"Incommensurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reality and humanity, without which they would not touch the earth. Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling, fingering, so to speak an entire assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what matters that?) stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in the presence of the incommensurable tirades which welled up every instant from all parts of his bridal song. I affirm that he shared the general beatitude, and that, quite the reverse of La Fontaine, who, at the presentation of his comedy of the "Florentine," asked, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... the wicked man turneth from his wickedness (then, there and then) he shall save his soul alive—and all his sin and wickedness shall not be mentioned unto him. What your "measure" of guilt (if there can be a measure of the incommensurable spiritual) may be, I know not. But this I know that as long as you keep the sense of guilt alive in your own mind you will remain justified in God's mind; as long as you set your sins before your face He will set ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... suffering by so many amiable and excellent people, one or two remarks on that matter may not be superfluous. To those who accept the belief in God, the soul and moral responsibility; and recognize the full results of that acceptance—to such, physical suffering and moral evil are simply incommensurable. To them the placing of non-moral beings in the same scale with moral agents will be utterly unendurable. But even considering physical pain only, all must admit that this depends greatly on the mental condition of the sufferer. Only during consciousness does it exist, and only ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Michelangelo, not as Parlagreco and Lombroso show him, nor even as the minute examination of letters and of poems proves him to have been, but as tradition and the total tenor of his life display him to our admiration. Incalculable, incomprehensible, incommensurable: yes, all souls, the least and greatest, attack them as we will, are that. But definite in solitary sublimity, like a supreme mountain seen from a vast distance, soaring over shadowy hills and misty plains into the clear ether of ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... we must begin by keeping still. We must listen. The whole world is a tongue of which the spirit is the meaning. God engraved its fiery capitals in the immensity of the heavens, and traced its delicate smaller letters on the flower, on the grass, on the human soul, as rich, as incommensurable as the abysses of space. Whosoever you are, brother, before letting yourself utter one word, lend your ear to that voice that seeks you, I might almost add, that implores you. Listen!—Listen to the confused murmur that arises from the human depths, and that, comprising in it all tears, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... all for Fools and Pedants, in the Chief, in the Chevron, and in the quarter Fess. Fools absolute, and Pedants lordless. Free Fools, unlanded Fools, and Fools incommensurable, and Pedants displayed and rampant of the Tierce Major. Fools incalculable and Pedants irreparable; indeed, the arch Fool-pedants in a universe of pedantic folly and foolish pedantry, O you pedant-fools ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... misunderstanding—that element of underlying pathos, in short, which so strangely gives its keenest salt to humour. In both alike there is the same suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite of resemblance—of the Incommensurable in man and nature, beside which all ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... regular figures? that the number six has the advantage of being the least of all the numbers that are called perfect? that in a plane six equal circles may touch a seventh? that of all equal bodies, the sphere has the least surface? that [429] certain lines are incommensurable, and consequently ill-adapted for harmony? Do we not see that all these advantages or disadvantages spring from the idea of the thing, and that the contrary would imply contradiction? Can it be thought that the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... from the service upon a superannuation of L4 4s. 4 1/2d. a year, paid quarterly by way of bothering the purser.' The purser can't do it with the help of farthings. And as respects aliquot parts, four shares among three persons are as incommensurable as a guinea is against any attempt at giving change in half-crowns. However, this was all the preservation that the horse found. No saltpetre or sugar could be had: but the frost was antiseptic. And the horse was preserved in as useful a sense ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... excellence upon which we range the various kinds of living creatures, putting ourselves at the top—not merely in obedience to a pardonable vanity, but, as has hitherto been supposed, in obedience to a trustworthy intuition which, without attempting to apply a common measure to things incommensurable, judges life to be higher than death; consciousness than unconsciousness; mind than mere sensation; and in general, what includes and surpasses, than what is included and surpassed. We see that the organic world presupposes the ministry of the inorganic; and the animal world, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell |
