"Geometrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gravel, and slime, most curiously made of these, even so as to be wondered at, but not to be made by man, no more than a king-fisher's nest can, which is made of little fishes' bones, and have such a geometrical interweaving and connection as the like is not to be done by the art of man. This kind of cadis is a choice bait for any float-fish; it is much less than the piper- cadis, and to be so ordered: and these may be so preserved, ten, ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... music; and in the latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to repeat. I observed in the king's kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... together, so that he resembled a gnome of amazing brain capacity and prodigious power of concentration, sat bent over a writing desk with a huge sheet of cardboard before him, on which he was swiftly drawing geometrical and trigonometrical figures. Compasses, T-squares, rulers, protractors, and ellipsographs obeyed the touch of his fingers ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... investigators, who work with so many learned theories, have been less successful in discovering the real facts about animals than of laymen, largely because the scientists have not yet learned that arithmetical notions are more difficult than geometrical ones. Our industrial civilisation has caused us to lose the idea of the insignificance that number has in animal life compared to the idea of size. Most animals have a remarkable sense of size; they measure time and distance better than civilised man. A hyena, for ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... very good of you to say so, Mrs. Merrill" answered Miss Lucretia, in her full, deep voice. It was by no means an unpleasant voice. She settled herself, though she sat quite upright, in the geometrical centre of the horsehair sofa, and cleared her throat. "To be quite honest with you, Mrs. Merrill," she continued, "I came upon particular errand, though I believe it would not be a perversion of the truth if I were to add that I have had for a month past ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... shift of the hatchet; this distance measured from the zero of the scale on the back of the instrument is the area of the figure in square inches. The scale is read in exactly the same manner as a geometrical scale on a drawing, the whole numbers being read to the right of the zero and the decimals to the left. The instrument does not profess to give results nearer than ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... Egyptians and the Greeks hung geometrical forms over their cradles, so as to strike the eyes of the child with lawful relations. Froebel introduces colored balls for the same purpose, which, considering the psychological and emotional condition of the child, leads to the joyful conception ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ingenuities. They had the boomerang and the weet-weet, but not the bow; the throwing stick, but not, of course, the sword; the message stick, but no hieroglyphs; and their art was almost purely decorative, in geometrical patterns, not representative. They deemed themselves akin to all nature, and called cousins with rain and smoke, with clouds and sky, as well as with beasts and trees. They were adroit hunters, skilled ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... previously a combination of geometrical figures, which may have been architecturally great and imposing, but was always more or less formal and rigid, disappeared; the new masters, whose names have been forgotten, looked round them and drew inspiration from nature. The forest trees of Central Europe became pillars; grouped together, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... all now convinced of the existence of America; and so, some three or four hundred years back, was Christopher Columbus—but nobody else. Alone, he proved that mighty continent so probable, from geometrical measurements, and the balance of the world, and tides, and trade-winds, and casual floatsams driven from some land beneath the setting sun, that he was antecedently convinced of the fact: and it would have been a shock ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fact that it preserves the race, the most important feature connected with this reproduction is its wonderful fruitfulness. Since it results from division, it always tends to increase the offspring in geometrical ratio. In the simplest case, that of the unicellular animals, the cell divides, giving rise to two animals, each of which divides again, producing four, and these again, giving eight, etc. The rapidity of this multiplication is sometimes inconceivable. It depends, of course, upon ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... should be shaped in the future. Professor Geddes, in fact, envisages our civic shell as becomes a brilliant biologist, who also happens to be a man of historic imagination, ethical impulses, and aesthetic perceptions. For the human shell is not merely geometrical and architectural, like those of apian or beaverish communities; it holds and expresses all those differences by which we are exalted above the bee or the beaver. It is coloured with our emotions and ideals, and contorted with all the spirals of our history. And all these manifestations of humanity ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... a Proposition into its Elements. Numerical and Geometrical Problems. The Theory of Inference. The Construction of Problems. And ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... gives us not mere shocks of sensation, but unity of joy as does music. Therefore when a poet sees the vision of a girl in April, even a downright materialist is in sympathy with him. But we know that the same individual would be menacingly angry if the law of heredity or a geometrical problem were described as a girl or a rose—or even as a cat or a camel. For these intellectual abstractions have no magical touch for our lute-strings of imagination. They are no dreams, as are the harmony of bird-songs, rain-washed leaves glistening in the sun, and pale clouds ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... unlimited points dazzled the eye. The ceiling was decorated with an elaborate and most effective design in wood—a fashion very common in Srinagar, consisting of a sort of patchwork panelling of small pieces of wood, cut to length and shape, and tacked on to a backing in geometrical designs. At a little distance the effect is rich and excellent, but close inspection shows up the tintacks and the glue, and a prying finger penetrates the solid-looking panel with ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... my life gains a kind of reality and that's what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming. Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don't laugh, that's just what I like, to become superstitious. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... one remarkable rock that of others; some have only one line of stones in their circumference, and some have two; some circles are adjacent, some contiguous, and some include, and some intersect each other. Sometimes urns are found in or near them. Some are curiously erected on geometrical plans, the chief entrance facing the cardinal points of the heavens; some have avenues leading to them, placed exactly north and south, with detached stones, sometimes in straight lines to the east and west, sometimes triangular. These monuments are found in many foreign ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... can easily imagine that once the idea of Number became associated with that of the knowable in things, a wide field of detailed development and experiment, so to speak, in the arcana of nature, seemed to be opened. Every arithmetical or geometrical theorem became in this view another window giving light into the secret heart of things. Number became a kind of god, a revealer; and the philosophy of number a kind of religion or mystery. And this is why the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... basal idea is that of Multiplication. Animals and plants multiply; they do not simply increase, they increase in a geometrical ratio. Anyone who has worked out one of these geometrical ratios knows how wondrously they mount up. There is an old familiar story of the blacksmith who asked the price at which the stranger would sell the horse he was shoeing. The owner of the horse replied ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... for ages under the rough bark of the patient forest-trees, are brought to light; the rings of lovely shadow which the creature went on making in the dark, as the oyster its opaline laminations, and its tree-pearls of beautiful knots, where a beneficent disease has broken the geometrical perfection of its structure, gloom ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... science by following prophetic declarations made a priori on grounds of pure reason. The same proofs of intellectual design and purpose are discerned in the order of atomic combination, in the beauty of crystals and dewdrops and snowflakes, in the perfect geometrical symmetry of minerals and flowers, and in the same spiral adjustment of the leaves on a tree and of the orbits of the planets in the sky, as in the artistic works of man. Intellect and will are as much shown in the production of a palm tree as they are in the production of a poem ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... mean that is observed according to arithmetical or geometrical proportion is a real mean. Now such is the mean of justice, as stated in Ethic. v, 3. Therefore the mean of moral virtue is not the rational, but the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... therefore, has the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it is the only measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition; it must have the air of reality; must be ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... democracy of which our army camps have been the cradle. The plan of this interior is cruciform, two hundred feet in each dimension. Built by the Red Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the larger uses of that organization, the symbolic appropriateness of this particular geometrical figure should not pass unremarked. The cross is divided into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries and mezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms of the cross in its upper stages, leaving the clear-story surrounding the crossing unimpeded and well defined. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... East, though Theophilus mentions the Germans as clever practitioners in woodwork. A minnesinger's harp of the 14th century, figured by Hefner Alteneck, appears to bear out his remark, though later in date, with its powdering of geometrical inlays and curiously-designed sprigs, which might almost have been produced by the latest art craze, which apes archaic simplicity. It belonged to the knightly poet Oswald von Wolkenstein, who died in 1445; the colours used are two browns, black, white, and green. The oriental inlays of ivory ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... success, that is, and their aim, not his. For he was, in his own eyes, a humble plodder, not in the swim at all. But he ascribed to the huge sums real people had a right to, outside the limits of the likes of him, a kind of sacredness that grew in a geometrical ratio with their increase. It gave him much more pain to hear that a safe had been robbed of thousands in gold than he felt when, on opening a wrapped-up fee, what seemed a guinea to the touch turned out a new farthing and a shilling to the sight. It was in the air that he lived in—that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... old idea, dressed in exquisite form, was as welcome as a new one. Anything strange, irregular, romantic, full of feeling, highly imaginative, or improbable to the intellect, was unpopular. Even in Gulliver's Travels, Swift endeavored to be as realistic as if he were demonstrating a geometrical proposition. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... presents to our understanding, are not radically and essentially different; but are the same Typal Ideas or Thoughts of God or of Nature, arrayed in various garbs, and, hence, assuming varying presentations. The Numerical Unit, the Geometrical Point, the Written Dot, the Globule, the Chemical Atom, the Physical Molecule, the Physiological Granule, the Yod or Iota, the least Element of Sound, are, for example, Identical Types, differently modified or clothed upon ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Godwin's and Condorcet's extravagancies were not worth confuting; and yet I thought that the Essay on "Population" had not confuted them. Professor Wallace, Derham, and a number of German statistic and physico-theological writers had taken the same ground, namely, that population increases in a geometrical, but the accessional nutriment only in arithmetical ratio—and that vice and misery, the natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by providence as the counterpoise. I have here no means of procuring so obscure a book, as Rudgard's; ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... is found in the method employed to dispell the illusion. It was suggested that, at the moment of the appearance of the phenomenon, the child be requested to fixate the end of the father's index finger which was revolved, in the air, to form various geometrical figures. This had the desired effect. Clearly we have here a case of the object altering its apparent size without altering its distance. Under normal conditions a change in size is followed by a corresponding change in the distance. It is probable that we have here inadequate convergence ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... pottery of exceptionally fine quality and by a similar absence of metal. The pottery has a polished appearance on the exterior; it is never painted, and mostly without decoration; at most it may have incised geometrical patterns. The forms of the vessels are the same as have remained typical of Chinese pottery, and of Far Eastern pottery in general. To that extent the Lung-shan culture may be described as one of the direct predecessors of the ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... many of that kind need not be doubted. For example: Is not the rule, Si inoequalibus aequalia addas, omnia erunt inaequalia, an axiom as well of justice as of the mathematics? and is there not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion? Is not that other rule, Quae in eodem tertio conveniunt, et inter se conveniunt, a rule taken from the mathematics, but so potent in logic as all syllogisms are built upon it? Is not the observation, Omnia mutantur, nil interit, a contemplation ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Kant's "Kritik der Reinen Vernunft" in the same year, and the death of the great Frederick in 1786. These names mark the physical and intellectual coming of age of Germany. Lessing died misunderstood and feared by the card-board literary leaders of his day, men who still wrote and thought with the geometrical instruments handed them from France; Kant attempted to push philosophical inquiry beyond the bounds of human experience, and Frederick left Prussia at last not ashamed to be Prussia. Napoleon was eighteen years old when Frederick died, and he, next to Bismarck, did more to ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... of it. Society was working not for the small pleasures of to-day but for the future security and improvement of the race,—in fact for "progress." If only the cake were not cut but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors. In that day overwork, ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... attributed to Socrates, have been made of old to give a definition of justice. The earliest description I have found is that of the early Pythagoreans, who, in accordance with their practise of symbolizing the virtues by geometrical figures, designated justice by the square, and the just man by the cube. Plato seems to have had a theory of justice when he wrote in the "Gorgias," "Nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... measurement for the triangle, but based his calculations upon measurements of the actual side of that figure. Nevertheless, he had learned to square the circle with a close approximation to the truth, and, in general, his measurement sufficed for all his practical needs. Just how much of the geometrical knowledge which added to the fame of Thales was borrowed directly from the Egyptians, and how much he actually created we cannot be sure. Nor is the question raised in disparagement of his genius. Receptivity is the first ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly yet come to a stand-still from the swaying of the stream; the first encroachment of commerce on this land. There was our port, our Ostia. That straight geometrical line against the water and the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, and what of sublimity there is in history ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... The number of eggs laid varies with the size of the animal. The law of production may be arithmetically expressed as follows: The number of eggs produced at each reproductive period varies in a geometrical series, while the length of lobsters producing these eggs varies in an arithmetical series. According to this law an 8-inch lobster produces 5,000 eggs, a lobster 10 inches long 10,000, a 12-inch ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... description of the stellar universe has been confined to its geometrical properties. A serious study of the evolution of the stars must seek to determine, first of all, what the stars really are, what their chemical constitutions and physical conditions are; and how they are ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... origin of Cubism in Cezanne, in a structural art that owes its very existence to matter, makes its claim to pure emotionalism seem untenable. Emotions are not composed of strata and conflicting pressures. Once abandon reality and the geometrical vision becomes abstract mathematics. It seems to me that Picasso shares a Futurist error when he endeavours to harmonize one item of reality—a number, a button, a few capital letters—with a surrounding aura of angular projections. There must be a conflict ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... large variety of these Winnebago sacks, and all were characterized by patterns of men, deer, turtles, or other animals. Not one Fox sack of such pattern was to be found, though many elaborate and beautiful geometrical designs ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... started back; and a deep flush swept her face. For a few seconds she paused; at such a time a few succeeding seconds seem to lengthen in geometrical progression. The strain upon me, and, as I could easily see, on the Doctor also, relaxed as ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... kings. Upon the site where had been the hive of huts wrapped in the green arms of the banana plantation, laboured under the incandescent sun gangs of prisoners under armed guards upon the building of larger huts laid out in streets, broad and geometrical, lined with correct ditches for drainage. Around the outskirts here and there remained ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... snapshots of a railhead, a busy factory, or an army headquarters. Prints are sent to the "I" people, who, at their leisure, map out in detail the point of interest. No fear of doubtful reports from the glossed surface of geometrical reproduction, for the camera, our most trusted spy, cannot distort the truth. Next a complete plan of the chosen objective, with its surroundings, is given to a bombing squadron; and finally, the pilots concerned, well primed with knowledge ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... &c.; Digby Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (of both of which the lithographic stones will be destroyed during the progress of the sale); Digby Wyatt's Metal Work, and its Artistic Design; Kirby Wyatt's Geometrical Mosaics of the Middle Ages; Darrell's China, India, and the Cape, coloured and mounted; Nash's Mansions of England in the Olden Time; Gruner's Specimens of Ornamental Art; Muse Royal (picked proofs ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... back, and Oily Heegan did a high dive from Rush Street that was a geometrical joy. He hit kind of amateurish, doin' what we used to call a 'belly-buster' back home, but quite satisfyin' for a maiden effort, and I reeled him ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... timber and real hemp, should absolutely rely on the propositions which he finds in treatises on Dynamics, and should make no allowance for the imperfection of his materials, his whole apparatus of beams, wheels, and ropes would soon come down in ruin, and, with all his geometrical skill, he would be found a far inferior builder to those painted barbarians who, though they never heard of the parallelogram of forces, managed to pile up Stonehenge. What the engineer is to the mathematician, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Reynaud's Science of Calculation, and then his Analysis Demonstrated; but I never went far enough thoroughly to understand the application of algebra to geometry. I was not pleased with this method of performing operations by rule without knowing what I was about: resolving geometrical problems by the help of equations seemed like playing a tune by turning round a handle. The first time I found by calculation that the square of a binocular figure was composed of the square of each of its parts, and double ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Noble Toby and Surreptitious Treasurer. Two months ago I was the only member. One month ago there were two. To-day we number four Emperors of the Abnormal Proboscis in good standing—doubles every four weeks, see? That's geometrical progression—you know how that piles up. In a year and a half every man in California will have a wart on his Nose. Powerful ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... of business, that it will take no ordinary effort to bring my mind properly into the routine: but you will save a "great effort is worthy of you." I say so myself; and butter up my vanity with all the stimulating compliments I can think of. Men of grave, geometrical minds, the sons of "which was to be demonstrated," may cry up reason as much as they please; but I have always found an honest passion, or native instinct, the truest auxiliary in the warfare of this world. Reason ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of geometry by means of algebra, and of the waste of intellectual force in modern analysis,[210] will at least understand how such a view as Diderot's was possible. And no one will be likely to deny that, whether or not the pillars of the geometrical Hercules were finally set a hundred years ago, the great discoveries of the hundred years since Diderot have been, as he predicted, in the higher sciences. The great misfortune of France was that the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 625 feet (or 125 geometrical paces) to each stadium, the distance will be 118 English miles, and a little above one-third of a mile. Herodotus says, that this design was afterwards put in execution by Darius the Persian, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... example of France is so singularly auspicious? Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of the kingdom? Is every landmark of the country to be done away in favor of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution? Is the House of Lords to be voted useless? Is Episcopacy to be abolished? Are the Church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers, or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... magnitude of the Word of God, the Creative Fiat, when as a mighty dynamic force it first reverberated through space and commenced to form primordial matter into worlds, as sound from a violin bow moulds sand into geometrical figures. Moreover, the Word of God still sounds to sustain the marching orbs and impel them onwards in their circle paths, the Creative Word continues to produce forms of gradually increasing efficiency, as media expressing life and consciousness. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... the Rhind Papyrus in the British Museum (No. 10,057), which was written before 1700 B.C., probably during the reign of one of the Hyksos kings. The papyrus contains a number of simple arithmetical examples and several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... changes of style. The shape of the arch is similar throughout. This was a concession on the part of the later builders which ensured harmony in the whole; but on each side the tracery is varied. On the east side it is geometrical in character, the work being transitional between Early English and Decorated; on the south side the tracery is more flowing and has advanced to Decorated; on the west side again, we get the transitional style between Decorated ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... begin to prove my Propositions in detailed geometrical fashion, it is advisable to sketch them briefly in advance, so that everyone may more ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... B!" But Joyce, who was a born tease, could no more resist the temptation of baiting Cynthia, than she could have refused a chocolate ice-cream soda, so she continued to make foolish and irrelevant comments on every geometrical statement, until, in sheer exasperation, Cynthia threw the ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... the question before me, I must say a word of the road that I shall traverse. When Pascal approached a geometrical problem, he invented a method of solution; to solve a problem in philosophy a method is equally necessary. Well, by how much do the problems of which philosophy treats surpass in the gravity of their results those discussed by geometry! ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training. Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden hour; and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These necessities may be hard for ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... limpid sapphire, set in the battlements of El-Azhar and fringed by those audacious slender towers. We are in the religious East of olden days and we feel how the mystery of this magnificent court—whose architectural ornament consists merely in geometrical designs repeated to infinity, and does not commence till quite high up on the battlements, where the minarets point into the eternal blue—must cast its spell upon the imagination of the young priests who are ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... in Celano there are the large lines of a soul-history, a sketch of the affecting drama of a man who attains to the conquest of himself, with Bonaventura all this interior action disappears before divine interventions; his heart is, so to speak, the geometrical locality of a certain number of visitants; he is a passive instrument in the hands of God, and we really cannot see why he should have ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... to vary the colour of the wood. The variation caused by the diverse lie of the grain and so forth, is enough. Most decorators will be willing, I believe, to accept it as an axiom, that when a pattern is made of very simple geometrical forms, strong contrast of colour is to ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year; otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home. The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a geometrical ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Nikolay Levin, with an ironical smile, his eyes flashing malignantly, "has the charm of—what's one to call it?—geometrical symmetry, of clearness, of definiteness. It may be a Utopia. But if once one allows the possibility of making of all the past a tabula rasa—no property, no family— then labor would organize itself. But you ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... leave of her governess, but he looked so masterful and independent that she hadn't the courage. It gave her quite a thrill as he took her hand and led her out through the low window to the great stone terrace. They passed down the terrace steps into a garden ablaze with tulip beds in geometrical patterns; at the foot ran a yew hedge, and beyond it, in a side-walk, they came upon a scullion boy chasing a sulphur-yellow butterfly. The Grand Duke forgot his fine manners, and dropped his bride's hand ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... oriental empire which, he assured O'Meara at St. Helena, held the first place in his thoughts after the overthrow of Austria. But it was not in his nature to make the needful concessions. "I must follow my policy in a geometrical line" he said to Lucchesini. England might have Hanover and a few colonies if she would let Sicily go to a Bonaparte: as for Prussia, she might absorb half-a-dozen ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... in his old home,—in the hipped roof of it, the mullioned casements, the wide window-seats, the high and spacious rooms, the geometrical gardens and broad lawns, in all that was quaint and beautiful at Matocton,—because it would be Patricia's so very soon, the lovely frame of a yet lovelier picture, as the colonel phrased it with ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... in our picture are geometrical figures, nevertheless geometry can obviously say nothing at all about their actual form and position. The network, however, is purely geometrical; all its properties can be given a priori. Laws like the principle of sufficient reason, etc. are ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... modern gutter. The staple growth of the place, in which the house was set, like the centre of an antique breastpin, seemed to lie in the shrub called box. This ornamental vegetable stretched down each side of the gravel walk, hedged in all sorts of ugly geometrical figures that contained flower-beds, and stood sentinel to the lower line of the piazza; farther on, you would see it allowed to grow to the height of three or four feet, to be curiously cut into cubes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... farther off from the mast-head; but this is the greatest distance which it is visible even from that height, and under the most favourable circumstances. The elevation of the pic has been determined by several observations. Borda's calculation, which is founded on a geometrical admeasurement, and is conceived to be the most correct, makes it 1905 toises, or 11,430 feet." The relations which some authors have given of the height of this famous pic or peak, are extravagant beyond all credibility. The reader will meet ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... his reverence for the Ancient Ones, was an exception. Whatever there was, indeed, of high, truly religious impulse among the Murians, this far, High God had. I found this exceedingly interesting, because it had long been my theory—to put the matter in the shape of a geometrical formula—that the real attractiveness of gods to man increases uniformly according to the square of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... house, in which thou hast oftentimes discoursed with me of the knowledge of divine and human things? Had I this attire or countenance when I searched the secrets of nature with thee, when thou describedst unto me the course of the stars with thy geometrical rod, when thou didst frame my conversation and the manner of my whole life according to the pattern of the celestial order? Are these the rewards which thy obedient servants have? But thou didst decree that sentence by the mouth of Plato: That commonwealths should be happy, if either ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... body and the body of geometry—which suggests itself so readily—denied by Poincare and other investigators? Simply because under closer inspection the real solid bodies in nature are not rigid, because their geometrical behaviour, that is, their possibilities of relative disposition, depend upon temperature, external forces, etc. Thus the original, immediate relation between geometry and physical reality appears destroyed, and we feel impelled toward the following more general view, which characterizes ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... dream for years of immeasurable distances, and what is beyond and beyond and beyond, and all that nonsense. The great beauty of astronomy is not what is incomprehensible in it, but its comprehensibility—its geometrical ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... in mouldings and wainscotings (for example, the alternation of egg and dart), the series of windows in a wall, or of the columns of a Greek temple, or of the black and white keys of a piano. Still more complex is the balanced arrangement of straight lines and curves in a geometrical design, as in certain Oriental rugs or the Gothic rose windows. And probably the most complex spatial rhythms are those of the facades of great buildings like the Gothic cathedrals or St. Mark's of Venice, where only the trained eye perceives the subtleties ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... which they found a market on the continent and in England; and the numerous cultivated patches along the mountain sides presented a very pretty appearance from the anchorage—laid out as they were with seemingly geometrical precision. The hardy little horses could be hired very cheaply, and the justly extolled natural beauties of the island in the vicinity of Funchal were fully explored. The greater portion of it is quite inaccessible ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... for Sandhurst begins on the 26th this year," he explained, "and so far as I can make out I shall romp through it. I am going to take all the subjects in Class One—mathematics, Latin, French, geometrical drawing, and English composition; I'll astonish them in the last subject! Plenty of dash and go, eh, Peggy,— that's the style to fetch 'em! In Class Two you can only take two subjects, so I'm going in for chemistry and physics. I rather fancy myself in physics, and if I don't come out at the ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... contrasted with the intellectual energy of after years. Newton, when a boy, was weakly, and he showed no particular aptitude at school; but in his eighteenth year he went to Cambridge, and soon afterwards astonished his teachers by his power of dealing with geometrical problems. During his quiet youth his brain was slowly preparing itself to be the organ of those ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... weight of the upper stories, though it had never given way under them. Built en colombage, that is to say, with a wooden frontage, the whole facade was covered with slates, so put on as to form geometrical figures,—thus preserving a naive image of the burgher habitations ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... which nevertheless the facts will verify; and thus the instinctive distrust of whatever is abstract or rational is gradually overcome. Where theorems are difficult, they should be first taught as exercises in geometrical drawing, until the figure has become thoroughly familiar; it will then be an agreeable advance to be taught the logical connections of the various lines or circles that occur. It is desirable also that the figure illustrating a theorem should be drawn in all possible ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... progress an intelligence that could see, but not feel, might make in geometry 154 He cannot understand those parts which relate to solids, and their surfaces, and lines generated by their section 155 Nor even the elements of plane geometry 156 The proper objects of sight incapable of being managed as geometrical figures 157 The opinion of those who hold plane figures to be the immediate objects of sight, considered 158 Planes no more the immediate objects of sight, than solids 159 Difficult to enter precisely into the thoughts of the above-mentioned intelligence ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... spiritual lustre. Nothing is more interesting than the way in which the two qualities of his mind alternate, and indeed play into each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes giving an almost geometrical precision to his most mystical visions. In his letter to Can Grande he says: "It behooves not those to whom it is given to know what is best in us to follow the footprints of the herd; much rather are they bound to oppose its wanderings. For the vigorous in intellect and reason, endowed with a certain ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... upright bars, and, deprived of tracery and feathering, were as void of beauty in the details as in the general proportions; buttresses and battlements were generally omitted. A great deterioration took place in the decorative part; the ornamental pannels and freizes of the Gothic style, consisting of geometrical combinations of circles and straight lines, had always a distinct outline and a sharpness of effect which contrasted agreeably with the foliage so often intermixed; but these were succeeded by strange grotesque combinations, confused, and void of outline ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the "Sagredo" of Espinel's romance called Marcos de Obregon. "The doctor was a tall, meagre, pale man, who had kept the shears of Clotho employed for forty years at least. He had a very solemn appearance, weighed his discourse, and used 'great pomp of words.' His reasonings were geometrical, and his opinions his own." Dr. Sangrado considered that blood was not needful for life, and that hot water could not be administered too plentifully into the system. Gil Blas became his servant and pupil, and was allowed to drink any quantity of water, but to eat only ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... not allowed to have pen and ink without special permission; but paper and pencils were not included under this regulation, so my guard got them for me, together with candles and candlesticks, and I proceeded to kill time by making geometrical calculations. I made the obliging soldier sup with me, and he promised to commend me to one of his comrades who would serve me well. The guard was relieved ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of men, women, and children, fishes, birds, and various other animals, such as the beaver, wolf, or bear. Each of the wall planks had evidently been hewn out of a whole log, and must have required sturdy deliberation as well as skill. Their geometrical truthfulness was admirable. With the same tools not one in a thousand of our skilled mechanics could do as good work. Compared with it the bravest work of civilized backwoodsmen is feeble and bungling. The completeness of form, finish, and proportion of these timbers ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... assuring him that all was quiet, was ordered to leave the room. Cato no sooner found himself alone, than, seizing his sword, he stabbed himself below his chest. The blow not despatching him, he fell from his bed and overturned a table, on which he had been drawing some geometrical figures. At the noise of the fall, his servants shrieked, and his son and friends immediately flew to the room. They found him weltering in his blood, with his bowels appearing through the wound. 11. The surgeon, perceiving that his intestines were not wounded, was replacing ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... the neat geometrical pattern of little scars, perpendicular on the forehead, horizontal on the cheeks and in concentric circles on the chest (done with loving care and a knife, in his infancy, by his papa) said only "Ptwack" as he chewed a mouthful ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... on what I had seen, a disquieting idea forced itself upon me in a geometrical form. It seemed to me that the activity and prosperity of the subjects of the Pope were in exact proportion to the square of the distance which separated them from Rome: in other words, that the shade of the monuments of the eternal city ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... color does in painting. And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas it acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as to distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same, according to the pitch,—quite regular when the combination is a true chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,—I say that music is an art conceived in the ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... INTENTION of its own; and yet the writer has lately found results of the most singular elaborateness to be wrought out by the instrumentality of these minute jelly specks, which build up tests or casings of the most regular geometrical symmetry of form, and ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... he drew the sword and thrust it beneath his chest, but as he used his hand with less effect owing to the inflammation, he did not immediately despatch himself, and having some difficulty in dying he fell from the bed and made a noise by overturning a little abacus of the geometrical kind that stood by, which his attendants perceiving called out and his son and his friends immediately ran in. Seeing him smeared with blood and the greater part of his bowels protruding, though he was still alive and his eyes were open, they were all dreadfully ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... and her low-spoken "I don't know" sounded like a wail of despair. Did she know anything, Guy wondered, and feeling some curiosity now to ascertain that fact, he plied her with questions philosophical, questions algebraical, and questions geometrical, until in an agony of distress Maddy raised her hands deprecatingly, as if she would ward off any similar ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... disposed to take pleasure in the natural sprouts of my own wit—without troubling whether the same idea has occurred to others. Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to have discovered even the simplest of his geometrical demonstrations, shall I be crestfallen when some one draws attention to the book? These natural sprouts are, after all, the best products of our life; it is a mere accident that they may have no value in the world's market. One of my conscious ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... part of the subject. Of Truth and its three classes, matter of fact, experimental or scientifical truth (contra-distinguished from opinion), and universal truth; which last is either metaphysical or geometrical, either purely intellectual or perfectly abstracted. On the power of discerning truth depends that of acting with the view of an end; a circumstance essential to virtue. Of Virtue, considered in the divine mind as a perpetual and universal beneficence. ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... to assure him of victory, a rule which he made known to me in answer to my many prayers." He goes on to acknowledge other obligations to Tartaglia:[109] how the Brescian had first taught him that algebraical discovery could be most effectively advanced by geometrical demonstration, and how he himself had followed this counsel, and had been careful to give the demonstration aforesaid for every rule ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... is plain that all truths cannot be established by reasoning. For the attempt to do so would involve us in an infinite regress, wherein the number of syllogisms required would increase at each step in a geometrical ratio. To establish the premisses of a given syllogism we should require two preceding syllogisms; to establish their premisses, four; at the next step backwards, eight; at the next, sixteen; and so on ad infinitum. ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... lips whenever occasion offered. The building was, in short, a recently-erected chapel of red brick, with pseudo-classic ornamentation, and the white regular joints of mortar could be seen streaking its surface in geometrical oppressiveness from top to bottom. The roof was of blue slate, clean as a table, and unbroken from gable to gable; the windows were glazed with sheets of plate glass, a temporary iron stovepipe passing out near ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... trembling interests of man. The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... or seeming deformity, if we can show the necessity of that particular construction for the use intended! A ship appears more beautiful to an artist, or one moderately skilled in navigation, where its prow is wide and swelling beyond its poop, than if it were framed with a precise geometrical regularity, in contradiction to all the laws of mechanics. A building, whose doors and windows were exact squares, would hurt the eye by that very proportion; as ill adapted to the figure of a human creature, for whose ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... work on geometry, first published in 1637, six years after Hariot's Algebra first saw the light in print, one is not disposed to accuse the great philosopher of plagiarism because in working out his problems of great novelty in reference to geometrical curves he employed any systems of notation and calculation in algebra (Hariot's among the others) that happened to be before the world. The point or essence of Descartes' work was geometry and not algebra. Therefore, in climbing ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... vessel of the state from being hurried forward with the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr. Malthus forward with the geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his hands, and holds them out to his affrighted contemporaries as the only means of salvation. "For" (so argued the author of the Essay) "let the principles of Mr. Godwin's Enquiry and ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... probability in progress in the case of the earth, though, owing to the much greater bulk of the latter, it occupies a longer period. —Lockyer, Lessons in Astronomy, p. 93.] be declining in intensity; but the rate of that decrease is unknown; it may be in arithmetical, or it may be in geometrical progression. It is, then, by no means impossible that changes, which now only become discernible with the lapse of centuries, might, at some past period of our globe's history, have been the work of years only. Nor is it at all probable that the present ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... bamboo show some realistic motives, such as the fish, birds, and flowers in Fig. 23, No. 1; the snake and lizard in No. 2; the man in No. 5; but the strictly geometrical is dominant in nearly every case. Probably the most typical of this class of work is shown in Nos. 3 and 4 and Fig. 22, Nos. 1, 2, and 3. It should be noted, however, that, where one decorated object is seen, many more entirely ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... starts, haggardly lit here and there by narrow, capricious sky-lights in the cornices. But there would seem no special need for light, the place being designed more to pass the night in, than the day; in brief, a pine barrens dormitory, of knotty pine bunks, without bedding. As with the nests in the geometrical towns of the associate penguin and pelican, these bunks were disposed with Philadelphian regularity, but, like the cradle of the oriole, they were pendulous, and, moreover, were, so to speak, three-story cradles; the description of one of which ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... not neatly chiselled; they do not fall into geometrical groups, however much the memory, for its own ease, seeks to arrange them thus. Their edges are jagged; and the slightest jar might have sent them in different ways. To recur to the events in question: the Duke of Brunswick objected to issuing the manifesto, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... society, with a deep sense of the unity of nature, have combined in the completest manner, all the branches of physical knowledge, and the historical, geometrical, and experimental philosophy. The names of natural historian and natural philosopher are here, therefore, nearly synonymous, chained by a terrestrial link to the type of the lower animals. Man completes the scale of higher organization. ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... like that," he said, "and I don't know what she means. I am not an artist. I never learned to draw, even; at least not pictures. I can do geometrical drawing, of course, and make plans of machines; but that's not being an artist. I can't paint. Why does she say I ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... from the ground-plan (fig. 129)[508]. This plan shews very clearly the library itself, the two circular staircases at the west end, leading up to the gallery, the wide geometrical staircase leading down to the portico, the corridor into which this staircase opens, and from which a visitor could either ascend by a flight of stairs to the gallery crossing the nave, or, turning to his right, either ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... Indians of pure blood, who wore the native costume. This, here, is characteristic, both for men and women. The men wore wide-legged trousers of native woven cotton, and an upper jacket-shirt, square at the bottom, made of the same stuff, with designs—rosettes, flowers, geometrical figures, birds, animals, or men—wrought in them in red, green, or yellow wools; about the waist was a handsome brilliant native belt, while a bright kerchief was twisted about the head. The men were well-built, but the alcalde was a white pinto. Women wore huipilis, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... beautiful enough in themselves. But an added attraction in these orchids is their form—the curvature of their sepals and petals, and the wonderful little pitchers and cups and lips and tongues which an orchid exhibits. And the form is no mere geometrical pattern of lines and curves. It is obviously an ingenious contrivance devised for some special purpose. That purpose we now know to be the attraction of insects, who in sucking the orchid's honey will unconsciously carry on their wings or backs the flower's pollen to fertilise another orchid. ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... increase in geometrical ratio. They are like living beings, each one of which may become parent of a dozen others—some good and some ne'er-do-weels; but they differ from animals and vegetables inasmuch as they not only increase in a geometrical ratio, but the period ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was a lump of ice. He was dragging along some pointed flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them; just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle. Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated, for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding. In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful, and of the utmost importance; ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen |
