"Calculator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was certainly impracticable; but Whiston and Ditton might have retorted that they were nearer to the longitude than their satirist to the kingdom of heaven, or even to a bishopric. Arbuthnot, I think, here and elsewhere, reveals himself as the calculator who kept Swift right in his proportions in the matter of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, etc. Swift was very ignorant about things connected with number. He writes to Stella that he has discovered that leap-year comes every four years, and that all his life he had thought it came every ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... how Billy was lost in astonishment at the Lightning Calculator,—wanted me to beg the secret of that prodigy for him to do his sums by,—finally thought he had discovered it, and resolved to keep his arm whirling all the time he studied his arithmetic lesson the next morning. Equally inadequate is it to relate ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... invested livres. In fine, this priest, vicious but politic, sceptical yet learned, treacherous yet amiable, weak in appearance yet as vigorous physically as intellectually, was so genuinely useful to his pupil, so complacent to his vices, so fine a calculator of all kinds of strength, so profound when it was needful to make some human reckoning, so youthful at table, at Frascati, at—I know not where, that the grateful Henri de Marsay was hardly moved at aught in 1814, except when he looked at the portrait of his beloved ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... learned the panel game from the Portuguese. This is an ugly habit of enticing men to such a point of complicity, that an indignant husband, and a close calculator, can appear suddenly and denounce the victim. Many a slave was furnished in this way.—But we restrain the pen from tracing the villanous and savage methods, suggested by violence or fraud or lust, to keep those decks well stocked over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... more serious matters, or the last resort of a feeble intellect, it was the all-engrossing theme. The man with the latest hare-brained theory of the causation of the wind was accorded a full hearing. The lightning calculator who estimated the annual tonnage of drift-snow sweeping off Adelie Land was received as a futurist and thinker. Discussion was always free, and the subject was never thrashed out. Evidence on the great topic accumulated day by day and month by month; yet there was no one without an innate hope ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... this calculator?" Sykes pointed to the delicate instrument that could add, subtract, divide, and multiply, in fractions and whole numbers, as well as measure the light years in ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... always, moreover, "a close calculator," and, with a wisdom worthy of all imitation, never mortgaged the future for the convenience of the present. Indeed, this power of "calculation" was not only a talent but a passion: you would have thought ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... of the strangers. 'Sirs Lamas,' said the banker, 'your mathematics are better than mine.' 'Oh, not at all,' replied we, with a profound bow; 'your souan-pan is excellent; but who ever heard of a calculator always exempt from error?' These phrases were, it seems, rigorously required under the circumstances by Chinese politeness. Whenever any person in China is compromised by any awkward incident, those present always carefully refrain from any observation which may make him blush, or, as the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... A calculator by nature and by habit, Napoleon was fond of order, and a friend to that moral conduct in which order is best exemplified. The libels of the day have made some scandalous averments to the contrary, but without adequate foundation. Napoleon respected himself too much, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... work is very profitable at the country-house of Voltaire, at Ferney, near Geneva. A Genevese, an excellent calculator, as are all his countrymen, many years ago valued as follows the yearly profit derived by the above functionary ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... repair, particularly at Good-knaves-end, towards Harborne; the Green-lane, leading to the Garrison; and that beyond Long-bridge, in the road to Yardley; all of them deep holloways, which carry evident tokens of antiquity. Let the curious calculator determine what an amazing length of time would elapse in wearing the deep roads along Saltleyfield, Shaw-hill, Allum-rock, and the remainder of the way to Stichford, only a pitiful hamlet of ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... vast city; some only come like birds of passage, at the approach of great occasions, or during the summer season. Besides these exotics, there are indigenous plants, which make a fraction in the population, of which the denominator is tolerably high. I leave to the great calculator, M. Charles Dupin, the task of enumerating them in decimals, and telling us if the sum that it amounts to should not be taken into consideration in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... of the Boy Scouts of America is full of information regarding knot tying, signalling, tracking, use of compass, direction and time calculator, etc., which every boy should know. Scoutcraft would furnish recreational ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... day of struggle; some changes I should think must be, but Denbigh,(215) who is a good calculator as to numbers, says that we shall have eight more than last time. That will make but a paltry majority; however, if it be so, we shall brush on, I suppose, live upon expedients, and hope for a more favourable crisis; and then we shall be soon ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Nider, Delrio, Lipsius, Bodin, Pererius, King James, &c. The learned and curious work of the melancholy Student of Christ Church and Oxford Rector has been deservedly commended by many eminent critics. That 'exact mathematician and curious calculator of nativities' calculated exactly, according to Anthony Wood (Athenae Oxon.), the ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... listen to the experience of others, which points to the distress and ruin that attend such experiments. Speaking of Law's great scheme of finance, this wise and venerable statesman says—"A foreigner of an eccentric mind, though a skilful calculator, had engaged the regent in operations the most disastrous to the finances of the state. John Law, after having persuaded credulous people that paper money might advantageously take the place of specie, drew from this false principle ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... index error, and shot the sun. The figuring from the data of this observation was child's play. In the "Epitome" and the "Nautical Almanac" were scores of cunning tables, all worked out by mathematicians and astronomers. It was like using interest tables and lightning-calculator tables such as you all know. The mystery was mystery no longer. I put my finger on the chart and announced that that was where we were. I was right too, or at least I was as right as Roscoe, who selected a spot a quarter of a mile ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the watchmaker; but they also form an aristocracy, and they win the aristocrat's guerdon without practising his idleness. The mathematician who makes the calculations for a machine is not so well paid as the man who finishes it; the observatory calculator who calculates the time of occulation for a planet cannot earn so much as the one who grinds a reflector. In all our life the same tendency is to be seen: the work of the hand outdoes in value the work of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... eyes upon yonder heads hung up; all their owners have lost their lives in this same venture." Yet Kamar al-Zaman paid no heed to them, but cried out at the top of his voice, saying, "I am the Doctor, the Scrivener! I am the Astrologer, the Calculator!" And all the townsfolk forbade him from this, but he regarded them not at all, saying in his mind, "None knoweth desire save whoso suffereth it." Then he began again to cry his loudest, shouting, "I am the Scrivener, I am the Astrologer!"—And ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... charm of this silent scene was a woman of sixty or seventy years of age, according to the gallantry of the calculator. It was easy to judge that she was tall and thin as she lay, rather than sat, in her chair with its back lowered down. She was dressed in a yellowish-brown gown. A false front as black as jet, surmounted by a cap with poppy-colored ribbons, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... interposed Handy. "Fogg, what do you take me for? A mind reader or a lightning calculator? Now, then, one thing at a time! ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... while proceeding with our story, to give convincing testimony from outsiders concerning the reasonableness and practicableness of his aims and hopes. In giving some interesting and striking illustrations by way of proof that he is no visionary, but a cool-headed, hard-working calculator who well knows that the capital he is working with will yield a high percentage, we may have to tell of what is in progress ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... Richard Hardie was a sagacious calculator, but not a prophet; no man is till afterward, and then nine out of ten are. At last he despaired of the national calamity ever coming at all. So then, one dark November day, an event happened that proved him ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... That cool calculator of the chances of life knew that this must be so; the power of the corsairs generally had received the worst blow it had ever encountered since the dispossessed Moriscoes had taken to the sea for a living; those of them who remained ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... from Horace's schoolboys (Sat.1. vi. 74). For the sand see Persius I.131, "Nec qui abaco numeros et secto in pulvere metas scit risisse," Apul. Apolog. 16 (pulvisculo), Mart. Capella, lib. vii. 3,4, etc. Cicero says of an expert calculator "eruditum attigisse pulverem," (de nat. Deorum, ii.18). Tertullian calls a teacher of arithmetic "primus numerorum arenarius" (de Pallio, in fine). The counters were made of various materials, ivory principally, "Adeo nulla uncia nobis est eboris, etc." (Juv. ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... hawks, harmonious? Their voices blend in tones euphonious. The great Sea Lion from Pacific's coast, The "Monarch of the Ocean," no empty boast; Old Adam's Bears, cutest of brute performers, In modern "peace meetings" models for reformers. That living miracle, the Lightning Calculator, Those figures confound Hermann the "Prestidigitator." The Grand Aquaria, an official story Of life beneath the waves ill all its glory; The curious "What is It?" which you, though spunky, Won't call a man and cannot call a monkey. These things and many more time forbids to state, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... later (Burnett says) he found his own thermometer quite inadequate and had to borrow the one that registers the heat of the ward. When he took it out of my mouth it wasn't far short of boiling-point, and he wrote straight off to The Lancet about it; also they had to get one of those lightning calculator chaps ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... him, as long as he's with me on this, Commander," said Hemmingwell, wiping his glasses carefully. "That young man has a mind equipped with a built-in calculator." ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... of frying brown—as a digression On music and poetical expression, Whereas, how few of all our cooks, alas! Could tell Calliope from "Callipee!" How few there be Could leave the lowest for the highest stories, (Observatories,) And turn, like thee, Diana's calculator, However cook's synonymous with Kater! Alas! still let me say, How few could lay The carving knife beside the tuning fork, Like the proverbial Jack ready ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... He was indeed flighty and half witted, but not on that account the less dangerous. Indeed a flighty and half witted man is the very instrument generally preferred by cunning politicians when very hazardous work is to be done. No shrewd calculator would, for any bribe, however enormous, have exposed himself to the fate of Chatel, of Ravaillac, or of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
