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More "Infinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the spherical surface away from S upwards, the disc shadow L' on the plane also moves away from S on the plane outwards, growing bigger and bigger. As the disc L approaches the luminous point N, the shadow moves off to infinity, and becomes ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... daybreak as, having climbed that rocky stair I have mentioned, we came upon the cliff and stood, hands tight-clasped, where we might behold the infinity of waters; and after some while, looming phantom-like upon the dawn, we descried the lofty sails of a great ship standing in towards the land and growing ever more distinct. And as we watched, and never a word, her towering canvas flushed rosy with coming day, a changing ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the conditioned becomes the absolute; art and science coincide. But truth which is assumed to be out of all relations, cannot be comprehended by man, and practically is not. Even the universal propositions of deduction express universality under conditions—that is universality of relation; just as infinity in mathematics means that which passes measurement, while in fact between infinity and measurement there is no relation, and the infinite is thus incomprehensible as an object of thought, although by no means ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... an infinity. One became giddy there at looking forwards, and giddy at looking backwards, and there stood a crowd of anxious, pining beings, who were waiting and hoping for the time when the gates of grace should be opened. They would have long to wait. Hideous, large, waddling ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... looked more and more strange as he gazed. The men's bodies swayed very little, and their arms all along the line looked misty, and seemed to stretch right away into infinity, so far away was the last rower from the prow. The water flashed with the moonlight on one side, and gleamed pallidly on the other as the blades stirred it; and then they grew more misty and more misty, but kept on plash—plash—plash, ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... calculations. The odds are piled up star-high, as it is, against Mr. Spectacles having a confidential agent here at all whom he would be inclined to trust with such a job. But when you suppose that the pair of them have a ready-arranged cipher in full working order, why, then, infinity is a small figure for the chances against it. Cabling is out of the question, old chappie. In fact, set alongside of that the idea of flying across carries ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... conduct is concerned, if it be mysterious, as you say, you have only yourself to blame for it." Porthos pronounced these words with an amount of confidence which, for a man who was unaccustomed to his ways, must have revealed an infinity ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... and healthy. It's an immense wilderness where a man is never lonely, because he feels life astir on every side. The sea is simply the vehicle for a prodigious, unearthly mode of existence; it's simply movement and love; it's living infinity, as one of your poets put it. And in essence, professor, nature is here made manifest by all three of her kingdoms, mineral, vegetable, and animal. The last of these is amply represented by the four zoophyte groups, three classes ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... understood that she is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it. Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and in her, beauty grows up suddenly out of ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man. In painting, he contented himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St Peter's scattered into infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex, gave the air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him for all in all, was Michael ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... rested quietly, wrapped up in personal concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an infinity of arid and hansom-less to-morrows. About them the city throbbed in a web of misty twilight, the humid farewell of a dismal day. In the air a faint haze swam, rendering the distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the after-glow of a drenched sunset ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... and bronze the peaks, The mesas are a brazen, molten sea, And e'en the heaven's blue infinity, Undimmed by kindly cloud through arid weeks, Seems polished turquoise. Like a sphinx she speaks, The scornful desert: "What would'st thou from me?" And in our hearts we answer her; all three Unlike, for each a different treasure ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... wandering "songs of joy," or on "the great hills and solemn chanting seas" where Mr. John Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And the guns of August 1914 found Mr. W.W. Gibson encompassed by "one dim, blue infinity of starry peace." There is a sort of German Georgian Poetry in existence; in time to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. Marsh may throw a side-light on the question, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... world in a grain of sand And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... breathing, of seeing, of looking on wonders in which his hands had taken no part in the making, would fill him with the indefinable pleasure which had suddenly become his experience. He wondered, as he still stood gazing into the infinity of that other world beyond the Saskatchewan, if romance was really quite dead in him. Always he had laughed at romance. Work—the grim reality of action, of brain fighting brain, of cleverness pitted against other men's cleverness—had ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... belittles a man; that it takes all the sparkle out of his soul; that he has to exchange a roistering independence for an ecclesiastical strait-jacket. Not so. When a man becomes a Christian, he does not go down, he starts upward. Religion multiplies one by ten thousand. Nay, the multiplier is in infinity. It is not a blotting out—it is a polishing, it is an arborescence, it is an efflorescence, it is an irradiation. When a man comes into the kingdom of God he is not sent into a menial service, but the Lord God Almighty from the palaces of heaven calls upon the messenger angels that wait upon the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... does us an infinity of harm: he encourages us to display all the worst points of the female character; he cheats us of our due amount of homage from many a noble heart, and perhaps robs us of our own dignity and self-respect. Yet such is the creature we encourage in our blind ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... it. The old unpainted shingles and boards of the mansion and out-houses are black with the moisture which they have imbibed. Looking at the river, we perceive that its usually smooth and mirrored surface is blurred by the infinity of rain-drops; the whole landscape—grass, trees, and houses—has a completely water-soaked aspect, as if the earth were wet through. The wooded hill, about a mile distant, whither we went to gather whortleberries, has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... just as this couple could see the track clear ahead, stretching smooth and nickel-plated to infinity, an ugly complication began to worm itself into ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... it not seem incredible,' said Elizabeth, 'that I, Elizabeth Woodbourne, should have voluntarily meddled with a radical, levelling affair, should have sought out Mrs. Turner and all the set I most dislike, done perhaps an infinity of mischief, and all because Kate wanted to go out on a party of pleasure with that foolish Willie. Oh! Anne, I wish ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... His idea of infinity is worthy of Aristotle or Hegel, to whom, in fact, it belongs—he says, "self-conditioning is the form of the whole, the form of that which is its own other." That something should be "its own ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... bearing still some half-shaped form of good, The flickering shadow of the moon upon the "moon-led flood." And ever, 'mid all the joys and weary cares of life, Through the dull sleep of sluggishness, and clangor of the strife, We hear the low, deep murmuring of that Infinity Which stretcheth round us dim and vast, as wraps the earth the sea. And in the twilight dimness, in silence and alone, The soul is almost startled by the power of its solemn tone. When we view the fairest works of Nature ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... copyright of its contents, as it assuredly did not; it may be that he quailed before the minute and almost undecipherable handwriting. But similar notebooks are in my possession, and there are, happily, in these days typists—you pay them by the hour, and it means an infinity of time and patience—who will copy the most minute and the most obscure documents. There are some of the notebooks of the Scottish tour of 1858 before me, and what is of far more importance—Borrow's letters to his ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... and necessity at the other, as 2 and 2 make 4, and a graduated rise of examples between them. Down came a blow: "What! put necessary and contingent propositions together! It's absurd!" I pointed out that the two kinds of necessity are but such extremes of probability as 0 and [infinity] are of number, and illustrated by an urn with 1 white and n black {247} balls, n increasing without limit. It was frankly seen, and the point yielded; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... as the first. I dilly reached my last Boyd station, in the pretty and varied Pyrenees district—a sheep station, then under charge of my friend James M. Hamilton. Here the hospitalities were equal, but all the rest sadly below The Gums, and an infinity underneath Dunmore. But Hamilton promised us compensation in a visit to the more comfortable residence of a squatting neighbour, Mr. John Allen. The master was not at home, but the mistress received us with squatting welcome. She was a young South Australian wife, charming ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... verse makes us fancy the Virtuous Woman as being unpleasingly strong, but we should guard against being purposely weak, with an idea of its being pleasing; Thackeray's Amelia is hardly a good model, and Patient Grizzel did her husband an infinity ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... ennobling sensuality. Of course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity, and some obscure recollections will always remind him of the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... thinking is no more in the brain than in the hair, although the brain may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not corporeal, it is not of this world; its existence is eternity, its residence is infinity.' I forbear to discuss the rationality of their belief, and pass on straightway to thine; if, indeed, I am to consider as ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... be varied to infinity. Here are a few more: Make the subject join his hands, and suggest that they are welded together; make him put his hand on the table, and suggest that it is stuck to it; tell him that he is fixed to his chair and cannot rise; make him rise, ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... unformulated ideal: it is the spirit clothed in form calling to the spirit not yet expressed, bidding it build beauty. "This building of man's true world—the living world of truth and beauty—is the function of Art. Man is true, where he feels his infinity, where he is divine, and the divine is the creator in him. Therefore with the attainment of his truth he creates."[23] This call to spirit is the old allegory of the sleeping beauty waiting to be awakened to her royal rank by the kiss of the seeking prince: it is the same truth as expressed ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... saying I don't believe in miracles. I don't believe in coincidence—that concept is as meaningless as that of paradox. I certainly do not believe that we hit this planet by chance against odds of almost infinity to one. So I've been looking for a reason. I found one. It goes against my grain—against everything I've ever believed—but, since it's the only possible explanation, it must be true. The only possible director of the Gunther Drive must ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... scattered dwellings and sparse trees and ground were coated with a soft monotony of rose-brown dust, the mills were jumbled in mile-long perspectives. Above the immediate noise of the train he could hear the sullen, blended roar of an infinity of strident sounds—the screaming of whistles, a choked, drumming thunder, rushing blasts of air, the shattering impact of steel rails, raw steam, and a multitudinous clangour of metal and jolting wheels and connective ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... who have been to Egypt or seen the Sahara naturally picture a sandy waste with its accompanying oases, palms and camels. Mesopotamia, however, is a land of clay, of mud, uncompromising mud. The Thames and Medway saltings at high tide, stretching away to infinity in every direction—this is the picture that I carry in my mind of the riverside country between Basra and Amara. No blue, limpid waters by Baghdad's shrines of fretted gold, but pea-soup or cafe ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... significance is relative to the surface of this planet only. In reality, for the inhabitants of the Earth, "low" is the inside, the center of the globe, and "high" is what is above our heads, all round the Earth. The Heavens are what surround us on all sides, to Infinity. ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the earth begins with the close of the dim Archean era. It is the lapse from then till now, a few hundred million years at most out of all infinity, which ever can greatly concern man, for during this time were laid the only rocks whose reading was assisted by the presence of fossils. During this time the continents attained their final shape, the mountains rose, and valleys, plains, and rivers formed ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... make an infinity of wise remarks on that scene,' said he. 'In the first place, note the ridiculous position into which their superstitious reverence for rank and title puts all these people. Because monsieur is a reigning prince over some minute principality, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... there be for us? We came from nothing, we go back to nothing—we are resolved into the elements which renew the earth for new comers. The wheel of progress is always revolving—for the mass there is eternity, infinity—no beginning, no end; but for the individual, his little span of life begins ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... loathsome that she seemed contaminated through and through by his touch, his words, and their previous relations. How grossly he had deceived her as to his real character! What a horrible future as his wife she had escaped! Nor was she yet free, for he promised to make an infinity of trouble. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... together. Over the distant range of hills were scattered close-set roofs, and you could divine that the sea of houses rolled afar off behind the undulating ground, into the fields hidden from sight. It was as the ocean, with all the infinity and mystery of its waves. Paris spread out as vast as the heavens on high. Burnished with the sunshine that lovely morning, the city looked like a field of yellow corn; and the huge picture was all simplicity, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... stars, suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable suns, attended each by a cortege of planets, and scattered—how, we know not—through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples? The demonstration of the simplest truths of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... praise his sweet poetry from morning to night. I hardly know whether it is my fault, or the effect of a weakness in Leigh Hunt's character, that I should be sensible of a regret of this nature, when, at the same time, I sincerely believe that he has found an infinity of better things in the world whither he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... as her mule steadily crept round the causeway—a legacy of the Incas—to behold the expanse of the Pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine, the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling of infinity ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... number of human beings; but the worst of all was the evil expression of their countenances, denoting that they were familiar with every species of crime, and it was not long before I found that their countenances did not belie them. After they had asked me an infinity of questions, and felt my hands, face, and clothes, they returned to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... spoke of infinite thought or infinite love: it is physico-mathematical. Nothing but number, M. Benda tells us, seems to him intelligible. Time, space, volume, and complexity (which appears to the senses as quality) stretch in a series of units, positions, or degrees, to infinity, as number does: and in such homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there will be no fixed point of origin for counting or surveying the whole and no particular predominant scale. Every position ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... it is established that if a mechanical explanation of a phenomenon can be given, we can find an infinity of others which likewise account for all the peculiarities revealed by experiment. But, as a matter of fact, no one has ever succeeded in giving an indisputable mechanical representation of the whole physical world. Even were we disposed to admit the strangest solutions of the problem; to consent, ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... to describe wherever she goes within those broad limits. The Yosemite, the Big Trees, the Mormons, the Chinese, the snow-sheds, drawing-room cars, agates, prairie-and mountain-flowers, New Hampshire life and scenery, and an infinity of like material, are readably, and not incongruously, presented in her little book. Population is so sparse and Nature so redundant in the scene of most of her descriptions as to render them sometimes a little lifeless, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... of that which lay beyond the ken of man. Somehow it exalted his thoughts to planes to which no association with his kind could ever have exalted them. It never failed to inspire him with a reverence for the infinity of power which crowned the glory of creation, and reduced self to a humble realization of its atomic place in the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... and he loved the night. The poetic side of his memories of watching the Dipper swing around Polaris, while he sung the cows to sleep, came back to him. In his mind he saw the vast prairie roll on to infinity; saw the mountains stand out, a world of white peaks, rising from a sea of darkness. Again he heard the plaintive shrilling of an Indian whistle, or the song of the lad down creek made tuneful and airy ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... suspect they have infinitely less; and I believe their great love of novels, which has been set down to imagination, arises mainly from their want of it. You writers of novels supply that defect for them by a pictorial style, by an infinity of minute details, and petty aids to realizing, all which an imaginative reader can do for himself on reading a bare narrative ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... shadow of some struggle, similar to that of Jacob with the Angel?" Art, he has said, "is a temporary mask, under which the unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity, introduced ...by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity, taken from a flower of eternity." Everywhere, throughout his most deeply characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought—he would have us realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing, ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... Ourselves we felt as if the Log of Infinity carried us to ground higher than what we ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... difference of taste, of manners, and an infinity of other causes, have rendered commerce necessary, though it does not increase the aggregate wealth of mankind: but nations are in an error when they set a greater value on ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... country on this, but suggested a very interesting reflection. It was that the continual increase of debt and paper machinery, will not produce a correspondent increase of ability in the nation to feed itself. That an infinity of paper will not produce an ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... with many obstacles. There are no short cuts to the summit. In spite of pessimistic clamours that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer, frothy yowls for free and unlimited coinage at sixteen to one, or for fiat paper at infinity to nothing, the fact remains that, whereas kings formerly used signets for the want of knowledge to write their names, licked their greasy fingers for lack of knives and forks, and starved in Ireland with plenty in France, the poorest to-day can, if they will, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... Squire. "I don't want the servants in. Give me some tea. Miss Bird, here's my cup, please. Take it, please, take it, Miss Bird. I don't know when I've felt so annoyed. You do all you can and put yourself to an infinity of trouble and expense for the sake of your children, and then they behave like this. Really, Walter wants a good thrashing to bring him to his senses. If I had nipped all this folly of doctoring in the bud, as I ought to have ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... to aid her in bodying forth according to her methods the ideal forms of the cosmos, the world of beauty, no less within the soul of man than without it, which was intended by such help to be realized as a whole in the infinity of time, and in part in the vision of every true workman. In short, Lincoln had a profound sense of the fitness of things, that which Aristotle, the scientific analyst of human thought and the philosopher of its proper expression, called "poetic justice." He strove to make ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... the merchant, "that it is now fourteen years since the first ocean telegraph of any importance was laid,—when I remember that the first cable was laid after an infinity of personal effort on the part of those who had to raise the capital,—when I mention that it was really a work of house-to-house visitation, when sums of 500 pounds to 1000 pounds, and even 10,000 pounds were raised by private subscription, ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... from actual ocular inspection is not only unnecessary, but unattainable. What says the axiom? That two straight lines can not inclose a space; that after having once intersected, if they are prolonged to infinity they do not meet, but continue to diverge from one another. How can this, in any single case, be proved by actual observation? We may follow the lines to any distance we please; but we can not follow them to infinity: for aught our senses can testify, they may, immediately beyond the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... state is peculiar to common lovers, who are known to have no eyes for anything except for the contemplation, actual or inward, of one human form which for them contains the soul of the whole world in all its beauty, perfection, variety and infinity. It must be extremely pleasant. But felicity was denied to Roderick Anthony's contemplation. He was not a common sort of lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor every sort of exceptional conduct. Roderick ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... granted to him an infinity of virtues, and naturally fine qualities—such as sensitiveness, generosity, frankness, humility, charity, soberness, greatness of soul, force of wit, manly pride, and nobility of sentiment; but, at the same time, they do not sufficiently clear him of the faults which directly ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... cannot separate the ocean; the salt water is part of the great sea and must be so; but nevertheless you do not hold the sea in your hand. Men so longingly desire personal power that they are ready to put infinity into a cup, the divine idea into a formula, in order that they may fancy themselves in possession of it. These only are those who cannot rise and approach the Gates of Gold, for the great breath of life confuses them; they are struck with horror ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the steps of the terrace, or paced up and down, watching the scene. Just beyond their crest was the frowning mass of Mount Misery. The crystal flood poured down from above, and the moon was rising over the distant hills. The sea had the look of infinity. There might be ships at anchor before Basseterre or Sandy Point, but the shoulders of the mountain hid them; and below, the world looked as if the passions of Hell had let loose—the torches flared and crackled, and the trees took ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... have dreamt nothing, seen nothing, heard nothing. But during these two dreadful hours I have experienced such an infinity of pain that I ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... Revolution, the works of Nietzsche, Emerson, W. Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, Alexander Herzen, Edward Carpenter and so on; and in the domain of fiction, the dramas of Ibsen, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Zola's Paris and Le travail, the latest works of Merezhkovsky, and an infinity of works of less known authors,—are full of ideas which show how closely Anarchism is interwoven with the work that is going on in modern thought in the same direction of enfranchisement of man from the bonds of the state as well as from those of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... perceived are communicated to our nervous system and inscribed in the nerve wave. The effect produced therefore is the measure of our perception of the cause. This is absolutely certain. All bodies possess an infinity of properties which escape our cognitions; because, as excitants of our organism, these properties are wanting in the intensity or the quality necessary to make it vibrate; they have not been tuned in unison with our nervous chords. And, inversely, all we perceive of the mechanical, physical, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... try To utter God's infinity, But the boundless hath no form, And the Universal Friend Doth as far transcend ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the carpet of the earth never so verdant. As she sat at her window and saw evening close in upon her in that broad forest home, and heard for the first time the mournful notes of the whippoorwill, and the harsh scream of the jay in the distant woods, she was oppressed with a sense of vastness, of infinity, which she never before experienced, not even on the ocean. She remained long in prayer, and when she lay down to sleep beside her matron-friend, no words were spoken between them. The elder, overcome with fatigue, soon sank into a peaceful ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... poetry always obtains, the enlargement of his comprehension and elevation of his fancy; but this is rarely to be hoped by Christians from metrical devotion. Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in the name of the supreme being. Omnipotence cannot be exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; perfection cannot be improved. The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving, repentance, and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform, cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving, the most joyful of all holy ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... people. By accident—or, more properly, by Providence—he appears to have been sent to put a stop to an unnatural war, and to save the lives of the unfortunate rebels; and the benefit he had conferred on so many of his fellow-creatures, the good he had already done, and the infinity of good which he saw he still might do, made him ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... wanderers, in calm thought 65 Reflected, it appeared to me the type Of a majestic intellect, its acts And its possessions, what it has and craves, What in itself it is, and would become. There I beheld the emblem of a mind 70 That feeds upon infinity, that broods Over the dark abyss, [B] intent to hear Its voices issuing forth to silent light In one continuous stream; a mind sustained By recognitions of transcendent power, 75 In sense conducting to ideal form, In soul of more than mortal privilege. One function, above all, of such a mind Had ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Plato's allegory it is easy to arrive at an understanding of the state of humanity at the present time. Imagine very imperfect, very undeveloped beings, possessing, however, an infinity of latent potentialities; imagine them born in a dark cavern where they swarm pell-mell, passing their time chiefly in devouring one another. Every moment this cavern is entered, and a certain number of these poor beings are taken out of it and carried into the light of day, that they may ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... its labour, Charmion, nor can it weight its tenderness on the scale of purchase. That which it has it gives, and craves for more to give and give, till the soul's infinity be drained. Dear to thy heart are these heavy nights of watching; sweet to thy weary eyes is that sad sight of strength brought so low that it hangs upon thy weakness like a babe to its mother's breast! For, Charmion, thou dost love this man who loves thee not, and now that he is helpless ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... The Infinity and Self-Existence of the Universe. Disproved by Its Evident Limits. Its Composite Materials. Its Steady Loss of Heat. Buffon's Explosion of Planets. The Nebular Theories. The Fiction of Homogeneous ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Scotland, and Alick's leave of absence was felt to be due to Mr. Clare, and thus it was that the first real family gathering took place on occasion of the opening of the institution that had grown out of the Burnaby Bargain. This work had cost Colonel Keith and Mr. Mitchell an infinity of labour and perseverance before even the preliminaries could be arranged, but they contrived at length to carry it out, and by the fourth spring after the downfall of the F. U. E. E. a house had been erected for the convalescents, whose wants were to be attended to by a matron, assisted ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal considerations! Let me continue to the end, as I began, without further digressions or anticipations, pursuing the plain path of dispassionate History. The exact facts, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... will be delighted to welcome back to its fold Sir ROBERT HERMAN-HODGE, whose flowing moustaches, once described as "the best definition of infinity," have been, at intervals, its pride and joy for over thirty years. But it will have to wait a while, for—strange lapse on the part of a hero of half-a-dozen contests!—Sir ROBERT had omitted to bring with him the returning-officer's certificate. Lord HALSBURY, delayed ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... not at all,—so subtly that none can feel the flowing of its tides, yet so swiftly that no life-time would suffice to count the number of the oscillations which it makes within the fraction of one second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm and illusion of color; there it ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... said Alexandrina, gazing upon a magnificent crimson ground through which rivers of yellow meandered, carrying with them in their streams an infinity of blue flowers. And as she spoke she held her head gracefully on one side, and looked down upon the carpet doubtingly. Lady Amelia poked it with her parasol at though to test its durability, and whispered something about yellows showing the dirt. Crosbie ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... fictitious; that his mind "is a part of the infinite intellect of God"; that he is not a mere transient, outside interpreter of the universe, but himself the soul or law, which is the universe, and he will feel a relationship with infinity which ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... festival was loud With drum and brass among the crowd Of panic revellers, whose cries Affront the quiet of the skies; Whose dancing lights contract the deep Infinity of night and sleep To a narrow turmoil of troubled fire. And I have found my heart's desire In beechen caverns that autumn fills With the blue shadowiness of distant hills; Whose luminous grey pillars bear The stooping sky: calm ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... they are less to be dreaded in woods than elsewhere, because their horns often catch in the branches, and give time for the persons pursued to escape by flight. The skins of these animals serve for an infinity of purposes, and even cruses are made of them for holding water or liquors. The animals on the coast of Malabar are all wild, and strangers are not prevented from hunting ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... life, and the braced mood Of power and joy and love; Forbidden, by wise heathen ev'n, to be Spoken of Deity, Whose Name, on popular altars, was 'The Unknown,' Because, or ere It was reveal'd as One Confined in Three, The people fear'd that it might prove Infinity, The blazon which the devils desired to gain; And God, for their confusion, laugh'd consent; Yet did so far relent, That they might seek relief, and not in vain, In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain. Nor bides alone in hell The bond-disdaining spirit ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... Author of it. Now, this Author cannot have received His own existence from another, if He is to be considered the primary cause; otherwise we should fall into a succession of causes and effects to infinity. Then, the true Author of our existence is one who exists by Himself, and as such He is eternal, omnipotent, all-wise, etc., etc.; He ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... live-oak near the steps Harran had built a little summer house for his mother. To the left of the ranch house itself, toward the County Road, was the bunk-house and kitchen for some of the hands. From the steps of the porch the view to the southward expanded to infinity. There was not so much as a twig to obstruct the view. In one leap the eye reached the fine, delicate line where earth and sky met, miles away. The flat monotony of the land, clean of fencing, was broken by one spot only, the roof of the Division Superintendent's house on Three—a mere speck, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... other, trying to crowd into their eyes an infinity of strange passionate messages, though their features were all awry with nausea and the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of our speculations, and should help us best of all though outwardly so appalling, to stand calm while the snake of unbelief writhes beneath our feet. The unutterable insignificance of man and his little world connotes the infinity which leaves his possibilities ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... having been so applied in such length and slope as is proper for capitals, the farther condition comes into effect described in Chapter IX. Sec. XXIV., and any one of the cornices in Plate XV. may become the abacus of a capital formed out of any other, or out of itself. The infinity of forms thus resultant cannot, as may well be supposed, be exhibited or catalogued in the space at present permitted to us: but the reader, once master of the principle, will easily be able to investigate for himself the syntax of all examples ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... face down on the stone. There was a roar of tortured air from overhead and a thundering sound that was unlike anything except the tearing of an infinity of cloth combined with a sustained explosion of atomic bombs. Then it seemed as if the thunderbolt of Thor himself ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... essential to the maintenance of civil society, and gave it such a form, that for many ages God was nowhere so much feared as in that republic. The effect of this was to render easy any enterprise in which the senate or great men of Rome thought fit to engage. And whosoever pays heed to an infinity of actions performed, sometimes by the Roman people collectively, often by single citizens, will see, that esteeming the power of God beyond that of man, they dreaded far more to violate their oath than ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... asked Mrs. Lascelles, calling her fine eyes home from infinity, and fixing them once more ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... substitute our own. With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. Our horizon is the universe. We spy on the Divine and try to surprise His secrets, or to sneak into His confidence by stealth. We make God the eternal a puppet. We measure infinity with a foot-rule. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... well the new life fitted him, and each time I had declared it creaseless. His third invitation was more informal than the others, and he hinted of some matter in which he was anxious for my sympathy or counsel, or both. There is room for an infinity of mistakes when a man begins to take liberties with his nationality; and I went down expecting things. A seven-foot dog-cart and a groom in the black Holt Hangars livery met me at Amberley Royal. At Holt Hangars I was received by a person of elegance ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Ugo Balzani, or in the drawing-room of the French Embassy, all that showed, at first, was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenth century, fin, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable of throwing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or the lift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certain ceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train of an Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with spring delight, The other with harvest gold, And treasures of Autumn untold: And on this highest throne of the midsummer now The waning but deathless day doth dream, With a rapturous grace, as tho' from the face Of the unveiled infinity, lo, a far beam Had fall'n on her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... speaker shows the good effects upon people to prove that certain laws—claimed as the causes—should be extended in application. Arguments from effect to cause may be extremely far reaching; as every effect leads to some cause, which is itself the effect of some other cause, and so on almost to infinity. The good speaker will use just those basic causes which prove ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... were chatting, eating, amusing themselves, some sitting, some lying down, going and coming, hanging about near the ladies of the Embassy, to examine the details of their dresses too. If instantaneous photography had existed in those days, what an infinity of charming and picturesque groups might have been snatched. I did venture to make one or two rapid sketches on the sly; but there were too many eyes upon me, and besides it was an abuse of the toleration which was being shown us. I could not tear myself away from this most exceptional ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... having given him the idea that the coast was clear, I kept guard as I have described. I already knew that the papers were probably in the room, but I had no desire to rip up all the planking and skirting in search of them. I let him take them, therefore, from the hiding-place, and so saved myself an infinity of trouble. Is there any other point which I can ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... down my neck. He only understands infinity on math papers. I let Cat out of the basket and strip off my splashed shirt and chase Nick along the edge of the water. No need to worry about Cat. He chases right along with us, and every time a wave catches his feet he hisses and hightails it up the beach. ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... granite cappings of the tors are strongly projected against the red light of the sunset, which gleams between the many openings in the huge piles of rock, making them look like passages into some unknown country beyond them, and suggesting that idea of infinity which is afforded by no other object of sight in equal degree. Meanwhile, the heather of the foreground is growing darker and darker; and the only sound which falls upon the ear is that of the river far below, or perhaps the flapping of some heron's wings, as he rises ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... is not in sight and perhaps never will be. The unexplored region extends to infinity and, judged by the past, the momentum of discovery will continue to increase for ages to come, unless the human race decays through the comfort and ease gained from utilizing the magic secrets which are constantly ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... small transient life when trying to contrast itself with his broad and Infinite Being. We are constantly speaking of two things wherewith we find ourselves related—space and time: and what are they? We hardly know. We know but something like this: space is a measured distance in infinity; time a measured duration ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... named Spirits of Knowledge,[5] who o'er Time And Space and Thought an empire claimed, Second alone to Him whose light Was even to theirs as day to night; 'Twixt whom and them was distance far And wide as would the journey be To reach from any island star To vague shores of Infinity ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... which comes from his temporal nature and the temporal world. Through the body he receives temporal pleasure or pain from the world of time and space; through the spirit he receives spiritual joy or sorrow from the world of eternity and infinity. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... created spirits are too insignificant to raise the glory of thy works! We lose ourselves in their immensity. To tell them one must resemble thyself on infinity. Humbly contented, I remain in my own prescribed circle. Incomprehensible Being! thy resplendent glories blind the presuming eye of man! and He from whom the earth receives its being, needs not the praises of ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... elements, the mountains, the seas, the clouds, the sky. He loved them all and partook of them all in his large, free, unselfish, untrammeled nature. His heart knew no limits, and feeling his feet mortised in granite and his footsteps tenoned in infinity he knew the amplitude ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... that the Promethean spirit is preparing a settling day for the universe somewhere out in infinity. But what concern is that of mine? What about my own ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... only be experienced, when the mind, rescued, for a moment, from the humbleness of earthly considerations, aspires to contemplate His power in the sublimity of His works, and His goodness in the infinity ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... not reply, only bent her sweet head, lest he should perceive the tears which had gathered in her eyes. All round them the wood seemed to have grown darker and more dense, whilst from afar the weird voice of that distant sea murmured of infinity and of the ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... common in former days as it is now. There was, indeed, the man in Homer who walked by the seashore in a very gloomy mood; but his case seems to have been thought remarkable. What is it in our modern mode of life and our infinity of cares, what little thing is it about the matter of the brain or the flow of the blood, that makes the difference between buoyant cheerfulness and deep depression? I begin to think that almost all educated people, and especially all whose work is mental rather than physical, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... such an infinity of love in that weak gaze that Richard and Ellen exchanged the abashed look that passes between lovers when it is brought to their notice that they are not the sole practitioners of the spiritual art. Richard murmured "Oh ... perhaps ... but really, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... for this do I love thee, but Because Infinity upon thee broods; And thou are full of whispers and of shadows. Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say So long, and yearned up the cliffs to tell; Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, What the still night suggesteth to the heart. Thy voice ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... disappoint him. A story of a hero who adventures into sinister places, disregards repeated warnings to "go back ere it is too late" (or the American for that entrancing formula), meets there a Distressed Damsel and kisses her as introduction, and finally, after an infinity of perils, is left with the D.D. as his B.B., or blushing bride—this I state emphatically to be not only Romance, but a most excellent brand of that article. What however Mr. CULLEY seems most to fear is that we shall think that McCoy himself and the whole setting (New Mexican scenes) are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... poem than a novel. Claudio Cantelmo, sickened with the corruption of Rome, retires to his old home in the Abruzzi, where he meets the three sisters Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante: "names expressive as faces full of light and shade, and in which I seemed already to discover an infinity of grace, of passion, and of sorrow." It is inevitable that he should chose one of the three, but which? And in the denouement the solution is only ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... than lake Superior, and an infinity of others, lesser and greater have to be discovered, for which I approve of M. the Marquis of Denonville's saying, often repeated:—that the King of France, our monarch was not high lord enough to open up such a vast country, as we are only beginning to enter on the confines of the immensity ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... division of labor is the way in which equality of condition and intelligence is realized. Through diversity of function, it gives rise to proportionality of products and equilibrium in exchange, and consequently opens for us the road to wealth; as also, in showing us infinity everywhere in art and Nature, it leads us to idealize our acts, and makes the creative mind—that is, divinity itself, mentem diviniorem—immanent ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... he turned his gaze within, Lost to his own vicinity; Erecting in a doubtful dream Frail bridges to Infinity. ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... Prince, he leaned against the parapet, and disposed himself to listen. The city was already sunk in slumber; had it not been for the infinity of lights and the outline of buildings on the starry sky, they might have been ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two lives or faculties are perpetual with every man from infancy even to the end of his life, and afterwards to eternity; because there is no end to knowledge, still less to intelligence, and least of all to wisdom; for there is infinity and eternity in the extent of these principles, by virtue of the Infinite and Eternal One, from whom they are derived. Hence comes the philosophical tenet of the ancients, that everything is divisible in infinitum; to which may be added, that it is multiplicable in like manner. The angels ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of these were already gone; two remained, and of these two one was Vic Gregg, no despicable fighter himself, and the other was no less than the invincible little sheriff himself. To imagine the sheriff beaten in the speed of his draw or the accuracy of his shot was to imagine the First Cause, Infinity, or whatever else is inconceivable; nevertheless, there were such possibilities as bullets fired at night through the window, and attacks from the rear. So Rickett waited, and held its breath and kept his eyes rather more behind than ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... have communication or relation with him. Where there is no relation, there can be no union, communication, or duties. If there be no duties between man and his God, there is no religion for man. Thus, in saying God is infinite, you annihilate religion for man, who is a finite being. The idea of infinity is to us an idea without ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... sat at her window and saw evening close in upon her in that broad forest home, and heard for the first time the mournful notes of the whippoorwill, and the harsh scream of the jay in the distant woods, she was oppressed with a sense of vastness, of infinity, which she never before experienced, not even on the ocean. She remained long in prayer, and when she lay down to sleep beside her matron-friend, no words were spoken between them. The elder, overcome with fatigue, soon sank into a peaceful slumber; but the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... recognition of Spirit and of infinity comes not 77:1 suddenly here or hereafter. The pious Polycarp said: "I cannot turn at once from good to evil." Neither do 77:3 other mortals accomplish the change from error to truth ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... built. We had all forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... message to the Archon proposing that the people of the country should send to him and his one-half of their yearly wealth for ever, "or," so the message proceeded, "take the consequences." Upon the Archon communicating this to the people there arose at once an infinity of babble, some saying one thing and some another, some proposing to pay neighbouring savages to come in and fight the invaders, others saying it would be cheaper to compromise with a large sum, but the most ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... glance again at this Nepal Buddhism. In the tenth century we find what at first seems to be a growth out of Polytheism into Monotheism, for a new Being, to whom the attributes of infinity, self-existence and omniscience are ascribed, is invented and named Adi-Buddha, or the primordial Buddha. According to the speculations of the thinkers, he had evolved himself out of the five Dhyani-Buddhas by the exercise of the five meditations, while each of these had evolved out of itself ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... novel of (I feel bound to add) precisely the same calibre as, in the sister realm of drama, made the name of Manchester at one period a word of awe. Why do these young Mancunians recollect to such stupendous purpose? Here is Mr. AGATE, with an introduction of forty-four pages, all about time and infinity, before he can get his protagonist so much as started anywhere at all. It is a little like one of those demon-scenes out of the pantomimes he describes so lovingly—"Do so! May safety and success attend on Crusoe." But of course the subsequent action is more responsible. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... indefinite succession of ages is "virtually infinite," "lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name," at least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn, which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings concocted for me in the boiling caldron of this universally contemptible life, and so on—scorning to infinity. This may represent some actual states of mind, for it is a narrow prejudice of mathematicians to suppose that ways of thinking are to be driven out of the field by being reduced to an absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an excellent ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... dream, there came One fair swift flash to me Of distances, of streets a-flame With joy and agony, And further yet, a moon-lit sea Foaming across its bars, And further yet, the infinity ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... he called his "Prayer;"—"Sadler's prayer," and he told me them one wet day, when a half gale was blowing, and he sat smoking with his feet hitched over the rail. He appeared to be trying to get a bead on infinity across the point of his shoe. It ran this way, beginning, ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of humour is a frequent cause of the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... art thou affrighted? Dost thou tremble at a word? Merely say: 'We will not live.' Is not life a burden that we long to lay down? Why hesitate when it is merely a question of a little sooner or a little later? Matter is indestructible, and the physicists, we are told, grind to infinity the smallest speck of dust without being able to annihilate it. If matter is the property of chance, what harm can it do to change its form since it can not cease to be matter? Why should God care what form I have received and with what ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... large sense of air and distance; and they amply verify two separate statements of Vasari concerning him: that "he delighted in drawing landscapes from nature exactly as they are, whence we see in his paintings rivers, bridges, rocks, plants, fruits, roads, fields, cities, exercise-grounds, and an infinity of other such things," and that he was an inveterate experimentalist in technical matters. His favourite method in wall-painting was to lay in his compositions in fresco and finish them a secco with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little. It is thus with the vulgar; and all men are as the vulgar in what they do not understand. The ideas of eternity and infinity, are among the most affecting we have: and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so little, as ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... seemed to me to have a more than human importance in the world. My heart was like dust under your feet. You produced on me the effect of moonlight on a summer's night, when around us we find nothing but perfumes, soft shadows, gleams of whiteness, infinity; and all the delights of the flesh and of the spirit were for me embodied in your name, which I kept repeating to myself while I tried to kiss it with my lips. I thought of nothing further. It was Madame ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... great expanse of marble-topped tables. He sat down at a marble-topped table. On the marble-topped table next to him were twenty-four sugar-basins, and on the next to that a large number of brass bells, and on another one an infinity of cruets. A very slatternly woman was washing the linoleum in a corner of the floor. Two thin, wrinkled girls in shabby black were whispering together behind the counter. The cash-den was empty. Through the open door he could keep an eye on his motor-bicycle, which was being surreptitiously ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... consummation of all things. You have seen the comet moving with its immense train of light through the sky; this likewise has a system supplied with living beings and their existence derives its enjoyment from the diversity of circumstances to which they are exposed; passing as it were through the infinity of space they are continually gratified by the sight of new systems and worlds, and you can imagine the unbounded nature of the circle of their knowledge. My power extends so far as to afford you a glimpse of the nature of a cometary world." I was again in rapid motion, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... and through by his touch, his words, and their previous relations. How grossly he had deceived her as to his real character! What a horrible future as his wife she had escaped! Nor was she yet free, for he promised to make an infinity of trouble. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... It was an uncanny, a horribly helpless sensation. All about them was infinity, a vast void out of which peered at them the cold, unwinking stars. They were like swimmers in mid-ocean, without even the buoyant feel of the salt water to ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth. This, more than the entrance to a wood or the source of a river or the top of a bald hill, is the beginning of infinity. Even the dirtiest coal-boat that lies beached in the harbour, a mere hulk of utilities that are taken away by dirty men in dirty carts, will in a day or two lift itself from the mud on a full tide and float away like a spirit into the sunset or curtsy to the image of ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... he adds: "Love is known to be all this. How great then, is Christianity, as being the religion of love, and causing men to believe both in the cause of love's supremacy and the infinity of ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... spent themselves, and he whistled as he walked on between the trees. When he turned into the lane near the house, he could see, in the west, a few black masses of cloud, vivid against the crimson flame of the sky—wandering spirits in an infinity ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... after the other, in a slow-moving decrescendo, until they constituted a solemn chorus played in moderato, melting at last into the lovely and serious main theme, which in the finale streamed away and beyond into infinity, dying ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... confined to Arabia and the Caribbean Archipelago. Its extreme scarcity during the war enhanced its price so enormously, that on the first announcement of peace in 1814, the plants were multiplied to infinity, and coffee plantations were formed in every possible situation—on the Coste Firme of South America, along the Brazilian shores of that continent, and even at some points on the coast of Southern Africa. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... is no matter of mine. God, the great conservative power of the Universe, when he established the right, saw to it that it should always be the safest and best. He never laid upon a poor finite worm the staggering load of following out into infinity the complex results of his actions. We may rest on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom, confident that it is enough for us to do justice, he will see to it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... not I, who should have the credit of it." He proved his case a few years later in the chapter of Orthodoxy called "The Paradoxes of Christianity." What it amounted to was roughly this: paradox must be of the nature of things because of God's infinity and the limitations of the world and of man's mind. To us limited beings God can express His idea only in fragments. We can bring together apparent contradictions in those fragments whereby a greater truth ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... in them, the round surface is not so likely to be roughened by it. By rights, the cords should be laid farther apart than in the sampler, where the attempt to force the effect (for purposes of explanation) has not proved very successful. An infinity of basket patterns, as these may be called (basket stitches they are not), may be devised by varying the intervals at which the gold threads are sewn down, and the number of cords they cross ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... letters. In spite of the limitations just referred to it is certain that as he surveyed the broadening horizon of the world of knowledge, he must have felt the student's spasm of agony when he first realized the infinity of research and the awful brevity of time. His reflections on old age give proof enough of this. If he missed the labour in the full harvest-field, the glimpse of the distant mountain tops, suffused for the ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... continual variability of all parts of the higher animals gives scope for innumerable changes, and Nature is not in a hurry. Mr. Spencer, however, says that "the chances against any adequate readjustments fortuitously arising must be infinity to one." But he has also shown that altered degree of use does not cause the needed concomitant variation of co-operative parts. So the chances against a beneficial change in an animal must be, at a liberal estimate, infinity to two. Mr. Spencer, if he has proved anything, ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... fraction converges to the sum to infinity of the series. Its n^{th} convergent is not equal to the sum to n terms of the series. Expressions for [beta]0, [beta]1, [beta]2, ... by means of determinants have been given by T. Muir (Edinburgh Transactions, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... subsided, and I could now look around me without feeling that if I stirred I was a doomed man. I clambered up the lower portion of the main rigging, but only saw black, turbulent waters, hissing and heaving, and raging on every side, and seemingly stretching away into infinity. With terrible force the utter awfulness and hopelessness of my position dawned upon me, yet I did not despair. I next thought it advisable to try and slip my anchor, and let the ship drift, for I still half-fancied that perhaps I might come across my companions somewhere. Before ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... that red-lit sea That circles brain with sense, and bids us be The playthings of an elemental law, Shall we forego the deeper touch of awe On love's extremest pinnacle, where we, Winging the vistas of infinity, Gigantic on ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... travel great roads without cringing,—clear-eyed, unafraid. They are finely made, but not nobly made,—in that sense. They will therefore have a too urgent need of religion. Few primates have the courage to face—alone—the still inner mysteries: Infinity, Space and Time. They will think it too terrible, they will feel it would turn them to water, to live through unearthly moments of vision without creeds or beliefs. So they'll get beliefs first. Ah, poor creatures! The cart before the horse! Ah, the blasphemy ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... colour with a given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely increased—and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that, while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or wrong, colour is wholly relative. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... statuary, by which we learn something of the world as it is and as it was. It gives us the telescope and the microscope, by whose agency we are able to appreciate, even though but imperfectly, the immensity of creation on the one hand, and its infinity on the other. The teacher is not to labour without money, nor to despise it more than other men; and the public might as well expect the free services of the minister, lawyer, physician, or farmer, as to expect the gratuitous or cheap education of their children. ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... Edward Thomas's poetical quest, he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience of the soul fronting its own infinity:— ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... that June morning, and the old sensation of a pause before advance was upon her, and the strange solemnity which was almost a terror, from the feeble clutching of her mind at the comprehension of infinity. She looked at the morning sunlight coming between the white slants of her curtains, an airy flutter of her new dress from the closet, her valedictory, tied with a white satin ribbon, on the stand, and she saw quite plainly all which had led up to this, and to her, Ellen ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... this gloomy and monotonous part of our tale, suffice it to say that he endured two months of water and infinity ere the vessel, fast as she was, reached Valparaiso. Their progress, however, had been more than once interrupted to carry out Wardlaw's instructions. The poor general himself had but one idea; to go and ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... forehead: the sun and the winds had worked on him daily ever since he was born. "The face of a strong man," thought the lady. "Let him thank his stars he isn't a silent strong man, or I'd turn him into the gutter." Suddenly it struck her that he was like an Irish terrier. He worried infinity as if it was a bone. Gnashing his teeth, he tried to carry the eternal subtleties by violence. As a man he often bored her, for he was always saying and doing the same things. But as a philosopher he really was a joy for ever, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... for the morning, O thou smitten child, Scorned, scourged and persecuted and reviled— Athirst and famishing, none pitying thee, Crowned with the twisted thorns of agony— No faintest gleam of sunlight through the dense Infinity of gloom to lead thee thence— Wait for the morning:—It will come, indeed, As surely as the ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... so many glow-worms. But let us see how he manages his atoms, those almighty tools that do every thing of themselves, without the help of a workman. When the atoms, says he, descend in infinite space (very ingeniously spoken, to make high and low in infinity), they do not fall plumb down, but decline a little from the perpendicular, either obliquely or in a curve; and this declination, says he, from the direct line is the cause of our liberty of will. But, I say, this declination of atoms in their descent was itself either necessary ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... espying the host of the Kafirs and seeing them as a surging sea, called a halt; so his troops pitched the tents and set up the standards, calling upon the name of the All-wise One, the Creator of light and gloom, Lord of all creatures, Who seeth while Him none see, the High to infinity, extolled and exalted be He! There is no God but He! The Miscreants also halted and pitched their tents, and Kurajan said to them "Keep on your arms, and in armour sleep, for during the last watch of the night we will ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... as this couple could see the track clear ahead, stretching smooth and nickel-plated to infinity, an ugly complication began to worm itself into the serenity of ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... said Flora. 'We all know it is a pity; but it would be a far greater pity to break it off now—and do Tom an infinity of harm. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lecturing upon the achievement of that master, threw upon the screen a certain large subject-picture, not one of Reynold's happiest efforts, but a laboured and unattractive design which, we know, gave Reynolds an infinity of trouble. ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... Alan, all suddenly relying on ourselves. I took out my handkerchief to mop my brow; but a thought struck me, and I put it back. Was it possible for me, and my distant relatives, and their distant relatives, and so on to infinity of those who be longed to a class provided by birth with a certain position, raised by Providence on to a platform made up of money inherited, of interest, of education fitting us for certain privileged pursuits, of friends similarly endowed, of substantial ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to these strange voids is hardly descriptive. Rather they produce upon the mind the effect of blank windows in a lonely house on a pitch-dark night, which, when looked at from the brilliant interior, become appalling in their rayless murk. Infinity seems to acquire a new meaning in the presence of these black openings in the sky, for as one continues to gaze it loses its purely metaphysical quality and becomes a kind of entity, like the ocean. The observer ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... gambling. That's hardly travelling. Now, I've studied this subject a little, quietly in Harley Street. I'm no traveller myself, but I have dozens of patients who are. And I'm convinced that the modern facilities for travel, besides giving an infinity of pleasure, ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... works being completed, and heavy artillery arrived, four batteries, erected on the banks of the Moldaw, began to play with great fury. Near three hundred bombs, besides an infinity of ignited balls, were thrown into the city in the space of twenty-four hours. The scene was lamentable, houses, men, and horses wrapped in flames and reduced to ashes. The confusion within, together with the want ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... puzzled, tired brain that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... abbess. Orion returned to the women, whose curiosity had been roused to a high pitch by seeing Rufinus disappear through the gate leading to the convent-garden. Dame Joanna could not sit still for excitement, and Pulcheria answered at random when Orion and Paula, who had an infinity of things to say or whisper to each other, now and then tried to draw her into the conversation. Once she sighed deeply, and when her friend asked her: "What ails ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... truth, has kept on its course successfully and gloriously. Newton died; yet the courses of the spheres are still known, and they yet move on by the laws which he discovered, and in the orbits which he saw, and described for them, in the infinity of space. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... himself was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling flowers of such familiar ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... becoming more and more widely recognized that by due attention to the pre-natal and post-natal care of mother and child an infinity of good can be done—indeed, a great deal is already under way in this direction throughout the Dominion. But the Committee are satisfied that much more ought to be done to ensure for children of the pre-school and school ages more generally favourable home conditions, and healthier ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... was entrusted to the Sieur Despagnet and I: we dedicated four months to the search, during which happened an infinity of unknown things, strange, and out of all belief, of which books written on the subject have never spoken: such for instance, as that the devil came and held his meetings at the gates of Bordeaux, and in the quarter of ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... places, behind the dry furrows of the field; they are only just behind something, hidden openly. The instant you look for them they multiply a hundredfold; if you sit on the beach and begin to count the pebbles by you, their number instantly increases to infinity by ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... as equally false and equally useful? Is there nothing more cheerful for us to contemplate than what the old Pagan philosophy holds out,—man destined to live like brutes or butterflies, and pass away into the infinity of time and space, like inert matter, decomposed, absorbed, and entering into new and everlasting combinations? Is America to become like Europe and Asia in all essential elements of life? Has she no other mission than to add to perishable glories? Is she to teach the world nothing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... archipelago of Calamianes consists of an infinity and indeterminate number of islands, large and small, and most of them very fertile. [72] Those best known and best supplied with the products of commerce which might make them rich are [here] set down. But their lack of attention ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... subjected, now from the rough character of the country he constantly compelled to traverse in his spiritual journeys, anon from the violence of colonists or Indians.... It will be seen that readers who expect an infinity of enjoyment from these missionary adventures will not be disappointed." ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal considerations! Let me continue to the end, as I began, without further digressions or anticipations, pursuing the plain path of dispassionate History. The exact facts, the exact words,—and they are burnt in upon my brain,—shall be ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... youthful companions; after which the faces of all were turned towards the shore, still only dimly distinguishable, and uninviting as seen, but more welcome to the sight than the wilderness of water stretching as if to infinity behind them. ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... amateur painting in water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an easy disposition and no rival to the wife's influence. I will not say they are the best of men, but they are the stuff out ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... understand how there should be such a population as all this implies, and how they can subsist, the answer is that all the Idolaters, and Saracens as well, take six, eight, or ten wives apiece when they can afford it, and beget an infinity of children. In fact, you shall find many men who have each more than thirty sons who form an armed retinue to their father, and this through the fact of his having so many wives. With us, on the other hand, a man hath but one wife; and if she be barren, still ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... excellent early craftsmen had been killed in these wars, as has been said, to the remainder of these Greeks, old but not ancient, there had been left nothing but elementary outlines on a ground of colour; and to this at the present day witness is borne by an infinity of mosaics, which, wrought throughout all Italy by these Greeks, are to be seen in every old church in any city whatsoever of Italy, and above all in the Duomo of Pisa, in S. Marco at Venice, and in other places ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... for the tiara," thought Pierre, who had listened passionately; for this man Nani interested him, caused him an instinctive disquietude, as though behind his pink and smiling face he could divine an infinity of obscure things. At the same time, however, the young priest but ill understood his friend, for he again felt bewildered by all this strange Roman world, so different from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... immense city seemed instantly to blaze with conflagrations, or rather by an infinity of mines sprung in its heart. Thick whirlwinds of smoke, pierced at intervals by flashes and long lines of flame, covered the doomed city. The blackness of darkness at one moment enveloped it. Again it blazed forth as if it were a sea of fire. The roar of cannon, the clash of ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... roadside as impartially as a towering mountain peak in the Alps. Every drop of water in the ocean is an epitome of the chemistry of the whole ocean; every drop is subject to precisely the same laws as dominate the united infinity of billions of drops that make that miracle of Nature, men call the Sea. No matter how humble the calling of the individual, how uninteresting and dull the round of his duties, he should do his best. He should dignify what he is doing by the mind he puts into it, ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... the girl had listened through it all without a move, without a sound. Now that he was silent, and it was her turn to speak, she still stood so, passive, waiting. Ever in times of stress his will had dominated her will; and the present was no exception. There was an infinity of things she might have said. A myriad which she should have spoken, would occur to her when he was gone. But at the present, when the opportunity was hers, there seemed nothing to offer; nothing to gainsay. She even forgot that she was expected to answer ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... it is easy to arrive at an understanding of the state of humanity at the present time. Imagine very imperfect, very undeveloped beings, possessing, however, an infinity of latent potentialities; imagine them born in a dark cavern where they swarm pell-mell, passing their time chiefly in devouring one another. Every moment this cavern is entered, and a certain number of these poor beings ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... porter's house, and cordon to open the door, and so forth; and is a Paris mansion in little. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room. Being a gentleman's house, and not one furnished to let, it has some very curious things in it; some of the oddest things you ever beheld in your life; and an infinity of easy chairs and sofas. . . . Bad weather. It is snowing hard. There is not a door or window here—but that's nothing! there's not a door or window in all Paris—that shuts; not a chink in all the billions of trillions of chinks in the city that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... train, until when it came to entraining reluctant horses and still more reluctant mules practically in the dark, for there was no other light but the dim glimmer of two candle-lamps, the task became herculean, and required an infinity of patience and tact. The General and his staff having gone by the first excursion, the task of bringing along the remainder of the column devolved on Colonel Hicks, with Captain Fetherstonhaugh as his staff officer. They did not complete ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... the distant purple hills. The whole western sky was one flame of fire. Ruth forgot herself in looking at the gorgeous sight. She sat up gazing, and, as she gazed, the tears dried on her cheeks; and, somehow, all human care and sorrow were swallowed up in the unconscious sense of God's infinity. The sunset calmed her more than any words, however wise and tender, could have done. It even seemed to give her strength and courage; she did not know how or ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... buttons of June are antiquated in July; the trimmings of July are passees by September; side-combs, back-combs, puffs, rats, and all sorts of such matters, are in a distracted race of improvement; every article of feminine toilet is on the move towards perfection. It seems to me that an infinity of money must be spent in these trifles, by those who make the least pretension to ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... obligingly ended with telling us there is no such thing; a conclusion extremely consoling, and which if they had drawn before they set pen to paper, would have saved both themselves and their readers an infinity of trouble. This fancy of hunting for what one knows is not to be found, is really an ingenious way of amusing both one's self and the world: I wish people would either write to some purpose, or be so good as not to ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... observances may be added, accidental rencounters, words spoken by chance, and afterwards turned into good or bad presages; forebodings, prodigies, monsters, eclipses, comets; every extraordinary phenomenon, every unforeseen accident, with an infinity of ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... observed as he called rather sharply to Tokudo to bring him his humidor. Then he took out a cigar and lighted it and ordered the car. And that was the lee and the long of it. That was the way we faced our Great Divide, our forked trail that veered off East and West into infinity! ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... the 67th, would fain have gone, but the good old corps was weak from casualties and sickness, and the gallant Knowles denied himself in the interests of his men. The two Highland regiments, the 72d and 92d, had done an infinity of fighting and marching, but both had received strong drafts, were in fine condition, and were not to be hindered from following the chief whom, though not of their northern blood, the stalwart sons of the mist swore ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... enabled her to hit the target against odds of almost infinity to one; not just once, but time after time. By definition, intuition. What quality did you use just now in getting me off the hook? Intuition. What makes Teddy Blake such an unerring performer? Intuition again. My hunches—they're intuition, too. Intuition, hell! ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... Writers in the Controversy, concerning the Foundation of Moral Virtue, and Moral Obligation. With some Thoughts concerning Necessary Existence; the Reality and Infinity of Space; the Extension and Place of Spirits; and on Dr. Watts's Notion of Substance. First ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... morning. This was Christmas Day. We were going to the trenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospect of straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, in an inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into my northerly ear, and the A.S.C. motor-car driver, who was mad, kept missing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint. One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... my eyes but one large window, wide open, through which the sun of midsummer, at midday, was showering down torrents of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold, or for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of life and the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... at the other, as 2 and 2 make 4, and a graduated rise of examples between them. Down came a blow: "What! put necessary and contingent propositions together! It's absurd!" I pointed out that the two kinds of necessity are but such extremes of probability as 0 and [infinity] are of number, and illustrated by an urn with 1 white and n black {247} balls, n increasing without limit. It was frankly seen, and the point yielded; a ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... infinity of satisfaction the success of his endeavours, in favour of these amiable twins, and said within himself, how great a pity would it have been, if capacities such as theirs had been denied the means ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word "death" he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, till he had learned to speak of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word "God" in a pulpit, and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or farther than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the sounding-board ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... had been unable to attain a velocity greater than that of light. As the accelerating energy pressed the vessel's speed closer and closer toward that limiting velocity, the mass of the ship and of its contents had increased toward infinity. And trying to move laboriously with such vast mass, our clocks and bodies had been slowed down until to our leaden minds a year of moon time became equivalent to ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... knowing it, or intending to do it. In the Protest presently noted he discovered that "the force taken as 1 is equal to the sum of all its fractions ... thus 1 1/4 1/9 1/16 1/25, &c., carried to infinity." This the mathematician instantly sees is equivalent to the theorem that the circumference of any circle is double of the diagonal of the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the utter weariness of motion repeated again and again without varying or ceasing. Every ligament in her body craved only stillness, but the camel's unaccustomed thrust and sway continued, repeated to infinity, until her nerves grew numb and she was hardly conscious of ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... women are really faithful to the end? Very many, indeed, if circumstances admit of easy faithfulness. A high-souled, generous, ardent nature will endure an infinity of disillusionment, of misfortune, of neglect, and even of ill treatment. Even so, the flame, though it may sink low, can be revived again to burn as brightly as before. But in order that this may be so it is necessary that the object of such a wonderful ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... it from actual ocular inspection is not only unnecessary, but unattainable. What says the axiom? That two straight lines can not inclose a space; that after having once intersected, if they are prolonged to infinity they do not meet, but continue to diverge from one another. How can this, in any single case, be proved by actual observation? We may follow the lines to any distance we please; but we can not follow them to infinity: ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... intoxicating aspect of art—one that fortified and calmed. All his scientific curiosities which had been so long laid to sleep revived. His first returning joy came from a sense of the inexhaustibleness and infinity of nature. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Carmen, "requires infinite time in which to completely express itself. So time ceases to be, and we find that all real things exist now, in an endless present. Now, the ideas of infinite mind range throughout the realm of infinity, but the greatest idea that the creative mind can have is the idea of itself. That idea is the image and likeness of the infinite creative mind. It is the perfect reflection of that mind—its perfect expression. That idea is what the man Jesus always saw back of the human concept ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... us grant for the sake of argument that there is a Creator, and therefore a scheme of creation. How much can we, dwellers upon a world which is but as a grain of sand washed hither and thither by the tide-flow of the ocean of Infinity, know about the workings of the Will in obedience to which, as some of us believe, that tide ebbs and flows through the uncounted ages of Eternity, and over the measureless expanse of Infinity? Faced with such a ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... as it assuredly did not; it may be that he quailed before the minute and almost undecipherable handwriting. But similar notebooks are in my possession, and there are, happily, in these days typists—you pay them by the hour, and it means an infinity of time and patience—who will copy the most minute and the most obscure documents. There are some of the notebooks of the Scottish tour of 1858 before me, and what is of far more importance—Borrow's letters to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... at last, early one day, Captain Barrington called the boys on deck and, with a wave of the hand, indicated a huge white cliff, or palisade, which rose abruptly from the green water and seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Mississippi steamboat who listened attentively to the persuasive arguments of a life-insurance agent; he "allowed" that he was willing to bet on almost any kind of game, but declined to take a hand in one where he had to die to win. It is painful to think of the infinity of petty economies, of all the grievous deprivations, the positive hardships, undergone in so many millions of families, day by day, and year by year, to secure these policies of insurance; but, as Plato said, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... all humankind, and not for the individual, is the so-called right-secured by barter, exchange or inheritance, to use or withhold from use, at the caprice of the owner—of a certain piece or portion of the planet. Under a legal fiction the title to land extends to the center of the Earth and to infinity in ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... is generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor multiplied. There ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night, in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the breeze, under that vast diffusion of force, having ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Its conceptions are never vague, but are tangible, real, and human. Thus with the Greek, a vast ocean, like that they know, encircles the whole earth, and fixes its bounds and the limits which man shall not pass; the Northerns compassed it about with a vast serpent of immense size, which bounded infinity and space, time and eternity, thereby mirroring, in some degree, as it were, the ancient symbol for time and space without end, the snake biting his own tail, the circle with no one beginning nor end. The heaven of the Greeks is the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... branches, and geography, and acquired some knowledge of English literature, beginning with that admirable book The Speaker, but it does not appear that Latin and Greek were attended to at this school. He records that at this time he learned an infinity of snatches of songs, small romances, &c., which his powerful memory retained most accurately throughout his life. He was no hand at active play: but was notorious for his skill in constructing guns for shooting peas and arrows, ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... sleep's dear death (it seemed) I rose and strolled along the sea Down silver distances that faintly gleamed On to infinity. ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... crushed in his heart the expansion, force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were "sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal sleep." He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts have the brand of immortality. If he had believed in God, he might have died a martyr, but he would have left behind him the religion of reason and the reign of democracy. Mirabeau, in a word, was the reason of the people; and ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... hand, it is established that if a mechanical explanation of a phenomenon can be given, we can find an infinity of others which likewise account for all the peculiarities revealed by experiment. But, as a matter of fact, no one has ever succeeded in giving an indisputable mechanical representation of the whole physical world. Even were we disposed to admit the strangest ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... my Lord's, where infinity of applications to him and to me. To my great trouble, my Lord gives me all the papers that was given to him, to put in order and to give him an account of them. I went hence to St. James's to speake with Mr. Clerke, Monk's secretary, about ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... attentive observer will readily recognize, and which have never been better described than by Mr. R.L. Stevenson, who, in his delightful Inland Voyage, speaks of the surface of the Belgian canals along which he was canoeing, as thrown up by the rain into "an infinity of ...
— The Splash of a Drop • A. M. Worthington
... thing that could happen to those innumerable Victims of Life, for whom he sought to kill his Pity, was that they should have to go through the same punishment again—not once or twice, but for an infinity of times—and it was just that that he, whose immense Pity for them took so long a killing, suddenly felt must be what had to happen—had to happen for no other reason than that it was intolerable that it should happen. Again, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... distinctions between 'grace' and 'glory,' and think that the latter applies mainly to what I might call the physical and the metaphysical, and less to the moral, attributes of the divine nature. We adore power, and when it is expanded to infinity we think that it is the glory of God. But my text delivers us from all such misconceptions. If we rightly understand it, then we learn this, that the true heart of the glory is tenderness and love. Of power that weak ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reflections. Was this effect produced beneath the depths of a profound ocean? or did a covering of strata formerly extend over it, which has since been removed? Can we believe that any power, acting for a time short of infinity, could have denuded the granite over so many ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... I must acknowledge. Still there is an infinity of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ever behold streets so insufferably narrow, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... there are in the Exhibition itself! Fine porcelain wares, mirrors, books, statues, perfumes, and many more articles from various parts of the world,—beautiful fans, books, bronzes, and an infinity of other matters, from France in particular. Here is a model in miniature of the ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... human wanderers, in calm thought 65 Reflected, it appeared to me the type Of a majestic intellect, its acts And its possessions, what it has and craves, What in itself it is, and would become. There I beheld the emblem of a mind 70 That feeds upon infinity, that broods Over the dark abyss, [B] intent to hear Its voices issuing forth to silent light In one continuous stream; a mind sustained By recognitions of transcendent power, 75 In sense conducting ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... invention, Mr. Edison no longer withheld the news of what he had been doing from the world. The telegraph lines and the ocean cables labored with the messages that in endless succession, and burdened with an infinity of detail, were sent all over the earth. Everywhere the utmost enthusiasm ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... holy one, as you observe," I continued. "He did an infinity of good, and through all the Terror kept himself from the guillotine. He brought me up and gave me such education as I have. It was in his house in the country at Dammarie, near Melun, that I made the acquaintance of your agent, Mr. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fifty problems out of Hamilton Moore, of blessed memory, and having drawn an infinity of triangles with all possible degrees of incidence, with very neat little ships, now upon the base, now upon the hypothenuse, and now upon the perpendicular, my erudite usher pronounced me to be a perfect master of the noble science of navigation in all its branches, for the which he ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... great effort for the stallion. Before them rose the foothills of the Roydon mountains; behind them the Las Casas range was lost in mist. It seemed that they had been galloping like this for an infinity of time, and Andrew was numb from the shoulders down. If he reached those hills Gray Peter was beaten. He knew it; Hal Dozier knew it; and the two great horses gave all their strength to the last duel of ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... of Christian hope. For the Christian contemplates steadfastly, though with trembling awe, the lowest point of his descent; since, for him, that point, the last of his fall, is also the first of his rescent, and serves, besides, as an exponent of its infinity; the infinite depth becoming, in the rebound, a measure of the infinite rescent. Whereas, on the contrary, with the gloomy uncertainties of a Pagan on the question of his final restoration, and also (which must not be ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... forms we try To utter God's infinity, But the boundless hath no form, And the Universal Friend Doth as far transcend An angel ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... can't tell. I have dreamt nothing, seen nothing, heard nothing. But during these two dreadful hours I have experienced such an infinity of pain that I ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... I seek what on the earth I sought as fruitlessly— The world I knew, the heaven I scorned Lost in infinity: Alone, and on the ageless breath Of cosmic whirlwinds spun, I hurtle through the outer dark Toward some ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... lawlessness; and killing more than murder is called war. The great industrial centers show us what ruthlessness may mean, more cruel and more dangerous than the worst deeds of our border fighting men. As for the criminal records of our great cities, they surpass by infinity those of the rudest wilderness anarchy. Their nature at times would cause a hardened desperado of the ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... which you may translate as it please your fancy. Inside the narrow doors were craters and trenches and redoubts and dug-outs of books. They lay everywhere, underfoot and overhead. They ran up at the back in a steep glacis with embrasures for curios, and were reflected to infinity in tall dusty pier-glasses propped against the walls. High up under the mansard roof hung an antique oriental candelabrum with one candle. Hanging from twine were stuffed fish of grotesque globular proportions, and with staring apoplectic eyes. A stuffed monkey was letting himself down, one-hand, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Others, whose course, perilous with a thousand battles, stained with the blood of their brothers and their friends, has raised them from base to regal estate, have found in place of the felicity they expected an infinity of cares and fears, and have proved by experience that a chalice may be poisoned, though it be of gold, and set on the table of a king. Many have most ardently desired beauty and strength and other advantages of person, and have only been taught their error by the death or dolorous life ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... trying to the patience in the course of months; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken identity of colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun touches it with roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue. But, when all is said, these fields ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the helm start slightly. A block aloft squeaked incomprehensibly, for what on earth could have made it do so? It was a whistling note like a bird's. For a long, long time I faced an empty world, steeped in an infinity of silence, through which the sunshine poured and flowed for some mysterious purpose. Then I heard Ransome's ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... it. Hercules knew me at once when he saw me, and spoke piteously, saying, 'My poor Ulysses, noble son of Laertes, are you too leading the same sorry kind of life that I did when I was above ground? I was son of Jove, but I went through an infinity of suffering, for I became bondsman to one who was far beneath me—a low fellow who set me all manner of labours. He once sent me here to fetch the hell-hound—for he did not think he could find anything harder for me than this, ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... out of infinite ("qui destruit omnem proportionem"[37]) is no wonder in God's power. And therefore Anaximander, Melissus, and Empedocles, call the world universal, but "particulam universitatis" and "infinitatis," a parcel of that which is the universality and the infinity inself; and Plato, but a shadow of God. But the other to prove the world's eternity, urgeth this maxim, "that, a sufficient and effectual cause being granted, an answerable effect thereof is also granted": inferring that ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... He was the little brother of all mankind as well. It was a new human joy that came into religion with him. His essentially artistic nature was the first to realize the full poetry of Christmas—the coming of infinity into extremest limitation, the Highest made the lowliest, the King of all kings a poor infant. He had, in a supreme degree, the mingled reverence and tenderness that inspire the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... city, which I hope to see again some day before there sounds for me the Taps.... But I do not know. The tide of life is more than past its ebb for me and I should be thinking more of a quiet rest on the hillside, my face turned to the turquoise blue of Arizona's matchless infinity, than to the treading again of noisy city streets in the country ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... loops and chains and shining clots of them. This was not too different from the way they had looked from Wheel Five. But what was different was that the starry firmament was partly blotted out by vast rifted ramparts of blackness, ebon cliffs that went up to infinity. Kieran had seen astronomical photographs like this and knew ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... Spectacles having a confidential agent here at all whom he would be inclined to trust with such a job. But when you suppose that the pair of them have a ready-arranged cipher in full working order, why, then, infinity is a small figure for the chances against it. Cabling is out of the question, old chappie. In fact, set alongside of that the idea of flying across carries ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... would become one sphere immense Of love, power, wisdom, filled with Deity, Elate with wonders of the eternal Sense. But we like sheep and wolves war ceaselessly: That love we never seek, that light intense, Which would exalt us to infinity. ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... either y or z, that the joint representation in one diagram would only be possible by choosing for the shading of x a colour different from that employed for y and z, and assigning to that colour a representative value higher than that assigned to the other in the ratio of one to infinity. It will be my object to estimate the relative probability of these rival estimates of the ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
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