"Orbit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... adjust yourself to them?" questioned Egon laughingly. "You will be flattered and spoiled there, as everywhere else, for you will appear in the heavens like a meteor and no one ever requires stars of that nature to follow a prescribed orbit. Moreover you will be both a guest and a foreigner; and as such will occupy an exceptional position. When in addition to that, the poet's halo shines round ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... leaves while they last: they will not last long. Grasp the day and hold it and rejoice in it: some time soon you will find of a sudden that the summer time has passed away. You come to yourself, and find it is December. The earth seems to pause in its orbit in the dreary winter days: it hurries at express speed through summer. You wish you could put on a break, and make time go on more slowly. Well, watch the sandgrains as they pass. Remark the several minutes, yet without making it a task to do ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... merits. If Indiana had gone out of her proper place in the Union, and her loyal population had been found too weak to force her back into it without negro bullets and bayonets, and if, after thus coercing her again into her constitutional orbit, her loyalists had been found unable to hold her there without negro ballots, the question of negro suffrage in Indiana would most obviously have been very different from the comparatively abstract one which it now is. It would, it is true, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... Kitty Bonnair he had the prettiest little calico-horse in the bunch, a pony painted up with red and yellow and white until he looked like a three-color chromo. Even his eye was variegated, being of a mild, pet-rabbit blue, with a white circle around the orbit; and his name, of course, was Pinto. To be sure, his face was a little dished in and he showed other signs of his scrub Indian blood, but after Creede had cinched on the new stamped-leather saddle and adjusted the ornate hackamore and martingale, Pinto was ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... Wentworth Hall, or in my office in Jersey City. I only knew that the page, illuminated by a drop gas-light, was before me, and on it the record of that brilliant triumph of the human intellect, the deduction of a planet's entire orbit from observations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... people affected by its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked the sidewalk day and night before its windows, gazing upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the persons over their coffee within as beings lifted by sudden magic out of the common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher sphere. All the waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and the head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat reaching to his feet, and armed ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... they feel a savage desire to hurt, to cry out, or make the other cry out. The black silence in which love reaches its final stage of disintegration, and the man and the woman, like the worlds, each following its own orbit, pass onward into the night.... They had reached a point at which everything they did, even an attempt to come together again, drove them farther and farther apart. Their life became intolerable. Events were precipitated by ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Montcornet was pursued by special ill-luck in this accidental separation of his dangerous enemies, who thus accomplished the evolutions of their individual power and vanity at such distances from each other that neither star interfered with the orbit of the other,—a fact which doubled and ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... those things which are moved by natural impulse are either borne downward by their weight, or upward by their lightness; neither of which things could be the case with the stars, because they move in a regular circle and orbit. Nor can it be said that there is some superior force which causes the stars to be moved in a manner contrary to nature. For what superior force can there be? It follows, therefore, that their motion must be voluntary. And whoever is convinced of this must discover not only great ignorance, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... of government consists, and its safety and durability must consist, in avoiding mutual collisions and encroachments and in the regular separate action of all, while each is revolving in its own distinct orbit. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... matter [10] was an extension of natural laws in another direction. In 1846 occurred the most spectacular proof of the reign of natural law which the nineteenth century witnessed. Two scientists, in different lands, [11] working independently, calculated the orbit of a new planet, Neptune, and when the telescope was turned to the point in the heavens indicated by their calculations the planet was there. It was a tremendous triumph for both mathematics and astronomy. Such work as this meant the firm establishment of scientific ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... assumed that the matter of the solar system was once wholly gaseous, and extended as a roughly globular or lenticular mass beyond the orbit of Neptune. Sir Robert Ball stated in a lecture here that even when the solar nebula had shrunk to the size of the earth's orbit it must have been (I think he said) hundreds of times rarer than the residual gas ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... They who belong to God cease to live to themselves. There are two centres for human life, and I believe there are only two—the one is God, the other is my wretched self. And if we are swept, as it were, out of the little orbit that we move in, when the latter is our centre, and are drawn by the weight and mass of the great central sun to become its satellites, then we move in a nobler orbit and receive fuller and more blessed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... awakened by the first touch of weariness. His brief infatuation had run its course. His judgment had been whirled—he told himself it had been whirled, but it had really only been tweaked—from its centre, had performed its giddy orbit, and now the check-string had brought it back to the point from whence it had set out, namely, that she was merely a ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... in fire or flood the deep decay And taint of wickedness. We suffer each Our ghostly penance; thence, the few who may, Seek the bright meadows of Elysian day, Till long, long years, when our allotted time Hath run its orbit, wear the stains away, And leave the aetherial sense, and spark sublime, Cleansed from the dross of earth, and cankering rust ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... him. So long as he still lived, there would be nothing but danger from the alien monster in his head. He had no idea of his limits—but he was sure that it could trigger the energies of the universe to move the whole world out of its orbit, if that seemed necessary ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... interval between the centres of the two planets is 59.9643 of the earth's equatorial radii, or only about 237,000 miles. I say the mean or average interval. But it must be borne in mind that the form of the moon's orbit being an ellipse of eccentricity amounting to no less than 0.05484 of the major semi-axis of the ellipse itself, and the earth's centre being situated in its focus, if I could, in any manner, contrive to meet the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... already moved in an orbit around her, and whose parents had, according to a familiar phrase, an even more circumscribed course around her little finger—for Bessie Hall to rail at fate was ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... suppose. At least if you are as good at making work for yourself in some cases as you are in others,' she said with a queer little recollective gleam in her face. 'Did it never occur to you that you might set the world straight—and persuade its orbit ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... estimated. Its face, which was turned to the earth, was very bright. One might have thought it a small moon reflecting the light of the large one. She advanced with great speed, and seemed to describe an orbit round the earth, which would intersect the passage of the projectile. This body revolved upon its axis, and exhibited the phenomena of all ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... the Cabinet which was shortly to produce an important change in the Administration. The eccentricities of the Chancellor had on several occasions given much uneasiness to Ministers. He seemed to move in an orbit of his own, independently of his colleagues; while the influence he exercised over the King's mind, and his repulsive bearing, made all approaches to him difficult and hazardous. The first consideration, when an unexpected question ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... revolution causes the precession of the equinoxes. This etheric sun-globe is revolving around Alcyone with other etheric globes having suns for their centers and solar systems of prakritic globes within them in a great year of 5,640,000,000 of our common years. Its orbit has a diameter ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... of a diminution of his fears. He had entirely underrated James Polder; the latter was an immense sight steadier than Mariana. His thoughts strayed momentarily to Harriet, back again in her public orbit. He could imagine that she had found Harrisburg insuperably dull, the hours with only Cherette empty after the emotional debauches of the plays elected by Vivian Blane. Yes, this young Polder would stand admirably firm. Mariana frowned at the cobalt smoke of her ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... poems. Over the Sunday-school of our church Starr King had provided a small room where he could retire and gain seclusion. It pleased Emerson. He said, "I think I should enjoy a study beyond the orbit of the servant girl." He was as self-effacing a man as I ever knew, and the most agreeable ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... which manifested Christ's birth removed all occasion of error. For, as Augustine says (Contra Faust. ii): "No astrologer has ever so far connected the stars with man's fate at the time of his birth as to assert that one of the stars, at the birth of any man, left its orbit and made its way to him who was just born": as happened in the case of the star which made known the birth of Christ. Consequently this does not corroborate the error of those who "think there is a connection between man's birth and the course ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... reflection have since led me to suspect] it was mean and degrading to accept. She only could prevail. She whose commands are irresistible, and who condescended to entreat!—Her eye glistening with a tear, which she with difficulty detained in its beauteous orbit, she entreated!—There was no opposing such intercession! Her eloquence was heavenly! God be praised that it was so! For, as it has happened, I am persuaded it has preserved a poor distressed creature from phrensy—Have patience, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... years old when these advanced ideas presented themselves to his intelligence. Vico in Italy had insisted on the doctrine that the course of human affairs is in a cycle, and that they move in a constant and self-repeating orbit.[49] Turgot, on the contrary, with more wisdom, at the opening of his subject is careful to distinguish the ever-varying spectacle of the succession of men from generation to generation, from the circle of identical revolutions in which the phenomena of nature are enclosed. In ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... this year after year—the marvel is that we are ever deceived; but after all, what is it but the conflict between arbitrary and natural law? The almanac-maker says that on the first day of September autumn is due. Nature, the orbit-maker, proclaims it summer until, the month three-quarters old, the equinox is crossed. Nature is always right, and after the usual breezy argument sends Summer, her garments a bit storm-tattered, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... gentleman was looking on with the teacher. Conscious of being looked at, the little fellows were wheeling round with more than usual swiftness and dexterity, when a little creature of two or three years made a sudden dart forward into their very orbit, and in an instant must have been knocked down with great force. With a presence of mind and consideration, and with a mechanical skill,—which to admire most we knew not, one of the boys, about five years old, used the instant of time in which ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... we live is turned towards the sun and its rays illumine our environment, but when our home is turned away from the sun and its rays obstructed by the opaque earth we term the resulting darkness: Night. The passage of the earth in its orbit around the sun produces the seasons and the year, which are our divisions of time. But in the Desire World where all is light there is but one long day. The spirit is not there fettered by a heavy physical ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... being the fastest sprinter in Guiana, with a record, so we were solemnly told, of 9-1/5 seconds for the hundred—a veritable Mercury, as the last world's record of which I knew was 9-3/5. His stay with us was like the orbit of some comets, which make a single lap around the sun never to return, and his successor Edward, with unbelievably large and graceful hands and feet, was a better cook, with the softest voice and gentlest manner ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... any appeal from her verdict; yet each of her subjects revolved in his or her own orbit of independence, according to laws which Junie acknowledged and respected; and the interpreting of this mysterious charter of rights and privileges had not been without difficulty ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... Wenus, as I need hardly inform the sober reader, revolves round the sun at a mean distance of [character: Venus sigil] vermillion miles. More than that, as has been proved by the recent observations of Puits of Paris, its orbit is steadily but surely advancing sunward. That is to say, it is rapidly becoming too hot for clothes to be worn at all; and this, to the Wenuses, was so alarming a prospect that the immediate problem of life became the discovery of new quarters notable for ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... decade that one star in every five or six on the average is attended by a companion so near to it as to remain invisible in the most powerful telescopes, and so massive as to swing the visible star around in an elliptic orbit. ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... &c. (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c. (angel) 244[obs3]; batophobia[obs3]. satellite, spy-in-the-sky. V. be high &c. adj.; tower, soar, command; hover, hover over, fly over;orbit, be in orbit; cap, culminate; overhang, hang over, impend, beetle, bestride, ride, mount; perch, surmount; cover &c. 223; overtop &c. (be superior) 33; stand on tiptoe. become high &c. adj.; grow higher, grow taller; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... gentle spirit that thought itself unfired gunpowder and latent ruin, it is Conrad Wiegand. If ever there was an oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o'lantern, confined to a swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is Conrad Wiegand. Therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look; and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature? When I met ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... universe of new thought. Every one who does anything with a heart for it, every specialist every one, however simple, who is strenuous and genuine, is a "new discovery." Let us give credit to the smallest planet that is true to its own orbit. ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... at it as a man looks at a flickering fireplace and thinks of other things. He thought of the sun, 52 trillion miles away, a pinpoint of light lost in the dazzle of the Milky Way—the Earth a speck of dust in orbit just as this planet was to its ...
— The Quantum Jump • Robert Wicks
... constructor of the first telescope, leading him to discover that the Milky Way was an assemblage of starry worlds, and the earth a planet revolving on its axis and about an orbit, for which opinion he was tried and condemned. When forced to retire from his professorship at Padua, he continued his observations from ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... century that that influence can be said to have existed at all. Up to that point China had pursued a course of her own, carrying on her own struggles within a definite limit, and completely indifferent to, and ignorant of, the ceaseless competition and contests of mankind outside her orbit, which make up the history of the rest of the Old World. The long struggles for supremacy in Western Asia between Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian, the triumphs of the Greek, followed by the absorption of what remained of the Macedonian conquests in the Empire of Rome, even the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... philosophers infer, with the greatest certainty, that the moon is kept in its orbit by the same force of gravity, that makes bodies fall near the surface of the earth, but because these effects are, upon computation, found similar and equal? And must not this argument bring as strong conviction, in ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... quantity of heat, electro-magnetic tension, and terrestrial light — p. 154-202 and note. Knowledge of the compression and curvature of the earth's surface acquired by measurements of degrees, pendulum oscillations, and certain inequalities in the moon's orbit. Mean density of the earth. The earth's crust, and the depth to which we are able to penetrate — p. 159, 160, note. Threefold movement of the heat of the earth; its thermic condition. Law of the increase of ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... it most formidably the strongest. Most sincerely do I grieve at what has happened. It has upset all my wishes and theories as to the influence of marriage on your life; for, instead of bringing you, as I expected, into something like a regular orbit, it has only cast you off again into infinite space, and left you, I fear, in a far worse state than it found you. As to defending you, the only person with whom I have yet attempted this task is myself; and, considering the little I know upon the subject, (or rather, perhaps, owing to this cause,) ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... other would have agreed with him. The man that shot his enemy from cover was a coyote—nothing less. But about that brown slip of a creature, who had for three minutes crossed his orbit, he wanted ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... with coffee and ended with oysters on the half-shell, he would have given the unusual meal a most animated consideration, although he might have utterly withheld any subsequent approbation. As a general thing, he revolved in an orbit where one might always be able to find him, were the proper calculations made. But if any one drew a tangent for him, and its direction seemed suitable and interesting, he was perfectly willing to fly ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... Agency, with whom he had been connected for several years, and where his sound and vivacious qualities were highly esteemed. It was in the course of drumming up post-war business that he had swung so far out of his ordinary orbit as to call on Roger Mifflin. Perhaps these explanations should have ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... discomfort doth proclaim itself. Often it is a sickness, warning us That we are diff'rent—other, though the same, And other things are fitting in the same. So is it with our inmost soul as well— It stretches out, a wider orbit gains, Described about the selfsame centre still. Such sickness have we, then, but now passed through; And saying we, I mean that thou as well Art not a stranger to such inner growth. Let's not, unheeding, pass the warning by! In future let us live as kings ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... usually looked upon as the cognate or allied studies of the subjective department of human knowledge are, Psychology, Logic, Ontology, Ethics. The debates in a society like the present will generally be found to revolve in the orbit thus chalked out. It is the sphere of the most animated controversies, and the widest discordance of view. The additional branch most nearly connected with the group is Sociology, which under that name, and under the older ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Now, up to this moment, Saunders knew no more, than those who had just been questioning him of the particular situation of the ship, in which he floated as indifferent to the whereabouts and the winds, as men sail in the earth along its orbit, without bethinking them of parallaxes, nodes, ecliptics, and solstices. Aware that it was about time for the captain to be heard, he sent a subordinate on deck, with a view to be ready to meet the usual questions from his commander. A couple of minutes were sufficient ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... a puzzled way. The professor was a riddle to him. He represented no type which had come within the orbit of his experience. With the arrival of the champagne, the professor became almost eloquent. He leaned forward, gazing stealthily ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years. Those larger planets held our little one to its orbit, and lent it their brightness. Happy indeed is the infancy which is surrounded only by ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... seek to know? Is not All life a problem? and the tiniest pulse Beats with a throb which the remotest star Feels in its orbit? Why ask me? Rather say Whence these vague yearnings, whither swells this heart, Like some wild floweret leaping at the dawn? 'Tis not for me, 'tis not for thee to tell, But Time shall be our teacher, and his voice Shall fall unheard, unheeded in the midst! Still art thou doubtful? Then arise ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... raised his ship from the Asteroid Moira when he saw the small planetoid lurch suddenly, bounding off its orbit at almost a right angle. The sudden combined driving force of all the rockets within the cave had sent it hurtling away like ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... carried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopp'd than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv'd, the fervid, the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... silence—their love driving them toward each other, and they withholding like fluttering moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving each about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight! It seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more potent than gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt each into each there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always alone, and always ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... of its extending as far as the moon. That her motion must be influenced by such a power he did not for a moment doubt; and a little reflection convinced him that it might be sufficient for retaining that luminary in her orbit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... days, if one can have days any earlier than those he now enjoys, Churchill was entirely influenced by two things: the tremendous admiration he felt for his father, which filled him with ambition to follow in his orbit, and the camaraderie of his mother, who treated him less like a mother than a sister ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... lyrist he added the dramatist, to the dramatist the novelist, to the novelist the mystic seer, and to all these the naturalist and scientific discoverer. The history of literature exhibits no other instance in which a great poet has supplemented his proper orbit with so wide ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... after much debate in the Solar Council Chamber. There have been many arguments pro and con. A week ago a secret vote was taken, and the project was approved. We are going to establish a Solar Alliance colony on a newly discovered satellite in orbit around the sun star Wolf 359, a satellite that has been ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... fraud life was! Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood! An ass, ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... half burnt And narrow cell sprang forth (1) and sought the sky Where dwells the Thunderer. Black the space of air Upreaching to the poles that bear on high The constellations in their nightly round; There 'twixt the orbit of the moon and earth Abide those lofty spirits, half divine, Who by their blameless lives and fire of soul Are fit to tolerate the pure expanse That bounds the lower ether: there shall dwell, Where nor the monument encased in gold, Nor richest incense, shall suffice to bring The ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... from that day to this. At the North, the Government of the United States was never feared as likely to become injurious in any sense to the inhabitants of the States. Each State fell quietly and harmoniously into its true subordinate orbit, acknowledging gladly and without question the supremacy of the new Government, representative of the whole of the people, in simple accord with the spirit and intention of the Constitution and the Government which the people had formed. At the South, on the contrary, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... cannot permanently endure half slave and half free; the Union will not be dissolved, but the house will cease to be divided;" and now, in 1861, with no experience whatever as an executive officer, while States were madly flying from their orbit, and wise men knew not where to find counsel, this descendant of Quakers, this pupil of Bunyan, this offspring of the great West, was ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... the women who are the preservers of the family worship and who are trying hard to cling to old loved customs. Perhaps it is because we suffer from lack of facility in adapting ourselves to new conditions. We are as fixed as the star in its orbit. Not so much the men of China but we women of the inner courtyards seem to our younger generation to stand an immovable mountain in the pathway of their freedom from the ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... precision, want precision alone to be capable of incorporation in an ideal science such as might actually exist for a supernatural observer of incomparably superior powers. A man who knows, though he knows nothing more, that the moon is kept in its orbit by forces similar to or identical with those which cause the fall of an apple, knows something which only requires more definite treatment to be made into a genuine theory of gravitation. If, on the contrary, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... other to the company, so as to attract attention to his hump, uttered the single word Mountain, and took on himself the part of the moon, proceeding to revolve in the circle which represented her orbit. Several of the boys and girls smiled, but no one laughed, for Mr Graham's gravity maintained theirs. Without remark, he used the mad laird for a moon to the end ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... "It ain't got no orbit, man," Joyce said. "I'm trackin' it, but I don't understand it. That rock is on a closing curve with us, and slowin' ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... hummed along a harmless orbit not far above our tree top and fell in the forest. It certainly looked as though we were shooting all the hard-stuff and the German end of the fireworks party was all coloured lights and Roman candles. Of the six shells that passed us, three ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... wages, lighter toils, a greater sense of the dignity of man—are not productive of any change in society. Give these advantages to the whole mass of the labouring classes, and what in the small orbit is the desire of the individual to rise becomes in the large circumference the desire of the class to rise; hence social restlessness, social change, revolution, and its hazards. For revolutions are ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... (for corresponding zenith distances) when the earth is in aphelion corresponds with the increased diffusion of the rays consequent on increased distance from the sun. This practical demonstration, however, has been questioned on the insufficient ground that "the eccentricity of the earth's orbit is too small and the temperature produced by solar radiation too low" to furnish a safe basis ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... especially during the changes proposed by Pericles and Ephialtes, there was always a strenuous party of resistance, who would not suffer the people to forget that they had already forsaken, and were on the point of forsaking still more, the orbit marked out by Solon. The illustrious Pericles underwent innumerable attacks both from the orators in the assembly and from the comic writers in the theatre. And among these sarcasms on the political tendencies of the day we are probably to number the complaint, breathed by the poet Cratinus, of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... were the blue waters breaking into foam, the ships traversing the deep, the far-encircling shores green in vegetation, the high rampart of ice-bound mountains that shut in the land, making it a world by itself. There was the sun, low on the horizon, which it traversed on its long orbit, lighting up all these scenes till the six-months day should end and the six-months ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... already observed that the fact that the earth's orbit and that of other planets are in the form of ellipses; that the curvature of the earth is nearly the same, ought to guide us in choosing this particular curve as a model of the projection of a complete and most advantageous ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... the subsequent reaction, or on the occurrence of any excitement. Inflammation of the meninges or brain may follow injuries, not only to the brain itself, but to the scalp and adjacent parts, as the orbit and ear. Inflammation does not usually come on at once, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the libration of the moon, or that apparent oscillatory inequality in her motion, caused by a change in the excentricity of her orbit, whereby her mean longitude is sometimes increased or diminished to the amount of 1 deg. 20', whereby we sometimes see a little further round one side ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... should call her eccentric, and be interested and amused by her vagaries; and I do not see why she should not be allowed the same excuse as it is, only St. Catherine's is not the place for her. Here all must move in the common orbit, to save confusion. So I shall write to her mother, and get her to take her from the school at the end of the term in the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... illustrations for fools. There is the mighty axis of Earth, The never-resting pole of Heaven; Let us grasp their clue, And with them be blended in One, Beyond the bounds of thought, Circling for ever in the great Void, An orbit of a thousand years,— Yes, this is the ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... situation in which she was neglected; this served to accelerate the decline and fall of her ladyship's power over her mind. She began to consider her not as a person by whom she had been brought into notice in the circles of fashion, but as one by whom she was prevented from rising to a higher orbit. Lady Bradstone went to see her sister the day after her arrival, but she was not at home. Some days afterwards Lady Pierrepoint returned her visit: she came in a sedan chair, because she did not wish ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... not be out of place to inquire into the nature of this peace about which swings this wide orbit of opinion and argument. At the most, such an inquiry can be no more gratuitous and no more nugatory than the controversies that provoke it. The intrinsic merits of peace at large, as against those of warlike enterprise, it should ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... in a planetary orbit, was designed by me and built under my direction. It is protected from meteorites by certain forces of my devising. It is undetectable and invisible—your detectors do not touch it and light-waves are bent around it without loss or distortion. ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... misdeemed of morn, our faces turned When volcan glares set all the east aglow, We are not poorer that we wept and yearned; Though earth swing wide from God's intent, And though no man nor nation Will move with full consent In heavenly gravitation, Yet by one Sun is every orbit bent. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a glimpse of it. The difficulties attending this observation are the tremendous velocity with which it travels, its very small mass, and the rapidity with which, at the hour of sunset, it passes into the shadow of the earth. I will, however, calculate its orbit, and search for it again; for I have this evening seen what no human eye has ever beheld, I HAVE SEEN THE EARTH'S LITTLE MOON." While I watched, entranced, the astronomer, aided by his assistants, labored over multitudes ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... thousand miles out. He set course for Earth at about five and a half mps, which Johnson calculated to bring them in on the station on the "going away" side of its orbit, and settled back for the tedious two hours of free wheeling. For ten or fifteen minutes, the interphone crackled with the gregariousness born of recent peril, and gradually the ship fell silent as each man returned to his ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... 30 or so months following the opening of the space age, as signaled by the launching of Sputnik I in October 1957, the United States put 21 satellites into orbit out of 42 attempts. Two out of five deep-space probes were successful. The degree of success for all major launchings ran better than 50 percent. The American effort has been based on a broad scope of inquiry and includes long-range communications, ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... alphabet, or the age of hieroglyphics. No record of the event is found upon the annals of human history. But seven hundred years have scarcely passed away since its polarity was first known to the civilized European man. It was by observation of the periodical revolution of the earth in her orbit round the sun, compared with her daily revolution round her axis, that was disclosed the fact that her annual period was composed of three hundred and sixty-five of her daily revolutions; or, in other words, that the year was composed ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... and disquieting, I refuse to leave all, including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colours are prismatic spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that. It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime on fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... as any comet when I first swing out o' my regular orbit, an' I rode on an' on, sometimes puttin' up for the night at a ranch house an' sometimes campin' out in the open, where I'd lay till dawn gazin' up at the stars an' wonderin' how things were goin', back at the Diamond Dot. I mooned on until at ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... follows this lucid and soul-stirring sentence: "5. We will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own orbit." What a jolly song it would be—so hearty, and with such a simple swing in it! I can imagine the Futurists round the fire in a tavern trolling out in chorus some ballad with that incomparable refrain; shouting over their swaying flagons some ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... development of the national soul, but ahead on the road is the world soul, the true Fatherland. The precious whisper is abroad that more sins have been committed in the name of patriotism than any other. The time will come when this little orbit and its slaying delusions will be well back among the provincialisms; not a bad word in itself, rather a lost ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... opportunity for further growth. Some large and dense swarm of meteorites, perhaps containing a number of bodies of the size of the asteroids, came within the range of the sun's attraction and were drawn by it into an orbit which crossed that of Mars at such a small angle that the planet was able at each revolution to capture a considerable number of them. The result might then be that, as in the case of the earth, the continuous inpour of the fresh matter first heated, and later on liquefied the greater ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... east to west, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning. The history of the world has an east in an absolute sense, for, although the earth forms a sphere, history describes no orbit round it, but has, on the contrary, a determinate orient—viz., Asia. Here rises the outward visible sun, and in the west it sinks down; here also rises the sun of self-consciousness. The history of the world is a discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... who had been lying in the Nevada desert for a hundred years or so. I was going to look like him, dried up, yellow, my teeth protruding in a grin, perfectly preserved. With no pilot, the ship would go into a cometary orbit around the sun. Maybe in a hundred years or so someone would come and take me back to a ...
— Last Resort • Stephen Bartholomew
... little things, that, formed into a total, become knowledge of the Great World. I say the Great World—for of the world without the circle of the great, Cleveland naturally knew but little. But of all that related to that subtle orbit in which gentlemen and ladies move in elevated and ethereal order, Cleveland was a profound philosopher. It was the mode with many of his admirers to style him the Horace Walpole of the day. But ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not here, Mr. Creswell?" asked the Baronet; for about this crazy old man, who preached in the fields, and appeared and disappeared so suddenly in the orbit of his wide and unknown perambulations of those northern and border counties, there was that sort of superstitious feeling which attaches to the mysterious and the good—an idea that it was lucky to harbour and dangerous to offend him. No one ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... weeks passed. Then, one day, a comet of amazing brilliancy shot suddenly into our social orbit, and things happened. That this interesting stellar phenomenon was a Russian grand duke, a nephew of the Czar, but added to the ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... under Hamiltonian centralising principles at the other extremity. To-day it is as far from the ideals of the one as the other. Controlled constantly by centrifugal and centripetal forces, the fixed orbit of the Union ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... mathematical precision, she measures with her eye the space to which she is restricted by the curiosity of the by-standers. Rapid as lightning, she springs forward till the measure recalling her to the place she left, she traces her orbit, like a planet, at the same time revolving on her axis. Sometimes her "light, fantastic toe" will approach within half an inch of your foot; nay, you shall almost feel her breath on your cheek, and still she will not touch you, except, perhaps, with ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... what the devil was going on. The spaceship William Branchell was to be built on the surface of Earth—and yet it was to be a much larger ship than any that had ever before been built on the ground. Usually, an interstellar vessel that large was built in orbit around the Earth, where the designers didn't have to worry about gravitational pull. Such a ship never landed, any more than an ocean liner was ever beached—not on purpose, anyway. The passengers and cargo were taken up by smaller vessels and ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... beating down slantingly, as if we were in a southern latitude, instead of in the far Northland. It was swinging around, its orbit ever visible and rising higher and higher each day, frequently mist-covered, yet always peering through the lacework of clouds like some fretful eye of fate, guarding the mysterious Northland and jealously watching the pranks ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... gods, but to be gods themselves: and when this theory was exploded, there movements were explained by metaphysical conceptions; such as a tendency of Nature to perfection, in virtue of which these sublime bodies, being left to themselves, move in the most perfect orbit, the circle. Even Kepler was full of fancies of this description, which only terminated when Newton, by unveiling the real physical laws of the celestial motions, closed the metaphysical period of astronomical science. As M. Comte remarks, our power ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... route—pictures and gimcracks on the walls, trinkets and globular old watches and snuff-boxes on the tables; and I took good care to finger everything within reach thoroughly and conscientiously. Some articles, in addition, I smelt. At last in my orbit I happened on an open door, half concealed by the folds of a curtain. I glanced carefully around. They were still deep in clothes, both talking ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... somewhat like the "Himalayan Brothers" of modern superstition. See Herklots (Qanoon-e-Islam) for a long and careful description of these "Mardan-i-Ghayb" (Pers.), a "class of people mounted on clouds," invisible, but moving in a circular orbit round the world, and suggesting the Hindu "Lokapalas." They should not be in front of the traveller nor on his right, but either behind or on his left hand. Hence tables, memorial couplets and hemistichs are required to ascertain the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... with a young dragoon officer; and as they passed me I rose from my seat, and approached the orbit of the dance, in order to keep them ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... over everything. We find it in the arrangement of the scales of a fir-cone, as in the arrangement of an Epeira's limy web; we find it in the spiral of a Snail-shell, in the chaplet of a Spider's thread, as in the orbit of a planet; it is everywhere, as perfect in the world of atoms as ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... Special'—look at its pristine beauty! What better consolation can a man ask, for not having gotten to land at the apogee point of his orbit?" ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... Assam, at noting how much of the tea-making machinery is manufactured in Belfast, for though Ulster enterprise is proverbial, I should never have anticipated it as taking this particular line. There is one peculiarly fascinating machine in which a mechanical pestle, moving in an eccentric orbit, twists the flat leaf into the familiar narrow crescents that we infuse daily. The tea-plant is a pretty little shrub, with its pale-primrose, cistus-like flowers, but in appearance it cannot compete with the coffee tree, with its ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton |
