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More "Distortion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... because of an excess of sentiment softening into "slush," or of a morbid optimism, or of a weak-eyed distortion of the facts of life,—is perverted. It needs to be cured, and its cure is more truth. But this cure, I very much fear, is not entirely, or even chiefly, in the power of the "regular practitioner," the honest writer. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Chopin-like whisper of which, among others, Mendelssohn also affirmed that for him nothing more enchanting existed." But enough of subjective fancies. This study contains much beauty, and every bar rules over a little harmonic kingdom of its own. It is so lovely that not even the Brahms' distortion in double notes or the version in octaves can dull its magnetic crooning. At times so delicate is its design that it recalls the faint fantastic tracery made by frost on glass. In all instances save one it is written as four unbroken quarter triplets in the bar—right ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... is but beauty weareth, near and far, Under the pale, blue sky and lonely star. This is that quick hour when the city turns Her troubled harsh distortion and blind care Into brief loveliness seen everywhere, While in the fuming west the ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered that his life was a long disease... When he rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... to the people he was laughed at and interrupted by their clamours, for the violence of his manner threw him into a confusion of periods and a distortion of his argument; besides he had a weakness and a stammering in his voice, and a want of breath, which caused such a distraction in his discourse that it was difficult for the audience to understand him. At last, upon his quitting the assembly, Eunomous the Thriasian, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... won't know it if it does. Anyhow, it'll live on suppression and distortion and manipulation of news, because it'll have to, if it's going to live ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... analyze the monstrous dream By painful introversion; rather fill Thine eye with forms thou knowest to be truth: But see thou cherish higher hope than this; A hope hereafter that thou shalt be fit Calm-eyed to face distortion, and to sit Transparent among other forms of youth Who own no impulse save to ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... exaggeration and distortion. I allow that he made her an angry speech; but let the circumstances fairly appear, as told by Mr. Baretti, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... saw him, just before his death, can not be imagined. His body had swollen until it seemed marvelous that the human skin could bear so much distention without disruption, All the old look of bright intelligence had been. driven from his face by the distortion of his features. His swarthy hair and beard, grown long and ragged, had that peculiar repulsive look which the black hair of the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... even know that," I retorted. "There is something abnormal about the light-waves coming from it. Not exactly blurred, but a distortion, a fading. It's some abnormality ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... on molecules, or sometimes on one and sometimes on the other? In soft iron, for instance, are the internal arrangements of the chemical atom forcibly distorted, and do they elastically return to their original relations when released? and in steel is the distortion permanent? In all the diagrams the heart-shaped body, exaggerated to show the depression caused by the inflow and the point caused by the outflow, is a ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such distortion of the intellect through passion and such deadening of the conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and slave less demoralizing ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Say, you," he called,—"you with the cro'-jack eye there,—what's that name you go by? Who are you?" He spoke to the large man who had answered to "Bigpig Monahan," and who suffered from a slight distortion of one eye; but the man, instead of civilly repeating his name, answered ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... out every possible combination of opinion, I should have to inquire whether the doctrine of another world might not be understood in such a sense as to involve no distortion of our views. The future world may be so arranged that the effect of the two sets of motives upon our minds may be always coincident. Our interest in our descendants might be strengthened without being distracted ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... applied herself to learn boston. Rogron, incapable of playing a game, twirled his thumbs and had nothing to say except to discourse on his new house. Words seemed to choke him; he would get up, try to speak, become frightened, and sit down again, with comical distortion of the lips. Sylvie naively betrayed her natural self at cards. Sharp, irritable, whining when she lost, insolent when she won, nagging and quarrelsome, she annoyed her partners as much as her adversaries, and became the scourge ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... aspect than was that of Pablo Garcia, as, distorted with rage, he started on seeing Lilla resting half supported by me. The handsome regularity of his features seemed then to have the effect of making the distortion more striking. There was an angry frown, too, upon my uncle's face as he strode up; and, almost roughly taking Lilla ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... patriotism leads him into what strikes me at least as a rather vulgar bit of claptrap. If any reader will take the trouble to compare De Quincey's account of a kind of anticipation of the Balaclava charge at the battle of Talavera, with Napier's description of the same facts, he will be amused at the distortion of history; but whatever the accuracy of the statements, one is a little shocked at finding 'the inspiration of God' attributed to the gallant dragoons who were cut to pieces on that occasion, as other gallant men have been before and since. The phrase is overcharged, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... him: the reading of the narrative had left its mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation labored more and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was emphatically ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... as fully as persons belonging to the last class; but sometimes he is especially attracted to some one division and rarely travels beyond its influences. His recollection of what he has seen may vary according to the degree of his development through all the stages from perfect clearness to utter distortion or blank oblivion. He will appear always in the astral body, since by the hypothesis he does not know how to form ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... ineffectual effort to escape. There was a little redness about the eyes, very slightly indicated, so that you would question whether or no the girl had been weeping. The whole face was quiet; there was no distortion or disturbance of any single feature, nor was it easy to see why the expression was not cheerful, or why a single touch of the artist's pencil should not brighten it into joyousness. But in fact it was the very saddest picture ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... sick, is now sick, or can be sick. We know, Father and Mother of us all, that there is no such thing as a really diseased stomach; that the disease is the Carnal Mortal Mind given over to the World, the Flesh and the Devil; that the mortal mind is a twist, a distortion, a false attitude, the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... that, even amid the clatter of twenty machines around me, not a word was lost,—"you may be sure that this prejudice against women working for their own support will never die out. It is one of those excrescences of the human mind that cannot be extirpated. It is a distortion of the reasoning faculty itself, unworthy of a sensible person, and is generally exhibited only by those who, while boasting of exemption for themselves, have really little or nothing else to boast of. It is the infirmity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... blank-verse, and said it always failed, unless sustained by the dignity of the subject. In blank-verse, he said, the language suffered more distortion, to keep it out of prose, than any inconvenience or limitation to be apprehended from the shackles and circumspection ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Griswold, but friendly relations had been nominally established and Poe had authorized Griswold to edit his works. This Griswold did, including a biography which Poe's friends declared a masterpiece of malicious distortion and misrepresentation; it certainly was grossly unfair and inaccurate. Poe's friends retorted, and a long war of words followed, in which hatred or prejudice on the one side and wholesale, undiscriminating laudation on the other, alike tended ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... greeted by the harsh voice and hard, weather-stained features of McBain wreathed in a smile which was a mere distortion, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... to take a peep at him if he was visible. He saw me and bounded to the window, bringing his leg-of-mutton fist against it with a blow that crashed the whole plate of glass into splinters. His face was purple, his eyes half out of their sockets. There was froth upon his lips, with such a general distortion of features that it would be impossible to figure a more horrible illustration of madness than his countenance. I bolted as if the devil had been after me, catching just a glimpse of the powerful creature wrestling in the grasp of the two seamen who were dragging him backwards into the gloom ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... times worse if I had done the deed and cast the blame of it on a man so devoted to me that he would bear the guilt in my stead, and a hundred thousand times worse if I had then held up that man to the execration of mankind, and tortured him with every distortion of evidence which great falsehoods can put upon a little truth. That would indeed have been far worse than anything I have done. God may find forgiveness for murderers, but there is only hell for traitors, and the hell of hells is the place of men ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... the unhappy girl who listened to this distortion of her meaning could find no vent in words. And then there followed the slow revelation in return, bringing with it all the misery of an explanation which comes too late. The question whether Miss Aldclyffe were schemer or dupe was almost passed over by Cytherea, under the immediate ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... surface. If two great globes attract each other, each tends to draw the other out into an ellipsoidal figure; they must be more rigid than steel to resist this — and even then they cannot altogether resist. If they are liquid or gaseous they will yield readily to the force of distortion, the amount of which will depend upon their distance apart, for the nearer they are the greater becomes the tidal strain. If they are encrusted without and liquid or gaseous in the interior, the internal mass will strive to assume the figure demanded by the tidal force, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... rather than better, passing his stools and urine, involuntarily. He lies on his back, and, with the exception of the left arm, he is completely paralytic on both sides, from the neck downwards. The sense of feeling is very much impaired—there is no distortion of the face, nor impediment of speech. Is troubled with twitchings in the lower extremities. Purgatives—blisters to the nape of the neck, and ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... and Rudolph, looking from his window, saw that on the river, by the same instinct, boatmen were stretching up their bamboo awnings. Breakfast was hardly ended, before river, and convex field, and huddling red tiles of the town, lay under a blurred, quivering distortion. The day flamed. At night, against a glow of fiery umber, the western hills broke sharp and thin as sheet-iron, while below them rose in flooding mirage a bright strip ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... said, "—remember that! The gun is there ... a great bore in the earth ... solid rock ... but the casing of titanite must be reinforced ... and bands shrunk about the muzzle that projects ... heavy bands ... it shows signs of distortion—the heat!..." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... see the image of her own management of her children reflected without exaggeration or distortion in this glass; and, as the former story shows how the freest indulgence is compatible with the maintenance of the most absolute authority, this enables us to see how a perpetual resistance to the impulses and desires of children may co-exist with no ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... we'll begin," said Uncle Richard; "and the first thing is to make our mould or gauge, for everything we do must be so exact that we can set distortion at defiance. We must have no ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it. He makes his models grimace, as ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... scene or scenery; an optical device which gave a distortion to the picture unless seen from a particular point; a relief, modelled ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... determination of her face, confronting him with this untruth, he saw enough of the last perversion and distortion of good surviving in that miserable breast, to be stricken with remorse that he ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... managed to scratch his face abundantly. Ridicule would be added to the scandal of the story. He imagined the adorned tale making its way through the garrison of the town, through the whole army on the frontier, with every possible distortion of motive and sentiment and circumstance, spreading a doubt upon the sanity of his conduct and the distinction of his taste even to the very ears of his honourable family. It was all very well for that fellow Feraud, who had no connections, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... find consolation in them. He was born under an evil star, he said, and would not be free of its spell until he had passed through a period of servitude. It sounds like insanity, but it was only a grim ironic distortion of his reason. He said that if honor was so poor a thing he would seek a world that knew no honor. I dread to think how he has ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... an illusion had they wished to do so, seems to imply ignorance of the amazingly dexterous realism of the notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the misrepresentation of the primitives must be attributed to what the critics call, "wilful distortion." Be that as it may, the point is that, either from want of skill or want of will, primitives neither create illusions, nor make display of extravagant accomplishment, but concentrate their energies on the one thing needful—the creation of form. Thus ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... The action of microbes. The cathartic habit. The true action of cathartics explained, and popular suppositions corrected. A correct solution of the difficulty. "Flushing the colon" as an ancient practice. Dr. Turner's post mortem experiences. Colon distortion illustrated. Objections to the ordinary appliances danger in using the long, flexible catheter. Invention of the "J. B. L. Cascade," and description ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... He was terrified by the havoc which grief had made of the noble and intelligent face of his friend. He was shocked at the distortion of his features, the unnatural brilliancy of his eyes, and the convulsive ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... chart, as the Government has for sale blank Mercator charts for every parallel of latitude in which they can be used. It is well to remember, however, that since a mile or minute of latitude has a different value in every latitude, there is an appearance of distortion in every Mercator chart which covers any large extent of surface. For instance, an island near the pole, will be represented as being much larger than one of the same size near the equator, due to the different scale used to preserve the accurate ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... But the distortion which the character of Emma Burton undergoes, and the caricature of Gerty Neville, are, after all, easily pardonable faults in a story rich in noble thought and sympathy, bright with pretty, audacious nonsense, and containing such real personages as Jim Burton and his father and mother, ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... even in the strange notions of our patients, and less eager to call them queer and foolish. A delusion may contain another person's attempt at stating truth. The goal of psychiatry and of sound common sense is truth free of distortion. Many a strange religious custom and fancy has been brought nearer our understanding and appreciation since we have learned to respect the essential truth and individual and group value of fancy and feeling even in the myths and in the ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... mind), outside of both thought and nature, and making it consist of a group of eternal schemes, or forms, of which natural things are merely transient phantoms, and which can be reached by only a few aristocratic souls, born to rule the rest. On the basis of this distortion he constructed his Republic, in which complete despotism is exercised by the philosophers through the military; man is reduced to a machine, his affections and will being disregarded; community of women and of property is the law; and science ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a crowded, ill-lighted hall, barn-like in its proportions, and the smoke-laden air gave a peculiar distortion to everything. She felt as though she would stifle. There were shrill cries of boys selling programmes and soda water, and there was a great bass rumble of masculine voices. She heard a voice offering ten to six on ...
— The Game • Jack London
... such articular surfaces are in contact they tend to adhere, thus obliterating the joint, cavity, and resulting in fibrous or bony ankylosis. The changes progress slowly and, before they result in ankylosis, various sub-luxations and dislocations may occur with distortion and deformity which, in the case of the fingers, is extremely disabling ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... and coloring. Some of them disappoint us; like the ghost of Hamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape." Thus, for instance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue with the world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuous innuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the occasional habit of seeing such things, and no doubt to Mr. Christopher it had not much that was new; but to Hester what each and all of them were capable of was astonishing—more astonishing than pleasant, for she was haunted for some time after with a vague idea of prevailing distortion and dislocation. It was satisfactory nevertheless to know that much labor of a very thorough and persevering sort must have been expended upon their training before they could have come within sight of the proficiency they had gained. She believed this proficiency bore strong ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... lathe, and the work proceeded with until it is completed. By again heating the chuck, by laying upon it a piece of red-hot iron, the work, however delicate, can be simply lifted off, and will be found perfectly free from all distortion. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... Baldacchino. Yet it is curious to observe how much of the dignity even of his later pictures, depends on such portions as the green light of the lake, and sky behind the rocks, in the St. John of the tribune, and how the repainted distortion of the Madonna dell' Impannata, is redeemed into something like elevated character, merely by the light of the linen window from ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... of a hero was this:—A hero was a man who must have ends beyond himself, in casting himself as it were out of himself, and must pursue these ends by means which were honourable, the lawful means, otherwise he might degenerate into a wild enthusiast. He must do this without distortion or disturbance of his nature as a man, because there were cases of men who were heroes in great part, but who were so excessively given to certain ideas and objects of their own, that they lost all the proportion of their nature. There were other heroes, who, by giving undue ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... old and upwards. But the roughness of the scholars bore no proportion to the roughness of the room. That had order, shape, and some decency of preparation. The poor young human creatures that clustered within it were in every stage of squalor, rags, and mental distortion. With a kind of wonder Mr. Carlisle's eye went from one to another to note the individual varieties of the general character; and as it took in the details, wandered horror-stricken, from the nameless dirt and shapeless rags which covered ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... after-life display themselves in infancy, and therefore they all ought to be quietly and easily brought into exercise. This maybe done by any object,—even a toy. Were we to tie up several of our members so as to prevent their use, and at the same time exercise strongly those at liberty, bodily distortion must result. If we, in teaching, exercise the memory alone, and that merely with a knowledge of words and not of things, an absolute mental distortion must result, and the higher powers of reflection, judgment, and reason will remain weak, feeble, and deficient ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... abundantly satisfied;" who once or twice every day looks at his little captives, presents them with a lump of sugar, whistles and chuckles to provoke them to sing, then goes about his business, flattering himself that he is a lover of birds, a being of a sweet and kindly nature. It is all a delusion—a distortion and inversion of the truth—so absurd that it would be laughable were it not so sad, and the cause of so much unconscious cruelty. The truth is, that if birds be capable of misery, it is only in the unnatural conditions of a caged ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... this whole class of humorists is the opposite of Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. Every thing in life is reversed, as in opera bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox takes the place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they have supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... more irreclaimable than a wicked clown, low-born and lowbred, namely, that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness: but principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning faculty; and man, accustomed from the cradle rather to reason than to feel, has that faculty more firm against abrupt twists and lesions than it is in woman; where virtue may have left him, logic may still linger; and he may decline to push evil to a point at which ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ever advanced into the public with fitter qualifications of body and mind for the propagation of a new religion. Oh, had those happy talents, misapplied to vain philosophy, been turned into their proper channels of dreams and visions, where distortion of mind and countenance are of such sovereign use, the base, detracting world would not then have dared to report that something is amiss, that his brain hath undergone an unlucky shake, which even his brother modernists themselves, like ungrates, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... fresh laurels for their crown of glory. The Russian arms were marching steadfastly toward their goal, assured of final victory against an enemy who, blinded by the hope of an easy victory, was making desperate efforts, having recourse to all kinds of subterfuges, even the distortion of the truth. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... extraordinary creations, due entirely to society for, according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish. The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal conditions,—where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to say, in lightning flashes, to energize the ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... movements and uses; so that no part of them shall be absent, or disordered, or enfeebled; for nature requires soundness. For there is a certain action of the body which has all its motions and its general condition in a state of harmony with nature, in which if anything goes wrong through any distortion or depravity, either by any irregular motion or disordered condition,—as if, for instance, a person were to walk on his hands, or to walk not forwards but backwards,—then he would evidently appear to be flying from himself, and to be putting off his manhood, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... commonly the obstruction comes from distortion and narrowing of the pelvis as the result of fractures. (Plate XIII, fig. 2.) Fractures at any point of the lateral wall or floor of the pelvis are repaired with the formation of an extensive bony deposit bulging into the passage of the pelvis. The displacement of the ends ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... really Mr. Common Sense, you've never got so far As to think Mercator's planisphere shows countries as they are; It won't do to measure distances; it points out how to steer, But this distortion's not for you; another is, I fear. The earth must be a cylinder, if seaman's charts be true, Or else the boundaries, right and left, are one as well as two; They contradict the notion that we dwell upon a plain, For straight away, without a turn, will ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... this because of my personal knowledge of six cases at White Earth, in which paralysis of one side of the face occurred soon after the Mid[-e] administered this compound. In nearly all of them the distortion disappeared after a lapse of from six weeks to three months, though one is known to have continued for several years with no signs of recovery. The Catholic missionary at White Earth, with whom conversation was held upon this ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... a last fond, lingering look at Mary. He saw her sitting up in bed, her golden hair, dimmed with her one day's illness, floating behind her, her head bound round with wetted cloths, her features all agitated, even to distortion, with the pangs of ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... foils the child as to make him half imbecile or criminal. I may have ideals if I like—even of love and forbearance and meekness. But I have no right to ask another to have these ideals. And to impose any ideals upon a child as it grows is almost criminal. It results in impoverishment and distortion and subsequent deficiency. In our day, most dangerous is the love and benevolence ideal. It results in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation or collapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. It is in us an ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... to the distortion introduced by the prism) the maximum ordinate representing the heat in the prismatic spectrum is, as observed by Tyndall, below the red, while upon the normal scale this maximum ordinate is found in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... Germany's capacity to pay was from the outset out of court. The expectations which the exigencies of politics had made it necessary to raise were so very remote from the truth that a slight distortion of figures was no use, and it was necessary to ignore the facts entirely. The resulting unveracity was fundamental. On a basis of so much falsehood it became impossible to erect any constructive financial policy which was workable. For ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... she was thunderstruck by an extravagant and seemingly senseless incident. Morange, having shown Alexandre out of the little salon, in advance of himself, turned round towards her with the sudden grimace of a madman, revealing his insanity by the distortion of his countenance. And in a low, familiar, sneering voice, he stammered in her face: "Ha! ha! Blaise at the bottom of the hole! He speaks, he has spoken to me! Ha! ha! the somersault! you would have the somersault! And you shall have it again, the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Church, whose life was one long devotion to its ordinances, should survive in this grotesque myth, might serve to point a satire upon the vanity of earthly fame. The legend in its very extravagance is a fanciful distortion of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... her audience she relied mainly on her own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion. Of course, her face changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious, and which she couldn't have reproduced to her mirror; it was ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... convalescence, holding him in my hand one whole Sunday afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and being rewarded at last by seeing animation and activity come back to his poor sickly little body. He will never be a robust chicken. He seems to have a permanent distortion of the spine, and his crop is one-sided; and if there is any such thing as blind staggers, he has them. Besides, he has a strong and increasing tendency not to grow. This, however, I reckon a beauty rather than a blemish. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... plea of business, before Mr. Carr's return, and with a reference to the family likeness obtaining between omnibuses, asked Joan to see him safe aboard. He accompanied the request with such a distortion of visage that she rightly concluded that he wished for an opportunity to speak ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... factor, grows in potency. The domineering, self-assertive, so-called master-morality of Nietzsche, itself akin in some respects to Bushido, is, if I am not greatly mistaken, a passing phase or temporary reaction against what he terms, by morbid distortion, the humble, self-denying slave-morality of ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... wretched man who had leaped over the taffrail, and reached the boat badly wounded; he was seen lying in it when the deck was regained, and was then pierced through with many balls. Nothing could be more horrible than his appearance; the distortion of every feature, his clenched hands, and the limbs which had stiffened in the forms of agony into which pain had twisted them, were appalling. The countenance of every man on board bore evidence of the nature of the deadly conflict in which he had been engaged. In some, sullenness had ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... be said to consist of a perfect polish of soul, which receives and reflects the images that fall upon it, without warping or distortion. And this fine polish of soul is, I believe, constantly attended with what philosophers ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... strength. I had, the November before, a slight paralysis in the face, which affected the muscles of the lower lid of one of my eyes, causing a constant irritation in the organ itself. After a time this caused a distortion of the lips, which I concealed somewhat by a moustache. But it operated, for a little while, as an effective disguise. When I came home during the winter, an old conductor on the Boston & Albany Railroad, whom I had known quite well, when he took my ticket ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... that light is caused by the vibrations of the ether in a plane transverse to the direction of propagation. In order to transmit motions of this kind, the parts of the luminiferous medium must resist compression and distortion, like those of an elastic solid body; its transverse elasticity being great enough to transmit one of the most powerful kinds of physical energy, with a speed in comparison with which that of the swiftest planets of our system is inappreciable, and its longitudinal ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... no time for the long study of the situation which alone could form a sure insight into the conduct it demands. We need readymade morals. Moreover, we are subject to bias, to individual one sidedness, and to the distortion of passion; in the stress of temptation we are not in a mood to reason judicially, even if we have the necessary data. Altogether, insight, though in the long run the critic of conscience, is not a practical substitute. What conscience tells us is more ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... action. Gradually as time passes this force of desire wears out, but only at the cost of terrible suffering for the man, because to him every day seems as a thousand years. He has no measure of time such as we have in the physical world. He can measure it only by his sensations. From a distortion of this fact has come the ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... forests, dim and silent as a cavern, columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channelled rind; some strong in youth, some grisly with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... London journals as "a cross between an Astley's chariot, a treadmill and a flying machine," and its uncouth appearance has been a standing butt for the London reporters at the Exhibition. It was the ready exemplar of American distortion and absurdity in the domain of Art. It came into the field at Mechi's, therefore, to confront a tribunal (not the official but the popular) already prepared for its condemnation. Before it stood John Bull, burly, dogged and determined not to be humbugged—his judgment made up and his sentence ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... small axial and large radial clearance, whereas the labyrinth packing of the piston Z has, vice versa, a small radial and large axial clearance. Elimination of causes of trouble with the low-pressure balance piston not only makes it possible to reduce the diameter of the cylinder, and prevent distortion, but enables the entire spindle to be run with sufficiently small clearance to obviate any excessive leakage ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... the end of this, Since you blame so much the power for distortion and for ill residing in our great towns, in our system of primary education and in our papers and in our books, what remedy can you propose? Why, none, either immediate or mechanical. The best and the greatest remedy is a true philosophy, ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... witnesses to the reality of that of which it is the distortion; the caricature to the existence of the feature caricatured. And so the universality of the existence of Superstition witnesses to the reality of these supernatural revelations and interpositions to which alone such a thing can be referred ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... 70 Fahr. as practicable, and is observed at intervals for at least 28 days. A third pat is exposed in an atmosphere of steam above boiling water, in a loosely-closed vessel, for 5 hours. These pats must remain firm and hard and show no signs of distortion, checking, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... infirmary, and it is his wish to die, where he has spent so many nights in penitential prayer. For several days, the paralysis of years has been gradually loosening its fetters, and this morning, the distressing and ghastly distortion of one side of his face almost disappeared. Though his voice is well nigh gone, it returns fitfully, and his strength seems supernatural. Fearing that you might not arrive in time, I have written down his last confession, and here commit ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... cedars and the temple-like stillness brought to Peter's mind the night of his mother's death. It seemed to him a long time since he had come running through the glade after a doctor, and yet, by a queer distortion of his sense of time, his mother's death and burial bulked in his past as ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... avarice of his character. He smokes his black pipe, folds his arms deliberately, discoursing of the affairs of the nation to two stupefied negroes and one blear-eyed son of the Emerald Isle. Three uncouth females, with hair hanging matted over their faces, and their features hidden in distortion, stand cooling their bared limbs at a running faucet just inside the door, to the left. A group of half-naked negroes lie insensible on the floor, to the right. A little further on two prostrate females, shivering, and reeking of gin, sleep undisturbed by ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... his phraseology for the express purpose of escaping misinterpretation, yet it would have been a marvel in applied political morals if the paraphrases devised by Douglas had been strictly ingenuous. The favorite distortion was to alter what was strictly a forecast into a declaration of a policy, to make a prediction pass for an avowal of a purpose to wage war against slavery until either the "institution" or "Abolitionism" should be utterly defeated and forever exterminated. It was said to be a "doctrine" ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Chopin that they manifested themselves distinctly in his last works. They little by little attained a kind of sickly irascibility, reaching the point of feverish tremulousness. This latter reveals itself in some of his last writings by a distortion of his thought which one is sometimes rather pained than surprised to meet. Suffocating almost under the oppression of his repressed transports of passion, making no longer use of the art except to rehearse to himself his own tragedy, he began, after having sung his feeling, to tear ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... and felt a recoil of more than ordinary dislike for the man. The latter had put the paper in his pocket and was coming their way. His face, once possibly handsome, for his eyes and forehead were conspicuously fine, showed a distortion quite apart from that given by his physical disfigurement. He was not simply angry but in a mental and moral rage, and it made him more than hideous; it made him appalling. Yet he said nothing and moved along very quietly, making, to all appearance, for his room. Would he notice them as ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... myself, and scalped us. The pain of losing the flesh from my head was most horrible; it made me leap in agonies, and roar like a bull. They then tied us to stakes, and making great fires around us, began to dance in a circle, singing with much distortion and barbarity, and at times putting the palms of their hands to their mouths, set up the war-whoop. As they had on that day also made a great prize of some wine and spirits belonging to our troop, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... swept over his house, and blasted all his worldly prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man who had the entire sanction and support of the Head of the Christian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... was accused of an affectation of muscularity, and an undue parade of anatomical knowledge, even upon quiescent figures: But the artist whom we are now considering has no quiescent figures:—even his repose is a state of rigid tension, if not extravagant distortion. He is the Fuseli of novelists. Does he deem it necessary to be energetic, he forthwith begins foaming at the mouth, and falling into convulsions; and this orgasm is so often repeated, and upon such inadequate occasions, that we ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... how they did what they did to us. I don't know. But I can tell you what they did. They empathize—that is, see through our eyes, feel with our fingertips—so that they perceive what we do. Second, they can control those perceptions; hang on a distortion circuit, as Ives would put it, between the sense organ and the brain. For example, you'll find all our fingerprints all around the port control, where, one after the other, we punched the wall and thought we ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... they hires, an' they thinks us don't matter." Tony is right, I believe. Most of the impropriety I used to hear at school, university, and in the smoking room, though often little but a reaction against silly conventions, a tilt against whited sepulchres,—was well-named smut. It was furtive, a distortion of life's facts and inimical therefore to life. Impropriety here, on the other hand, is a recognition of life's facts, an expression of life, a ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... 6, which runs: "The fact of the weft not being at right angles to the warp, if one may conclude by the fabrics, does not, I think, imply that such weaving is of inferior quality. When I noticed the peculiarity first, I thought it might have arisen through distortion by stretching over the body, but repeated examples of the same fact have led me to consider other causes. We know how closely analogous to 'darning' was the early weaving; and in our days it is not ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... yellow pigments, black powders or rouge, or by applying any dye that alters the natural features." And afterwards he adds: "They lay hands on God, when they strive to reform what He has formed. This is an assault on the Divine handiwork, a distortion of the truth. Thou shalt not be able to see God, having no longer the eyes that God made, but those the devil has unmade; with him shalt thou burn on whose account thou art bedecked." But this is not due except ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... concern to him) the spectator will mix them—which he often does. The advantage of this method of color presentation lies in the degree of purity which the pigment retains. Its disadvantage appears in its frequent distortion of fact and aspect of nature, sacrificed to a scientific method of representation. An estimate of impressionism is wholly contained in the reply to the question, "Do you like impressions? Yes, when they are good;" and in ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... and condemns the ignorant praise bestowed by Fielding on Garrick. Not an idea of deception enters the mind of actor or author. On the stage, even the expression of strong passion must be without the natural distortion and screaming voice. Transfer, he observes, acting to a private room, and it would be ridiculous. "Quid enim deformius, quum scenam in vitam transferre?" Yet he gives here a caution, "that no art can be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... placed himself at the head of one troop, and Lagediak of the other: both gave the signal for attack, by blowing their muscle horns. The adverse forces approached; but instead of the battle began a comic dance, in which the two armies emulated each other in grimaces, furious gesticulations, and a distortion of the eyes, which left only the whites visible, while the women shrieked a war-song, which, if their opponents had been lovers of harmony, would assuredly have put them to flight. The leaders on each side took no share in these violent exertions, but stood still, animating their troops by the ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... diameter of their object mirror or lens, their defining power depends on the exquisite correctness of their optical surfaces. Grand instruments may possess the former quality in perfection by reason of their size, but the latter very imperfectly, either through want of original configuration, or distortion arising from flexure through their own weight. But, unless an instrument be perfect in this respect, as well as adequate in the other, it may fail to decompose a nebula ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... was momentarily shocked by a distortion of one side of her face, which seemed, however, to end in a wink of her innocent brown eyes, but recovering himself, gallantly expressed his gratitude. The next moment he was ascending the stairs, side by side with Miss Tish, and had a distinct impression that ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sonorous native language, and when in conversation she would look me one of those dreamy glances which had at the first set my heart in agitation, it perfectly bewildered me. You needn't smile, Langley, (poor Bill's face was guilty of no such distortion,) but if your little danseuse should practice for years, she couldn't attain to the delicious glance which my handsome creole girl can give you. The heavily-fringed eyelid is just raised, so that you can look as if ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... point in his address, but intending a good deal more, O'Flaherty suddenly stopped short, drew himself into a stooping posture, with a flush and a strange distortion, and his eyes fastened upon Father Roach with an unearthly glare for nearly two minutes, and seized Puddock upon the upper part of his arm with so awful a grip, in his great bony hand, that the gallant little gentleman piped out in ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and men quarreling over whether Clayton or Ellsworth should be mayor, Kittrell had to draw a political cartoon each day; and as he struggled with his work, less and less the old joy came to cheer and spur him on. To read the ridicule, the abuse, which the Telegraph heaped on Clayton, the distortion of facts concerning his candidature, the unfair reports of his meetings, sickened him, and more than all, he was filled with disgust as he tried to match in caricature these libels of the man he so loved and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's opponent, to picture him as a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... a sacrifice to their sympathy. Even the eyes of the patient were considered a sources of contagion, which had the power of acting at a distance, whether on account of their unwonted lustre, or the distortion which they always suffer in plague, or whether in conformity with an ancient notion, according to which the sight was considered as the bearer of a demoniacal enchantment. Flight from infected cities seldom availed the fearful, for the germ of the disease adhered ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... limbs of the child assumed the appearance of deformity and distortion, as, with his back humped up, and his master's stick in his hand, he hobbled about the room, his childish face drawn into a doleful pucker, and spitting from right to left, in imitation of ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... have seen them already. How are you going to get out of that corner, except by saying that you do not want to see the old porpoises and whales and bergs?—and I know your "Scotch" conscience forbids such distortion of facts. ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... was dancing, some in a state of nudity, others half dressed, singing an unmusical wild air with (I suppose) appropriate words, the particular sounds of which were ha! ha! ha! uttered vociferously and with great distortion of countenance and peculiar attitude of body, the feathers being always kept in a tremulous motion. The ensuing day I made the chief acquainted with the object of our mission and recommended him to keep at peace with his neighbouring tribes and to conduct himself with attention and friendship ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... constantly appeals to the testimony of the Commission as being in its own favour. The consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly enough. The Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long working-hours. This distortion usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and legs, and is described as follows by Francis Sharp, M.R.C.S., of ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... from west to east—and to be able to see a light on a balloon, it has to be well below 65,000 feet; the man from CIA told me that they had even considered the possibility that the UFO was a meteor and that the "jump" had been due to some kind of an atmospheric distortion. But the light had been in sight too long to be a meteor. He added that an army chaplain and two teetotaler guests had also ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... strongly against Paley's distortion of Justin Martyr's testimony, complaining: "The works of Justin Martyr do not fall in the way of one in a hundred thousand of our countrymen. How is it, then, to be deprecated that erroneous statements should be current about him! How is it ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... Misshapen Parts go together as both cause and effect, and the one, when found, will usually very soon lead to the other. Twisting or Curving is one of the most positive signs of previous inflammation, stricture and twisting or distortion of the seminal ducts, and hence sterility or barrenness. In such especially are the remarkable effects of the Civiale Treatment the most noticeable. We can say with positiveness, and prove it by case after case, that by no other method can such rapid ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... forbear to urge the moral difficulties and perversions of the Christian revelation, "the recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a hell." "Is it possible," he asks, "to adore such a one without a frightful distortion of the standard of right and wrong?" "Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful idealization of wickedness. Most of them, too, are happily ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... masters, the second to his own compositions. Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, were likely to be represented, and he also did missionary work for Templeton Strong and other Americans. His interpretation of the music of other composers was both objective and subjective; there was no distortion or exaggeration, yet one could not mistake the fact that it was MacDowell who was ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... hope of contributing reciprocally to the entertainment of the company. Merriment, extorted by sallies of imagination, sprightliness of remark, or quickness of reply, is too often what the Latins call, the Sardinian laughter, a distortion of the face ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... the outbreak after three centuries of mind-repression and soul-distortion, of forcing a growing subject into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural selection reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and leadership, is indeed a curious study. That there will be an outbreak somewhere is as certain as that the plant ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... a modern Pindaric writer compared with Pindar is like a sister among the Camisars compared with Virgil's Sibyl; there is the distortion, grimace, and outward figure, but nothing of that divine impulse which raises the mind above itself, and makes ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... necessary correlatives of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent—of the boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most original design that a human brain could conceive. There was, so to speak, that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic of British than of Continental grotesques of the period. All the eight were different from each other. A beholder was convinced that nothing on earth could be more hideous than those ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... no one in this neighborhood will stop to ask what is the matter with you. I tell you I am determined to possess myself of that ivory ball, and have it I shall, even though I am obliged to cut out your heart to get it!" As he spoke he grinned with so extraordinary and devilish a distortion of his countenance, and with such an appearance of every intention of carrying out his threat as to send the goose-flesh creeping like icy fingers up and down our hero's spine with the ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... prisoner at Pretoria the Boers showed me a large green pamphlet Mr. Reitz had written. It was intended to be an account of the Dutch grounds of quarrel with the English, and was called 'A Century of Wrong.' Much was distortion and exaggeration, but a considerable part dealt with acknowledged facts. Wrong in plenty there has been on both sides, but latterly more on theirs than on ours; and the result is war—bitter, bloody war tearing the land in twain; dividing brother from brother, ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... to solve the problems, it manifestly was necessary to state them. In doing this the writer has sought to present them in a readable and attractive form, but without any distortion ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... this was ever granted, I would rest My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast, Pressing the brain, which too much thought expands, 25 Back to its proper size again, and smoothing Distortion down till every nerve had soothing, And all lay quiet, happy, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... But they are fifty-nine. Who, then, is the fifty- ninth? Cromwell's young kinsman, Colonel Richard Ingoldsby, who, though a member of the Court, had attended none of its meetings till precisely that of the 29th, the date of the Warrant. Here comes in Clarendon's famous story, a distortion of some convenient rigmarole of Ingoldsby's own in later times. Ingoldsby, says Clarendon, "always abhorring the action in his heart," had purposely kept away from every meeting of the Court, till, chancing to look into the Painted Chamber on the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... laughing, when all the wit in the world would not do it; a plain proof, in my mind, how low and unbecoming a thing laughter is: not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions. Laughter is easily restrained, by a very little reflection; but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... though he responded with a faint gleam as Walter, looking back at him, produced for his benefit a cynical distortion of countenance which offered little confirmation of Alice's account of things. Then the door was swiftly opened to the brother and sister; and they came into a marble-floored hall, where a dozen sleeked young men lounged, ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... in one?" She shrugged a shoulder to incite him to argument, for he was interesting when excited; when spurting out little geysers of other people's cheap wisdom and philosophy, poured through the kind distortion ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... burlesco, from burla, a joke, fun, playful trick), a form of the comic in art, consisting broadly in an imitation of a work of art with the object of exciting laughter, by distortion or exaggeration, by turning, for example, the highly rhetorical into bombast, the pathetic into the mock-sentimental, and especially by a ludicrous contrast between the subject and the style, making gods speak like common men and common men like gods. While parody (q.v.), also based ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... she had taken hold of one of the others, whose business it then became to take her station in the centre, so that almost every woman in her turn occupied this post, and in her own peculiar way, either by distortion of countenance or other gestures, performed her part in the game. This continued three-quarters of an hour, and, from the precaution of placing a look-out, who was withdrawn when it was over, as well as from some very expressive signs which need ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... surprise found vent in a positive distortion of his features. "Ah!" said he, in three different tones; "ah! ah!" And as no one had offered him a seat, he approached an arm-chair and took possession of it, exclaiming, "You will allow me, I trust? Those stairs have put me in ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... vitiis. Dryden and Pope are the standards of excellence in this species of writing in our language; and when young minds are rightly instituted in their works, they may, without much danger, read such glittering verses as Dr. Darwin's. They will then perceive the distortion of the sentiment, and the harlotry of the ornaments." To the short-lived popularity of Dr. Darwin, the admirable poem of "The Loves of the Triangles'" the joint production of Mr. Canning and Mr. Frere, in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... hard to bear with the foibles of things and people which he saw with the most disconcerting clarity. And, as there is no good cause, nor any good man, who, seen at a certain angle or with a certain distortion, does not present a ridiculous aspect, there was nothing that, with his ironic disposition, he could go on respecting for long. All this was not calculated to make him friends. And yet he was always well-disposed towards people, and inclined to do good: he did much ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... have got rid of it never ask a woman to marry you. Men like you do not understand women. They do not try to; probably they could not if they did. Men like you are so twisted and distorted in mind that they cannot recognise their own distortion. It seems to me that Mr. Amarinth has created a cult. Let me call it the cult of the green carnation. I suppose it may be called modern. To me it seems very silly and rather wicked. If you would take that hideous green ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... drunken women shouted foul language at one another everywhere was wickedness everywhere want. Her heart felt as if it would break. What was to reach these poor, miserable fellow creatures of hers? Who was to raise them out of their horrible plight? The coarse distortion and the narrow contraction of Christ's teaching which she had just heard, offered no remedy for this evil. Nor could she think that secularism would reach these. To understand secularism you meed a fair share of intellect what intellect would these poor creatures have? ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... to Heine's tragedy, "William Ratcliff." The different psychological phases of the tragedy are presented by characteristic motives which war among themselves. The Scottish locale is indicated vividly, and the despair of the lovers presented in one place by the distortion and rending of all the principal motives. A dirge with bells and a final musing upon, and resignation before, implacable Fate give a dignified close to a work in which passion is exploited with erudition ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... a wide difference between folk-lore of the so-called Old World and that of America. Transmitted orally through countless generations, the folk-stories of our ancestors show many evidences of distortion and of change in material particulars; but the Indian seems to have been too fond of nature and too proud of tradition to have forgotten or changed the teachings of his forefathers. Childlike in simplicity, beginning with ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... challenge boldly with the declaration that Senator Chamberlain's statement was "an astonishing and unjustifiable distortion of the truth," and must have been due to disloyalty to the Administration. Chamberlain's reply, while admitting that he might have overstated his case, was a proclamation of loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief and an appeal for ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... wildest lion but, finding his bars are made of iron, ceases to bite them. The Crown-Prince there, in his horror, indignation and despair, had a lucid human judgment in him, too; loyal to facts, and well knowing their inexorable nature, Just sentiments are in this young man, not capable of permanent distortion into spasm by any form of injustice laid on them. It is not long till he begins to discern, athwart this terrible, quasi-infernal element, that so the facts are; and that nothing but destruction, and no honor that were not dishonor, will be got by not conforming to the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... name of the man who went to him on this honorable errand, soon after his election in 1829, was George W. Erving, of whom and of whose revelations I shall also have something to say. I do not charge this distortion of the name as wilfully made; but it shows how carelessly and loosely all his relations and intercourse with him hung upon his memory, and how little he ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Mary-'Gusta, shocked into protest by her fellow culprit's distortion of the truth. "How can you say so! What a ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... saw something at which they had been taught to laugh and make sport; they saw that which the heading of every newspaper column, the lie of every cub reporter, the exaggeration of every press dispatch, and the distortion of every speech and book had taught them was a mass of despicable men, inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, the ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Rudisten-kalk, imposed on shaly masses of Neocomian, modified by their pressure. More complex forms of harder rock were wrought by the streams and rains into fantastic outlines; and the transverse gorges were cut deep where they had been first traced by fault or distortion. The analysis of this aqueous action would alone require a series of discourses; but the sum of the facts was that the best and most interesting portions of the mountains were just those which were ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... crucifixion declension dimension dissension distortion divulsion expulsion impulsion insertion intention occasion propulsion recursion repulsion revulsion scansion ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... vehemence, the wild accents, the frantic looks, with which Nathan ended the horrid story, into which he had been betrayed by his repining companion. His struggles to subdue the passions that the dreadful recollections of a whole family's butchery awoke in his bosom, only served to add double distortion to his changes of countenance, which, a better index of the convulsion within than were his broken, incoherent, half-inarticulate words, assumed at last an appearance so wild, so hideous, so truly terrific, that Roland was seized with ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... afterward, it would be no remarkable thing if the mental images of the injuries inflicted on his victim are reproduced in himself. In idiocy we have apparently merely a distorted brain so that the consciousness cannot function through it. Might not that distortion of the physical brain easily be the result of violent reaction from cruelties in a past life? The consciousness that can be guilty of cruelty is seeing things crooked—out of proportion. Otherwise it ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... expound its purport. First, loc. cit., he finds fault with gird as being employed in rather an unusual manner; or, if taken in its common meaning of taunt or reproof, then that kindly is said ironically; because there seems to be a contradiction in terms. (Monck Mason's rank distortion of the words, there cited, I will not pain the reader's sight with.) MR. COLLIER'S note concludes with a supposition that gird may possibly be a misprint. This is the misery! Men will sooner suspect the text than their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... great many purposes; in fact its range of usefulness so far as the color is concerned, is about the same as that of the ordinary incandescent lamp, and therefore can be used by florists or by clothing merchants, and the distortion is not any worse than that of the ordinary incandescent lamp. However, it is not by any means claimed that when a tube is fed nitrogen, that the color is at all near daylight; it is simply a color which appears about the same as that produced by the ordinary incandescent ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... no trace of the slight distortion left by her stroke. She merely looked paler, with darker shadows in the folds and recesses of her obesity; and, in the fluted mob-cap tied by a starched bow between her first two chins, and the muslin kerchief crossed over her billowing purple dressing-gown, ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... uninquiring character of the people, that the allusions of Indian authors to Ceylon, an island of such magnitude, and so close to their own country, are pre-eminent for absurdity and ignorance. Their "Lanka" and its inhabitants are but the distortion of a reality into a myth. ALBYROUNI, the Arabian geographer, writing in the eleventh century, says that the Hindus at that day thought the island haunted; their ships sailing past it, kept at a distance from its shores; and even within the present century, it was the popular ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... confusion or uncertainty as to the exact whereabouts of things on the atomic level, which cannot be rendered more exact due to disturbance caused by the investigation of its whereabouts. My humble attempt is to secure a sufficiently statistical sample of aligned protons to obtain data on the distortion of the electron orbits caused by an external electrostatic field, thus rendering my own uncertainties more susceptible of ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... created by their brains with the assistance of labour out of Nature, has rather enriched labour than that labour has enriched Carnegie and Krupp. Their wealth is not dead wealth; it produces wages and articles of use. The "Surplus-Value Doctrine" is a grotesque distortion of, and an unjustified protest against, the fact that manufacturers and other organisers and directors of labour will ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... was the actual progress of the Grass. We were all, I think, impressed by the sense of repetition, of a scene enacted over and over again. It was this quality which gives my story, now that I look back upon it, a certain distortion, for no one, hearing it for the first time, and not as any reader of these words must be, thoroughly familiar with the events, could believe in the efforts made to combat the Grass. These efforts existed; we did not yield without struggles; we fought for South America ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... breach of an impersonal law, not merely an infraction of "the constitution of our nature"—but the rising of a subject will against its true king, disobedience to a person as well as contravention of a standard. It is "iniquity"—perversion or distortion—a word which expresses the same metaphor as is found in many languages, namely, crookedness as descriptive of deeds which depart from the perfect line of right. It is "sin," i.e., "missing one's aim;" in which profound word is contained the truth that ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... nightmare on thee, nor until Thy soul hath caught the morning's early gleam Seek thou to analyze the monstrous dream By painful introversion; rather fill Thine eye with forms thou knowest to be truth; But see thou cherish higher hope than this,— hope hereafter that thou shall be fit Calm-eyed to face distortion, and to sit Transparent among other forms of youth Who own no impulse save to God ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... of self-love, is to single out what is absolutely the most unimportant element in the transaction, and to insist on thrusting it under the onlooker's eye as the vital part of the matter. And it involves the most perverse kind of distortion. For the whole issue and difference between the virtuous man and the vicious man turns, not at all upon the fact that each behaves in the way that habit has made least painful to him, but upon the fact ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of desperation one clutches at the semblance of a straw. A last, wild hope had flashed to Kano's mind. "Come nearer, Tatsu San," he whispered, forcing his face into the distortion of a smile. "Lean nearer. The real motive of my ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... the banks of the Swan River, near where the city of Perth now stands; and two of Baudin's officers, whose names were not Munchausen and Sindbad but Heirisson and Moreau, declared that they also had observed the same phenomena at the same place. Peron set down these stories to the exaggerative distortion of lovers of the marvellous, "of whom we counted some amongst us." But when the sailors came scampering back to the ship with the tale that they had actually seen the giants and been pursued by them, the naturalist began to think that there was probably some ground for the belief. At ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... reverent disciples as a matter of fun. Indeed, if any personality is then evinced in the adaptation of these old world themes, it is generally connected with a more or less emphatic disparagement or grotesque distortion of ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... in a good refractor, while "in a Newtonian reflector, in average condition, the percentage seldom exceeds fifty per cent, and more frequently is lower than higher." The superiority of the refractor in regard to definition arises from the fact that any distortion at the surface of a mirror affects the direction of a ray of light three times as much as the same distortion would do at the surface of a lens. And this applies equally both to permanent errors ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... Pontiff, to believe that Ireland was sunk in the grossest ignorance and superstition, and that, in making a descent upon it, he had only the glory and honor of the Church in view. So terrible a distortion of the facts of the case on his part, necessarily rendered all action based upon his statement morally invalid at least; and thus it is, that even those who have confidence in the genuineness of this Bull, regard it as utterly worthless, and at not all admissable into any ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... leaned his arm on the window-frame, and with his head in the room, said in his patois, "Ho! waiting are you? You'll have enough of the lake one day. Don't you mind watching; they'll send when you're wanted;" and twisting his yellow face into a malicious distortion, he went on. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... libels; he had no invention except in defamation; he was a mere pretender to genius. His morals were not left unimpeached; he was charged with selling other men's work printed in his name,—a gross distortion of his employing assistants in the translation of the 'Odyssey',—he was ungrateful, unjust, a foe to human kind, an enemy like the devil to all that have being. The noble authors, probably well aware how they could give the most pain, proceeded to attack his family and his distorted person. ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... English and gavelkind, therefore, though not the same, are near akin; and it is an interesting question which of the two was prior to the other. It may be that gavelkind is the older, and that Borough English is a remnant or distortion of what appears, on the face of it, a more equitable condition of things. On the other hand, gavelkind may have been, so to speak, grafted on a more simple usage which the community, through change of circumstances, had outgrown, and had ceased ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... noblest characters have fallen short of unstained purity, and with boldness of hope as great as its frankness teaches the weakest to aspire, and the most sinful to expect perfect likeness to a perfect Lord, It is a plane mirror, giving back all images without distortion. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... because of my personal knowledge of six cases at White Earth, in which paralysis of one side of the face occurred soon after the Mid[-e]/ administered this compound. In nearly all of them the distortion disappeared after a lapse of from six weeks to three months, though one is known to have continued for several years with no signs of recovery. The Catholic missionary at White Earth, with whom conversation was held upon this subject, feels impressed that some of ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... is that in which there is more or less pain and difficulty in connection with the menstrual process. The causes are various, as congestion of the uterus, malformation, and displacement or distortion of the organ. Some of these conditions require the attention of a skilled physician to remedy; but all will be palliated more or less by a course of treatment similar to that described for the previous condition. A warm sitz or ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... curious instance of the distortion of a very upright nature; for she is undoubtedly a person of great natural truth and integrity, and yet, under the influence of an unfortunate passion, her pre-eminent virtue suffered total eclipse; and she must have condescended, proud ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... trace of the slight distortion left by her stroke. She merely looked paler, with darker shadows in the folds and recesses of her obesity; and, in the fluted mob-cap tied by a starched bow between her first two chins, and the muslin kerchief crossed over her billowing ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... and an undue parade of anatomical knowledge, even upon quiescent figures: But the artist whom we are now considering has no quiescent figures:—even his repose is a state of rigid tension, if not extravagant distortion. He is the Fuseli of novelists. Does he deem it necessary to be energetic, he forthwith begins foaming at the mouth, and falling into convulsions; and this orgasm is so often repeated, and upon such inadequate occasions, that we are ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... full of blasphemies, subtle, tremendous, hideous in shamelessness, some put into the mouths of priests; the illustrations are, in a word, one continuous revelry in the most loathsome and monstrous aspects of death and sin, enlarged into fantastic ghastliness of caricature, as if seen through the distortion and trembling of the hot smoke of the mouth of hell. Take this following for a general type of what they seek in death: one of the most labored designs is of a man cut in two, downwards, by the sweep of a sword—one half of him falls toward the spectator; the other half is elaborately ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... arrived at the stage where, by a distortion of a series of phases, the new incident emerges that by means of a human sacrifice the Nile flood can be produced. By a further confusion the goddess, who originally did the slaughter, becomes the victim. Hence the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... will say at the end of this, Since you blame so much the power for distortion and for ill residing in our great towns, in our system of primary education and in our papers and in our books, what remedy can you propose? Why, none, either immediate or mechanical. The best and the greatest remedy is a true ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... slept off. This, too, accounted for the persistence with which the flies clustered around the mouth, lured by the alcohol-laden exhalations. He was a powerfully built man, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, with sinewy wrists and toil-distorted hands. Yet the distortion was not due to recent toil, nor were the callouses other than ancient that showed under the dirt of the one palm upturned. From time to time this hand clenched tightly and spasmodically into a fist, large, heavy-boned ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... very limited visual works of art, but in theory may apply under contract and other principles. Moral rights may include the right of an author to have his or her name on a work, the right of attribution, and the right to object to distortion ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... upon his arms and strove to raise herself. The bloodless lips, the choked voice, meant dread of him, but the distortion of her features was hatred and the will ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... comes more and more to be a dramatic and emotional power, the power to cry "Fire!" in the theatre, the power to give enormous value for a limited time to some personality, some event, some aspect, true or false, without any power of giving a specific direction to the forces this distortion may set going. Directly the press of to-day passes from that sort of thing to some specific proposal, some implication of principles and beliefs, directly it chooses and selects, then it passes from the miscellaneous to the sectarian, and out of touch with the grey indefiniteness of the general ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... that may be as beautiful in later age as lip-dimples are in girlhood; a fair, broad forehead, that had never learned to frown; lines about mouth and chin, in sweet, honest harmony with the record of the eyes; no strain, no distortion of consciousness grown into haggard wornness; a fine, open, contented play of feature had wrought over all like a charm of sunshine, to soften and brighten continually. Her hair had been golden-brown; there ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... having a power of emitting from their surface extremely delicate images of themselves. These are composed of very fine atoms, but, in spite of their tenuity, they are able to maintain for a considerable time their relative form and order, though liable after a time to distortion. They fly with great celerity through the void, and find their way through the windows of the senses to the soul, which by its delicacy of nature is in sympathy with them, and apprehends ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... cheeks against his, while she spoke to him in caressing tones. At first his sobs were only the louder, but he made no effort to get away, and presently the outburst ceased with that strange abruptness which belongs to childish joys and griefs: his face lost its distortion, and was fixed in an ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Hugo Schroeder, now with the firm of Ross & Co. The lecturer congratulated the newly-proposed member of the Society, Mr. John Stuart, for his enterprise in securing for this country a man of such profound acquirements. The subject of distortion was next treated of, and the manner in which the idea of a non distorting doublet could be evolved from a single bi-convex lens by division into two plano-convex lenses with a central diaphragm was shown. The influence of density of glass was illustrated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... every conceivable direction. And there were specks of islands—rocks only yards in extent—and islands of every imaginable size and shape, with their surfaces in every possible state of upheaval and distortion. A broader mass of land appeared ahead and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that which charms now and charms always,—true power and originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... within him as the man spoke, and a grove of trees with moving forms hovered before his eyes and then vanished again, while for an instant the stranger seemed to be capable of self-distortion and to have assumed vast ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... he indulged in a distortion of the countenance which might have been meant for a smile,—and which seemed to suggest that he regarded the police with a contempt which was ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... wicked—wicked—to try to spread spiritual terror in people's hearts, and to call it the teaching of religion. It is no more like religion than a penny-terrible is like life. It is a cruel and fantastic distortion ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... admirer of blank-verse, and said it always failed, unless sustained by the dignity of the subject. In blank-verse, he said, the language suffered more distortion, to keep it out of prose, than any inconvenience or limitation to be apprehended from the shackles and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Sterne, "Werther" and "Siegwart" gave impulse, and for which they secured literary recognition. Wezel fails as a satirist, partly because his leading character is not convincing, but largely because his satirical exaggeration, and distortion of characteristics, which by a process of selection renders satire efficient, fails to make the exponent of sentimentalism ludicrous, but renders her pitiful. At the same time this satirical warping impairs the value of the book ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... studied the Middle Age carefully, not for its picturesque externals, its feudalisms, chivalries, and the like; but because he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstrosities, strange outcroppings of fanaticism, superstition, and moral and mental distortion of all shapes. It furnished him especially with a great variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in Fra Lippo Lippi, Bishop Blougram's Apology, and The Bishop Orders his ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the onset, they join in a war-song, to which they all keep the exactest time, and soon raise their passion to a degree of frantic fury, attended with the most horrid distortion of their eyes, mouths, and tongues, to strike terror into their enemies; which, to those who have not been accustomed to such a practice, makes them appear more like demons than men, and would almost chill the boldest ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... another room, so inconceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how any man can have imagined such creatures. In the chamber in which they abound, these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks, and every kind of distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins; upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath; vainly striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon their heads; and, in a word, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... morals of which they are but the revelation. Look at the high-shouldered, ungainly child in the corner: his mother tells him to go to his book, and he wants to go to his play. Regard the swollen lips, the skin tightened over the nose, the distortion of his shape, the angularity of his whole appearance. Yet he is not an awkward child by nature. Look at him again the moment after he has given in and kissed his mother. His shoulders have dropped to their place; his limbs are ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... no less useful data. It permits of comparing the resistance of bottles and of classifying them according to the degree of such resistance. After numerous experiments, it has been found that first class bottles easily support a pressure of twelve atmospheres without distortion, while in those of an inferior quality the resistance is very variable. The champagne wine industry should therefore use ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... Government has for sale blank Mercator charts for every parallel of latitude in which they can be used. It is well to remember, however, that since a mile or minute of latitude has a different value in every latitude, there is an appearance of distortion in every Mercator chart which covers any large extent of surface. For instance, an island near the pole, will be represented as being much larger than one of the same size near the equator, due to the different scale ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... tears the flesh from his hands and arms with his teeth, pulls his hair, and beats himself against the ground, meanwhile uttering the most piercing cries, until he is quite exhausted. The cold then deprives him of all motion and feeling, his body becomes much swollen, and fearful distortion of the features is produced by the dreadful convulsions he is suffering, while the surface of his skin becomes nearly black. The only remedy the natives know of is to scourge each other, and to drink the cold water from the springs, which are found here and there ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... for drink. He declares that he heard cries, but is unable to state from what direction they came. No signs of violence were to be discovered upon Sir Charles's person, and though the doctor's evidence pointed to an almost incredible facial distortion—so great that Dr. Mortimer refused at first to believe that it was indeed his friend and patient who lay before him—it was explained that that is a symptom which is not unusual in cases of dyspnoea and death from cardiac exhaustion. This ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to me so great. I imagine this is because the building remains stationary and a balloon moves. Almost directly below us was one of our party, wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim. It appeared to me that almost instantly his shoulders and ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... to the Catholic faith? Has any Catholic writer of our time been able to present fairly the arguments which seem so overwhelmingly convincing to Protestant thinkers? In either case, is there not something of distortion or exaggeration? Certainly it cannot be due to intentional and perverse obliquity of mental vision. As a rule reasonable men endeavour to be just and fair. Now and then, in the heat of controversy, a tendency to overstatement or exaggeration may be evident, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... maintained as near 70 Fahr. as practicable, and is observed at intervals for at least 28 days. A third pat is exposed in an atmosphere of steam above boiling water, in a loosely-closed vessel, for 5 hours. These pats must remain firm and hard and show no signs of distortion, checking, cracking, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... and this change increased in degree as I approached. When I receded to the former distance, the former appearance was restored. The nature of the change was grotesque, following no fixed rule. The nearest resemblance to it that I know, is the distortion produced in your countenance when you look at it as reflected in a concave or convex surface—say, either side of a bright spoon. Of this phenomenon I first became aware in rather a ludicrous way. My host's daughter was a very pleasant pretty girl, who made herself more agreeable ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... one catches a man glancing at the pair of boots sticking out stiffly from under a blanket, but at once he speaks of other things. Nevertheless some suppressed part of my being had been stirring up ugly and monstrous memories, of distortion, disfigurement, torment and decay, of dead men in stained and ragged clothes, with their sole-worn boots drawn up under them, of the blood trail of a dying man who had crawled up to a dead comrade rather than die alone, of Kaffirs heaping limp, pitiful bodies together for burial, of the ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... be on his guard against Laban, Jacob worded his agreement with him regarding his marriage to Rachel with such precision that no room was left for distortion or guile. Jacob said: "I know that the people of this place are knaves, therefore I desire to put the matter very clearly to thee. I will serve thee seven years for Rachel, hence not Leah; for thy ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... impassive, though he responded with a faint gleam as Walter, looking back at him, produced for his benefit a cynical distortion of countenance which offered little confirmation of Alice's account of things. Then the door was swiftly opened to the brother and sister; and they came into a marble-floored hall, where a dozen sleeked young ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... suggestion to the mind, seems to have been an universal feeling, and it accorded with a fundamental principle of ancient art; that of never permitting violent passion to produce in its representation distortion of form. This may be observed in the Laocoon, where the mouth only opens sufficiently to indicate the suppressed agony of superior humanity, without expressing the loud cry of vulgar suffering. Pausanias considered as a personification of death a female figure, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and the treatment that they receive from those intrusted with their care or custody, shall be such as to establish in them habits of industry, of sobriety, of honesty, and good conduct. For injurious treatment of a child, inasmuch as it tends to result in the distortion of its physical and moral nature, constitutes an offence whose importance seriously effects the public order." But what is to be understood by cruel treatment? It consists in every act of omission ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... his head slightly turned, I was able to look through one glass of his spectacles at the wall beyond. On the wall was a framed print; and the edge of the frame, seen through the spectacle-glass, appeared quite unaltered and free from distortion, magnification or reduction, as if seen through plain window-glass; and yet the reflections of the candle-flame in the spectacles showed the flame upside down, proving conclusively that the glasses were concave on one surface at least. The strange phenomenon was visible only for a moment or ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... of business, before Mr. Carr's return, and with a reference to the family likeness obtaining between omnibuses, asked Joan to see him safe aboard. He accompanied the request with such a distortion of visage that she rightly concluded that he wished for an opportunity ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... Others are of opinion that we should conceive him, in the sense of the early communities, as the second God who is one in essence with the Father, in order to understand from this point of view all the declarations and judgments of these communities. But this hypothesis leads to the most violent distortion of the original declarations, and the suppression or concealment of their most obvious features. The duty of the historian rather consists in fixing the common features of the faith of the first two generations, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass: the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... another. They are gross, like the joy of Worcester sauce on the palate. Now, if there is one point common to all classics, it is the absence of exaggeration. The balanced sanity of a great mind makes impossible exaggeration, and, therefore, distortion. The beauty of a classic is not at all apt to knock you down. It will steal over you, rather. Many serious students are, I am convinced, discouraged in the early stages because they are expecting a wrong kind of pleasure. They have abandoned Worcester sauce, and they miss it. They ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... be used without suggesting the gay babes who tumble deliciously among Correggio's clouds or who snatch flowers in ways of grace, on every sort of decoration. In these later drawings, these tapestry borders of say 1650, they are monsters of distortion, and resemble not at all the rosy child we know in the flesh. They are overfed, self-indulgent, steeped in the wisdom of a corrupt and licentious experience. I cannot feel that anyone should like them, except as curiosities ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... of the barrel, to act as guide. Drill a 5/32-inch hole in the barrel on this line just below plate B, and a similar hole in the bottom of the cylinder. (The cylinder end should be put in position temporarily while this is done to prevent distortion.) Flatten down the cylinder slightly on the line of the hole, so that it may lie snugly against the barrel, and clean the outside of the barrel. Lay the cylinder against the barrel with the holes opposite one another, and push a short piece of wood through to ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... chocolates "for the sole purpose of throwing her testimony into ridicule.... What do you, Sir, think of such methods as that?" And he concluded by declaring that I wallowed in a "truly Balkan slough of distortion and calumny." Well, on referring to Mrs. Re-Bartlett's article I find that there is no mention of chocolates, and I apologize; presumably the children were crowding round their adored Capitano ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Alvan, they signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them, lower than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him, became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!—Clotilde! Clotilde! Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and flung ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice—in the singular and most appalling distortion of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... gives an instructive account of the manner in which displacement and distortion take place when such brains are preserved in spirits as in the ordinary ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... our Jacobins the communists, have including in their register the distortion, the lie and slander as a regular tool of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... been very precise and accurate in his phraseology for the express purpose of escaping misinterpretation, yet it would have been a marvel in applied political morals if the paraphrases devised by Douglas had been strictly ingenuous. The favorite distortion was to alter what was strictly a forecast into a declaration of a policy, to make a prediction pass for an avowal of a purpose to wage war against slavery until either the "institution" or "Abolitionism" should be utterly defeated and forever exterminated. It was said to be a ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the activity of children, encourage laziness and thoughtlessness, and do them more harm than can be told. The active tendency in them turns to the distortion of what is complete, and ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Earth's surface strata made by Hecker, Paschwitz and others, and by Michelson's recent extremely accurate comparison of land and water tides. Michelson's results establish further that the Earth is highly elastic: though distortion is resisted, there is yielding, but the original form is recovered quickly, almost as quickly as a perfectly elastic body ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Never shall I forget the effect it produced on me. I seemed to be holding communion with Satan himself, robed as an angel of light, the transparent drapery revealing his hideous form but baffling my endeavors to rend it away. Such sophistry, such impudence of unsupported assertion, such distortion of truth and gilding of gross falsehood, I never met with. I tried in vain to find an answer to things that I saw and felt to be antiscriptural and destructive; but this "End" was the beginning of my controversy, for I was wholly new to it, and ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... difference between folk-lore of the so-called Old World and that of America. Transmitted orally through countless generations, the folk-stories of our ancestors show many evidences of distortion and of change in material particulars; but the Indian seems to have been too fond of nature and too proud of tradition to have forgotten or changed the teachings of his forefathers. Childlike in simplicity, ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... can be called unveracious writers; both give a picture of life that is true up to a point. Hardy, in particular, errs less by distortion than by omission; he sees one side of life, but at the expense of another side; he fails to hold the balance fairly, and lacks the large charity of the universe. Both writers are incomplete. No one could say of them, what is completely true of most Greek writers and largely true of all, that they ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... shut her eyes, and ran about till she had taken hold of one of the others, whose business it then became to take her station in the centre, so that almost every woman in her turn occupied this post, and in her own peculiar way, either by distortion of countenance or other gestures, performed her part in the game. This continued three-quarters of an hour, and, from the precaution of placing a look-out, who was withdrawn when it was over, as well as from ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... due. It is certain that he was considered a youth of extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native critic (in the Quarterly Review) as ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Hamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape." Thus, for instance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue with the world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuous innuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of history into a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Robert Maturin. Amid the chaos of horror into which Maturin hurls his readers, Scott shrewdly discerned the spirit and animation which, though often misdirected, pervade his whole work. The story is but a grotesque distortion of life, yet Scott found himself "insensibly involved in the perusal and at times impressed with no common degree of respect for the powers of the author." His generous estimate of Maturin's gifts and his prediction of future success is the more impressive, because The Fatal Revenge ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... morning I rose, that I might contemplate my person in the mirror, and I at once perceived the alteration which had taken place. There was a certain degree of distortion of features which I thought would never be removed. I felt, that although the sultan might respect me, I could not expect the same influence and undivided attention as before. With a heavy heart I threw ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the following week Fred answered Ginger's letter. But his phrases were guarded and his description of life at the hospital full of studied distortion. He knew quite well that every letter which left the institution was opened and censored, but, with certain plans lying fallow in his brain, he had a method back of the exaggerated contentment he pictured. He had a feeling that Ginger would not be misled altogether. She knew the deceitful bravado ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... you have got rid of it never ask a woman to marry you. Men like you do not understand women. They do not try to; probably they could not if they did. Men like you are so twisted and distorted in mind that they cannot recognise their own distortion. It seems to me that Mr. Amarinth has created a cult. Let me call it the cult of the green carnation. I suppose it may be called modern. To me it seems very silly and rather wicked. If you would take that hideous green flower out of your coat, not because I asked you to, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... thought in the unhappy girl who listened to this distortion of her meaning could find no vent in words. And then there followed the slow revelation in return, bringing with it all the misery of an explanation which comes too late. The question whether Miss Aldclyffe were schemer or dupe was almost passed ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... of wishing for some one like Mary,—indeed, for Mary herself. They talked the same language, absolutely. Their minds had the same index of refraction, so that thoughts flashed back and forth between them effortlessly and without distortion. He thought of her so often and wished for her so much during the first two days of his solitude that it seemed almost a case for the psychical research people when he got a telegram ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... for him and for herself would have grown beyond control. But, with him or away from him, at every instant there was the sense of that other real William Siddall—a shadowy menace full of terror. She dreamed of it—was startled from sleep by visions of a monstrous and mighty distortion of the little general's grotesque exterior. "I shall marry him if I can," she said to her self. "But—can I?" And she feared and hoped that she could not, that courage would fail her, or would come to her rescue, whichever it was, and that she would refuse him. Aside from the sense of her body ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... some stanza which caught them by its sound, if they were not up to its sense. On some pane in every inn-window there was a scrap of Byron; and in young ladies' portfolios there were portraits of the poet, recognizable, through all bad drawing and distortion, by the cast of the beautiful features and the Corsair style. Where a popularity like this sprang up, there must be sufficient reason for it to cause it to involve more or less all orders of minds; and the wisest and most experienced men, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... from the hope of contributing reciprocally to the entertainment of the company. Merriment, extorted by sallies of imagination, sprightliness of remark, or quickness of reply, is too often what the Latins call, the Sardinian laughter, a distortion of the face without gladness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... idol. The wonderful thing becomes a fetish. So we end in an irrational reverence of that which is worthy of a real and rational reverence. Then we have a superstition. Superstition always results in destroying the rightful belief of which it is the exaggeration and distortion. ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... the beginning of the inner warp threads. Two-ply cords were introduced rapidly to make a maximum of the 27 present at its greatest width. Introduction of the warp elements was accomplished very evenly, producing no distortion of the flat surface. Twining was done with the pitch up-to-the-right. The weft was also of 2-ply ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey
... that she was crying at last. Tears stained her cheeks. Her lips were strange to him in the distortion of a grief that seeks to control itself. He slackened his pace and let her walk ahead. He followed with a sort of awe that there should have been grief for Silas Blackburn after all. He blamed himself because his own eyes were ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... through the distortion of his legs, could move only with great pain and difficulty along a road or floor, the prodigious muscular power which nature seemed to have bestowed upon his arms, by way of compensation for deficiency ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... control. The measures taken to prevent a girl's becoming a tom-boy are measures of sex-repression quite as much as of sex-differentiation. Over-reaction of sensitive little souls to lessons in modesty often causes distortion of normal sex-development. Ignorance concerning the phenomena of life is commended as innocence, while it really implies a sex-curiosity which has been too severely repressed. The young woman blushes at thoughts of love, while the young man is filled with a sense ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... birches may be curly only in part of their trunks and sometimes only in restricted segments. Trees frequently have curly grain at the base where the trunk joins the roots but not elsewhere. Such curliness may be related to the shortening of the curve where the root joins the trunk, thus causing distortion. W. G. Bixby states (Ref. 3) that a birdseye maple tree 170 years old was only about a quarter as large in diameter as normal trees of the same age. I know of no comparison of curly walnut with other types ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered, that his life was a "long disease." His most frequent assailant was the headache, which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee, which he ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... of the opposite side with compensating fulness. It is no uncommon thing to see this carried to such an extent that it is idle to give credence to anything the person says; the more especially as such a person very rarely stops with mere distortion of the facts of a story. As the habit increases, invention supplies new facts and details to make out all the parts desired, till the listener finds it impossible to separate the true from the false, and the speaker is as unable to distinguish his own ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... bringing his leg-of-mutton fist against it with a blow that crashed the whole plate of glass into splinters. His face was purple, his eyes half out of their sockets. There was froth upon his lips, with such a general distortion of features that it would be impossible to figure a more horrible illustration of madness than his countenance. I bolted as if the devil had been after me, catching just a glimpse of the powerful creature ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... stomach-pump was then, unfortunately, not invented. Poor Jacko's sufferings, of course, were great: first, he lost the use of his limbs, then he became blind, next paralytic; and, in short, he presented, at the end of the week, such a dreadful spectacle of pain, distortion, and rigidity of limb, that I felt absolutely obliged to desire that he might be released from his misery, by being thrown into the sea. This was accordingly done when the ship was going along, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... speaks of him as 'that unhappy man,'[211] and said he was 'owned by the atheistical wits of all England as their primate and apostle.'[212] Of course opinions thus promulgated by the leaders of a party descended with still further distortion to more ignorant partisans. Tom Tempest in the 'Idler' believes that King William burned Whitehall that he might steal the furniture, and that Tillotson died an atheist.[213] John Wesley, as has been already observed, held the Archbishop ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... stating a false syllogism. Your opponent makes a proposition, and by false inference and distortion of his ideas you force from it other propositions which it does not contain and he does not in the least mean; nay, which are absurd or dangerous. It then looks as if his proposition gave rise to others which are ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... found upon the shelves of public libraries. These MS. collections furnish a mine of inexhaustible riches to the student of manners. When checked by legal documents, they frequently reveal carelessness, inaccuracy, or even willful distortion of facts. The genius of the Novella, so paramount in popular Italian literature of that epoch, presided over their composition, adding intreccio to disconnected facts, heightening sympathy by the suggestion of romantic motives, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... centre, close to her hot and almost naked breast, might take their turn in the cooler space just under her wings. By this means each egg got its fair share of heat, properly distributed, and the little life taking shape within escaped the distortion which might have been caused by lying too long in one position. Whenever the wary brown mother left the nest, she covered the eggs with down, now, which kept the warmth in better than leaves could. And whenever she came back from her ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
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