"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Shakespeare would not have it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is infinitesimal in comparison. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... direction, with a prodigality which seems well-nigh inexhaustible. No doubt the earth does intercept a fair supply of sunbeams for conversion to our many needs; but the share of sun-heat that the dwelling-place of mankind is able to capture and employ forms only an infinitesimal fraction of what the sun actually pours forth. It would seem, indeed, very presumptuous for us to assume that the great sun has come into existence solely for the benefit of poor humanity. The heat and light daily lavished by that orb of incomparable splendor would suffice to warm and illuminate, ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... raised his hands toward heaven with every sign of intense dismay. "Unhappy man!" he exclaimed; "do you think of going to arrest the Duc de Sairmeuse! Poor Lecoq! Free, this man is almost omnipotent, and you, an infinitesimal agent of police, would be shattered as easily as glass. Take care, my boy, don't attack the duke. I wouldn't be responsible for the consequences. You might imperil ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... she might stagger and fall. She gasped again as she looked at the shack they were nearing, but, as she beheld the scenery of the great pool, something in it that was very grand and beautiful appealed to her for an instant. Yet she felt crushed by it, as if she had been some infinitesimal insect beside that stupendous crashing of waters, before the great ledges whose tops were hirsute with gnarled firs and twisted jack-pines. She stopped for a moment, perhaps owing to her weakness, or possibly because of awe at ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... redeemed: we are saved. Christ has made with us no bargain at all except to believe that the bargain is concluded. What are we at the best that He should make distinctions between us? We are all sinners and our infinitesimal grades of sin sunk in His magnificent mercy. Only acknowledge your sin: only admit the mercy; and you are healed, pardoned, made joint heirs with Christ—not in a fair way to be healed, not going to be pardoned in some future state; but healed, pardoned, your sins washed ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... superior usefulness; there was no time to lose. I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called Earth. Now the part is played, and I am to be withdrawn. That my human heart is torn with insupportable anguish, matters not at all. I leave ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... were a log. Pinney had no need to use arguments or adjurations to induce Lansing to adopt his suggestion. The man before him was in no mood to balance probabilities against improbabilities. It was enough that the project offered a chance of success, albeit infinitesimal; for on the other hand there was nothing but an intolerable despair, and a fate that truly seemed more than flesh ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... compartments each, and a male snail in each compartment. If flour is down, offering a chance for profit in New York upon 'time' sales, I approach the box marked minus, the three snails of which are called x, y, and z. I take up a little tube,—such a one as is used by chemists to drop infinitesimal portions of any liquid; I dip this into a vial marked No. 1, containing a solution of salt in water,—there is a row of these vials, the solution in each being of a different strength,—and then, with the moistened tube, I touch snail x, or snail y, or snail ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... views then entertained of the evidences of a true regeneration, the number of the whole human race who could be supposed as yet to have received this grace was so small, that, as to any numerical valuation, it must have been expressed as an infinitesimal. Dr. Hopkins in many places distinctly recognizes the fact, that the greater part of the human race, up to his time, had been eternally lost,—and boldly assumes the ground, that this amount of sin and suffering, being the best and most necessary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... communities, and nations, and languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... men preparing for the start before he left the village. True, they had not overtaken him, but that was nothing. There were other ways of reaching the rustlers' hollow. He knew of at least three trails, and the difference in the distance between them was infinitesimal. ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... Maud and Elsie went down on their knees, and travelled slowly across the floor, pushing infinitesimal creases before them, while the others pulled and strained to make the most of the advantage thus given. It was a lengthy business, and the crawling operation was repeated several times over before the first ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... narrow-collared coat was of the infinitesimal order; that is to say, a coat, and yet as little of a coat as possible—very near a jacket, in fact. The seams, of course, were outside, and were it not for the extreme strength and evenness of the sewing and the evident intention ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, "Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not—and, he will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fraction of an inch; and he would never risk the possibility of being publicly mortified by his ward's failure. He dreads humiliation of any kind, far more than cholera or Asiatic plague, or than even the eternal loss of that infinitesimal microscopic bit of flint, which he is pleased in facetious moments to ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... been mentioned in the presence of the other. He had a good memory and he remembered that a scarcely perceptible change had taken place in the manner or conversation of the one who heard the other's name. It even seemed to him that at such moments Maria Consuelo had shown an infinitesimal resentment, whereas Spicca had faintly exhibited something more like impatience. If this were true, it argued that Spicca was more friendly to Maria Consuelo than she was to him. Yet on this particular evening ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... slow and restricted; and even though it should be impelled to a geometrical ratio of progression, still would the prospect of effectual relief be discernible only through a vista of years. Meanwhile, time presses, and the patient might perish if condemned alone to the homoeopathic process of infinitesimal doses of relief. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... position will have some relation to the direction in which the heat escapes. Now, when all, or a majority of particles of the same nature have a general tendency to one position, that must of course determine a cleavage- plane. Thus we see the infinitesimal crystals of fresh-precipitated sulphate of barytes, and some other such bodies, arrange themselves alike in the fluid in which they float; so as, when stirred, all to glance with one light, and give the appearance of silky filaments. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... young women carrying tiny round babies; there were old women who had all they could do to carry themselves; there were little girls gravely knitting their brothers' stockings; and toddling creatures so infinitesimal that one could not guess whether they would grow up male or female. There were men, too, but not many young ones; and there were plenty of ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... something not even a veteran took lightly. Rip's round face thinned while they watched. Jellico was still functioning. But if the Captain collapsed the whole responsibility for the snap-out would fall directly on Shannon. An infinitesimal error would condemn them to almost hopeless ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... his trencher; for it is always what is not done that a man sees. If one chair-round escapes dusting, it is that chair-round which he particularly notices. In his mind then are two ideas: one is of the whole long day, the other of that infinitesimal undone duty. The remark visible on his countenance is this: "The whole day, and no time ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... intently the dark wall of the east, and presently his eyes picked out a dot against its background, infinitesimal like the light of a firefly, but not to be ignored ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not understand me. I mean that when you see a Woman, you ought—besides inferring her breadth—to see her length, and to SEE what we call her HEIGHT; although the last Dimension is infinitesimal in your country. If a Line were mere length without "height," it would cease to occupy Space and would become invisible. ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.... Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.... Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... not two sparrows sell for a half-penny?" is our Lord's illustration on this point, "yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father's leave. But as for you," He reasons, in order that we may understand the infinitesimal nature of God's care, "the very hairs on your heads are all numbered. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... the old Corthell beyond doubting or denial. Not a single inflection of his low-pitched, gently modulated voice was wanting; not a single infinitesimal mannerism was changed, even to the little tilting of the chin when he spoke, or the quick winking of the eyelids, or the smile that narrowed the corners of the eyes themselves, or the trick of perfect repose of his whole body. Even his ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... might not be further exhibited by means of visible mechanical response, thus fully removing the distinction commonly assumed to exist between the 'sensitive' and supposed 'non-sensitive.' Dr. Bose invented 'special apparatus of extreme delicacy,' which detected infinitesimal tremors, and showed that ordinary plants, usually regarded as insensitive, gave motile responses, which had hitherto passed unnoticed. His later investigation shows that "all plants, even the trees, are fully alive to changes of environment; they respond visibly ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... visit, for the galena, or lead-ore, lay on the surface of the soil. You saw its metallic brightness shining out everywhere, and so rich was the ore, that it yielded seventy-five per cent. of lead, even under the most summary of processes. Added to this fact, the expense of transport being infinitesimal, as the huge artery of the Mississippi River ran a few paces from the beds, the working of them was so profitable that nobody took the trouble to extract the silver from it. But the result of this mineral ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in the great human family. Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram. "He hath made earth's peoples to be healed;" they shall redeem themselves one day. The moment of awakening comes sooner or later to all; there is an unextinguished capacity for good under the sores and scars of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... imperceptible in the whole of things that every complaint and every desire is ridiculous. Humanity in its entirety is but a flash in the duration of the planet, and the planet may return to the gaseous state without the sun's feeling it even for a second. The individual is the infinitesimal of nothing. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... life that Fate, leading a traveler in easy gradients upwards along a road of triumph, suddenly assumes a madcap mood and with wanton hand throws a tiny obstacle in his way; an obstacle at times infinitesimal, scarce visible on that way towards success, yet powerful enough to trip the unwary traveler and bring him down to earth ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... leaned his back against a huge birch-tree. The ragged, ancient, sweet-smelling bark felt familiar and friendly to his touch. Here he stood, sniffing the still air with discrimination, testing with initiated ears every faint forest breathing. The infinitesimal and incessant stir of growth and change and readjustment was vaguely audible to his fine sense, making a rhythmic background against which the slightest unusual sound, even to the squeak of a wood-mouse, or the falling of a worm-bitten leaf, would have fairly startled ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... there were taxes to pay, and there would be repairs every little while to eat up the infinitesimal income which was left her, when all the expenses of her mother's long illness and death were paid. They had been spending their principal. It could not have been helped. In all, she knew, she had something like two hundred dollars a year remaining. Not enough to board her if she tried to board ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Certainly the returns were temptingly large and the least optimistic among them believed he could convince his wife of the perfect safety of the investment, the success of which was practically assured by the fact that Andy P. Symes for an infinitesimal salary, as compared to his ability, was willing ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... told of Mrs. Mott's rigid economy, such as sewing together the smallest rags to be woven into carpets, and writing letters on infinitesimal bits of paper; but it must not be inferred from this peculiarity that she was penurious, as she was generous in her charities, and in the support of every good cause. Considering her means and the self-denial she practiced in her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... house, there stole over her a pleasant weakness, a childlike and tremulous trust; and she felt the soft air more keenly, smelled more delicate fragrances, heard a multitude of infinitesimal sounds that had not reached her ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... there be much hesitation as to the second step which ought to be taken. The intrinsic importance of the moon, when compared with other celestial bodies, may be small; it is, indeed, as we shall afterwards see, almost infinitesimal. But in the economy of our earth the moon has played, and still plays, a part second only in importance to that of the sun himself. The moon is so close to us that her brilliant rays pale to invisibility ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... life is a matter of indifference. A portion might be termed satisfaction, and a minute balance, an infinitesimal part, termed—if there is such a ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the Universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish, ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... very simple. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, against the light of two flaring and guttering candles, through a blue, pungent, thin haze which made his eyes smart, he saw the man standing, as he had imagined him, with his back to the door, casting an enormous and distorted shadow upon the wall. Swifter than a flash ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... boys were to be landed at Su'u and with wild gesticulations and cries they began to recognize and point out the infinitesimal details of the landfall of the only spot they had known on earth prior to the day, three years before, when they had been sold into slavery by their ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... of voices got on to his nerves? Surely a voice had whispered derisively in his ear, "Which one is the poor, weak devil?" And in answer within his soul Crane knew that the margin was indeed of infinitesimal narrowness. Cass, hastened in his temptation, yielding to the first insane impulse, not knowing that the damnation of a friend hung on his act, had fallen. He, Crane, in full knowledge that two innocent lives might be wrecked by his doing, had been kept to ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... his little talk with Edith Whyland, all unteased by consideration of the imperceptible nuances and infinitesimal gradations that characterize the social fabric. He thought her rather quiet and inexpressive; but he felt her to be a good woman, and was inclined to like her. She dwelt at some length on Dr. McElroy's Christmas sermon, and it presently transpired that, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... a coronet upon the flap, addressed to David Drexley, Esq., in a handwriting distinctly feminine. He singled it out from the rest, held it for a moment between his thumb and broad forefinger, and then turned his chair round, abandoning the rest of his correspondence as a matter of infinitesimal consequence. A letter from her was by no means an everyday affair, for she was a woman of caprices, as who should know better than he? There were weeks during which it was her pleasure to hold herself aloof from him—and ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... tore the letter in two, the halves into quarters, the quarters into infinitesimal squares. He took a pinch of them and extended his arm, dropping the particles of paper upon the current of the wind. They rose, fell, eddied, swam, and rose again, finally to fall on the roofs below. Again and again he repeated this act, till not a single square remained ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... the keys gently a few times, he shook off something of the spell that bound him, and moved to a spot whence he could get a view of her face in profile. It had not an infinitesimal trace of the storm that had driven him from the room a short time before. It was entirely serene. There was on it no anger, no grief, no reproach of self or of another, no scorn. There was pride, but only the pride it normally wore; reserve, but only the reserve habitual to a high-born ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... progress seemed infinitesimal, and yet it was real. In a while we had gained sea room; in a while more we were fairly under sailing way, and the cliffs had begun to drop from our quarter. With one accord we looked back. Percy Darrow waved his hand in an indescribably graceful and ironic gesture; then turned square on his heel ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... wafer cakes, Nipon tea. Here, if tired you can stop at the end of about two hours' ankle-ache. All is cleanly, well spiced with talk, and served with the utmost politeness. Sipping tea may be substituted for the infinitesimal whiffs of polite smoking. A grand dinner is much more elaborate; at least, so far as the variety of smokes is concerned. After dinner, rest ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... we think they can do more than we, and enjoy more than we—in a word, because they live more than we. Let us envy them, if at all, because they have more than we to give to God and men, and answer with a fuller and more eager impulse to the breath of inspiration, and can throw a less infinitesimal weight into the scale of the ...
— Strong Souls - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... be conceived as having had beginnings, while Space had no beginning. The thought of this blank form of existence which, explored in all directions as far as imagination can reach, has, beyond that, an unexplored region compared with which the part which imagination has traversed is but infinitesimal,—the thought of a Space compared with which our immeasurable sidereal system dwindles to a point is a thought too overwhelming to be dwelt upon. Of late years the consciousness that without origin or cause infinite Space has ever existed and must ever exist, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... could not have been so surprising. Beverley not only started, but recoiled as if from a sudden and deadly apparition. The step between supreme exhilaration and utter collapse is now and then infinitesimal. There are times, moreover, when an expression on the face of Hope makes her look like the twin sister of Despair. The moment falling just after Long-Hair spoke was a century condensed ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... gt^2/2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person in a remote wilderness like La Fayette Square could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar universe weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like this was one in which he could look for no help from anybody ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... naught, Focus of light infinitesimal, Sum of all things by sleepless Nature wrought, Of which the normal ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... hear each other groan," believe that the world is some dreadful mistake, full of meaningless anguish. This is because we are in the midst of it all: we can not see far: the nearest objects, though infinitesimal in size, loom enormous, as with the palm of your hand you can cut off the sun. But if we could only see the end from the beginning, if we could get the angel's view-point, the final result would be beauty. Browning is not ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the question of contraband. Orders were very precise on the subject; the Cabinet had limitless power since the opening of the war; if there was any smuggling it was infinitesimal, and, as to foodstuffs, Switzerland regretted she could not import more for her own needs. The Government had established a monopoly and forbidden re-exportation, but supplies were not up to the normal. The route by the Rhine ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the ocean and streams, and the atmosphere contain traces of alcohol; and that this compound, formed by the fermentation of organic matters, is everywhere distributed throughout nature. We should add that only infinitesimal quantities are involved—reaching only the proportion of millionths—yet the fact, for all that, offers a no less powerful interest. The method of analysis which has permitted the facts to be shown is very elegant and scrupulously exact, and is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... before this brain-benumbing aspect. Modern astrophysics, to one who attempts to comprehend its vastness, imposes on the mind but a faint comprehension of the vastness of the universe in space, time, and size; but imposes a deep conviction of the infinitesimal meaning of our planet Earth, both as to size and its relation to the millions of related heavenly bodies. The evolution of man on our planet in this broad conception of space and time is most infinitesimal. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... out the fleet with guns blazing and dragged him to justice. Very nice, and I wished it could be done that way. Except where was he? A battleship may be gigantic on some terms of reference, but in the immensity of the galaxy it is microscopically infinitesimal. As long as it stayed out of the regular lanes of commerce, and clear of detector stations and planets, it would never ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... about a decade later the principal organ of the Spanish-Filipino population, El Comercio, which, with varying vicissitudes, has continued down to the present. While rigorously censored, both politically and religiously, and accessible to only an infinitesimal portion of the people, they still performed the service of letting a few rays of light into the Cimmerian intellectual gloom ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... inward blow in his chest. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second it was as if the spinning of the earth had become perceptible with an awful, slight rustle in the eternal stillness of space. But this noise of blood in his ears passed off at once. Involuntarily ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... before he reached it, came quickly in, and closed it behind her. She was in a street dress and a black hat, with a black umbrella in her black-gloved hand—for Fanny's heavy mourning, at least, was nowhere tempered with a glimpse of white, though the anniversary of Wilbur's death had passed. An infinitesimal perspiration gleamed upon her pale skin; she breathed fast, as if she had run up the stairs; and excitement was sharp in her widened eyes. Her look was that of a person who had just seen something ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... and spent some days prospecting with variable success—i.e., we found gold nearly everywhere, each shovelful of earth contained gold, but in quantities so generally infinitesimal as to be not worth the time spent in working for it. The land was impregnated with gold, but the difficulty was to find it in sufficient ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... same medicine, and after the same heroic fashion. Concho reasoned, not illogically, that if he were to be physicked at all he ought to get the worth of his money. The grotesque extravagance of life, of fruit and vegetables, in California was inconsistent with infinitesimal doses. In Concho's previous illness the doctor had given him a dozen ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... speaking to her his gaze wandered away for a second; in that infinitesimal space of time there came into his eyes a dazzling flash of light that was like a revelation to the sharp-eyed little girl, who, following the direction of his glance, beheld Colette. Then came the second triumph. ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... with her, and seldom ceased the incessant twist, twist of the shining steel among the white cotton meshes. She might put down the needles and lace into the spool-box long enough to open oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and coal into infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the knitting was snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and the worn, white, blue-marked fingers, half enclosed in kid-glove stalls for protection, would writhe and twist in and out again. Little girls just learning to ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... ganglion. This ganglion cannot do much, if any, thinking; it is rather a steering organ to control the muscles and guide the animal. It is the servant of the locomotive system. Yet it is the beginning of the brain of higher animals, and probably still persists as an infinitesimal portion of our human brain. And all this is the prophecy of a head soon to be developed. An excretory system has appeared to carry off the waste of ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... make us also less certain about the prominent participation of the Emperor in these persecutions. My own belief is (and it is a belief which could be supported by many critical arguments), that his share in causing them was almost infinitesimal. If those who love his memory reject the evidence of Fathers in his favour, they may be at least permitted to withhold assent from some of the assertions in virtue of which he ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... for cook-shops and hauled us into cook-shops without number, sometimes presenting his Gallic friends, Asper and Felix, to his good friend, the proprietor, sometimes bursting into invectives against the bad cookery, infinitesimal portions or absurd prices of his enemies' establishments. In cook-shops Agathemer and I felt safe, near a cook-shop we felt almost safe, between cook-shops, companioned by Colgius and any cook-shop frequenters we met, we felt more than a little safe. To our thinking no spy, informer or ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... To me, somehow, there is no other side of the ocean. And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... It is in reality even more insidious, being a stepping-stone to vice, a gradual initiation into desperate play. Just as addiction to absinthe is imbibed by potions quite innocuous in the beginning, so the new Casino at Nice schools the gamester from the outset, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees preparing him for ruin, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the same opinion of the Straits-born Chinese? But as one who has traveled in China, living among the Chinese and with them, seeing them under all natural conditions, at home in their own country, I say unhesitatingly that at the present time only an infinitesimal percentage of the population of the vast Interior entertain genuine respect for the white man, and, in centers where Western influence has done so much to break down the old-time hatred towards us, the real, unveneered attitude of the ordinary Chinese ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... all the great discoveries, made! How like the egotism of the infinitesimal mind of the human race that ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... passed the evening together tete-a-tete. That kind little creature had a way of taking other people's turn of duty in the line of penitence and apology. On the present occasion she was remarkably gushing in her contrition, though her own guilt was infinitesimal; but she met with scanty encouragement. She had found time to extract from Harry all the details of the matrimonial misadventure, and wished to give her friend the benefit of them. Miss Tresilyan would not listen ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Philadelphia, older than the newcomer by two years, and who, also, had left America for the first time. They brought with them the unconquerable aversion to negro blood and that wonderful keenness in discovering it, even in the most infinitesimal degree, which distinguishes real Yankees. Little Lydia Chapron, having been entered as French, they at first hesitated in the face of a suspicion speedily converted into a certainty and that certainty ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... said the blonde matron, but the brunette matron still stared, without the slightest trace of interest in anything else, at the infinitesimal spot she had ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... minutest wiggle of independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality, would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees—as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute as fatal as ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... and he preferred a Pope who would be undividedly imperialist at heart. Pace was sent to join Clerk at Rome in urging Wolsey's suit, and they did their best; but English influence at the Court of Rome was infinitesimal. In spite of Campeggio's flattering assurance that Wolsey's name appeared in every scrutiny, and that sometimes he had eight or nine votes, and Clerk's statement that he had nine at one time, twelve at another, and nineteen at a third,[437] Wolsey's name only appears in one ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... three nearly equal parts, while myriads of rainbows hovered in the clouds of spray. Two things especially struck the observers: the water made but little curve or sweep on passing over the edge, and then rushed down to the abyss at almost lightning speed, shivering itself to infinitesimal particles on striking any rock or projection at the side. Its behaviour was, of course, due to its weight, and to the fact that on Jupiter bodies fall 40.98 feet the first second, instead of sixteen feet, as on earth, and at correspondingly ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... the proper sense of the word—that is to say, no bursting and casting of a wrapper. The most minute attention is necessary to show that appearances are deceptive and that actually a fine membrane is thrown off from front to back. This infinitesimal shred is the shell ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... learnt, all goes smoothly until we reach those studies in which the notion of infinity is employed—the infinitesimal calculus and the whole of higher mathematics. The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of which our own age has to boast. Since the beginnings of Greek thought ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... bounder" by that isolated community of Englishmen, who played as hard as they worked, and invariably "played the game"; a code of morals which had apparently been left out of Kresney's desultory education. The fact revealed itself in a hundred infinitesimal ways, and each revelation added a fresh stone to the wall that sprang up apace between himself ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... easily dismissable murmurings now and again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the ship. But for such infinitesimal stirrings of sound, carefully recorded for this exact purpose, the feel of the ship would have been that ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... said the white-haired one again, "I have examined every bit of the infinitesimal mechanism in the ball on this tympanum. It is perfect. You are a genius, Naka Machi. There is only one ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... region of forest and streams and wild mountain ranges, men were infinitesimal specks hurrying here and there about their self-appointed tasks. Those like himself and Doris, who did not mind the privations inseparable from that remoteness, fared well enough. The land held out to them manifold promises. Hollister looked at the ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the fittest. They will transmit their superior size, or swiftness, or better color, or whatever superiority they possess, to their offspring. The process will go on in successive generations, each adding an infinitesimal quantity to the stock gained by the past generation; just as breeders of improved stock increase the weight of cattle by breeding from the largest; or breeders of race-horses increase the speed by breeding from the swiftest. In this way varieties ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... addressed to a popular audience, was careful to choose examples that would be familiar; but his treatment of the subject was strictly expository in tone. In some arguments of this sort, which touch on the great forces of the universe and on the nature of the world of life of which we are an infinitesimal part, the tone of the discourse will take on warmth and eloquence; just as Webster in the White Murder Case, dealing with an issue of life and death, let the natural eloquence which always smoldered in his speech, burn up into a clear glow. But both Huxley and Webster would have held any studied ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Jerningham, British Minister to the Chilian Republic, by whose joint exertions the Government was induced to admit—that national honour was involved in fulfilling national obligations; though an infinitesimal view of either the one or the other was certainly taken when awarding me the insignificant sum ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... man they were all anxious; but on inspection it was found that one hundred and fifty only out of that nine hundred were fit to proceed further, and so it was decided that the gallant Major Watson should march in at the head of this infinitesimal force and demand the surrender of twenty thousand ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... There was a change in me; something deep-rooted had happened. I got to thinking about it. On that motor-trip through England I had considered myself in the light of a philanthropist, who might come to the help of the Allies and might not. Now all I asked was to be considered worthy to do my infinitesimal "bit." I had lost all my old conceits and hallucinations, and had come to respect myself in a very humble fashion not for what I was, but for the cause in which I was prepared to fight. The knowledge that I belonged to the physically fit ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... should instantly go out and make a bonfire of the works of Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace, and then return to enjoy the purely jocular side of the present volume. If you admit that it has changed, let me ask you how it has changed, unless by the continual infinitesimal efforts, upon themselves, of individual men, like you and me. Did you suppose it was changed by magic, or by Acts of Parliament, or by the action of groups on persons, and not of persons on groups? Let me tell you that human nature has changed since yesterday. Let me tell you that to-day ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... lain slumbering under this old wall, sheltered by the ivy boughs. While all that is ourselves perpetually changes and passes away, the constancy with which Nature repeats, always in the same manner, her most infinitesimal details, seems a wonderful mystery; the same peculiar species of moss grows afresh for centuries on precisely the same spot, and the same little insects each summer do the same thing in the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickmaker, goes, with whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic influences, and tells with some operative power, however imperceptible and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that everything tells on everything, and there is no one specific cause, primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... to sit with their heads bare in our churches, while women must wear bonnets, is based on this ancient custom of the Nazarine. But as fashion is gradually reducing the bonnet to an infinitesimal fraction it will probably in the near future be dispensed with altogether. A lady in England made the experiment of going to the established church without her bonnet, but it created such an agitation in the congregation that the Bishop ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... creation—the mechanism of the universe, its motions—the exact perfection of every creation for the design of that creation; see and know God's will, and God's wisdom, and God's power in all of them; descend to the minor and most infinitesimal creation; learn its organization, and see God here with a design, and a perfect organization, to work it out—learn truth, where only truth exists, from God in all created nature, and teach this, that all may learn and conserve to ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... taken up his residence, this leader, in spite of his fire-eating declarations, soon fled to the Legation Quarter and besought an asylum. His men held out until two in the afternoon, when their resistance collapsed and the cease-fire sounded. The number of casualties on both sides was infinitesimal, and thus after eleven days' farce the Manchu dynasty found itself worse off than ever before. It is necessary, however, not to lose sight of the main problem in China, which is the establishment of a united government and a cessation of internecine warfare,—issues ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... the little amphitheatre, walking lightly with his heavy burden down the old skid-road to the waiting automobile. And two days later John Cardigan returned to rest forever—with his lost mate among the Giants, himself at last an infinitesimal portion of that tremendous silence that is the ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, could one ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... to hold her fast. She made a little movement vaguely indicating that she wished him to let her go, and her free right hand pretended to loosen his from her waist. He felt infinitesimal lines of fire running from his head to his feet, and he saw lights where there ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... scholars, foreign as well as native, who coveted them was numerous. Every library now has its quota of humbler copies of the classics, often on paper, in the Roman or the more cursive Italic hand, not written by a professional scribe. Often these are of infinitesimal value, transcripts of extant copies of no greater age; but there is always the possibility that they may be a competent scholar's own careful apograph of some ancient MS. which a Poggio had unearthed at St. Gall, and which has since vanished. A glance at ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... profit and segregation of industries has come an almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour. Under a right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified. The dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as possible each man should carry ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... his immortality even, into the forlorn hope, to bridge, with a never-dying soul, the chasm over which white-robed victors should pass to a commonwealth of glory and splendour, whose vastness should dwarf the misery of all the lost to an infinitesimal.' And while by many the idea of suffering everlasting pains for the glory of God, and the good of being in general, was thus contemplated with equanimity, there were some few for whom the idea of so suffering for the good of others dearer than themselves would have ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton |
