"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only another way of saying that sales should be made on the natural basis of real value, which is the cost of transmuting human energy into articles of trade and commerce. But that simple formula is not considered business-like. It is not complex enough. We have "business" which takes the most honest of all human activities and makes them subject to the speculative shrewdness of men who can produce false shortages of food and other commodities, and thus excite in society anxiety of demand. We have false ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... seems a somewhat complex question whether a native even of French Flanders at that time should be necessarily claimable as a Frenchman;[A] but no doubt on this point is alluded to by M. d'Avezac, so he probably had good ground for that assumption. [See also Yule's article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... turned to "Subway" Smith, who was at her right—the latest addition to her menagerie. "What is this friend of yours?" she asked. "I have never seen such complex simplicity. This new plaything has no real charm for him. He is breaking it to find out what it is made of. And something will happen ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... which must have stricken the General with stupefaction. The rocks, surf, fogs, and gales of that tempestuous coast are all left out of the account; and so, too, is the nature of the country, which consists of deep marshes, rocky hills, and hollows choked with evergreen thickets. Yet a series of complex and mutually dependent operations, involving long marches through this rugged and pathless region, was to be accomplished, in the darkness of one April night, by raw soldiers who knew nothing of the country. This rare specimen of amateur soldiering ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... very complex affair—dependent in part upon associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation formed by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed by some people ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... even their careful studies enabled them to do. We have selected a number of instantaneous stereoscopic views of the streets and public places of Paris and of New York, each of them showing numerous walking figures, among which some may be found in every stage of the complex act we are studying. Mr. Darley has had the kindness to leave his higher tasks to transfer several of these to our pages, so that the reader may be sure that he looks upon an exact copy of real human individuals in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... are not easy; they are hard-as hard and complex, perhaps as any in our history. Now, the President not only has to carry on these tasks in such a way that our democracy may grow and flourish and our people prosper, but he also has to lead the whole free world in overcoming the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... BOSWELL. 'I rather believe, Sir, it is the fine climate which keeps him there.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, how can you talk so? What is CLIMATE to happiness? Place me in the heart of Asia, should I not be exiled? What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life? You may advise me to go to live at Bologna to eat sausages. The sausages there are the best in the world; they ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... inhabitants, and little change of occupation. The spirit of the Gospel, unaided by acquisitions of profane learning and experience in the world,—that spirit and the obligations of the sacred office may, in such situations, suffice to effect most of what is needful. But for the complex state of society that prevails in England, much more is required, both in large towns, and in many extensive districts of the country. A minister should not only be irreproachable in manners and morals, but accomplished in learning, as far as is possible without sacrifice of the least of his ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... record of his work, it depends not upon this, but upon the permanency in other men of the spirit that gave his music birth, whether it shall live in the minds of future generations. Year after year the language of the art grows richer and more complex, and work after work sinks into ever-deepening oblivion, until music that once thrilled men with delirious ecstasy becomes a dead thing, which here and there a student looks back upon in a mood of scarcely tolerant antiquarianism. In the temple of the art a hundred statues of ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... and indignation of the afternoon she had passed with extraordinary rapidity to a state of merriment, which would have been incomprehensible to one who did not understand her peculiarly complex character. Mrs. Raeburn listened with a good deal of amusement to her racy description ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... muttered remarks to himself, as he gathered up the reins and cheered on his sturdy cob. He had a habit of talking over his experiences, half aloud, as he drove from case to case; the two sides of his rather complex nature apparently comparing notes with each other. And ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... processes without demanding his very careful attention. Most of the chapters in the present volume (and the second volume will be less difficult) are easily intelligible to all; but there are points at which the line of argument is necessarily subtle and complex. In the hope that most readers will be induced to master even these more difficult chapters, I will give an outline of the characteristic argument of the work. Haeckel's distinctive services in regard ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... inside of the bower. The boat was then hoisted on board and the anchor weighed; which latter operation cost us great labour and much time, as the anchor was so heavy that we could not move it without the aid of my complex machinery of blocks and pulleys. A steady breeze was blowing off shore when we set sail, at a little before sunset. It swept us quickly past the reef and out to sea. The shore grew rapidly more indistinct as the shades of evening fell, while our clipper bark bounded lightly over the waves. Slowly ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... head, feet for an attitude of complete rest. He repeated his illustration again and again, Susan watching and listening with open-eyed wonder and admiration. She had never dreamed that so simple a matter could be so complex. When he got her up beside him and went through it with her, she soon became as used to the new motions as a beginner at the piano to stretching an octave. But it was only after more than an hour's practice that she ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... to disclose a small door let into the plaster. A key made the door open into a cupboard, out of which Democrates drew a brass-bound box of no great size, which he carried gingerly to a table and opened with a complex key. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... other hand, the country has the aspect of having once been a table-land, elevated on the average about 1,700 feet above the level of the sea, and of having been washed by some mighty flood, which, wearing away the softer rocks, had cut it into valleys, forming a complex system incapable of being described in words and only to be understood by inspection ...
— 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
... Salmon River lies just above the twin glaciers. Scenically, these are by far the more impressive, and they present a more complex engineering problem; yet the canon itself was the real strategic point in the struggle between the railroad-builders. The floor of the valley immediately above Garfield glacier, though several miles wide, was partly filled with detritus which had been carried down from ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... 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 speed, toward ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... to be in its brevity a fairly complex piece of work, was not intended to touch on the supernatural. Yet more than one critic has been inclined to take it in that way, seeing in it an attempt on my part to give the fullest scope to my imagination by taking it beyond the confines of the world ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... age given over to the marketable commodity, England can still breed men of this calibre. Not perhaps in her cities, where individual aspiration and character are cramped, warped, deadened by the brute force of money, the complex mechanism of modern life: but in unconsidered corners of her Empire, in the vast spaces and comparative isolation, where old-fashioned patriotism takes the place of parochial party politics, and where, alone, strong natures can grow up ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... point of the ions with inflexible exactitude under any acceleration strains. But now, instead of the heavy silver block in which a mirror was figured, the mirror consisted of a polished silver plate, parabolic to be sure, but little more than a half-inch in thickness. It was mounted in a framework of complex, ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... elaboration of hygiene moves pari passu with the rank of a species in intelligence. Even the cockroach, which lives on what we call filth, spends the greater part of its time in the cultivation of personal cleanliness. And all social hygiene, in its fullest sense, is but an increasingly complex and extended method of purification—the purification of the conditions of life by sound legislation, the purification of our own minds by better knowledge, the purification of our hearts by a growing sense of responsibility, the purification of the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... centre of right and nobleness, and of that only, is all this confusion tending. We already know whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will have none! The Heaviest will reach the centre. The Heaviest, sinking through complex fluctuating media and vortices, has its deflexions, its obstructions, nay at times its resiliences, its reboundings; whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating, "See, your Heaviest ascends!"—but at all moments it is moving centreward, fast as is convenient for it; sinking, sinking; and, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... distended with artificial ashes, dead dry protections against the exposures he so unaccountably fears. Will he go on shrinking, I wonder?—become at last a mere lurking atomy in his own recesses, a kind of hermit crab, the bulk of him a complex mechanism, a thing of rags and tatters and papier-mache, stolen from the earth and the plant-world and his fellow beasts? And at last may he not disappear altogether, none missing him, and a democracy of honest ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... resumed, "the schedule becomes a part of you. Everything—" he held his hands before him, fingers spread, palms facing, and drew them together—"converges on that. It's that simple. Other planets are waiting. In a society as complex as ours, a million—and I mean this literally, sir—a million decisions must be reviewed if the schedule falls behind. Delay of a critical item of equipment can necessitate an unbelievably vast reassignment of personnel and supply patterns. A small cause ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... all things he must render impossible the descent of the elevator cage. But for a moment he could think of no bar that might be flung across the path of that complex and almost irresistible machinery, once awakened into its full power. Then the solution of the riddle came ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... people or period as the necessary result of the conditions of race, religion, civilization, and manners in the midst of which the art was produced—and esteems a knowledge of these conditions as sufficient to account for the character of the art, seems to me to exclude many complex and mysterious influences, especially in individual cases, which must affect the work of the artists. At the same time an intelligent study of the art of any nation or period demands a study of the conditions in which it was produced, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... follies, Ida had never been a pale shadowy creature, full of complex psychological moods which neither she nor any one else could untangle. She knew whom and what she liked and disliked, and it was not her nature to do things by halves. There had always been a kind of simplicity and straightforwardness even in her wickedness; and she usually seemed to people ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... result is thus 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... facts; the barbaric refusal of the new astronomical calendar merely because it was invented by a Pope, and the singular decision to pronounce Latin as if it were something else, making it not a dead language but a new language. Later, the part played by particular royalties is complex and accidental; "the furious German" came and passed; the much less interesting Germans came and stayed. Their influence was negative but not negligible; they kept England out of that current of European life into which the Gallophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only one of the Hanoverians ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... rather than with distinctions that are objectively demonstrable. The difficulty of drawing distinctions is all the greater in view of the fact that in the case of non-sexual feelings sexuality constantly plays a certain part. Our sentiments are complex, and compounded of many and various elements; sexual contrasts play their part in family relationships; and it is not by pure chance that harmony exists by preference between father and daughter, and between mother and ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... our words in a dictionary under twenty-four letters, so do they arrange all their words, or characters, under two hundred and fourteen radical signs; the simplest radicals being the first, and the more complex ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... M.E. Church. Had a real estate and insurance office and drug store on W. Broad St. facing the present Brown's Hardware at 100 W. Broad St. Note windmill. On site of the George Mason Square complex, now under construction. (See p. 89 for more details ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... though Tehran, and Meshed, and Shiraz were to share the fate of Persepolis and Susa, it would yet remain as a portrait of unrivalled humour and accuracy of a people who, though now in their decadence, have played an immense and still play a not wholly insignificant part in the complex drama of Asiatic politics. It is the picture of a people, light-hearted, nimble-witted, and volatile, but subtle, hypocritical, and insincere; metaphysicians and casuists, courtiers and rogues, gentlemen and liars, hommes d'esprit and yet incurable cowards. To explain the history and ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... reach the difficulty. If the insufficiencies of existing laws can be remedied by further legislation, it should be done. The fact must be recognized, however, that all Federal legislation on this subject may fall short of its purpose because of inherent obstacles and also because of the complex character of our governmental system, which, while making the Federal authority supreme within its sphere, has carefully limited that sphere by metes and bounds that can not be transgressed. The decision of our highest court on this precise question renders it ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... smiled at her; the silver heart miraculously shed its tarnish and glittered beneficent lightnings. Doubtless she knew somewhere in her mind that no physical change had occurred in the picture or the heart; but her mind was a complex, and like nearly all minds could disbelieve and ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... ocean from the Old World, and having lost that contact with its affairs which the relation with Britain had hitherto maintained, they followed but dimly, and without much comprehension, the obscure and complex struggles wherein the spirit of liberty was working out a new Europe, in the face of difficulties vastly greater than any with which the Americans had ever had to contend. They had been alienated from Britain, the one great free state ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... the simple windings of her own brain, inspecting the bare shelves taciturnly stored with the impressions of a meagre life. No disorder; no confused mingling of records; no devious and interminable impress of complex emotions, tangled theories, and bewildering abstractions—nothing but simple facts, neatly classified and conveniently collated. Unerringly from the stores of the past she picked and chose and put together in the instant ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... followed the two saw much of each other. This fellow, Lowe by name, interested Hanford. He was a cosmopolite; he was polished to the hardness of agate by a life spent in many lands. He possessed a cold eye and a firm chin; he was a complex mixture of daredeviltry and meekness. He had fought in a war or two, and he had led hopes quite as forlorn as the one Hanford was now engaged upon. It was this bond, perhaps, which drew the ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... is taboo among these Calvinists of the hills. They "run sets" and "play plays"—and these are against the sterner morals that prevail—but they do not dance. The Mission teacher smiled. This was a side-light on the complex character of Pleasant Trouble that she had not known before, and she knew it had nothing to do with his absent leg. A hundred yards ahead of them a boy and a girl emerged from a ravine—young King Camp and Polly Sizemore—and ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... the first time in his life, Henry found himself behind the scenes of a theatre, and instantly began to experience all the complex emotions which come to the layman in that situation. That is to say, he felt like a cat which has strayed into a strange hostile back-yard. He was in a new world, inhabited by weird creatures, who flitted about in an eerie semi-darkness, like brightly coloured ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the paragraphing in this book. For most of the book the paragraphing is as you would expect it to be, but there is an over-supply of very long paragraphs, and some of these contain quite complex conversations, so that one is tempted to split them up so that passage looks more conventional and readable. I have not done so, except in one flagrant case, because I suspect that Kingston may have been experimenting in some way. On the other hand it may be that he had contracted to write ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... before, he had worked for his uncle's. The situations then and now, similar in many respects, were yet full of differences. Perhaps in either case the difficulties to be encountered were equally great; but the present problem was the more complex and the more interesting. The young doctor who, unknown and insignificant, had nothing at the back of him but his own wits and the friendship of an unimportant Prince, had been replaced by the accomplished ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... no way of knowing with certainty that the plan ... or any other plan ... would work. It was only during the past few months that the four of them had begun to understand in detail the extent to which the vast, apparently loose complex of the Federation's worlds was actually organized. How long they had been under observation, how much the Federation suspected or knew about them—those questions were, at the moment, unanswerable. So Halder walked on in alert silence, giving his attention to anything ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... poorly paid clerks or teamsters, these men risk their lives daily, must face death at any moment, and are held under a discipline no less rigorous than that of the regular army. Their problems are more complex than those of any soldiery; they deal with fifty different nationalities, and are forced by circumstances to act as judge and jury, as firemen, as life savers, as directories, as arbiters of neighborhood squabbles and domestic wrangles. Their ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... so many conflicting 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
... shown that living bodies contain comparatively few elements, but these are combined into extraordinarily complex compounds. The following elements appear to be essential to all living bodies: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, potassium. Besides these there are several others usually present, but not apparently essential to all organisms. These include phosphorus, iron, ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... degrees of gravity, malice and guilt, to determine which, that is, to fix exactly the value of stolen goods sufficient to constitute a grievous fault, is not the simplest and easiest of moral problems. The extent of delinquency may be dependent upon various causes and complex conditions. On the one hand, the victim must be considered in himself, and the amount of injury sustained by him; on the other, justice is offended generally in all cases of theft, and because justice ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... the future instead of a force of the past; a force of trade instead of a force of war; European instead of Asiatic; intensely independent, democratic, maritime." Here, and not in any Slavonic State, did he see the rightful successors to the Ottoman dominion. Towards Russia his feelings were complex: admiration for the people accompanied detestation of the Government, and the unscrupulous power commanding the services of so vast and virile a people always appeared in his eyes as a menace to civilization. Yet in the future of Russia he "firmly ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... scratched upon walls in many places frequented by Bedaween, as, for instance, in the ruined convents, churches, etc., on the plain of the Jordan, and occasionally, as at 'Amman, several such cyphers are united into one complex character. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... The movement of the appetitive power follows an act of the apprehensive power. Now the apprehensive power apprehends a thing in two ways. First, by way of an incomplex object, as when we understand what a man is; secondly, by way of a complex object, as when we understand that whiteness is in a man. Consequently in each of these ways the appetitive power can tend to both good and evil: by way of a simple and incomplex object, when the appetite ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the Jews are merely a religious community. One of our brilliant young philosophers has strikingly said that a Jew can change his religion, but that he cannot change his grandfather; nor, he might have added can he destroy his more general antecedents, that complex of customs, traditions and ideals which have manifested themselves in the course of thirty-five centuries of recorded history and which create within him an ineradicable historic consciousness. Jewish solidarity is not grounded in religion alone, and the distinctiveness ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... permissible, but only during special services; and an organization of mixed voices was allowable, but not a mixed choir; children might be confirmed, but the word "confirmation" should be avoided. Poor Rabbinate! The politics of the little community were extremely complex. What with rabid zealots yearning for the piety of the good old times, spiritually-minded ministers working with uncomfortable earnestness for a larger Judaism, radicals dropping out, moderates clamoring for quiet, and schismatics organizing new and tiresome movements, the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... when I saw the fact that one-half of the United States was upon the one side and the other half upon the other side as to the understanding of the true theory of this Government of ours, simple as it may be to the lawyer, complex as it may be when examined more thoroughly, I was more than ever disinclined to widen the suffrage, to intrust the franchise to a larger number of people. I trembled for the success of the experiment; I hesitated as to where it would end. I may say, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... light conscience and revelation may afford him as to the constitution and laws of his being, his duty to himself, his fellow man, and his Creator, and his destiny, which he himself is to determine? The Christian religion may be comprehensively defined as the golden circlet which includes all the complex duties, interests, and affections of the most complex being, man, and lifts him up, and binds him back, with all his capacities, hopes, and sympathies, to the throne of the Infinite, from which, in his low, fettered, and sinful estate, he is an alien; and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Amaryllis, turning in her seat, thought she saw a small cloud of dust start up from the road; and Dick, on the assumption of a pursuit almost as swift as his flight, found himself involved in the solution of complex chances. ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... Balzac's condemnation of the portrait as a daub, when he saw the canvas some years later in Russia. Remarking on the difficulty of rendering the novelist's physiognomy, on account of its mobility and strange aspect, Gautier gives it as his opinion that Boulanger succeeded perfectly in seizing the complex expression which seemed to escape all efforts of the brush. The description is a long one; and any one desirous of comparing with each other the impressions received by Balzac's contemporaries who came into close contact ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... words he used most constantly, both on paper and in conversation, were "fine shades" and "fineness" in its most psychological sense. "Fineness" was a quality he was for ever belauding: a quality that he believed was only to be found in persons of complex character ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... aggressive in such matters than to write "it is true," but it is also nearer the reality of the case. One knows what seems true to one's self, but we are coming to realize that the world is great and complex, beyond the utmost power of such minds as ours. Every day of life drives that conviction further home. And it is possible to maintain that in perhaps quite a great number of ethical, social, and political questions there is no ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... life, and would like to give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he means by this peroration, which once closed an article in the Nineteenth Century: "O human life! so varied, so vast, so complex, so rich and subtle in tremulous deep organ tones, and soft proclaim of silver flutes, so utterly beyond our spell of insight, who of us can govern the thunder and whirlwind of thy ventages to any utterance of harmony, or pluck out the heart of thy eternal mystery?" ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... disputes: complex maritime, air, and territorial disputes with Turkey in Aegean Sea; Cyprus question; dispute with The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia over name, symbols, and certain constitutional provisions; Greece is involved ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland's works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... makes one mentally exclaim in despair, "Heavens! how can any one hope to get all that into his head?" The only plain honest thing about law is the outside of the books where it is laid down—there all is simple; inside all is complex. The interlacing lines of the binder's patterns find no place on the covers; but intricacies abound inside, where any line is easier found than a straight one. Nor gold leaf nor tool is employed without, but within how many fallacies are enveloped in glozing ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... of France and Spain were more complex. The moral incentives of hereditary enmity and desire of revenge for the recent past doubtless weighed strongly, as in France did also the sympathy of the salons and philosophers with the colonists' struggle for freedom; but powerfully as ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... way of treatment, save to hurry the ripening of the abscess and its discharge by steaming with hops, hay, or similar substances and by poulticing the throat. The operation for opening an abscess in this region necessitates an intimate knowledge of the complex anatomy ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... men of these morae are sometimes, according to the command issued, formed in enomotiae, sometimes by threes, sometimes by sixes. As to what most people imagine, that the arrangement of the Lacedaemonians under arms is extremely complex, they conceive the exact contrary to what is the fact; for in the Lacedaemonian order the officers are placed in the front ranks, and each rank is in a condition to perform everything which it is necessary for it to perform. So easy is it to understand this arrangement that no one who can distinguish ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... philosopher. He had never read the books. He was a hard-headed, practical man, and farthest from him was any intention of ever reading the books. He had lived life in the simple, where books were not necessary for an understanding of life, and now life in the complex appeared just as simple. He saw through its frauds and fictions, and found it as elemental as on the Yukon. Men were made of the same stuff. They had the same passions and desires. Finance was poker on a larger scale. The men who played were the men who had stakes. The workers were ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... March 1914, a mosaic floor, 16 feet square, with a complex geometrical pattern in red, white, and blue, has been found 9 feet below the present surface, at 22 Northgate Street. Some painted wall-plaster from the walls of the room to which it belonged were ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... the stranger each man and woman he meets is a complete individual, each standing alone, like letters on an alphabet block, and not easily to be confused, one with the other. But these letters of the small town's alphabet are often tangled into as long and complex words as those of the greatest city; it takes but twenty-six letters to spell all the passions. The letter A, that looked so distinctly separate, is soon found to be connected with C and T in Cat, and with W and R in War, as well as cross-connected with ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... Latin. This, of course, is in accord with the English pronunciation of Latin. Examples are 'acid', 'tepid', 'rigid', 'horrid', 'humid', 'lurid ', 'absurd', 'tacit', 'digit', 'deposit', 'compact', 'complex', 'revise', 'response', 'acute'. Those which have the suffix -es prefixed throw the stress back, as 'honest', 'modest'. Those which have the suffix -men prefixed also throw the stress back, as 'moment', 'pigment', 'torment', and to the antepenultima, if ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... divination when in the somnambulic state were of the most extraordinary character. He invited the members of that body to go into any hospital, and choose persons afflicted with any diseases, acute or chronic, simple or complex, and his somnambulist, on being put en rapport, or in magnetic connexion, with them, would infallibly point out their ailings and name the remedies. She, and other somnambulists, he said, could, by merely laying the hand successively on the head, the chest, and the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... creation of the folklorist himself. Not only has he neglected to classify and arrange the scattered items of custom, belief, and rite, and to ascertain the degree of association which the scattered items have with each other, but he has set about the far more difficult and complex task of comparative study without having previously ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... lot of pictures, mostly French. This academic canvas, of Darius' family at the feet of Alexander, has not the simplicity and decorative quality of the Italian pictures of that period, and it is entirely too complex to be enjoyable. The beautiful Courbet on the left, while suggestive of Ribera in its severe disposal of light and shadow, has also a quality of its own, a wonderful mellowness which gives it a unity of expression lacking in its ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... faithful, and he sympathised in sentiment, if he did not agree in dogma, with evangelical Christians. With Catholics, Roman or Anglican, he neither had nor pretended to have any sympathy at all. The Reformation is a convenient name for a complex European movement, difficult to describe, and almost impossible to define; but so far as it was English and constitutional, it is embodied in the legislation of Henry VIII., which substituted the supremacy of the Crown for the supremacy of the Pope. It was because Froude wrote avowedly in ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... grew into loveliness, for all was idealized, and the scattered and hidden beauties of the universe were brought to light. The plan of creation is far too vast to be embraced in its complex unity by the finite: it is the province of art to divide, condense, concentrate, reunite, and rearrange the vast materials in smaller frames, but the new work must always be a whole. Angelo aroused and excited the emotions of the soul, which Zophiel analyzed and described ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... man worth while. The social life has banished simplicity from even the most savage tribe. Indeed, savages, filled with superstitions, their every movement the result of some notion of proper ceremonial, are the most complex of all the human kind. The effort toward simplicity is not a movement back to nature, for there savage and lower animal are completely enslaved by custom and instinct; it is a movement upward toward the freedom of thought and action ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... slight—his common sense told him that. But supposing—just supposing that they actually had chosen his aunt's abode for their prey!... Conceivably they had learnt that Mrs. Maldon was to have a large sum of money under her roof. Conceivably a complex plan had been carefully laid. Conceivably one of the great burglaries of criminal history might be in progress. It was not impossible. No wonder that, with bank-notes loose all over the place, his shockingly negligent auntie ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... that high name,—surely to him, as to every living man, in every conceivable situation short of the Kingdom of the Dead—there is something possible; some plan of action other than that of standing mildly, with crossed arms, till he and we—sink? Complex as his situation is, he, of all Governors now extant among these distracted Nations, has, as I compute, by far the greatest possibilities. The Captains, actual or potential, are there, and the million Captainless: and such resources for bringing them together ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... so holy fell from grace, which they had accepted and for a long time enjoyed, we should look anxiously to God as if in peril at this very moment. In this manner these examples are discussed to our profit; but those who give no attention to them and chase after complex high thoughts on an election according to the purpose of God, drive and thrust their souls into despair, to ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... not feel competent to judge in a matter so complex, and must be content to abide by the opinions of those who have knowledge ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... consistent method of procedure. Dr Landmann carried the analysis still further in his now famous paper published in the New Shakespeare Society's Transactions (1880-82). But these two, and those who have followed them, have erred, on the one hand in implying that euphuism was much more complex than it is in reality, and on the other by confining their attention to single sentences, and so failing to perceive that the euphuistic method was applicable to the paragraph, as a whole, no less than to the sentence. And it is upon these two points that Mr Child's essay is so specially illuminating. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... her one appreciative glance, then returned to his aloof pedestal of indifference. Obviously his pattern was to stand in majestic splendor and allow the girls to fawn somewhere down near his shoes. These lads with a glamour boy complex almost always gravitate toward some occupation which will require them to wear a uniform. Sara catalogued him as quickly as I did, and seemed unimpressed. But you never can tell about a woman; the smartest of them will fall for the ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... accelerated rapidity to overcome the problems that confront humanity by substituting human inquiry for divine revelation. Thus this attitude of man to proceed through life dependent only on his own resources will expand and strengthen his mentality by doing away with the inferiority complex of the God-idea. This vision of man, the master of his own destinies, the searcher for truth and the shaper of a better life for the only existence that he knows anything about, this reliance of man upon man, and without the supposed interference of any god, constitutes atheism in its broadest ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... we shall see close against the ground the rosettes of year-old evening primrose plants - exquisitely symmetrical, complex stars from whose center the flower stalks of another summer ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... system of credit by means of which our civilisation works, deserves an epic. Neither the wanderings of Ulysses nor the discoveries of a traveller through Paradise and Purgatory make so splendid an appeal to the imagination as this vastly complex machine which Ascher and men like him guide. The oceans of the world are covered thick with ships. Long freight trains wind like serpents across continents. Kings build navies. Ploughmen turn up the clay. The wheels of factories ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... artificial light it is seen that preceding the modern electrical age, man depended universally upon burning material. Obviously, the course of civilization has been highly complex and cannot be symbolized adequately by the branching tree. From its obscure beginning far in the impenetrable fog of prehistoric times, it has branched here and there. These various branches have been subjected to many different influences, with the result that some flourished ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... it all, and certainly no engineer knows all there is to know about his profession. Time was when this might have been true; but it isn't true to-day. The work of engineering research and development has become so complex that engineers are forced to specialize. The engineering graduate, entering upon his first job, will discover early that he, too, must specialize. This will not be difficult, owing to the fact that his engineering education has ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... of humor are legion and exceedingly complex and various disquisitions upon humor and laughter would seem to support him. Its social nature is emphasized ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... quantity of work with cheaper and simpler machinery than had been usual before, are always regarded as advantageous to every society. A certain quantity of materials, and the labour of a certain number of workmen, which had before been employed in supporting a more complex and expensive machinery, can afterwards be applied to augment the quantity of work which that or any other machinery is useful only for performing. The undertaker of some great manufactory, who employs a thousand ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... That was the voice of Fifth Avenue below his windows. He remembered that when he moved into his rooms eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now it filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the symbol of the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less hurried in the old days ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... Plateau Italian artillery destroyed the Austrians' complex system of defenses at several points. Italian infantry, attacking during a violent storm in the direction of Monte Zebio and Monte Forno, carried the pass of Agnello, and captured nearly the whole of Monte Ortigara, 6,924 feet high, east of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... 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 ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... it, all of which may be summed up in the term "superior man," which seems simple enough, but which may be decomposed into a series of complex characters. The superior man differs from the man of genius, who may be unintelligent enough, and from the man of talent, who is often a mere specialist, in an ability to form general ideas about ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... civilization and material well-being, their mutual duties and common interests have become more and more important and numerous, and government as controlling these interests and duties, has developed in form and improved in structure until it has become an all-powerful, complex machine, controlling in many ways the actions, and even the lives of ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby
... "sunshine in a shady place," reclined Chris, beneath a harmony of many greens, where the single, double, and triple shadows of the manifold leaves above her created a complex play of light and shade all splashed and gemmed with little sun discs. Drowsy noon-day peace marked the hour; Chris had some work in her hand, but was not engaged upon it; and Clement, who lolled beside her, likewise did nothing. His eyes were upon ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... washing places. We don't mind them on the march; they are dotted along every road in South Africa now, I should think; but when making a refreshing toilette they jar painfully. Kipling somewhere describes a subtle and complex odour, which, he says, is the smell of the great Indian Empire. That of the great African Empire in this year of grace is the direct and simple one which I have indicated. In the evening we had a ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... printing-press. The subject is fully referred to in the 'Life of Sir Rowland Hill' (i. 224,525). In his final word on the subject, Sir Rowland "gladly admits the enormous difficulty of bringing a complex machine into practical use," a difficulty, he says, which "has been most successfully overcome by the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... fared a little better with that. But having now to initiate my boys into the mysteries of equations, I soon found that although I could manage a very simple one, yet when I attempted one more complex—one in which something bordering upon imagination was necessary to find out the object for which to appoint the symbol to handle it by—the necessary power of concentration ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... they had been a couple of babes in a wood, or any two respectable lost children of romance, memories of lullabies and prayers at mother's knee would have precipitated them at this juncture into floods of tears; but home to them was simply supper and bed. The situation did not seem complex to their minds; the only plan was, of course, to howl, and to do it thoroughly,—stand in a corner of the market-place, and howl in such a manner that there could be no mistake as to the significance of the proceeding; when the crowd collected,—for naturally a ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... assertion is a summary, inaccurate, and unfair manner of dealing with perhaps the most complex series of diplomatic, legal, and racial questions that arose in the nineteenth century. It would appear from the best evidence that Schleswig was indissolubly united with the Crown of Denmark. To maintain this ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... less complex. I had enough temperance-work and preaching in the country school-houses and churches to pay my college expenses, and, now that my financial anxieties were relieved, my health steadily improved. Several times I preached ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... the whole of our notion of a body consists of a number of our own or others' sensations occurring together habitually (so that, the thought of one being associated with the thought of the others, we get what Hartley and Locke call a complex idea). They deny that a residuum would remain if all the attributes were pared off; for that, though the sensations are bound together by a law, the existence of a substratum is but one of many forms of mentally realising the connection. And they ask how it ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... visage so repulsive that the simplest stranger will shudder at sight of it and turn of his own accord to more attractive Virtue. If that were only true! More often than not it is the former that wears a smile and masquerades in agreeable forms, while the latter repels. This is true of the complex life of the city, where a man has landmarks and guide-posts of conduct to go by, and it is equally true of the less complicated life of the far frontier where he must blaze his own trail. Along with the strength and vigor and independence derived from the great outdoors, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... be watched intently, responsively, night after night by thousands of men and women, necessarily of diversified temperaments, aims, and interests, men and women of all classes of society—surely the writing of that drama, the weaving of that complex fabric, is one of the most arduous of the tasks which art has set us; surely its successful accomplishment is one of the highest achievements of which ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... of that night, and all had fallen down in more or less degage and reckless attitudes. Here a fat fist, doubled; there a fatter leg, protruded; elsewhere a spread eagle was represented, with the bedclothes in a heap on its stomach; or a complex knot was displayed, made up of legs, sheets, blankets, and arms. Subsequently the tall but faithful guardian had gone round, disentangled the knot, reduced the spread eagle, and straightened them all out. They now lay, stiff and motionless as mummies, roseate ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... said Lord Henry. "They are the last refuge of the complex. But I don't like scenes, except on the stage. What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. I am glad he is not, ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... laws which regulate this remnant of a once powerful tribe of Indians, are not familiar to many, and it is one great defect in the present system, that these laws are so difficult of access, and so complex that the Indians neither know nor comprehend them; and it cannot be expected that they should live contentedly under oppressive regulations which they do not understand. Should any new laws be passed, they ought to be as simple as possible, ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes |
