"Archimedes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... according to Hue, it is sometimes carried by water-power, and rises to the dignity of a mill. The Japanese, however, have mills for hulling rice, turned by very respectable water-wheels. The Egyptians and Greeks had water-wheels, and in fact understood all the mechanical powers. Archimedes, all the world knows, astounded the Romans by mechanical combinations which showered rocks on the besiegers of Syracuse, and boasted he could make a projectile of the world itself, if he could only find a standing-place ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... constitute a security against errors of this description. Touching God and His ways with man, the highest human faculties can discover little more than the meanest. In theology the interval is small indeed between Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage. It is not strange, therefore, that wise men, weary of investigation, tormented by uncertainty, longing to believe something, and yet seeing objections to every thing, should submit themselves absolutely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is better known to the reader than those I am preparing for him. When the magistrates of Syracuse were showing to Cicero the curiosities of the place, he desired to visit the tomb of Archimedes; but, to his surprise, they acknowledged that they knew nothing of any such tomb, and denied that it ever existed. The learned Cicero, convinced by the authorities of ancient writers, by the verses of the inscription which he remembered, and the circumstance of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of which they are extracted; that is to say, three whole parts, with an eighth and a half, a little more, or a seventh and a half, a little less, according to the instructions given us of old by Euclid, Aristotle, Archimedes, and others. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... slip and entered it at Stationers' Hall. He says he has done it by actual measurement; and I hear from a private source that he uses a disc of twelve inches diameter which he rolls upon a straight rail.' The 'rolling is a very creditable one; it is as much below the mark as Archimedes was above it. Its performer is a joiner who evidently knows well what he is about when he measures; he is not wrong by 1 in 3000.' Such skilful mechanicians as the builders of the pyramid could have obtained a closer approximation still by ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... his head. He held up the battery. "This comes from the planet Archimedes," he said, "one of the most highly industrialized in the UP, so I understand. On Archimedes do you know how many persons it takes to manufacture ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... that way." He quoted Schiller as saying, "He who would do benefit to the age in which he lives must bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity and then return to his own time to be in it, but not of it." That is, if we are to move the world with Archimedes' lever, we must have an historical basis to rest on. If a man ever had this it was Wasson. He went back to the Vedas in his study of religion; to the German forests and the pyramids in his investigation of politics ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... the miner, with an expression of countenance which Archimedes might have worn when he made ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... A woman does not always know why she is in love. It is rarely that a man falls in love without some selfish purpose. A husband should discover this secret motive of egotism, for it will be to him the lever of Archimedes. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... contrivance. Thus, the human body is penetrated by the passive and powerless skeleton, which is a mere weight upon the muscles, a part of the burden that, nevertheless, it enables them to bear. The lever of Archimedes would push the planet aside, provided only it were supplied with its indispensable complement, a fulcrum, or fixity: without this it will not push a pin. The block of the pulley must have its permanent attachment; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... of belief in science, of respect for scientific pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open new paths through the great field of the inductive sciences by ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... and the latter under the patronage of their masters continued their studies of Greek science and philosophy and translated those writings into Syriac and Arabic. Among the authors translated were, Hippocrates and Galen in medicine, Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy in mathematics and astronomy, and Aristotle, Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias in philosophy. In many cases the Greek writings were not turned directly into Arabic but as the translators were Syrians, the versions were made first into Syriac, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... assurance that it was impossible to know anything, could now assert with positive conviction, that the human soul could exist apart from the matter it had animated. He had thus gained that fixed footing outside the earth which Archimedes had demanded to enable him to move it; and he should soon be able to exert his power over departed souls, whose nature he now understood as well as—ay, and better than—Serapion. Korinna's obedient spirit would help him, and when once he should succeed in commanding the souls of the dead, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... silenced—of his kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared. And half the alchemists were of ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... only an expert should deal—even in the few sentences required for our purpose—with such matters as the calculation of the capacity and proportional relations of cylinders, or with the mechanics and hydrostatics of Archimedes. That philosopher so far understood the laws of applied force that he had boasted: "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the world." What he and others had learned concerning fluid pressure, or concerning pulleys, levers, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... age imitated and surpassed Archytas. But even Archimedes was not free from the prevailing notion that geometry was degraded by being employed to produce anything useful. It was with difficulty that he was induced to stoop from speculation to practice. He was half ashamed of those inventions which were ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not the point with more seriousness,—nor had he more faith,—or more to say on the powers of necromancy in dishonouring his deeds,—or on Dulcinea's name, in shedding lustre upon them, than my father had on those of Trismegistus or Archimedes, on the one hand—or of Nyky and Simkin on the other. How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... excited their wonderment, by recapitulating the feats of Archimedes. As the narrative proceeded, one restrained his scepticism, till he was almost ready to burst, and then vociferated, "Silas, that's a lie!" "D'ye think so?" said Mr. C. smiling, and went on with his story. The idea, however, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... only true religion; and I would to God our country was full of it. For it is the only spice to embalm and to immortalize our republic. Any politician can sketch out a fine theory of government, but what is to bind the people to the practice? Archimedes used to mourn that though his mechanic powers were irresistible, yet he could never raise the world; because he had no place in the heavens, whereon to fix his pullies. Even so, our republic will never be raised above the shameful factions and ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... civil service could not serve in the same battalion with architects' clerks on the one hand, or students at law on the other,—you may have, in your algebra class, a goldsmith who is afraid of being snobbish if he speaks to a map-engraver, or a tailor who does not presume to address an opinion on Archimedes' square ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... destroy the ships of war, and to join me at Palermo; leaving one or two ships to cruise between Capri and Ischia, in order to prevent the entrance of any English ships into the Bay of Naples. On the 23d, at seven in the evening, the Vanguard, Samnite, and Archimedes, with about twenty sail of vessels, left the Bay of Naples, The next day, it blew much harder than I ever experienced since I have been at sea. Your lordship will believe, that my anxiety was not lessened by the great charge that was with me; but, not a word of uneasiness ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... highly of, and made great use of, by his successors. He worked both as an observer and an inquirer, mapping out the heavens by his observations, and collecting the accounts of the eclipses which had been before observed in Egypt. He was the friend of Archimedes of Syracuse, to whom he sent his problems, and from whom he received that great ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... portions of the works of the Greek mathematicians in the original, say, some of the early books of Euclid in full and the definitions (at least) of the other books, as well as selections from other writers. Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff has included in his Griechisches Lesebuch extracts from Euclid, Archimedes and Heron of Alexandria; and the example should be followed in ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the exertion of intellectual superiority and the discovery of truth and the bestowing benefits and blessings upon society, which induced men to sacrifice all their common enjoyments and all their privileges as citizens to these exertions. Anaxagoras, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Galileo Galilei, in their deaths or their imprisonments, offer instances of this kind, and nothing can be more striking than what appears to have been the ingratitude of men towards their greatest benefactors; but hereafter, when you understand more of the ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... attached to his country and his emperor, and regarded anxiously the rumblings and quakings of the period; but he did not intermit his labor, or allow his consecration to his divine art to be in the least shaken. Like Archimedes of old, he toiled serenely at his appointed work, while the political order of things was crumbling before the genius and energy of ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... the first author goeth furthest, and time leeseth and corrupteth. So we see artillery, sailing, printing, and the like, were grossly managed at the first, and by time accommodated and refined; but contrariwise, the philosophies and sciences of Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, Hippocrates, Euclides, Archimedes, of most vigour at the first, and by time degenerate and imbased: whereof the reason is no other, but that in the former many wits and industries have contributed in one; and in the latter many wits and industries have been spent about the wit of some one, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... discoveries of recent years, the study of ordinary matter is hardly inferior, either in interest or audacity, to the work of the astronomer. And there is the same foundation in both cases—marvellous apparatus, and trains of mathematical reasoning that would have astonished Euclid or Archimedes. Extraordinary, therefore, as are some of the facts and figures we are now going to give in connection with the minuteness of atoms and molecules, let us bear in mind that we owe them to the most solid and ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... thinking of Archimedes?" he asked. "What he said was 'Eureka' and what he found out wasn't anything about ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... go-ahead theories that I would rashly bring into practice. My only wish is to have the opportunity of cultivating some intercourse with the hands beyond the mere "cash nexus." But it might be the point Archimedes sought from which to move the earth, to judge from the importance attached to it by some of our manufacturers, who shake their heads and look grave as soon as I name the one or two experiments that I should ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... expended in raising or coiling it, and in no possible way can it do more. In practice, on account of friction, etc., we know it does less. This law, being invariable, of course limits us, as it did Archimedes and Pythagoras; we have simply utilized sources of power that their clumsy workmen allowed to escape. Of the four principal sources—food, fuel, wind, and tide—including harnessed waterfalls, the last two do by far the most work. Much of the electrical ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... but one blot with infants. If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment. How many pulses made up the life of Methuselah, were work for Archimedes: common counters sum up the life of Moses his man. Our days become considerable, like petty sums, by minute ac- cumulations: where numerous fractions make up but small round numbers; and our days of a span long, make not ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... no harder test for the character and doctrine of a great teacher than the siege of his city. Instances beyond the Bible are those of Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse, 212 B.C., Pope Innocent the First in that of Rome by Alaric, 417 A.D., and John Knox in that of St. Andrews by the French, 1547. A siege brings the prophet's feet as low as the feet of the crowd. He shares the dangers, the duties ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... could be used with telling effect, as the Romans learned from Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse (214-212 B.C.). As Plutarch relates, "Archimedes soon began to play his engines upon the Romans and their ships, and shot stones of such an enormous size and with so incredible a noise and velocity that nothing could ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... book on his lap. Suddenly a beautiful delf blue-and-white flower-pot, which had been set on the window-sill of an upper story, fell to the ground with a crash, and the fragments spluttered up round my father's legs. Sublime in his studies as Archimedes in the siege, he continued to read,—Impavidum ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of intellectual joy. When rapid, the pleasure is concentrated, and becomes a kind of ecstasy or intoxication. To any one who has experienced this pleasure, even in a moderate degree, the action of Archimedes when he quitted the bath, and ran naked, crying 'Eureka!' through the streets ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... author hopes it may be as lawful for him to write a thousand lines of as light a subject. Socrates (whom the oracle pronounced the wisest man of Greece) sometimes danced: Scipio and Laslius, by the sea-side, played at peeble-stone: Semel insanivimus omnes. Every man cannot with Archimedes make a heaven of brass, or dig gold out of the iron mines of the law. Such odd trifles as mathematicians' experiments be artificial flies to hang in the air by themselves, dancing balls, an egg-shell that shall climb ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... men he ever saw one was a Negro. Gentleness is a wonderful agency in managing a Negro: I know it tells powerfully upon white folks. The psalmist, addressing his Maker, says, "Thy gentleness hath made me great." It is a mighty lever; it moves the world; it moved it before Archimedes; it moves it still; but peevishness, fault-finding, scolding, cursing, premature censure, haughty and assuming ways, sullenness, ill-temper, whether in the field, the kitchen, the nursery, or parlor, will legitimately result in thriftlessness, revolt, departure, and contempt for ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... 'You have. Archimedes, Newcomen, Watt, Telford, Stephenson, those are your father's direct ancestors. Have you forgotten them? Have you forgotten your father, and the railways he made over half Europe, and his great energy and skill, and all connected with him as if ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... cite, among those who have wrought strongly upon opinion or practice in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke. I take none but names known out of their {6} fields of work; and all were learned as well as sagacious. I have chosen my instances: if ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... with exertion,) and regardless of moving shadows, or cooing doves, my two friends gave up the sense of hearing to their reels, and that of seeing to the career of the little zinc hooks at the end of their gut lines. When I looked at the insular P——, and his active rod, I thought him like to Archimedes who had found his extramundane spot of ground, and, as he threw the fly, and bent his back to let it touch the water lightly, was endeavouring to fasten his lever to the base of the adjacent mountain in order to consummate his wish of raising the world; and the circumfluous ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... men]. To that place then we must remove, where there are so many great orators, and so many noble philosophers, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates; so many heroes of former days, and so many generals after them, and tyrants; besides these, Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes, and other men of acute natural talents, great minds, lovers of labor, versatile, confident, mockers even of the perishable and ephemeral life of man, as Menippus and such as are like him. As to all these ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... either true or false, either seraphic or demoniac, Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy I might call the true Heaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbuehne), whereon thick-streaming influences from both these far yet near regions meet visibly, and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... to watch the rest of the night by the side of Cinq-Mars, who was in a deep sleep, he seated himself in a large armchair, covered with tapestry, and began to squeeze lemons into a glass of water with an air as grave and severe as Archimedes calculating the condensing power ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... saw opens a plank from end to end on the sole conditions of labor and time; but the discovery of truth preserves always a sudden and unforeseen character. Archimedes leaps from a bath and rushes through the streets of Syracuse, crying out, "I have found it!" Why? The flash of genius has visited him unexpectedly. Pythagoras discovers a geometrical theorem; and he offers, it is said, a sacrifice to the gods, in testimony ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... scholar, and not only versed in the law of Mahomet, but acquainted with all kinds of polite learning. For this reason he is not at all surprised when Dorax calls him a Phaeton in one place, and in another tells him he is like Archimedes. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Great Britain was never forged. About that time the substitution of the Screw for the paddle-wheel as a means of propulsion was attracting much attention. The performances of the Archimedes, as arranged by Mr. Francis P. Smith, were so satisfactory that Mr. Brunel, after he had made an excursion in that vessel, recommended the directors to adopt the new propelling power. After much discussion, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... one or two detached remarks suggested by Condorcet's picture, which it may be worth while to make. He is fully alive, for example, to the importance to mankind of the appearance among them of one of those men of creative genius, like Archimedes or like Newton, whose lives constitute an epoch in human history. Their very existence he saw to be among the greatest benefits conferred on the race by Nature. He hardly seems to have been struck, on the other hand, with the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... the philosophers are wrong, as they generally are, even in the commonest things; because they seldom look beyond their own tenets, unless through captiousness, and because they argue more than they meditate, and display more than they examine. Archimedes and Euclid are, in my opinion, after our Epicurus, the worthiest of the name, having kept apart to the demonstrable, the practical, and the useful. Many of the rest are good writers and good disputants; but unfaithful suitors ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... knew the Toxidae had arrived at the Imperial camp. Every night these Skipetars who could cross the moat betook themselves to Kursheed's quarters. One single man yet baffled all the efforts of the besiegers. The chief engineer, Caretto, like another Archimedes, still carried terror into the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Petey boy was a wonder at getting up ideas. Think of it! Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Christopher Columbus, old Bill Archimedes and all the rest of the wise guys had overlooked this simple little discovery of how to make a neophyte initiate himself. It was too good to be true. We held a war dance of pure delight, and we whistled some more. We got behind stone walls, and whistled. We climbed embankments, ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... neighboring city of Leontini against Rome and the Roman party in Syracuse. Marcellus at once attacked and stormed Leontini. The Syracusans then closed their city gates against him. A siege of two years (214-212) followed, famous for the various devices adopted by the noted mathematician ARCHIMEDES (Footnote: Archimedes was a great investigator in the science of mathematics. He discovered the ratio of a sphere to its circumscribed cylinder. One of his famous sayings was, "Give me where to stand, and I will move the world." ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... disturbed him. He had the faith that tosses mountains aside like pebbles, now that the means were in his hand. He had the little fulcrum for his lever, which was all Archimedes required to move the world. He had in him the certainty of being right that has sent millions of ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers. On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid. But no student of science has yet been taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka, Eureka, or that the law of inverse squares must be discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his life. When some unusually ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... they pronounce it here. The question was, Could such a name be fitly borne by a young lady at the Convent of the Stigmata? Half the population here have names as unchristian quite—Norma, Odoacer, Archimedes—my housemaid is called Themis—but Dionea seemed to scandalize every one, perhaps because these good folk had a mysterious instinct that the name is derived from Dione, one of the loves of Father Zeus, and mother of no less a lady ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Archimedes,[316] apart from his rank, would have the same veneration. He fought no battles for the eyes to feast upon; but he has given his discoveries to all men. Oh! how brilliant he was to ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... is natural to men, in all times, if they live or have lived in a metropolis noted for dignity or prowess. Caesar boasted of his native Rome; Lycurgus of Sparta; Virgil of Andes; Demosthenes of Athens; Archimedes of Syracuse; and Paul of Tarsus. I should suspect a man of base-heartedness who carried about with him no feeling of complacency in regard to the place of his residence; who gloried not in its arts, or arms, or behavior; who looked ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the pulse of the state, and Richelieu, the point of support which Archimedes was in search of, to move the world. In all modern nations, the history of the debates on the raising of revenue and of the passing of budgets is, at the same time, the history of parliamentary life; and most great revolutions, the Reformation of the sixteenth century ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... By the way, did you ever hear of my machine for teazing wool? Wonderful invention! horse labor entirely superseded: a little steam, and a man or two,—give me these, and I'll teaze the whole world. Wonderful the progress of the human intellect since the time of Archimedes!—But no doubt you are acquainted with ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... only the religious enthusiast and the worshiper of beauty "lose themselves" in ecstasy. The "fine frenzy" of the thinker is typical. From Archimedes, whose life paid the forfeit of his impersonal absorption; from Socrates, musing in one spot from dawn to dawn, to Newton and Goethe, there is but one form of the highest effort to penetrate and to create. Emerson is right in saying of the genius, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... and as year after year the weather-beaten ships returned from their venturesome pilgrimage, the first glimpse of home that greeted them was likely to be the beacon-light in the tower where the master sat poring over problems of Archimedes or watching the stars. For Henry, whose motto was "Talent de bien faire," or (in the old French usage) "Desire[381] to do well," was wont to throw himself whole-hearted into whatever he undertook, and the study ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... on. My infancy was one sickening round of glory. Did I build a house of bricks four courses high? Archimedes wasn't in it with me. Did I sing a nursery rhyme to a tune all one note? Apollo was a dabbler in music beside me. Did one of my first teeth drop out without my knowing it? Casabianca on the burning deck couldn't touch me for ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... is not haughty, is not ostentatious, is not anxious for display, is not arrogant, and, least of all, is he capable of descending to envy. Who or what is it that he should be envious of? Does anybody suppose that Wordsworth would be jealous of Archimedes if he now walked upon earth, or Michael Angelo, or Milton? Nature does not repeat herself. Be assured she will never make a second Wordsworth. Any of us would be jealous of his own duplicate; and, if I had a doppelganger, who went about personating me, copying me, and pirating me, philosopher as ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... induce men to act without an inducement is too much, even for him. He should reflect that the whole vast world of morals cannot be moved unless the mover can obtain some stand for his engines beyond it. He acts as Archimedes would have done, if he had attempted to move the earth by a lever fixed on the earth. The action and reaction neutralise each other. The artist labours, and the world remains at rest. Mr Bentham ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... had been there above two hundred and fourteen years, for it was so great that they could not by any device get it so much as above the ground, although they used all the means that are found in Vitruvius de Architectura, Albertus de Re Aedificatoria, Euclid, Theon, Archimedes, and Hero de Ingeniis; for all that was to no purpose. Wherefore, condescending heartily to the humble request of the citizens and inhabitants of the said town, he determined to remove it to the tower that was erected for it. With that he came to the place where it was, and lifted ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Telemachus and Calypso. * Angelica and Madora. The Damsel and Orlando. Cicero at the tomb of Archimedes. St. Paul's Conversion. St. Paul persecuting the Christians. His restoration to sight by Ananias. Mr. Hope's family; nine figures, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... be readily accepted that the use of toothed wheels to transmit power or turn it through an angle was widespread in all cultures several centuries before the beginning of our era. Certainly, in classical times they were already familiar to Archimedes (born 287 B.C.),[3] and in China actual examples of wheels and moulds for wheels dating from the 4th century B.C. have been preserved.[4] It might be remarked that these "machine" gear wheels are characterized by having a "round number" of teeth (examples with 16, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... Euclid reappears to Minos, "followed by the ghosts of Archimedes, Pythagoras, &c., who have come to see fair play." Euclid thus sums ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... in mathematics, Galileo, whilst engaged in studying the writings of Archimedes, wrote an essay on 'The Hydrostatic Balance,' and composed a treatise on 'The Centre of Gravity in Solid Bodies.' The reputation which he earned by these contributions to science procured for him the appointment ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... says,[1180]"I would like to see her a city of two, three, four millions of inhabitants, something fabulous, colossal, unknown down to our day, and its public establishments adequate to its population.... Archimedes proposed to lift the world if he could be allowed to place his lever; for myself, I would have changed it wherever I could have been allowed to exercise my energy, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Archimedes so long ago Spoke out so grandly, 'Dos pou sto— Give me a place to stand on; I'll move your planet for you now,' He little dreamed or fancied how The sto at last should find its pou For woman's faith to ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... is, that Hiero suspected that a craftsman to whom he had given a certain weight of gold to make into a crown had alloyed the metal, and he asked Archimedes to ascertain if his suspicion was well founded. The philosopher, getting into his bath, observed that the water ran over, and it flashed into his mind that his body displaced its own bulk of water. Now, suppose Hiero gave ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Beauchamp drop, knowing full well his regiment had polled to a man. Radicals poll early; they would poll at cockcrow if they might; they dance on the morning. As for their chagrin at noon, you will find descriptions of it in the poet's Inferno. They are for lifting our clay soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great mathematicians. They have perchance a foot of our earth, and perpetually do they seem to be producing an effect, perpetually does the whole land roll back on them. You have not surely to be reminded that it hurts them; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which specially claims his attention—my best-bound quarto—is spread upon a piece of bedroom-furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face from the book with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... delight and profit which he had derived from his visit. He was entertained while there by Mr. Robertson, an eminent mathematician, then superintending the publication of an edition of the works of Archimedes. The architectural designs of buildings that most pleased him were those of Dr. Aldrich, Dean of Christchurch about the time of Sir Christopher Wren. He tore himself from Oxford with great regret, proceeding by Birmingham on his way home to Shrewsbury: "Birmingham," ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... into poetic raptures upon any other score; nor, by Jove, Euxodus, Aristarchus, or Archimedes. And when the lovers of the art of painting are so enamoured with the charmingness of their own performances, that Nicias, as he was drawing the Evocation of Ghosts in Homer, often asked his servants whether he had dined or ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... an afternoon than you in a twelvemonth. What, I suppose you have seen the Pillars of Hercules, and perhaps the walls of Carthage. Nay, you may have heard Scylla, and seen Charybdis; you may have entered the closet where Archimedes was found at the taking of Syracuse. I suppose you have sailed among the Cyclades, and passed the famous straits which take their name from the unfortunate Helle, whose fate is sweetly described by Apollonius Rhodius; you have passed the very spot, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... for the schools of Alexandria two thousand years ago. Modern astronomy is the natural continuation and development of the work of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy; modern physics of that of Democritus and of Archimedes; it was long before modern biological science outgrew the knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by Theophrastus, and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... we cannot stand upon trifles nor fret ourselves about such matters [as a few blemishes]. Time enough for that afterwards, when larger works come before us. Archimedes in the bath had many particulars to settle about specific gravities and Hiero's crown, but he first gave a ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... lace with nothing but brass and a pocket with nothing but copper in it, has a brilliant, if a short, career before him, and will be sure to gain the character of ability; for if ambition but find selfishness to work upon, it has that leverage which Archimedes wished for. But time makes sad havoc with this false greatness, with this reputation which passes for fame, and this adroitness which passes for wisdom, with merely acute minds. When Plausibility and Truth divided the world between them, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... and left Syracuse uncaptured. The second was the siege by Timoleon, who took the city almost without a blow. The third was the siege by the Romans, in which the genius of one man, the celebrated mathematician and engineer Archimedes, long set at naught all the efforts of the besieging ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... I mentioned various persons whose speculations he seemed to have ignored; among others, Thales. The reply was, "I am instructed by the author to inform you that he is perfectly acquainted with the works of Thales, Euclid, Archimedes, ..." I had some thought of asking whether he had used the Elzevir edition of Thales,[172] which is known to be very incomplete, or that of Professor Niemand with the lections, Nirgend, 1824, 2 vols. folio; just to see whether the {84} last would ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... the palace, that its inscriptions are no longer legible, and great part of its figures are gone. Selvatico states them as follows: Solomon, the wise; Priscian, the grammarian; Aristotle, the logician; Tully, the orator; Pythagoras, the philosopher; Archimedes, the mechanic; Orpheus, the musician; Ptolemy, the astronomer. The fragments ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... successive generations. We cannot hear, without an instinctive glow, of the cities of Rome, Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, and others which respectively produced a Cæsar, a Demosthenes, a Lycurgus, and an Archimedes; of the islands of Samos and Ægina, whence emanated the resplendent genius of a Pythagoras and a Plato; of the villages of Alopece and Andes, immortalized as having produced ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... remove the whole furniture of a drawing-room, almost as it stands, without packing. My chief difficulty is with the fulcrum; but that is a difficulty that met the philosopher of old. You have heard of Archimedes, William—the man who said he could make a lever big enough to move the world, if he could only get a fulcrum to rest it on. But Archimedes was weak in that point. He ought to have known that, even if he did get such a fulcrum, he would still have required another world as long as ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... Apo taute:s te:s he:meras, peri pantos, Archime:dei legonti pisteuteon. From this day, forward (said the King) Credit ought to be giuen to Archimedes, what ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... to waive irrelevant disputes). But then the true inference will be—not that vegetable increase proceeds under a different law from that which governs animal increase, but that, through an accident of position, the experiment cannot be tried in England. Surely the levers of Archimedes, with submission to Sir Edward B. Lytton, were not the less levers because he wanted the locum standi. It is proper, by the way, that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look for Coleridge's skirmishings ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... self-indulgence? It is the drunkenness of drugs, and woe be unto him that crosseth the threshold of its dream-curtained portal, for though gifted with the strength of Samson, the courage of Richard and the genius of Archimedes, he shall never return, and of him it is written that forever he ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... banks. The vestiges of a temple of Diana, converted into a monastery, and the nearly perfect remains of that amphitheatre which Cicero pronounced the largest in the world, are not to be seen in every morning's walk! Of Archimedes, without being able to fix his proper tomb among so many, the name here is enough. One ought to be able to conjure with it; the genius that concentrated the sun of Syracuse on the hostile anchorage, was of no common measure. We spent our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... centre of the cell, in a circle traced with a fragment of plaster detached from the wall, sat a man whose tattered garments scarcely covered him. He was drawing in this circle geometrical lines, and seemed as much absorbed in his problem as Archimedes was when the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... present world to fix himself long in a contemplation where the present world has no part; he has no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never expect to remove the earth he rests upon while he has no support besides for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand. To talk of bearing pain and grief without any sort of present or future hope cannot be purely greatness of spirit; there must be a mixture in it of affectation and an alloy of pride, or perhaps ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... perfect emotional solitude, close study, absolute chastity and celibacy, and at last the merging of the personal into the impersonal. This austere life is the secret of all greatness. You know how Archimedes when threatened with death by the vandalistic invaders of his country raised his head and said 'Please do not disturb my circles' and nothing more. This man was practising Yoga unconsciously. You must be ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... Paul's eyes,—tears drawn from an honorable man by the shame of this discussion as much as by the peremptory speech of Madame Evangelista, threatening rupture,—and the old man stanched them with a gesture like that of Archimedes when he cried, "Eureka!" The words "peer of France" had been to him like a torch in a ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... some Star-of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we find in his works," and "wonderfully accurate considering the manner in which they were obtained;" yet he failed to understand the real nature of the famous experiment of Archimedes. And so with the larger features of his teaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he had emancipated himself from the power of words and of common prepossessions; how for one reason or another he had failed to call himself to account in the terms he employed, and the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... remembered the formula for that—or else remembered part of it and obligingly invented the remainder. I had never any real confidence in that formula; and even had we got it from a book, there were difficulties in the way of the application that might have daunted Archimedes. We durst not drop any considerable pebble lest the sentinels should hear, and those that we dropped we could not hear ourselves. We had never a watch—or none that had a second-hand; and though every one of us could guess a second to a nicety, all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ignorant of nothing but sin, or at least it rested in the notion, without the smart of the experiment. Could any difficulty have been proposed, the resolution would have been as early as the proposal; it could not have had time to settle into doubt. Like a better Archimedes, the issue of all his inquiries was a eureka, a eureka, the offspring of his brain without the sweat of his brow. Study was not then a duty, night-watchings were needless, the light of reason wanted not the assistance of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... metals, like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the world, an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, Port, and clubs, we should have had no "Theory of the Sphere," and no "Principia." They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... 31. Archimedes, the well-known inventor, was by birth a Syracusan. Now this old geometrician, who had passed through seventy-five seasons, had built many powerful engines, and by the triple pulley, with the aid of the left hand alone, could launch a merchant ship of fifty thousand medimni burden. ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... Archimedes Q. Porter and his assistant, Samuel T. Philander, after much insistence on the part of the latter, had finally turned their steps toward camp, they were as completely lost in the wild and tangled labyrinth of the matted jungle as two human beings well ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs |
