"Oscillate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they are connected by a spring in each case. If we hang any one of the systems up by the hook on one of its projecting rods, and hang a weight to the hook of the other projecting rod, the weight, when first put on, will oscillate up and down, and will go on doing so for ever if the system be absolutely unfrictional. If we check the vibration by hand, the weight will hang down at rest, the pin drawn out to a certain degree; and the distance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... to ascertain what is the effect of all of them taken together, and then to eliminate this, which is the casual part of the effect, in reckoning up the results. If the results of frequent experiments, in which the constant cause is kept invariable, oscillate round one point, that average or middle point is due to the constant cause, and the variable remainder to chance; that is, to causes the coexistence of which with the constant cause was merely casual. The ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... peaceful place to sleep in? Upon earth, houses in the town or cottages in the country feel every shock upon the surface of the globe. At sea, ships, rocked by the waves, are in perpetual movement. In the air, balloons incessantly oscillate upon the fluid strata of different densities. This projectile alone, travelling in absolute void amidst absolute silence, offered absolute repose ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... the tiny radio with his pocket-knife to establish a circuit which should oscillate when the battery was turned on. There was induction, to raise the voltage at the peaks and troughs of the oscillations. A transistor acted as a valve to make the oscillations repeated surges of current of one sign ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... indication that the repast was finished, Fougas arose without difficulty, gracefully offered his arm, and conducted his partner to the parlor. His gait was a little stiff and oppressively regular, but he went straight ahead, and did not oscillate the least bit. He took a couple of cups of coffee, and spirits in moderation, after which he began to talk in the most reasonable manner in the world. About ten o'clock, M. Martout, having expressed a wish to hear his history, he placed ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... bosom, ascended the green summit of the Sun's hill, now glimmering in the moonlight, and drew from its hiding-place the pledge that had been entrusted to her. As if by a miracle, the little flower, touched by the moon's silvery glow, expanded in an instant. Almost spontaneously it began to oscillate in her hand, and shrill and clear the little bell rang, so that it resounded into the adjacent wood, whence a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... other of its mean place. This he traced to the fluctuations of the moon's orbit, which undergoes a continuous change in a period of nineteen years. Thus the efficiency with which the moon acts on the protuberant mass of the earth varies, and thus the pole is caused to oscillate. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... one go into such minutiae in order to teach singing? I think the answer must ever be in the negative. You might as well talk to a gold-fish in a bowl-and say: 'If you desire to proceed laterally to the right, kindly oscillate gently your sinister dorsal fin, and you will achieve the desired result.' Oh, Art, what sins are committed ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... rope half-way up the precipice, the wind acting upon his body, carried him at times several feet out from the face of the cliff—causing him also to oscillate violently from side to side, notwithstanding that the rope ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... quarter of a century; its inhabitants are so varied that the 'go slow' directions over its bridges are printed in three languages, and the religious services in its churches held in four; the thermometer, the barometer, the vane, the hygrometer, oscillate so rapidly, so frequently, so lawlessly, and through so wide a meteorological range, that the climate is simply indescribable, yet it is a growing resort for consumptives; it stands with all its gay prosperity just in the edge of a lonesome, untilled belt of land one hundred and fifty miles wide, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... four farewell nights in April), and begin four nights at Brooklyn, on the opposite side of the river, to-night; and thus oscillate between Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and then cut into New England, and so work my way back to Boston for a fortnight, after which come Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit and Cleveland, and Buffalo, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... as Dahlias flung at us by sunburnt urchins posted at their several doors. The sandy shore for many miles is beautifully notched in upon by tiny bays like basins, on which boats lie motionless and baking in the sun, or oscillate under a picturesque rock, immersed up to its shoulders in a green hyaloid, which reflects their forms from a depth of many fathoms. On more open stretches of the shore, long-drawn ripples of waves of tiny dimension are overrunning and treading on one another's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... leads to savagery, and the inertness of mind which leads to barbarism, Schiller defines the savage as a man whose feelings control his principles, the barbarian as a man whose principles destroy his feelings. At present, he declares, the mass of men still oscillate between savagery and barbarism, but the man comme il faut must establish and preserve a perfect equipoise between his sensuous and his rational nature. Whither shall he look for help? The state cannot aid him, for it treats him as if he had no reason; nor can philosophy ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... that incomparable style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the thought within, its simplicity (not, in Newman's case, I think, the result of labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity, its music. I oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly, as honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. There is no sense of elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out of a full heart; then ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... only take into consideration carbon's relationship to oxidation and reduction respectively. As it is natural for sulphur to be in the reduced state, and for phosphorus to be in the oxidized state, so it is in the nature of carbon to be related to both states and therefore to oscillate between them. By its readiness to change over from the oxidized to the reduced state, it can serve the plant in the assimilation of light, while by its readiness to make the reverse change it serves man and animal ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... reticence vacillate coincidence publicity license tenacity crescent prejudice scenery condescend effervesce proboscis scintillate oscillate rescind transcend ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... Logan or Swinging Stone was estimated to weigh about eighty tons, and although it was quite still when we reached it, we were easily able to set it moving. It was a block of granite, and continued to oscillate for some little time, but formerly it was said that it could not be moved from its axis by force. This led to a foolish bet being made by Lieutenant Goldsmith of the Royal Navy, who landed with his boat's crew ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... small disks on the machine bends toward the negative pole, becomes widened, and, at a certain point of electric intensity, commences to vibrate and oscillate, exhibiting a peculiar stratification. Since these phenomena are also least observed in flames rich in oxygen, it appears to be a general law that carbon and hydrogen are more strongly attracted by the negative pole, while oxygen is more attracted by the positive ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... they build upon the solid basis of a legal principle, I would endeavor to fix that mercury by a positive law. If to please an administration the judges can go one way to-day, and to please the crowd they can go another to-morrow, if they will oscillate backward and forward between power and popularity, it is high time to fix the law in such a manner as to resemble, as it ought, the great Author of all law, in whom there is no variableness nor shadow ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of obsolete superstition, we shall have ere long to fight over again the battle with a modified form of infidelity, as now with a modified form of popery. Thus, probably, for some time to come, will the human mind continue to oscillate between the extremes of error; but with a diminished are at each vibration; until truth shall at last prevail, and compel it ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... approach of a tempest there passes through the forests a terrible gust of wind which makes the trees shudder, to which profound silence succeeds, so had Napoleon, in passing, shaken the world; kings felt their crowns oscillate in the storm, and, raising hands to steady them, found only their hair, bristling with terror. The Pope had travelled three hundred leagues to bless him in the name of God and to crown him with the diadem; but Napoleon had taken it from his hands. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... states between which men oscillate, passing from one to the other with equal ease, according to the influences brought to ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... Samuel Bligh, of Oneonta, N. Y., have patented an improved power for churning and other purposes where little power is required. It consists in the combination of a drum and weight, a train of gearing, and a pallet wheel arranged to oscillate a ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... the pleasure that a full developed woman could. Tight as it was, it had not that peculiar suction, embrace, and grind, that a full-grown woman's or girl's has. When I was getting drier and drier, the old one stiffened my prick, and I put it into the child; but oscillate my arse as I might, I could not get a spend out of me; then in the aunt's clipping though well stretched cunt, I got my pleasure in no time. A fuck is barely a fuck if a man's prick is but half up a girl, it wants engulfing. ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... Middle Ages look on the world as a vale of tears, which Pope and Emperor are set to guard against the coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of the Renaissance oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and seasons of superstition or of stupid resignation) here, in this circle of chosen spirits, the doctrine is upheld that the visible world was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern pre-existing ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... screen remote from the spectators. Behind this are ranged, one behind the other, and at right angles to the screen, a row of lighted candles. Being all in the same line, they throw one shadow only on the screen. The figure is now made to oscillate slightly, so as to impart some little motion to the shadow. One of the candles is now removed from its place in the row, and waved gently about, now high, now low, the effect to the spectators being that a second shadow springs out of the first, and dances about it on the screen. ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... said Warren, speaking collectedly, like a professor, "if I raise my pendulum till it reaches the point of Moderate Desires and then let it go, it will naturally swing to the point of Slight Troubles, and go no further. Then it will oscillate for some time in a more and more limited space on the line of Indifference, and finally it will stand still without any jerk on Dead Stop, Absolute Repose. That is ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... vessels were seen drawn up in three parallel lines on the east and three on the west. Then the search-lights again flashed out, filling the whole intermediate area of the sky with beams of brilliant coloured light, which were caused to oscillate sideways and overlap, producing a most gorgeous intermingling of glowing colours. The Martians certainly had a complete understanding of all the peculiarities connected with ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... of two great parties and no more, parties each strong enough to restrain the violence of the other, yet one of them steadily predominant in any given House of Commons. Where a third, perhaps a fourth, party appears, the conditions are changed. The scales of Parliament oscillate as the weight of this detached group is thrown on one side or the other; dissolutions become more frequent, and even dissolutions may fail to restore stability. The recent history of the French Republic has shown the difficulties of working a Chamber composed ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... and misery and give way to temptation, frequently falling into a life of vagabondage, drunkenness, and crime. In prison they often develop mental disorders, are looked upon as malingerers, and oscillate between prison and the insane asylum, only to begin the old game over again so soon as they again come in contact ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... with their feet to the fire, and their heads resting in the hollow of their saddles. The horses, standing around a tree, and tied to its lower branches, seem also to sleep. I am awake and listening. The wind is high up, whistling among the twigs and causing the long white streamers to oscillate. It utters a wild and melancholy music. There are few other sounds, for it is winter, and the tree-frog and cicada are silent. I hear the crackling knots in the fire, the rustling of dry leaves swirled up by a stray gust, the "coo-whoo-a" of the white owl, the bark of the raccoon, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... shiver, totter, brandish, joggle, quaver, shudder, tremble, flap, jolt, quiver, sway, vibrate, fluctuate, jounce, reel, swing, wave, flutter, oscillate, rock, thrill, waver. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... I like to waver, and vacillate, and oscillate, and make scruples? These are things a woman can do, both with privilege and inclination. I think myself to be very clever in ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... work had a severe diarrhoea, and while in the tunnel was obliged to make use of the bucket, in which the excavated chalk was hauled to the top. He admitted that at times the bucket, in being hauled up, would oscillate in such a way as to spill part of its contents and thereby pollute the water of the well below. Two weeks from this accidental pollution the epidemic began, and there can be little doubt of the relation of this mild case of typhoid ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... moderate man like W. H. Draper, the attorney-general for Upper Canada in Sydenham's ministry, argued in favour of a policy almost identical. While his views tended to oscillate, now to this side, now to that, their general direction was clear. He felt that the ideal condition was one of union between the parties of Western Canada, which would "render the position of the government safer ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... a little behind his companions, and was three or four yards to the left of them. He was drifting along with his gaze fixed on the ducks, when all at once his canoe began to twist and oscillate in ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... with which oil and water slide over each other is agreeably seen if a phial be about half filled with equal parts of oil and water, and made to oscillate suspended by a string, the upper surface of the oil and the lower one of the water will always keep smooth; but the agitation of the surfaces where the oil and water meet, is curious; for their specific gravities being not very different, and their friction on each other ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... flitter, flit, flutter, shift, shuffle, shake, totter, tremble, vacillate, wamble^, turn and turn about, ring the changes; sway to and fro, shift to and fro; change and change about; waffle, blow with the wind (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c 314; vibrate between, two extremes, oscillate between, two extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform^; versatile. unstaid^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... turn for weeks at a time on the foot of Brahma, then on his knee, on his thigh, on his navel, and so on, until, beneath the strain of this intense meditation, hallucinations appear, when all the forms of being, mingling together and transformed into each other, oscillate to and fro in this vertiginous brain until the motionless man, with suspended breath and fixed eyeballs, beholds the universe melting away like vapor over the vacant immensity of the Being in which he hopes for absorption. In this case ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... those odd types that oscillate between remote country towns in England and the conduct of English Church services on mutual terms in enterprising hotels abroad, a tremulous, obstinate little being with sporadic hairs upon his face, spectacles, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the movement, I started with my first four Chasseurs. The bridge rang strangely under our horses' hoofs, and seemed to me to oscillate in an alarming manner. Fortunately the enemy was not on the other side; if he had been, our passage would have ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... "outside" surface would carry it far past the magnetic center, yet, before reaching the "inside" surface of the earth it would gradually diminish in speed, after passing the halfway point, finally pause and immediately fall back toward the "outside" surface, and continue thus to oscillate, like the swinging of a pendulum with the power removed, until it would finally rest at the magnetic center, or at that particular point exactly one-half the distance between the "outside" surface and the "inside" surface of ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... popular prejudices — is not only injurious because it perpetuates error with the obstinacy engendered by the evidence of ill-observed facts, but also because it hinders the mind from attaining to higher views of nature. Instead of seeking to discover the 'mean' or 'medium' point, around which oscillate, in apparent independence of forces, all the phenomena of the external world, this system delights in multiplying exceptions to the law, and seeks, amid phenomena and in organic forms for something beyond the marvel of a regular succession, and an internal and ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Church of Christ has become great in poverty, and straightway been corrupted by riches? Willingly or unwillingly, the government had to yield to public opinion, and awaken to a still more lively consciousness, that, if it would not continually oscillate, without character, between the old and the new, no escape remained, except in the way which the welfare and honor of the country pointed out; by making common cause with the ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... Others, of more austere taste, allow ornament only to emphasize the main lines of the design, or to conceal such inharmonious elements as nature or utility may prevent them from eliminating.[12] We may thus oscillate between decorative and structural motives, and only in one point, for each style, can we find the ideal equilibrium, in which the greatest strength and lucidity is ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... turn back, and seek some safer place. In all cases the line should separate a little, and not follow in each other's footsteps. The indications of a quicksand are easily recognised. If the surface of the sand begins to oscillate and undulate with a tremulous rocking motion, it is always wise to seek some other passage. Looking back, after elephants have passed, you will often see what was a perfectly dry flat, covered with several inches of water. When water begins to ooze up in any quantity, after ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... In reality M. Sagnac operated in the converse manner. He took two equal weights of a salt of radium and a salt of barium, which he made oscillate one after the other in a torsion balance. Had the durations of oscillation been different, it might be concluded that the mechanical mass is not the same for radium ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... but not really changing their nature. They are not observed to produce anything quite new, and evolution of course, is not restricted to the increase of the already existing peculiarities, but depends chiefly on the continuous addition of new characters to the stock. Fluctuations always oscillate around an average, and if removed from this for some time, they show a tendency to return to it. This tendency, called retrogression, has never been observed to fail, as it should, in order to free the new strain from the links with the average, while new species and new varieties are seen to be ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... around several times, as we have described, he at length posted himself near the hind-quarters of the porcupine, and with his nose a few inches from the tail of the latter. In this position he stood for some moments, apparently watching the tail, which still continued to oscillate rapidly. He stood in perfect silence, ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... artifice. His diction is often inflated into fustian, and he indulges in exaggeration till it sometimes, unconsciously no doubt, amounts to falsehood. It is a common fault of those who strive at producing oratorical effects, to oscillate between commonplace and extravagance; and while studying Mr. Macaulay, one feels as if vibrating between facts that every one knows and consequences which nobody can believe. We are satisfied that whoever will take, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the Royal Institution tells me that he often craves for an absence of visual perceptions, they are so brilliant and persistent. The Rev. George Henslow speaks of their extreme restlessness; they oscillate, ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... we conceive the peculiar actions of the tendrils of some climbing plants to have been produced by minute modifications? These, according to Mr. Darwin,[101] oscillate till they touch an object, and then embrace it. It is stated by that observer, "that a thread weighing no more than the thirty-second of a grain, if placed on the tendril of the Passiflora gracilis, will cause it ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... in general best to be explained by the action of earthquakes. Water being an exceedingly elastic substance, an earthquake passes through it with much greater speed than it traverses the rocks which support the ocean floor. The result is that, when the fluid and solid oscillate in the repeated swingings which a shock causes, they do not move together, but rub over each other, the independent movements having the swing of from a few inches to a foot or two ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... was of the usual standard. He had seen everything worth seeing in London and in Paris, between which cities he seemed to oscillate with such frequency that he might be said to live in both places at once. He had his stall at Covent Garden, and his stall at the Grand Opera. He was a subscriber at the Theatre Francais. He had seen all the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... world cannot get on without faith of some sort. There is a sense in which that is as eminently as obviously true; there is another, in which, in my judgment, it is as eminently as obviously false, and it seems to me that the hortatory, or pulpit, mind is apt to oscillate between the false and the true meanings, without ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the name before, nevertheless my lips were forming the syllables almost before he spoke. As he flicked up his grey horse and the gig began to oscillate in more business-like fashion, I put him a fourth question—a question at once ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the faults of the other. It may be described as being the reverse of that of Garnerin, being made in the form of an umbrella blown inside out. The resistance to the air, it was thought, would be sufficient to check the rapid descent, while its form would prevent the tendency to oscillate. ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Jassy, said in 1912 that "the Serbs have just as many reasons for asserting that the Macedonian is a Serbian language as the Bulgars have to deny it." As it was in the Middle Ages, so it is now; the mediaeval language used to oscillate between the two, and it is sometimes impossible to tell whether an old Macedonian Slav document is Bulgarian or Serbian.... When we come to the ethnologists we find they have only written books which deal ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... its white plumage oscillate against the darkness which it displaced with a splash, when a bell sounded with slow strokes; "Ah," said he, looking again at his watch, "that is the hour ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans |
