"Finite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Professor. "In fact, I am accustomed, in talking to my class, to give them a very clear idea, by simply taking as our root F,—F being any finite constant—" ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... beginning, or end, of so vast a scheme lies within the reach of our philosophical inquiries, or even of our speculations, appears to be inconsistent with a just estimate of the relations which subsist between the finite powers of man and the attributes of an infinite ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... which is in motion, while the sun is at rest, though in viewing the sun rise one finds it impossible to believe the sun not to be really rising, so the body is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it seems otherwise to finite sense; but we shall never understand this while we admit that soul is in body, or mind in matter, and that man is included in non-intelligence. Soul is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man coexists ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... its repose, you steep yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to emanate from it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it at last perhaps you understand the infinite; you understand where is the bourne to which the finite flows with all its greatness, as the great Nile flows from beyond ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... negative—the everlasting essence of nothing. You see in me that which existed before the beginning of matter many years before the commencement of time. I am the algebraic x which represents the infinite divisibility of a finite particle.' ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would have been doing had the doctor connected the fact that Sally's mother went out to India to be married with this meeting of two lovers at a simmering railway-station, name not known. The idea of the impossible per se is probably the one a finite intelligence most readily admits, and is always cordially welcome in intellectual difficulties—a universal resolution of logical discords. In the case of these two men, at that moment, neither was capable of knowing the actual truth had he been told ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... March, "that nothing is put on us that we can't bear. But I should think," he went on, musingly, "that when God sees what we poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... God, gives a sense of completeness, and attainment, and security, and peace, which mere ethics, or adjustment to the separate fragmentary objects which constitute our environment, can never give. The moral life is from its very nature partial, fragmentary, and finite. The religious life by penitence and faith and hope and love, rises above the finite with its limitations, and the temporal with its sins and failings, and lays hold on the infinite ideal and the eternal goodness, with its boundless ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... not—seek to know What finite vision, to the end, Through years of strictest search below, Must ever fail to comprehend! God! whose intents so far transcend Our poor discernment, let me see Some portion of the truths that tend By slow ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... these things are made. And whilst we were discoursing and panting after her, we slightly touched on her with the whole effort of our heart; and we sighed, and there left bound the first fruits of the spirit, and came back again to the sounds of our own mouths—to our own finite language. And what we then said was in this wise: If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of the earth and air and waters, hushed too the poles of heaven, yea the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... not squared itself with our national anthem. Any patriotism must be poor which desires glory, or even profit, for a few at the expense of the many, even though the few be brothers and the many aliens. As a rule, patriotism is a virtue only because man's aptitude for good is so finite that he cannot see and comprehend a wider humanity. He can hardly bring himself to understand that salvation should be extended to Jew and Gentile alike. The word philanthropy has become odious, and I would fain not use it; but the thing itself is as much higher than patriotism as heaven ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... life, its colorless egotism, the barrenness of its routine. Like a flash it stood glaringly out before him. Stripped of all its intellectual furbishing, the chill selfishness of the creed he had adopted struck home to his heart. A finite life, with a finite goal—annihilation! Had it really ever satisfied him? Could it satisfy anyone? A great weariness crept in upon him. Epicureanism could have been carried no further than he had carried it. He had steeped his senses in the most refined and voluptuous pleasures civilization ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... vision would have accomplished itself and brought out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that, besides the vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in life (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the Mayflower, and putting into the fire the alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont Blanc)—besides, these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe), there were pitchforked in on us a great rowen-heap ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... never have in regard to any moral truth whatever. The Divine law is a deduction necessarily and mathematically certain as much so as any truth in geometry. Human law can aim only at such a probable deduction as results from a finite and imperfect knowledge. ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... philosopher of Jewish parentage, the chief representative of Pantheism, "the doctrine of one infinite substance, of which all finite existences are modes ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... and there, to the best of my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, oh if I had ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... mystery! how condescending the love! that the infinite Deity and finite flesh should meet in one person (Christ), in order to display to mankind the glory of God in that divine person! to bring hell-deserving mortals into a nearness, yea, into a oneness with his Creator, that they might be made partakers of his holiness, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to support them without relieving itself by resting a great part of the burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process where much is represented in little, and the Infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry; between religion—making up the deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry—passionate for the instruction of reason; between religion—whose element is infinitude, and whose ultimate ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... argument upon this subject is, that, because the intelligence of man has been able to produce certain varieties in domesticated animals, therefore physical causes have produced all the diversity existing among wild ones. Surely, the sounder logic would be to infer that, because our finite intelligence may cause the original pattern to vary by some slight shades of difference, therefore a superior intelligence must have established all the boundless diversity of which our boasted varieties are but the faintest echo. It is the most intelligent ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... eternal. Therefore the hours of his posthumous life, when unveiled he stands face to face with truth, and the short-lived mirages of his terrestrial existence are far from him, compose or make up, in our ideas, the only reality. Such breaks, in spite of the fact that they are finite, do double service to the Sutratma, which, perfecting itself constantly, follows without vacillation, though very slowly, the road leading to its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... Sistine Chapel. That beautiful figure, with all the freshness of its primal grace, stretching out its arms from a new-born world towards the infinite Creator, had expressed, with extraordinary pathos, the weakness, the failure, almost the non-existence of what is finite. "I Am Who Am" thundered Almighty Power, and how ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... 303. "We finite ones with infinite souls are born only for sorrows and joy and it might almost be said that the best of us ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... death That was not mine; mine each last breath That, crying, met an answering cry From the compassion that was I. All suffering mine, and mine its rod; Mine, pity like the pity of God. Ah, awful weight! Infinity Pressed down upon the finite Me! My anguished spirit, like a bird, Beating against my lips I heard; Yet lay the weight so close about There was no room for it without. And so beneath the Weight lay I And suffered death, but could ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... reveals the fact that all our passions and antipathies, all our limitations of experience, all that is ignoble and small in us, all that is transient and finite in us is false. We "do not know" but are "pure knowledge" ourselves. We are not limited by anything, for we are the infinite; we do not suffer death, for we are immortal. Emancipation thus is not a new acquisition, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... author has not compromised conscience to suit x:12 the general drift of thought, but has bluntly and hon- estly given the text of Truth. She has made no effort to embellish, elaborate, or treat in full detail so in- x:15 finite a theme. By thousands of well-authenticated cases of healing, she and her students have proved the worth of her teachings. These cases for the most part x:18 have been abandoned as hopeless by regular medical attendants. Few invalids will turn to God till all physical ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the tranquil soul That tolerates the indignities of Time And, from the centre of Eternity All finite motions over-ruling, lives ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... There can be no 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can perceive, and do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it. However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not only a law-giver, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... of sensations and agencies too subtle to be detected by ordinary means. It was enough for me that I heard and understood, and felt the goodness and glory of God. I may say that my first great lessons in true philosophy were obtained in these lectures, where I learned to distinguish between the finite and infinite, ceasing to envy any, while I inclined to worship one. The benevolence of Providence is extended to all its creatures, each receiving it in a mode adapted to its own powers of improvement. My destiny being toward a communion with man—or rather with woman—I have ever looked upon ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... master's wistful tolerance, so [114] extraordinary a characteristic in that age, attracted him, in his present humour, not so much in connexion with those problematic heavenly lights that might find their way to one from infinite skies, as with the pleasant, quite finite, objects and experiences of the indubitable world of sense, so close around him. Over against the world's challenge to make trial of it, here was that general licence, which his own warm and curious appetite just then demanded of the moral theorist. For so pronounced a ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... Paper, 'On Wollaston's Argument from the Limitation of the Atmosphere as to the finite Divisibility of Matter.' — 'Trans. of the Royal Society of Edinb.', vol. xvi., p. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the last day Heaven and earth shall roll away? Yes, as my landscape passed through death, Lay like a corpse, and with new breath Became instinct with fire and light— So shall it roll up in my sight, Pass from the realm of finite sense, Become a thing of spirit, whence I shall pass too, its child in faith Of dreams it gave me, which nor death Nor change can wreck, but still reveal In change a Something vast, more real Than sunsets, ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... "But, my friends, our finite minds cannot fathom the profound mysteries of the infinite. We cannot understand. Why would a just God permit such a noble man to meet such a tragic death? It is not ours to reason why. We simply bow our hearts to the will of ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... new emotions and desires, and stir them into active life. The grim old Forest of Dean was dwarfing to a mere coppice; the rushing Severn was becoming an insignificant brook. The forester's heart was expanding; his eyes were opening; his arms were stretching forth to grasp that which was finite, yet infinite. He dreamed strange dreams; his eyes started open to behold wondrous visions. The fever of the time was getting into his blood. Vague, half-understood impulses moved him hither and ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the dignity of our own soul.... Man independent would be an object of contempt; the feeling of his own imperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when we admit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope; it reveals to him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to his principle, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone can satisfy his desires in the possession ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... are wonderful, and His thoughts past finding out. To our finite minds, Mr. Lue seemed needed here. The Lord had put him in a place where he had many opportunities for service, and those opportunities were not left unheeded or misused. "Oh, that he might be spared to us!" that was the cry in ...
— Everlasting Pearl - One of China's Women • Anna Magdalena Johannsen
... elders." They like us, we like them, get our guarantee as to the facts of the primal past not by sight but by faith, by taking God at His word. He, in His revelation, tells us that "in the beginning"—the beginning of whatever existence is other than eternal—"God created." Things finite, things visible, came into original being not as evolved from previous similar material, but as ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... very slowly, but with a decision more finite than the most emphatic negation which words could ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... subjects to be wrought upon be infinite, it is all the more easy for fortune, with such an abundance of material, to effect this similarity of results. Or if, on the other hand, events are limited to the combinations of some finite number, then of necessity the same must often recur, and in the same sequence. There are people who take a pleasure in making collections of all such fortuitous occurrences that they have heard or read of, as look like works of a rational power and design; they observe, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... a thing finite, suo genere, when it can be limited by another (or others) of the same nature—e.g. a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... might almost begin my famous essay on "The Improbability of the Infinite." It would be a pity for the country to lose such a masterpiece—she has had quite enough trouble already what with one thing and another. For my view of the Infinite is this: that although beyond the Finite, or, as one might say, the Commensurate, there may ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... the Finite the Infinite search! Did the blind discover the stars? Is the thought that I think a thought, Or a throb of ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... with dread and loathing on this system of corruption and exclusion. To their remonstrances Cosimo replied in four memorable sayings: 'Better the State spoiled than the State not ours.' 'Governments cannot be carried on with paternosters.' 'An ell of scarlet makes a burgher.' 'I aim at finite ends.' These maxims represent the whole man,—first, in his egotism, eager to gain Florence for his family, at any risk of her ruin; secondly, in his cynical acceptance of base means to selfish ends; thirdly, in his bourgeois belief that money makes a man, and fine clothes suffice ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the angels are continually perfected in wisdom,{1} their wisdom, even to eternity, cannot become so perfect that there can be any ratio between it and the Lord's Divine wisdom; for the Lord's Divine wisdom is infinite and the wisdom of angels finite; and between what is Infinite and what is finite no ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... not again enter into bodies, they must either be infinite in number or God must constantly be making new ones. But there is nothing infinite in the world; for in a finite whole there cannot be an infinite part. Neither can others be made; for everything in which something new goes on being created, must be imperfect. And the World, being made by a perfect author, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... war itself is only one of a series of catastrophes and calamities that splash the human chronicle with innocent blood. They give it up, sorrowfully, and find a thin consolation in learned formulae about the impossibility of a finite mind understanding an infinite mind, and so on: which give, as I say, thin consolation, for one may at least see that an infinite benevolence ought not to act worse ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... that their bliss is not secure, he learns that as long as he proves obedient his happiness will continue, but that, having been created as free as the angels, he can choose his lot. When Adam asks in regard to heavenly things, Raphael wonders how he can relate, in terms intelligible to finite mind, things which, even angels fail to conceive in their entirety and which it may not be lawful to reveal. Still, knowing he can vouchsafe a brief outline of all that has hitherto occurred, Raphael describes how the Almighty, after creating the Son, bade the angels ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... through long and subtle argument, the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. "All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned, and come ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our world, penned in as we were on every side, and separated from all else by an ocean inexorable and illimitable as space, and were not we likewise looking forward to a fiery doom—our finite, perhaps final, day ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... knows the phenomenon or nature, and philosophic intuition the noumenon or spirit; so economic activity wills the phenomenon or nature, and moral activity the noumenon or spirit. The spirit which desires itself, its true self, the universal which is in the empirical and finite spirit: that is the formula which perhaps defines the essence of morality with the least impropriety. This will for the true ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... those adventurous minds that essay to deal with the profound problems of the greater universe, and a statement of the reasons for their feeling this pressure. These reasons are well suggested by Professor B.G. Harrison, in his Popular Astronomy. He says: "With the idea of a universe of finite dimensions there is the obvious difficulty of the beyond. The truth is that a universe of finite proportions is equally difficult to realize as one of infinite extent. Perhaps the nearest analogy to infinity that we can ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... great cause—the supreme intelligence of the universe. "From the principle ex nihilo nihil fit, he concluded that nothing could pass from non-existence to existence. All things that exist are eternal and immutable. God, as the most perfect essence, is eternally One, unalterable, neither finite nor infinite, neither movable nor immovable, and not to be represented under any human semblance." [Footnote: Tennemann, Hist. of Phil., p. 1, Section 98.] What a great stride was this! Whence did he derive his opinions? He starts ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the planet. The old days of virgin continents will be gone. The habitable planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, will be inhabited. And in the matter of food-getting, as in everything else, man is only finite. Undreamed-of efficiencies in food-getting may be achieved, but, soon or late, man will find himself face to face with Malthus' grim law. Not only will population catch up with subsistence, but ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... which is less than 100 have been actually multiplied together, and the value of the product recorded in the multiplication table. But we also know that the number of integers is infinite, and that only a finite number of pairs of integers ever have been or ever will be thought of by human beings. Hence it follows that there are pairs of integers which never have been and never will be thought of by human ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... placed under a large ash tree. From that point St. Mary's spire was visible, about half a mile away in the west, rising boldly, confidently, one might say, into the sky, as if it dared to claim that it too, although on earth and finite, could match itself against the infinite heaven above. On this particular evening the spire was specially obvious and attractive, for it divided the sunset clouds, standing out black against the long, narrow interspaces of tender green which lay between. ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... circumstances of our history have retarded the acceptance of a long-time scientific viewpoint in business, but forces now at work are making powerfully for a scientific approach to business management. First among these is a realization that our resources are measured in finite terms. We have begun to take account of what we have, and we are able in a rough way to figure the loss from what we have squandered. The situation is not desperate, but we can see that it may become so. To insure against ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... an assemblage of words so arranged as to convey a determinate sense or meaning, in other words, to express a complete thought or idea. No matter how short, it must contain one finite verb and a subject or agent to direct the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... mind than this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!—life in the making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification means loss of interest; and loss of interest, not years, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... dropped some heavy tree-trunk across Hunt's pleasant stream, and banked it up with philosophical doubts and objections at every interval of the speaker's joyous progress. But the unmitigated Hunt never ceased his overflowing anticipations, nor the saturnine Carlyle his infinite demurs to those finite flourishings. The listeners laughed and applauded by turns; and had now fairly pitted them against each other, as the philosopher of hopefulness and of the unhopeful. The contest continued with all that ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... other source but the word of God. To that word, in all difficulty, distress, and dismay, these poets appeal; and though they may sometimes, or often, misinterpret its judgment, that is an evil incident to finite intelligence; and the very consciousness that it is so, inspires a perpetual humility that is itself a virtue found to accompany only a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... more we see of Nature, the more we find there is to understand. And the more we understand Nature and commune with her, the more Beauty do we find there is to see. So to arrive at a complete understanding of Nature and see all her Beauty is beyond the capacity of us finite men. ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... knowledge; and all that exists is really Brahma, one and indivisible in essence, but presenting itself illusively to the finite consciousness as a world of plurality, of most manifold subjects and objects of thought. The highest wisdom, the greatest of all secrets, is to know this truth, to realise with full consciousness that ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... From this source had logically grown the idea that the intellectual rejection of this or that dogma which dominant theology had happened at any given time to pronounce essential, since such rejection must bring punishment infinite in agony and duration, is a crime to be prevented at any cost of finite cruelty. Still another service rendered to humanity by the revisers was in substituting a new and correct rendering for the old reading of the famous text regarding the inspiration of Scripture, which had for ages done so much to make our sacred books a fetich. By this more correct reading ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... were hundreds, yes, thousands of books, triumphantly settling every question which an over-seething and ill-instructed brain might by any chance suggest,—what could it boot?—how was a poor finite mortal, with much the ordinary faculty and capacity, and but a very small stock already stored, to set about reading, studying, understanding, mastering, appropriating the contents of those thousands of volumes necessary to ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... surpassed all count and reckoning, dish followed dish, till I began to fancy that the cook either expected I would honour his highness's entertainment as Caesar did the supper of Cicero, or supposed that the party were not finite beings. During the course of this amazing service, the principal singers and musicians of the seraglio arrived, and sung and played several pieces of very sweet Turkish music. Among others was a song composed by the late unfortunate Sultan Selim, the air of which ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Divine Truth before another soul who may have an immeasurably larger vision than you have. Oh, the pitiableness of man's colossal conceit, the arrogance of his ignorance. As if the God of the Universe were so small that one paltry, finite man could contain in his pint measure of a mind all the ocean of His power, knowledge, and love. Let your small and wretched worries go. Have a little larger faith in the Love of the Infinite One. Tenderly love and trust those whose welfare you seek, and trust ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... reduction of all machine-industry to public routine services, when it becomes possible, will imply a net diminution in the scope of individual self-expression, rests upon the patent fallacy of assigning certain fixed and finite limits to human interest and activity, so that any encroachment from the side of routine lessens the absolute scope of human spontaneity and interest. If, as there is reason to believe, human desires and the activities which are engaged in satisfying them are ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... uttermost parts of the earth! And the great Giver longed to bestow it on the millions of His creatures, but waited the unwilling feet of His messengers! It was heart-breaking! But was there no other way? Why should an infinite God limit Himself to finite man in carrying out His great design? Mr. ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... Wrath without end on Man, whom death must end? Can he make deathless death? That were to make Strange contradiction, which to God himself Impossible is held; as argument Of weakness, not of power. Will he draw out, For anger's sake, finite to infinite, In punished Man, to satisfy his rigour, Satisfied never? That were to extend His sentence beyond dust and Nature's law; By which all causes else, according still To the reception of their matter, act; Not to the extent of their own sphere. But say That death be not one stroke, as ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... the light of 'the sun when it shines, nor of the moon walking in brightness,' but the glory of the one, and the grace and loveliness of the other. It is not instruction, but that which lends to instruction a loftier character, ascending from the finite to the infinite. It is not morality, but that which deepens the moral impression, and sends the thrill of spiritual beauty throughout the whole being. But its appeals, says an eloquent writer, are mainly 'to those affections ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... his revelation. In spite of the rudeness and diversity of the instruments, there breathes through them all a certain divine melody and harmony. While the inductive and horizontal method would give us only finite and earthly truth, the deductive and vertical can give us truth that is infinite and eternal. The indispensable condition of success in the interpretation of Scripture is therefore a hearty belief that the Bible is Christ's ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... of his system of ethics, by adding a sixth and supreme relation—that between God and man. This he declined to do, and so left his people without any aspiration toward the Infinite. By setting before them only a finite goal he ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... cognition; but that does not mean that they cannot do so. So "the unconditioned" is really a part of the thought of "the conditioned," the "unknowable" a part of the "knowable," the "infinite" a part of the thought of the "finite." Under material images these privatives, as such, cannot be expressed; but in pure thought which deals with symbols and ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the permanent nature of the one compared with the transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure, knowledge and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue and pleasure, the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite, harmony or beauty and discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so many pairs of opposites, which in Plato easily pass into one another, and are seldom kept perfectly distinct. And we must not forget that Plato's ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... epoch faithfully reflect themselves in the pages of Carlyle, with whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... much in an art so consummate as Milton's which escapes analysis, there are also elements which can be measured and weighed. Here as in the Paradise Lost students of metre can count and compare his stresses and pauses, and set out some finite portion of the infinite variety of rhythms which, even more needed here than in Paradise Lost, sustain the poem in its difficult flight over so apparently barren a country. The art of the poet as distinct from the musician is ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... Pre-Raphaelitism from the tendency to insist on too literal an application of its own principles. The best principles will not include all cases. The workings and ways of Nature are infinite, and the principles of Art are finite deductions from these infinite examples. As yet these deductions have been but imperfectly made. The most exact and truthful representation of Nature may be the rule of the artist, but it is not an easy thing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... how such conjectures must conclude. Can means impure Omnipotence befit, And clog the range of its solicitude? Can finite bonds confine the Infinite? Though man, by choice of ill, must needs offend, Need God do ill that good may come of it? Must havoc's mad typhoon perforce descend? May naught else serve to fan the stagnant air? Must captive ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... "an immaterial substance," distinct from the body, a soul hampered by the body and which may survive the body.—This immortal soul imprisoned within the flesh has conscience for its organ. "O Conscience, divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice, unfailing guide of an ignorant and finite but free and intelligent being, infallible judge between good and evil, and rendering Man similar to God, Thou foremost ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... totality of matter is finite?—that it can be viewed, spiritually, from the outside,—even from such a distance as to appear infinitely small? If so, can there be infinite power, either material or spiritual? If the universe is spherical because its molecules are, can the molecules compose any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... in one silver flower Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks The moon in heaven, yet hath power To tell the soul the thing it seeks. And pack, as by some wizard's art, The whole within the finite part. ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... a perfume in spring or ripens into a robe of beauty in autumn, so that the aspirations of childhood, led by beautiful surroundings, may form higher and broader conceptions of life and humanity; for the teachings of nature lead up from the material and finite to the ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... are, by a decree of God, perceptible to them, then are they said to begin a relative existence, with respect to created minds. Upon reading therefore the Mosaic account of the creation, I understand that the several parts of the world became gradually perceivable to finite spirits, endowed with proper faculties; so that, whoever such were present, they were in truth perceived by them. This is the literal obvious sense suggested to me by the words of the Holy Scripture: in which is included no mention, or no thought, either ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the learned ladies. If I should proclaim that they were protests against the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all human action from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the jealousy of the cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums. By saying nothing about it, the large majority of those whom my book reaches, not being preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them beyond the simple ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... more. And when Miss Boutelle returned with the doctor she was beyond the reach of finite voices. Falloner would have remained all night with them, but he could see that his presence in the contracted household was not desired. Even his offer to take Jimmy with him to the hotel was declined, and ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... with my large faith unto gloom allied, Sprang up a shadow sunshine could not quell, And the voice said, Would'st haste to go outside This continent of being, it were well: Where finite, growing toward the Infinite, Gathers its robe of glory out of dust, And looking down the radiances white, Sees all God's purposes about us, just. Canst thou, Elhadra, reach out of the grave, And draw the golden waters of love's well? His years are chrisms of brightness in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the great marvel of His death To the one order witnesseth, No doubt of changeless goodness wakes, No link of cause and sequence breaks, But, one with nature, rooted is In the eternal verities; Whereby, while differing in degree As finite from infinity, The pain and loss for others borne, Love's crown of suffering meekly worn, The life man giveth for his friend Become vicarious in the end; Their healing place in nature take, And make ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... who is even now at the "right hand of God, making intercession for us?" Who would think that the kindness and humanity, and self-denial, and patience in suffering, which we so drily commend, had been exerted towards ourselves, in acts of more than finite benevolence of which we were to derive the benefit, in condescensions and labours submitted to for our sakes, in pain and ignominy, endured ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... gold, but made as beautiful as the Occidental taste and architectural skill will permit, as comfortable as Occidental standards demand, and as sanitary as the mortal desire for immortality can with finite wisdom ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... "That" is used in the Upanishads to designate the Invisible-Absolute, because no word or name can fully define It. A finite object, like a table or a tree, can be defined; but God, who is infinite and unbounded, cannot be expressed by finite language. Therefore the Rishis or Divine Seers, desirous not to limit the Unlimited, chose the indefinite term ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... into the house, and returned with a well- thumbed brown book. She turned the pages thoughtfully, and read aloud, presumably for the benefit of the cats: "In a symbol there is concealment yet revelation, the infinite is made to blend with the finite, to stand visible, and as it were attainable there." The Child sighed, "We had better go to the Recluse," she said. ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... result, and the operation of the intellect inhibits feeling. In the greatest art the medium is least perceived, and the beholder stands immediately in the presence of the artist's idea. The material is necessarily fixed and finite; the idea struggles to free itself from its medium and untrammeled to reach the spirit. It is mind speaking to mind. However complete the material expression may seem, it is only a part of what the artist would say; imagination transcends the actual. In the art which goes deepest into life, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... Nominal Essence is that only whereby we distinguish Species of Substances, further evident, from our ideas of finite Spirits and ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... objects at the same time. If we are careful to inspect some things, we must of course neglect others. This imperfection which we observe in ourselves is an imperfection that cleaves in some degree to creatures of the highest capacities, as they are creatures, that is, beings of finite and limited natures. The presence of every created being is confined to a certain measure of space, and consequently his observation is stinted to a certain number of objects. The sphere in which we move, and act, and understand, is of a wider circumference to one creature than ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Son, and Holy Ghost. Hence, we say that God is the Holy Trinity, or the Three in One. We cannot understand or explain how God can be three Persons and yet only one God. But we must not expect with our finite mind to comprehend the infinite God. We must accept the truth concerning God as He himself has revealed it to us in His Word. He plainly tells us that He is One; for He says, "I am the Lord thy God; thou ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... to the care of its own very life, the God conscious of himself and in himself conscious of it, I had been for months offering the sacrifices of despair and indignation, arose in spectral hideousness before me. I saw that I, a child of the infinite, had been worshipping the finite—and therein dragging down the infinite towards the fate of the finite. I do not mean that in Mary Osborne I had been worshipping the finite. It was the eternal, the lovely, the true that in her I had been worshipping: in myself I had been worshipping ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald |
