"Parabolical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he should speak extravagantly any more for ever?" And yet once more, in his essay on Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the time there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East, but from a desire that people should understand and realise what he was writing. He was near the truth upon the general question; but in his own particular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not less a conventional art ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... package he had brought, holding it to his eye as if sighting it, his right hand grasping a handle as one holds a stereoscope. A moment later, as I examined it more closely, I saw that instead of looking at anything he had before him a small parabolic mirror turned away ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... "Hundred-meter parabolic mirrors," he said. "Easy to make; you spray a thin metallic coat on a plastic backing. They're in orbit around us, each with a small geegee unit to control drift and keep it aimed directly at the sun. The focused radiation charges heavy-duty ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, however, will disappear if the plane mirror of the old construction is accurately plane; and in your case, if the large speculum is parabolic and the small one elliptical ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... spherical, the reduction to parabolic form being attained in the process of polishing. A very interesting account of the practice of dealing with very large lenses will be found in Nature, May 1886, or the Journal of the Society of Arts, same date (I presume), ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... the nature and scope of its military activity: the universe was its antagonist; its methods that of a projectile. It fought like the angels and devils, in mid-air, cleaving the atmosphere like a bird, describing a parabolic curve and descending upon its victim at just the exact angle of incidence to make the most of its velocity and weight. Its momentum, calculated in foot-tons, was something incredible. It had been seen to ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... or to reproduce this miracle of nature. When a comet approaches the sun, the orbit in which it travels indicates that it is moving under the impulse of the sun's gravitation. It is in reality falling in a great parabolic or elliptical curve through space. But, while a comet approaches the sun it begins to display—stretching out for millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions of miles on the side away from the sun—an ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... only the albatross moving athwart the sky, no longer slow sailing as before, but with the swift-cutting flight of a falcon pouncing down upon its prey. It seemed descending not in a straight line, but in an acute parabolic curve, like a thunderbolt or some aerolite projected toward the surface of the sea. But the bird, with a whirr like the sound of running spindles, was going in a definite direction, the point evidently aimed at being ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... dominates all the magnificent development of the social life, equally governs the fate and the parabolic career of ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Elshawe dictated into the phone, "Malcom Porter made good his threat to take a spaceship of his own devising to the Moon. Ham radios all over North America picked up his speech, which was made by spreading the beam from an eighty-foot diameter parabolic reflector and aiming it at Earth from a hundred thousand miles out. It was a collapsible reflector, made of thin foil, like the ones used on space ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dial set flush with its surface, swung a heavy door aside, and lifted out the Standish—a fearsome weapon. Squat, huge, and heavy, it resembled somewhat an overgrown machine rifle, but one possessing a thick, short telescope, with several opaque condensing lenses and parabolic reflectors. Laboring under the weight of the thing, he strode along corridors and clambered heavily down short stairways. Finally he came to the purifier room, and grinned savagely as he saw the greenish haze of light obscuring the door and walls—the shield ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... obliged if any of your correspondents can inform me where I can find a paper, called "Directions for making the best Composition for the Metals of reflecting Telescopes, and the Method of grinding, polishing, and giving the great Speculum the true parabolic figure," by the ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... like our own. They do not come from our own volcanoes, for the velocities with which they entered our atmosphere prove their cosmical origin. Had our atmosphere not entangled them, many, circuiting the sun in a parabolic or hyperbolic curve, would have escaped for ever from our system. The swift motions, which they had on entering our atmosphere, are considerably greater on the average than those of comets, and ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... Then, disregarding the influence of the air resistance, I see the stone descend in a straight line. A pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the footpath notices that the stone falls to earth in a parabolic curve. I now ask: Do the "positions" traversed by the stone lie "in reality" on a straight line or on a parabola? Moreover, what is meant here by motion "in space" ? From the considerations of the previous section the answer is self-evident. In the first place we ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... Roseton to his dressing-room. Here the lavish wealth of the Pont-Noirs found another appropriate field for its display. The floor was of Carrera marble, curiously tesselated, rising in the centre to the support of a fountain, where water-nymphs breathed forth shattered columns of fragrant spray, whose parabolic curves filled a spacious lake below. Vases of diamond, emerald and ruby crowded the mantles, each filled with some unknown perfume—the result of Roseton's miraculous chemistry; for in this science Roseton was supreme. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... blister the walls of our cathedrals and churches were the consequences. Verrio and Laguerre had long set the fashion of disfiguring ceilings and staircases with their incomprehensible compositions. Roubiliac carved similar parabolic productions in marble and set them up in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere. In these, heathen divinities jostle Christian emblems; Paganism is seen abreast of true religion. In the aisle of a Gothic abbey, John, Duke of Argyle and Greenwich, warrior and orator, expires ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... points of view, they fly to other remote parts of the universe, and do not condescend to show themselves again for a hundred years or so. Such is the erratic conduct of a heavenly body whose course is regulated by a parabolic curve. ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... sun. The same curve around the sun may be an orbit that will bring it back again, [Page 127] or one that will carry it off into infinite space, never to return. One rate of speed on the curve indicates an elliptical orbit that returns; a greater rate of speed indicates that it will take a parabolic orbit, which never returns. The exact rate of speed is exceedingly difficult to determine; hence it cannot be confidently asserted that any comet ever visible will not return. They may all belong to the solar system; but some will certainly ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... when the process of redemption is, for this small particle, completed. Always, however, is exerted the gravitational pull of matter, and the energy that drove through, instead of pursuing a right line, tends to bend in a parabolic curve, like the trajectory of a cannon ball. In the completion of the process some portion of redeemed matter "gets by," so to speak, but other portions do not; they return to their source of origin and are reabsorbed in matter, becoming subject to the operation of future interpenetrating jets ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... forms have been given to the heads of projectiles, as flat, ogival, hemispherical, conoidal, parabolic, blunt trifaced, etc. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... perfectly arranged and adjusted, appeared a giant, parabolic, refracting mirror with which he could obtain a view of any portion of the earth's surface by sending vibrating currents around the world and reproducing impressions already recorded on the ether, on the surface ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... huge olive-colored water-beetles, yellow underneath; red-bellied newts; green frogs, with beautiful spots and a splendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. I mention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were too tame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; the rare, flat, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of several chains united at the extremity, as thus: a a mark of d, b of e, c of f, d e f of n, therefore a b c a mark of n. Suppose, for example, the following combination of circumstances: 1st, rays of light impinging on a reflecting surface; 2d, that surface parabolic; 3d, those rays parallel to each other and to the axis of the surface. It is to be proved that the concourse of these three circumstances is a mark that the reflected rays will pass through the focus of the parabolic surface. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... hollow of the sea. Hence, the whole appearance of the bed of the stream is changed, and all the lines of the water altered in their nature. The quiet stream is a succession of leaps and pools; the leaps are light and springy, and parabolic, and make a great deal of splashing when they tumble into the pool; then we have a space of quiet curdling water, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... a certain velocity it would take a parabolic curve; with a velocity considerably greater it should ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... in question, there it stood, nearly ready. Just behind the great hissing locomotive, with its parabolic headlight and its coal-laden tender, came the baggage, mail, and express cars; then the passenger coaches, in which the social condition of the occupants seemed to be in inverse ratio to their distance ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... concamerate^; bow, curl, recurve, frizzle. rotundity &c 249; convexity &c 250. Adj. curved &c v.; curviform^, curvilineal^, curvilinear; devex^, devious; recurved, recurvous^; crump^; bowed &c v.; vaulted, hooked; falciform^, falcated^; semicircular, crescentic; sinusoid [Geom.], parabolic, paraboloid; luniform^, lunular^; semilunar, conchoidal^; helical, double helical, spiral; kinky; cordiform^, cordated^; cardioid; heart shaped, bell shaped, boat shaped, crescent shaped, lens shaped, moon shaped, oar shaped, shield shaped, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... honest and good heart' for the soil of His word. Just because He saw the shallowness of the momentary enthusiasm, He spoke this pregnant parable from a heavy heart, and as He tells us in His explanation of it to the disciples (ver. 10), uses the parabolic garb as a means of hiding the truth from the unsusceptible, and of bringing it home to those who were prepared to receive it. Every parable has that double purpose of obscuring and revealing. The obscuring is punitive, but the punishment is meant to be remedial. God never cheats men ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Spencer's Trunnion Microscope, as combining the greatest number of improvements with an almost perfect freedom from tremor. Along with this I purchased every possible accessory—draw-tubes, micrometers, a camera lucida, lever-stage, achromatic condensers, white cloud illuminators, prisms, parabolic condensers, polarizing apparatus, forceps, aquatic boxes, fishing-tubes, with a host of other articles, all of which would have been useful in the hands of an experienced microscopist, but, as I afterward discovered, were not ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... parabolic representation of Micaiah is held as proving not the bare permission of an event, but the actual deception of Ahab. The matter is recorded in 1 Kings xxii. Jehoshaphat had paid a visit to his neighbour, the King of Israel, Ahab. The latter ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... given by Captain James M. Ingalls, U.S.A., for approximating to a high angle trajectory in a single arc, which assumes that the mean density of the air may be taken as the density at two-thirds of the estimated height of the vertex; the rule is founded on the fact that in an unresisted parabolic trajectory the average height of the shot is two-thirds the height of the vertex, as illustrated in a jet of water, or in a stream of bullets from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... our understandings in the present state, some obscurities will always attend even the clearest revelations of Heaven. "Touched with a feeling of our infirmities," our blessed Saviour often adopted a parabolic method of instruction, which was calculated to awaken attention and to stimulate inquiry, as well as to simplify the great principles he was perpetually inculcating; and he has caused those frequent conversations into which he entered with different individuals during his personal ministry, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox |
