"Cosmic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and destiny, the influence of the study of anthropology would change the philosopher's vision of life to a certain extent. The recognition that man is "part and parcel" of the universe, subject to cosmic law, as well as a specialized type, subject to the laws of evolution, and, indeed, that he is of a spiritual nature through which he is subjected to spiritual law, causes the philosopher to pause somewhat before he determines the purpose, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... substitute the word powers for "forces.") possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... beliefs that are not grossly utilitarian and material, promising houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting or a cosmic mortgage. The Peace of God passeth understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven within us and without can be presented only by parables. But the unapproachable distance and vagueness of these things makes them none the less necessary, just as a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... the doer, come back as thine own exhalations Into thy bosom return, weepings of mountain and vale; Man with the cosmic fortunes and starry vicissitudes tangled, Chained to the wheel of the world, blind with the dust of its speed, Even as thou, O giant, whom trailed in the wake of her conquests Night's sweet despot draws, bound to her ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... bliss in perpetual peace might well seem a malevolent inspiration from the Lords of Death and Darkness. All life that feels and thinks has been, and can continue to be, only as the product of struggle and pain,— only as the outcome of endless battle with the Powers of the Universe. And cosmic law is uncompromising. Whatever organ ceases to know pain,—whatever faculty ceases to be used under the stimulus of pain,—must also cease to exist. Let pain and its effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions, reaching back and back, and ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... given. Living matter is subject to the laws which govern matter, and like matter of any other sort it is composed of atoms and molecules. There is no force inherent in living matter, no vital force independent of and differing from the cosmic forces; the energy which living matter gives off is counterbalanced by the energy which it receives. It undergoes constant change, and there is constant interchange with the environment. The molecules which compose it are constantly undergoing change in their ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... gateways of the stars" and at "the pale ports o' the moon" for shelter. He seeks to hide beneath the vague and blossom-woven veil of far sky-spaces, or, in lust of swift motion, "clings to the whistling mane of every wind!" Here is a choice of paganism at its most modern and most impressive. The cosmic imagination, revelling in the limitless fields of time and space, will surely be sufficient for a man's idealism, without any insistence upon further definition. Here are Carlyle's Eternities and Immensities—are they not enough? The answer ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... "Cosmic rays, perhaps," needled Smithy, and became instantly sorry when his friend's face began to redden. Possy didn't believe in ...
— When I Grow Up • Richard E. Lowe
... it best to preserve, as far as possible, the spirit of the original by the employment of mundane colloquialisms; the result, in spite of many regrettable trivialities, will, it is believed, be of interest to students of Cosmic Sociology. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... along Market street with the procession of people that passes all day, ah, how shall I express it? It is thrilling and it is amusing; it is cosmic and it is puny. It is often ridiculous and always sublime. Sometimes when we are in most of a hurry the consciousness of the procession will come to us. It is as though we were one of a moving crowd that never began and will never end. ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... nature which produce a particular species of persons, of whom he is the centre, and who group around him ex necessitate, in obedience to that mysterious law of gravitation which regulates the moral being no less than the cosmic atom. To undertake "the act of the 2nd of December,"—to execute it, and to complete it, he needed these men, and he had them. Now he is surrounded by them; these men form his retinue, his court, mingling their radiance with his. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... was deemed worth while to argue against them. Kepler and Newton had stirred men's minds by their account of the prodigious scale upon which the mechanism of the Universe was constructed, and Laplace had already enunciated the theory according to which the cosmic bodies were originally formed in obedience to the law of gravitation by the condensation of rotating nebulous spheres. And there were those who used these discoveries of astronomy to cast doubts upon the likelihood that the Divine ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the financial heavens happened—it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... played all sorts of wild pranks, and at school worked earnestly for one teacher only, often found me toiling late at night for hours with burning head over a profound creation—I called it The Poem of the World—in which I tried to represent the origin of cosmic ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is the product of a miscarriage, especially a concealed miscarriage. In this case it is not merely the man who is threatened or killed, it is the whole country, it is the sky itself which suffers. By a curious association of ideas a physiological fact causes cosmic troubles!" As for the disastrous effect which a miscarriage may have on the whole country I will quote the words of a medicine-man and rain-maker of the Ba-Pedi tribe: "When a woman has had a miscarriage, when she has allowed her blood to flow, and has hidden the child, it is enough to cause ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... either in Russian literature or in Russian life itself. There is no other single work in the modern literature of any language that carries with it the wealth of associations which the Inspector-General does to the educated Russian. The Germans have their Faust; but Faust is a tragedy with a cosmic philosophic theme. In England it takes nearly all that is implied in the comprehensive name of Shakespeare to give the same sense of bigness that a Russian gets from the ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... stand behind you." She was inspired with the idea of making America in the high sense American and saw in the young genius a good ally. The chance was embraced and John Fiske after that dipped only fitfully into philosophical themes, writing, however, The Destiny of Man, The Idea of God, Cosmic Roots of Loveland Self-sacrifice, and Life Everlasting. He gave his main strength, to a thing worth while, the establishment in America of Anglo-Saxon freedom. Would he have served the world better had he adhered ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... he walked briskly. Ten blocks away he came to a building roofing four square blocks. Over the massive doorway, set into the beryllium steel, was a map of the Solar System, a map that served as a cosmic clock, tracing the movement of the planets as they swung in their long arcs around the Sun. The Solar System was straddled by glowing, golden letters. They ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... colossal whisperings. Slowly it withdrew, sob by sob, into whatever great bosom had birthed it, until it whimpered deadly whispers of wrath and as equally seductive whispers of delight, striving still to be heard, to convey some cosmic secret, some understanding of infinite import and value. It dwindled to a ghost of sound that had lost its menace and promise, and became a thing that pulsed on in the sick man's consciousness for minutes after it had ceased. When he could ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... world war progressed, the more did it lose the character of the work of individual men. It assumed rather the character of a cosmic event, taking more and more from the effectiveness ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... no regulative or coercive intelligence such as the Biblical God is conceived to be. Whatever is, is one. And it is, in the special Spinozistic sense, supremely perfect because absolutely real. There is, considered in its totality, no lack or defect in Nature. There can be, therefore, no cosmic purposes, for such purposes would imply that Nature is yet unfinished, or unperfected, that is, not completely real. Something that cannot possibly be true of an absolutely ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... model with blood and breath, with vigour and variety, which not merely informed but transformed it. David and Bethsabe, Doctor Faustus, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, are chaotic enough, but they are of the chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one knows how natural it is to childhood ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... power that flashed up within him a daimon. He was himself the product of this daimon. It seemed to him as though another being had entered him and taken possession of his organs, a being standing between his physical personality and the all-ruling cosmic power, the divinity. ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in its veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks, sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... makes much of the three cosmic laws. Our earth, by a form of self-love called molecular attraction, ceases to be scattered dust, and takes on the shape of a rich and beautiful planet. But self-loved, our earth is also sun-loved, and drawn by invisible ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... muzzle velocity of 2360 ft. per second or 8-1/2 million feet per hour. But the speed of the snail when magnified ten million times would render it 200 million ft. per hour or 24 times faster than the fastest cannon shot. We may next turn to the cosmic movement for a parallel: A point in equator whirls round at the rate of 1037 miles per hour. But a snail with the magnified speed would beat the earth by going round 40 times during the period the earth ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... reddening and stiffening into something closely akin to a blinding rage. "Mr. Opdyke, believe me: your poor, broken body is only the outer guise of your erring mind. Dismiss your error; throw yourself unresistingly into the vast and placid pool of the Cosmic Ego, and you will arise from your bed of pain, a cured ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... high above the cenotaph in which the roses and rapture of our youth lie entombed in one red burial blent, we see the shimmering strands of St. Martin's Summer drawn athwart the happenless days of Autumn, with the dewdrops of cosmic unction sparkling in the rays of a sunshine never yet seen on land or sea, but reflecting as in a magic mirror that far off El Dorado, that land where Summer always is "i-cumen in," for which each and all of us feel a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... came a flash of lightning, followed by a crack like that of a cosmic whip-lash, and a ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... social position. I did not deceive myself as to its value in the cosmic scheme, but it was one of the pleasant things to which I was born, just as I was born to good food and wines and unpatched boots and the morning hot water brought into my bedroom. I liked it. I suspect that it has fled into eternity with ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... the whirling mass holding a naked child in one hand and in the other a gleaming sword. A bear crouched at her feet, and all about her swirled and glowed a multitudinous host of tiny atoms which sang all together, "We are the will of God." Atom wedded atom, and chemical married chemical, and the cosmic dance went on in changing, changeless measure, until my head sang ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... condensed, that it broke up into that wonderful group of harmoniously rolling balls we call planets and satellites, and that then each of these underwent its appointed metamorphosis, until at last our own share of the cosmic vapour passed into that condition in which we first meet with definite records of its state, and in which it has since, with comparatively ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... are this Straussian God, whose hobby is to err and to fail, and this Straussian man, who must atone for this erring and failing. Here, indeed, one hears "a faint ring of infinite import"; here flows Strauss's cosmic soothing oil; here one has a notion of the rationale of all becoming and all natural laws. Really? Is not our universe rather the work of an inferior being, as Lichtenberg suggests?—of an inferior being who did not quite understand his business; ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to embody the dominant moral and intellectual tendencies, as he saw them in history and his own times. Satan, the demiurgos, is to him no theological devil, but a princely character, the "Lord of Necessity," the non-moral, irresistible, cosmic force of physical creation. He demands, expressing the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... development from a relatively uniform condition to a relative complexity. From the greatest solar system down to the smallest blade of grass, everything in the universe has taken its present shape and form through this cosmic process of evolution. Our planet earth has gradually evolved, perhaps out of a nebulous mass which existed at first in a gaseous state. The sun, moon, stars, satellites and other planets have come into existence by going ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... a peal of sound that might have been the shouting of some playful god hurling great suns through the net of stars. It was like the deepest notes of all the organs in the world combined in one; summoning, majestic, cosmic! ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... grey eyes, but found there nothing to contradict, nothing to supplement the indifference of her words. There was no lurking sparkle of humour, no acknowledgment of kindness. There was a something, but he could not understand it, for his poor shapeless soul might not read the cosmic mystery embodied in their depths. He stammered—who had never known himself stammer before, broke the joints of an ill-fitted answer, swept the tiles with the long feather in his hat, and found himself parted from her, with the feeling that he had not of himself left her, but had been ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... battled its way to complete predominance. The lesser themes were drowned or absorbed. Mr. Britling returned from the role of an incompetent automobilist to the role of a soul naked in space and time wrestling with giant questions. These cosmic solicitudes, it may be, are the last penalty of irreligion. Was Huxley right, and was all humanity, even as Mr. Britling, a careless, fitful thing, playing a tragically hopeless game, thinking too slightly, moving too ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... must have known, for he has portrayed him with matchless art. "But Othello was a mere monograph; Lear is a cosmic picture. Shakespeare turns from Othello to Lear in consequence of the necessity which the poet feels to supplement and round out his beginning." Othello is noble chamber music; Lear is a symphony played by a gigantic orchestra. It is the noblest of all the tragedies, for in it ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... conditions of social progress than the late Professor Huxley in his essay on Evolution and Ethics. The gradual strengthening of the social bond by the practise of self-restraint in the interests of society he called the ethical process, and he showed that social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution of this ethical process. This action he compares to that of a gardener in clearing a patch of waste ground. If he relaxes his efforts to maintain the state of art within the garden, weeds will overrun ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... first note we make of the gospel of Spinoza. But if any one thinks that the sacred word "gospel" is here misused, and that such teaching is fatal to piety, let him turn to the 104th Psalm and read, from Spinoza's point of view, the cosmic vision of the Hebrew seer. True, we can think no longer of the supernatural carpenter who works on "the beams of his chambers" above, or of the mythical engineer who digs deep in the darkness to "lay ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... the nature of morality, the inspiration for character, the solution of human destiny, are not sought outside in some sort of cosmic relationship, but within, either in the experience of the superman, the genius or the hero, or, as later, in the collective experience and consciousness of the group. Thus this, too, throws man back upon himself, makes a new exaltation of personality in sharpest contrast to the scholastic ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... mighty cosmic forces arrests his thought. Everything in the material universe is changing, transient; all is in a state of flux, of motion, of perpetual disintegration or re-integration. But there is one thing fixed and abiding—that which we call spirit—and amid all uncertainty, one truth is certain—that ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... such grounds it is that those who held The stuff of things is fire, and out of fire Alone the cosmic sum is formed, are seen Mightily from true reason to have lapsed. Of whom, chief leader to do battle, comes That Heraclitus, famous for dark speech Among the silly, not the serious Greeks Who search for truth. For ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... upswept from a face that had never been beautiful but which was alive with something rarer than mere beauty: she possessed, at the brink of fifty, a charm and smartness that many women half her age might have envied, and she knew more about cosmic rays than any ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper
... breathed, all right, but it was nothing they'd had to do in order to live. It gave them nothing their incredible metabolism couldn't scrounge up out of rock or cosmic rays or interstellar gas or simply do without for a few thousand years. If the human body is a furnace, then the Zen body is a feeder pile. Maybe that, I thought, was ...
— Zen • Jerome Bixby
... on Natural Selection for its existence, but must be a consequence of the fundamental chemical and physical nature of living things. The study of Variation had from the first shown that an orderliness of this kind was present. The bodies and the properties of livings things are cosmic, not chaotic. No matter how low in the scale we go, never do we find the slightest hint of a diminution in that all-pervading orderliness, nor can we conceive an organism existing for a moment in any other state. Moreover not only does this order prevail in normal forms, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... between two railroads seemed very small compared with two minutes forty seconds of observation of a total eclipse. One was terrestrial, the other cosmic. ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... spending. But for some mysterious reason this arrangement did not appeal to you, and you accordingly go forth daily to the office and return therefrom with money. The theory of your daily excursion is firmly based in the inherent nature of things. The theory is the fundamental cosmic one that money is made in order that money may be spent—either at once or later. Even the miser conforms to this theory, for he only saves in obedience to the argument that the need of spending in the future may be more imperious than is the need ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... that you and Alice didn't," he said. "I knew there was a very sick woman involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They've had a lot of trouble with it, I believe—some say its spores come from outside the world with the cosmic dust—and now it seems to have been carried to Atla-Hi. Let's hope they've found the answer this time. Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some water ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... beside me, whispering With lips derisive: "Thou that wouldst forego— What god assured thee that the cup I bring Globes not in every drop the cosmic show, All that the insatiate heart of man can wring From life's long ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship's air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like ...
— The Stoker and the Stars • Algirdas Jonas Budrys (AKA John A. Sentry)
... a chaos of canyons and divides which did not yield themselves to any rational topographical plan. It was as if they had been flung there by some cosmic joker. In vain he sought for a creek or feeder that flowed truly south toward the McQuestion and the Stewart. Then came a mountain storm that blew a blizzard across the riff-raff of high and shallow divides. Above timber-line, fireless, for two ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... demanded, which was about every three months. There were three girls in the family—Mary, Everina and Eliza—all above the average in intelligence. Whether there is any such thing in Nature as justice for the individual is a question, but cosmic justice is beyond cavil. The stupidity of a parent is often a very precious factor in the evolution of his children. He teaches them by antithesis. So if a man can not be useful and strong, all is not lost: he can still serve humanity as a horrible ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... humans send forth our thoughts, exploring every region of the world—be this "of use" or not! And in thus probing the depths of our own subject do we not come up against those weightier questions which are of Cosmic importance? Does not Nature here fix man's eye with her own gaze—granting him new riches? For rich, indeed, is this gift that proves to him that not he alone is dowered with a soul[25]—nor dwelling in ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... to talk about Than a window in Greenwich Village And hyacinths sprouting Like little puce poems out of a sick soul? Some cosmic hearsay— As to whom—it can't be Mars! put the moon—that way.... Or what winds do to canyons Under the tall stars... Or even How that old roue, Neptune, Cranes over his bald-head moons At the twinkling ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... of fog and then began slowly to move his finger around and gradually to increase the speed of his finger until at last he whirled that bank of fog into a solid ball of fire, and it went rolling through the universe, burning its way through other cosmic banks of fog, until it condensed the moisture without, and fell in floods of rain upon the heated surface and cooled the outward crust. Then the internal flames burst through the cooling crust and threw up the mountains and made the hills of the valley of this wonderful world of ours. ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... square miles of that material; ribbed, channelled, torn and quarried, in this manner, by the ever-busy elements, for a million of Ages past! Chiefly by the Elbe himself, since he got to be a River, and became cosmic and personal; ceasing to be a mere watery chaos of Lakes and Deluges hereabouts. For the Sandstone was of various degrees of hardness; tenacious as marble some parts of it, soft almost as sand other parts. And the primordial diluviums ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down. Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!—I understand the instinct, my friend,—it is cosmic,—it is planetary,—it is a conservative ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... this cosmic dust continuously, but the earth now never parts with a particle of its mass. The consequence is inevitable; the mass of the earth must be growing, and though the change may be a small one, yet to those who have studied Darwin's treatise on "Earth-worms," or to those who are acquainted ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... to view, filling me with unknown comfort. Blue, an incomparably beautiful blue, is the most characteristic color for this sphere. When I see blue I know that all is well, that I am going right and safely, that divine favor and support surround me. Blue is the cosmic color, the color of sky and ocean, of the vaster universal life, just as green is the telluric color, the color of the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... month of May on the wooded summits near Heidelberg called forth this song. The giant magnitude of the starry heavens awakened in the poet to an overpowering degree the feeling of the greatness of cosmic life; he feels the insignificance of his own individual existence, he feels as if it were in danger of being extinguished by the vastness of the great All; but then sleep comes as a kindly nurse and draws her protecting circle about the meager flame of individual ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... approach to that clear, pure white color in the aura—mentally, of course. This will leave the patient in an inspired, exalted, illuminated state of mind and soul, which will be of great benefit to him, and will also have the effect of reinvigorating the healer by cosmic energy or para-prana. ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... know were free and theres an end on it! He prefers Lamarcks, The will is, in truth, never free. He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Natures great progression; a result of the interaction of organism and environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere product of organization; living ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... word descriptive of my sister, for it is a thing of manner from a nature elevated and noble, but it was not the word for Madame Barras. The woman was a lure. I mean the term in its large and catholic sense. I mean the bait of a great cosmic impulse—the most subtle and the most persistent of which ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... be, but must be, taken seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such comedies one laughs with the heroes, and not at them. The humour which steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading. Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of comedies ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... resemblance? The continent is a great giant, and the northern half holds the head and shoulders. You can count the pulse of the giant wherever the tide runs up a creek; but if you want to look at the giant's tongue, you must go to Niagara. If there were such a thing as a cosmic physician, I believe he could tell the state of the country's health, and the prospects of the mortality for the coming season, by careful inspection of the great tongue, which Niagara is putting out for him, and has been showing to mankind ever since the first flint-shapers chipped their ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Bihar as compared with the spirit of revolution in Bengal proper. The microbe of anarchy finds an excellent culture-ground in minds which grovel before the goddess Kali. But the unrest cannot be isolated from other manifestations of cosmic energy, which flash from mind to mind and keep the world in turmoil. Every force of nature tends to be periodic. The heart's systole and diastole; alternations of day and night, of season and tide, are reflected in ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... Pythagoras himself is of course the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 that the square on the hypotenuse of any right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. But Proclus also attributes to him, besides the theory of proportionals, the construction of the 'cosmic figures', the five ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... supernatural interposition in mundane affairs, as in the case of the devotees of the anthropomorphic cults, or merely the tendency to give a teleological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a meliorative trend to the cosmic process, as in Tennyson's "through the ages one increasing purpose runs," tends, by retarding the prompt perception of relations of material cause and effect, to lower the ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... first advances, as by right supreme, With frosted locks adrift, and eyes a-dream, With quick short footfalls, and an arm a-swing, As to some cosmic rhythm heard to ring From Putney to Parnassus, a brief bard. (In stature, not in song!) Though passion-scarred, Porphyrogenitus at least he looks; Haughty as one who rivalry scarce brooks; Unreminiscent now of youthful rage, Almost "respectable," and well-nigh sage, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... behind the idea of a limited and personal God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the cosmic process generally, the human part of that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through whole centuries institutions and ideas and ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... upward from the inorganic to the organic creation; for not only do we behold the entire vast spectacle thrilled through and through by one Life, but we are also enabled to discern something of the august Purpose which progressively realises itself in all the phases of the cosmic process. That the God revealed by the universe must transcend the universe in order to be in any real sense its Creator, is self-evident; but that it is His own Energy which pervades it, a present Power operating from within—in other words, that He is immanent in the world, as well ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... finally, that ether-friction, if it exist, or, in default of that, meteoric friction, must ultimately bring the earth back to the sun. But in all these prognostications there are possible compensating factors that vitiate the estimates and leave the exact results in doubt. The last word of the cosmic science of our generation is a prophecy of evil—if annihilation be an evil. But it is left for the science of another generation to point out more clearly the exact terms in which the prophecy is most likely ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... Sociology," published fifteen years later. Its publication at this late date gave it an unfortunate vitality long after its main tenets had been disproved in the biological laboratory. Germ-cell and body-cell functions were not separated. Arguments from social structures, from cosmic, natural and human history, much of it deduced by analogy, were jumbled together in a fashion which seems amazing to us now, though common enough thirty years ago. It was not a wild hypothesis in 1888, its real date, but its repeated republication (in the original and in the works ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... conflict and for some time afterward, all centre more or less upon the social problems which then agitated Russia. But with Andreyev the treatment of all questions tends to assume a universal aspect. He envisages phenomena from a broad, cosmic point of view; he beholds things sub specie aeternitatis. The philosophical tendency of his mind, though amply displayed even in works like "Savva"—which is purely a character and social drama—manifests itself chiefly by his strong propensity for such subjects as those ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, more than he loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing.... From somewhere sound accents of an authority not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a thinker of the widest views to contract himself ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... excellent accord these tenors and basses, so blameless in their living, lifted up their voices and sang they "would that the wavelets of ocean were wavelets of sparkling champagne!" It was a blithe and rippling morceau if one could forget the well-nigh cosmic depravity of it; but Miss Caroline, it appeared, was not able to forget. She confided as much to Marcella Eubanks and Aunt Delia McCormick, intimating that while she was doubly desirous to be pleased because of her position as an outsider, she ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... Space Cadets, and we are proud to say Our fight for right will never cease. Like a cosmic ray, we light the way ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... really odd thing about England in the nineteenth century is this—that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads; they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright, great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a demagogue of fiction, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... in 1802, wrote, 'In every living being there exists a capacity for endless diversity of form. Each possesses the power of adapting its organization to the variations of the external world; and it is this power, called into activity by cosmic changes, which has enabled the simple zoophytes of the primitive world to climb to higher and higher stages of organization, and has brought endless variety into nature.' There you have your evolution of Man from the amoeba all complete whilst Nelson was still alive ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... to geigercount the radioactivity in the carbon. You see, all living things like the cotton in the rags the paper is made of absorb the radioactive carbon fourteen that is formed in the upper atmosphere by cosmic radiation. Then it begins to decay and we can measure very accurately the amount, which gives us ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland
... them in imagination, in a grey-green stormy sea, out of reach of human banalities. I can feel the cold spray as I paint and the sense of power and rest in the elemental forces—an almost Wagnerian feeling of great Cosmic Realities.' ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... the seismic, astral, and cosmic disturbances are graphically described, as befitting the death of a god. "The veil of the temple was rent ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... a million idiot minds. The coursing of cosmic-ray particles. The wrenching of Earth's magnetic and gravitational fields. Old and sluggish memories were renewed, memories meant to be buried for all of ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... encouragement to remain, and did remain, feeding upon the life found here in the shape of toads and lizards—to carry the theory forward a step—even as the toads and lizards—to carry it back again—fed upon the insects which they in their turn found here. Then along came other forms of life, higher in the cosmic setting, and these, finding encouragement in the presence of the earlier arrivals, fed upon them and remained. And so on up, to the forerunners of our present-day animals—coyotes and prairie-dogs. And after these, primitive man—to find encouragement in the coyotes and prairie-dogs—and to ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... when she had entered Cordova's service two years ago she had been positively cadaverous. She herself said that her appearance had been the result of living many years with the celebrated Madame Bonanni, who was a whirlwind, an earthquake, a phenomenon, a cosmic force. No one who had lived with her in her stage days had ever grown fat; it was as much as a very strong constitution could do not ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... horizon: the gentle wind blowing through the molten darkness; overhead, the great vault without arch or keystone, of dim liquid blue, and sown with worlds so far removed they could only shine; and, on the shore, the centre of all the cosmic order, a misshapen heap of man, a tumulus in which lay buried a live and lovely soul! The one pillar of its chapter house had given way, and the downrushing ruin had so crushed and distorted it, that thenceforth until some resurrection should ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious lords. Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable element in things, or that the library had been handed down from father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by devious lines of descent. It was a tradition in the family that its men should be scholars and ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... neither light nor shade. The colour of everything is perfectly discernible, but there is no lustre in the world as yet, though yonder the bloat sun is already visible in the blue and red east, which is like a cosmic bruise; and upon a sudden you find it just possible to stay awake long enough to ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... symbols. The snake is everywhere in his poems the incarnation of good, and if we ask why, there is probably no other reason than that the Hebrew mythology against which he revolted, had taken it as the symbol of evil. The legitimate Gods in his Pantheon are always in the wrong. He belongs to the cosmic party of opposition, and the Jupiter of his Prometheus is morally a temporarily omnipotent devil. Like Godwin he felt that the God of orthodoxy was a "tyrant," and he revolted against Him, because he condemned the world which ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... long, pitiless day of fierce, devouring sunlight, the moon glided over the fainting world with peace and healing—like an angel over a battle-field.... The two are mystic in every Indian ideal of beauty, and alike cosmic—woman and the moon. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... regulates and strictly adapts to those purposes, by the attainment of which, on the one hand, the creature itself subsists, but, on the other, the world continues. The artist leads a similar dream life, naturally only as an artist, and probably from the same cause; for the cosmic laws hardly come any more clearly into his field of vision than the organic laws come into that of the beast, and yet he cannot round off and complete any of his images without going back to them. Why then should nature not do for him what she does for the beast? ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... abruptly. It was his first shell, and it was a thousand times more terrible than he had imagined. It was a rip-snorting, sky- splitting sound as of a cosmic fabric being torn asunder between the hands of some powerful god. For all the world it was like the roughest tearing across of sheets that were thick as blankets, that were broad as the earth ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... society, and is initiated as a member. | | | | Set in the Chicago Complex, a multi-level city with | | individual subway cars and automatic libraries, NECROMANCER | | is science fiction in the popular cosmic | | style—thought-provoking and entertaining. ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... flooded the earth with effulgent glory, and each little star began to wonder who I was, to the loftiest turret of his quite commodious castle this dwarf would climb, and muse upon sciology and the cosmic forces. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... blackboard and creaking chalk, to the romance of an old flower garden where blossoms flirted with each other across the borders, and birds made love in every bough, was enough to freshen the spirit of even a John Jay Queerington. His cosmic conscience, which usually worked overtime, striving to solve problems which Nature had given up, seemed to be asleep. His fine, serious face relaxed somewhat from its austerity, and as the days passed he read less ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... me possessed, He shambles forth in cosmic guise; He is the Jester and the Jest, And he the Text ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... the cause of truth and honour, we may import a profitable lesson from the highly unscientific region of public life. There a man does not take long to find out that he is opposed by some who are abler and better than himself. And, in order to understand the cosmic force and the true connection of ideas, it is a source of power, and an excellent school of principle, not to rest until, by excluding the fallacies, the prejudices, the exaggerations which perpetual contention and the consequent precautions breed, we have made out for ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... sounds, and words by which beautiful sights and sounds are suggested. Nay, there has always lurked in men's minds, and expressed itself in the metaphors of men's speech, an intuition that the Beautiful is in some manner one of the primordial and, so to speak, cosmic powers of the world. The theories of various schools of mental science, and the practice of various schools of art, the practice particularly of the persons styled by themselves aesthetes and by others decadents, have indeed attempted to reduce man's relations ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... your glasses and tie them, telescope-fashion, to a window-ledge or railing. Seat yourself in an easy position and focus on the moon. Shut out all earthly scenes from your mind and imagine yourself wandering amid those arid wastes. What a scene of cosmic desolation! What vast deserts, and gaping craters of barren rock! The cold, steel-white planet seems of all things most ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... instrument which the intellect of man could produce would really succeed in conveying sounds which, if they exist at all, are born in the vast cosmic areas that envelope our earth and its atmosphere, he believed to be most improbable. Still, such a thing was possible, for what is not? Moreover, the world itself as it rushes on its fearful journey across ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... and inspiring sight Of cosmic grandeur of the universe, A sense of vague and overwhelming awe; Of inconceivable immensity, The being's inmost recess permeates; And man, the atom in comparison, In spellbound admiration, mutely stands; With speculative meditation, dwells On that most solemn of impressive thoughts, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... die in the face of the folly I read and see around me. Know you what certain obscure writers are now about in magazines? They are vindicating the cosmic forces, whitewashing Mother Nature after Huxley's Romanes lecture! He told the truth, and Nature loved him for it; but now come hysterical religious ciphers who squeak boldly forth in print that Nature is the mother of altruism, that self-sacrifice is her first law! One genius observes that 'tis ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... The unprecedented cosmic phenomena which occurred on the 22d and 27th days of the month of July, and which were felt over the entire surface of the globe, have left a permanent effect of such magnitude on the position of the earth's axis in space and the duration of the period of the rotation, ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... gravitation, and chemical affinity do not think. They follow certain fixed laws which we have no power to alter. Therefore we are confronted at the outset by a broad distinction between two modes of Motion—the Movement of Thought and the Movement of Cosmic Energy—the one based upon the exercise of Consciousness and Will, and the other based upon Mathematical Sequence. This is why that system of instruction known as Free Masonry starts by erecting the two symbolic pillars Jachin and Boaz—Jachin so called from the root "Yak" meaning "One," indicating ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... nothing. Then, in an instant, the blackness vanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunning splendor that Kieran could ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... death-dealing fingers; and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would be no one to hear them if they cried out; there would be ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... social conditions. Exerting to the full his gift of mental discipline, he rejected the promptings of prejudice and of sentiment, and brought his sense of analysis to bear on his subject with the cold, callous detachment of a scientist studying some cosmic phenomenon. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... and it cannot die. It may be obscured by the clouds of falsehood, or buried in the debris of brutish ignorance, but it can never be destroyed. It exists in every atom, lives in every flower and flames in every star. When the heavens and the earth shall pass away and the universe return to cosmic dust, divine truth will stand unscathed amid the crash of matter and the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and from the City hovered a cosmic spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... walked on water without sinking, and I had distinct understanding that matters seemed to be disintegrating and dissolving around me. I was frightened but self-conscious and quiet. I remained in this state for about three hours, my consciousness seeming to have reached almost cosmic greatness. I could have cured, I felt, any human ill, was filled with an absorbing altruistic desire to help suffering. It was tremendous and totally foreign to my everyday attitude. At the end of the day, ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... pointed out, that the nebular hypothesis is null without a creative act to produce the inequality of distribution of cosmic matter ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... by methodical training soon permitted of vocalization only in iambics. "Over There," "The Long, Long Trail," "Sons of America," were songs they sung of hope and not of sorrow. They connoted the Negro's reaction to the cosmic urge. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... heat of things we heard him say: "One may not really compare or contrast the literary emanations of Tolstoy and Kipling except as to the net human residuum. Difference in environment would preclude any cosmic psychology ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... furnace of gold, was absolutely calm. Overhead a few clouds blurred the sky. Beyond them the eternal march of the stars proceeded in the majesty of space, with billions of years in which to fulfil the cosmic ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... can hardly say they were ever absent. They are of those flaming thoughts the soul projects, splendid prophecies that become the light of all our science and all our day. Plato formulated these laws. Two thousand years after him, the cosmic brain of Swedenborg traced their working throughout the universal economies of matter and spirit, and Fourier endeavored to translate them into axioms of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various |
