"Chaotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me, are mountains piled on mountains in chaotic confusion. Some are bald and bleak; others exhibit traces of vegetation in the dark needles of the pine and cedar, whose stunted forms half-grow, half-hang from the cliffs. Here, a cone-shaped peak soars ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... and the other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards—I think I see him now—along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 'New Sources of English History' the learned author has given us a startling account of the deplorable condition into which some of the most precious of our national manuscripts had been allowed to fall—of the utterly chaotic state of our depositories—of the hopelessness, the despair which must needs have come upon one student after another who might be fortunate enough to be turned loose into the various prison-houses of our muniments—and of the efforts made, and happily at last made with splendid success, to cleanse ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... before the bill could be acted on by the Senate, the Government was defeated and the Parliament was dissolved. Italy soon, like other European countries, was threatened with revolution. Ministers rose and fell; politics was in a chaotic state. This situation has continued to a considerable degree and women are still without the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... useful and more "modern" than this? Sheer commercial greed, stubbornness, indolence have thus far made futile all efforts towards more progressive methods in handling food stuffs, particularly in the weighing of them and in selling them by their weight. Present market methods are very chaotic, and are kept purposely so to ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved horribly in the Gaelic O'Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all the horse-men and fish-women that man's unnatural fancy has begotten. A voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: "Keep out of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid the evil garden where died ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as he was sinking into the dulness of despair, there came, like the fist gleam of light in chaotic darkness, the memory of Mildred Carr. Truly she had spoken prophetically. His idol had been utterly cast down and crushed to powder by a hand stronger than his own. He would go to her in his suffering; perhaps she could find ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... seconds her thoughts wandered, they always came swiftly back. Magsie and Warren had fallen in love with each other—wanted to marry each other. Rachael tried to marshal her whirling thoughts; there must be simple reason somewhere in this chaotic matter. She had the desperate sensation of a mad-woman trying to prove herself sane. Were they all crazy, to have got themselves into this hideous fix? What was definite, what facts had they upon which to build ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... else, Mr. Butler sat down in the hat with so much expression that it was a wreck. Everyone expected to see James W. Nye walk up and smite Benjamin F. Butler, but he did not do so. He looked at the chaotic hat for a minute, more in sorrow than in anger, and ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... regiments had thrown down their arms, which were lying in regular lines on the ground, as if for inspection; suppers just prepared had been abandoned; tents, baggage, wagons, cannons, half-slaughtered oxen, covered the foreground in chaotic confusion, while in the background a host of many thousand Yankees were discerned scampering for their lives as fast as their limbs could carry them, closely followed by our men, who were taking prisoners by the hundreds, and scarcely firing ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... first hours of the night, but seldom all night; and even should one have the capacity to do so, his companions in durance would wake him with a shout or a song or a curse or the kicking of a door. A noisy and chaotic medley frequently continued without interruption for hours at a time. Noise, unearthly noise, was the poetic license allowed the occupants of these cells. I spent several days and nights in one or another of them, and I question whether I averaged ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... hiring each other's men, with a production made up of a multiplicity of grades, made the business one of chaotic uncertainty. The rule ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... come to give her while she was undressing. No doubt she deserved it. She had been unmaidenly, and all for love of this light-hearted vagabond who did not care the turn of a hand for her. All day her thoughts had been in chaotic ferment. At times she lashed herself with the whip of her own scorn because she cared for a self-confessed thief, for a man who lived outside the law and was not ashamed of it. Again it was the knowledge of her unwanted love that flayed her, or of the injustice to her ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... harvesting, and game and fish for the least expenditure of labor, no man would long serve for another, and any system of reliable service indoors or afield must fail. Whether the colonists came to work or not, they had to in order to live, for domestic service was soon in the most chaotic state. Women were forced to be notable housekeepers; men were compelled to attend to every detail of masculine labor in their households and on their farms, thus acquiring and developing a "handiness" at all trades, which ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... came and went. They were amazing trollops, painted until, like the picture of Balzac's madman, they were chaotic, a mere mess of frantic colours. Not for these, I thought, did Smain play his flute. The time wore on. I grew drowsy in the keef-laden air, despite the incessant uproar of the pipes. Suddenly I started—Safti ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... bright; it has hawkers' barrows and chaotic shop windows. It has the curiosity-stimulating, cosmopolite air of all dockside areas, but to the Englishman accustomed to the picturesque bedragglement of East End costumes, it is almost dismayingly well-dressed. Its young men have the leanness ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... armies, and of new combinations disturbing the established balance of Italian Powers, the lesser potentates were exposed to destruction; and there were forces about sufficient, under capable guidance, to remodel the chaotic centre of Italy, where no strong government had ever been constituted. Caesar Borgia recognised the opportunity as soon as the French were at Milan; the Pope was growing old and was clay in his terrible hands. His sister just then became Duchess of Ferrara, on the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... for many years been a veritable "metaphysical tramp," roaming from lecture to lecture, hearing the teachings of everybody and practicing nothing. Like the Athenians on Mars' Hill, he was always looking for something "new," particularly in the line of phenomena, and his mind was in that seething chaotic state which is one of the most prominent symptoms of ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... temple, renovated in 1898. It is built on the side of a hill; a flight of steps leads up to it and the whole front is covered with metal lanterns which produce a weird effect. Not far distant is a large temple which contains a bronze Buddha called Dai-butsu. When we saw it, the temple was in a chaotic condition, undergoing renovation. The height of the Buddha is fifty-three and one-half feet; the face is sixteen feet long and nine and one-half feet broad. It is in a sitting position, with right hand uplifted. ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... room, however large, which is the common habitation of fifty boys. Nevertheless, the undaunted Daubeny would choose out the quietest and loneliest corner of the room, and with elbows on knees and hands over his ears to shut out the chaotic noises which surrounded him, would stay repeating the lines to himself with attention wholly concentrated and absorbed, until, after perhaps an hour's work, he knew enough of them to enable him ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... aboriginal darkness and brought under distinct illumination for all time to come. These are the vast acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,—acres that have been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into the mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some measure bridged over infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have extended the fluctuating boundaries of human empire. And for De Quincey himself, in view of that monumental structure which rises above the shattered wrecks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... them the old eagle watched with outstretched wings, the great free bird which we stamp on American silver, backed with "In God We Trust." It is not a bad combination, and things in this country might, perhaps, have been less chaotic if we had taught newcomers to link love of God ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and horseplay which is ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... of old-time range and trail men to write autobiographic sketches. He used to refer to Volume II as the "second edition"; just the same, he was not ignorant, and he had a passion for the history of his people. The chronicles, though chaotic in arrangement, comprise basic source material. An index to the one-volume edition of The Trail Drivers of Texas is printed as an appendix to The Chisholm Trail and Other Routes, by T. U. Taylor, San Antonio, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... expression of the successive Ages of the World's growth. The Central Fountain symbolizes the nebulous world with its innate human passions. Out of a chaotic condition came Water (the Basin) and Land (the Fountain) and Light (the Sun supported by Helios, and the Electroliers). The Braziers and Cauldrons symbolize Fire. The floor of the Court is covered with verdure, trees, flowers and fruits. The two ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... passage of Scripture had been running in his mind during the past hours. He was thinking of chaos before the creation; and their own situation might well suggest the chaotic age. He was thinking—and reverentially—of the wonderful power of the Creator, who out of such darkness could cause light to shine forth by the simple expression of his will, "Let there be light, and there ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... suffering, and longed for repose. The land was filled with plots and counterplots. But there was no one man of sufficient prominence to carry with him the nation. The government was despised and disregarded. France was in a state of chaotic ruin. Many voices here and there, began to inquire "Where is Bonaparte, the conqueror of Italy, the conqueror of Egypt? He alone can save us." His world-wide renown turned the eyes of the nation to him as ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... expanded beyond the mound into light and deafening din, staggering the brain with unbearable brutalities of noise. Another came, and then another, and the world was full of uproar and volcanic vapor and chaotic light. The artillery of the West country and the Irish had located the great enemy battery, and were pounding ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... with an overture representing chaos. Its effect is at first dull and indefinite, its utterances inarticulate, and its notes destitute of perceptible melody. It is Nature in her chaotic state, struggling into definite form. Gradually instrument after instrument makes an effort to extricate itself, and as the clarinets and flutes struggle out of the confusion, the feeling of order begins to make itself apparent. The resolutions indicate harmony. At last the wonderful discordances ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... her incoherence and the noise of battle—and, perhaps, the chaotic tumult in his brain—was unheard; but some little of it registered, for suddenly he turned upon his knees and stared at her, as though his normal faculties were beginning to quicken. For half a minute ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... the present transitional and dangerous state of systematic zoology. Innumerable labourers, many of them crotchety and half-educated, are rushing into the field, and it depends, I think, on the present generation whether the science is to descend to posterity a chaotic mass, or possessed of some traces of law and organisation. If we could only get a congress of deputies from the chief scientific bodies of Europe and America, something might be done, but, as the case stands, I confess I do not ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... everything, so they swept up the gorge like a whirlwind. Thus both parties drew nearer to the chaotic opening styled the Wild-Cat Pass—the trappers, all ignorant of what awaited them there; the savages bent on giving ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... better imagined than described. His brain was in a whirl, on fire. For the second time a woman had treated his confidence lightly. The whole world seemed to spin round him in chaotic confusion as he sought to lay hold of a single, tangible thought that might temper his judgment, steady his nerves and check the fierce outbursts of passion which were fast sweeping him beyond self-control. He had reached a state of recklessness that renders a man ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... seem to me that you leave the part which is best worth having. In writing the First Part of "Faust" Goethe made free use of the legend of Dr. Faustus, not always improving that legend where he departed from it. If we turn to Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" we shall see, embedded among chaotic fragments of mere rubbish and refuse, the outlines of a far finer, a far more poetic, conception of the legend. Marlowe's imagination was more essentially a poetic imagination than Goethe's, and he was capable, at moments, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... which forms a common summit for all. One is bewildered in the attempt to describe such scenery. There is no central figure, no prevailing character, no sharp contrasts, which may serve as a guide whereby to reach the imagination of the reader. All is confused, disordered, chaotic. One begins to understand the old Norse myth of these stones being thrown by the devil in a vain attempt to prevent the Lord from finishing the world. Grand as they are, singly, you are so puzzled by their numbers ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Tom had tried. Byrne ran to the bed and attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering the body. It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable like a tombstone. The rage of vengeance made him desist; his head buzzed with chaotic thoughts of extermination, he turned round the room as if he could find neither his weapons nor the way out; and all the time he ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... chaotic night in which he was drifting, David experienced neither pain nor very much of the sense of life. And yet, without seeing or feeling, he seemed to be living. All was dead within him but that last consciousness, which is almost the spirit; he might have ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... chaotic mass of rock. The clearing was illuminated by the flaring torches carried by a dusky band of men. Weird shadows leaped and played in the dense foliage, where, high above the ground, rude shelters had been made in the thick branches of the trees. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... iridescence of the glaciers which are bared and gleam down upon the valley below. At the edge of this iridescence, there where it seems from the distance like a fringe of gems, a nearer view reveals confused masses of wild and monstrous boulders, slabs, and fragments piled up in chaotic fashion. In very hot and long summers, the ice-fields are denuded even in the higher regions, and then a much greater amount of blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the valley, many knobs and depressions are laid bare which one otherwise sees only covered with white, the muddy edge ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... had his gun ready, just in case, but there was no sign of anyone in the room he entered. A quick search showed that the other two rooms were also empty. His mind had told him that there was no one awake in the apartment, but a sleeping man's mind, filled with dimmed, chaotic thoughts, blended into the background and might ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... It is all chaotic and even contradictory,[3] without order, a medley of outbursts of joy and bitter sobs, of hopes and regrets. There are passages in which the passion of the soul speaks in every possible tone, runs over the whole gamut from the softest note to the most masculine, from ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... an unfinished one, it will remain a lasting monument to the industry of its author. He has done enough to exhibit the necessity of studying and writing history, henceforth as a science; and of replacing the chaotic fragments of narrative, called history, with which the world abounds, by a systematic statement of facts, and philosophical deductions. Some other author, with sufficient energy and industry, will—not finish the work of Mr. Buckle, but—write another ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... dear friend, you must not grudge me the moments I have thus lost. It is a real gain for universal perfection: it was the provision of the Wisest Spirit that the erring reason should also people the chaotic world of dreams, and make fruitful even the barren ground of contradiction. It is not only the mechanical artist who polishes the rough diamond into a brilliant whom we ought to value, but also that one who ennobles mere ordinary stones by giving them the apparent dignity of the diamond. The industry ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... be secured, this knowledge imparted? Two rival methods now solicit attention,—the one organised and equipped, the labour of centuries having been expended in bringing it to its present state of perfection; the other, more or less chaotic, but becoming daily less so, and giving signs of enormous power, both as a source of knowledge and as a means of discipline. These two methods are the classical and the scientific method. I wish they were not rivals; it is only bigotry and short-sightedness that make them so; for assuredly it ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... opinion in the Assembly was, therefore, chaotic: a few schemers and dreamers were loud and outspoken for paper money; many of the more shallow and easy-going were inclined to yield; the more thoughtful endeavored to ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the conjurer's art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective UTOPIAN. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... drawers, never too orderly, began to assume a chaotic appearance, she said fretfully one morning to Marion Parke, who was looking and laughing ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... uprising finally led to free elections in 1979 and independence (as Zimbabwe) in 1980. Robert MUGABE, the nation's first prime minister, has been the country's only ruler (as president since 1987) and has dominated the country's political system since independence. His chaotic land redistribution campaign begun in 2000 caused an exodus of white farmers, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread shortages of basic commodities. Ignoring international condemnation, MUGABE ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Morrison. It made it look as if the house and the ordering of it were to be entirely Stella's, whereas it had been arranged that she and Amy should share in the management. So, leaving Vava with Eva to clear away, she followed Amy to her room, which did indeed look chaotic. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... bit dazed by his chance discovery, he made no comment on the child's continual chatter, but let her exuberance and delight have full play while he tried to adjust himself to a realization that made all thought but a chaotic mixture of hope and doubt, of turbulent fear and determined purpose, and of one thing only was he sure. Three years of his life had been wasted. Another hour should not be lost were it in his power ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... passionately fond of them. And when the wonderful view (mentioned in Baedeker—'fatiguing but repaying')—was disclosed to him after the effort of the climb, he had doubtless felt the existence of some great, dignified principle crowning the chaotic strivings, the petty precipices, and ironic little dark chasms of life. This was as near to religion, perhaps, as his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dignity. Benedict, however, regained the papal seat shortly afterward, and drove Sylvester into a refuge, but later sold the office to John Gratianus, Arch-priest of Rome, who as Gregory VI made laudable attempts to effect a general reformation. He failed in his efforts, and a chaotic state ensued; three popes claiming the triple tiara and reigning in Rome: Gregory at the Vatican, Benedict in the Lateran, and Sylvester in the Church of Santa ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... in sickly pallor over the jagged scarp of the Mesa, bounding the chaotic labyrinth of bowlders, crag and canon beneath. Far up the rugged valley, jutting from the faded fringe of pine, juniper and scrub oak that bearded the Mogollon, a solitary butte stood like sentry against the cloudless sky, its lofty crown of rock ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... out of chaotic grey as the day brightened. At the dressing-station an attendant ran up ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... Tribunal: "This tribunal will take the place of that supreme tribunal, the vengeance of the people; let us be terrible so {194} as to dispense the people from being terrible." Judicial, organized terror was to replace popular, chaotic terror. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... have put my reader in some perplexity by these cursory and desultory remarks on German literature, I have succeeded in giving them a conception of that chaotic condition in which my poor brain found itself, when, in the conflict of two epochs so important for the literary fatherland, so much that was new crowded in upon me before I could come to terms with the old, so much that ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... been disfigured, traditions are generally presented to us torn from their original connection with edifices once renowned for beauty and magnificence. It is our wish, as it has been our aim, to rescue these ruins from degradation and decay. Gathered from many an uninviting heap of chaotic matter, they are now presented in a different form, and under a more popular aspect. We cannot pretend to say that we have invariably assigned to them their true origin, or that their real character and position have been ascertained. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the Dragon. In Christian literature Michael has been replaced by St. George. The old Babylonian conception has been fruitful of poetry, representing, as it does, in grand form the struggle between the chaotic and the formative ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... closed in langour, their full- blooded bodies ached with a delicious sensation. Their hearts seemed to grow benumbed, the numbness spreading through their blood to their limbs; it deprived them of strength, and their thoughts became chaotic. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the valleys, which are sheltered against the cold south wind by the adjacent mountain ridge. The passes have a gloomy character, and the rugged grandeur of the surrounding country presents an aspect of chaotic wildness and disorder. The ground is covered with huge masses of rock; and the ungenial fruitless soil is shunned alike by plants and animals. The thin tendrils of a lichen, here and there twining on a damp mass of stone, are the only traces of life. Yet the remains of human ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... confusion, and could generally lay her hand in a moment upon anything she wanted. This afternoon, however, she rummaged for her atlas in vain. She turned books and papers over and over in her futile search, till the desk was in a chaotic muddle. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... belts of bright colors; and almost always a necklace and ear-rings. Bonnets they had none. I only saw one on the coast, and that belonged to the wife of an American sea-captain who had settled in San Diego, and had imported the chaotic mass of straw and ribbon, as a choice present to his new wife. They wear their hair (which is almost invariably black, or a very dark brown) long in their necks, sometimes loose, and sometimes in ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... mankind, vary from time to time. The Mediterranean was for many ages the centre round which gathered all the influences and developments of those earlier civilizations from which our own, mediately or immediately, derives. During the chaotic period of struggle that intervened between their fall and the dawn of our modern conditions, the Inland Sea, through its hold upon the traditions and culture of antiquity, still retained a general ascendency, although at length its political predominance was challenged, and finally overcome, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... to provide an adequate structure for the support of the mass of imagery that the taste of the age demanded, it showed itself superior to the rival prose fashions. Euphues is a model of form beside the tedious prolixity of the Arcadia, or the chaotic effusions of Nash. The weariness, which the modern reader feels for the romance of Lyly, is due rather to the excessive quantity of its metaphor, which was the fault of the age, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... of it at this moment, in a confused distressing manner, what is still valuable or salable. And, in fact, it lies massed up in our minds as a disastrous wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon; a kind of dusky chaotic background, on which the figures that had some veracity in them—a small company, and ever growing smaller as our demands rise in strictness—are delineated for us.—"And yet it is the Century of our own Grandfathers?" cries the reader. Yes, reader! truly. It is the ground ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... if not annihilated altogether, in this tedious and monotonously killing way. Nature goes her age-old round impassively; summer changes into winter; spring vanishes away; autumn comes, and finds us still a mere chaotic whirl of daring projects and shattered hopes. As the wheel revolves, now the one and now the other comes to the top—but memory betweenwhiles lightly touches her ringing silver chords—now loud like a roaring waterfall, now low and soft like far off sweet music. I stand and look out over this desolate ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... a chaotic jam of incoherent explanations as she thought of an accounting to Van Lennop should he return, and again she raged at herself for the insane impulse which had led her to boast of a farewell letter to her. The sleepless hours in which she had gone over ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... then to others, which were nearly deserted; then on he went, until he reached a quarter where the houses stood far apart, with vacant lots between them. Still he kept on. Then came fields, and cottages, and farm-houses, surrounded by tall trees. Still on he went, still wading through a mass of chaotic fancies, springing up, and reeling and flitting through his mind; shadows of things that had been, and might be; ghosts of the past; prophets of the future. He had become a very child. At last he stood on the bank of the river; and then for the first time he seemed ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... to hint to him that I like to understand what is said to me. If he comes at me with unknown tongues, I shall wish him in unknown parts. I can't stand mysteries. I am a geologist, and believe that there are rocks all the way down, and that we had much better stand on them than wriggle in mere chaotic space. Good morning, Doctor. I shall come again soon; I shall keep a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... numbers, if there were no supreme authority ready to assert itself; to correct errors; to resist abuses; and to restrain those who might introduce dissensions and differences. Of this fact, the present deplorable chaotic state of the Anglican and other non-Catholic Churches offers us abundant and forcible illustrations. From the very first the One True Church has not only taught, but ruled; not only spoken, but acted. And when any of her subjects have proved obstreperous and disobedient, and stubborn ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... have clearly a profound unbelief in the Christian doctrine of divine influence, or I could not thus grossly insult it I answer... that which Harrington ridiculed, as the context would have shown Mr. Newman, if he had had the patience to read on, and the calmness to judge, is the chaotic view of inspiration, formally held by Mr. Parker, who is expressly referred to, "Eclipse," p. 81." In ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... have taken counsel with someone—with someone not bound to act upon such information—it would have relieved his mental stress. His ideas were so chaotic that he felt himself to be incapable of approaching the task presented by the pile of papers lying ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... seemed to set their tatters on fire as they sat with their backs and uncovered heads exposed to it . . . a chaotic mixture of the vegetable, mineral, and animal kingdoms. In the corners of the yard the tall steppe grass grew luxuriantly . . . Nothing else grew there but some dingy vegetables, not attractive even to those who nearly always felt the pangs ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... as they swayed amid the uproar. For the first time she understood how perilous such a crowd might be. A band of roisterers, linked arm in arm, were trying to break up the orderly march of thousands into a chaotic fight. The point for which Crewe made was unattainable; just in front of him a woman began shrieking hysterically; another fainted, and dropped ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... happened. Moreover, thanks to Bong's timely alarm, every one had got out of the way in good season. All fear of earthquake being removed, the crowd flocked back eagerly to stare down into the wrecked tunnel, which formed now a sort of gaping, chaotic ditch, with sides at some points precipitous and at others brokenly sloping. The throng was noisy with excited interest and with relief at having escaped so cleanly. The break had run just beneath one corner of the keepers' cottage, tearing away a portion of the foundation and wrenching ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... vowels have shifted their phonetic values with such uniform regularity that it is possible in almost every case to infer the Modern English sound; but our spelling is so chaotic that while the student may infer the modern sound, he cannot always infer the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... the controversy regarding the rights of the settlers in the Hampshire Grants; it simply postponed the vexing matter. But in the end the freedom of Vermont as a state was brought about. After the war, and while the Thirteen States were endeavoring to bring order out of the chaotic conditions which had been the legacy of the great struggle, it was really New York herself that urged the admittance of Vermont into the Union. Even at that early date the supremacy of the South was feared, and when Kentucky applied for entrance to the Union, Vermont ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... the instruments of which are the conquerors. Further,—Ps. lxx. 4: "The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are melted,"—by the success of the conqueror of the world, the earth is, as it were, dissolved, and sunk back into the chaotic state of primitive time.—The words, "And it riseth up," are to be explained from the fact that the earth, changed into a great stream, cannot be distinguished from the water which covers it. The earth rises up, it is ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus. To read their several treatises through in the order named, with equal attention, would undoubtedly leave in the mind a good many thoughts on Rhetoric, but in a somewhat chaotic state. Much better would it have been to have adopted a Text-book-in-chief, the choice lying between Aristotle and Ouintilian (who comes in at a prior stage of the Miltonic curriculum). The book so chosen would be read, and re-read; or rather each chapter would be gone over several times, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... in fortuitous or chaotic ways, but are doubtless in accordance with some perfect plan. We have climbed up from revolving earth and moon to revolving planets and sun, in order to understand how two or ten suns can revolve about a common centre. Let us now leap to the grander idea ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... for Miss Dix that at the time when she received her appointment it was so unprecedented, and the entire service was still in such a chaotic state, that it was simply impossible to define her duties or her authority. As, therefore, no plan of action or rules were adopted, she was forced to abide exclusively by her own ideas of need and authority. In a letter to the writer, from an ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... to say, know exactly what he means, in words, or mean exactly what, to souls less gloriously chaotic, his words appear to express? I have always felt this ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... missions directed to the attainment of definite ends. They have not seen in them any clear dominant purpose to which they could relate the manifold activities of the missionaries whom they were asked to support; and they cannot give to the vague and chaotic that support which they might give to work which they saw clearly to be directed to the attainment of a great goal which they desired by a policy which they understood. The attitude of these men is the attitude of those who await an intelligent ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... After a chaotic period of several minutes they took their childhood's place upon the hearth log within the warm, bright fireplace. Dic stirred the fire, and the ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... research and industry,—a race now almost extinct. Without a literary education, and impeded too, it appears, by much trouble of mind and infirmity of body, he has accomplished such a thorough work of classification and description for the chaotic mass of Irish literature, that the student has now half his labour saved, and needs only to use his materials as Eugene O'Curry hands them to him. It was as a professor in the Catholic University in Dublin that O'Curry gave the ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... of sense are reduced by the imagination to order and unity the soul is satisfied, and its experience is an experience of what is called the beautiful. It is with this discovering of order in the seemingly chaotic, in other words the discovering of beauty, that the creative artist is concerned. It is his business to inform matter with idea; and matter symbolically used becomes the expression of the artist's ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... did it all happen that I was entangled in the sail and drawn under. When I fought my way to the surface, suffocating, my lungs almost bursting, I could see nothing of the oars. They must have been swept away by the chaotic currents. I saw Demetrios Contos looking back from his boat, and heard the vindictive and mocking tones of his voice as he shouted exultantly. He held steadily on his course, ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... first-class children parents must be in good physical condition and be controlled mentally. Chaotic parents can not have orderly children. The young people learn quickly from their elders and they usually take after one of the parents. They intuitively learn what they can do and what they can not do and how to get their way while ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings,—for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated,—for no family ties exist ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... most men fighting their way up, was too near-sighted for any abstract theories. Liberty, he thought, was a very poetic, Millennium-like idea for stump-speeches and college-cubs, but he grappled with the time the States were too chaotic, untaught a mass for self-government; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny; he would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome discipline. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... refuse, when every hour Thou spakest every word my heart could hear, Though oft I did not know it was thy voice. My prayer arose from lonely wastes of soul; As if a world far-off in depths of space, Chaotic, had implored that it might shine Straightway in sunlight as the morning star. My soul must be more pure ere it could hold With thee communion. 'Tis the pure in heart That shall see God. As if a well that lay Unvisited, till water-weeds had grown Up from its depths, and woven a thick ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... the country. Remonstrance may be proffered, with zeal: but it avails not. The outer gate goes up, drawbridges tumble; iron window-stanchions, smitten out with sledgehammers, become iron-crowbars: it rains furniture, stone-masses, slates: with chaotic clatter and rattle, Demolition clatters down. And now hasty expresses rush through the agitated streets, to warn Lafayette, and the Municipal and Departmental Authorities; Rumour warns a National Assembly, a Royal Tuileries, and all men who care to hear ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the base, and narrowing abruptly to a point. The sides of this wedge-shaped projection were quite perpendicular—indeed, in some places the top overhung the base—and they were at least three hundred feet high. Broken and jagged rocks, of that peculiarly chaotic character which probably suggested the name to this part of the great American chain, projected from and were scattered all round the cliffs. Over these the Indians, whose numbers increased every moment, strove to drive the luckless herd of buffaloes that had chanced ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... pointing; and here, after such brief attempting or thoughts to attempt at other posts, he already in this same year arrives. As many do, and ever more must do, in these our years and times. This is the chaotic haven of so many frustrate activities; where all manner of good gifts go up in far-seen smoke or conflagration; and whole fleets, that might have been war-fleets to conquer kingdoms, are consumed (too truly, often), amid "fame" enough, and the admiring shouts of the vulgar, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... he spoke there was a long grinding, crunching sound. A great volume of black water had forced its way under the gorge, and now lifted it bodily over the dam. It sank in a chaotic mass, surged onward and upward again, struck the bridge, and in a moment lifted it from its foundations and swept it away, a shattered wreck, the red covering showing in the distance like ensanguined stains among ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... All these chaotic thoughts surging through her, and ever beside her the voice of Kenneth McVeigh, not the voice alone, but the eyes, at times appealing, at times dominant, as he met her gaze, and forbade ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... provide the considerable funds required for the preparation of the desired treatise. The Christian antiquities of Agra also deserve systematic treatment. At present the information on record is in a chaotic state. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... hastily went up to the unknown lord's room to discover, if she could, some clue to this mysterious business. Like some learned men who give themselves infinite pains to complicate the clear and simple laws of nature, she had already invented a chaotic romance to account for the meeting of these three persons under her humble roof. She hunted through the chest, examined everything, but could find nothing extraordinary. She saw nothing on the table but a writing-case and some sheets of parchment; and as she could not read, this discovery told ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... in the park. The roar of the city was hushed. It was pleasant to sit there and watch the squirrels playing on the green slopes or scampering up into the branches through which one could see the gleam of water. Her thoughts became less chaotic. The peace of the summer afternoon ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... must be some sort of real causation. It is not any scene that can harmonise with or foster any mood. The range of variety in the effects produced by mountains, rivers, sunsets, and the rest, is admittedly great, but it is not chaotic. The nature-mystic admits variety, nay, rejoices in it, but he postulates an equivalent variety of influences immanent in the phenomena. Of course Auerbach is right if by mood in nature he means an experience similar to that of the human observer: but he is wrong if he implies that ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... no sooner hastened out of the corridor than he already heard in the adjacent streets, that vague hubbub whose chaotic voice sounds so terrifying in the ears of the faint-hearted, who know not whether it is an alarm of fire or a hue and cry ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... wilderness which mere human patience seems unable to explore, is yet enlivened here and there with a cheerful spot, when he tells us of some scalade or camisado, or speculates on troopers rendered bullet-proof by art-magic. His chaotic records have, in fact, afforded to our Novelist the raw materials of Dugald Dalgetty, a cavalier of the most singular equipment, of character and manners which, for many reasons, merit study and description. To much of this, though, as he afterwards proved, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... seemed to him that an accident must happen, that these streams of carts and trams and 'buses and hurrying people must become so involved that disaster must follow. He became reassured when he observed how imperturbed everyone was. There were moments when the whole traffic seemed to become chaotic and the roads were choked, and then as suddenly as the congestion was created, it was relieved. He felt enthralled by this wonder of traffic, of great crowds moving with ease through ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... exciting suspicion of the cause. She was right, although she little imagines the reason; we could never have those readings together, and I fear I must manage with far fewer visits to my studio than I had hoped for. What an accursed chaotic old world it is anyway! How grateful she is because I merely treat her father politely! It would be impossible to do anything else, now that he is himself again, and yet, by this simple, easy method, I have won a friendlier regard than I could by any other means. Like an idiot, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by other and more polite methods. Do you suppose," he went on, flicking a twig off a tree with his whip as we passed, "that the intellectual husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearnings of his intellectual wife, ever achieves the result aimed at? He may and does go on wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in the very least convince her of her folly; while his brother in the ragged coat ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... a chaotic state of affairs, track and train troubles were the rule rather than the exception, and it was a Red Butte Western boast that the fire was never drawn under the wrecking-train engine. For the first ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... with a sort of boding fierceness; he framed dramatic pictures of all that was passing in the chaotic ruin of shattered seas that rushed and seethed around. He had often spoken of the gigantic forces of Nature, but the words had been like algebraic formulae; now he saw the reality, and ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Lord came to him, not in darkness, but in light. He brought the light with him. He never works in darkness. Even when he was about to fashion the world, the first thing he did was to throw a flood of light all over its wide, chaotic surface. But the light which he caused to shine in the prison did not wake Peter up, although it must have shone in his eyes. So he smote him on the side, and no ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... Janeiro. We then returned to the high road, and in half an hour reached a little elevated plain, whence the eye ranged over a valley of the most remarkable description, one portion of it being in a state of wild chaotic confusion, and the other resembling a blooming garden. In the former were strewed masses of broken granite, from which, in some places, larger blocks reared their heads, like so many Collossi; while in others large fragments of rocks lay towering one above the ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... matter seemed to me too trifling to consider, and as soon as the conversation became general I took the opportunity to slip away and get down to my cabin, where I locked the door and gave myself up to the freedom of my own meditations. They were at first bewildered and chaotic—but gradually my mind smoothed itself out like the sea I had looked upon in my vision,—and I began to arrange and connect the various incidents of my strange experience in a more or less coherent form. According to psychic consciousness I knew what they all ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... and having been reported in the world with infinite noise and censure, made up of laughter and horror, it will behoove us to be the more exact in relating them as they actually befell. Very difficult to pull, out of that ravelled cart-load of chaotic thrums, here a thread and there a thread, capable of being brought to the straight state, and woven into legible narrative! But perhaps, by that method the mingled laughter and horror will modify ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... was not far from the summit of the highest peak in the range of the soapstone hills. The gorge in which our party of thirty-two had entered ran within fifty feet to the left of us. But, for at least one hundred yards, the channel or bed of this gorge was entirely filled up with the chaotic ruins of more than a million tons of earth and stone that had been artificially tumbled within it. The means by which the vast mass had been precipitated were not more simple than evident, for sure traces ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... boastful, the cruel more merciless, the untruthful more false, the carnal more degraded. 'In vino veritas' expresses, even, indeed, to physiological accuracy, the true condition. The reason, the emotions, the instincts, are all in a state of carnival, and in chaotic feebleness. ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... it ascends the mountains on the right, and runs along their sides until the head of the pass is gained. Here it crosses, by means of a rude stone bridge, a deep chasm, at the bottom of which the waters of the burn leap and roar among chaotic rocks—a foretaste of the innumerable rushes, leaps, tumbles, and plunges, which await them all down the glen. Just beyond this bridge is a small level patch of mingled rocky and mossy ground. It is the summit of the mountain ridge; yet the highest peaks rise above it, and ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... few weeks were a time of the very liveliest thought and growth for Ann Veronica. The crowding impressions of the previous weeks seemed to run together directly her mind left the chaotic search for employment and came into touch again with a coherent and systematic development of ideas. The advanced work at the Central Imperial College was in the closest touch with living interests and current controversies; ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... here, as so often, our best source of knowledge. At Timgad (p. 109), a town laid out in Roman fashion with a rigid 'chess-board' of streets was subsequently enlarged on irregular and almost chaotic lines. At Gigthi, in the south-east of Tunis, the streets around the Forum, itself rectangular enough, do not run parallel or at right angles to it or to one another.[89] At Thibilis, on the border of Tunis and Algeria, ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... President ever got much of the forced contribution from the clergy, I cannot say. At any rate, they have turned him out since; and for a very poor government have substituted mere chaotic anarchy, as Mr. Carlyle would call it. While the siege was going on, all the commerce between Vera Cruz and the capital was interrupted, and, of course, trade and manufacturing felt the effects severely. Nothing shews the ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... hers and his eyes looked into hers for a wavering second before they dropped awkwardly and looked at her cheek. And then he kissed her. It took a long time. It took just as long as it takes to transform a whole system of reasoned thinking into something chaotic, nebulous. The chances are that, had that kiss never happened to Marcella, she would have gone on with her dreams of deliverance, her ideals of a high road through life. Louis's lips opened a locked door in her personality. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Cazalet himself, who now and then would slouch awkwardly about the place trying to hide his toes. She expressed simple-hearted wonder at the mysteries of my art, and vowed she saw a speaking likeness in the first stages of chaotic pinks and blues. I have never seen a human being so ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... of modern science in the West has led to the danger of losing sight of the fundamental fact that there can be but one truth, one science which includes all the branches of knowledge. How chaotic appear the happenings in Nature? Is nature a Cosmos! in which the human mind is some day to realise the uniform march of sequence, order and law? India through her habit of mind is peculiarly fitted to realise the idea of unity, and to see in the phenomenal ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... he rushed to give his aid, and just in time caught the arm of a native about to slash him with a huge knife. With the two gripped hands high in the air struggling for mastery, the adversaries became separated a bit from the rest of the chaotic mass of friend and foe, swaying out to one side of the plaza, and under the walls of a convent. Bansemer was facing it; and just at the moment that he felt his strength giving way and could see a grin of triumph on the fiendish face, there ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... as philosophical. Therefore, it is a matter of pressing importance that all people who can think at all should use their own minds, and should do their best to widen and strengthen the influence of the ablest thinkers. The chaotic condition of the average mind is our reason for trying to strengthen the influence, always too feeble, of the genuine thinkers. Much that passes itself off for thought is simply old prejudice in a new dress. Tradition has always this, indeed, to say for itself: that it represents ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... labored, and prayed over this subject, and will continue to do so until the millennium. And the disbeliever in Revelation has also turned his mind to the consideration of this black mass of ignorance and misery, which welters upon the globe like a chaotic ocean; these teeming millions of barbarians and savages who render the aspect of the world so sad and so dark. The Church, we need not say, have accepted the Biblical theory, and have traced the lost condition of the pagan world, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... dependent on Natural Selection for its existence, but must be a consequence of the fundamental chemical and physical nature of living things. The study of Variation had from the first shown that an orderliness of this kind was present. The bodies and the properties of livings things are cosmic, not chaotic. No matter how low in the scale we go, never do we find the slightest hint of a diminution in that all-pervading orderliness, nor can we conceive an organism existing for a moment in any other state. Moreover not only does this order prevail in normal forms, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... river like a great tidal wave they could see a chaotic front of blue water and glistening bergs advancing swiftly and surely. At its approach the huge slabs of ice in the river were forced upwards, and shivered into all manner of fanciful shapes. It was the dammed-up current of the mighty river which at length had ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... back beyond all stars, back to the blackness of nothing— that awful nothing, whose outside ring vibrated with fearful flames; the fiery cherubim, winged, taking all possible shapes, and unformed living shapes. A human flamed and changed and vanished. The tornado of whirling, flashing, chaotic life swirled and drove through the darkness of chaos of nothing from nothing—and that great, unknown abyss is God! But ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... had been sitting in a state of semi-stupor all the evening,—his chaotic mind utterly confused and bewildered by the events which had taken place;—but now, on being called, his usual audacious and irrepressible spirit came to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... influence was proving much stronger than at first anticipated, and I cheerfully admitted the same to the stockholders assembled. The Eastern mind, living under established conditions, could hardly realize the chaotic state of affairs in the West, with its vicious morals, and any attempt to levy tribute in the form of blackmail was repudiated by the stockholders in assembly. Major Hunter understood my position and delicately suggested coming to terms with ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... recall of him he was not a person to meet before breakfast," yawned Francesca; "still I shall be glad of a little fresh light, for my mind is in a most chaotic state, induced by the intellectual preparation that you have made me undergo during the past month. I dreamed last night that I was conducting a mothers' meeting in Ronald's new parish, and the subject ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... seemed like a ball of fire, already horned by the cutting of the horizon. From the bosom of the water rose sheaves of liquid jets by hundreds. In the distance lay the Nautilus like a cetacean asleep on the water. Behind us, to the south and east, an immense country and a chaotic heap of rocks and ice, the limits of which were not visible. On arriving at the summit Captain Nemo carefully took the mean height of the barometer, for he would have to consider that in taking his observations. At a quarter to twelve the sun, then seen only by ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... spells of intense heat and intense cold to which the moon is continually exposed, will account for the formation of many of those tremendous chasms and precipices which we see everywhere around us, as well as for the huge mounds of dislodged rocks and debris, which are piled up in such chaotic confusion on the ledges of the mountains ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... "There are authors, doubtless, who can write with these in their customary place—upon their feet. I cannot. My soul is too large, too chaotic. But perhaps you are not interested in men's shoes, ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... adventure was very distasteful. He recollected the smell of the place, and the memory brought with it a sense of nausea. He thought of Lala Huang, and his ideas became grotesque and chaotic. Yet the solution of the mystery lay at last within his grasp, and to the zest of the investigator everything ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the foot to the crest of the knoll Fracasse's men have gone in face of the hot, sizzling tornado of bullets, when there is a blast of explosions in their faces with all the chaotic and irresistible force of a volcanic eruption. Not only are they in the midst of the first lot of the Browns' shells at the shorter range, but one Gray battery has either made a mistake in cutting its fuses or struck a streak of powder below standard, and its shells ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... No, but I have tried to read him, and failed. I think he had a very crude, chaotic mind indeed; ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... if the genius of man has been able to tame the strongest of animals, such as elephants,—the fiercest, such as lions,—the swiftest, such as horses, and the dullest, such as the ass,—why should we despair of reducing to order this chaotic mass of labor, and of turning that which at present constitutes a danger that threatens the very existence of society into a source of safety, of wealth and power? At any rate this is the object that will be kept steadily in view ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... and decay, and flowers, and every conceivable discordant odor. Flashes of insane colorings formed themselves in his eyes. He heard the chaotic uproar which meant that his auditory nerves, like the nerves in his eyes and nostrils and skin, were stimulated to violent activity, reporting every kind of message they could possibly report ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... cavalry drove on headlong into the unseen; behind clanked the flying battery, mounted gunners sabering the dark forms that leaped out of the underbrush; on—on—rushed horses and guns, riders and cannoneers—a furious, irresistible, chaotic torrent, thundering through ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind ever written—a story which, as I have said before, is not only extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... percentage of average daily attendance (71.1 per cent.), though slowly improving, is still very bad.[59] Many of the school-houses are, in the words of the Commissioners, "mere hovels," unsanitary, leaky, ill-ventilated. The distribution of schools and funds is chaotic and wasteful. Out of 8,401 schools (in 1909-10)[60] nearly two hundred have an average daily attendance of less than fifteen pupils. In 1730 the number is less than thirty, and it is not only in sparsely inhabited country districts, but in big towns, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Pantheistic reveries. Search over all the religions of the world—the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the arrow-headed inscriptions of Assyria, the classic mythologies of graceful Greece and iron Rome, the monstrous shasters of thine Indian Pundits, or the more chaotic clouds of thy German philosophies—in none of them wilt thou ever find this divine thought, an end of destructions—a perpetual end. Cycles of ruin and renovation, and of renovation and ruin, vast cycles, if you will, but evermore ending ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... offspring who are then born will in time become the rulers; the State will decline, and education fall into decay; gymnastic will be preferred to music, and the gold and silver and brass and iron will form a chaotic mass—thus division will arise. Such is the Muses' answer to our question. 'And a true answer, of course:—but what more have they to say?' They say that the two races, the iron and brass, and the silver and gold, will draw the State different ways;—the one ...
— The Republic • Plato
... menial proved to be Yossel himself squatted on the floor, his crutches beside him. Almost as in guilty confusion the hunchback hastily closed the sheet containing a huddle of articles, and tied it into a bundle before the artist's chaotic sense of its contents could change into clarity. But instantly a flash ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... quietly going on beneath us in the earth's bosom. A great dream of science, but perhaps an earnest, glowing reality, suggests that when God's almighty power was rolling away the curtains of darkness from earth's chaotic state—forming channels for oceans and rivers, and heaving up as barriers the mountain chains of earth, His eternal prescience of man's coming need induced Him to bury deep down in subterranean recesses the imperfect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... elsewhere. Here is a people's playground in which all manner of amusements are thrown together, from the balhaus, where nothing but expensive champagne is sold, to the scenic railway, on which one may ride for fifty heller. This park presents a bizarre and chaotic mingling of outdoor concerts, variety theatres, bierkabaretts, moving picture halls, promenades and sideshow attractions of the Atlantic City type. The Kaisergarten is the rendezvous of the bourgeoisie, the heaven of hoi polloi—rotund merchants ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... arches of differing forms, tastes, and styles, that it defies concise description and is unworthy of serious consideration. Provence has modest Cathedrals of small architectural significance, but except Sainte-Reparate of Nice, it has none so chaotic and commonplace as ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... vision—was a stern, palpable reality, very difficult to get rid of, and one which he often thought to himself would very probably swallow up that other love, and drive his sweet dream far away into utter darkness and dim chaotic space. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... a sunset! The whole world, the three great spaces of sea and land and sky, were incarnadined with the glory of it. The ocean floor was a blinding red radiance, the hills were amethyst, the sky one gigantic opal, and they two seemed poised in the midst of all the chaotic glory of a primitive world. It was New Year's Day; the earth was new, the year was new, and their love was new and strong. Everything was before them. There was no longer any past, no longer any present. Regrets and ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... other scientific learning, the highest aim does not consist in seeking to accumulate a vast chaotic mass of isolated items of knowledge, but in a general comprehension of the science, its aims and problems. The teacher should, above everything, guide the pupil to this general knowledge, and then it will be easy to him, by the ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... all right, but Hodge isn't even a piece of a man!" he growled, as he made his way home, his thoughts in a chaotic state. "I shall have to punch his head for him. Merry wouldn't have beat me shooting if I had taken my own gun along! I reckon I was a fool for going into the thing. Hodge isn't any too good to slip that shell in on Merry! ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... one could get hysterics out of you. Now why do you suppose James Penhallow wants to plunge into this chaotic war?" ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... death-dealing missiles, and the whole atmosphere lit up luridly from the firing of cannon, the bursting of shell and the flash of the rifle. In the darkness it seemed as if the hand of Deity had let loose its hold upon the world, its attraction was gone, and, amid thunder and lightning and tempest, the chaotic masses of earth and sky were commingling together in ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... grounds of dissertation. A pause for a few days, a visit to the country, anything that would seem designed to restore the mind to its normal state, destroys the faculty. The weary penman, who wishes his chaotic head could be relieved by being transformed even as by Puck, knows that very whirling chaos is the condition of his multitudinous periods. It seems as if some special sluices of the soul must be opened to force the pen. One man, on returning to his desk from a four weeks' vacation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... world in all its completeness, as it now exists, was moulded out of material in a chaotic state in six ordinary days. Geologists have ascertained, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that the process must have occupied ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... order, with a keen scientific insight into the bearings of isolated facts and a power of generalization which admirably fitted him for the self-imposed task, unfortunately never completed, of digesting or codifying the chaotic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... itself. All its elements are found in other tribes: most of them belong to the whole Indian race. Undoubtedly there was a distinct and definite effort of legislation; but Iroquois legislation invented nothing. Like all sound legislation, it built of materials already prepared. It organized the chaotic past, and gave concrete forms to Indian nature itself. The people have dwindled and decayed; but, banded by its ties of clan and kin, the league, in feeble miniature, still subsists, and the degenerate Iroquois looks back ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... at a time when political and social conditions are a bit chaotic, and it is a little difficult to distinguish between the symptoms that are ephemeral and those which are permanent. What we must do is to try to make things better and to save from the past the things which are good. It is often true that a movement that is ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... beliefs of her husband. Kabirpanthis also wear the choti or scalp-lock and shave the head for the death of a relative, in spite of Kabir's contempt of the custom. Still, the sect has in the past afforded to the uneducated classes a somewhat higher ideal of spiritual life than the chaotic medley of primitive superstitions and beliefs in witchcraft and devil worship, from which the Brahmans, caring only for the recognition of their social supremacy, made no attempt to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... 1838 Lamartine published his "La chute d'un age."[8] This is one of his poorest productions, though exhibiting vast powers of imagination and productive genius. The scene is laid in a chaotic antediluvian world, inhabited by Titans, and is, perhaps, descriptive of the author's mind, full of majestic imagery, but as yet undefined, vague, and without an object worthy of its efforts. Lamartine's time had not yet come, though he required but a few years to complete the fiftieth ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... who reduced the apparently chaotic diversity of stellar spectra to order was Secchi, who showed that they might all be grouped according to four types. Within the last thirty years, however, so many modifications of the various types have been found that it has become necessary to subdivide Secchi's ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... law is infallible and can bring about order in the chaotic social conditions, knows the curative effect of law to the minutest detail. The question how things might be improved is met with this reply: "All criminals should be caught in a net like fish and ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... about this time that Jean's memory book! became chaotic. Most of the things in it had to do with Derry, a bit of pine from a young plume which Derry had sent her from the south—triangles cut from the letter paper on which he sometimes wrote—post-cards to say ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... it by fierce struggles and many falls; saw another beyond that; and, rushing down and up two slopes of moss, reached a region where the upright lava-ledges had been split asunder into chasms, crushed together again into caves, toppled over each other, hurled up into spires, in such chaotic confusion, that ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley |
