"Chaos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... caused this result, but that this result must have already been in the plan. But there certainly are imaginable, in abstracto, infinitely many possibilities of other elements and primitive beginnings of the world,—perhaps of some whose result would have been but an eternal chaos, or of others whose result would have been but an eternal rigidness, or of still others whose result would also have been a certain order and variety of phenomena and processes, but less beautiful than that of the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... lying stretched comfortably on the straw, snoring. He recognized in the sluggard "hideous Pista," who had been summoned to the castle that morning to put new spokes into some broken carriage-wheels. The work he had commenced, a chaos of naves, spokes, fellies, tires, and a variety of tools, lay in a heap beside him, but he was sleeping ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one corner of a ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Edith of a Scotch terrier. But her first glance around convinced her that he was a gardener. Neatness, order, thrift, impressed her the moment she opened his gate, and she perceived that he was already quite advanced in his spring work. Smooth seed-sown beds were emerging from winter's chaos. Crocuses and hyacinths were in bloom, tulips were budding, and on a sunny slope in the distance she saw long green rows of what seemed some growing crop. She determined if possible to make this man her ally, or by stratagem to ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... convinced, accept such an offer as Anna's. It was not, however, her business. Her business was to look after Anna's house; and she did it with a zeal and thoroughness that struck terror into the hearts of the maid-servants. Trudi's fitful energy was nothing to it. Trudi had introduced workmen and chaos; the princess, with a rapidity and skill little short of amazing to anyone unacquainted with the capabilities of the well-trained German Hausfrau, cleared out the workmen and reduced the chaos to order. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... slow degrees through a carefully graduated series of hints. He will then start with objects really perceived by the subject, and will endeavour to make the perception of these objects more and more indefinite; then, step by step, he will bring out of this state of mental chaos the precise form of the object of which he wishes to create an hallucination. Something of the kind happens to many people when dropping off to sleep; they see those coloured, fluid, shapeless masses, which occupy ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep." The Chaldean cosmogony taught that in the beginning "all was darkness and water." The Phoenicians supposed that "the beginning of all things was a wind of black air, and a chaos dark as Erebus." [104] ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... Out of the chaos that the startling facts he was able to glean created in Bobby's mind there came a thought of Ferris, and he immediately telephoned him, out at the site of the new G. E. and W. shops, where ground was already being broken, that he would ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... this chaos of waters. No demon hand was anywhere visible, nor any island, but a few icebergs were in sight, and the frightened sailors rowed away and made sail for home. It was rare to see icebergs so far south, and this naturally added to the general dismay. ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... all the necessity of retaining his grasp of Loup Garou, as the only means of preventing him from further uncovering of the body—on the other, urged by the summons of her, whom he knew, from her very manner, to be in possession of this fearful secret, his mind become a perfect chaos, and large drops of perspiration streamed from his brow. In this irritating dilemma, a sudden transport of rage took possession of his heart, and seizing Loup Garou with both his hands, he so compressed them around his throat, that the dog, already ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... men to earn a scholarship, and for no sane reason to depart instantly thereupon before the mast of a sailing-ship; also another, the central figure, to fall in love with the girl. The book is in three parts, of which the third is superfluously specialized as "chaos." Whether Miss JAMESON will yet write a story I am unable to say; I rather wonder, however, that Messrs. HEINEMANN did not suggest to her that these heterogeneous pages would furnish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... papers stuck their tongues in their cheeks. Of course our fine sentiments were all sham, they said. Of course we intended to swallow Cuba, and never had intended anything else. And when General Leonard Wood came away from Cuba, having made Havana healthy, having brought order out of chaos on the island, and we left Cuba independent, Europe jeered on. ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casualties the ancient poets, according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected some the crimes of men, and some their absurdities; some the momentous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occurrences; some the terrours of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of this chaos of rock, ice, and snow, Chumulari raises his majestic summit, crowned and robed in white, as becomes his sacred character. Around are other forms, his acolytes and attendants, less in stature, but mighty mountains nevertheless, and, ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... using or forbearing to use them; but the progress of things superseded the necessity of such deliberation. In a few months, Louis perished on the scaffold; the Bourbon family were murdered, or scattered over Europe; and the French government was changed into a frightful chaos, amid the tumultuous and bloody horrors of which, calm truth had no longer a chance to be heard. Schiller turned away from these repulsive and appalling scenes, into other regions where his heart was more familiar, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... be selfish, bigoted, and ignorant, and a Radical party, while the Whig party, who will have carried the measure, will sink into insignificance. Such present themselves to my mind as possible alternatives, as far as it is practicable to take anything like a view of probabilities in the chaos and confusion that ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... imaginatively a better ordering of human society than the destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind has hitherto existed is by no means modern: it is at least as old as Plato, whose "Republic'' set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers. Whoever contemplates the world in the light of an ideal—whether what ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... fluctuate. The poet's chaos was no unapt emblem of the state of my mind. A torment was awakened in my bosom, which I foresaw would end only when this interview was past, and its consequences fully experienced. Hence my impatience for the arrival of the hour which had ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... occurred in a city, in a crowded street. Hundreds would have been stricken blind, then hundreds would have been suffocated. Vehicles would have run amok, and the result would have been an indescribable chaos of the maimed, mangled and distraught. A flash like this green ray (which blinded Miss McLeod and her dog, deluded the General, and nearly suffocated us) at the mouth of a harbour, say, the entrance to a great port—Liverpool, London, or ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... unruffled by the easterly gusts that bent the two rows of larches which stretched in deliberate diagonal lines from the street to the corners of its grim facade. Hastings could hear the beating of the sea; it was probably in that chaos of space behind the house. As he stood leaning against one of the tall gate-posts and surveying the scene, he began to feel, almost in spite of himself, in sympathy ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... thick of such a chaos that M. de Trailles tried to insinuate himself into my good graces. My head was fairly clear, I was upon my guard. As for him, though he pretended to be decently drunk, he was perfectly cool, and knew very well what he was about. How it was done I do not know, but the upshot ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... man as we are bound to do we shall win the confidence of all, and we may hope for a braver and better future, wherein some light of the primal Beauty may wander again over earth as in the beginning it dawned on chaos when the Spirit of God first moved ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... washing-stands, and scraps of carpet, were huddled away into corners as objects of secondary consideration, not to be thought of but as disagreeable necessities, furnishing no profit, and intruding on the one affair of life. The single sitting-room was on the same principle, a chaos of boxes and old papers, and had more counting-house stools in it than chairs; not to mention a great monster of a desk straddling over the middle of the floor, and an iron safe sunk into the wall above the fireplace. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... answered over and over again; played with them as the conjurer tosses his handful of pretty globes into the air and catches them without one click of the ivories. It was a forcible reminder of Clapham Junction; the perfect system that brings order out of chaos, and saves a little world, but a mad one, from the total annihilation that threatens it every moment in the hour, and every hour in the day, and ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... shown by some of Luther's own tunes (e.g. Vom Himmel hoch, da komm' ich her) soon advanced, especially in the tunes of Crueger, beyond any that was shown by folk-music; and it provided an invaluable bulwark against the chaos that was threatening to swamp music on all sides at the beginning of the 17th century. By Bach's time all the polyphonic instrumental and vocal art-forms of the 18th century were mature; and though he loved to derive the design as well as the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... description than the simple and uncircumscribed arrangement of the universe expressed by the Copernican theory. It also afforded him an opportunity of localising those regions of space in which the chief incidents in his poem are described—viz. HEAVEN, or THE EMPYREAN, CHAOS, HELL, and the MUNDANE UNIVERSE. Milton's Ptolemaism, with its adjuncts, may be ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... of those who have died in this war. I told you you'd be no coward when the time came to fight, and, my faith! you were not. I can see you now, with a smile and a wave of the hand plunging into that bloody chaos." ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... dragging a few pieces of furniture and some pictures across the lawn—evidently what little there had been time to drag from the burning house. They could see also a group of women, where Madame de Frenard was calming the women-servants and trying to bring order out of chaos. ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... opened it a little way, and peeped out: the morning was a chaos of blackness and snow and wind. She had been born and brought up in a yet wilder region, but the storm threatened to be such as in ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... journey proved to be less perilous than the descent. The awful chaos of water was beneath them, but invisible, the darkness being so intense that everything was hidden but the mass of rock over and by which they climbed. In addition, the exertion and busy action after the long waiting seemed ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... frightened child. His determination to win success never faltered, rather it hardened with opposition into adamant; but he was beginning to realize his blunder. He had overwhelmed her; had brought about an upheaval of her world so violent that, in her bewilderment, her dread of chaos, she instinctively laid hold on the old supports and clung to them with desperation. She must have time to think, to familiarize herself with the strange emotions, to adapt herself to the changed conditions. Only one other ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... coachman shook hands with him, and then the boy found himself in the vestibule among a bustling crowd. He did not linger in this chaos, for the house had no longer any interest for him, but hurried into the street, eager to start on the journey that would end by placing him ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... was sing out an order, then knock a man down, jerk him to his feet, thrust a line into his hands, and kick him until he bent his weight upon it. It was bitter driving. But I'll admit it brought order out of chaos. We cleared the decks of the first-day-out hurrah's nest in jig time. Mercifully, it was fair weather, with a ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... work long, to beg a little and to cheat a little, to eat not over-much and to "drink" scarce at all, to beget annual children by chaste wives (disallowed them half the year), and to rear them not over-well, to study the Law and the Prophets and to reverence the Rabbinical tradition and the chaos of commentaries expounding it, to abase themselves before the "Life of Man" and Joseph Cam's "Prepared Table" as though the authors had presided at the foundation of the earth, to wear phylacteries and fringes, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... excitement. Just beyond this he had first encountered the strange trail. There were no signs of it left in the snow, but he saw other things which led him on: a huge rock thrusting itself out of the chaos of white, a dead poplar which stood in his path, and at last, half a mile ahead, the edge ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... void," said the prophet. This is the same phrase that is used in the opening verses of Genesis to describe the chaotic state of the earth in the beginning. At the beginning of creation week the earth was in a state of emptiness and chaos—an "abyss," as it is called in the Greek translation of Genesis. Again, during this thousand-year period, the earth is an "abyss," or a desolate waste. "Abyss" is the meaning of the word translated "bottomless pit" in the text telling of the ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... the Exchange the members switched the chaos of the pit into shouts of a more hearty and powerful volume, and to listen to a crowd of such fully-seasoned lungs doing their utmost in the confined space of a building is ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... out any individual expression. Words, curses, groans, came down like hailstones, and mixed together in a chaos indescribable. At last, from the wide open door of the Bet-ha-Midrash poured the dark stream of people which, outside in the court, was met by another of those who had not found room within, and were less noisy, though equally excited. ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... the Deluge;" a picture upheld by its admirers (and these were some of the most intelligent judges of the day) for a work of consummate imaginative power; while it was pronounced by the public journals to be "a chaos of unconcocted color." If the writers for the press had been aware of the kind of study pursued by Mr. Linnell through many laborious years, characterized by an observance of nature scrupulously and minutely patient, directed by the deepest sensibility, and aided by a power of drawing ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... through Homer, and Dante, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in search of subjects worthy of his hand; he loved to grapple with whatever he thought too weighty for others; and assembling round him the dim shapes which imagination readily called forth, he sat brooding over the chaos, and tried to bring the whole into order and beauty. His coloring is like his design; original; it has a kind of supernatural hue, which harmonizes with many of his subjects—the spirits of the other ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... similar position, he rubbed his hands, and walked up to the fire, into which he insinuated the poker, and immediately destroyed the small symptoms of combustion which remained, reducing the whole to one chaos ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different for many years. Once a summer the sailing ship from England felt its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, to drop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer a six-fathom canoe ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... worse to a High Church curate. To us theism means that at the ground of being, at the heart of existence, there is a self-subsistent reality which we call by the highest name we know, viz., reason or mind. "Before the chaos that preceded the birth of the heavens and the earth one only being existed, immense, silent, immovable, yet incessantly active; that being is the mother of the universe. I know not how this being is named, but I designate it by the word 'reason'." [1] Absolute, unconditioned ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of social chaos arose the inchoate form of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... which I thought was "pas mauvais," Where, in spite of all my boasting, I encountered some delay; For, much to my amazement, at the steepest part I met A matron who weighed twenty stones, and I think must be there yet: The stupendous Col du Geant, with its chaos of seracs; The procession into Cormayeur, with lantern, rope, and axe: The sweet girl with golden ringlets—her dear name was Mary Ann— Whom I helped to climb the Jardin, and who cut me at Lausanne: On these, the charms of Chamonix, sweeter far than words can tell, At the witching ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... must have been. We should all be shocked if we knew how many people there were like her, and we should all try to deny it, and so would they. I guess Christianity is about as uncommon as civilization,—and that's very uncommon. If her poor, feeble mind was such a chaos, what do you suppose her ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... or not The failure of an angry task That relegates him out of time To chaos, I can only ask. But as I knew him, so he was; And somewhere among men to-day Those old, unyielding eyes may flash, And flinch — ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... that of Viviers, founded by Cassiodorus in 531, the Benedictine rule required of every monk that a fixed portion of each day be spent in the scriptorium. There the more skilled scribes were entrusted with the copying of precious documents rescued from the chaos of the preceding century, while monks not yet sufficiently expert for this high duty were instructed ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... got thus far, but it is not to be found. The sea indeed is partly blocked with ordinary ice, but there is nothing to be seen of this vast collection of mighty blocks, some of them thirty feet high—this wild chaos of ice which so effectually stopped some of those who went ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... Courtney took it in as a whole; the dancing, jumbled web of words that raced before his glazed eyes. Parts of sentences, a word here and there, his own name, filtered through the veil,—and were lost in the chaos of his own thoughts. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... "Books of Genesis" are the "Voluspa Saga," or "prophecy of Vola" (about 230 verses), "Vafthrudner's Saga," and "Grimner's Saga." These three resemble the Sibylline books of ancient Rome, and give a description of chaos, the formation of the world, the creation of all animals (including dwarfs, giants and fairies), the general conflagration, and the renewal of the world, when, like the new Jerusalem, it will appear all glorious, and there shall in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the dwarf, "this planet is poorly constructed. It is so irregular and has such a ridiculous shape! Everything here seems to be in chaos: you see these little rivulets, none of which run in a straight line, these pools of water that are neither round, nor square, nor oval, nor regular by any measure; all these little pointy specks scattered across ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... the patient, insensible apparently to all the remedies usually employed in cases of apoplexy. The whole being seemed to be surrendering to death, to be preparing the way for the rigidity of the corpse; and this in the most sinister place in the world, this chaos, lighted by a lantern merely, amid which there lie about pell-mell in the dust all the remains of former plays—gilt furniture, curtains with gay fringes, coaches, boxes, card-tables, dismantled staircases and balusters, among ropes and pulleys, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... down into the valley of the Marne where division after division of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far away," but they are young, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... assistants, had provisions and articles innumerable to stow away; the gunner, boatswain, and carpenter, their respective stores to look to; indeed, in every department order had to commence its reign, where chaos had hitherto seemed to prevail, operations not to be performed without their due allowance of shouting and swearing. On deck all went smoothly, and under the pleasantest of auspices the two ships ran through the Needles, and stood ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... Colonel fondly pictured his nephew wandering distractedly through a long suite of padded cells—but, alas! the bird had flown. Such things were always expedited with such felicitous despatch in those parts of the earth inhabited by civilized men, but here where everybody was equally mad, where chaos reigned, and nobody either recognized or respected beings of a superior order, what could be done to check the headlong career of his nephew who with twenty millions ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... early as 1526; but it was the financial embarrassments of Henry's last years which brought about a debasement that was almost catastrophic. From 1543 to 1551 matters went from bad to worse till the currency was in a state of chaos: and the silver coin issued in the last year contained only one-seventh of the pure metal that went to that of twenty-five ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... I am like an infant which has not yet smiled. I look dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go to. The multitude of men all have enough and to spare. I alone seem to have lost everything. My mind is that of a stupid man; I am in a state of chaos. ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... presided was in a state of indescribable chaos. It could not be arranged as he had seen stores all his life, so he did nothing to ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... singer, "can the good come without a struggle? Is the beautiful accomplished without strife? Recall the tales of primeval chaos, when, as sang the Ascraean singer, love first darted into the midst; imagine the heave and throe of joining elements; conjure up the first living shapes, born of the fluctuating slime and vapour. Surely they were things incomplete, deformed ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Cardinal de Bouillon no longer affected any doubt about the authenticity of the discovery. All his friends complimented him upon it, the majority to see how he would receive their congratulations. It was a chaos rather than a mixture, of vanity the most outrageous, modesty the most affected, and joy the most immoderate which he ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... wind, tossing loose ends of things, they broke into her quiet morning hour and threw her groping thoughts into greater chaos. Masking their real errand with long-drawn faces, they feigned a concern for her welfare only. "We come to ask how you are living. We heard you were slowly starving to death. We heard you are one of those Indians who have been cheated ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... The chaos that followed the death of the Protector resulted in Monk's bringing over the exiled Stuart king—Charles II. Thereafter Round Head and Royalist served together in the British navy. An important effect of the Restoration was organization ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... be no constitution of any sort in a State, no law, nothing but chaos, then that State would no longer exist as an organization. But that has not been the case, it never is the case in great communities, for they always have constitutions and forms of government. It may not be a constitution or form of government adapted to its ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... of heaven, the stately procession of planets around a central light, the majestic sun; the unbroken sequence of the seasons and the unvarying alternation of tidal ebb and flow;—all this aggregate of systematic order, was called Cosmos, and was supposed to have proceeded from Chaos. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... Chaos and old Night, Cimmerian Muse, all hail! That wrapt in never-twinkling gloom canst write, And shadowest meaning with thy dusky veil! What Poet sings and strikes the strings? It was the mighty Theban spoke. He from the ever-living lyre ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... novels, similar to those of Miss Wilkinson, Scott singled out for commendation The Fatal Revenge or The Family of Montorio, by "Jasper Denis Murphy," or the Rev. Charles Robert Maturin. Amid the chaos of horror into which Maturin hurls his readers, Scott shrewdly discerned the spirit and animation which, though often misdirected, pervade his whole work. The story is but a grotesque distortion of life, yet Scott found himself "insensibly involved ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... route, but rather according to the course of the river, for the sake of water; and in such cases, the beaten track from station to station, no matter how crooked, becomes the road. Thus it is, in the fortuitous occupation of Australia, that order and arrangement may precede, and be followed only by "CHAOS come again." I arrived about sunset, at Mr. Cyrus Doyle's station near the Nammoy, where I was hospitably entertained by a man in charge of it, who rode eight miles in twenty minutes only, to borrow some tea and sugar for me, and who lived ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,—the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings,—for ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of Creation is—Light. Till the eye have vision the whole members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let there be Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... only that Dick was gone, though the pain of that separation was far greater than she would have believed possible, but a moral earthquake had shattered their little world, involving them in utter chaos. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Now thou art slain, will not endure to light The Immortal Heavenly Ones! No, I will plunge Down to the dread depths of the underworld, Where thy lone spirit flitteth to and fro, And will to blind night leave earth, sky, and sea, Till Chaos and formless darkness brood o'er all, That Cronos' Son may also learn what means Anguish of heart. For not less worship-worthy Than Nereus' Child, by Zeus's ordinance, Am I, who look on all things, I, who bring All to their consummation. Recklessly My light Zeus now despiseth! Therefore I ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... it, notably in 1840, 1848, and 1887, have so altered its character as to have made of it an essentially new instrument. The revision of 1840 was forced upon the king by the Liberals, whose position was strengthened by the fiscal chaos into which the nation had fallen (p. 522) under the previous autocratic regime. The reformers got very much less than they demanded. Instead of the ministerial responsibility and the public control of the finances for which they asked ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... particular of lesser phrases. One cogent theme may well prevail as text of the whole. As the recurring motives are multiplied, they must lose individual moment. The listener's grasp becomes more difficult, until there is at best a mystic maze, a sweet chaos, without a clear melodic thought. It cannot be maintained that the perception of the modern audience has kept pace with the complexity of scores. Yet there is no gainsaying an alluring beauty of these waves of sound rising to fervent height in the main melody that ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... an egg according to the conceptions of many of the ancients; and few ideas were more widely spread, or can be traced further back, than the one that the whole visible creation emerged from the original Chaos or Darkness in the shape of ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... the highest circle, then through all its bounds Such trembling seiz'd the deep concave and foul, I thought the universe was thrill'd with love, Whereby, there are who deem, the world hath oft Been into chaos turn'd: and in that point, Here, and elsewhere, that old rock toppled down. But fix thine eyes beneath: the river of blood Approaches, in the which all those are steep'd, Who have by violence injur'd." O blind lust! O foolish wrath! who so ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... orderly arrangement of his time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all his occupations. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, all things lie huddled together in one chaos, which admits of neither ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... of the present and future, form the line of demarkation between parties. The north has made enormous growth and development since the war. Immense capital is seeking investment, and millions of idle men are seeking employment. The south, from a state of chaos, is showing marked evidence of growth and progress, and these two sections, no longer divided by slavery, can be united again by the same bonds that united ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... transformed into little bits of porcelain. He adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced as well as exhibited in his proper person everything of which he urged the necessity on others. Such a chaos of dirt, confusion, and noise, as the little theatre was the day we entered it, and such a cosmos as he made it of cleanliness, order, and silence, before the rehearsals were over! There were only two things left as we found them, bits of humanity both, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of the problem. It is appalling enough to make us despair. But those who do not put their trust in man alone, but in One who is Almighty, have no right to despair. To despair is to lose faith; to despair is to forget God Without God we can do nothing in this frightful chaos of human misery. But with God we can do all things, and in the faith that He has made in His image all the children of men we face even this hideous wreckage of humanity with a cheerful confidence that if we are but faithful to our own high calling He will not fail ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... during this conversation along the bare avenue, through the lines of faint, weak-kneed young trees which had been planted with a far-off hope of some time, twenty years hence, filling up the gaps. Little Geoff, with all the chaos of ideas in his mind, a child unlike other children, just saved from the grave of his race, the last little feeble representative of a house which had been strong and famous in its day, was not unlike one of the feeble saplings which rustled and swayed in ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... be the Russian Empire, to a truce of God, to stop reprisals and outrages and to send men here to give, so to speak, an account of themselves. The Great Powers would then try to find a way to bring some order out of chaos. These men were not to be delegates to the Peace Conference, and he agreed with the French Government entirely that they should not be made members of ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... a hubbub of voices, a chaos of suggestions; friends rushed to and fro between the camps, some emerging from their seats in the synagogue to add to the confusion. But Eliphaz had taken his stand upon a rock—he had no more ready money. To-morrow, the next day, he would have some. And Leibel, pale ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the close of World War I allowed the Slovaks to join the closely related Czechs to form Czechoslovakia. Following the chaos of World War II, Czechoslovakia became a Communist nation within Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe. Soviet influence collapsed in 1989 and Czechoslovakia once more became free. The Slovaks and the Czechs agreed to separate ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... without reference to a whole, so neither can a whole be imagined without fitness of parts. To give this fitness, then, is the ultimate task and test of genius: it is, in fact, calling form and life out of what before was but a chaos of materials, and making them the subject and exponents of the will. As the master-principle, also, it is the disposer, regulator, and modifier of shape, line, and quantity, adding, diminishing, changing, shaping, till it becomes clear and intelligible, and it finally ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... the occasion. Several members of the company were detailed on separate errands to Clark Street for various raw meats and non-alcoholic liquid supplies, and Mrs. Bates herself descended to the kitchen to oversee the preparation of the bounteous feast which presently emerged from chaos. By way of grace, Field read an impromptu poem written in dark blue ink on pale blue paper with each line beginning with ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... sober; checking the extravagrance of Celeste; nursing Castleman Lysle through green apple convulsions. That was to be her life for the future, she told herself, and she was making herself really happy in it—when suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, came an event that swept her poor little plans into chaos. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... is and what are its species and kinds. Then he discusses the Causes, supernatural and natural, of the disorder, and afterwards proceeds to set down the Symptoms (which cannot be briefly summarized, "for the Tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues as the Chaos of Melancholy doth of Symptoms"). The Second Partition is devoted to the Cure of Melancholy. As it is of great importance that we should live in good air, a chapter deals with "Air Rectified. With a Digression of the Air." Burton never travelled, but the study of cosmography had ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing, old Duncan Tremble, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... a true Parisian's handiness, had contrived to restore order from chaos, and had arranged the table, with its one or two pieces of broken crockery, with scraps of brown paper instead of plates. A fresh supply of wood crackled bravely on the hearth, and two candles, one of which was placed in a chipped bottle, and the other in a tarnished ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... there was one pleasure in the house,—Arctura. We had made an art-kitchen; now we were making a little poem of a serving-maiden. We did not turn things over to her, and so leave chaos to come again; we only let her help; we let her come in and learn with us the nice and pleasant ways that we had learned. We did not move the kitchen down stairs again; we were determined not to ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the shrieking, strident cries produced by a pair of clarinets, and altogether there came from out of the knots of the serpents a hideous chaos of sound, drawn onward by a team of six horses, and received with wild cheers by the crowd, for it was really the new triumphal march freshly down from town, but in which the bandsmen were not perfect as ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... Andrey Yefimitch lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to be struck again. He felt as though someone had taken a sickle, thrust it into him, and turned it round several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible unbearable thought that these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight, had to endure such pain day by day for years. How could it have happened that for more than twenty years he had ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... chief consideration amid the chaos of her conflicting feelings and interests, for she had lived this life so long that she could imagine no other as endurable. She had, moreover, the persistence of a small nature, and longed to humiliate the Muir pride, and to spite Madge ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... was Chaos"[165] in respect to futurity. My generous friend, Mr. Patrick Miller, has been talking with me about a lease of some farm or other in an estate called Dalswinton, which he has lately bought, near Dumfries. Some life-rented ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the lyre, and sang of Chaos, and the making of the wondrous World, and how all things sprang from Love, who could not live alone in the Abyss. And as he sang, his voice rose from the cave, above the crags, and through the tree tops, and the glens of oak and pine. And the trees bowed their ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... gloomy, the aspect savage. On one side, heavy shadows, a chaos of trees, twisted and gnarled on a steep slope, down which foamed a torrent noisily; to right, an enormous rock overhanging the road and bristling with branches that ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... Chaos' doting years, Nurse of ten thousand hopes and fears, Whether thy airy, insubstantial shade (The rights of sepulture now duly paid) Spread abroad its hideous form On the roaring civil storm, Deafening ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... clean, transparent dream is now that hot chaos. What should he do now that he wished to live, to enjoy ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Their glance, but a moment chronologically, was a season in their history. To Elfride the intense agony of reproach in Stephen's eye was a nail piercing her heart with a deadliness no words can describe. With a spasmodic effort she withdrew her eyes, urged on the horse, and in the chaos of perturbed memories was oblivious of any presence beside her. The deed of deception ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... it is impossible to know anything about God, or to make any use of the knowledge if he had it? Then his whole interior world is in the condition of confusion, which must necessarily exist where no spirit of order has yet begun to move upon the chaos in which are, indeed, the elements of being, but all disordered and neutralising one another. Has he advanced a step further, and realised that there is a ruling and an ordering power, but beyond this is ignorant of its nature? Then ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... down the stairs in a storm of mental hysteria. His physical senses seemed to be numb, but the brain more than made up for this. It was writhing in an agony of fear, a chaos of racing tortures; yet in their midst one thing stood aloof with the firmness of rock. This was the belief—unassailable, absolute—that he could not by any human means turn from the direction his life was pointing. He felt this profoundly. ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... to a great extent Tennyson's idea," came the lecturer's voice. "Swinburne's Song in the Time of Order might well have been Tennyson's title. He idealized order against chaos, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... he walked on, unconscious whither he went, unable to grasp or realize the events that had befallen. But at last-dimly, darkly, grim shapes arose out of the chaos of his brain. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... order or system into your life, or in fact to give it to yourself any meaning at all. Without the belief that what you hold to be good really somehow is so, your life, I think, would resolve itself into mere chaos." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... bogs! If the Irish orator riots in a studied neglect of his subject and a natural confusion of ideas, playing with words, ranging them into all sorts of fantastic combinations, because in the unlettered void or chaos of his mind there is no obstacle to their coalescing into any shapes they please, it must be confessed that the eloquence of the Scotch is encumbered with an excess of knowledge, that it cannot get on for a crowd of difficulties, that it staggers under a load of topics, that it is so environed in ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... book-shelves, greatly too limited in space for the number of volumes placed upon them, which were, therefore, drawn up in ranks of two or three files deep, while numberless others littered the floor and the tables, amid a chaos of maps, engraving, scraps of parchment, bundles of papers, pieces of old armour, swords, dirks, helmets, and Highland targets. Behind Mr. Oldbuck's seat (which was an ancient leathern-covered easy-chair, worn ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... with which he entered his studio that morning. In all this chaos, what of his work? Could he ever have peace of mind for it again? Those people last night had talked of 'inspiration of passion, of experience.' In pleading with her he had used the words himself. She—poor soul!—had but repeated them, trying to endure them, to believe ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "In the midst of chaos," observed Tregarthen, laughing; "and she looks as placidly indifferent to the noise around her as if it were only the murmuring of a summer breeze, although there are two boys yelling at her ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... Delighted with our world's embrace: The moss-root smell where beeches grew, And watered grass in breezy space; The silken heights, of ghostly bloom Among their folds, by distance draped. 'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume, That cried to have its chaos shaped: Absorbing, little noting, still Enriched, and thinking it bestowed; With wistful looks on each far hill For something hidden, something owed. Unto his mantled sister, Day Had given the secret things we sought And she was grave and saintly gay; At ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Carolina, Georgia, and other far Southern States in cruelty and inhumanity to its slave population; and in Wilmington and vicinity, the pillage of a victorious army, and the Reconstruction period were borne with resignation. Former master and freedman vied with each other in bringing order out of chaos, building up waste places, and recovering lost fortunes. Up to but a few years ago, the best feeling among the races prevailed in Wilmington; the Negro and his white brother walked their beats together on the police force; white and black aldermen, white mayor and black ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... The entree of Her Majesty could not have created a greater sensation than did that of Mrs. Million. All fell back. Gartered peers, and starred ambassadors, and baronets with blood older than the creation, and squires, to the antiquity of whose veins chaos was a novelty; all retreated, with eyes that scarcely dared to leave the ground; even Sir Plantagenet Pure, whose family had refused a peerage regularly every century, now, for the first time in his life, seemed cowed, and in an awkward retreat to make way for the approaching presence, got entangled ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... shoulder, Ted Flaggan pursued his way, moralising as he went, until he came to a rugged hollow among the hills, in which was a chaos of large stones, mingled with scrubby bushes. Here he paused again, and the wrinkles of perplexity returned to his brow, as ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... and by the same rule, 15 Magnanimous Goldsmith a gooseberry fool. At a dinner so various, at such a repast, Who'd not be a glutton, and stick to the last? Here, waiter! more wine, let me sit while I'm able, Till all my companions sink under the table; 20 Then, with chaos and blunders encircling my head, Let me ponder, and tell what I think ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... his mind teeming with its chaos, and still master of no other language than that barren idiom which was incapable of expressing the ideas he was meditating on. He had scarcely made a step into the philosophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelssohn had probably been lost to Germany, had not the singularity of his studies ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... obliged to reject. But as Dr. Whewell truly says, the successful hypothesis, though a guess, ought generally to be called, not a lucky, but a skillful guess. The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... therefore no need to have recourse to a principle of evil, as St. Basil aptly observes. Nor is it necessary either to seek the origin of evil in matter. Those who believed that there was a chaos before God laid his hand upon it sought therein the source of disorder. It was an opinion which Plato introduced into his Timaeus. Aristotle found fault with him for that (in his third book on Heaven, ch. 2) because, [353] according to this doctrine, disorder ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... their home, set out wine, butchered a chicken [5], and prepared a meal. Other villagers heard about the fisherman, and they all came to ask him questions. Then the villagers told him, "To avoid the chaos of war during the Qin Dynasty [6], our ancestors brought their families and villagers to this isolated place and never left it, so we've had no contact with the outside world." They asked the fisherman what the present reign was. They were not even aware of the Han Dynasty [7], let alone the ...
— Peach Blossom Shangri-la: Tao Hua Yuan Ji • Tao Yuan Ming
... castle, only just enough of it remaining to give an idea of the shape it once had been, for regardless of the respect that is due to antiquity the keepers had carted away loads of the solid masonry to build their houses, leaving the place but a beautiful moss-grown chaos. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... to recall what she were best to say, which might secure herself from the imminent dangers that surrounded her, without endangering her husband; and plunging from one thought to another, amidst the chaos which filled her mind, she could at length, in answer to the Queen's repeated inquiries in what she sought protection, only falter out, "Alas! I ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... pencil sketch done on cheap, unruled tablet paper, but her mind dissolved into a chaos of interrogation marks and exclamation points—with the latter predominating more and more the longer ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... multiplying around me; and, in thus cultivating what is in the rudest state of nature, I shall taste one of the greatest of all pleasures, that of creation, and see order and beauty gradually rise from chaos. ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... well dark, and walking most of the way to rest them, we set our faces towards the Southern Cross. Half way through the night we halted, and resting for a while, again pushed on, but this time due east. Dawn found us eagerly looking round for a change in the landscape if a featureless chaos of tumbled sand is worthy of such a name? but I, at any rate, could ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... most knowing judge of men, and the best master, has acknowledged the ease and benefit he receives in the incomes of his treasury, which you found not only disordered, but exhausted. All things were in the confusion of a chaos, without form or method, if not reduced beyond it, even to annihilation; so that you had not only to separate the jarring elements, but (if that boldness of expression might be allowed me) to create them. Your enemies had so embroiled the management of your office, that they looked ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... overwhelming burden of distress. Such a situation is declared by the radical communists to spell the bankruptcy of the wage-system; while the most conservative students of the subject confess that this periodic chaos in the labor market is the strongest indictment of, and involves the gravest dangers to, the ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... Athenian"—Themistocles.] noticed as amongst the desiderata of human life—that gift which, if in some rare cases it belongs only to the regal prerogatives of the grave, fortunately in many thousands of other cases is accorded by the treachery of a human brain. Heavens! what a curse it were, if every chaos, which is stamped upon the mind by fairs such as that London fair of St. Bartholomew in years long past, or by the records of battles and skirmishes through the monotonous pages of history, or by the catalogues of libraries ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the German mind. But no matter whence arising, or how interpreted, the fact is what we have described; absolute confusion, the "anarch old" of Milton, is the one deity whose sceptre is there paramount; and yet there it was, in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built his throne. That he must have looked with trepidation and perplexity upon his wild empire and its "dark foundations," may be supposed. The tenure was uncertain to him as regarded its duration; to us it is equally ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... at last that he was in the presence of a hostile army. From that moment he did everything that mortal man could do to retrieve his fatal mistake. Wounded twice, several horses successively killed under him, chaos and defeat all around, yet his clear intelligence and steady courage stamped him a born leader of men. The other generals and officers yielded to his superior force and obeyed his orders. He was everywhere, encouraging, threatening, ...
— "Shiloh" as Seen by a Private Soldier - With Some Personal Reminiscences • Warren Olney
... valley from the broken hills which formed its northern limits. And, within half an hour, the silence was torn, and ripped, and tattered, and the world transformed, and given up to complete and utter chaos. A hurricane descended on the post, and its timbers groaned under the added burden. The forest giants laboured and protested at the merciless onslaught, while the crashing of trees boomed out its deep note amidst the shriek of the storm. As the fury of it all rose, so rose up the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... be clouded, yet ever the sun Will sweep on its course till the cycle is run. And when into chaos the systems are hurled, Again shall the Builder ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... expression and comprehension; and, he was wont to say, mixing up metaphors at a great rate, that he could only stand, like the High Priest of the Delphic oracle, before the gates of his inner life, to note down such fragmentary utterances as 'foamed up from the depths of that divine chaos.' for the benefit of inquiring minds with a preference for the oracular. He added that cosmos was a condition of grovelling minds, and that while the thoughts, faculties, and emotions of an ordinary member of society might fitly be summed up in the epithet 'microcosm.' ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... ages unfriended, With sophistry blended, Deep science in Chaos had slept; Its limits were fettered, Its voters unlettered, Its students in movements but crept. Till, despite of great foes, Great WALSH first arose, And with logical might did unravel Those mazes of knowledge, Ne'er known in a college, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... forces striving to destroy her. And, as they sat waiting, the realization came to both what a small part of the incidents of this heaving night the dismemberment of their washing vessel would be. In the vortex of the riot, when the heavens and the ocean seemed united in the creation of chaos, they sensed the littleness of their own lives and the vanity of ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... then, who in the sixteenth century set in motion the chaos which threatens to overwhelm us to-day, the religious abuses existing at the time can offer no excuse for their destruction of Religion, because stains happened to sully the purity of her ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... them, and yet sought to keep them out of waste, uncultivated lands which they did not regard as being any more the property of the Indians than of their own hunters. With the best intentions, it was wholly impossible for any government to evolve order out of such a chaos without resort to the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... opinion of hell." Let me not forget to add, that it rains every day, that it blows every night, and that it rolls through the twenty-four hours till the whole world seems as if turned bottom upwards, clinging with its nails to chaos, and fearing to launch away. The captain comes and says,—"It is true, you have a nasty, short, chopping sea hereabouts; but you see, she is spinning away down South jolly!" And this is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Carlyle, there may be more than one interpretation of his inverted commas at "gentleman" as regards Voltaire, to whom he certainly would not have allotted the word in its best sense. The phrase about Chaos and the Evil Genius is Carlyle shut up in narrow space like the other genius or genie in the Arabian Nights. The "awful jangle of bells" speaks his horror of any invading sound. The "Naseby matter" refers to a monument which he and FitzGerald had planned, and which (with the precedent ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... breathes its native climate. We predict that woman will seek her home among the flowers on the hill rather than in the atelier specially prepared for her in the valley we have passed. Her tremendous struggles through the mud, while yet the grounds were all chaos, to get sight of the first plants that appeared in the Horticultural Building, left no doubt of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... before the world, erect and calm and grave, And speak the words that decency must rule the land and wave; Into the chaos of despair we fling ourselves to-day As guardians of a precious trust hate must not ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... that all the girls were ready for the evening's entertainment; and some of the girls who were not quite perfect in their pieces of music or their recitations, had to study and practise a little while; but beyond that, there was nothing but the most delightful chaos of packing trunks, laying out dresses, and talking over plans for the next day. Every little while some one would ring the bell, and the girls would rush to see which happy girl was ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... create new difficulties,—by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and presumptuous curiosity which enquires whether we are to consider him co-ordinate with the Veiled Being, and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate, and in that case instrumental? Are we, in a word, to consider ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Assembly meanwhile, Mirabeau, a nobleman who had become leader of the Third Estate, was beginning to put order into chaos. But before he could save the position of the king he died, on the 2nd of April of the year 1791. The king, who now began to fear for his own life, tried to escape on the 21st of June. He was recognised from his picture on a coin, was stopped ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... confessed, that this infinite substance seems rather a metaphysical, abstraction of the mind, than a real object endowed with self-consciousness, or possessed of moral perfections. From either the blind or the intelligent operation of this infinite Time, which bears but too near an affinity with the chaos of the Greeks, the two secondary but active principles of the universe, were from all eternity produced, Ormusd and Ahriman, each of them possessed of the powers of creation, but each disposed, by his invariable nature, to exercise them ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I think you appreciate the chaos at the present moment in the status of investigation of the Persian walnut. When Professor Fagan reports that the number of trees in Pennsylvania exceeds 2,000, most of which he has not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... present time, Capitalism is tottering to its downfall. The world is in chaos and revolution. The Supreme Court has handed down a decision which ostensibly will assist in preserving established order, but the United States is a Capitalist nation and, as Mr. Wilson himself has so ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... impression of continually "making discoveries" in the world about them; and in this they find the greatest joy. They take from the world a knowledge which is ordered and inspires them with enthusiasm. Into their minds there enters "the Creation" instead of "the Chaos"; and it seems that their souls find therein ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... was a roar as if all earth and heaven were dissolving in chaos, and Harry, feeling as if he were being whirled downward into everlasting night, knew ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the line and leave no gaps. Remember, too, what I have already told: Remind them of it now. They must not pause For signallings from me amid a strife Whose chaos may prevent my clear discernment, Or may forbid my signalling at all. The voice of honour then becomes the chief's; Listen they thereto, and set every stitch To heave them on into the fiercest fight. Now I will sum up all: heed well the charge; EACH CAPTAIN, PETTY OFFICER, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... strange demeanor of his chief, the pathetic appeal that he had seen in the young woman's eyes, the ambush, and now this unaccountable ride to Wekusko, strapped in a coffin box, all combined to plunge him into a chaos of wonder from which it was impossible for him to struggle forth. However, he assured himself of two things; he was comparatively comfortable, and within two hours at the most they would reach Hodges' headquarters, if the Wekusko ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... enlightenment and without restraint, were everywhere and incessantly struggling for dominion, or, in other words, were ever troubling and endangering the social condition. Let there but arise, in the midst of this chaos of unruly forces and selfish passions, a great man, one of those elevated minds and strong characters that can understand the essential aim of society and then urge it forward, and at the same time keep it well in hand ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... This Bible of Kabbalism is indeed so confused and confusing that only a "golden dustman" would have had the patience to sift out its gems from the mountain of dross, and attempt to reduce its wide-weltering chaos to order. Even Waite, with all his gift of research and narration, finds little more than gleams of dawn in a dim forest, brilliant vapors, and glints that tell by ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... wreck Outworld Enterprises, and throw a whole world into chaos over a few thousand animals. I ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... of government; infinitely better than the blundering inefficiencies of democratic rule. But throughout history, this elite, whether monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship or junta, has been unable to perpetuate itself. Leaders die, the followers squabble for power, and chaos is close behind. With immortality, this last flaw would be corrected. There would be no discontinuity of leadership, for the leaders would always ...
— Forever • Robert Sheckley
... Nor wrath of Jove, nor Felix' ire, his fatal purpose shakes. Foredoomed by Fate, the Furies' prey—they rush, they rend, they tear, The vessels all to fragments fly—all prone the offerings fair; And on the front of awful Jove they set their impious feet, And order fair to chaos turn, and thus their work complete. Our hallowed mysteries disturbed, our temple dear profaned, Mad flight and tumult dire let loose, proclaim a God disdained. Thus pallid fear broods over all, presaging wrath to come, ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... and liquids is the same in our bodies as out; that turmoil of the particles goes on forever; it is, in itself, blind, fateful, purposeless; but life furnishes, or is, an organizing principle that brings order and purpose out of this chaos. It does not annul any of the mechanical or chemical principles, but under its tutelage or inspiration they produce a host of new substances, and a world of new ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... we discover the value of the unknown factor in an equation. Pythagoras must have his pupils understand music and geometry; and by music he intended, all the arts, every department of life that came under the sway of the Nine Muses. Why?—Because, as he taught, God is Poet and Geometer. Chaos is only on the outer rim of existence; as you get nearer the heart of thing, order and rhythm, geometry and poetry, are more and more found. Chaos is only in our own chaotic minds and perceptions: train these ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... apothecary-clerk then became the epistolary right-hand of General Brounckers, whose wife, son, and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and Confusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues—English severely excepted—made Babel. And, side by side with the domestic, decent virtues weltered all the vices rampant in ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... spontaneous process of human thought, due to the innate power of reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise simplification. Let us try to trace in this historic fact the classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism succeeds to irregular ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... There were seventy-seven thousand miles of railway, but poorly built and in short lengths. There were manufacturing industries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, but every trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, each at war with all the others. There were energy and enterprise in the highest degree, but not efficiency or organization. Little as we knew it, in 1876 we were mainly gathering ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson |
