"Incommensurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shed no doubt only serenity upon their souls. But for us, who knows, alas! it is on the contrary the field of the great fear, which, out of pity, it would have been better if we had never been able to see; the incommensurable black void, where the worlds in their frenzied whirling precipitate themselves like rain, crash into and annihilate one another, only to be renewed ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time, pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no great importance) that the form of Gulliver may have been to some extent determined by Robinson Crusoe and Defoe's other novels of travel. And there is a subtler reason for taking ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... how long ago it took place. The one essential idea is that the processes and methods of Creation are beyond us, for we have nothing with which to measure it; Creation and the reign of "natural law" are essentially incommensurable. The one thing that the doctrine of Creation insists upon is that the origin of our world and of the things upon it must have been brought about by some direct and unusual manifestation of the power of the Being ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... pleasure and hope, against the corresponding states so far as he can recall them from his periods of intemperance. But these comparisons I warn him are fallacious when made in this way. The two states are incommensurable on any plan of direct comparison. Some common measure must be found, and out of himself; some positive fact that will not bend to his own delusive feeling at the moment; as, for instance, in what degree he finds tolerable what heretofore was not so—the effort of writing letters, or ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... such as no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite; and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them. Between money and such services, if done by abler men than I am, there is no common principle of comparison: they are quantities incommensurable. Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animal life. It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must indeed sustain, but never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have not had more than sufficient. As to any noble use, I trust I know how to employ, as ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... already occupied to some extent by trade unions, and the Government would not approve of any development or extension of the policy of insurance which did not do full justice to existing institutions, or which did not safeguard those institutions, to whom we owe so inestimable and incommensurable a debt, or caused any sudden disturbance or any curtailment of their general methods of business. On the contrary, we believe that when our proposals are put in their full detail before the country, they will be found to benefit and encourage and not to injure those agencies which have so long ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... cannot be interfered with by the hand of man. But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known generations of men have never yet been able to classify them. I do not speak of man's faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to confine itself within the Word,—a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... right to give the proof that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is incommensurable. This method of proof was given by Lambert,[672] in the Berlin Memoirs for 1761, and has been also given in the notes to Legendre's[673] Geometry, and to the English translation of the same. Though not elementary algebra, it is within the reach of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... truth is, there is no resemblance, no analogy, between Electricity and Life; the two orders of phenomena are completely distinct; they are incommensurable. Electricity illustrates life no more ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
