"Inverse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... addition to our apprehensions or our measures of precaution. I will go beyond this, and say that religions have very frequently exercised a decidedly demoralizing influence. One may say generally that duties towards God and duties towards humanity are in inverse ratio. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... energy. And then the Burattini deserve the greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... coincide with the absolute maximum of utility. Hence, in the first place, it appears that you cannot apply this test of utility in a practical sense; you cannot say, This is useful, ergo, it is virtuous; but, in the inverse order, you must say, This is virtuous, ergo, it is useful. You do not rely on its usefulness to satisfy yourself of its being virtuous; but, on the contrary, you rely on its virtuousness, previously ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... supported.[264] The ingenious M. Muret, again, had found a Swiss parish in which the mean life was the highest and the fecundity smallest known. He piously conjectures that it may be a law of God that 'the force of life in each country should be in the inverse ratio of its fecundity.' He needs not betake himself to a miracle, says Malthus.[265] The case is simply that in a small and healthy village, where people had become aware of the importance of the 'preventive check,' the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... blouses, and full trousers of black velveteen, tucked into tall wrinkled boots, dart about to bakery and dairy shop, preparing for their masters' morning "tea." Venders of newspapers congregate at certain spots, and charge for their wares in inverse ratio to the experience of their customers; for regular subscribers receive their papers through the post-office, and, if we are in such unseemly haste as to care for the news before the ten o'clock delivery—or the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... makes their public extremely small, and causes their fame to be more remarkable for its length than for its breadth. And, in general, it may be said that the possibility of a man's fame lasting a long time, stands in almost inverse ratio with the chance that it will be early in making its appearance; so that, as regards length of fame, the above order of precedence may be reversed. But, then, the poet and the composer will come in the end to stand on the same level as the philosopher; since, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... regarding the important questions of God, immortality, and freedom, would have been either decided long ago, or would very soon be brought to a conclusion. But, in general, the uprightness of the defence stands in an inverse ratio to the goodness of the cause; and perhaps more honesty and fairness are shown by those who deny than by ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... recorder is exactly the inverse of the mirror galvanometer. In the latter we have a small magnet suspended in the centre of a large coil of wire—the wire enclosing the magnet, which is free to rotate round its own axis. In the former ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... it again. She regarded him from above. It was astonishing to note the perfect ease and grace with which he performed. The erect carriage, the fine cut of the head, the delicately carved features became the objects of her attention in their inverse order, and the richly endowed talents, with which he was so signally accomplished, furnished objects of special consideration to her reflective soul. He was exceedingly fascinating and a dangerous object to pit against ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... uniformity of differences presented, reveal the operation of the same law in this dual manifestation. Upon examining the processes of deduction and induction, we find in each the same series of terms, differing only in the fact that they are in inverse order, and this correspondence reveals the operation of one and the same law. An inductive series is only a deductive series read backward. Any two terms in a series whether inductive or deductive, differ only in the degree of generality, and differ ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... that many of them did believe that this was a great sign of a beauteous stirring of people's minds in favour of Rome. The fervent Romanists have always this point in their favour, that they are ready to believe. And they have a desire for the conversion of men which is honest in an exactly inverse ratio to the dishonesty of the means which they employ to produce it. Father Barham was ready to sacrifice anything personal to himself in the good cause,—his time, his health, his money when he had any, and his life. Much as he liked the comfort of Carbury ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... young nobles approached the presumably fair peripatetic, and, with courtesy commonly in inverse ratio to the amount of wine he was carrying home, proffered his escort to his gondola. Whenever this happened the figure removed her mask and unclasped her robe, and revealed a sight which for one moment rooted the young man to the earth ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... fallen, than the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes, carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the town hall. The attorneys for Portugal deferred their voting until this day, and voted that the order of examination should be in the inverse order. Immediately the deputies for Spain declared that in order to avoid discussions they made the declaration of the following writ. In substance this was reduced to saying that they ought to determine first the manner of locating the islands and to choose the meridian for the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... alike for his social wit and professional wisdom, who prescribed "a rush of blood to the boots" to all professional patients and head-workers—men who, happening to possess brains, are prone to forget that they have bodies. In no way can this inverse apoplexy be more healthfully or pleasantly induced than by a jolly game of cricket. That the sport is adapted to American tastes and needs we are convinced, and that it may find a habitat throughout the length and breadth of our land is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... portly principal. She enters the school-room makes a few criticisms, asks a blessing at the table; occasionally a misdemeanor is reported to her, when the offender is cited to the august presence, and duly reprimanded, not according to the quality of the offense, but, in an inverse proportion, to the quality of the offender. Her teachers do the mental drudgery of the institution. Their life is about as varied and pleasant as that of a churn-dog; that is, if the dog were kept churning all day. The balancing of accounts with them, and the making out of the bills for the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... MacDonald's brigade must have been almost hopeless. In the actual event it was one of extreme peril. The attack in his front was weakening every minute, but the far more formidable attack on his right rear grew stronger and nearer in inverse ratio. Both attacks must be met. The moment was critical; the danger near. All depended on MacDonald, and that officer, who by valour and conduct in war had won his way from the rank of a private soldier to the command of a brigade, and will doubtless ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,' he replied. 'When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution—then the snakes and swans and lotus—marsh-flowers—and Gudrun and Gerald—born in the process of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... it will undoubtedly serve in many cases to afford light to enable the animal to see by, and in the Lampyridae it would seem that the degree of luminosity is related to the development of the vision. In that family, according to the Rev. H.S. Gorham, the eyes are developed, as a rule, in inverse proportion to the luminosity. Where there is an ample supply of this kind of light the eyes are small, but where the light is insignificant the eyes are large by way of compensation. And moreover, where both eyes and light are small, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... to the ladies, ventured to kiss the fair, smooth hand of his hostess, undeterred by the frosty stare of O'Moy's blue eyes whose approval of all men was in inverse proportion to their approval of his wife—and finally proffered her the armful of early roses that ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... embarrassed; and he had no gift of putting any order in them. Prudence was not one of Schubart's virtues; the nearest approximation he could make to it was now and then a little touch of cunning. His wife still loved him; loved him with that perverseness of affection, which increases in the inverse ratio of its requital: she had long patiently endured his follies and neglect, happy if she could obtain a transient hour of kindness from him. But his endless course of riot, and the straits to which it had reduced their hapless family, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... between these two things; that, therefore, it is a mere chance whether or not organs which are of importance to organisms are likewise of importance as guides to classification; and, in point of fact, that the general tendency in this matter is towards an inverse instead of a direct proportion. More often than not, the greater the value of a structure for the purpose of indicating natural affinities, the less is its value to the creatures ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... enters, the Masters of Ceremony and Deacons halt inside the door and cross their rods, the committee proceed, followed by the Grand Lodge in the inverse order of their rank. When the Grand Master arrives in front of the altar, he halts, and the Grand Lodge filing to the right and left form a line across the hall. The committee then introduce The Most Worshipful ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... Of the inverse variation between activity and genesis we have examples in the contrast between the fertility of birds and the fertility of mammals. Comparing the large with the large and the small with the small, we see that creatures which continually go through the muscular exertion of sustaining themselves ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... 358. The inverse process, the reduction of divine beings to simple human proportions, has gone on in early cults and in early attempts at historical construction to a not inconsiderable degree. Thus, to take a relatively late example, by Saxo ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... not excessive; which three things it was impossible for the Latin Commentary to have; and, therefore, it was impossible for it to be obedient. That to the Latin it would have been impossible, as is said, is evident by such an argument as this: each thing which proceeds by an inverse order is laborious, and consequently is bitter, and not sweet; even as to sleep by day and to wake by night, and to go backwards and not forwards. For the subject to command the sovereign, is to proceed ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... of filtering does not decrease in inverse ratio to the rate, but at a much slower rate. This is especially true with rates of more than 5,000,000 or ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... super-Consciousness than a consciousness like ours. Matter is a flux rather than a thing, but its flow is in the opposite direction to that of Spirit. The flow of Spirit shows itself in the creativeness of the evolutionary process; Matter is the inverse movement towards stability. Bergson adheres to the view of Spirit as fundamental, while Matter, he says, is due to a lessening of the tension of the spiritual force which is the initial elan. Now, of course, Matter and Spirit have come to be two opposing forces, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... immense quantity of nonsense about, regarding this thing. For my part, I don't credit half of it. I believe in Malthus,—a great deal more than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village is honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its residents. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... towards the Needles passage. Numberless yachts skimmed by them; those fairy-like fabrics which Englishmen alone know how thoroughly to enjoy, varying in size from Lord Yarborough's superb Falcon, to the tiny craft whose owner is probably proud of her in inverse ratio to her tonnage. All is not gold that glitters, and the fair admirers of the graceful frigate and corvette would have been somewhat horrified, could they have witnessed the various scenes taking ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... this point the contraction process does not stop, but the heating process does. Further contraction is now accompanied by cooling, and the star goes through its colour changes again, but this time in the inverse order. It contracts and cools to yellow and finally to red. But when it again becomes a red star it is enormously denser and smaller than when it began as a red star. Consequently the red stars are divided into two ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... of the hotel room, was merely that we should perhaps appreciate more if we were offered less to appreciate. Apropos of this, I have long been struck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness of perception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost in inverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel. An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonous to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside village which is not a—not a great village; she is quite marvellously delightful by her power ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... feeling himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie." with its sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate, drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates his euthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's "Danse Macabre." It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "For to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness is over now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that "does not flow so far underground." ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the current of the Loire carries barks almost as far as Croisic. If they want to lie by a little, or to refresh the crew, they come to Pirial along the coast; from Pirial they find another inverse current, which carries them to the Isle-Dumal, two leagues and ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... many times we don't get the effect we planned on. But ... there's an inverse to that famous ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... of those who send him; the newspaper circulates not because it is filled with words of truth and wisdom, but because it panders to the pruriency and prejudice of its patrons; and a book is popular in inverse ratio to its individuality and worth. Our National Library is filled with books which have copyright, but no other right, human or divine, to exist at all; and when one of us does succeed in asserting his personality, he usually only makes himself odd and ridiculous. He rushes into polygamous ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Mr. Otis in debate," says Dr. Magoon, "was often keen but never malignant, as in John Randolph. The attacks of the latter were often fierce and virulent, not unfrequently in an inverse proportion to the ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... from wit, and defined as "a warm, tender, fellow-feeling with all that exists," as "the sport of sensibility and, as it were, the playful, teasing fondness of a mother for a child" ... as "a sort of inverse sublimity exalting into our affections what is below us,... warm and all-embracing ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sensible object to which it can be related, this word or this idea is unmeaning, and void of sense; it were better for man that the idea was banished from his mind, struck out of his language: this principle is only the converse of the axiom of ARISTOTLE,—"if the direct be evident, the inverse must be so likewise." How has it happened, that the profound LOCKE, who, to the great mortification of the metaphysicians, has placed this principle of ARISTOTLE in the clearest point of view? how is ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... hatred. His work is written with excessive negligence, which, added to its numerous errors, shows how much respect he must have entertained for his readers. It would appear that his object was to make it the inverse of his novels, where everything is borrowed from history. I have been assured that Marshal Macdonald having offered to introduce Scott to some generals who could have furnished him with the most accurate, information respecting ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... philandering Broadway or Bond Street masher makes the physiological mistake of undervaluing the innate sense of decency inherent in every woman. Gentle courtesy and manners impress a courtesan by reason of the novelty. The inverse is often useful in dealing with a ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... divinity is generally in inverse ratio to its responsiveness, and the sense of discouragement produced by Osric Dane's entrance visibly increased the Lunch Club's eagerness to please her. Any lingering idea that she might consider herself under an obligation to her entertainers was at once dispelled by her manner: as ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... But the inverse problem—given the perturbations, to find the planet that causes them—such a problem had never yet been attacked, and by only a few had its possibility been conceived. Friedrich Bessel made preparations for solving this mystery in 1840, but he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... remedies, or she can let him die without remedies because she doesn't believe in the reality of disease. She is quite willing to legislate for his stomach, his mind, his soul, her teachableness, it goes without saying, being generally in inverse proportion to her knowledge; for the arrogance of science is humility compared with the ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... most important reason is that most women have skill in domestic matters; and domestic service is needed everywhere, no matter how many unemployed walk the streets. Needed most in the poorest home, the help of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio to the income. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... has proposed to itself something to prove, and assumed grounds on which it may depend; and when these have been established, it comes back to its original proposition, and concludes. But the other kind of argumentation, proceeding as it were backwards and in an inverse way, first of all assumes what it chooses, and confirms it; and then, having excited the minds of the hearers, it throws on to the end that which was its original object. But there is this variety, and a distinction which is not disagreeable ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... lives in the omnipresent Spirit; for him there is no distance inverse to the square. Only one reason, therefore, can motivate Babaji in maintaining his physical form from century to century: the desire to furnish humanity with a concrete example of its own possibilities. Were man never vouchsafed a glimpse of Divinity ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Milton or some Cromwell may be lost to the world under the garb of a ploughman. Others may suppose that some excellent jack-pudding may lie hidden under red velvet and ermine. I cannot say that by the experiment of last night the latter hypothesis has been demonstrated, any more than the inverse proposition in France, where, though there seem to be many as bloody-minded rascals as Cromwell, I can discover none of his abilities.(699) They have settled nothing like a constitution; on the contrary, they seem to protract every thing but violence, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... could change his great love for his erring Jessie, nothing could wipe out his sense of loss; his grief was always with him. But whereas, judged by the outward seeming of his character, he should have been crushed under Fate's cruel blow, an inverse process seemed to have set in. He was lifted, exalted to the almost sublime heights where his ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... educated men of the present day have by no means universally outgrown. Save for some such old associations as these, why should it be supposed that matter becomes "spriritualized" as it diminishes in apparent substantiality? Why should matter be pronounced respectable in the inverse ratio of its density or ponderability? Why is a diamond any more chargeable with "grossness" than a cubic centimetre of hydrogen? Obviously such fancies are purely of mythologic parentage. Now the luminiferous ether, upon which ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... own letters, while Louis laughed at the enunciation of this inverse ratio; and then took up the note again, to wonder at the tone of anxiety and distress, so unlike James. He went to call on Lady Conway, and was better satisfied to find that James had written in a lively strain to her, as if proud of his little daughters, and resolved not to be pitied. Of this ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arrangement, for it is well understood that the second Volksraad is simply a show institution, devised in 1890. The various schemes for redistribution lead one to the conclusion that the number of members in the First Volksraad were to be in inverse ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... distances is proportional to the square of the corresponding times. In other words, the ratio of r^3 to T^2 for every planet is the same. Or, again, the length of a planet's year depends on the 3/2th power of its distance from the sun. Or, once more, the speed of each planet in its orbit is as the inverse square-root of its distance from the sun. The product of the distance into the square of the speed is the same for ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... that which had just happened; but this was neither my turn of mind nor the inclination of my heart. The facility with which I forget past evils, however recent they may be, is astonishing. The remembrance of them becomes feeble, and, sooner or later, effaced, in the inverse proportion to the greater degree of fear with which the approach of them inspires me. My cruel imagination, incessantly tormented by the apprehension of evils still at a distance, diverts my attention, and prevents ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... inverse permutation: to obtain only females and no males, or very few. The first permutation makes the second seem very probable, although I cannot as yet conceive a means of realizing it. The only condition which I can regulate is the dimensions of the home. When the rooms are small, the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... "As far as humanly possible. The element of error is always present. I've checked and re-checked my calculations. I've augmented the vacuum tubes by installing three super-dimensional inverse power tubes." He clasped the girl's arm. "The street is no place to talk. Let's go ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... my mind, is much as if a man of science should make the story of the fall of the apple in Newton's garden an integral part of the doctrine of gravitation, and teach it as of equal authority with the law of the inverse squares. ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... a general rule that the constancy of species is in an inverse ratio to their range. Those which are confined to one or two islands are generally very constant. When they extend to many islands, considerable variability appears; and when they have an extensive range over a large part ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... art is improved by confining the professor of it to that single study. But, although the art itself is advanced by this concentration of mind in its service, the individual who is confined to it goes back. The advantage of the community is nearly in an inverse ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... pathetic facts of human history. After he had made one or two mistakes in following the dicta that Sampson uttered with all the diffidence of a papal encyclical, Millard became aware that in social matters pretension is often in inverse ratio to accomplishment. About the time that he gave up Sampson he renounced the cheap tailor into whose hands he had unwarily fallen, and consigned to oblivion a rather new thirty-dollar dress-suit in favor of one that cost half a hundred dollars more. He had by this ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... African bourgeois republic. I can well imagine," he said, looking far away with his bright little eyes through the walls of the dark dining room, "that the working men's republics of Europe may have to have a colonial policy of an inverse kind. Just as now you conquer backward races in order to exploit them, so in the future you may have to conquer the colonists to take from them the means of exploitation. There is only one thing ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... various formalities, are treated by their lords as existences on sufferance. And even more. The fact that they are ruled, governed, and owned they must acknowledge and confess as a favour of heaven! On the other hand, there are those rulers themselves whose greatness is in inverse proportion to ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx |
