"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in being hailed by a large assemblage as the representative of the aspirations of two hundred and fifty millions of people. Such a man looks 'through all the roaring and the wreaths,' and does not reflect that it is a false perspective, which, as a matter of fact, hides the real complex and manifold India from his gaze. He can scarcely be expected to distinguish between the ambitions of a new oligarchy and the real wants of the people of whom he knows nothing. But it's strange that a professed ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... city as a school for political training. Intensity of the jealousies and rivalries between adjacent self-governing groups of men. Smallness of simple social aggregates and universality of warfare in primitive times. For the formation of larger and more complex social aggregates, only two methods are practicable,—conquest or federation. Greek attempts at employing the higher method, that of federation. The Athenian hegemony and its overthrow. The Achaian and Aetolian leagues. In a low stage of political development ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... kerchief, as if wishing to take it off, but let it drop again. The five minutes spent with his eyes bandaged seemed to him an hour. His arms felt numb, his legs almost gave way, it seemed to him that he was tired out. He experienced a variety of most complex sensations. He felt afraid of what would happen to him and still more afraid of showing his fear. He felt curious to know what was going to happen and what would be revealed to him; but most of all, he felt joyful that the moment had come when ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Burke declared himself attached is not French liberty. That liberty is nothing but the rein given to vice and confusion. Mr. Burke was then, as he was at the writing of his Reflections, awfully impressed with the difficulties arising from the complex state of our Constitution and our empire, and that it might require in different emergencies different sorts of exertions, and the successive call upon all the various principles which uphold and justify it. This will appear ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... apiece. We're all so complex nowadays that one can't possibly satisfy us. Two would just do it. Two would serve to relax the tension of married life, and yet would not lead to what the newspapers call licence. Everyone would have another chance, and what the first ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... an infinite knowledge and infinite benevolence at work; but no one of the instances in which they found their argument, from the watch, which affords the primal illustration, to the human body, which furnishes the most complex confirmations, is a more astonishing or exquisite proof of pre-arrangement than is the adaptedness of gold and silver to the purposes of currency. Your standard or measure, for instance, must, in the first place, possess a certain uniformity; if it be a measure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... bottle of ink and a pen out of the bookcase, and also, from the lowest shelf, a bag of money and a long narrow account book. Then he sat down at the table and commenced accountancy. It was clear that he regarded his task as formidable and complex. To see him reckoning the coins, manipulating the pen, splashing the ink, scratching the page; to hear him whispering consecutive numbers aloud, and muttering mysterious anathemas against the untamable naughtiness of figures—all ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... reader it is useless to say more than that the innumerable and varied positions of these glassy particles, some transparent, others semi-transparent or opaque, reflecting the sun's rays in different directions, with a complex modification of colour and effect resulting from the blueness of the sky, the condition of the atmosphere, and many other causes—all combined to produce the remarkable appearances of light and colour ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... admitted one into his Holy of holies. At other times, literary or artistic themes, the newest poem, novel, picture, concert, came up for discussion; and as these ladies were verse-writers, essayists, critics, and lovers of beauty in all forms, the conversations called out the rich genius and complex tendencies and aptitudes of Dr. Dewey in stimulating suggestions, which were refreshing as spring breezes. His mind gave hospitable welcome to each new fact disclosed by science, to all generous hopes for human refinement ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... night. And the change in the aspect of the broad spaces, now dark and impenetrable and mysterious, seemed like the change in the knowledge of herself. Once she had flattered herself that she was an inch of crystal water; now she seemed a complex, aloof, and contrary creature, almost on the verge of ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the irrevocable step of marriage was due to a simple and yet complex cause. Stated baldly, it was the consciousness of her secret; the complexity arose out of the various ways in which it seemed to bear upon her future. Our lives are so bound up with those of our fellow men that the slightest departure from the beaten path involves a multiplicity of small adjustments. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... responsibility of the seceding party for any damage thus done. No association can be dissolved without a likelihood of the occurrence of incidental questions concerning common property and mutual obligations—questions sometimes of a complex and intricate sort. If a wrong be perpetrated, in such case, it is a matter for determination by the means usually employed among independent and sovereign powers—negotiation, arbitration, or, in the failure of these, by war, with which, unfortunately, Christianity ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... between two persons solely for material advantages on each side; but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who keeps the contract. Surely, it cannot be dishonest to be honest—even if honesty is the best policy. Imagine the most complex maze of indirect motives, and still the man who keeps faith for money cannot possibly be worse than the man who ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... method of these brothers in first attacking a mass of data, most of it contradictory—and a large amount of it of little intrinsic value—and then framing their own research on lines which they discussed and studied with methodical care, forms a model of sound judgment for workers in any complex field. Their kite experiments, their gliders, their refusal to hasten their steps unduly in the fitting of an engine to their machine, reveal again their discretion, and that judgment which never failed them. Perseveringly and unswervingly, exhibiting doggedness without obstinacy, and ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... and Turkey have resumed discussions to resolve their complex maritime, air, territorial, and boundary disputes in the Aegean Sea; Cyprus question with Turkey; dispute with The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia over ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the belief that nothing has been left undone which was called for by a true spirit of economy or by a system of accountability rigidly enforced. This is in some degree apparent from the fact that the Government has sustained no loss by the default of any of its agents. In the complex, but at the same time beautiful, machinery of our system of government, it is not a matter of surprise that some remote agency may have failed for an instant to fulfill its desired office; but I feel confident in the assertion that nothing has occurred to interrupt the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... depreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt upon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for the enthusiasm that fills and guides many an earnest man and woman, working amongst the squalid vice of our great cities and of our complex and barbarous civilisation to-day. I would recognise all their work as good and blessed; but, oh! dear brethren, it deals with the surface, and you will have to go a great deal deeper down than asthetic, or intellectual, or economical, or political reformation and changes ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... after his death, in which very slight traces of miracles begin to be found; then other biographies later and later, century after century, in which more and more miracles appear, and earlier miracles of very simple character grow more and more complex and astounding, until finally we see him credited with a vast number of the most striking miracles ever conceived of. In order to develop the subject I have collected books and documents of every sort bearing upon it from his time to ours, and have given ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... arise out of universal discord, fermented from principle in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the periodical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace; sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace; and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose, by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... quickly chained to the wall, but the third was thrown on his back, and a complex chain was put on his neck and limbs, in such a way that, when drawn tight, it forced his body into a position that must have caused him severe pain. No word or cry escaped him, however, only an ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... The complex construction, which at first sight seems a difficulty, is, in fact, like all mechanism, a great saving of labour to the operator. A sonnet almost makes itself, as a musical snuff-box plays a tune, or rather as a cotton Jenny spins twist. When a would-be poet ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... rendered infinitely complex. In some cases the intercrossing of aboriginally distinct species appears to have played an important part in the origin of our breeds. When several breeds have once been formed in any country, their occasional intercrossing, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... timidly withdrawing into itself. Strength attracts and weakness repels in the long run here as elsewhere. The Clarks, who had never been considerable or numerous, had in the course of three generations gradually lost their hold upon the complex threads of life, shiftlessly shedding relationships as the Veteran had done, or proudly refusing inferior connections as Addie had, until the family was left solitary in the person of this one fifteen-year-old girl, in whom the social habit seemed utterly atrophied. Of course, Adelle could ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... made three days before in a public gathering. It had included a noteworthy display of minute information of western conditions, extending to the physical features of the country and to every degree of its complex population. One sentence among many had caught Cary's attention, had perplexed him, and had remained in his memory to be considered afterwards, closely and thoughtfully. There ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... we did well to halt a while, in order clearly to mark the position and part of the new actor in the great drama of national life. We will now return to the real business of the drama, that is, to the history of France, which became, in the fourteenth century, more complex, more tragic, and more grand than it had ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... however, was complex and we must be careful to understand its workings. A mercantile curiosity, to find the parallel for which we must go back to the Middle Ages in Europe, when "free cities" such as those of the Hanseatic League plentifully ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... squire. Its appearance was hailed with acclamation, being the Wassail Bowl, so renowned in Christmas festivity. The contents had been prepared by the squire himself; for it was a beverage in the skilful mixture of which he particularly prided himself, alleging that it was too abstruse and complex for the comprehension of an ordinary servant. It was a potation, indeed, that might well make the heart of a toper leap within him, being composed of the richest and raciest wines, highly spiced and sweetened, with roasted apples bobbing about ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... on the table. I, you, we are all new people, and all of us have this quality—we are not dolls, painted with the same color. There is room in us for convictions, love, hatred—in a word, as I told you, for everything of which a man of complex nature is composed. Nature has given me a heart and the right to live, therefore I desire for happiness; it gave me a mind, therefore I serve my chosen idea. One does not exclude the other. Why should you mix the princess with our public ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... more than one would think possible, with so imperfect an instrument. Their being accustomed to a music which consists of so few notes, is, perhaps, the reason why they do not seem to relish any of ours, which is so complex. But they can taste what is more deficient than their own; for, we observed, that they used to be well pleased with hearing the chant of our two young New Zealanders, which consisted rather in mere strength, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... Vogler, known also as Abbe (or Abt) Vogler (1748-1816), was a German musician. He composed operas and other musical pieces, became famous as an organist, and invented an organ with pedals and several keyboards. Browning seems to have in mind the complex musical harmonies of which the instrument was capable. See lines 10, 13, 52, 55, and 84 of the poem. See also the ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils, the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... oppressing the community to-day come under this category. They are hidden from the public view. They assail you from ambush and you are helpless. The deadly missiles smite you on every side, but there is no revealing flash by which you can locate your foe. The social order is so complex that wrongs of this nature are easily perpetrated. Many of the transactions by which we are wont to profit are veiled injustices. They are of a nature so subtle and indirect that the law has not yet defined and forbidden them. Those who suffer these injustices are at a distance ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... sad or happy? The answer is complex and hard to find, for it depends on many contingencies. The husband—what will he be? He is not of Meenachi's choosing. Did she choose her father and mother, and the house in which she was born? Were they ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... change of scheme in John Gabriel Borkman seem to me almost unmistakable. The first two acts laid the foundation for a larger and more complex superstructure than is ultimately erected. Ibsen seems to have designed that Hinkel, the man who "betrayed" Borkman in the past, should play some efficient part in the alienation of Erhart from his family and home. Otherwise, why this insistence on a "party" at the Hinkels', ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... of causing the characteristic curdling and subsequent digestion quite independent of cell development. The quantity of ferment produced by different species differs materially in some cases. In these digestive fermentations, the chemical transformations are profound, the complex proteid molecule being broken down into albumoses, peptones, amido-acids (tyrosin and leucin) and ammonia as ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... of meteorology, to which the following pages are devoted, is, and always has been, a confessedly complex subject; and on this account, any suggestions and facts which observation gleans,—no matter how humble the source may be, should not be denied a hearing by those professedly engaged in the pursuit of truth. Step by step, the author became more and more confirmed in his doubts of the soundness of ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... the distant-information transmitter aimed at what she'd said might be a dead comet. Baird pressed the button. An extraordinary complex of information-seeking frequencies and forms sprang into being and leaped across emptiness. There were microwaves of strictly standard amplitude, for measurement-standards. There were frequencies of other values, ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... the brother of a person who greatly interested me, and from that person I had in the past heard a very great deal about you, from which I gathered that you had a great influence over her; isn't that enough? Ha-ha-ha! Still I must admit that your question is rather complex, and is difficult for me to answer. Here, you, for instance, have come to me not only for a definite object, but for the sake of hearing something new. Isn't that so? Isn't that so?" persisted Svidrigailov with a sly smile. "Well, can't you fancy then that I, too, on my way here in the train ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... chromospheric chemistry. Several bright lines, persistently seen at the edge of the sun, and early suspected by Young[596] to emanate from the same source as D3, were now derived from helium in the laboratory; and all the complex emissions of that exotic substance ranged themselves into six sets or series, the members of which are mutually connected by numerical relations of a definite and simple kind. Helium is of rather more than twice the density of hydrogen, and has no chemical affinities. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the undertakings outside of Kaiserswerth were initiated personally by Fliedner. When we recall the complex demands of the home field in Germany we marvel at the versatile executive ability of this man, who started life as the humble pastor of an obscure village church. But he loved work. He possessed "iron industry." He ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... he submitted his modified plan to the adjutant-general of the army. [Footnote: Id., p. 744.] It had grown more complex with the passage of time. The eastern line of the department had been moved forward so as to bring the South Branch of the Potomac and the Cow-pasture branch of the James River under Rosecrans's command. He now planned four separate columns. The first was to move up the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... question, which of those many trunks was the original and true one; a matter that had puzzled the wisest heads among his subjects; and in vain had a reward been offered for the solution of the perplexity. But the tree was so vast, and its fabric so complex; and its rooted branches so similar in appearance; and so numerous, from the circumstance that every year had added to them, that it was quite impossible to determine the point. Nevertheless, no sooner did the nine blind men hear that there was a reward ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... a private friend a formula for making synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are. For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States this is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise, not even ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Inca tutelage) in the time of the Conquest was Tamviambea. The cultural development of the Chincha was, artistically speaking, not so high as that of the Chimu. It was, however, in pre-Inca times, relatively complex. They practised trephining successfully (an art derived from their Yauyu ancestors), and they also frequently indulged in the anterio-posterior type of cranial deformation. Their general physical condition was good. They numbered about 25,000. Cf. Cieza, Tr., p. 228; Garcilasso, ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... chisel, the sixteenth century, even in France, is, in the quality of taste, far greater than the two succeeding centuries: it is neither meagre nor massive, heavy nor distorted. In art its taste is rich and of fine quality,—at once unrestrained and complex, ancient and modern, special to itself and original. In the region of morals it is unequal and mixed. It was an age of contrasts, of contrasts in all their crudity, an age of philosophy and fanaticism, of scepticism and ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... with the mercurial hot-headedness of the Master; and each character stands forth more vividly because of its opposition to the other. Of the two women who are loved by Tito Melema, the one, Tessa, is simple and childish, the other, Romola, complex and intellectual. The most interesting stories present a constant contrast of mutually foiling personalities; and whenever characters of varied views and opposing aims come nobly to the grapple in a struggle that vitally concerns them, the tensity of the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... colleagues. For more than us, for scores of Labour men and Liberals, it had become almost a fixed belief that European war was only a nightmare of the imagination. War in the Balkans, war possibly in the East of Europe, we could think of; but war flinging the complex organization, so potent yet so delicate, of great and fully civilized States into the melting-pot—that we never really believed in. Prophets of finance, prophets of the labour world, had told us the thing was impossible. Even our most recent ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... alliance of these opposites—they are not contraries—appears from the circumstance, that laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous,—a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... shadow. But, sir, any one of them could be cleared up in five minutes' intelligent explanation. Pontius Pilate could have been saved his blunder by far, far, far less than five minutes of intelligent explanation. But—mark ye!—but who has ever heard five minutes of intelligent explanation? The complex interwoven mesh of life constantly, eternally, prevents people from giving intelligent explanations. You sit in the theatre, and you say to yourself: 'Well, I could mount the stage, and in a short talk to these people I could anticipate a further continuation of the drama.' Yes, you ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... to relations. The easiest relations to apprehend are those which hold between the different parts of a single complex sense-datum. For example, I can see at a glance the whole of the page on which I am writing; thus the whole page is included in one sense-datum. But I perceive that some parts of the page are to the left of other parts, and some parts are above other ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... before his eyes, set there upon his direction, maintained by himself with the help of a dozen complex machines which lay locked and sealed in the Maintenance Room for ...
— Planet of Dreams • James McKimmey
... need is an expert repair technician—a man who knows how to build and repair complex research instruments. He doesn't have to know anything about the purpose of the team itself, all he has to do is keep the equipment ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... fumbling motions as force fields from the landing grid groped for the Med Ship and centered it in their complex pattern. Then there came the sudden solid feeling when the grid locked on. The Med Ship began to settle, at first slowly but with increasing ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... been reading was closed and finished. Weeks had passed in the delicious reading, but now the last page was turned; he came back to duty—duty in London—great, noisy, overwhelming London, with its disturbing bustle, its feverish activities, its complex, artificial, unsatisfying amusements, and its hosts of frantic people. He grew older in a moment; he was forty again now; an instant ago, just on the further side of those blue woods, he had been fifteen. Life shrank and dwindled in him to a little, ugly, unattractive ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... came. In the carelessness of annoyance, Gering left part of his sword arm uncovered, while he was meditating a complex attack, and he paid the penalty by getting a sharp prick from Iberville's sword-point. The warning came to Gering in time. When they crossed swords again, Iberville, whether by chance or by momentary want of skill, parried Gering's disengage from tierce to carte on to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... consisted of upwards of ten thousand springs, formed so as to give the greater impetuosity to the vehicle, and were more complex than a dozen clocks like that of Strasburgh. The external of the chariot was adorned with banners, and a superb festoon of laurel that formerly shaded me on horseback. And now, having given you a very concise description of my machine for travelling into Africa, which you ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and deductions, which by habit become of the nature of intuitions; he considers him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and sensations, and finding everywhere objects that immediately excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature, are accompanied by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... complex influences the Maryland Assembly passed in 1649 an Act concerning Religion. It reveals, upon the one hand, Christendom's mercilessness toward the freethinker—in which mercilessness, whether through conviction or policy, Baltimore acquiesced—and, ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... being able fully to express, the complex idea of Satan, as distracted between a thousand thoughts, all miserable—tossed between a thousand winds, all hot as hell—'pale ire, envy, and despair' struggling within him—fury at man overlapping ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... seen a finer woman, nor one whose features displayed a more heart-rending emotion. This called for respect, and I, for one, endeavored to show it by withdrawing into the background. But I soon stepped forward again. My desire to understand her was too great, the impression made by her bearing too complex, to be passed over lightly by one on the lookout for a key to the remarkable tragedy ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... of city government arise in connection with the numerous administrative departments; these are quite complex in their operation. In large cities the number of officials and the variety of their duties render it almost impossible for the average citizen to become informed concerning these affairs; consequently, opportunities for fraud and mismanagement ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... only less nutritious, they are also less easy of digestion than the infant's natural food. We all know how complex is the digestive apparatus of the herbivorous animal, of which the four stomachs of the ruminants are an instance, and how large is the bulk of food in proportion to his size which the elephant requires, ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... seemed toward a mighty simplification, as though the complexities of the world were reverting toward their original philosophic unity. The complex summer had become simple autumn; the autumn, winter; now the very winter itself was apparently losing its differentiations of bushes and trees, hills and valleys, streams and living things. The growths were disappearing; ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... most senseless extravagance, and spending their whole time, as spectators or actors, in playing, fiddling, dancing, and singing, does it not, my lord, strike your imagination with the image of a sort of complex Nero? And does it not strike you with the greater horror, when you observe, not one man only, but a whole city, grown drunk with pride and power, running with a rage of folly into the same mean and senseless debauchery ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... present a complex problem,—a question of civilization, which condemns them; a question of liberty, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... twined and hawked above the pool; the swift's wings whirred like musket-balls, as they rushed screaming past his head; and ever the river fleeted by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun. The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul, and he sank away into a still daydream, too passive for imagination, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... been born. But, at the distance of additional time, and from the undreamed-of height upon which recent historical science has enabled us to stand, we can easily see that in this he would have been mistaken. Not only is our modern culture no child of Faustus and Helena, but it is the complex descendant, strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of many and various civilizations; and the eighteenth century, so far from being a Faustus evoking as his bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was in itself a curiously varied ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... progressed beyond the physical relationship. Annabel, a reluctant mother in the beginning, had been consistently selfish ever since, and Persis gave scant recognition to parental rights that were not the out-growth of parental love. Moreover, the project she had in mind was of too complex importance for her to allow it to be ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Avenue: "It's a privilege for a fellow to know that sort of a girl—so many surprises in her—the charmingly unexpected and unsuspected!—the pretty flashes of wit, the naive egotism which is as amusing as it is harmless. . . . I had no idea how complex she is. . . . If you think you have the simple feminine on your hands—forget it, Boots!—for she's as evanescent as a helio-flash and as stunningly luminous as a searchlight. . . . And here I've been doing the benevolent prig, bestowing society ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... but complex, and what we need to aim at is a character, not an excrescence. Some people's goodness is like a wart or a wen. Their virtues are cases of what medical technicality calls hypertrophy. But our goodness should be like ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... administration of the Indian service. We believe that this should be disconnected entirely from the Department of the Interior, and be made a separate department. This whole Indian question is so important and so complex that it ought not to be simply an annex to a department which has under its control land, patents, etc. It should stand by itself; there should no longer be a divided responsibility, which is always productive of evil. We are finding the necessity in our cities ...
— American Missionary, Vol. 45, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... didn't suit them to do it. Would they obey the Maid? In the first place they wouldn't know how to obey her or anybody else, and in the second place it was of course not possible for them to take her military character seriously—that country-girl of seventeen who had been trained for the complex and terrible business of war—how? By ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... expenditure of human energy in sensible motion, in heat, or in the nervous waste of mental or emotional exercise without first being built up into living tissue; the breaking down or chemical decomposition of which tissue, and subsequent oxidation of less complex compounds or their constituents, is the direct source of bodily energy of every description. This, at least, is our reading of modern authorities, like Foster. If tea and gelatine, and possibly alcohol, are to form exceptions ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... is more than a mere utterance of certain historical facts with deductions therefrom; more than a declaration of certain doctrines with their applications. It is a highly complex intellectual, moral and spiritual act. Two men may deliver the same sermon. There may be similarity of voice, of manner, of delivery, but one of these men will preach the sermon, the other only recite it. The difference may be almost beyond definition, ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... domesticated with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of character must always have been substantially identical with such elements and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough to enable him to adhere to his own idea, and ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Rasputin, knowing full well what supreme influence he wielded over the Imperial couple. For that reason I frequently had conversation with him both at Court and at the Poltavskaya. He was a man of complex nature. A lady-killer of the most elegant type, refined and determined, yet lurking in the corners of his nature was a tyrannical trait and a ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... he carried in his hands. With some trepidation I called out, "Hi!" But answer there was none. Then again I called, "Hi!" but this time with a sickening sense of failure and of doom. She replied only by a complex gesture, decisive in import if not easily described. A petulant toss of the head, a jerk of the left shoulder, and a backward kick of the left foot, all delivered at once—that was all, and that was enough. The red-headed boy never even condescended to ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... still needs improvement, and that it was at first far more defective than it now is. But whoever seriously considers what it is to construct from the beginning the whole of a machine so vast and complex as a government, will allow that what Hastings effected deserves high admiration. To compare the most celebrated European ministers to him seems to us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... two curves, the one showing the advancement of the feeling of fatigue, and the other showing the advancement of impotence on the part of the bodily processes, the two curves would not at all coincide. Stated another way, fatigue is a complex thing, a product of ideas, feelings and sensations, and sometimes the ideas overbalance the sensations and we think we are more tired then we are objectively. It is this fact that accounts for our too rapid giving up when we are ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... of reading our thoughts and theories too much into the minds and actions of birds. Their mental processes, in many ways, correspond to ours. When a bird expresses fear, hate, bravery, pain or pleasure, we can sympathise thoroughly with it, but in studying their more complex actions we should endeavour to exclude the thousand and one human attributes with which we are prone to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... event of a divorce, returns to her relations. Where the putus tali is allowed to take place, he has a property in her, little differing from that of a slave, as formerly observed. The particular sums which constitute the jujur are less complex here than at other places. The value of the maiden's golden trinkets is nicely estimated, and her jujur regulated according to that and the rank of her parents. The semando marriage scarcely ever takes place but among ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... vocabulary obscure, unexpected, and steeped in splendour. Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the same great music, and a translator who should strive ambitiously to represent the complex effect of the original would clog his own powers of expression and strain his instrument to breaking. But, apart from the diction in this narrower sense, there is a quality of atmosphere surrounding ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... allow his body to get into, it develops that the Auto-Comrade hates a flabby brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demands of his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is one reason why so many more Auto-Comrades are to be found in crow's-nests, gypsy-vans, and ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the idea penetrated even through the density of Colville's selfish content. A very complex emotion, which took itself for indignation, throbbed from his heart. "Is she cold ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... to Hadow, is no "builder of the lofty rhyme," but the poet of the single line, the maker of the phrase exquisite. This is hardly comprehensive. With the more complex, classical types of the musical organism Chopin had little sympathy, but he contrived nevertheless to write two movements of a piano sonata that are excellent—the first half of the B flat minor Sonata. The idealized ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Yahoos; one might point out that they were in many respects a simple and unsophisticated race, whose faults were the result of their enslaved position, while such virtues as they had were all their own. They might be compared, he thought, much to their advantage, with more complex civilizations. There was no hint of anything like the Beit system of publishing in existence amongst them; the great Yahoo nation would surely never feed and encourage a scabby Houyhnhnm, expelled for his foulness from the horse-community, and the witty dean, in ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... of the bladder. The cells composing the outer surface, or that facing the valve, have rather thick walls, are of a brownish colour, minute, very numerous, and elongated; the lower ones being divided into two by vertical partitions. The whole presents a complex and elegant appearance. The cells forming the inner surface are continuous with those over the whole inner surface of the bladder. The space be- [page 402] tween the inner and outer surface consists of coarse cellular tissue (fig. 20). The inner side is thickly ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... son, who had been hastily summoned, and with others of his trusty servants, all deeply moved by complex emotions at the grandeur of their victory. What should be done? The emperor spoke for himself only, and his surrender would not settle the great issue. It was necessary to obtain something definite, and the result of a short conference was that Count Hatzfeldt, instructed ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... my pleasure to go before, and announce them. But if I know, having just been there, that she is not yet there, then I have no function to perform. It is the business of some other creature—her maid very likely—to receive the news from the footman that someone is waiting to see her. That is a complex process with which I have nothing to do.' The favoured visitor, therefore—the visitor, that is to say, whom To-to favoured, believing him or her to be favoured by To-to's mistress—had to pass through what may be called ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... particular country, or to insulated groups of events. Before there could spring up the idea of universal history, it was necessary that there should be a broader view of mankind as a whole. The ancient Stoics had a glimpse of the race as a family, and of the nations as forming one complex unity. The conquests and extended dominion of Rome first suggested the idea of universal history. Polybius, a Greek in the second century B.C., had watched the progress of Rome, in its career of conquest, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... law, the fundamental law upon which Christian society in its very construction must rest; and that law, as defined by the Almighty, is immutable. Through it the women of this Christian land, as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, have distinct duties to perform of the most complex order, yet of the very ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... growth slowed considerably in 2001-03 - to less than 2% - because of a slowdown in major markets and the hiking of interest rates by the Central Bank to combat inflationary pressures. New president DA SILVA, who took office 1 January 2003, has given priority to reforming the complex tax code, trimming the overblown civil service pension system, and continuing the fight ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sufficiently enlivening trilogy! Miss Sarah O'Malley wore the dresses in exuberant rotation, Mr. Morrissy read the emotional poetry with great admiration, Mrs. Morrissy made friends with the dog, and life at once became complex and joyful. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... ones. Compared to these habitual feats, walking, standing upright, and bicycling are the merest trifles; yet it is only by going through the wanting, trying process that he can stand, walk, or cycle, whereas in the other and far more difficult and complex habits he not only does not consciously want nor consciously try, but actually consciously objects very strongly. Take that early habit of cutting the teeth: would he do that if he could help it? Take that later habit of decaying and eliminating ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the day named for Mrs. Manston's journey from London to her husband's house; a day of singular and great events, influencing the present and future of nearly all the personages whose actions in a complex drama form the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... State, having carefully considered all the circumstances of this complex and involved case, finds that the depositions of the material female witnesses, Terentyeva, Maximova, and Koslovska, containing as they do numerous contradictions and absurdities and lacking all positive evidence and indubitable conclusions, cannot be admitted ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... Factor, and making him break ground. Being a creature so elemental as to have room for but one idea at a time, Snettishane could pursue that one idea a greater distance than could John Fox. For John Fox, elemental as he was, was still complex enough to entertain several glimmering ideas at a time, which debarred him from pursuing the one as single-heartedly or as far as ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... experience and experience cannot be knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible. There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in memory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted with this ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... billows, in the solitude relieved but by the boats of the early fishermen, she felt those deep and tranquillizing influences which belong to the Religion of Nature. Unconsciously to herself, her sweet face grew more thoughtful, and her step more slow. What a complex thing is education! How many circumstances, that have no connection with books and tutors, contribute to the rearing of the human mind! The earth and the sky and the ocean were among the teachers of Evelyn ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... kindred Germany by the antagonism of institutions. A patriotism by the chart is a monster that the world ne'er saw. Men may fall in love with a lady's picture, but not with the map of their country. Few persons have the poetic imagination of Mr. Choate, that can vivify the dead lines and combine the complex features. It seems to us that our own problem of creating a national sentiment out of such diverse materials of race, such sometimes discordant or even hostile traditions, and then of giving it an intenseness of vitality that can overcome our vast spaces and our differences of climate and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... This complex system of restrictions which is the outgrowth and expression of a class struggle for the control of the government must necessarily disappear when the supremacy of the people is finally established. This brings us to the next and for our present purpose, ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... of Chicago, no God west of Denver," we used to hear when I was a child. But to-day, the churches are part of the community and even men go. People in the West do not seem to go to church merely out of respect for the devil and a conscience complex, but because they like to. Churches and schools are important ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... details by which children are to be converted into desirable types of men and women, the expert schoolmaster should be authoritative, at least to a degree commensurate with his superior knowledge of this very complex problem. The administration of the schools, the making of the course of study, the selection of texts, the prescription of methods of teaching, these are matters with which the people, or their representatives upon boards of ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... nation small improvements accumulate. In modern Europe the cultivation of mechanics and chemistry conduces to a steady improvement in tools, a cheapening also of tools, and introduction of such more complex tools as we call "machines," by dint of all which human work constantly becomes more effective, so that fewer and fewer workmen are needed for the same amount of produce. Thus the normal and natural order of things, wherever the wage-system exists tends to dispense with some, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... not one of the hazing party who had entirely escaped injury. Tender toes had been trampled upon, jarring jolts administered, and scratches and bruises distributed ad libitum. Leslie was outwardly morose. Her inner emotions were too complex to be analyzed. They were a mixture of hate, fear, baffled pride and humiliation. The cherished scheme, concocted by her in the autumn, and on which she had spent so much time and money, had utterly fallen through. Exposure and disgrace stared herself and ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... embroidered black silk, and a short, embroidered jacket over his night shirt. Beside the bed stood a table covered with glasses and bottles and pill-boxes, and also a telephone. Every few minutes this telephone would ring, and Peter would wait patiently while Mr. Ackerman settled some complex problem of business. "I've told them my terms," he would say with irritation, and then be would cough; and Peter, who was sharply watching every detail of the conduct of the rich, noted that he was too polite even to cough into the telephone. "If they ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... repetition of only one of the elements—rhythm, intervals, or general outline. Figs. 58 and 59 show examples of both types. The principle almost invariably holds that the simpler the music (cf. folk-tunes) the more obvious the form of the period, while the more complex the music, the less ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... the cap two twisted horns, which, spreading right and left, become a sort of basis for the other forms to rest upon. These consist of two grotesque human-headed figures, one at either side, and of a complex triple ornament between them, clumsily imitated from a far more elegant Egyptian ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... nature and art. To do this they must possess a molecular structure commensurate in complexity with that of light itself. Thirdly, we have the human eye and brain, so organized as to be able to take in and distinguish the multitude of impressions thus generated. The light, therefore, at starting is complex; to sift and select it as they do, natural bodies must be complex; while to take in the impressions thus generated, the human eye and brain, however we may simplify our conceptions of their action,[8] ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... they come up, and say, "Lord, here is another piece of Thy territory; govern it; I don't know anything about it." But there is the business. I don't know myself, but God knows me, understands all the complex relationships of my life, knows how matter affects mind, and physical and mental and spiritual are blended in one in the high ideal of humanity. Oh, remember, man is the crowning and most glorious work of God of which we know anything as yet. ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... no longer the court, but the salons. They had multiplied indefinitely, and, representing every shade of taste and thought, had reached the climax of their power as schools of public opinion, as well as their highest perfection in the arts and amenities of a brilliant and complex society. There was a slight reaction from the reckless vices and follies of the regency. If morals were not much better, manners were a trifle more decorous. Though the great world did not take the tone of stately elegance and rigid propriety which it had assumed under the rule of Mme. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... to church on Sundays and holidays; so much tobacco or snuff; so many gowns and bonnets, or suits of clothes and hats; and so on. These gifts lead to frequent law- suits; and one can quite understand how, in a country with large tracts of its land held upon tenures of the most complex character, under a system which has passed away even in the country from whence it came, and where to this mass of difficulty is added the cause of dispute just alluded to, the legal profession should flourish,—which ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... all the impolicy of it at this moment, and the connection it might have with the Peerage question; to which he only replied by enlarging on 'the importance of the Belgic question,' either unable or unwilling to embrace this measure in its complex relations, and never perceiving that the country cares not a straw about Belgium or anything but Reform, though they may begin to care about such things when this question is settled. Haddington also went to Aberdeen, who would hear nothing; but he and the Duke severally promised to speak ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... grazing ranges were being encroached upon by sheepmen newly come to the Tonto. To Blaisdell's way of thinking the rustler menace was more serious than the sheeping-off of the range, for the simple reason that no cattleman knew exactly who the rustlers were and for the more complex and significant reason that the rustlers did ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... mind that this strain in all things, small and great, is something that can be and should be studiously abandoned, with as regular a process of training, from the first simple steps to those more complex, as is required in the work for the development of muscular strength. When a perversion of Nature's laws has continued from generation to generation, we, of the ninth or tenth generation, can by no possibility ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... too strongly this distant prospect; yet it appears founded on so few, and simple principles, that there is not the same probability of adverse incidents as in more complex schemes. These vague rambling contemplations which I here faithfully retrace, carry me sometimes to a great distance; I am lost in the anticipation of the various circumstances attending this proposed metamorphosis! Many unforeseen accidents may doubtless arise. Alas! it ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... Hainaut, Liege, Limburg, Luxembourg, Namur, Oost-Vlaanderen, Vlaams-Brabant, Wallonia*, West-Vlaanderen note: as a result of the 1993 constitutional revision that furthered devolution into a federal state, there are now three levels of government (federal, regional, and linguistic community) with a complex division of responsibilities ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... minutes, then wandered into the empty Orion shed, abandoned now that its crew and rocket had moved to the firing pad and blockhouse. As he stood looking at the complex test equipment a sedan pulled up and Gee-Gee Gould got out. The electronics chief waved at him and trotted by into the project office. He returned in a moment with a portable tube and circuit tester under his arm and paused to ask, "What's ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... assurance that their advice is backed up by Deity, followed with an offer of reward if we believe it, and a threat of dire punishment if we do not, the Self-appointed Superior Class has driven men wheresoever it willed. The evolution of formal religions is not a complex process, and the fact that they embody these two unmixable things, dogma and morality, is a very plain and simple truth, easily seen, undisputed by all reasonable men. And be it said that the morality ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... property of matter, and are to be met with even in inorganic substances, it will perhaps be advisable to see whether they are not paralleled by phenomena in the transitional world of plants. We shall thus pass from a study of response in highly complex animal tissues to those given under ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... complex amalgam of custom and statute, largely criminal law; rudimentary civil code in effect since 1 January 1987; new legal codes in effect since 1 January 1980; continuing efforts are being made to improve civil, administrative, criminal, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... lowest point: Caribbean Sea 0 m highest point: Chances Peak (in the Soufriere Hills volcanic complex) 914 m ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... chanced,—if you admit such a thing as chance in so tangled a coil as this complex world of ours,—Adam Black had just tucked Charles Pixley into a close little argumentative corner, and given him food for contemplation, and catching Graeme's last remark, he smiled across the table, and in a word of four letters dropped a seed into several lives ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... Mrime as a man of exceptionally complex and refined mind, capable of deep feeling, but rarely showing it, and ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... his revelation had given her. And what might his other relations prove to be? Good Lord! Yet, oddly enough, she was so prepossessed by him, and so fascinated by his very Quixotism, that it was perhaps for these complex reasons that she said ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... her his study, thinking to master the secret of her curious physical being, he has been forced to stop short of his purpose, dumb and blind in the presence of that wondrous complexity that no science of his own can master; and no casuist has yet solved the why of her equally wonderful and complex mental and spiritual being. They have made Reason, cold, critical, judge, the test; but the fine, delicate essence of her real being has always eluded it. When Love seeks the solution—the large, generous Love, that is one day to sit as the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... can in no case be bridged over even by Freud's own accounts. The conversion always remains as a mere statement and is a logical connection between the appearance of physical symptoms and the so-called conflicts; in other words, it is an explanation and not a FACT. Compared with the complex Freudian mechanism, with its repressions, compressions, censors, dreams, etc., the conception of hysterical symptoms as a marital weapon as comparable with the tears of more normal women seems very simple and probably too simple. In fact, it does not explain the hysteria, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... has been already implied, we do not immediately see when the baby could have made the necessary mistakes and acquired that infinite practice without which it could never go through such complex processes satisfactorily; we have therefore invented the word "heredity," and consider it as accounting for the phenomena; but a little reflection will show that though this word may be a very good way of ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Maria still looked, however, out of the window; the lights in the house windows, and red and green signal-lights, gave her a childish interest. She forgot entirely about herself. She turned her back upon herself and her complex situation of life with infinite relief. She did not wonder what she would do when she reached Ridgewood. She did not think any more of herself. It was as if she had come into a room of life without any looking-glasses, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... people is just as strange as they are themselves. It is based on euphony, from which cause it is very complex, the more especially so as it requires one to be possessed of a negro's turn of mind to appreciate the system, and unravel the secret of its euphonic concord. A Kisuahili grammar, written by Dr. Krapf, will exemplify what I mean. There is one peculiarity, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... crude but quite intelligible motives which lead these savages to sacrifice to the spirits of their dead may be commended to the attention of writers on the history of religion who read into primitive sacrifice certain subtle and complex ideas which it never entered into the mind of primitive man to conceive and which, even if they were explained to him, he would in all probability be ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... of the Republic of Florence; and the Turkish reis-effendi, or minister of foreign affairs, soon perceived that the Christian embassador was quite incompetent to enter into the intricacies of treaties and the complex machinery of diplomacy. But suddenly the official notes which the envoy addressed to the reis-effendi began to exhibit a sagacity and an evidence of far-sighted policy which contrasted strongly with the imbecility which had previously characterized ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... to the theatre of action, may be supposed also to have had ample means for obtaining the requisite information. Yet their several accounts, although not strictly contradictory, it is not always easy to reconcile with one another. The narratives of complex military operations are not likely to be simplified under the hands of monkish bookmen. I have endeavored to make out a connected tissue from a comparison of the Moslem with the Castilian authorities. But here the meagreness of the Moslem annals compels us to lament the premature death ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... no longer the simple New England farmer of a century ago. He is rich beyond calculation. His family is more numerous than that of any European country save Russia. His interests are world-wide, his trade tremendous, his industry complex, his finance fabulous. Above all, his family is no longer of one race. The hatreds of Europe are not echoed in his house; they are shared and reverberate through his corridors. It is difficult, then, for him to take the simple views of right and wrong, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... in form between the sections of Keeling atoll and of the atolls in the Low Archipelago, in the general steepness of the reefs of the Maldiva and Chagos atolls, and in the perpendicularity of those rising out of water always tranquil, we may discern the effects of uniform laws; but from the complex action of the surf and currents, on the growing powers of the coral and on the deposition of sediment, we can by no means follow out ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists used their complex stuff naively. The "Faerie Queene" is the typical work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and personified vices and virtues. The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil—the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... compromising domesticity of marriage. It is his rigorous transvaluation of all moral values and conventionalities that proclaims this Hamlet a man of the future. No half-way treaties with the obvious in life, no crooking the pregnant hinges of his opinions to the powers that be. An anarch, pure and complex, he despises all methods. What soliloquies, replete with the biting, cynical ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... profess to understand it yet. This case of yours is very complex, Sir Henry. When taken in conjunction with your uncle's death I am not sure that of all the five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled there is one which cuts so deep. But we hold several threads ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... the psychological moment to study the highly complex and delicate problem of conscience. The strain and tension of world issues disturb our judgment. We cannot if we would turn away from the events and movements that affect the destiny of nations to dwell calmly and securely upon our own inner, ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in my life, and studied my lord and master's face. It was not an easy map to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces. And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... national dress altogether, but compromise matters by putting on, in addition to their long gown, a European hat and shoes, which, if anything, looks worse still. The ladies have not yet adopted the European style which, perhaps, they have sense enough to see, is far more complex and inconvenient than their own. Of this much I am certain that no mysterious production of Worth would be more becoming, or suit them better than ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... political matters they have much the same interests that we men have. In State and national issues their interests differ little, if at all, from ours. In municipal questions they have an even greater interest than we have. All the complex questions of housing, schooling, policing, sanitation and kindred matters are peculiarly the interests of women as the home makers and the rearers of children. Women need and must have the ballot by which to protect their interests in these ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... are always of a delicate nervous organization. Fiske[D] has proved to us that the reason why the human young is so far more helpless and dependent than the young of any other species is because the activities of the human race have become so many, so widely varied, and so complex, that they could not fix themselves in the nervous structure before birth. There a only a few things that the chick needs to know in order to lead a successful chicken life; as a consequence these few things are well impressed upon ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... middle of the depth of the concrete beam, and if variation of intensity of stress in the concrete be taken as uniform from this neutral axis up, the formula for the resisting moment of a reinforced concrete beam becomes extremely simple and no more complex than that ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... it is true, a sensation of colour apart from the perception. This may be separated, in our reflection, from all external surface. It is a pleasure which colour gives, and which enters largely into the complex sentiments of beauty. But our notion of colour itself we cannot dissociate from external surface: we cannot think of colour but as something outward. And if it comes to us originally under the condition of external surface, it must also present ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Assembly or Zgromadzenie Narodowe consists of the Sejm (460 seats; members are elected under a complex system of proportional representation to serve four-year terms) and the Senate or Senat (100 seats; members are elected by a majority vote on a provincial basis to serve four-year terms) elections: Sejm elections last held 23 September 2001 (next to be held by September 2005); ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... a possibility, however, that we have been going too fast, and have consequently overlooked a few items of importance. We forgot for the moment, as often happens, that the factors in the problem are not homogeneous digits with fixed values, but complex personalities with decided opinions of their own as to their individual and relative importance, as well as pugnacious tendencies for compelling an acceptance of their assumptions by equally pugnacious factors which claim a differential ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... in his copy, shows that he does not enjoy those relations in the original—that is to say, that all appreciation of noble design (which is based on the most exquisite relations of magnitude) is impossible to him. To give him habits of mathematical accuracy in transference of the outline of complex form, is therefore among the first, and even among the most important, means of educating his taste. A student who can fix with precision the cardinal points of a bird's wing, extended in any fixed position, and can then draw the curves of ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... the episode occurred to which I have referred, Dr. Kreener occupied a house in Regent's Park, to which, when his duties at the munition works allowed, he would sometimes retire at week-ends. He was a man of complex personality. I think no one ever knew him thoroughly; indeed, I doubt ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... was in a more complex condition than Balder imagined. His absorption in Gnulemah, if only as she was the instrument of his dominant purpose, must have been complete; the success (as he deemed it) of his life was staked on her. But, in addition to this, the unhappy man had, unwittingly, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... and his environment. Controlling these are the "Fiery Lives," the Devourers, which constrain these to their work of building up the cells of the body, so that they work harmoniously and in order, subordinated to the higher manifestation of life in the complex organism called Man. These Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and organising function, with the One Life of the Universe,[7] and when they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower lives run rampant, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... of mine. God, the great conservative power of the Universe, when he established the right, saw to it that it should always be the safest and best. He never laid upon a poor finite worm the staggering load of following out into infinity the complex results of his actions. We may rest on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom, confident that it is enough for us to do justice, he will see to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... is nothing after death and death is nothing; is as well off as he who struggles to be a blind leader of the blind. Would I could believe that we shall live many lives and each a preparation for a higher one. Our religion, like our government, as it grows old grows complex and rotten. What we need is a simple government, a simple faith and ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... between those ideas brought out by the other stories, many in number, into which those powers of darkness enter. It is evident that the traditions from which the popular conception of the ghostly enemy has been evolved must have been of a complex ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... is a very simple matter, but how best to get the greatest quantity of plant food out of the soil, with the least waste and the greatest profit, is a much more complex and difficult task. Plant food consists of a dozen or more different substances. We have talked about them in the pages of this book, and all I wish to say here is that some of them are much more abundant, and more readily obtained, ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... four representative orations on this complex subject, from four of our most prominent public men. The literature of the subject is unlimited. Mr. Morrill is a representative advocate of the gold standard. In the same discussion Mr. Blaine offers a compromise ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... peppermint bottle held close to alternately sniffing nostrils Sadie Corn was running her eye over the complex report sheet of the floor clerk who had just gone off watch. The report was even more detailed and lengthy than usual. Automobile Show Week meant that the always prosperous Magnifique was filled to the eaves and ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... complex process much blood and energy is needed for the abdominal region, therefore hard work or exercise should not immediately follow a meal. It will be noticed that each stage of digestion prepares the food for the next stage ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... complex knife, out of the depths of which a pair of scissors burst on touching a spring. Mrs. Payson cut off the address, and placed the photograph in her pocket-book. "Now," she said, "Sally will be happy, and no harm can come ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... the lower end of Shimuni, a long reach of the river was before us, undivided by islands— a magnificent expanse of water stretching away to the southeast. The country on the left bank is not, however, terra firma, but a portion of the alluvial land which forms the extensive and complex delta region of the Japura. It is flooded every year at the time of high water, and is traversed by many narrow and deep channels which serve as outlets to the Japura, or at least, are connected with that river by means of the interior water-system of the Cupiyo. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... To her, marriage was more than it usually seems to dreaming maiden or to disconsolate widow. So had the strong desire to escape from the control of her unprincipled and remorseless brother grown a part of her very soul; so had whatever was best and highest in her very mixed and complex character been galled and outraged by her friendless and exposed position, the equivocal worship rendered to her beauty, the various debasements to which pecuniary embarrassments had subjected her—not without design on the part of the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... forces and interests, and the conditions of success are so complex! If the seed fall here, it will not germinate; if there, it will be drowned or washed away; if yonder, it will find too sharp competition. There are only a few places where it will find all the conditions ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... of the natural races are necessary and frequent, and the movements of the culture races have been even more complex. The leadership of these mass-movements and spatial reaccommodations necessarily rests with the men, who, in their wanderings, have become acquainted with larger stretches of space; and whose specialty is motor co-ordination. The progressive races have managed the space problem ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... by the different characters. Brynhild loses a great deal, and is a poor creature when compared with herself in the saga; Grimhild and her fateful drink have gone; Gudrun (Chriemhild) is much more complex, but not more tragic; one new character, Rudiger, appears as the type of chivalry; but Sigurd (Siegfred) the central figure, though he has lost by the omission of so much of his life, is, as before, the embodiment of all the virtues ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... new address, or to hear from Mr. Gillat, or her family, at this new place, as it might spoil her arrangements. Rawson-Clew recognised the last word as a favourite of Julia's; with her it was elastic, and could mean anything, from a piece of lace arranged to fill up the neck of a dress, to a complex and far-reaching scheme arranged to bring about some desired end. What it meant in the present instance was not indicated, but clearly she did not wish for interference, and, with some wisdom, took the surest way to prevent it by making it well-nigh ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad |
