"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that poor diversion, that miserable consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself—given ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... satisfactory line of distinction between the two, except that the one is a mere aggregation of the other. A germinal mass is only made up of germinal points—those considered as the least of any given whole—however infinitesimal they may be in theoretical statement. If any germinal point in germinal matter, therefore, be a bioplast, then every germinal point, to the extent of making up its entire mass, must be a bioplast; and the distinction between the two becomes merely verbal, and without generic signification. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... and examined the picture. It was almost finished, in that last stage where the artist can play with his creation, fondly touching and perfecting infinitesimal details, knowing that the thing has really been "pulled off." And it was triumphantly done! Even to Milly's untutored eyes, the triumph of it was indubitable. There the Russian stood on her thin, lithe haunches, her head tipped a little ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... for the mother, I was conscious of a growing warmth of toleration. And yet I wondered. Even while I spoke with her, she would doze off into a little sleep, and presently awake again without embarrassment; and this composure staggered me. And again, as I marked her make infinitesimal changes in her posture, savouring and lingering on the bodily pleasure of the movement, I was driven to wonder at this depth of passive sensuality. She lived in her body; and her consciousness was all sunk into and disseminated ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... teaching by such men was to throw many who would otherwise have resorted to observation and investigation back upon scholastic methods. Again reappears the old system of solving the riddle by phrases. In 1733, Dr. Theodore Arnold urged the theory of "models," and insisted that fossils result from "infinitesimal particles brought together in the creation to form the outline of all the creatures and objects upon and within the earth"; and Arnold's ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... "You are very weak, but shall have a bit." She went for it, returning with an infinitesimal portion ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... are constantly changing; the rough horse-trail of to-day becomes the stage-road of to-morrow and the railway of the day after. The conservative clinging to the old, so common in Europe, has no place in the New World; an apparently infinitesimal advantage will occasion a bouleversement that is ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... advantages of the place chosen by his captors for the meeting. Rolling hills surrounded the little pocket on all sides, and here and there a red scoria butte thrust its ugly height out of the plain. The chances of discovery were infinitesimal. ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surely this is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp; surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Our consciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: let us then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony of being at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaks and my moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... deeper and deeper into error by the complicated imperfections of their own science. But he who loves greatly possesses in his intuition the capacities of all instruments of observation which man has invented and applied to his use. The lenses of his eyes can magnify the infinitesimal detail to the dimensions of common things, and bring objects to his vision from immeasurable distances; the labyrinth of his ear can choose and distinguish amidst the harmonies and the discords of the world, muffling in its tortuous passages ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... dogmatic opinion is the acceptance of something that seems to be established by a course of reasoning, or by some proof, as for example, that atoms are elements of things, and that they are either homogeneous, or infinitesimal, or of some other description. Now we place each of these things sometimes in opposition to itself, and sometimes in opposition to each one of the others. For example, we place a custom in 148 opposition to a custom thus: some of the Ethiopians tattoo new-born ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with his industrial and financial exploits. But side by side with that history of inflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is another development, the change year by year from the shabby impecuniosity of the Camden Town lodging to the lavish munificence of the Crest Hill marble staircase and my aunt's golden bed, the bed that was facsimiled from Fontainebleau. And the odd thing is that as I come to ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... not. There are others whose mannerisms plague me too. For instance, TRUBERRY, whom I meet occasionally, has a wild and venomous habit of relating to me his infinitesimal jokelets. That I could pardon. But when, having related one, he bursts, as he always does, into a helpless suffocation of purple laughter, the savage within me awakes and I murder TRUBERRY in fancy to an accompaniment of refined and protracted tortures. Once, as I helped him on ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... always did those feelings which she felt it behoved her to understand once for all, she half discovered in it an element which only severe self-judgment would allow; it seemed to her that the fear was, in an infinitesimal degree, of herself, that, under other conditions, she might have known what it was to respond to the love thus offered her. For she neither scorned nor loathed the man, notwithstanding her abhorrence of his passion as devoted to herself. She wished him well; she even found herself ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... flavors, smells but few odors; his whole sensuous life is narrow and blunt, and his facts that are made up of the combination of sensuous impressions are few. In comparison, the civilized man has his vision extended away toward the infinitesimal and away toward the infinite; his perception of sound is multiplied to the comprehension of rapturous symphonies; his perception of taste is increased to the enjoyment of delicious viands; his perception of smell is developed ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... her curiously. He had no experience of children of that early age. His own daughters had been some years older before he began to notice them. He could but wonder at this quick and eager brain animating so infinitesimal a body. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... he would explain as due to an anomaly of development in the sexual organs. Fere makes no attempt to explain the presence of the sexual impulse in the congenital absence of the sexual glands; here, however, Munde intervenes with the suggestion that it is possible that in most cases "an infinitesimal trace of ovary" may exist, and preserve femininity, though insufficient ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and in another ten seconds the iron clanged behind her, shutting her off from husband and all present hope of succor. The chance of any rescuer entering the palace that night, whether by force or subtlety, was infinitesimal. ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... revelation of life,—the eternal battle of man between the spirit and the flesh, between the seen and the unseen, the struggle infinite and always. Where life is, that must be. And the vision of man's little, misshapen existence,—the incomplete and infinitesimal unit he is,—and also the significance of him,—this material atom, the symbol, the weapon of the spirit, shone forth before them. This the woman had felt in giving herself to him, that the spirit within was freed by the ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... joint-heiresses; but that Lady Temple—the most incredible part of the story—had blown up the whole affair, made her way into the penetralia of the asylum, and rescued two female 'prentices, so nearly whipped to death that it took an infinitesimal quantity of Rachel's homoeopathy to demolish one entirely, and that the virtuous public was highly indignant that there was no inquest nor trial for manslaughter; but that it was certain that Rachel had been extremely ill ever since. Poor ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an opening—a good one—to go into business, as he desired, upon a liberal scale; but he found vent for the explosion of one very hallucinating idea—his six hundred dollars, as a cash capital, was a most infinitesimal circumstance, a mere "flea bite;" would do very well for an amateur in the cake and candy, pea-nut or vegetable business, but was hardly sufficient to create a sensation among the monied folks of Milk street, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... of combustion from coal gas (which are steam and carbonic acid mixed with an infinitesimal quantity of sulphur) are, proportionately, far less injurious to animal life than the products from an equal illuminating power derived from either oil or candles. They are, however, it is certain, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... fire-eating declarations, soon fled to the Legation Quarter and besought an asylum. His men held out until two in the afternoon, when their resistance collapsed and the cease-fire sounded. The number of casualties on both sides was infinitesimal, and thus after eleven days' farce the Manchu dynasty found itself worse off than ever before. It is necessary, however, not to lose sight of the main problem in China, which is the establishment of a united government and a cessation of internecine warfare,—issues which ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... back in its place scrupulously. He did so now, but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never have occasion to use that box any more. The vividness of the thought checked him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on the small object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that chain us to the weary round of life. He released it at last, and letting himself fall on the settee, listened for the ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... come to the conclusion that it cannot be so applied, simply because when the essence of pine-apple is smelled at, the vapor produces an involuntary action of the larynx, producing cough, when exceedingly dilute. Even in the infinitesimal portions it still produces disagreeable irritation of the air-pipes, which, if prolonged, such as is expected if used upon a handkerchief, is followed by intense headache. It is obvious, therefore, that the legitimate ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... is, of course, absolutely black and devoid of any form of light save the faint twinklings of the far-off stars. Without the surface of some globe to reflect the sun's rays, no light of any kind would be possible; so that if life were conveyed across space, from star to star, upon infinitesimal specks of dust, under the influence of light pressure, as postulated by Arrhenius (Worlds in the Making, pp. 212-30), this life must exist, and in a sense originate, in the blackness of inter-stellar space.[10] And, finally, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... the great discoveries, made! How like the egotism of the infinitesimal mind of the human ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... cause disappears when it is considered that any check to the motion of bodies revolving round a centre of attraction causes them to draw closer to it, thus shortening their periods and quickening their circulation. If space were filled with a resisting medium capable of impeding, even in the most infinitesimal degree, the swift course of the planets, their orbits should necessarily be, not ellipses, but very close elliptical spirals along which they would slowly, but inevitably, descend into the burning lap of the sun. The circumstance that no such tendency can be traced in their revolutions ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... microscopic fungus—a mere infinitesimal ovoid particle, which finds space and duration enough to multiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... for the most part, but two kinds of men living in it, living on opposite sides of the same truths glaring at each other. On the one hand the anaemically spiritual, broad, big, pallid men, and on the other the funny, infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... harmless. It is in reality even more insidious, being a stepping-stone to vice, a gradual initiation into desperate play. Just as addiction to absinthe is imbibed by potions quite innocuous in the beginning, so the new Casino at Nice schools the gamester from the outset, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees preparing him for ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... watergates. Their local importance is comparatively small. They are important or not according to whether they are on trade routes, and easily accessible. An infinitesimal part of the trade that flows through New Orleans originates or terminates there. The back country gets the bulk of the business. The development of the harbor is for the service of the ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... majority of people are being swamped by the spectacular side of the business. It was very largely my fear of being so swamped myself that made me reluctant to go as a spectator to the front. I knew that my chances of being hit by a bullet were infinitesimal, but I was extremely afraid of being hit by some too vivid impression. I was afraid that I might see some horribly wounded man or some decayed dead body that would so scar my memory and stamp such horror into me as to reduce ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... of area, Graustark is but a mite in the great galaxy of nations. Glancing over the map of the world, one is almost sure to miss the infinitesimal patch of green that marks its location. One could not be blamed if he regarded the spot as a typographical or topographical illusion. Yet the people of this quaint little land hold in their hearts a love and a confidence that is not surpassed by any of the lordly monarchs ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... about setting the town on fire; any coward could have yelped about the danger of it, and improbability of success. It needed adventurers to size up instantly all the odds against the idea, recognize the one infinitesimal chance, and plump for ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... interesting story. It hit me right between the eyes. I knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period and ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... keep the money," he grinned, wrenching from her fingers the plain gold band he had given her mother as a wedding ring, as well as another, bigger, broader, showier, and set with two infinitesimal white ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... During the infinitesimal interim between the shock which hurled him into the air, and the closing of the waters of Blood River over his head, Bill Carmody's brain received a confusion of flashlike impressions: The futile shouting and waving of arms upon the man-crowded bank of the river; the sudden roar of the rapid; ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Protestant states of northern Germany.[Footnote: Another source of weakness in Saxony was the custom in the Wettin family of dividing the inheritance among members of the family. Such was the origin of the present infinitesimal states of Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... a vegetable or animal life. Besides an equally strong desire for specifics, and a determined opposition to compound medicines, Boyle, who was born the year of Bacon's death, and inherited the mantle of the great philosopher, manifests a strong belief in the power of the infinitesimal dose. Neither Bacon nor Boyle, however, were medical men by profession. But Sydenham followed them, according to Dr. Russell, in their tendency towards specifics. It is almost needless to mention Jenner's victory over the small-pox as, in the eyes ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... maiden, was suddenly unmasked in profile. Though not quite in the front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed her to great advantage. Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart- burning, and almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company. Mrs. Hob had said her say at Cauldstaneslap. "Daft-like!" she had pronounced it. "A jaiket that'll no meet! Whaur's the sense of a jaiket that'll no button upon you, if it should come to be ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of space intervening; countless throngs of citizens and carriages scarcely bigger than ants to the eye; broad sheets of water, dotted with steamers, brigs, barks, wood-barges and row-boats, still infinitesimal in the distance; long rows of trees, forming a foliage to some of the principal promenades, with glimpses of gardens and shrubbery at remote intervals; canals and dismal green swamps—not all at one sweep of the eye, but visible from time to time in the course of an afternoon's ramble, are ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... necessarily be frail?" But Calvin intensely aggravates whatever there is of difficulty: for he supposes God to have created the most precious thing on earth in unstable equilibrium, so as to tipple over irrecoverably at the first infinitesimal touch, and with it wreck for ever the spiritual hopes of all Adam's posterity. Surely all nature proclaims, that if God planted any spiritual nature at all in man, it was in stable equilibrium, able to right itself ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... The poison has evidently been administered in infinitesimal doses. But you cannot too soon withdraw yourself from all those who now surround you. Life is not to be tampered with. The poisoner may take it into his ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... power. What was the use of having a strong-handed man at the head of the Government if bombs still continued to terrify the country? Moreover, he had displeased the Chamber by his voracious appetite, which had prevented him from allowing others more than an infinitesimal share of all the good things. And this time he had been succeeded by Vignon, although the latter's programme of reforms had long made people tremble. He, Vignon, was honest certainly, but of all these reforms he had only been able to carry out a few insignificant ones, for ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... It was vain to tell the common people that the mutilators of the coin were causing far more misery than all the highwaymen and housebreakers in the island. For, great as the aggregate of the evil was, only an infinitesimal part of that evil was brought home to the individual malefactor. There was, therefore, a general conspiracy to prevent the law from taking its course. The convictions, numerous as they might seem, were few ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... door, when he saw an unwelcome sight which brought him to a sudden stop. That sight was a long feathery tail, waving above a clump of ferns to the left. Was it possible that the monster was loose? The gate was between Mr Bastian and that tail, in an infinitesimal space of time. Ignorant of the presence of the enemy, the wind being in the wrong direction, Jack finished at leisure his inspection of the ferns, ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... element of free will to the infinitesimal, that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... confidence that if the Pope got the money it would not be expended for the benefit of Christendom; moreover, he did actually hand over four thousand pounds. In fact, he took the Church as he found it. There was but one almost infinitesimal curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges in his reign, necessitated by political considerations and accepted by the Pope, whereby the right of Sanctuary was ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... himself his dissent from this, and was silent a moment, thinking how this man's life was spent to one end; and desirable as he felt that end to be, he was of age now to feel a tinge of regret for all that had been and still was sacrificed to it. An infinitesimal sacrifice of personal feeling and convenience was demanded of him now, if he were to second St. Michael's attempt to keep Aymer from Aston House and teach him to permanently regard Marden Court ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... concerned in removing an infinitesimal speck from his left cuff. "Ah," he commented, "the Canned Meat Trust. What have you been doing ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Changes in the speed of air waves meet with specific response in the brain patterns tuned to receive impressions through the aural nerves, and so we distinguish differences in sound pitch. If we can realize the infinite delicacy of the mechanisms adapted to these infinitesimal variations in the speed and intensity of invisible and intangible stimuli, it will not be difficult to conceive the variations of brain patterns which render possible the specific responses to the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... closer with the Homoeopathists, and meeting them manfully on their own ground. 'We will not,' says he, 'give in to the absurdity of attempting to counteract a disease by a medicine that produces the same disease; but something good may be learned from your infinitesimal system. To that system you owe the fact that you are now at large: if you had given doses like ours of such medicines, you would have been in the hands of the turnkey or the mad-doctor long ago. Your cures have been effected by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... words of Phoebe rang in the ears of the big doctor as he bent over Mother Bab's sightless eyes and began the tedious operation. His hands moved skilfully, with infinite precision, cutting to the infinitesimal fraction of an inch. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... the chamber, to bring the country face to face with the facts as they are. The cabinet will fall amid a general outcry, there will be a few riots, but we shall have peace ... and peace, as you, monsieur, were saying a moment ago, peace without dishonour, at the price of an infinitesimal sacrifice of self-esteem, which will make France ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... which showed the clearest, though this was rather guesswork, since I could not see distinctly the fore-sight. I pulled, but either the cap or the powder had got a little damp on the journey and hung fire for the fraction of a second. In that infinitesimal time the devil—it is the best name I can give the thing—saw me, or perhaps it only saw the light gleaming on the barrel. At any rate it dropped the Kalubi, and as though some intelligence warned it what to expect, threw up its massive right arm—I remember how ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... down to hold on to the limber and think at the same time of the great game of which I had become an infinitesimal part. I was sitting on the right hand side of the limber close to the wheel and, before long, the effort to think and hold on at the same time was too much for me, and I fell into a fairly sound sleep, Sergeant Johnson, my companion, ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... said. "Let us begin with the assumption that the atom is an infinitesimal magnitude. Very good. Let us grant, then, that though it is imponderable and indivisible it must have a spacial content? You ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... AM'INES (3 syl.), the beautiful wife of Sidi Nouman. Instead of eating her rice with a spoon, she used a bodkin for the purpose, and carried it to her mouth in infinitesimal portions. This went on for some time, till Sidi Nouman determined to ascertain on what his wife really fed, and to his horror discovered that she was a ghoul, who went stealthily by night to the cemetery, and feasted on the freshly-buried ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... knowing and philosophical, and—Havelock Ellish, Martin, dear," she admonished him, pending a minute operation with an infinitesimal hairpin. "It isn't your lay a bit. Just concentrate your mind on one thing, and that's being ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... a fruitful theme, and I could be fluent for a week or two. Going? Well, luck go with you, of the sort you merit. I'd call you a cur, but there isn't a cur in all the world who wouldn't walk himself blind and lame to bite me in revenge for the insult I put upon him. Go—you infinitesimal! you epitome of unpitiable ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... thoughts—madness lay that way. Madness, and a watching demon that whispered of substance, and sought to guide his wanderings in the night. Hodder clung to the shell of reality, to the tiny panorama of the visible and the finite, to the infinitesimal gropings that lay recorded before him on the printed page. Let him examine these first, let him discover—despite the price—what warrant the mind of man (the only light now vouchsafed to him in his darkness) ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... extravagance, had run through every cent he had, and La Chance had saved him from having to live on Marcia's charity,—if she had any. There was no fear, either, of his being interfered with in the bonanza he had struck; for leaving out my infinitesimal share, Dudley was sole owner,—and he had bought a thousand acres mining concession from the Government for ten dollars an acre, which is the law when a potential mining district in unsurveyed territory is more than ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... that given by his opponents. It is probable enough that in many respects his views were truly patriotic. His methods, on the other hand, were callous to an altogether inhuman point. It is, in any case, quite certain that the value he placed on life was altogether infinitesimal. ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... for typographical blunders lay. In over twenty years' experience in handling copy I have only known one regular writer for the press who wrote as many words to a sheet as Field. That was David H. Mason, the tariff expert, whose handwriting was habitually so infinitesimal that he put more than a column of brevier type matter on a single page, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... were now things without a name. A moment of suspended animation followed Byrne's words. The sorceress with the spoon ceased stirring the mess in the iron pot, the very trembling of the other's head stopped for the space of breath. In this infinitesimal fraction of a second Byrne had the sense of being really on his quest, of having reached the turn of the path, almost within ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... attach a certain importance to her individual existence even while she realized the pettiness of it, comparatively speaking. She was an infinitesimal part, but the whole could not be without that part. Suddenly the religious instruction which she had drank in with her mother's milk took possession of her, but she had a breadth of outlook which would have terrified ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... primarily intended for use in detecting and measuring infinitesimal degrees of temperature, however remote, and its conception followed Edison's researches on the carbon telephone transmitter. Its principle depends upon the variable resistance of carbon in accordance ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... small, diminutive, little, narrow, short, tiny, inconsiderable, mean, paltry, slender, trifling, infinitesimal, microscopic, petty, slight, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... lightly touched upon the greatness of the Universe, in the cosmos of which our earth is but an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... slightest occurrence of any kind, that ever occurred, may be said to have been essential, in its actual termination, to the whole order of subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country, recognise in history nothing more than a series ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... Macaire ten thousand times, and for twenty-five years of their lives go on grinding out and grinding out an idiotic part. But we are on the road to it. Our theaters are so poverty-stricken! The public will only stand genius in infinitesimal doses, sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature.... A 'fashionable genius'! Doesn't that make you laugh?... What waste of power! Look at what they have made of a Mounet. What has he had to play the whole of his life? Two or three parts ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... over now. The girl, who for two winged days had been so magically his gypsy comrade, was returning to her own world, the world in which he played so infinitesimal a part. For very pride's sake now he could never force himself upon her ... as he might ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... respectable manners,—we have far more need to tell orderly, respectable moral men—'My brother, that thing that you have is worth nothing, as settling your position before God'; than to stand up and thunder about crimes which half of us never heard of, and perhaps only an infinitesimal percentage of us have ever committed. All sin separates from God, but the thing that makes the separation permanent is not the sin, but the ignorance of the sin. Self-righteousness, aye, and pride of wisdom, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... brief acquaintance with Paris. In the daytime he haunted the libraries and picture galleries. He had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and research; but he learned what he could by day, and threw himself into a search for relaxation and amusement at night. Nor did he find Paris ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is an immense mass-meeting. Look sharper, and you will see a mite brandishing his mandibles in an excited manner. That is the great Mr. Soandso, defining his position amid tumultuous and irrepressible cheers. That infinitesimal creature, upon whom some score of others, as minute as he, are gazing in open-mouthed admiration, is a famous philosopher, expounding to a select audience their capacity for the Infinite. That scarce discernible pufflet of smoke and dust is a revolution. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... reply, but words were hard to find. As he stood silent a voice behind him cried, "Why, if it isn't Infinitesimal James!" and there she was, with her shining hair and laughing eyes. He laughed, too, for ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... the rooms about him. These, at all events, were companionable, and they assured him of safety. But in a while they ceased, and he was left in a silence as absolute as the darkness. He endured this silence for perhaps half an hour, and then all manner of infinitesimal sounds began to stir about him. The lightest of footsteps moved about his bed, faint sighs breathed from very close at hand, even his name was softly whispered. He sat suddenly up in his bed, and at once all these sounds became explained to him. They came from the street and the square ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... like it at all," Mangan said, frankly. "People will think the book has something to do with the American civil war. However, don't take my opinion at all. My connection with literature is almost infinitesimal—I'm merely a newspaper ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... forest would enjoy their existence unmolested, and the great sun would shine on ever the same, rising at dawn, sinking at even, with unbroken exactitude and regularity if Man no longer lived. Why have the monstrous forces of Evolution thundered their way through cycles of creation to produce so infinitesimal a prodigy? ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... being thick and our position uncertain. I did my best to descry it, ready to quarrel with my eyes for not doing so, and a little annoyed to find myself but a landsman after all. But see it I couldn't. I did indeed, after a while, make out to fancy that I perceived an infinitesimal densening of the mist there; but the illusion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... the improvement he contemplated. It was very delicate work, and as he did it he felt a certain pride in the reflection that he could not have detected the place where improvement was possible when he had worked upon the piece ten years ago. He found it now, in the infinitesimal touches upon the expression of the face, in the minute increase in the depressions and accentuated lines in the anatomy of the figure. As he went over each portion he became more and more certain that though he could not at present do better in the way of idea and general ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... This is the result of allopathic education. Homeopathic education has not yet been officially tried, and would obviously be a delicate matter if it were. A body of schoolmasters inciting their pupils to infinitesimal peccadilloes with the object of provoking them to exclaim, 'Get thee behind me, Satan,' or telling them white lies about history for the sake of being contradicted, insulted, and refuted, would certainly do less ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... fact that voice failure, accompanied by throat ailments, more or less serious, occurs with startling frequency, and no other reason is assigned for it than the irresponsible, indefinite one that the voice broke down under training. Of the infinitesimal number of successful students—that is to say, of those who, having completed their studies, come before the public as professional singers—so few escape the common lot that it would almost appear as if a fatality attended the following of the vocal art; yet from a health point of view, ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... received on the morning of the gale, when I was absorbed in delicate investigations. It is still legible. From poor dear Casimir! It is as well," he chuckled, "that I have educated him to patience. Poor Casimir and his correspondence—his infinitesimal, timorous, idiotic correspondence!" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been immeasurably surprised at finding my hostess and future sitter so completely unlike everything I had anticipated. Or no—now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt surprised at all; or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but an infinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the equator and the poles, that any slight changes which may have resulted from such geological causes could have had only an infinitesimal effect upon the. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... made of it is to put it carefully away among other treasured objects, picked up at odd times in out-of-the-way places. It may be that some minute mysterious insect or infinitesimal mite—there is almost certain to be a special walnut mite—has found an entrance into this prized nut and fed on its oily meat, reducing it within to a rust-coloured powder. The grub or mite, or whatever it is, may do so at its pleasure, ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... inconvenience indemnidad, indemnity, signed guarantee indemnizacion, indemnity (compensation for loss) indicar, to indicate, to point out indigena, native industria, industry inercia, idleness, inertia infeliz, unhappy infimo, infinitesimal infinidad, an infinite number informe, report informes, information(s), references informar (de), to inform of, to acquaint with ingeniero, engineer ingratitud, ingratitude ingresos netos, net revenue inmaturo, verde, unripe inmediato, immediate innavegable, ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... that Carrie Samstag, even in her lovely pink night-dress, a crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed, unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, "Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... growth of communities, and nations, and languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible? Even were it so—what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow? This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared to the target at which ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... a grand new song evolved from a 'cute young pate, Of a fine old Atom-Molecule of prehistoric date; In size infinitesimal, in potencies though great, And self-formed for developing at a prodigious rate— Like a fine old Atom-Molecule, Of the young ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... moves with the speed of light. The young man's mental revolution was over and done with in a second's time; the pause was infinitesimal. Almost as she finished her last remark, Mr. Carstairs's daughter turned from the rail and took a step forward upon the deck, as though to jog her host toward that promised tour of the yacht which had now flagged ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... forced to ask myself again if it was at all likely that one world could be made so unlike all others as to become the only scene of such a wonderful event as the death of the Son of God. And even if this could be made to seem probable, what an infinitesimal chance there would be that our earth would be the one chosen for this exhibition, out of the unnumbered worlds that fill the immensity ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... to whom? the philosopher asks. The relativity of things human is a wholesome theory for the artist to bear in mind. Even as the most terrific cataclysm on this third planet from the sun in a minor system, makes not a ripple upon Mars, so the most infinitesimal occurrence in eighteenth century Hampshire may seem of account,—if only a master draws ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... west; to the east, by sharper peaks. The scant growth was blackened or partly covered with sand, and it fringed the distant uplands like a stubbly beard. The little ravines were darkened with hot shadows, but the bald slopes presented areas, shining with infinitesimal particles of quartz and mica, to a savage sun and an almost unendurable sky. From somewhere to the barren north the wind came like a breath of flame, ash-laden and drying. There was nothing of the cool, damp river breeze in this. They were in the hideous heart ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... imperial interests; and he preferred a Pope who would be undividedly imperialist at heart. Pace was sent to join Clerk at Rome in urging Wolsey's suit, and they did their best; but English influence at the Court of Rome was infinitesimal. In spite of Campeggio's flattering assurance that Wolsey's name appeared in every scrutiny, and that sometimes he had eight or nine votes, and Clerk's statement that he had nine at one time, twelve at another, and nineteen at a third,[437] Wolsey's name only appears in ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... any notice of him; this gradually encouraged him to take more notice of other people, when he found, not altogether to his surprise, that the majority of those passing through the Park at that late hour were hardly of his own class. So much the more infinitesimal were the chances of his being recognised or even suspected for what he was. There were young men in straw hats, there were red-coated soldiers, and there were girls. They all filled the schoolboy with their fascinating possibilities. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... them to pay the large general tax for the aggregate sum. No one hears any complaint regarding the sum necessary to support the General Government, except by those in remote districts, who have but an infinitesimal interest involved, but an imaginary part of the sum to pay, and who, producing but little, and having nothing to do, assume the right to manage the affairs of those who really have something at stake. The American people are willing ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria's desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal variant among the changing colors of the sea. Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar glorified by the polo costumes of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... been choked by a gigantic gooseberry, which had formed part of the cargo of a Greenland tramp torpedoed by an enemy submarine. The serpent was actually being stuffed when a bomb dropped by a Zeppelin blew it into infinitesimal smithereens, to the profound disappointment of the Professor and my daughter Anna, who has never been quite the same woman since. Permit ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... Ben will judge for himself,' she said, reddening; thankful all the same to remember that among her uncle's reticent, old-fashioned ways none was more marked than his habit of destroying all but an infinitesimal fraction of his letters. 'He read all those speeches of yours, last year. You'll have to think—how you're going ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... paid a business visit a few years ago, in search of certain edibles, to an island in the Mediterranean Sea. He was to have returned in triumph to Tooley Street and launched upon the provision-buying world a new cheese of astounding quality and infinitesimal price—instead of which he brought home ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... may try to explain by word of mouth what ought to be seen, the layman cannot see it. When persons who are convinced of the great discovery made by De Vries go to his laboratory to observe the mutations in the varied minute plants of the Aenothera, he often explains in vain the infinitesimal yet essential differences, denoting, indeed, a new species, among seedlings which have hardly germinated. It is well known that when a new discovery is to be explained to the public, it is necessary to set forth the coarser details; the uninitiated cannot take in those minute details which ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... more perhaps than from force of reasoning, she flew to the rose-trees, and there fixed in her shear jaws not more than two of the helpless, fool, unarmed, soft, juicy green-fly, which are really no more, if one may so put it, than living, infinitesimal "white" grapes. That she was challenged by a sentry ant—about as big to her as a bulldog to us—that the sentry gave the alarm, that the guard turned out from one of the ants' "cowsheds" over some of the green-fly, and that she went away in a hurry, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... she slid out of her chair and crossed to the door; even in action her broad, squat figure infinitesimal to the room's proportions. When she opened the door the dignity of great halls lay in waiting. She crossed the wide vista to a closed door, a replica of her own, and knocked, waited, turned the crystal knob, knocked, waited. Rapped again, this ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... present he and Harold were content to go through life never saying anything about themselves to anybody. In fact, they hardly ever thought of Henrietta. She would have been astonished if she had known what an infinitesimal difference ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... range, we had passed over places where I knew that all the horses I then had with me had gone over the ground, but no signs of former horse-tracks could be seen, therefore the chance of finding any traces of a single animal was infinitesimal. Tommy and I expended three days in trying to discover traces, but it was utterly useless, and we returned ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... less certain about the prominent participation of the Emperor in these persecutions. My own belief is (and it is a belief which could be supported by many critical arguments), that his share in causing them was almost infinitesimal. If those who love his memory reject the evidence of Fathers in his favour, they may be at least permitted to withhold assent from some of the assertions in virtue of which ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most infinitesimal nerve of a man's body - not one of the least of these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of its own into the character of the pleasure ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of inequality due to the different military systems of the two countries. Universal service enabled Germany to select the ablest men—at least from the middle and upper classes—to officer and command her armies. In England before the war only an infinitesimal fraction of her youthful ability found its way into the army. Independent means and social position rather than brains were the common qualifications for a commission; and what there was to be said for such a system so long as fighting was mainly ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... examined has plainly been derived in situ from the underlying rock. It represents the more insoluble residue after water and acids have done their work. Each year there must be a very slow sinking of the surface, but the ablation is infinitesimal. ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... a mere habitation—stood on the same site in the twelfth century, a work which, under the energies of Philippe Auguste, in 1204 began to grow to still more splendid proportions, though infinitesimal one may well conclude as compared with the mass which all Paris knows to-day under the inclusive ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... religion as you (for the special glory of his Creator, I suppose, and the honor of your species) can wish him to have been. Well, man began by being a polytheist, and very gradually emerged out of that pleasant condition —or rather an infinitesimal portion of the race has emerged out of it, into the better forms of idolatry—(poor wretch!), and from thence to monotheism; that, in short, his polytheism is not the corruption of his monotheism, but his monotheism ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of Englishmen, who played as hard as they worked, and invariably "played the game"; a code of morals which had apparently been left out of Kresney's desultory education. The fact revealed itself in a hundred infinitesimal ways, and each revelation added a fresh stone to the wall that sprang up apace between himself and ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the little body in his arms stiffened suddenly. As one who saw the supreme achievement of a life-time swept away by some one careless joggle of an infinitesimal part, the Little Girl stared up agonizingly into her father's face. "Oh, I don't think—'buzzed' was the word!" she began convulsively. "Oh, ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... and the die was cast. Macfarlane could not suppress a nervous twitch, the infinitesimal mark of an immense relief, as he felt the key between his fingers. He opened the cupboard, brought out pen and ink and a paper-book that stood in one compartment, and separated from the funds in a drawer a sum suitable to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the whole quintessence of our lives,—our loves, our hopes, our failures, in one concentrated drop of happiness or misery. We look behind us and see that our whole past has led up to that infinitesimal fraction of time which is the consummation of the past in the present, the end of the old and the beginning of the new. We look forward from the vantage ground of the present, and the world of a new revelation lies ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... chief training-school for caste. The Brahmins are the "gold" employees, white American citizens with all the advantages and privileges thereto appertaining. But—and herein we out-Hindu the Hindus—the Brahmin caste itself is divided and subdivided into infinitesimal gradations. Every rank and shade of man has a different salary, and exactly in accordance with that salary is he housed, furnished, and treated down to the least item,—number of electric lights, candle-power, style of bed, size of bookcase. His Brahmin highness, ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck |
