very little or it may be so great as to completely distort, and render unrecognizable, the face. It must be remembered that, though mumps is not regarded as an important or dangerous disease, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... you can ever make a rule which it's good for every one to obey. You've got to make your rule for the average person. Therefore it's bound not to fit the man or woman who is not average, and it's folly to wish them to distort themselves to fit it." ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... was her country's civilisation, its very soul, the meaning of it all gentleness, balance. Her spirit, of that quality so little gross that it would never set up a mean or petty quarrel, make mountains out of mole-hills, distort proportion, or get images awry, had taken its stand unconsciously, no sooner than it must, no later than it ought, and from that stand would not recede. The issue had passed beyond mother love to that self-love, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and learn the secret. This he failed to do, owing, perhaps, to his love-making being wanting in conviction on account of her shaved head. At last Irala and his friends determined to send the Governor a prisoner to Spain, taking care, of course, to despatch a messenger beforehand to distort the facts and prejudice the King. The friends of Nunez, however, managed to secrete a box of papers, stating the true facts, on board the ship. At dead of night a band of harquebusiers dragged him from his ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... through great windows that were worth the price they paid for them? Haven't we allowed those checks and barriers that are so important a restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into and distress and distort adult life?... ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... wrathfully and irritably, crimson with confusion, "to distort my words in this way! Excuse me, allow me to assure you that the report which has reached you, or rather, let me say, has been conveyed to you, has no foundation in truth, and I... suspect who... in a word... this arrow... ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... prevented the growth of Labour parties in Australia and in England, or why numerous parties and single-member constituencies go hand in hand both in France and Germany. Single-member constituencies may distort and falsify the representation of parties, but they cannot prevent the coming of a new party if that party is the outcome, the expression, of ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... errors which distort men's opinions on the so-called "silver question" is the belief that the gold supply of the present and near future need be considered merely as it may affect Europe and America. Asia and Africa are in most men's minds entirely excluded ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... but must haste. I may add that if this spherometer is placed on a plate of glass and exact contact obtained, and then removed, and the hand held over the plate without touching it, the difference in the temperature of the glass and that of the hand would be sufficient to distort the surface enough to be readily recognized by the spherometer when replaced. Any one desiring to investigate this subject further will find it fully discussed in that splendid series of papers by Dr. Alfred Mayer on the minute measurements of modern ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... to Ulpius. It is a peculiarity observable in the characters of men living under the ascendancy of one ruling idea, that they intuitively distort whatever attracts their attention in the outer world, into a connection more or less intimate with the single object of their mental contemplation. Since the time when he had been exiled from the Temple, the Pagan's faculties had, unconsciously to himself, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... single stroke, he completely reversed the judgment of the English nation about their greatest man. The whole weight of Church, monarchy, aristocracy, fashion, literature, and wit had for two centuries combined to falsify history and distort the character of the noblest of English statesmen. And a simple man of letters, by one book, at once and for ever reversed this sentence, silenced the allied forces of calumny and rancour, and placed Oliver for all future time as the greatest hero ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... what has hitherto been our musical speech, melody, in favour of what corresponds to the shadow languages of speech, namely, gesture and facial expression. Just as these shadow languages of speech may distort or even absolutely reverse the meaning of the spoken word, so can tone colour and harmony change the meaning of a musical phrase. This is at once the glory and the danger of our modern music. Overwhelmed by the new-found powers ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... then that consideration leads an Englishman to suspend with a stoic [Greek: epoche], and exceedingly to doubt whether the fact could have been as it was originally reported. So said we, when first we heard it; and now, when the zeal of malice has ceased to distort things, let us coolly state the circumstances. A Mahometan Ghazee is a prededicated martyr. It is important to note the definition. He is one who devotes himself to death in what he deems a sufficient cause, but, as the old miser of Alsatia ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... strange alteration, which very nearly approaches to madness; they speak many things at an abrupt and incoherent rate, as if they were actuated by some possessing demon; they make an inarticulate noise, without any distinguishable sense or meaning; they sometimes screw and distort their faces to uncouth and antic looks; at one time beyond measure cheerful, then as immoderately sullen; now sobbing, then laughing, and soon after sighing, as if they were perfectly distracted, and out of their senses. If they have any sober intervals of coming to themselves again, like ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... expect every one to understand on the spot the uselessness of intellect 'seething in vain activity' ... and so we get again one monster the more in the world, one more of those worthless creatures in whom habits of self-ccnsciousness distort the very striving for truth, and a ludicrous simplicity exists side by side with a pitiful duplicity ... one of those beings of impotent, restless thought who all their lives know neither the satisfaction of natural activity, nor genuine suffering, nor the genuine thrill of conviction.... ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... and bless me: Say thou didst not drink it! Say Inis did not—While I speak, the blood Fades from thy cheek! Thine eyes close! Dying pangs Distort thy features; pangs like those which shortened His life, whose angry ghost, grim, fierce, and ghastly, Comes gliding yonder. See his livid finger Points to the poisoned cup! He frowns and threatens. Pray for me, angel! Pray ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... Free will is a glorious but a dangerous prerogative. All experience leads towards the belief that a human will may so distort itself as to grow incapable of good. Even a character not hardened into permanent evil may grow incapable of the highest good. A soul even forgiven through the mercy of God may "enter into life halt and maimed" like a consumptive patient cured of his ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... choose good things and reject bad ones; full of the desire for knowledge and the excitement of discovery. The joy to him is to see things as they are and to judge them normally. He is not bored by the sight of normal, healthy muscles in a healthy, well-shaped body; he is delighted. If you distort the muscles for emotional effect, he would say with disappointment: 'But that is ugly!' or 'But a man's muscles do not go like that!' He will have noted that tears are salt and rather warm; but if you say like a modern poet that your heroine's tears are 'more hot than fire, more salt than the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... judgment, but also in candor. For whereas we, with a simple mind, desired, in passing, to recount those things which original sin embraces, these men, by framing an invidious interpretation, artfully distort a proposition that has in it nothing which of itself is wrong. Thus they say: "To be without the fear of God, to be without faith, is actual guilt"; and therefore they deny that ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... this time saw that he and Ray were not on speaking terms. Blake, too, had arrived, a little cross and crabbed for him, as his wounds were painful, consisting mainly of bruises where his wounded horse had fallen and rolled with him. But he could limp about and swear, and distort the poetry of the old masters and be savage and cynical. He hated Gleason, ridiculed him in public, and hailed him ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Thus did they distort and misinterpret the words he had uttered, the instructions he had given and the parables by which he had illustrated his instructions, giving them the semblance of crimes. But these witnesses could not agree ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... street dragging a train and sweeping the dirt up on the under-flouncings. (Let us hope that fashion never comes back!) Don't wear too much jewelry; it is in bad taste in the first place, and in the second, is a temptation to a thief. And don't under any circumstances, distort your figure into a ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... images, such as are accessible to the common normal perception. In this process much must be disfigured, although Buddha's doctrine of the migration of souls expresses the truth with almost perfect precision. The normal vulgarity of man and the license of general egoism further distort the image until it becomes a caricature. And I pity the poet who undertakes to restore the original image from this caricature. It seems to me that Dante, especially in the "Paradise," has not succeeded in this; and in his explanation of the Divine natures he appears, to me at least, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... its teachers and advocates, it has neither beauty, nor worth, nor credibility. Some teach only a very small portion of Christianity, and the portion they teach they often teach amiss. Some doctrines they exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an antiquated and outlandish ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... ladylike conduct will command. Those who are most pleasing will receive the most attention, and those who desire more should aspire to acquire more by cultivating those graces and virtues which ennoble woman, but no lady should lower or distort her own true ideal, or smother and crucify her conscience, in order to please any living man. A good man will admire a good woman, and deceptions cannot long be concealed. Her show of dry goods or glitter of jewels cannot long cover up her imperfections ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... there must be a fact," I said. "There is some bit of history concealed there. The common people never invent: they distort." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... given to abstractions, and his moods are sometimes rather combative, and certain prejudices (which are not always musical ones) make him lean towards ideals of reason and immovable faith—and if at times his followers unconsciously distort his ideas, and try to dam the stream which flows from life itself, I am convinced it is only the passing evidence of a reaction, perhaps a natural one, against the exaggerations they have encountered, and that the Schola will always know ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... its peculiar dialect, so to speak, by which one knows it. And, indeed, it is an admirable law of Supreme Wisdom, that every passion which is noble and generous beautifies the body, while those that are mean and hateful distort it into animal forms. The more the mind departs from the likeness of the Deity, the nearer does the outward form seem to approach the animal, and always that animal which has a kindred proclivity. Thus, the mild expression of the philanthropist attracts ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... had given Clara food for thought. She was uneasily conscious, after all, that there might be a grain of truth in what had been said, enough, at least, to justify her in warning Tom to be careful, lest his enemies should distort some amiable weakness into a ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... already occurred between her and her brother—consternation, anger, and passionate denial on her part; on his, fury, threats, maudlin paroxysms of self-pity, and every attitude that drink and utter demoralisation can distort into a parody on what a brother might say ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... is, but it is impossible to utter it. The face of your listener, his eyes mirthful or sorry, his eager expectance or his churlish disdain insensibly distort your message. You find yourself saying what you know he expects you to say, or (more often) what he expects you not to say. You may not be aware of this, but that is what happens. In order that the world may go on ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... may be substituted for the amber, but it is not so durable. Oil varnish made from amber is highly elastic. If it is used to protect tin-plate printing, when the plates after stoving have been subsequently rolled so as to distort the letters, the varnish has in no way suffered, and its surface ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... reflected heat from the society around it. We give back words of tepid greeting, without improvement. We talk to our fellows in the phrases we learn from them, which come to mean less and less as they grow worn with use. Then we exaggerate and distort, heaping epithet upon epithet in the endeavour to get a little warmth out of the smouldering pile. The quiet cynicism of our everyday demeanour is open and shameless, we callously anticipate objections founded on the well-known vacuity of our seeming emotions, and assure our friends that we are ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... hours, and warms to rosy glow the tip of a cloud. It appears in unexpected places, grows where only shadow seemed to be, and surprises you anew each time you look up. Painted in the flat—that is, with no part of the picture telling as farther from the eye than another, to distort the proportions of the room—the ceiling yet has great depth, distance, airy lightness. It is a ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... extreme limits of his chair to regard her in a sort of incredulous horror, she did not fall at his feet as everyone expected her to, and as she herself had thought to do. Instead, she flung up her head with a spirit that sent the long locks flying. Even when anger began to distort his face,—anger headlong and terrible as Eric's,—her glance ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... for the largest of your planets, would indicate that. Their own world was probably even larger—they were forced to wear pressure suits even on that large world, and could jump all over, you said. On so huge a sphere as their native world seems to be, the gravity would be so intense as to distort space. Geometry, such as yours seems to be, and such as ours was, could never be developed, for you assume the existence of a straight line, and of an absolute plane surface. These things cannot exist in space, but ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... movement seeks to create and exploit a division between the Muslim and non-Muslim world and within the Muslim world itself. The terrorists distort the idea of jihad into a call for violence and murder against those they regard as apostates or unbelievers, including all those who disagree with them. Most of the terrorist attacks since September 11 have occurred in Muslim ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... the bones, being naturally of a looser texture, are most liable to this disease, and perhaps the cartilages and capsular ligaments may also become inflamed and swelled along with the heads of the bones. This malady is liable to distort the fingers and knees, and is usually called gout or rheumatism; the former of which is liable to disable the fingers by chalk-stones, and thence to have somewhat a similar appearance. But the arthrocele, or swelling of the joints, affects people who have ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... in order to work, and to work efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how still less is there any need—this never under any circumstances—to shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it idealistically—that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the pleasure of helping young men. But beware how you do this, saying in your heart, "I will help this young man, and when he succeeds I will reap my reward." Such a selfish thought will utterly poison your advice, deflect your moral vision, distort your ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Some singers distort their vowel sounds almost beyond recognition, and many pupils seem to be definitely taught to adopt the habit. Then "and" becomes "awnd," and the various words take on new disguises after the reputed Oxford model of "He that hath yaws ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Renfrew—I—I—" His throat abruptly ached and choked. He felt his face distort in a spasm of uncontrollable grief. He turned quickly from this strange old man with a remote sarcasm in his eyes and a remote affection in his tones. Peter clenched his jaws, his nostrils spread in his effort stoically to ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... will have to look out for, therefore, in a receiving set is that it does not cut out some of the high notes which are necessary to give the sound its naturalness. You will also have to make sure that your apparatus does not distort, that is, does not receive and reproduce some notes or "voice frequencies" more efficiently than it does some others which are equally necessary. For that reason when you buy a transformer or a telephone receiver it is well to ask for a characteristic curve of the apparatus which ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to feel dissatisfied. But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom of it. They seek the general effect. We distort a dozen sickly trees into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room, and then surely they look absurd enough. But here they take two hundred thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of leaf or branch to grow ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... those unhappy times that scalped the head feebly protected by a mitre or a crown. But the private virtues and the rich genius of such a man are pure from the taint of party. We are now to see how far private hatred can distort, in its hideous vengeance, the resemblance it affects to give after nature. Who could imagine that Parker is describing Marvell in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... seen again and again how he expresses himself in terms of somewhat exaggerated admiration when writing of a painter whom he appreciates, or a picture that he loves. To us this enthusiasm is an attractive characteristic. It has never been permitted to distort the vision or cloud the critical faculty; and we follow the teaching of the Master all the more closely because we feel his fervor, and know how completely he becomes possessed with a subject which appeals to his imagination ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... if not indeed with amusement, and such a holy awe as Dostoeffsky felt when in moments of revelation he saw by some sudden gleam into the hearts of the criminals around him in Siberia—and what do we do with them? Tie up their souls in official red tape and render their bodies anaemic with clothes, distort them in factories or slay them on battlefields. The doctor is herein the New Mystic at whose feet all must patiently learn the Revelation of Humanity. When there is not quite so much Mankind in the world, and what remains is of better quality, we may perhaps begin to see that ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... upon which all revelations should rest. The purer the intention and motive of the seer, the more lucid will be the visions accorded. No reliable vision can be obtained by one whose nature is not inherently truthful. Any selfish desire dominanting the mind in regard to any thing or person will distort the visions and render them misleading, while a persistent self-seeking spirit will effectually shut the doors upon all visions whatsoever. Therefore, above all things it is essential for the investigator to have an unflinching ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... you my honor now that I am not going to distort or discolor the facts of this miserable trial. No, I will give them to you honestly, detail by detail, just as Manchon and I set them down daily in the official record of the court, and just as one may read them in the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... American Film Company, says: "The most noticeable fault with manuscripts dealing with Western life is the natural inclination to run too much to gun play, stagecoach robberies, etc. Please remember that we do not wish to distort conditions in the great West—rather we seek to portray it ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... by an architectural description, provided the imagination of the writer does not distort essential facts. The mind is enabled by rigid deduction to link it with the past; and to man, the past is singularly like the future; tell him what has been, and you seldom fail to show him what will be. It is rare indeed that the picture of a locality where lives ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... You let your religion distort your view of Nature. You sacrifice truth to a dogma. Nature has no ethics. You profess to paint facts and paint them wrong. You are not a mystic; that we could understand and criticise accordingly. You try to run with ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... feels. And this difficulty is much further complicated by the fact that words themselves tend in the process to harden and petrify, and in their hardening to form, as it were, solid blocks of accretion which resist and materially distort the subtle and evasive play of the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... maternal grasp.' She was terrible. At first, I had seen her as an angel of goodness. Now, although she had not changed, she was like an angel of mercilessness and vengeance. I saw a sort of hatred for those who would trouble him distort her face, resplendent with superhuman maternity. Her cruel heart was full of one heart only. It foresaw sin and shame. It hated men and settled accounts with them like a destroying angel. She was the mother with fearful nails, ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... in common with the whole class of allegorical pastorals, is undoubtedly open to the charge of artificiality, since, in truth, the pastoral garb can never illustrate, but only distort and obscure subjects drawn from other orders of civilization. Yet none but a great master could, to produce a desired effect, have utilized every association which tradition afforded with the consummate skill ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... capital the opposite faces are of identical appearance. If this were the case with the capital at the corner of a building, the result would be that on the side of the building all the capitals would present their bolsters instead of their volutes to the spectator. The only way to prevent this was to distort the corner capital into the form shown by Fig. 64; cf. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... their posterity wish to be even greater. For we create worlds, we direct and domineer over nature, we will have it that all things are as in our folly we think they should be, not as seems fittest to the Divine wisdom, or as they are found to be in fact; and I know not whether we more distort the facts of nature or of our own wits; but we clearly impress the stamp of our own image on the creatures and works of God, instead of carefully examining and recognising in them the stamp of the Creator himself. Wherefore our dominion over creatures ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... merely mention one instance of many in reply to the injustice done to the memory of him who harmonised our poetical language. The attorneys clerks, and other self-educated genii, found it easier to distort themselves to the new models than to toil after the symmetry of him who had enchanted their fathers. They were besides smitten by being told that the new school were to revive the language of Queen Elizabeth, the true English; as every body in the reign ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... undertaken by Adams in London, and as a man new to the diplomatic service he attached to it an unusual importance, even, seemingly, to the extent of permitting personal chagrin at the ultimate failure of the negotiation to distort his usually cool and fair judgment. The matter in question was the offer of the United States to accede by a convention to the Declaration of Paris of 1856, establishing certain international rules for ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... portions of work in the turning-lathe, one of the most important points to attend to is, that while they are held with sufficient firmness in order to be turned to the required form, they should be free from any strain which might in any way distort them. In strong and ponderous objects this can be easily accomplished by due care on the part of an intelligent workman. It is in operating by the lathe on delicate and flexible objects that the utmost care is requisite in the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... and handle thy feeblest lines that they shall seem but the doggerel of a street ballad monger! I will give so bald an epitome of this sickly love-tale that it shall appeal to all who read my commentary the veriest trash that ever poet penned! ... Moreover, I can most admirably misquote thee, and distort thy meanings with such excellent bitter jesting, that thou thyself shall scarcely recognize thine own production! By Nagaya's Shrine! what a feast 'twill be for my delectation!"—and he rubbed his ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... only to bring out the internal secretion make-up of the girl, or to suppress and distort and so spoil her. Adolescence will be peaceful, calm, semi-conscious, or disturbing, revolutionary and obsessive according to the reaction of the other endocrines to the rise of the ovaries. Harmony, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of burbot. This last is one of the most voracious of the finny tribe, and preys upon all others that it is able to swallow. It devours whole quantities of cray-fish, until its stomach becomes crammed to such a degree as to distort the shape of its whole body. When this kind was drawn out, it was treated very rudely by the boys—because its flesh was known to be extremely unsavoury, and none of them cared to eat it. Marengo, however, had no such scruples, and he was wont to make several ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... her deep abysses among the pearls and corals of her eternal seas," then said the priest, solemnly extending his hands. "When for some holy and sublime purpose man may need you, God will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom of the waves. Meanwhile, there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, you will not ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... To place us down beneath, where numbing cold Locks up Cocytus. Force not that we crave Or Tityus' help or Typhon's. Here is one Can give what in this realm ye covet. Stoop Therefore, nor scornfully distort thy lip. He in the upper world can yet bestow Renown on thee, for he doth live, and looks For life yet longer, if before the time Grace call him not unto herself." Thus spake The teacher. He in haste forth stretch'd his hands, And caught my guide. Alcides whilom felt ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... consult old documents. The clothes of man, like his over-ornate furniture, show a debauched and vulgar taste. Instead of the lines which follow one another, solid colours, and trimmings kept to hem of neck and sleeve and skirt, great designs, in satins and velvet brocades, distort the lines and proportions of ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... truth a tragedy," said Donovan, sighing. "But I can well believe that in another world the barriers which he allowed to distort his vision will be removed; the very continuance of existence would ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... however, that love is a mystery, inexplicable, profound. With all the chains, with all the pains, and I may even say, with all the disgust with which the world has surrounded it, buried as it is under a mountain of prejudices which distort and deprave it, in spite of all the ordure through which it has been dragged, love, eternal and fatal love, is none the less a celestial law as powerful and as incomprehensible as that which suspends the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... and when we have laid down rules of this sort we need not be surprised if we now and then come upon facts that will not exactly fit into them. In such an event it is best not to try to squeeze or distort the unruly facts, but to look and see if our rules will not bear some little qualification. The faculty for generalizing is a good servant but a bad master. If we observe this caution we shall find Mr. Morgan's work to be of great value. It will be observed that, with one exception, his restrictions ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... bear the galling calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that same Satanic working, which, if it could, would burn your body, will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... who, without apparent intention of falsehood, seem incapable of speaking the truth. If they relate a circumstance that has passed under their own observation, or describe anything that they have seen, they add here and diminish there, distort this and give a new color to that, in such a manner that the hearer receives an impression of nothing as it really is. If there seem to be no malicious or evil design in all this, such persons are commonly called very imaginative; they should ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... desirous of ascertaining whether these Indians had any amusements of music or dancing, prevailed with two of them to give a specimen of their dancing. One of them began to distort his features and turn up his eyes. He then proceeded to execute, in succession, a variety of strange gestures and attitudes, accompanied by hideous distortions of countenance. His body was generally in a stooping posture; and his hands rested ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... most part it was composed of idle people who were there only for the sake of having something to do: and the role of official entertainer was not at all to his liking. Worst of all, speaking from a platform is almost bound to distort ideas: if the speaker does not take care there is a danger of his passing gradually from a certain theatricality in gesture, diction, attitude, and the form in which he presents his ideas—to mental trickery. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... country, when attention is called to, or attack is made on specific misuses of capital, there has been a deliberate purpose on the part of the condemned minority to distort the criticism into an attack on all capital. That is wilful deception but it does ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... younger son of a poor landowner in the north of Ireland, had practised at the Bar without success. His failure to maintain himself at the law was not due to ignorance of the statutes of the land or to any inability on his part to distort their meaning: it was due solely to the fact that he was a Unionist and a gentleman. His Unionism, in a land where politics take the place of religion, prevented him from receiving briefs from Nationalists, and his gentlemanliness made ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... not nations be judged thus? Is not a full indulgence of its natural tendencies essential to a people's greatness? Force the manners, dress, language, and constitution of Russia, or Italy, or Norway, or America, and you instantly stunt and distort the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... notions of metaphysics than all the treatises which in his state of casual entanglement the least immersed spirit can out-spin. It is good to leave such subjects to that period when we shall have no Heads to ache, no brains to distort, no faces to lengthen, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... at him, speechless. How could he wilfully distort facts in this barefaced way? It seemed a revelation of some incredible pettiness of character hitherto unsuspected in him. When she found her voice she spoke evenly, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... And side by side with the invention of inferior cheap substitutes for existing words and phrases, and infinitely more serious than that invention, goes on a perpetual misuse and distortion of those that are insufficiently known. These are processes not of growth but of decay—they distort, they render obsolete, and they destroy. The obsolescence and destruction of words and phrases cuts us off from the nobility of our past, from the severed masses of our race overseas, far more effectually than any growth of neologisms. A language ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... tendency to shed his privileges, still clings to this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bare of all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in which any hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, would simply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the story of the Princesse de Cleves, floating serenely in the void, without a sign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, no doubt, nothing would be gained by bringing the lucid action to ground and fixing it in its ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... myth; the more we learn of the anthropoid apes the surer we may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a familiar round-game testifies. The greatest of all the epochs in human history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of preceding years were substantially sterile just ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Tecumseh joined the standard of Great Britain in the war of 1812; and as a Brigadier General in her army, lost his life, bravely supporting the cause which he had espoused. He deserved a better fate; and but for prejudice which is so apt to dim the eye and distort the object, Tecumseh would, most probably, be deemed a martyr for his country, and associated in the mind with the heroes of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good Mr. M'Choakumchild: when from thy store thou shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost thou think thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within, or sometimes only maim him and distort him!" ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... of by the sciolists of the age, maintain that God himself was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a full-grown man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full activity. Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always contain some elements of truth, however they may distort, mutilate, or travesty them, make the gods the first teachers of the human race, and ascribe to their instruction even the most simple and ordinary arts of every-day life. The gods teach men to plough, to plant, to reap, to work in iron, to erect a shelter from the storm, and to ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... rose to encounter that which was on its way to meet him. He is a fool who stands and lets life move past him like a panorama. He also is a fool who would lay hands on its motion, and change its pictures. He can but distort and injure, if he does not ruin them, and come ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... Pirckheimer and Dr. Peutinger as if it were a revelation. The gray-haired leech and antiquary, Hartmann Schedel, whom Herr Wilibald,—spite of the gout which sometimes forced a slight grimace to distort his smooth-shaven, clever, almost over-plump face,—led by the arm like a careful son, resembled, with his long, silver locks, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... put his arm about the dying man, who repulsed him, feebly, and dropped upon the turf. Raising himself upon his hands, he gazed at him for an instant, with scorn and hatred in his look; but, seeming to remember, even then, that this expression would distort his features after death, he tried to smile, and, faintly moving his right hand, as if to hide his bloody linen in his vest, fell back ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... engine—and all its wonders clear down to Judge Tom's devil wagon. That's a good deal for one short life. I've seen industry revolutionized—leaving the homes of the people, and herding into the great factories. I've seen steam revolutionize the daily habits of men, and distort their thoughts; one man can't run a steam engine; it takes more than one man to own one. So have I seen capital rise in the world until it is greater than kings, greater than courts, greater than governments—greater than God himself as matters ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... simple elimination of certain factors upon which the judgment depends. The second is the appearance of definite types of error due to the withdrawal of certain correctives of organic tendencies which distort the judgment in specific directions. The loss in accuracy is great; the mean variation increases from 7.69 to 31.43, or more than 400 per cent. This large increase must not, however, be understood as indicating a simple reduction ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... worthy of being well served. All nature and all humanity will serve a good master and rebel against an ignoble one. And there is no surer test of the quality of a nation than the quality of its servants, for they are their masters' shadows and distort their faults in a flattened mimicry. A wise nation will have philosophers in its servants'-hall, a knavish nation will have knaves there, and a kindly nation will have friends there. Only let it be remembered that 'kindness' means, as with your child, not ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... more widely the state opens a forum for members of the public to speak on a variety of subjects and viewpoints, the more vulnerable is the state's decision selectively to exclude certain speech on the basis of its disfavored content, as such exclusions distort the marketplace of ideas that the state has created in establishing the forum. Cf. Velazquez, 531 U.S. at 544 ("Restricting LSC attorneys in advising their clients and in presenting arguments and analyses to the courts distorts the legal system by altering the traditional role of the attorneys in ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... libraries; they instruct, they amuse, they edify. Passing from county to county, hawking news, composing satirical songs, they fill also the place of a daily gazette; they represent public opinion, sometimes create it, and often distort it; they are living newspapers; they furnish their auditors with information about the misdeeds of the Government, which, from time to time, seizes the most talkative, and imprisons them to keep them silent. The king has minstrels in his service; they are great personages in their way, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... myself:—How were they to grow? But again, Why should they grow? In seeking to improve their conditions, might I not do them harm, and only harm? To enlarge their minds after the notions of my world—might it not be to distort and weaken them? Their fear of growth as a possible start for gianthood might ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... itself composite and abounds in forms of speech that belong to one earlier still. For the N.T. Greek, even in the writings of Luke, contains a large number of Hebrew idioms; and a literal rendering into English cannot but partially veil, and in some degree distort, the true sense, even if it does not totally obscure it (and that too where perfect clearness should be attained, if possible), by this admixture of Hebrew as well ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... unadventurous, he seems to say, there is still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through pathless space. Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort human spirits into grotesque forms. The inhabitants of Winesburg tend toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse. They see visions which ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... remarked upon. In the latter case it illustrates the fact that at any time there is a general disposition of the mind to look upon a thing under certain forms, patterns, etc., to which it has grown accustomed; and to do this it is led sometimes to distort what it sees or hears unconsciously to itself. So it falls into errors of judgment through the trap which is set by its own manner of working. Nowhere is the matter better illustrated than in the sphere of vision. The number of illusions of vision is remarkable. We are ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... degrees and shades of delight, from peace and calmest content to ecstasy. His life was hid in God. No vain show could enter at his eyes; every truth and grandeur of life passed before him as it was; neither ambition nor disappointment could distort them to his eternal childlike gaze; he beheld and loved them from the bosom of the Father. It was not for himself he came to the world—not to establish his own power over the doings, his own influence over the hearts of men: he ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... man, you made your soul yourself, and it's yours. This young dispenser of oils, substances, and mysteries wishes only to help you scrape off the rough edges and gouge out the bad spots. He will not steal it, nor distort it with his supernatural chisels, nor make fun of it. He can take nothing away, but only cauterize and neutralize, he says, so why not let him try? Tell him the ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... mission of the poet is "to see life steadily and see it whole," a feat which is impossible if the worship of one figure out of the multitude is allowed to distort relative values, and to throw his ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... what name am I to call you,—since you will answer to none that I remember? Surely you do not live: yet I know the sleeping-places of all my dead,—and yours, I do not know! Neither are you any dream;—for dreams distort and change; and you, you are ever the same. Nor are you any hallucination; for all my senses are still vivid and strong.... This only I know beyond doubt,—that you are of the Past: you belong to memory—but to the memory ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... of potassium dichromate or chromate) added to water containing soft creatures such as molluscs, generally will kill them gently by paralysis and leave them relaxed. Usually almost anything else one uses, short of illegal or expensive drugs, causes such specimens to distort or contract into useless lumps. Once the chromate has thoroughly killed and relaxed them, say after an hour or two, the specimens can be fixed, preserved, or manipulated as required. You may wish to compare this method with the method that I describe for killing molluscs ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... stared with eyes that bulged. What were they? Spawned neither of God nor Satan—what could they be? Black-skinned—or was it skin?—like rubber, with round bodies, like black basket balls inflated to triple size; bodies that seemed to ripple, distort, swell and contract with life ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... other hand, no poet has so planted our literature with gorgeous gardens from which generations of lesser laborers will be enriched and prospered. The figures in which Tennyson uses Nature are not, moreover, strained or artificial; they do not distort or cover the inner meaning, but bloom from it, revealing its beauty and its sweetness. All bear the mark of loving thought,—now so delicate that its very faintness thrills and holds us, now strong ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... text to make full acknowledgments in footnotes. For the same reason, there has been almost no attempt made to show, by means of the conventional devices, the re-arrangements and abridgements that have been made. Every care has been taken not to distort in any way the meaning of the text. And that is all that is important in a ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... securing adequate information on the great problems of modern civilization. Here the individual needs some help. Second, everyone who can distinguish between license and liberty must agree that we should limit the influence of individuals and institutions which suppress minority opinion, and distort facts in the effort to ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... prisoner's features distort; I saw him suddenly dash himself down upon his knees despite his fetters, and beat his face into the dust, crying out the while in a passion of hoarse remorse that made one's ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear— and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... distinction to the Anglo-Saxon race—and he and Shakespeare were contemporaries, and yet of this spirit not a vestige is to be found in the English historical plays and no opportunities lost to obliterate or distort its manifestations. Only in Brutus and his fellow-conspirators—of all Shakespearian characters—do we find the least consideration for liberty, and even then he makes the common, and perhaps in his time the unavoidable, mistake of overlooking the genuinely democratic leanings ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... cadence, caesura, &c. which alone recommend metre as a better or more rememberable form for conveying knowledge than prose: prose, if it has no music, at any rate does not compel the most inartificial writer to dislocate, and distort it into non-intelligibility. Another reason is, that 'As in praesenti' and its companions, are not so much adapted to the reading as to the writing of Latin. For instance, I remember (we will suppose) this sequence ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... between its shoulders which gave a grotesque and distorted aspect to the shadow which its weaving bulk cast upon the sand. I could see the shadow clearly across three hundred feet of sand. It lengthened and shortened, as if an octopus-like ferocity had given it the power to distort itself at will, lengthening its tentacles and then ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... various hypotheses which have been offered in explanation of the religious phenomena of the world may be summed up as follows: The first and second theories we have rejected as utterly false. Instead of being faithful to and adequately explaining the facts, they pervert, and maltreat, and distort the facts of religious history. The last three each contain a precious element of truth which must not be undervalued, and which can not be omitted in an explanation which can be pronounced complete. Each theory, taken by itself, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... her sole wealth, it was, perhaps, from economy of her charms that she hid the ankle in such flowing sables, that she bound the black locks straightly under a little widow's-cap, seldom parted the fine lips above the treasured pearls beneath, disdained to distort the classic features, and graved no wrinkles on the smooth, rich skin with any lavish smiling. She went about the house, a self-contained, silent, unpleasant little vial of wrath, and there was ever between her and Eloise a tacit feud, waiting, perhaps, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... purposes of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly. And logicians have generally felt that unless, in the very first stage, they removed this source of error; unless they taught their pupil to put away the glasses which distort the object, and to use those which are adapted to his purpose in such a manner as to assist, not perplex, his vision; he would not be in a condition to practice the remaining part of their discipline with any prospect of advantage. Therefore it is that an inquiry ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... their reason to be swathed by all the absurd bandages of custom. What, though they cripple or distort their minds; are not these deformities beauties in the eyes of fashion? and are not these people the favoured nurselings of the World, secure of her smiles, her caresses, her fostering praise, her partial protection, through all the dangers of ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... methods and from insufficient data. The data obtained from live-trapping are not fully adequate because traps cannot sample, in time and space, the entire home range of an individual. Also, "trap habit" or "trap shyness" may distort the apparent shape of the home range. In order to compare these methods I have calculated home range from my data by each of five different methods. The results are shown ...
— Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in Kansas • Donald W. Janes
... heart, from which all life must spring, but they do not answer all questions about all the subordinate provinces of life. The arts in their narrow sense, philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by. Man will not neglect the one or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of Christ, but at times the urgency of his Master's business will seem to shut them out ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... always be selfish. If you do not think this, then there is only the other extreme of austere abnegation of self for any cause however trivial. Nature is the only guide and I don't believe Nature is bad. Of course the curse of freedom will allow one for a long time to distort and vilely modify natural instincts, but at least one can fly from the too palpable artificial. Dear Poodie, don't sigh. I only let off steam in words—that is safe. I am still a slave to this disgusting civilization and always your ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... clear-headed, and what people call dull. It didn't take sides: it simply gave, in more detail than any other paper, the issues, and the account of the negotiations, and had expert articles on the different currents of influence on both sides. It didn't distort or conceal ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... subject upon the attention of the Emperor, and had solicited his intercession with Philip. It was not an interposition to save the Prince from chastisement, however the artful pen of Granvelle might distort the facts. It was an address in behalf of religious liberty for the Netherlands, made by those who had achieved it in their own persons, and who were at last enjoying immunity from persecution. It was an appeal which they who made it were bound to make, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... bladder and block the opening into the urethra; the side lobes may compress the urethra into a mere slit, or may lengthen it so that the prostatic portion measures three or four inches, or may twist and distort it so that the most flexible instrument can only be made to ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... this genial liquor all its power of stimulating the palate. Conversation would become dull and vapid, if negligence were not sometimes roused, and sluggishness quickened, by due severity of reprehension. But acids unmixed will distort the face and torture the palate; and he that has no other qualities than penetration and asperity, he whose constant employment is detection and censure, who looks only to find faults, and speaks only to punish them, will soon be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... in the literature of an age is often to distort facts in the interest of theory. But there may come a point—and I think the most notable literature of the year preceding the Coal Strike marks such a point—when certain salient facts emerge so ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... now so much pleased the eye; for there were none of those quartz dykes I had seen protruding through the same kink of aqueous formations in Usui and Karague; nor were there any other sorts of volcanic disturbance to distort the calm quiet ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... officers of the garrison assembled to consider whether or not they should recognize me. The unanimous vote was "yes." Was all this official? No. It is the white people, the disappointed tyrants of Georgia, who try to distort social courtesies in official ones. The "many white" people were some half-dozen newspaper reporters, whose articles doubtless were partly written when they came. "Old Si" in his spectacles was ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... following Buckle, that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does seem to follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... drowsy fancy began to distort them. He had no knowledge of it. He never realized the change. He passed to the realms of sleep like a tired child, striving to follow the course of the flying sparks from the fire till his final memory was of a hundred ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... receiver. However, that relationship fails at velocities far below that of fifth-order rays. At only a very small fraction of that speed the tracers I am following are so badly distorted that they disappear altogether, and I have to distort them backwards. That wouldn't be too bad, but when I get up to about one per cent of the velocity I want to use, I can't calculate a force that will operate to distort them back into recognizable wave-forms. That's another problem for Rovol to chew ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... illustrious, for the ennoblement of their own lives. No book has sold more largely than the Imitation of Christ. But was it not often a blind struggle in the dark, an attempt to reach a goal never clearly seen. Wandering in a labyrinth of fanaticism, agonizing in the effort to distort nature, the biographical record of religious aspiration serves to show how nearly multitudes may approach the boundary line of insanity in their protracted periods of causeless mental agony and in their ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... to live on the best of terms with England. Have I ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature. My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you listen not to them but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult which I feel and resent. To be for ever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinized with jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... are not to take in a decoction or in nauseous form, so you need not snub that so charming nose, or I shall point out to my friend Arthur what woes he may have to endure in seeing so much beauty that he so loves so much distort. Aha, my pretty miss, that bring the so nice nose all straight again. This is medicinal, but you do not know how. I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and hang him round your neck, so you sleep well. Oh, yes! They, like the lotus flower, make your trouble ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... 'You distort my words!' cried Tarhov. 'I only wanted to explain how I understand that person. Do you think he's such a rare specimen? Not a bit of it! I've met other people like him in my time. A man sits with an air of importance, silent, obstinate, angular.... O-ho-ho! say you. It shows that there's ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... who was a many-sided mirror, Which could distort to many a shape of error, This true fair world of things, a sea reflecting love; Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven 385 Gliding o'er ocean, smooth, serene, and even, Darting from starry depths radiance and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in, "that all proves nothing! The Schuylers don't care for ragtime and Vicky Van does. You mustn't distort those plain facts to fit ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... convince us even against our own experience, they are positively undoing the work which education was meant to do. When we receive them merely as an enlargement of what we know and make of the unseen things of which we read, things in the image of the seen, then they quite distort our ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... I talked! "I've trained all the little muscles in my face—muscles you others don't even know you have. Started when I was a kid, then made a good living at it, acting. Comes in handy now, damn handy. I can make anything of my face, and hold it forever if I have to. Chink, Russ—anything. Distort my limbs too, and change my voice. That won't be necessary now. Simple, but it takes ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... or that vulgarian (men began to say) exercise (and boast of!) the power to keep the people ignorant upon matters vital to us all? To distort, to lie? The sheer necessity of getting certain truths told, which these powerful but hidden fellows refused to tell, was a force working at high potential and almost compelling the production of Free Papers side by side with the big Official ones. That is why you nearly always find ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... the issuance by this government on May 29 of a statement regarding the nationalist aspirations for freedom of the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugoslavs, German and Austrian officials have sought to misinterpret and distort its manifest interpretation. In order, therefore, that there may be no misunderstanding concerning the meaning of this statement, the Secretary of State to-day further announces the position of the United States Government ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... added, "speaketh the Book of Ecclesiasticus, of Medicine, and good Physicians; but of the bad ones we may safely affirm the very contrary, since there are no people more injurious to the commonwealth than they are. The judge may distort or delay the justice which he should render us; the lawyer may support an unjust demand; the merchant may help us to squander our estate, and, in a word, all those with whom we have to deal in common life may do us more or less injury; but to kill us without fear and standing quietly ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... King Louis wonder. Charles also wondered, and cursed the stupidity of the Bishop of Cambrai, who had so "encumbered his letter with senseless courtesy as to distort ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... narrative of Livy, who was a man of fine imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times of Rome. It enlivens the dulness of the Universal History, ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Its perfection in one respect, its strongly marked imperfection in another, both appealed equally to his artistic and thoughtful mind. At one moment it would appear before him with an ideal loveliness such as had never blessed the eye of his fancy even; but while he yet looked the features would distort themselves into the vivid expression of some contemptible trait, so like what he had seen in reality, during the evening, that, in uncontrollable irritation, he would start ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... asked: "Do you not think it cowardly when a man leaves his family unprovided for, to end his life, because he is dissatisfied with life in general?" No, I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not that enough to say of it? Must we distort words from their true meaning in order more effectually to damn the act and cover its author with a greater infamy? A word means something; despite the maunderings of the lexicographers, it does not mean whatever you want it to mean. "Cowardice" means the fear ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... of Cyprian's works. As the theory there developed is opposed to that which became dominant, and as Cyprian was regarded as the great upholder of the Church's constitution, interpolations were early made in the text which seriously distort the sense. These interpolations are to-day abandoned by all scholars. The best critical edition of the works of Cyprian is by W. von Hartel in the CSEL, but critical texts of the following passage with references to literature and indication of interpolations may ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... amid the vast horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments of human thought, and felt in ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... seated herself on his knee and put an arm about his neck. Before she had spoken another word, Tarrant understood; the smile on his face lost its spontaneity; a bitter taste seemed to distort his lips. ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... may trust to well-directed native industry. The time is, I hope, at hand, when those who are most in earnest will feel that therefore they are most bound to be just—when they will confess the exceeding wickedness of the desire to distort or suppress a fact, or misrepresent a character—when they will ask as solemnly to be delivered from the temptation to this, as to any crime which is punished ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... the Duke, the King instantly comprehended the whole intrigue, and at once declared that it was useless to search further; as he well knew that she possessed both malice and invention enough to distort the words of the minister to her own purposes; an admission which indicated for the moment a considerable decrease of infatuation on the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Board again mounted his invisible rostrum. "Do you mean to intimate that we are to falsify the record?" he declaimed. "To try to make liars out of hundreds of eyewitnesses? You ask us to distort the truth, to ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... children, all dying of scarlatina; but such is too often the case: too often, while the player is tortured with physical pain, or sinking under moral distress, he is obliged in his vocation to wear the face of mirth, and distort his features into the extremes of grimace. The actress, writhing under the pangs of ingratitude in man, or insult from woman, is similarly driven to strain her lungs to charm the ears of an audience, or exhibit her graceful figure to the best advantage in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... told us what he wishes to convey in the most perfect language of which that idea is susceptible, and that any attempt to put it into the lower and more prosy language of the critic would only weaken and distort the thought. ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... wire-drawing and over-refining; from of old we have been familiar with his tendency to Mysticism and Religiosity, whereby in everything he was still scenting out Religion: but never perhaps did these amaurosis-suffusions so cloud and distort his otherwise most piercing vision, as in this of the Dandiacal Body! Or was there something of intended satire; is the Professor and Seer not quite the blinkard he affects to be? Of an ordinary mortal we should ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... composer with inspiration for expression which, MacDowell felt, could not be clearly demonstrated in a small space, and that the music therefore is apt to distort the words if they are harnessed to it in song form. Most of MacDowell's finest pianoforte pieces bear verses in addition to titles, thus definitely indicating what the music is intended to suggest. His verses are of an uncommon and gifted order, for he was a true poet in both the literary ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... Russ reached for the power controls. A sudden roar of thunderous fury and the beams leaped at the sphere ... but this time the sphere did not materialize again. Again the wrench shuddered through the laboratory, a wrench that seemed to distort space and time. ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... told of late visits; of strolls in the dusk of evenings on unfrequented streets; of little suppers after the opera; of all the small things that deviltry can suggest and malignity distort. Wickersham cared little for having his name associated with that of any one, and he was certainly not going to be more careful for another's name than for his own. He had grown more reckless since his return, but it had not injured him with his set. It flattered his pride to be ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... containing such fishes: the double refractions of the glass and water represent them, when moving, in a shifting and changeable variety of dimensions, shades, and colours; while the two mediums, assisted by the concavo-convex shape of the vessel, magnify and distort them vastly; not to mention that the introduction of another element and its inhabitants into our parlours engages the fancy in a ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... purpose, abjure it for so much as a casual purpose. The acts of Csar speak also the same language; and as these are less susceptible of a false coloring than the features of a general character, we find this poet of liberty, in the midst of one continuous effort to distort the truth, and to dress up two scenical heroes, forced by the mere necessities of history into a reluctant homage to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... of the youth, for it can develop in him only that which exists in him as a possibility. It can lead and assist, but it has no power to create. What nature has denied to a man education cannot give him, any more than it can on the other hand annihilate his original gifts, though it may suppress, distort, and measurably destroy them. And yet it is impossible to decide what is the real essence of a man's individuality until he has left behind him the years of growth, because it is not till then that he fully attains conscious ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... theoretical instinct itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of the thinker himself is recognized as that which is likely to distort truth rather than that which conditions it. When the wise man, the devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is acknowledged because he has renounced himself. As witness of the universal being he purges himself ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... a good deal for one short life. I've seen industry revolutionized—leaving the homes of the people, and herding into the great factories. I've seen steam revolutionize the daily habits of men, and distort their thoughts; one man can't run a steam engine; it takes more than one man to own one. So have I seen capital rise in the world until it is greater than kings, greater than courts, greater than governments—greater ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... will prevent its being restored. Thus in the common impediment of speech, when the association of the motions of the muscles of enunciation with the idea of the word to be spoken is disordered, the great voluntary efforts, which distort the countenance, prevent the rejoining of the broken associations. See No. II. 10. of this Section. It is thus likewise observable in some inflammations of the bowels, the too strong efforts made by the muscles to carry forwards the offending material ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... again mounted his invisible rostrum. "Do you mean to intimate that we are to falsify the record?" he declaimed. "To try to make liars out of hundreds of eyewitnesses? You ask us to distort the ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... perhaps two or three years older. He was of Cope's own height, but slightly heavier, with a possible tendency to plumpness. The best of the photographs made him dark, with black, wavy hair; and in some cases (where sunlight did not distort his expression) he indulged a determined sort of smile. He figured once, all by himself, in choir vestments; again, all by himself, in rowing toggery; a third time, still by himself, in a costume whose vague inaccuracy suggested a character ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... not so much hide as distort the truth. The enemy are seldom altogether hidden from view, the trouble is rather to tell whether one is observing a cavalry patrol or an infantry regiment, or if the object moving forward is not in reality a sandhill or a bunch of reeds. The mirage ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... whatever is brought under the frequent observation of the young must have its influence upon their susceptible natures for good or evil. Shabby school-houses induce slovenly habits. Ill-constructed benches may not only distort the body, but, by reflex influence, the mind as well. Conditions like these seldom fail to disgust the learner with his school, and neutralize the best efforts of his teachers. On the other hand, neat, ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... since, or perhaps ever shall laugh so heartily as at these troglodyte dramas. Their acting was assuredly the most diverting beyond all comparison, or example, I ever saw. They would cut so many negroish capers in tragedy, grin and distort their countenances in such a variety of inhuman expressions, while they kept their bodies either stiff as so many stakes, or in a monkeyish wriggle, and ever and anon such a baboon stare at Desdemona, whose face, neck and hands, were covered with chalk and red paint, to make ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... perhaps upon our words, let us control our fancies and distinguish realities from fictions. There hangs over every great struggle, and especially over every civil war, a hot and hazy atmosphere of excited feeling which is too apt to distort all objects to the view. In the French Revolution, men were suspected of being objects of suspicion, and sent to the guillotine for that offence. The same feverish and delirious fancies prevailed as to the conduct of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... deliberate purpose of making the case against her as black as she could. In reality her evidence was strongly in the prisoner's favour, as I shall point out to you. But she, too, was instructed, or was taught by her own evil nature, to so distort the facts as to make them bear an appearance against the unhappy girl who is ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... work in the turning-lathe, one of the most important points to attend to is, that while they are held with sufficient firmness in order to be turned to the required form, they should be free from any strain which might in any way distort them. In strong and ponderous objects this can be easily accomplished by due care on the part of an intelligent workman. It is in operating by the lathe on delicate and flexible objects that the utmost care is requisite in the process of chucking, as they are easily ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "One advantage," says Mr. Southey, "this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. Southey ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Shutruk-nakhunta is the Susian form of the name; the Assyrian texts distort it into Shutur-nankhundi, and the Babylonian Chronicle of Pinches, into Ishtar-khundu, owing to a faint resemblance in the sound of the name of the goddess Ishtar with the form Shutur, Sthur, itself derived from Shutruk, with which the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Grecian civilization was preeminently the ferment of African blood. Take all the archeological facts of the last fifty years and read them up or down, across or diagonally, inside and out, and this fact rises into your mind like a Banquo that will not down. Historians may distort truth and rob the African race of its historical position, but facts are everywhere throwing open the secret closets of nations and exposing ethnic skeletons that laugh and jest at our racial vanities. The Aryan savages ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... speaking terms. Blake, too, had arrived, a little cross and crabbed for him, as his wounds were painful, consisting mainly of bruises where his wounded horse had fallen and rolled with him. But he could limp about and swear, and distort the poetry of the old masters and be savage and cynical. He hated Gleason, ridiculed him in public, and hailed him as ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... imbue, tint, tincture, variegate; falsify, pervert, garble, palliate, gloss, distort; blush, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... pensively around the room at those stretched in their berths. For a few seconds she is quiet; then, contorting her face into a deep scowl, she gives vent to the most violent bursts of passion,—holds her long black hair above her head, assumes a tragic attitude, threatens to distort it from the scalp. "That one's lost her mind-she's fitty; but I think the devil has something to do with her fits. And, though you wouldn't think it, she's just as harmless as can be," Mr. Praiseworthy coolly remarks, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... "us men and our salvation"? Then we may be sure that, whatever is meant by the "made Himself void," heauton ekenosen, which describes His Incarnation here, one thing it could never possibly mean—-a "Kenosis" which could hurt or distort His absolute fitness to guide and bless us whom He came to save. That awful and benignant "Exinanition" placed Him indeed on the creaturely level in regard of the reality of human experience of growth, and human capacity for ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... unnecessary. And side by side with the invention of inferior cheap substitutes for existing words and phrases, and infinitely more serious than that invention, goes on a perpetual misuse and distortion of those that are insufficiently known. These are processes not of growth but of decay—they distort, they render obsolete, and they destroy. The obsolescence and destruction of words and phrases cuts us off from the nobility of our past, from the severed masses of our race overseas, far more effectually than any growth of neologisms. A language may grow—our language ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... in the net, and a species of burbot. This last is one of the most voracious of the finny tribe, and preys upon all others that it is able to swallow. It devours whole quantities of cray-fish, until its stomach becomes crammed to such a degree as to distort the shape of its whole body. When this kind was drawn out, it was treated very rudely by the boys—because its flesh was known to be extremely unsavoury, and none of them cared to eat it. Marengo, however, had no such scruples, and he was wont to make ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... steel is necessary to aid, by its stiffness, in preventing the very ductile iron from giving back to such an extent as to distort the steel face and thus tear or separate the parts of the plate. The ductile iron gives a very low resisting power, its duty being to hold the steel face up to its work. If now we substitute a soft steel plate in the place of the ductile iron, we will get greater resisting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... place us down beneath, where numbing cold Locks up Cocytus. Force not that we crave Or Tityus' help or Typhon's. Here is one Can give what in this realm ye covet. Stoop Therefore, nor scornfully distort thy lip. He in the upper world can yet bestow Renown on thee, for he doth live, and looks For life yet longer, if before the time Grace call him not unto herself." Thus spake The teacher. He in haste forth stretch'd his hands, And caught my guide. Alcides whilom felt That grapple straighten'd ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... lengthens, until early in March, the sun, a flaming disk of fiery crimson, shows his distorted image above the horizon. This distorted shape is due to the mirage caused by the cold, just as heat-waves above the rails on a railroad-track distort the shape ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... powers to excite vivid visions and distort the imagination, and, therefore, employed in the magical rites, were the thiuimeezque, in Michoacan, and ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... if any powerful emotion seizes him, his brain under the irritation begins to disengage energy at a tremendous rate. He has to use all his available force of control in keeping the energy in. Some of it will leak away into the nerves of his face and distort his features, some may set his tear-glands at work, some may travel down his vagus nerve and inhibit his heart's action so that he faints, or upset the blood-vessels in his head and give him a stroke. Or if he pens it up, without its reaching any of these vents, it may ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... seems to say, there is still the individual, who, perhaps all the more because of the rigid decorums forced upon him, may adventure with secret desires through pathless space. Only, the pressure of too many inhibitions can distort human spirits into grotesque forms. The inhabitants of Winesburg tend toward the grotesque, now this organ of the soul enlarged beyond all symmetry, now that wasted away in a desperate disuse. They see visions which in some wider world might become wholesome ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... sinking spirits now supplies With cordials in her hands and eyes, Now with a soft and silent tread Unheard she moves about my bed. I see her taste each nauseous draught And so obligingly am caught, I bless the hand from whence they came, Nor dare distort my face ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... boy more closely than Doug at all realized, was deeply troubled by what he felt might permanently distort ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... not mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions, incongruous or inappropriate. And if in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer that they are imitations of Petrarch, or that the genius of the poet, cribbed and confined by the fashion of the time, forgot to soar, and limped and waddled in the footsteps of the inconspicuous sonneteers ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... very last words are ominous and suggestive of another possibility (xi.). Job, with a sarcastic compliment to the wisdom of his friends, claims the right to an independent judgment and challenges the whole moral order of the world. Better be honest—God needs no man to distort the facts for Him. Job longs for a meeting, in which God will either speak to him or listen to him. But, as no answer comes, he laments again the pathos of life, which ends ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... and remain hard as flint to a beast, is possible only to humanity. The cat, following her predatory instincts, is at once more logical and less ruthless, because the question of property does not distort her vision. She has none of the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... boiled linseed oil. Both compounds are then mixed together. Copal resin may be substituted for the amber, but it is not so durable. Oil varnish made from amber is highly elastic. If it is used to protect tin-plate printing, when the plates after stoving have been subsequently rolled so as to distort the letters, the varnish has in no way suffered, ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... merely shrugged his shoulders and remained silent. When it finally appeared that he was not going to ask anything more, his wife added: "If you could listen, like any one else, and not interrupt with remarks that distort all one's ideas"—Then, as he persisted in his silence, she relented still further. "Why, of course, as you say, you will have to know it in the end. But I can tell you, to begin with, Owen, that it's nothing you can do anything ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... with all his tendency to shed his privileges, still clings to this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bare of all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in which any hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, would simply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the story of the Princesse de Cleves, floating serenely in the void, without a sign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, no doubt, nothing would be gained by bringing the lucid action to ground and fixing it in its setting. It is a drama ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... crookedness &c. (obliquity) 217; grimace; deformity; malformation, malconformation[obs3]; harelip; monstrosity, misproportion[obs3], want of symmetry, anamorphosis[obs3]; ugliness &c. 846; talipes[obs3]; teratology. asymmetry; irregularity. V. distort, contort, twist, warp, wrest, writhe, make faces, deform, misshape. Adj. distorted &c. v.; out of shape, irregular, asymmetric, unsymmetric[obs3], awry, wry, askew, crooked; not true, not straight; on one side, crump[obs3], deformed; harelipped; misshapen, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... comfortless, high horse-hair-seated chairs, and a sofa of the same uncomfortable material, cold and slippery, on which it was impossible to rest. The carpet was nearly threadbare, and the curtains of dark-red moreen were very dingy; the mirror over the chimney-piece seemed to have been made purposely to distort my features, and produce in me a feeling of depression. My bedroom, which communicated with this agreeable sitting-room by folding-doors, was still smaller and gloomier; and opened upon a dismal back-yard, where a dog in a kennel howled dejectedly from time to time, and ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... their children should grow up high-minded and affectionate. One of the darkest shadows of my present condition is the fear that any revelation of my own weakness and emptiness may discourage and distort my children's characters; and the watchfulness which this requires increases the strain under which I suffer, because it is a hard fact that an example set for a noble and an unselfish motive is not nearly so potent as an example set naturally, sweetly, and generously, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as Bergson calls it, though practically useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less than the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we distort what we knew originally: furthermore just in so far as we make a selection among the facts, attending to some and passing over others, we limit the field of direct knowledge which we might otherwise have enjoyed. For these two reasons Bergson insists ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... human sacrifice as represented by the Spanish chroniclers, also by the letters and despatches of Cortez, we do not credit, though undoubtedly they had some foundation in truth. It is the characteristic of all these records to persistently distort facts so as to further the purposes of the writers, and as to correctness where figures are concerned, they are scarcely ever to be relied upon. Though forced to admit this want of veracity, Prescott has ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... which very nearly approaches to madness; they speak many things at an abrupt and incoherent rate, as if they were actuated by some possessing demon; they make an inarticulate noise, without any distinguishable sense or meaning; they sometimes screw and distort their faces to uncouth and antic looks; at one time beyond measure cheerful, then as immoderately sullen; now sobbing, then laughing, and soon after sighing, as if they were perfectly distracted, and out of their senses. If they have any sober intervals of coming to themselves again, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within - or sometimes only maim him and distort him! ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs; so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas. It is easy to guess the trade of an artizan by his knees, his fingers, or his shoulders: and there are few among men of the more liberal professions, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the man whose amorous lips incline, Full with young Eros' osculative sign, To the lorn maiden whose lact-albic hands, Drew albu-lactic wealth from lacteal glands Of that immortal bovine, by whose horn Distort, to realm ethereal was borne The beast catulean, vexer of that sly Ulysses quadrupedal, who made die The old mordacious Rat, that dared devour Antecedaneous Ale, ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... aid of Hanuman, King of the Monkeys, and his hosts.[361] Is there any kernel of history in this story? An examination of Hindu legends suggests that they usually preserve names and genealogies correctly but distort facts, and fantastically combine independent narratives. Rama was a semi-divine hero in the tales of ancient Oudh, based on a real personality, and Ceylon was colonized by Indians of Aryan speech.[362] But can we assume that a king of Oudh really ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of excellence, a mean delight in recognizing inferiority in others, a meaner delight in refusing to recognize the superiority of others, all the honest and all the base forms of self-assertion, cloud and distort the vision when one mind directs its glance at another. For one person who is mentally conscientious there are thousands who are morally honest. The result is a vast massacre of character, which would move the observer's compassion were it not that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... tend to arouse suspicions as to the questioner's motives. Such information is obtained more readily by cultivating the friendship of boys than by consulting the older folks. This tendency to disguise or to distort the truth, though it has its natural basis in a desire for self-protection, gives the Manbos a reputation for lack of that straightforwardness and frankness that is so noticeable among the Mandyas, even after very ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of foreign lands for matter relating to Holland, it was impossible for a man of his temperament, convictions, and purpose to write a calm, dispassionate history. He is not the cool judge, but the earnest advocate, and yet he does not distort facts. He is just and can be coldly critical, even of his heroes, but he is always on one side, the side of liberty and justice, pleading their cause. His temperament gives warmth, eloquence, and dramatic passion to his style. Individual incidents ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... bridge leading to the picket line, no sapper was required to show them how to throw a suspension bridge above the flood from tree to cliff. It was characteristic of the Regiment that they carried out in war their peace training, never allowing the atmosphere of excitement to distort their actions. ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... reflect one another and we ourselves do not become conscious of our powers until the day of the supreme love, as if, till then, we had only seen ourselves in pocket-mirrors which never reflect more than a morsel of our lives, a movement, a gesture ... and which always distort it!" ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... rear-guard, and otherwise roughly handled the Turkish troops. Upon this, Omer Pacha put him in chains, and would have shot him, as he richly deserved, had he not known that his enemies at Constantinople would not fail to distort the true features of the case. He therefore sent him to Constantinople, where he was shortly afterwards released, and employed his gold to such good purpose, that he was actually sent down as Civil Governor to Travnik, which he had so recently ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... expression is somewhat vague. In order to reconcile the facts with this hypothesis, Navarrete is compelled to reject, as a chirographical blunder, a passage in a letter of the admiral, placing his birth in 1456, and to distort another passage in his book of "Prophecies," which, if literally taken, would seem to establish his birth near the time assigned by Munoz. Incidental allusions in some other authorities, speaking of Columbus's old age at or near the time of his death, strongly ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Shakespeare; who could enact a brother man's biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things he saw; in short, know his course and him, as few "Historians" are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-piled perversions which distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try to represent them so; in sequence, as they were; not in the lump, as they ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... his manly features flicker and quiver like the mist; strange spasms distort them; he bows his head in anguish, and with every tear from her eyes mingle the bitter drops only shed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is independent of the velocity of either source or receiver. However, that relationship fails at velocities far below that of fifth-order rays. At only a very small fraction of that speed the tracers I am following are so badly distorted that they disappear altogether, and I have to distort them backwards. That wouldn't be too bad, but when I get up to about one per cent of the velocity I want to use, I can't calculate a force that will operate to distort them back into recognizable wave-forms. That's another problem for ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... enduring torment under the hands of the hair-dresser, who was doing his best to spoil her hair, and distort her head with a mass of curls, braids, frizzles, and puffs; for though I discreetly refrain from any particular description, still, judging from the present fashions, I think one may venture to predict that six years hence they ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... cried wrathfully and irritably, crimson with confusion, "to distort my words in this way! Excuse me, allow me to assure you that the report which has reached you, or rather, let me say, has been conveyed to you, has no foundation in truth, and I... suspect who... in a word... this arrow... in a word, your mamma... She seemed to me in ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the religious phenomena of the world may be summed up as follows: The first and second theories we have rejected as utterly false. Instead of being faithful to and adequately explaining the facts, they pervert, and maltreat, and distort the facts of religious history. The last three each contain a precious element of truth which must not be undervalued, and which can not be omitted in an explanation which can be pronounced complete. Each theory, taken by itself, is incomplete and inadequate. The third hypothesis overrates feeling; ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... my Lord Bacon, 'think to govern words by their own reason: but it also happens that words throw back their force upon the understanding;' and thus, we may justly add, often distort our thoughts, and lead us to very ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... from the grave to prove thine innocence, Francisco!' said a deep, hollow voice, which startled the whole court, and most of all Hawkhurst and the prisoners at the bar. Still more did fear and horror distort their countenances when into the witness-box stalked the giant ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... babe is still on the bottle. Such being the case, I sent for you. They are inseparable. They have put off falling in love so long that, when they do, it will prove a catastrophe for one of them. Take him away for a while. Distort ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... now, there must be a fact," I said. "There is some bit of history concealed there. The common people never invent: they distort." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... they pleased, although the strictest inquisition followed all that was allowed to pass outside the walls, lest reports adverse to His Majesty's health should reach the party of the Princes, his sons, who caught eagerly at any facts they might distort in a way to gain the Regency for the dissolute Prince of Wales, and cast the Queen completely into his power. It so happened that one day I was seated to my knotting behind the Japan screen in the parlour apportioned by the Prince to Her Majesty ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... alone and by a single stroke, he completely reversed the judgment of the English nation about their greatest man. The whole weight of Church, monarchy, aristocracy, fashion, literature, and wit had for two centuries combined to falsify history and distort the character of the noblest of English statesmen. And a simple man of letters, by one book, at once and for ever reversed this sentence, silenced the allied forces of calumny and rancour, and placed Oliver for all future time as ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... terror and anger distort men's countenances, but never have I seen aught to compare with the disorder of Chatellerault at that moment. He stamped and raved and fumed. He poured forth a thousand ordures of speech in his frenzy; he heaped insults ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... opium-eating. Different races also seem to be differently affected by its use. It seldom, perhaps never, intoxicates the European; it seems habitually to intoxicate the Oriental. It does not generally distort the person of the English or American opium-eater; in the East it is represented as frequently producing ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... must spring, but they do not answer all questions about all the subordinate provinces of life. The arts in their narrow sense, philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by. Man will not neglect the one or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of Christ, but at times the urgency of his Master's business will seem to shut them out ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Theresa Tattle knew, had usually a great effect, even at thirteen; but she had not observed that it had much power upon Sophy; nor were her remarks concerning grace and manners much attended to. Her mother had taught Sophy that it was best to let herself alone, and not to distort either her person or her mind in acquiring grimace, which nothing but the fashion of the moment can support, and which is always detected and despised by people of ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... cum Tryphonte, p. 143, 144. See Le Clerc, Hist. Eccles. p. 615. Bull and his editor Grabe (Judicium Eccles. Cathol. c. 7, and Appendix) attempt to distort either the sentiments or the words of Justin; but their violent correction of the text is rejected even by the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... alone in the universe. To be alone, to be oneself, not to be driven or violated into something which is not oneself, surely it is better than anything. He thought of Lottie, and knew how much more truly herself she was when she was alone, with no man to distort her. And he was thankful for the division between them. Such scenes as the last ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... his child; even the dues of that darling of our current law, the landlord, will stand second to that. This conception of the responsibility of the parents and the State to the child and the future runs quite counter to the general ideas of to-day. These general ideas distort grim realities. Under the most pious and amiable professions, all the Christian states of to-day are, as a matter of fact, engaged in slave-breeding. The chief result, though of course it is not the intention, of the activities of priest and moralist to-day in these matters, is to lure a vast ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Greenland, and we must all learn to tell our saga in the same words, for that is the only way in which truth can be handed down to future generations, seeing that when men are careless in learning the truth they are apt to distort it so that honest men are led into telling lies unwittingly. They say that the nations of the south have invented a process whereby with a sharp-pointed tool they fashion marks on skins to represent words, so that once put down in this way a saga never changes. Would that we ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... Free culture, free occasion, Higher responsibility, will make A higher type of femininity, Ay, of maternal femininity,— Not derogate from that which now we have, And which, through laws and limitations old, Is artificial, morbid, and distort, Except where Nature works in spite of all. 'Woman is but the complement of man!' Granted. But why stop there? And why not add, Man, too, is but the complement of woman? And both are free! And Nature never meant, For either, harder rule than that of Love, Intelligent, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear— and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the universal law ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... passive: the homo tantum et audacia which may with perfect justice be applied to such men as Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah, is with them equivalent to deus tantum et servitus. But their creed is not to be found in any book. It is barbarism, in dealing with such a phenomenon, to distort its ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Human Knowledge, which occupies a portion of his treatise "On the Advancement of Learning." Imperfect and erroneous as his scheme may be allowed to be, D'Alembert and his coadjutors in the last century were able to do no more than to copy and distort it. In his "Novum Organum" he undertakes to supply certain deficiencies of the Aristotelian system of logic, and expounds his mode of philosophizing; he was the first to unfold the inductive method, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and he has given the divergent views it was certain to create, as constituting a part of its history. He reminds us that two sets of persons equally acquainted with the facts, equally free from any wish to distort them, might be led into opposite judgments through the mere action of some impalpable bias in one direction or the other, which third, more critical or more indifferent, would adopt a compromise between the two; and he closes his introductory chapter ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... without apparent intention of falsehood, seem incapable of speaking the truth. If they relate a circumstance that has passed under their own observation, or describe anything that they have seen, they add here and diminish there, distort this and give a new color to that, in such a manner that the hearer receives an impression of nothing as it really is. If there seem to be no malicious or evil design in all this, such persons are commonly called very imaginative; they should be called persons ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... insane individual has lost all relationship with his natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason, instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and as time goes on, he loses ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... imperfection in another, both appealed equally to his artistic and thoughtful mind. At one moment it would appear before him with an ideal loveliness such as had never blessed the eye of his fancy even; but while he yet looked the features would distort themselves into the vivid expression of some contemptible trait, so like what he had seen in reality, during the evening, that, in uncontrollable irritation, he would start ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... medicines." Here Lucy made a wry face. "Nay, but they are not to take in a decoction or in nauseous form, so you need not snub that so charming nose, or I shall point out to my friend Arthur what woes he may have to endure in seeing so much beauty that he so loves so much distort. Aha, my pretty miss, that bring the so nice nose all straight again. This is medicinal, but you do not know how. I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and hang him round your neck, so you sleep well. Oh, yes! They, like the lotus flower, make your trouble forgotten. ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... do but see these eyes— Yes, see the eyes, the body, neck, and form! God made them verily with master hand; 'Twas she herself the image did distort. Let us revere in her, then, God's own work, And not destroy what he so ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... bulged. What were they? Spawned neither of God nor Satan—what could they be? Black-skinned—or was it skin?—like rubber, with round bodies, like black basket balls inflated to triple size; bodies that seemed to ripple, distort, swell and contract with life ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... being her sole wealth, it was, perhaps, from economy of her charms that she hid the ankle in such flowing sables, that she bound the black locks straightly under a little widow's-cap, seldom parted the fine lips above the treasured pearls beneath, disdained to distort the classic features, and graved no wrinkles on the smooth, rich skin with any lavish smiling. She went about the house, a self-contained, silent, unpleasant little vial of wrath, and there was ever between her and Eloise a tacit feud, waiting, perhaps, only for occasion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... are selected who step into the ring, and holding up the recently taken scalps, begin a low chant. The braves circle round, brandishing weapons of various kinds, whilst they distort their faces and bodies into the most horrid shapes. Simultaneously jumping into the air, they come down on both feet with a blow and thrust of their weapons, while it would appear as if they were indulging in ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... "I suppose that no lie becomes prevalent in the world for evil without some fault on the part of somebody. Even though it may not have been expressed in exact terms, some false person has intentionally spread it abroad. And then a man in his wrath, when he hears the lie will distort it, and twist it, and aggravate it,—to his own wrong and ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... work might have achieved a triumph of industry and skill, valuable as well as interesting to general readers and professional writers: but the political opinions, with the partial feelings they engender, continually distort the view and influence the estimate of this positive yet pleasant historian; while his almost wilful blunders, like the errors of Lord Mahon in regard to the American War, have been repeatedly demonstrated. Mackintosh philosophized about ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... latter is Mengino himself, and Sempronio, not recognizing the two, bids them sit down. He dictates the marriage contract, in which Grilletta is said to marry Sempronio by her own free will besides making over her whole fortune to him. This scene, in which the two false notaries distort every word of old Sempronio's, and put each his own name instead of the guardian's, is overwhelmingly comical. When the contract is written, Sempronio takes one copy, Grilletta the other and the whole fraud is discovered.—Volpino vanishes, ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... vast horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing what ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... forced by the needs of her nature to poach for diversion, cook for kindness, and clean, and fight, and pray, and lie, and love, in her brave struggle against the hard and stupid conditions of her life—conditions which were not only retarding the development, but threatening utterly to distort, if not actually to destroy, all that was best, most beautiful, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... assembled. In election returns and official utterances generally the Demijohn District bore a number like every district in the land, but the singular shape lent it by the last gerrymander had settled its popular title till another political overturn should distort ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... by the noble Lord at the head of the Government, or by the Secretary of State for India, letters or despatches of his from which passages have been cut out, and into which passages have been inserted, in which words have been so twisted as wholly to divert and distort his meaning, and to give to him a meaning, it may be, utterly the contrary to that which his original despatch intended to convey. I cannot conceive any anticipation more painful or more bitter, more likely to eat into the heart of any man engaged in the ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... I have an idea that the ultraviolet light—the actinic rays beyond the violet end of the spectrum, you know—will penetrate fog to a great distance, and in spite of its higher refractive power, which would distort and magnify an object, it is better ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... slumbering, so I did not speak. I stood for some minutes watching his youthful countenance. It was almost feminine in its beauty—so clear, so fair, so free from the effects of the evil passions which distort and disfigure so often the features of those of older years. His long light-brown hair had fallen off his clear broad forehead, and his lips were parted, and moved slightly, as if he were speaking to himself. A sickly gleam of light from the ship's lanthorn, which hung from a beam above, fell ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... intrudes upon intellectual operations only to vitiate them; its part is to fill up the gaps of memory by conjecture, to magnify and attenuate realities, and to confuse them with the products of pure invention. Most children distort everything by inexactitude of this kind, and it is only after a hard struggle that they ever attain to a scrupulous accuracy—that is, learn to master their imagination. Many men remain children, in this respect, the whole ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... was the objective existence of matter per se—matter minus perception. Now, matter per se, or minus perception, is a thing which no belief will countenance. Reid, however, could not admit this. Having appealed to the belief, he was compelled to distort its evidence in his own favour, and to force it, in spite of itself, to bear testimony to the fact which he wished it to establish. Thus Dr Reid's appeal not only came to naught, but being premature, it drove him, as has been said and shown, to falsify the primitive convictions of our nature. Scepticism ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... attention was shown me by all. Another officer told me that before I came the officers of the garrison assembled to consider whether or not they should recognize me. The unanimous vote was "yes." Was all this official? No. It is the white people, the disappointed tyrants of Georgia, who try to distort social courtesies in official ones. The "many white" people were some half-dozen newspaper reporters, whose articles doubtless were partly written when they came. "Old Si" in his spectacles was prominently ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... destruction Tango, tactum touch intangible, tact Tempus, temporis time temporize, contemporary Tendo, tensum stretch distend, intense Teneo, tentuin hold tenure, detention *Tendo try tentative, attempt Terminus end, boundary terminal, exterminate Terra earth territory, inter Torqueo, tortum twist distort, tortuous Traho, tractum draw extract, subtraction Tumeo, tumidum swell tumor, contumacy Turba tumult, crowd turbulent, disturb *Unus one unify, triune, onion *Urbs city urbane, suburban Vado, vasum go pervade, invasion Valeo, validum be strong prevail, invalid ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the case, all medical men admit. Thus, the mind may often be used as a therapeutic agent, and clever physicians never fail to employ this kind of Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy is therefore no more the discoverer of the "malade imaginaire" than Moliere. When you' distort this truth and write books proclaiming the fact that all ills are of this sort, then you have Eddyism up to date. Mrs. Eddy gathers her skirts in her hand and leaps over the abyss between "some ills" and "all ills" with the ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... topsy-turvy?—he, too, was listening to every word uttered by Wilibald Pirckheimer and Dr. Peutinger as if it were a revelation. The gray-haired leech and antiquary, Hartmann Schedel, whom Herr Wilibald,—spite of the gout which sometimes forced a slight grimace to distort his smooth-shaven, clever, almost over-plump face,—led by the arm like a careful son, resembled, with his long, silver locks, a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... whether these Indians had any amusements of music or dancing, prevailed with two of them to give a specimen of their dancing. One of them began to distort his features and turn up his eyes. He then proceeded to execute, in succession, a variety of strange gestures and attitudes, accompanied by hideous distortions of countenance. His body was generally in a stooping posture; ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... them no ambition but that of avarice," replied Almamen; "and as the plant will crook and distort its trunk, to raise its head through every obstacle to the sun, so the mind of man twists and perverts itself, if legitimate openings are denied it, to find its natural element in the gale of power, or the sunshine of esteem. These Hebrews were not traffickers and misers in ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... I answered slowly, "they do just wring and distort them and deform them for life. But I intend to see that Nell's has no such torturous operation performed on it if I can appeal to you ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... on each other as he drew it out. He put his arm about the dying man, who repulsed him, feebly, and dropped upon the turf. Raising himself upon his hands, he gazed at him for an instant, with scorn and hatred in his look; but, seeming to remember, even then, that this expression would distort his features after death, he tried to smile, and, faintly moving his right hand, as if to hide his bloody linen in his vest, fell back dead—the phantom ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... might as well call him "a marquis," or "a privy councillor"—that he is simply naming a rank or class, not a phrase for a good man. And this perennial temptation to a shameful admiration, must, and, I think, does, constantly come in and distort and poison our ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... mankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does seem to follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... of the truth, who, incapable of submitting their reason to Holy Scripture, distort at will the meaning of the Holy Scriptures, pretend that these words mean matter. For it is matter, they say, which from its nature is without form and invisible—being by the conditions of its existence without quality ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... how to give as to receive severe thrusts. As an illustration of the method of the discussion, we mention the title of a book written in favor of Cocceius: "Satan's Defense of himself, on being questioned why he had instigated some persons to distort and vilify the orthodox, wise, and edifying Writings of the Blessed Professor Cocceius, &c., &c." In this work Satan, on being questioned whom he fears most, replies that "no one has done more harm to the power of darkness ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... diaphragm vibrate towards and away from the magnet. The distances through which the diaphragm moves have been measured, and found not to exceed in some cases more than 1/10,000,000 of an inch! Its movements distort the shape of the "lines of force" (see p. 118) emanating from the magnet, and these, cutting through the turns of the coil, induce a current in the line circuit. As the diaphragm approaches the magnet a circuit is sent in one direction; as ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... "unwritten" "laws" of nature, | more on the model of Pasteur than of | Newton. | | Any treatment that tries to interpret | Bacon's Logic Machine in the light of what | classical physics called "science" will | distort Bacon's meaning and achievement. | | Note: if a scholar's interpretation of | Bacon's Science does not square with the | detailed description of the application of | Bacon's science in "Salomon's House" ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... that is the first, the greatest gift of love. We can not deny, however, that love is a mystery, inexplicable, profound. With all the chains, with all the pains, and I may even say, with all the disgust with which the world has surrounded it, buried as it is under a mountain of prejudices which distort and deprave it, in spite of all the ordure through which it has been dragged, love, eternal and fatal love, is none the less a celestial law as powerful and as incomprehensible as that which suspends the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the mere fact of being married, are always entitled to certain consideration, put—par exemple—into a bed-room, a little larger than a dog kennel, and accommodated with a looking-glass, that does not distort one's features like a paralytic stroke. But we single men suffer a plurality of evils and hard-ships, in entrusting ourselves to the casualties of rural hospitality. We are thrust up into any attic repository—exposed to the mercy of rats, and the incursions of swallows. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... caught a phrase or two," was the answer, spoken gravely but quite calmly. "I would not speak words of which I am ashamed; at the same time, it is well in these perilous days to use all caution, for an enemy can well distort and magnify the words he hears, till they sound like rank heresy. For myself I have no fear. I prize not my life greatly, though to die as a heretic, cut off from the Church of Christ, is a fearful ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... instance of many in reply to the injustice done to the memory of him who harmonised our poetical language. The attorneys clerks, and other self-educated genii, found it easier to distort themselves to the new models than to toil after the symmetry of him who had enchanted their fathers. They were besides smitten by being told that the new school were to revive the language of Queen Elizabeth, the true English; as every body in the reign of Queen Anne wrote no better than French, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... work, and to work efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how still less is there any need—this never under any circumstances—to shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it idealistically—that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... youth, and he is assured that he may never have any doubts about them, under penalty of thereby forfeiting eternal salvation; propositions, I mean, which affect the foundation of all our other knowledge and accordingly determine for ever, and, if they are false, distort for ever, the point of view from which our knowledge starts; and as, further, the corollaries of these propositions touch the entire system of our intellectual attainments at every point, the whole of human knowledge is thoroughly adulterated by them. Evidence ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... review his entire life within seconds. Psychologists know this is possible, because your subconscious mind contains a complete record of everything that has happened to you since birth. Therefore, in moments of extreme distress your subconscious has the ability to distort and ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... fit to shift and break. It is that distant years which did not take Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow, Have forced my swimming brain to undergo Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake Thy purity of likeness and distort Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit: As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, His guardian sea-god to commemorate, Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort And vibrant tail, within ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... was able to reflect upon its great truths with higher relish than I had ever before done. This, in me, did not give rise to the least tendency to moroseness or superstition, nothing being more apt than misdirected devotion to weaken and distort the mind. With the love of God and mankind, it inspired me also with a veneration for justice, and an abhorrence of wickedness, along with a desire of pardoning the wicked. Christianity, instead of militating against anything good, which I had derived from Philosophy, strengthened it ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... justify itself verbally. Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ's suffering for every sinner, are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth everywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate, although they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression. The same myths, in cruel hands, become goads to fanaticism. That natural sensitiveness in which charity consists has many degrees and many inequalities; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Incidental circumstances determine its phases and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... original method of arriving at the truth, by intimate conversations with Mormon husbands and wives, as well as with the most intelligent of the "Gentiles." She discarded from her mind pre-conceptions and all prejudices which discolor and distort objects which should be rigidly investigated, and looked at the mass of facts before her in what Bacon calls "dry light." Cornelius Vanderbilt, the elder, was accustomed to account for the failures and ruin of the brilliant young brokers who tried to corner the stocks in which he had an ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... be judged thus? Is not a full indulgence of its natural tendencies essential to a people's greatness? Force the manners, dress, language, and constitution of Russia, or Italy, or Norway, or America, and you instantly stunt and distort the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... think that people ought always to speak the truth, and to be especially careful not to distort ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... next, and spoke this speech: "Go bid Vasishtha'a sons appear, And all the saints be gathered here. And what they one and all reply When summoned by this mandate high, To me with faithful care report, Omit no word and none distort." ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... considerable swelling. The ridges become broader and are more distinct. An inked impression in such an instance may show a pattern larger in area than a print made from the same finger when the person was alive. Also, if the skin is on the finger but is loose, inking and rolling could distort the impression so that some of the ridge formations would seem to be in a different alignment from corresponding details in a print made during life. When decomposition commences, what are really solid ridges may be broken, giving rise to the possibility ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced." Can what Bacon says of the fallacies of the mind be also said of its proper cognitions? Does the mind, by its own action, in any way distort the appearance of the things presented to it; and if so, how far does the distortion extend, and in what manner is it to be rectified? To trace the course of this inquiry, from the day when Plato compared the objects perceived by the senses to the shadows thrown ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... find his Master." They are well aware also that only under such guidance can a man develop his latent powers in safety and with certainty, since they know how fatally easy it is for the untrained clairvoyant to deceive himself as to the meaning and value of what he sees, or even absolutely to distort his vision completely in bringing it down into ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... Else will that life go out. All earthly goods By the Great Spirit meant for common use Must so be held. Red shall not marry white, To lop our parent stems; and never more Must vile, habitual cups of deadliness Distort their noble natures, and unseat The purpose of their souls. They must return To ancient customs; live on game and maize; Clothe them with skins, and love both wife and child, Nor lift a hand ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... they created. They had no hostility to truth, as such; they only doubted whether it could be reached in the realm of psychological inquiries, and sought to apply knowledge to their own purposes, or rather to distort it in order to gain a case. They are not a class of men whom I admire, as I do the old sages they ridiculed, but they were not without their use in the development of philosophy. The Sophists also rendered a service to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... follow you in your estimate of Hubert Price. I don't see him either mentally or physically as you do. It seems to me that you distort the facts to make them fit in with your theory. He is tall and thin, but I do not think that his nature is hard and dry. I should, on the contrary, say that he was of a soft rather than a hard nature. The expression of his face is mild ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
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