"Infinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regular laws, it would be easy enough to believe in God. And yet as it was, it seemed so imperfect, and in some ways so unsatisfactory; so fortuitous in certain respects, so wanting in prevision, so amazingly deliberate. Such an infinity of care seemed lavished on the delicate structure of the smallest insects and plants, such a prodigal fancy; and yet the laws that governed them seemed so strangely incomplete, like a patient, artistic, whimsical force, working on ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... non-sentient beings—instruments of sport for him as it were—in so subtle a form that they may be called non-existing; and as they are his body he may be said to consist of them (tan-maya). Then desirous of providing himself with an infinity of playthings of all kinds he, by a series of steps beginning with Prakriti and the aggregate of souls and leading down to the elements in their gross state, so modifies himself as to have those elements for his body— when he is said to consist of them—and thus ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... expands; it outsteps the narrow limits of temples, and leaves the altars to crumble into dust; and calls man to seek for it where alone it resides—in thought, in intelligence, in virtue, in nature, in infinity."—(II. 39, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... We reach infinity through the love of one, and loving this one, we are in love with all. And this condition of mutual sympathy, trust, reverence, forbearance and gentleness that can exist between a man and a woman, gives the only hint of Heaven that mortals ever know. From the love of man ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Matthiette heard the querulous birds call sleepily above; the margin of night was thick with their petulant complaints; behind her was the monstrous shadow of the Chateau d'Arnaye, and past that was a sullen red, the red of contused flesh, to herald dawn. Infinity waited a-tiptoe, tense for the coming miracle, and against this vast repression, her grief dwindled into irrelevancy: the leaves whispered comfort; each tree-bole hid chuckling fauns. Matthiette laughed. Content ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... the spherical surface away from S upwards, the disc shadow L' on the plane also moves away from S on the plane outwards, growing bigger and bigger. As the disc L approaches the luminous point N, the shadow moves off to infinity, and becomes ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... daybreak as, having climbed that rocky stair I have mentioned, we came upon the cliff and stood, hands tight-clasped, where we might behold the infinity of waters; and after some while, looming phantom-like upon the dawn, we descried the lofty sails of a great ship standing in towards the land and growing ever more distinct. And as we watched, and never a word, her towering canvas flushed rosy with coming day, a changing ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the conditioned becomes the absolute; art and science coincide. But truth which is assumed to be out of all relations, cannot be comprehended by man, and practically is not. Even the universal propositions of deduction express universality under conditions—that is universality of relation; just as infinity in mathematics means that which passes measurement, while in fact between infinity and measurement there is no relation, and the infinite is thus incomprehensible as an object of thought, although by no means ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... an infinity. One became giddy there at looking forwards, and giddy at looking backwards, and there stood a crowd of anxious, pining beings, who were waiting and hoping for the time when the gates of grace should be opened. They would have long to wait. Hideous, large, waddling ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... looked more and more strange as he gazed. The men's bodies swayed very little, and their arms all along the line looked misty, and seemed to stretch right away into infinity, so far away was the last rower from the prow. The water flashed with the moonlight on one side, and gleamed pallidly on the other as the blades stirred it; and then they grew more misty and more misty, but kept on plash—plash—plash, ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... calculations. The odds are piled up star-high, as it is, against Mr. Spectacles having a confidential agent here at all whom he would be inclined to trust with such a job. But when you suppose that the pair of them have a ready-arranged cipher in full working order, why, then, infinity is a small figure for the chances against it. Cabling is out of the question, old chappie. In fact, set alongside of that the idea of flying across carries ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... conduct is concerned, if it be mysterious, as you say, you have only yourself to blame for it." Porthos pronounced these words with an amount of confidence which, for a man who was unaccustomed to his ways, must have revealed an infinity ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... and healthy. It's an immense wilderness where a man is never lonely, because he feels life astir on every side. The sea is simply the vehicle for a prodigious, unearthly mode of existence; it's simply movement and love; it's living infinity, as one of your poets put it. And in essence, professor, nature is here made manifest by all three of her kingdoms, mineral, vegetable, and animal. The last of these is amply represented by the four zoophyte groups, three classes ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... understood that she is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it. Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and in her, beauty grows up suddenly out of ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man. In painting, he contented himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St Peter's scattered into infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex, gave the air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him for all in all, was Michael ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... rested quietly, wrapped up in personal concerns. Her companion pensively contemplated an infinity of arid and hansom-less to-morrows. About them the city throbbed in a web of misty twilight, the humid farewell of a dismal day. In the air a faint haze swam, rendering the distances opalescent. Athwart the western sky the after-glow of a drenched sunset ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... and bronze the peaks, The mesas are a brazen, molten sea, And e'en the heaven's blue infinity, Undimmed by kindly cloud through arid weeks, Seems polished turquoise. Like a sphinx she speaks, The scornful desert: "What would'st thou from me?" And in our hearts we answer her; all three Unlike, for each a different treasure ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... wandering "songs of joy," or on "the great hills and solemn chanting seas" where Mr. John Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And the guns of August 1914 found Mr. W.W. Gibson encompassed by "one dim, blue infinity of starry peace." There is a sort of German Georgian Poetry in existence; in time to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. Marsh may throw a side-light on the question, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... world in a grain of sand And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... breathing, of seeing, of looking on wonders in which his hands had taken no part in the making, would fill him with the indefinable pleasure which had suddenly become his experience. He wondered, as he still stood gazing into the infinity of that other world beyond the Saskatchewan, if romance was really quite dead in him. Always he had laughed at romance. Work—the grim reality of action, of brain fighting brain, of cleverness pitted against other men's cleverness—had ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... belittles a man; that it takes all the sparkle out of his soul; that he has to exchange a roistering independence for an ecclesiastical strait-jacket. Not so. When a man becomes a Christian, he does not go down, he starts upward. Religion multiplies one by ten thousand. Nay, the multiplier is in infinity. It is not a blotting out—it is a polishing, it is an arborescence, it is an efflorescence, it is an irradiation. When a man comes into the kingdom of God he is not sent into a menial service, but the Lord God Almighty from the palaces of heaven calls upon the messenger angels that wait upon the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... does us an infinity of harm: he encourages us to display all the worst points of the female character; he cheats us of our due amount of homage from many a noble heart, and perhaps robs us of our own dignity and self-respect. Yet such is the creature we encourage in our blind ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... it. The old unpainted shingles and boards of the mansion and out-houses are black with the moisture which they have imbibed. Looking at the river, we perceive that its usually smooth and mirrored surface is blurred by the infinity of rain-drops; the whole landscape—grass, trees, and houses—has a completely water-soaked aspect, as if the earth were wet through. The wooded hill, about a mile distant, whither we went to gather whortleberries, has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... just as this couple could see the track clear ahead, stretching smooth and nickel-plated to infinity, an ugly complication began to worm itself into ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... it not seem incredible,' said Elizabeth, 'that I, Elizabeth Woodbourne, should have voluntarily meddled with a radical, levelling affair, should have sought out Mrs. Turner and all the set I most dislike, done perhaps an infinity of mischief, and all because Kate wanted to go out on a party of pleasure with that foolish Willie. Oh! Anne, I wish ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... His idea of infinity is worthy of Aristotle or Hegel, to whom, in fact, it belongs—he says, "self-conditioning is the form of the whole, the form of that which is its own other." That something should be "its own ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... bearing still some half-shaped form of good, The flickering shadow of the moon upon the "moon-led flood." And ever, 'mid all the joys and weary cares of life, Through the dull sleep of sluggishness, and clangor of the strife, We hear the low, deep murmuring of that Infinity Which stretcheth round us dim and vast, as wraps the earth the sea. And in the twilight dimness, in silence and alone, The soul is almost startled by the power of its solemn tone. When we view the fairest works of Nature ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... copyright of its contents, as it assuredly did not; it may be that he quailed before the minute and almost undecipherable handwriting. But similar notebooks are in my possession, and there are, happily, in these days typists—you pay them by the hour, and it means an infinity of time and patience—who will copy the most minute and the most obscure documents. There are some of the notebooks of the Scottish tour of 1858 before me, and what is of far more importance—Borrow's letters to his ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... and necessity at the other, as 2 and 2 make 4, and a graduated rise of examples between them. Down came a blow: "What! put necessary and contingent propositions together! It's absurd!" I pointed out that the two kinds of necessity are but such extremes of probability as 0 and [infinity] are of number, and illustrated by an urn with 1 white and n black {247} balls, n increasing without limit. It was frankly seen, and the point yielded; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... as the first. I dilly reached my last Boyd station, in the pretty and varied Pyrenees district—a sheep station, then under charge of my friend James M. Hamilton. Here the hospitalities were equal, but all the rest sadly below The Gums, and an infinity underneath Dunmore. But Hamilton promised us compensation in a visit to the more comfortable residence of a squatting neighbour, Mr. John Allen. The master was not at home, but the mistress received us with squatting welcome. She was a young South Australian wife, charming ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... verse makes us fancy the Virtuous Woman as being unpleasingly strong, but we should guard against being purposely weak, with an idea of its being pleasing; Thackeray's Amelia is hardly a good model, and Patient Grizzel did her husband an infinity ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... ennobling sensuality. Of course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity, and some obscure recollections will always remind him of the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... thinking is no more in the brain than in the hair, although the brain may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not corporeal, it is not of this world; its existence is eternity, its residence is infinity.' I forbear to discuss the rationality of their belief, and pass on straightway to thine; if, indeed, I am to consider as ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... be varied to infinity. Here are a few more: Make the subject join his hands, and suggest that they are welded together; make him put his hand on the table, and suggest that it is stuck to it; tell him that he is fixed to his chair and cannot rise; make him rise, ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... unformulated ideal: it is the spirit clothed in form calling to the spirit not yet expressed, bidding it build beauty. "This building of man's true world—the living world of truth and beauty—is the function of Art. Man is true, where he feels his infinity, where he is divine, and the divine is the creator in him. Therefore with the attainment of his truth he creates."[23] This call to spirit is the old allegory of the sleeping beauty waiting to be awakened to her royal rank by the kiss of the seeking prince: it is the same truth as expressed ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... saying I don't believe in miracles. I don't believe in coincidence—that concept is as meaningless as that of paradox. I certainly do not believe that we hit this planet by chance against odds of almost infinity to one. So I've been looking for a reason. I found one. It goes against my grain—against everything I've ever believed—but, since it's the only possible explanation, it must be true. The only possible director of the Gunther Drive must ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... scattered dwellings and sparse trees and ground were coated with a soft monotony of rose-brown dust, the mills were jumbled in mile-long perspectives. Above the immediate noise of the train he could hear the sullen, blended roar of an infinity of strident sounds—the screaming of whistles, a choked, drumming thunder, rushing blasts of air, the shattering impact of steel rails, raw steam, and a multitudinous clangour of metal and jolting wheels and connective ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... who have been to Egypt or seen the Sahara naturally picture a sandy waste with its accompanying oases, palms and camels. Mesopotamia, however, is a land of clay, of mud, uncompromising mud. The Thames and Medway saltings at high tide, stretching away to infinity in every direction—this is the picture that I carry in my mind of the riverside country between Basra and Amara. No blue, limpid waters by Baghdad's shrines of fretted gold, but pea-soup or cafe ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... significance is relative to the surface of this planet only. In reality, for the inhabitants of the Earth, "low" is the inside, the center of the globe, and "high" is what is above our heads, all round the Earth. The Heavens are what surround us on all sides, to Infinity. ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the earth begins with the close of the dim Archean era. It is the lapse from then till now, a few hundred million years at most out of all infinity, which ever can greatly concern man, for during this time were laid the only rocks whose reading was assisted by the presence of fossils. During this time the continents attained their final shape, the mountains rose, and valleys, plains, and rivers formed ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... make an infinity of wise remarks on that scene,' said he. 'In the first place, note the ridiculous position into which their superstitious reverence for rank and title puts all these people. Because monsieur is a reigning prince over some minute principality, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... there be for us? We came from nothing, we go back to nothing—we are resolved into the elements which renew the earth for new comers. The wheel of progress is always revolving—for the mass there is eternity, infinity—no beginning, no end; but for the individual, his little span of life begins ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... loathsome that she seemed contaminated through and through by his touch, his words, and their previous relations. How grossly he had deceived her as to his real character! What a horrible future as his wife she had escaped! Nor was she yet free, for he promised to make an infinity of trouble. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... together. Over the distant range of hills were scattered close-set roofs, and you could divine that the sea of houses rolled afar off behind the undulating ground, into the fields hidden from sight. It was as the ocean, with all the infinity and mystery of its waves. Paris spread out as vast as the heavens on high. Burnished with the sunshine that lovely morning, the city looked like a field of yellow corn; and the huge picture was all simplicity, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... stars, suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable suns, attended each by a cortege of planets, and scattered—how, we know not—through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples? The demonstration of the simplest truths of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... praise his sweet poetry from morning to night. I hardly know whether it is my fault, or the effect of a weakness in Leigh Hunt's character, that I should be sensible of a regret of this nature, when, at the same time, I sincerely believe that he has found an infinity of better things in the world whither he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... as her mule steadily crept round the causeway—a legacy of the Incas—to behold the expanse of the Pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine, the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling of infinity ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... number of human beings; but the worst of all was the evil expression of their countenances, denoting that they were familiar with every species of crime, and it was not long before I found that their countenances did not belie them. After they had asked me an infinity of questions, and felt my hands, face, and clothes, they returned to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... spoke of infinite thought or infinite love: it is physico-mathematical. Nothing but number, M. Benda tells us, seems to him intelligible. Time, space, volume, and complexity (which appears to the senses as quality) stretch in a series of units, positions, or degrees, to infinity, as number does: and in such homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there will be no fixed point of origin for counting or surveying the whole and no particular predominant scale. Every position ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... it is established that if a mechanical explanation of a phenomenon can be given, we can find an infinity of others which likewise account for all the peculiarities revealed by experiment. But, as a matter of fact, no one has ever succeeded in giving an indisputable mechanical representation of the whole physical world. Even were we disposed to admit the strangest solutions of the problem; to consent, ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... to describe wherever she goes within those broad limits. The Yosemite, the Big Trees, the Mormons, the Chinese, the snow-sheds, drawing-room cars, agates, prairie-and mountain-flowers, New Hampshire life and scenery, and an infinity of like material, are readably, and not incongruously, presented in her little book. Population is so sparse and Nature so redundant in the scene of most of her descriptions as to render them sometimes a little lifeless, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... of that which lay beyond the ken of man. Somehow it exalted his thoughts to planes to which no association with his kind could ever have exalted them. It never failed to inspire him with a reverence for the infinity of power which crowned the glory of creation, and reduced self to a humble realization of its atomic place in the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... and he loved the night. The poetic side of his memories of watching the Dipper swing around Polaris, while he sung the cows to sleep, came back to him. In his mind he saw the vast prairie roll on to infinity; saw the mountains stand out, a world of white peaks, rising from a sea of darkness. Again he heard the plaintive shrilling of an Indian whistle, or the song of the lad down creek made tuneful and airy ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... suspect they have infinitely less; and I believe their great love of novels, which has been set down to imagination, arises mainly from their want of it. You writers of novels supply that defect for them by a pictorial style, by an infinity of minute details, and petty aids to realizing, all which an imaginative reader can do for himself on reading a bare narrative ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... shadow of some struggle, similar to that of Jacob with the Angel?" Art, he has said, "is a temporary mask, under which the unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity, introduced ...by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity, taken from a flower of eternity." Everywhere, throughout his most deeply characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought—he would have us realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing, ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... Ourselves we felt as if the Log of Infinity carried us to ground higher than what we ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... difference of taste, of manners, and an infinity of other causes, have rendered commerce necessary, though it does not increase the aggregate wealth of mankind: but nations are in an error when they set a greater value on ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... country on this, but suggested a very interesting reflection. It was that the continual increase of debt and paper machinery, will not produce a correspondent increase of ability in the nation to feed itself. That an infinity of paper will not produce an ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... with many obstacles. There are no short cuts to the summit. In spite of pessimistic clamours that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer, frothy yowls for free and unlimited coinage at sixteen to one, or for fiat paper at infinity to nothing, the fact remains that, whereas kings formerly used signets for the want of knowledge to write their names, licked their greasy fingers for lack of knives and forks, and starved in Ireland with plenty in France, the poorest to-day can, if they will, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... Squire. "I don't want the servants in. Give me some tea. Miss Bird, here's my cup, please. Take it, please, take it, Miss Bird. I don't know when I've felt so annoyed. You do all you can and put yourself to an infinity of trouble and expense for the sake of your children, and then they behave like this. Really, Walter wants a good thrashing to bring him to his senses. If I had nipped all this folly of doctoring in the bud, as I ought to have ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... to aid her in bodying forth according to her methods the ideal forms of the cosmos, the world of beauty, no less within the soul of man than without it, which was intended by such help to be realized as a whole in the infinity of time, and in part in the vision of every true workman. In short, Lincoln had a profound sense of the fitness of things, that which Aristotle, the scientific analyst of human thought and the philosopher of its proper expression, called "poetic justice." He strove to make ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... the merchant, "that it is now fourteen years since the first ocean telegraph of any importance was laid,—when I remember that the first cable was laid after an infinity of personal effort on the part of those who had to raise the capital,—when I mention that it was really a work of house-to-house visitation, when sums of 500 pounds to 1000 pounds, and even 10,000 pounds were raised by private subscription, ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... from actual ocular inspection is not only unnecessary, but unattainable. What says the axiom? That two straight lines can not inclose a space; that after having once intersected, if they are prolonged to infinity they do not meet, but continue to diverge from one another. How can this, in any single case, be proved by actual observation? We may follow the lines to any distance we please; but we can not follow them to infinity: for aught our senses can testify, they may, immediately beyond the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... state is peculiar to common lovers, who are known to have no eyes for anything except for the contemplation, actual or inward, of one human form which for them contains the soul of the whole world in all its beauty, perfection, variety and infinity. It must be extremely pleasant. But felicity was denied to Roderick Anthony's contemplation. He was not a common sort of lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor every sort of exceptional conduct. Roderick ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... granted to him an infinity of virtues, and naturally fine qualities—such as sensitiveness, generosity, frankness, humility, charity, soberness, greatness of soul, force of wit, manly pride, and nobility of sentiment; but, at the same time, they do not sufficiently clear him of the faults which directly ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... cannot separate the ocean; the salt water is part of the great sea and must be so; but nevertheless you do not hold the sea in your hand. Men so longingly desire personal power that they are ready to put infinity into a cup, the divine idea into a formula, in order that they may fancy themselves in possession of it. These only are those who cannot rise and approach the Gates of Gold, for the great breath of life confuses them; they are struck with horror ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the steps of the terrace, or paced up and down, watching the scene. Just beyond their crest was the frowning mass of Mount Misery. The crystal flood poured down from above, and the moon was rising over the distant hills. The sea had the look of infinity. There might be ships at anchor before Basseterre or Sandy Point, but the shoulders of the mountain hid them; and below, the world looked as if the passions of Hell had let loose—the torches flared and crackled, and the trees took ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... have dreamt nothing, seen nothing, heard nothing. But during these two dreadful hours I have experienced such an infinity of pain that I ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... Revolution, the works of Nietzsche, Emerson, W. Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, Alexander Herzen, Edward Carpenter and so on; and in the domain of fiction, the dramas of Ibsen, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Zola's Paris and Le travail, the latest works of Merezhkovsky, and an infinity of works of less known authors,—are full of ideas which show how closely Anarchism is interwoven with the work that is going on in modern thought in the same direction of enfranchisement of man from the bonds of the state as well as from those of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... perceived are communicated to our nervous system and inscribed in the nerve wave. The effect produced therefore is the measure of our perception of the cause. This is absolutely certain. All bodies possess an infinity of properties which escape our cognitions; because, as excitants of our organism, these properties are wanting in the intensity or the quality necessary to make it vibrate; they have not been tuned in unison with our nervous chords. And, inversely, all we perceive of the mechanical, physical, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... try To utter God's infinity, But the boundless hath no form, And the Universal Friend Doth as far transcend ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the carpet of the earth never so verdant. As she sat at her window and saw evening close in upon her in that broad forest home, and heard for the first time the mournful notes of the whippoorwill, and the harsh scream of the jay in the distant woods, she was oppressed with a sense of vastness, of infinity, which she never before experienced, not even on the ocean. She remained long in prayer, and when she lay down to sleep beside her matron-friend, no words were spoken between them. The elder, overcome with fatigue, soon sank into a peaceful ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... poetry always obtains, the enlargement of his comprehension and elevation of his fancy; but this is rarely to be hoped by Christians from metrical devotion. Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in the name of the supreme being. Omnipotence cannot be exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; perfection cannot be improved. The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving, repentance, and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform, cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving, the most joyful of all holy ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... people. By accident—or, more properly, by Providence—he appears to have been sent to put a stop to an unnatural war, and to save the lives of the unfortunate rebels; and the benefit he had conferred on so many of his fellow-creatures, the good he had already done, and the infinity of good which he saw he still might do, made him ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... wanderers, in calm thought 65 Reflected, it appeared to me the type Of a majestic intellect, its acts And its possessions, what it has and craves, What in itself it is, and would become. There I beheld the emblem of a mind 70 That feeds upon infinity, that broods Over the dark abyss, [B] intent to hear Its voices issuing forth to silent light In one continuous stream; a mind sustained By recognitions of transcendent power, 75 In sense conducting to ideal form, In soul of more than mortal privilege. One function, above all, of such a mind Had ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Plato's allegory it is easy to arrive at an understanding of the state of humanity at the present time. Imagine very imperfect, very undeveloped beings, possessing, however, an infinity of latent potentialities; imagine them born in a dark cavern where they swarm pell-mell, passing their time chiefly in devouring one another. Every moment this cavern is entered, and a certain number of these poor beings are taken out of it and carried into the light of day, that they may ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... its labour, Charmion, nor can it weight its tenderness on the scale of purchase. That which it has it gives, and craves for more to give and give, till the soul's infinity be drained. Dear to thy heart are these heavy nights of watching; sweet to thy weary eyes is that sad sight of strength brought so low that it hangs upon thy weakness like a babe to its mother's breast! For, Charmion, thou dost love this man who loves thee not, and now that he is helpless ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... The Infinity and Self-Existence of the Universe. Disproved by Its Evident Limits. Its Composite Materials. Its Steady Loss of Heat. Buffon's Explosion of Planets. The Nebular Theories. The Fiction of Homogeneous ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Scotland, and Alick's leave of absence was felt to be due to Mr. Clare, and thus it was that the first real family gathering took place on occasion of the opening of the institution that had grown out of the Burnaby Bargain. This work had cost Colonel Keith and Mr. Mitchell an infinity of labour and perseverance before even the preliminaries could be arranged, but they contrived at length to carry it out, and by the fourth spring after the downfall of the F. U. E. E. a house had been erected for the convalescents, whose wants were to be attended to by a matron, assisted ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal considerations! Let me continue to the end, as I began, without further digressions or anticipations, pursuing the plain path of dispassionate History. The exact facts, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... will be delighted to welcome back to its fold Sir ROBERT HERMAN-HODGE, whose flowing moustaches, once described as "the best definition of infinity," have been, at intervals, its pride and joy for over thirty years. But it will have to wait a while, for—strange lapse on the part of a hero of half-a-dozen contests!—Sir ROBERT had omitted to bring with him the returning-officer's certificate. Lord HALSBURY, delayed ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... not at all,—so subtly that none can feel the flowing of its tides, yet so swiftly that no life-time would suffice to count the number of the oscillations which it makes within the fraction of one second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm and illusion of color; there it ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... said Alexandrina, gazing upon a magnificent crimson ground through which rivers of yellow meandered, carrying with them in their streams an infinity of blue flowers. And as she spoke she held her head gracefully on one side, and looked down upon the carpet doubtingly. Lady Amelia poked it with her parasol at though to test its durability, and whispered something about yellows showing the dirt. Crosbie ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... fictitious; that his mind "is a part of the infinite intellect of God"; that he is not a mere transient, outside interpreter of the universe, but himself the soul or law, which is the universe, and he will feel a relationship with infinity which ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... festival was loud With drum and brass among the crowd Of panic revellers, whose cries Affront the quiet of the skies; Whose dancing lights contract the deep Infinity of night and sleep To a narrow turmoil of troubled fire. And I have found my heart's desire In beechen caverns that autumn fills With the blue shadowiness of distant hills; Whose luminous grey pillars bear The stooping sky: calm ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... they are less to be dreaded in woods than elsewhere, because their horns often catch in the branches, and give time for the persons pursued to escape by flight. The skins of these animals serve for an infinity of purposes, and even cruses are made of them for holding water or liquors. The animals on the coast of Malabar are all wild, and strangers are not prevented from hunting ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... life, and the braced mood Of power and joy and love; Forbidden, by wise heathen ev'n, to be Spoken of Deity, Whose Name, on popular altars, was 'The Unknown,' Because, or ere It was reveal'd as One Confined in Three, The people fear'd that it might prove Infinity, The blazon which the devils desired to gain; And God, for their confusion, laugh'd consent; Yet did so far relent, That they might seek relief, and not in vain, In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain. Nor bides alone in hell The bond-disdaining spirit ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... Author of it. Now, this Author cannot have received His own existence from another, if He is to be considered the primary cause; otherwise we should fall into a succession of causes and effects to infinity. Then, the true Author of our existence is one who exists by Himself, and as such He is eternal, omnipotent, all-wise, etc., etc.; He ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... live-oak near the steps Harran had built a little summer house for his mother. To the left of the ranch house itself, toward the County Road, was the bunk-house and kitchen for some of the hands. From the steps of the porch the view to the southward expanded to infinity. There was not so much as a twig to obstruct the view. In one leap the eye reached the fine, delicate line where earth and sky met, miles away. The flat monotony of the land, clean of fencing, was broken by one spot only, the roof of the Division Superintendent's house on Three—a mere speck, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... other, trying to crowd into their eyes an infinity of strange passionate messages, though their features were all awry with nausea and the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of our speculations, and should help us best of all though outwardly so appalling, to stand calm while the snake of unbelief writhes beneath our feet. The unutterable insignificance of man and his little world connotes the infinity which leaves his possibilities ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... having been so applied in such length and slope as is proper for capitals, the farther condition comes into effect described in Chapter IX. Sec. XXIV., and any one of the cornices in Plate XV. may become the abacus of a capital formed out of any other, or out of itself. The infinity of forms thus resultant cannot, as may well be supposed, be exhibited or catalogued in the space at present permitted to us: but the reader, once master of the principle, will easily be able to investigate for himself the syntax of all examples ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... face down on the stone. There was a roar of tortured air from overhead and a thundering sound that was unlike anything except the tearing of an infinity of cloth combined with a sustained explosion of atomic bombs. Then it seemed as if the thunderbolt of Thor himself ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... essential to the maintenance of civil society, and gave it such a form, that for many ages God was nowhere so much feared as in that republic. The effect of this was to render easy any enterprise in which the senate or great men of Rome thought fit to engage. And whosoever pays heed to an infinity of actions performed, sometimes by the Roman people collectively, often by single citizens, will see, that esteeming the power of God beyond that of man, they dreaded far more to violate their oath than ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... asked Mrs. Lascelles, calling her fine eyes home from infinity, and fixing them once more ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... substitute our own. With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. Our horizon is the universe. We spy on the Divine and try to surprise His secrets, or to sneak into His confidence by stealth. We make God the eternal a puppet. We measure infinity with a foot-rule. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... well the new life fitted him, and each time I had declared it creaseless. His third invitation was more informal than the others, and he hinted of some matter in which he was anxious for my sympathy or counsel, or both. There is room for an infinity of mistakes when a man begins to take liberties with his nationality; and I went down expecting things. A seven-foot dog-cart and a groom in the black Holt Hangars livery met me at Amberley Royal. At Holt Hangars I was received by a person of elegance ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Ugo Balzani, or in the drawing-room of the French Embassy, all that showed, at first, was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenth century, fin, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable of throwing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or the lift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certain ceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train of an Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with spring delight, The other with harvest gold, And treasures of Autumn untold: And on this highest throne of the midsummer now The waning but deathless day doth dream, With a rapturous grace, as tho' from the face Of the unveiled infinity, lo, a far beam Had fall'n on her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... speaker shows the good effects upon people to prove that certain laws—claimed as the causes—should be extended in application. Arguments from effect to cause may be extremely far reaching; as every effect leads to some cause, which is itself the effect of some other cause, and so on almost to infinity. The good speaker will use just those basic causes which prove ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... were chatting, eating, amusing themselves, some sitting, some lying down, going and coming, hanging about near the ladies of the Embassy, to examine the details of their dresses too. If instantaneous photography had existed in those days, what an infinity of charming and picturesque groups might have been snatched. I did venture to make one or two rapid sketches on the sly; but there were too many eyes upon me, and besides it was an abuse of the toleration which was being shown us. I could not tear myself away from this most exceptional ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... having given him the idea that the coast was clear, I kept guard as I have described. I already knew that the papers were probably in the room, but I had no desire to rip up all the planking and skirting in search of them. I let him take them, therefore, from the hiding-place, and so saved myself an infinity of trouble. Is there any other point which I can ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... down my neck. He only understands infinity on math papers. I let Cat out of the basket and strip off my splashed shirt and chase Nick along the edge of the water. No need to worry about Cat. He chases right along with us, and every time a wave catches his feet he hisses and hightails it up the beach. ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... granite cappings of the tors are strongly projected against the red light of the sunset, which gleams between the many openings in the huge piles of rock, making them look like passages into some unknown country beyond them, and suggesting that idea of infinity which is afforded by no other object of sight in equal degree. Meanwhile, the heather of the foreground is growing darker and darker; and the only sound which falls upon the ear is that of the river far below, or perhaps the flapping of some heron's wings, as he rises ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... is not in sight and perhaps never will be. The unexplored region extends to infinity and, judged by the past, the momentum of discovery will continue to increase for ages to come, unless the human race decays through the comfort and ease gained from utilizing the magic secrets which are constantly ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh |
