"Chaos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoughts were chaos; my brain throbbed heavily; I fixed my hot eyes on the road and strode onward, numbed, seeing, ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... through the malice of time, or, finally, through the decree of Heaven, which appears to be unwilling that the things of this earth should exist for long in one form, that she falls again into the same chaos of ruin; that these my labours, whatsoever they may be worth (if indeed they may be worthy of a happier fortune), both through what has been already said and through what remains to say, may be able to keep her alive or at least to encourage the most exalted minds to provide ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... lungs of the feasters were choked with overpowering perfumes! What repulsive exhibitions met the eye! How shamelessly was all decency trodden under foot! The poisonous breath of unchecked license had blasted the noble moderation of the vapor of wine which floated round this chaos of riotous topers slowly rose the pale image of Satiety watching for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he pushed open the door, thrusting in his head. "What the hell are you doing here? This region is sacred to Chaos and old Night," striking the panels, first one and then the other, with the tassels of his dressing-gown. No one answered him. Adelaide counted a row of ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... cheered him, honoured him, and extolled him up to the skies. Everybody said that, unless leading men like Nabendu devoted themselves to the Cause, there was no hope for the country. Nabendu was disposed to agree with them, and emerged out of the chaos of mistake and confusion as a leader of the country. When he entered the Congress Pavilion on the first day, everybody stood up, and shouted "Hip, hip, hurrah," in a loud outlandish voice, hearing which our Motherland reddened with shame to the root ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... sea which should break aboard. And as I stood there gasping for breath and staring about me I discovered that I could not only dimly perceive my immediate surroundings, but that the entire hull of the schooner was visible as an all but shapeless black patch in the midst of a madly leaping chaos of swirling foam, which gleamed ghostly white in the light of its own phosphorescence. It was still blowing as furiously as ever, and the air was thick with spindrift and scudwater, which blotted out everything outside the radius of some thirty fathoms ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos—because of the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... order to meet his obligations, but the thought of relinquishing his control of it never dawned upon him. It was the pride of his heart, the one tangible achievement in a wilderness of dreams. Life without Guinevere had seemed a desert; life without "The Opp Eagle" seemed chaos. ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... shows the globe of Earth revolving in the Infinite. Streams of water by day, clouds of luminous steam by night, give it the effect of swimming out of chaos. The powerful panels of Earth are boldly modeled in pierced relief, giving statuesque realism as well as the picturesqueness demanded of a panel. They follow in a natural sequence as regards their deep and arresting symbolism. ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... from one of quiet and peace to indescribable chaos. The startled and terrified buck uttered cries of agony. His fellows broke and leaped off in all directions. The elephant raised his trunk, and, trumpeting loudly, lumbered off through the wood, crushing down small trees and trampling bushes in his ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... desouthernized Southerner I ever knew Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men Most journalists would have been literary men if they could Motley Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Nearly nothing as chaos could be Neatness that brings despair Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it Never paid in anything but hopes of paying Never saw a man more regardful of negroes No rose blooms right along No man ever yet told the truth about himself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... swing, drenching the whimpering dogs at every lurch, and hurling everything on board into confusion. The petroleum-launch was washed from the davits; down at one time to 40 deg. below zero sank the thermometer; while a high aurora was whiffed into a dishevelled chaos of hues, resembling the smeared palette of some turbulent painter of the skies, or mixed battle of long-robed seraphim, and looking the very symbol of tribulation, tempest, wreck, and distraction. I, for the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... of men grew blind, mistaking the shadow for the substance. And because the least error when extended to infinity produces chaos, the whole world became chaos, full of nothing but ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... system, where there is nothing to be done but to lounge on the sofa and read, an hour sooner or later in breakfast or dinner isn't of much account. Now, there's Dinah gets you a capital dinner,—soup, ragout, roast fowl, dessert, ice-creams and all,—and she creates it all out of chaos and old night down there, in that kitchen. I think it really sublime, the way she manages. But, Heaven bless us! if we are to go down there, and view all the smoking and squatting about, and hurryscurryation of the preparatory ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... days when Gregory VII was Pope, and William of Normandy had just won his English crown, and Henry III ruled in Germany and Henry I in France, in the days when feudalism was making its first attempts to bring order out of chaos, several councils of the Church in France and in Normandy had traced out the plan and the outlines of the "Truce of God." Earlier even, at the Councils of Charroux (989), Narbonne (990), Le Puy and Anse (990), severe ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as 'De las' sack! De las' sack!!' inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad. By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the packets would be packed and black with passengers, the last bells would begin to clang all down the line, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... like the most miserable little steamer that ever went to sea; and to feel that if one cannot remember one's part, one's head will certainly fly off at the neck and join the hideous dance of jumbled heads and lights and stalls and boxes in the general chaos. ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... long time hesitated to adopt principles altogether subversive to society. In her worldly good sense she endeavored to follow what she imagined a via media in her wisdom, to avoid what seemed to her extremes, but what is in reality the eternal antagonism of truth and falsehood, of order and chaos. Twenty years back there was a unanimity among English writers to speak the language of moderation and good sense whenever a rash author of foreign nations hazarded some dangerous novelties; and in their reviews they immediately ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... who divined that Eros evolved the worlds from Chaos, metaphysics have not advanced one step. Only death is a power equally absolute; yet in the eternal struggle between the two, love is the stronger; love conquers death by night and day, conquers it every spring, follows death ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... thing to keep any room in the house orderly, and Sidney, as part of his struggle against the downward tendency in all about him, against the forces of chaos, often did the work of housemaid in the parlour; a little laxity in the rules which made this a sacred corner, and there would have been no spot where he could rest. With some success, too, he had resisted the habit ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... individual liberty of action, or to a state of anarchy in which the weak would have no protection. I do not imagine that the leaders who preach socialism, who live by agitation and not by labor, really desire to overturn the social order and bring chaos. If social chaos came, their occupation would be gone, for if all men were reduced to a level, they would be compelled to scratch about with the rest for a living. They live by agitation, and they are confident that government will ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... her now, though it was no consecutive tale that he heard, but a very chaos of excuses and extenuations, regrets, suppositions, and not always revelant recollections, of which he had to make what he could in his own mind. What he made was a narrative so natural that he could not believe it was the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... as he looked about him and saw so much good stuff and good force wasting for want of a little will and skill to train the force and manage the stuff. He abhorred bankruptcy and chaos. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's chambers, in order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had made. She had ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the contents of the old portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent manuscript, about the floor. I did what I ought to have done on my first visit; I brought the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... fight waxes the fog rises and a grey darkness settles over the valley. The forest is hidden, the hills are gone, the sun is obscured, and a fierce desolation reigns. Darker and darker it becomes as the blizzard gains force. And the cries of the forest beasts add to the chaos and din of the ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... Mythologists represented the Ark was an immense egg. This was supposed to have been produced by Ether and Chaos, at the bidding of Time, the one ethereal being who created the universe. By Nox (Night) the egg was hatched, which, being opened into two parts, from the upper part was formed heaven, and the ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... increase in violence as Antrid drew nearer to the sun, and, if she finally took up her position as a new satellite of the Earth, the entire solar system would be in chaos. By this time, even if life still remained on Earth, it would quickly become extinct, for the vastly increased tidal forces on that body would flood the land to the peaks of the highest mountains. Earth would ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... south-west. The torrent waters have swept away the whole of the northern wall, and the treasure-seeker has left his mark upon the interior. Columns and pilasters and bevelled stones have been hurled into the Wady below; the large pavement-slabs have been torn up and tossed about to a chaos; and the restless drifting of the loose yellow Desert-sand will soon bury it again in oblivion. The result of all such ruthless ruining was simply null. The imaginative Nj declared, it is true, that a stone dog ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... Daughter of the Air; —tar is the usual feminine suffix in Finnish, and is generally to be understood to mean "daughter of ——." In the following passages we have the combined Finnish version of the widespread cosmogonical myths of the Divine Spirit brooding over the waters of Chaos; and the Mundane Egg. In the First Recension of the Kalevala however, and in many Finnish ballads, an eagle is said to have built her nest on the knees of Vainamoinen after he was thrown into the sea by the Laplander, and the Creation-Myth ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... still Beethoven, gigantic in pride, purity, and passion. "I dream now," said Rodomant; "like the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, so stir my shadows, dim shapes of sound, across the chaos of my fathomless intention." This "Rumour" has never been reprinted in America; it will, then, be excusable to give here a scene which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... empire to Byzantium and the incursions of the Northern tribes was melancholy in the extreme. Nothing but the church retained any semblance of organised existence; and when at last some kind of order began to emerge from a chaos of universal ruin, and churches and monastic buildings began to be built in Western Europe, all of them looked to Rome, and not to Constantinople, as their common ecclesiastical centre. It is not surprising that, as soon as differences between the ritual of the Eastern and the Western Church ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... saw how that monstrous chaos trembled and stirred. Speechless and stern, like death in its haughty majesty, stood Judas Iscariot, and within him a thousand impetuous and ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... as he waited. He searched his mind for anything calculated to aid the doomed traveller. He could find nothing. He thought to call out, to burst his lungs in a series of shouts on the chance of being heard in the chaos of the storm. But he realised the uselessness of it all, and abandoned the impulse. No puny human voice could hope to make impression on the din of the elemental battle being fought out on the plain. No. His only service must be to stand there beating ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... told ye so. Now I hope ye'll keep quiet a minute. Ye won't? Going at it again? Very well; do as you please; it's none o' my business—by gosh!"—lifting up his head with a bitter grin; "that inside of me is like Milton's chaos, in Paradise Lost. 'Up from the bottom turned by raging wind and furious assault!'—Here it ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... that the Church could miraculously control nature; but they insisted that if the Church possessed such power, she must use that power for the common good. Upon this point they would not compromise, nor would they permit delay. During the chaos of the ninth century turmoil and violence reached a stage at which the aspirations of most Christians ended with self-preservation; but when the discovery and working of the Harz silver had brought with it some semblance of order, an intense yearning possessed both men and women to ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... out the tangled bedclothes and made up the bed, and reduced to order some of the chaos in the room. Then she opened the wardrobe and took out the mass of clothes, sorting out the suits and putting them away carefully, with a shake to the coats to remove creases. The dress suit she laid in a drawer, running to her own room for a tiny lavender bag to keep away the moths. ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Penworthy, were so far convalescent as to be up and away, presumably by the life-giving sea, whose rhythmic murmur he could hear. For the first time since he awoke to find himself bandaged up in a strange dug-out, and surrounded by strange faces, did the chaos of his ideas resolve itself into anything like definite memories. Yet many of them ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... done to deserve such a delicate attention, but I take it as a token of good feeling, although you pretty near killed me with your kindness. The Law is strong, but public opinion is stronger; and when the two meet in conflict, the result is chaos for the Law." ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... they could scarcely keep a footing, and now and then they fell into the trees. There were places where these grew so close together that they could scarcely force a passage through, and others where they had gone down before a screaming gale and lay piled in a tangled chaos over which it was almost impossible to flounder. It was dark in the timber, and they could not see the broken ends of the branches that rent their clothing; but they went on somehow, down and down, until, when they reached a clearer ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... that in the much blotted and broken efforts at goodness, and in the careless gift which they themselves despised,[185] and in the sweet ryme and murmur of their unpurposed words, the Spirit of the Lord had, indeed, wandering, as in chaos days on lightless waters, gone forth in the hearts and from the lips of those other three strange prophets, even though they ate forbidden bread by the altar of the poured-out ashes, and even though the wild beast of the desert found them, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... conditions as these it was a big undertaking to try to sift the wheat from a mountain of chaff and become enthusiastic in one's devotion to State and Church. Why should there be such a state of chaos on matters of the most vital importance? Is human nature not sincere? Or is ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... ended with the most extraordinary chaos of noises: abuse and hisses hurled at Genovese and a fit of frenzy in praise of la Tinti. It was a long time since the Venetians had had so lively an evening. They were warmed and revived by that antagonism which is never lacking in Italy, where the smallest ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... chaos naturally affects the value of literature as a record of the development of thought. We are in danger of moving in a vicious circle: of assigning ideas to an epoch because they occur in a certain book, while at the same time we fix the date of the book in virtue of the ideas which it ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... barbarians, and, above all, practised, as well as preached, a PURE MORALITY. The Protestant sects in this enlightened age, by their novelties, by their dissensions, and, above all, by the low standard of morals which they inculcate, threaten to throw the world back again to the dark chaos from which Catholicity has drawn it, and to substitute for the glory of Christianity the miserable philosophism and superstition of the degenerate ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Nuisance; needing to be handcuffed, gagged and abated. Human Nature, if it be in a terrified and imperilled state, with the sword of this fellow swashing round it, calls him "Infamous," and a Monster of Chaos. He is indeed the select Monster of that region; the Patriarch of all the Monsters, little as he dreams of being such. An Angel of Heaven the poor caitiff dreams himself rather, and in cheery moments is conscious of being:—Bedlam holds in it no madder article. And I often think he will again ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the bed, another under one of the boy's playthings. Music, money, caps, letters, watches, and boots were scattered about in the utmost confusion. The chairs, tables, and even the bed had all been removed from their proper places. In the midst of the chaos sat Paganini, his black silk nightcap covering his still blacker hair, a yellow handkerchief carelessly tied around his neck, and a chocolate-coloured jacket hanging loose upon his shoulders. On his knees he held Achillino, his little son of four years ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... the chaos of his reflections there shone out clearly one coherent thought, the recollection of what Hank Jardine had offered to him. "If ever you are in a ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... him, if he lacked genius, there was no alternative but the dragging out of a worthless and wearying existence. Conscious of his powers, it was a time of struggle, of passionate endeavour, possibly of bewilderment; with the one great determination standing firm in the midst of a chaos of doubt and difficulty—the determination to persevere, and to become a ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... could she be the other, when scarcely eighteen months previous, she had told him that which, if it were true, must equally prevent her union with Morales as with himself? In what were they different save in the vast superiority of wealth and rank? And in the chaos of bewildering emotions, so trustful was he in the truth of her he loved, that, against the very evidence of his own senses, he for the moment disbelieved in the identity of the wife of Morales with the Marie Henriquez of the Cedar Vale. Perhaps it was well he ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... and a small one were drawn up beyond high-water mark, and the waves as they ran up towards them seemed as if they were calling to them. Gaffs, oars, coiled ropes, baskets and barrels lay about in disorder and amidst it all was a cabin built of yellow branches, bark and matting. Above the general chaos floated a red rag at the extremity ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... be the condition of the world if all our minds lay dormant? If men did not think, reason and act, our undisturbed, slumbering intellects would not excel the imbecility of the brute; we would live in chaos, hardly aware of our existence. And yet with all our activity of mind, we daily pass by unobserved that which would be wonderful if philosophised and reasoned upon, and with the same inconsistency wonder at that ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... hour with his face buried in his hands, the chaos of his soul formed itself into definite shape. His first clear thought was this,—"Without Adele, my life will be a blank. She is absolutely necessary to my existence. I must win her". A very decided conclusion certainly, for ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... true-manumitting law, And Freedom, only which the wise intend, To work thine innate end. Over thy vacant counterfeit of death Broods with soft urgent breath Love, that is child of Beauty and of Awe: To intercleavage of sharp warring pain, As of contending chaos come again, Thou wak'st, O Earth, And work'st from change to change and birth to birth Creation old as hope, and new as sight; For meed of toil not vain, Hearing once more the primal fiat toll:- 'Let there be light!' And there is light! Light ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos; proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making less demand on the poet's creative power, required greater resources of knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. Nature must ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... he became the pupil of the great teacher Abbe Vogler, under whose charge also Meyerbeer was then studying. Our young composer worked with great assiduity under the able instruction of Vogier, who was of vast service in bringing the chaos of his previous contradictory teachings into order and light. All these musical Wanderjahre, however trying, had steeled Karl Maria into a stern self-reliance, and he found in his skill as an engraver the means to remedy his ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... without any effectual control over delinquent servants? Was the collection of the revenue left without any check? Was the tyranny of a double government, like our double cabinet, tolerated with a view of seeing the concerns of the company become an absolute chaos of disorder, and of giving to government a handle for seizing the territorial revenue? I know that this was the original scheme of administration, and I violently suspect that it never has been relinquished. If the ministry have no sinister view, if they ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... The change from the chaos of the storm-cloud to the almost perfect calm of the upper ether was so great that it was almost stunning. For a minute none of the five spoke ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... Browning wrote Pauline—which is also the history of a poet's mind, has described his own experience of the loss of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair. The poet of Pauline turns from political and social abstractions to real life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream; but his mood is not so sane ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... sat there he did not know. Minutes or hours seemed all the same to him. Nothing but that gray monochrome, of neither light nor darkness, that endless panorama of miles and years, blended together into this chaos! ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... for all time. Scourges should fall and penance be done for many a long week before the shadow of that day should pass from Waverley. But meanwhile there was no effort to bring them back to their rule. Everything was chaos and disorder. The Abbot had left his seat of justice and hurried angrily forward, to be engulfed and hustled in the crowd of his own monks like a sheep-dog who finds himself entangled ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with this man for not being a seer, or to feel superior to him for not being an idealist, or to heckle him for not being a sociologist, when here he was all the time with this mighty frenzy or heat in him that could melt down the chaos of a world while we looked, weld it to his will, and then lift his arm and smite it, though all men said him nay—back into a world again—to heckle over this man's not being a complete sociologist or professor is not worthy of thoughtful ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... wives would believe it. We said that everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... that Dick was gone, though the pain of that separation was far greater than she would have believed possible, but a moral earthquake had shattered their little world, involving them in utter chaos. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... less than two hours I was comfortably settled in a town which is sometimes described as a chaos, especially for a stranger. But in London everything is easy to him who has money and is not afraid of spending it. I was delighted to be able to escape so soon from a house where I was welcomed so ill, though I had a right to the best reception; but ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the door which she had shut; she was leaning against it and both her hands were pressing the wood behind her, as if the solid surface were the only thing firm in a world of chaos. There was no sound in the room except the slow ticking of the clock which seemed to be tolling ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... uncultivated lands which they did not regard as being any more the property of the Indians than of their own hunters. With the best intentions, it was wholly impossible for any government to evolve order out of such a chaos without resort to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... servant, but his accounts had always been audited every month, and in his old age, his arithmetic would not carry him farther, so that his mistress's long absence abroad had occasioned such a hopeless chaos, that but for his long services, his honesty might have been in question. Honora put this idea away with angry horror. Not only did she love and trust the old man, but he was a legacy from Humfrey, and she would have torn the page from her receipts rather ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... world in which I had been living securely for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours I still did not know; nor did I know, though I was beginning to guess, the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... all other relatives, friends and acquaintances. If the man I had accepted as my brother was spurious, so was everybody—that was my deduction. For more than two years I was without relatives or friends, in fact, without a world, except that one created by my own mind from the chaos that reigned ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... which the very silence of the night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh. Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out of the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know precisely of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it saw reflected its visage, in "water stilled ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and newspaper feuilletons, speeches at meetings, and the vague, uneasy, and violent sexual instincts which his parents had transmitted to him. All these things together formed a monstrous grim dream-world, from the dense night, the chaos and miasma of which there darted ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... water in central lower Greece. "The thread of water descends from a huge cliff against a background of dark moss, which has earned for the brook the name of 'Black Water.' At the bottom of the cliff the water loses itself in a chaos of rocks. The ancients saw in the icy coldness of the water and in the barren tract around an image of the underworld." (See Baedeker's Greece.) To swear by the Styx was to take "the ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... the world needs food. Food is the greatest safeguard—I would almost say the only safeguard—against anarchy and chaos. Then, I want to learn by experience; to prove by my own demonstrations that my theories are workable—or that they're not. And then, most of all, I love the prairies and the open life. It's my whim, and ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... and support. The revenue system, the public lands, the arrangement of loans, the mint, all alike met with his active concurrence. He was too great a man not to value rightly Hamilton's work, and the way in which that work brought order, credit, honor, and prosperity out of a chaos of debt and bankruptcy appealed peculiarly to his own love for method, organization, and sound business principles. He met every criticism on Hamilton's policy without concession, and defended it when it was attacked. To ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... muse of fire, &c.] This goes, says Warburton, upon the notion of the Peripatetic system, which imagines several heavens one above another, the last and highest of which was one of fire. It alludes, likewise, to the aspiring nature of fire, which, by its levity, at the separation of the chaos, took the highest seat of ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... 'Hail! oh, hail! Eve's younger[3] brother! and again, all hail! Thou bright-eyed Morning! fairest among all Of God's fair creatures! Rise, bright prince, and shine O'er this green earth, from brooding Darkness won, From wild, waste Chaos, and ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... organic evolution. According to this idea, man developed from a fishlike ancestor, "growing up as sharks do until able to help himself and then coming forth on dry land."(1) The thought here expressed finds its germ, perhaps, in the Babylonian conception that everything came forth from a chaos of waters. Yet the fact that the thought of Anaximander has come down to posterity through such various channels suggests that the Greek thinker had got far enough away from the Oriental conception to make his view seem to his contemporaries a novel and individual one. Indeed, nothing ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Several members of the company were detailed on separate errands to Clark Street for various raw meats and non-alcoholic liquid supplies, and Mrs. Bates herself descended to the kitchen to oversee the preparation of the bounteous feast which presently emerged from chaos. By way of grace, Field read an impromptu poem written in dark blue ink on pale blue paper with each line beginning with ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... a number of works, with such titles as "Anthroposophia Theomagica, or a Discourse of the Nature of Man, and his State after Death, grounded on his Creator's Proto-chemistry;" "Magia Adamica, with a full discovery of the true Coelum terrae, or the Magician's Heavenly Chaos and the first matter ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... around you. Amongst these threatening apparitions, there are some which fade away and reenter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no longer with the horrors of this present chaos; but there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and alive, to say: 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we, we do not mean ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Franks." He died in 741, at the age of forty-seven, leaving the monarchy to his three sons, Pepin, Carloman, and Griffo. Of the elder of these, we shall hear more anon. Charles Martel is the first hero who succeeded in stamping his image upon the surface of European history, after the chaos of the broken Roman empire had in some measure yielded to the spirit of order. He was chieftain of an unruly tribe, rather than king of a settled state. In this light we must regard him if we would judge his character fairly; and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... bullets patter, The rattle, rattle, rattle Of the mitrailleuse in battle, And the yells Of the men who charge through hells Where the poison gas descends. And the bursting shrapnel rends Limb from limb In the dim Chaos and clamor of the strife Where no man thinks of his life But only of fighting through, Blindly ...
— The Red Flower - Poems Written in War Time • Henry Van Dyke
... events of the past year with some knowledge of political philosophy and history, and with the love of his neighbor in his heart, will discover, amid the horrors of the time and its moral chaos, three hopeful leadings for humanitarian effort, each involving a great constructive invention. He will see that humanity needs supremely a sanction for international law, rescue from alcoholism, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... is unhinged, and we are nearing chaos. It is going so far that Wyclif cannot refrain from inserting some of those slight restrictions which the logicians of the Middle Ages were fond of slipping into their writings. In time of danger this was the secret door by which they made their escape, turning away from the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... to the condition of the capital paralyzes the imperial authority in the provinces; and bold men, taking advantage of the moment of weakness, start up in various places, asserting independence, and seeking to obtain for themselves kingdoms out of the chaos which they see around them. The more remote provinces are especially liable to be thus affected, and often revolt successfully on such an occasion. It appears that the circumstances under which Darius obtained the throne were more ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... Each recurrence of the dismal sound added sharpness and intensity to his grief. His sufferings became almost intolerable, and drove him to the very verge of despair and madness. If a weapon had been at hand, he might have seized it, and put a sudden period to his existence. His breast was a chaos of fierce and troubled thoughts, in which one black and terrible idea arose and overpowered all the rest. It was the desire of vengeance, deep and complete, upon her whom he looked upon as the murderess of his child. He cared ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... from leaving the wharf, they stood among a confused, gigantic chaos of boulders flung, dicelike, amid heavy timbers on the brow of the Palisades. Off to the north, the faint, ghostly aura dimly silhouetted the trees. Far below, the jetty river trembled here, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... a weary morning she had labored hard at the building of a new castle in Spain, and now it was dissipated at a breath. Her sky had fallen; she was plunged into chaos; her brain reeled under ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... to give some account of the stages in the process from original chaos to present arrangements. The division into cold mist and warm ether first broke the spell of confusion. With increasing cold, the former gave rise to water, earth and stones. The seeds of life which continued floating ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... point,—answers, no! He wants Harry brought to him, that he may acknowledge his crimes; that he may quench the fire of unhappiness burning within him. "How seldom we think of death while in life,—and how painful to see death while gathering together the dross of this worldly chaos! Great, great, great is the reward of the good, and mighty is the hand of Omnipotence that, holding the record of our sins, warns us to prepare." As Mr. M'Fadden utters these words, a coloured woman enters the room to enquire ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the designs perceptible at all. As we sat in the chapel there were clouds flitting across the sky; when the clouds came the pictures vanished; when the sunshine broke forth the figures sadly glimmered into something like visibility,—the Almighty moving in chaos,—the noble shape of Adam, the beautiful Eve; and, beneath where the roof curves, the mighty figures of sibyls and prophets, looking as if they were necessarily so gigantic because the thought within them was so massive. In the "Last Judgment" the scene of the greater ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... although theater managers find that these plays draw bigger crowds and fill their houses better than any other, in the large cities running for over a year, I cannot help regarding this feature of theatrical life as so much theatrical chaos. It lacks culture, and is sometimes both bizarre and neurotic. I do not object to patter, smart give and take, in which the comical angles of life are exposed, if it is brilliant; neither have I anything to say against light comedy ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... a country that looked as if it still hung upon the edge of chaos: wild, fertile, massive, barren, luxuriant, crouching on the ragged line of the Pacific. From his point of vantage he saw long ranges of stupendous mountains, some but masses of scowling crags, some green ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... example of uncontrolled feelings; she is encouraging them to transgress by the prospect of probable impunity: she is entailing endless squabbles and accompanying damage to her own temper and the tempers of her little ones; she is reducing their minds to a moral chaos, which after years of bitter experience will with difficulty bring into order. Better even a barbarous form of domestic government carried out consistently, than a humane one inconsistently carried out. Again we say, avoid coercive measures whenever it is possible ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... these insubstantial walls,— A myriad secretly gliding lights lie bare . . . The lovers rise, the harlot combs her hair, The dead man's face grows blue in the dizzy lamplight, The watchman climbs the stair . . . The bank defaulter leers at a chaos of figures, And runs among them, and is beaten down; The sick man coughs and hears the chisels ringing; The tired clown Sees the enormous crowd, a million faces, Motionless in their places, Ready to laugh, and seize, and crush and tear . . . The dancer smooths her hair, Laces her golden slippers, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... Mary's mind was a complete chaos; and for the first time in her life she found it impossible to determine which was the right course for her to pursue. Even in the midst of her distress, however, she could not help smiling at the naivete of the good ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... few remembered that time of chaos a season ago—but it was fleeting recall at best, as somatic responses rose to blot ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... activity whatever powers lie within any conscious being are only potential. Activity is the bridge between the inner man and the outer world, by which he impresses his thought, in forms, on chaos or the atoms about him, receiving in return increased knowledge and experience of all he touches, and knowledge of himself through the results of his own actions; and it is the bridge between man and man. For this reason ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... not ultimately get even with his Highness? Our author tells us in this book, as he has told us in others, more especially in The World Set Free, and as he has been telling us this year in his War and the Future, that if mankind goes on with war, the smash-up of civilization is inevitable. It is chaos or the United States of the World for mankind. There is no other choice. Ten years have but added an enormous conviction to the message of this book. It remains essentially right, a pamphlet story—in support of the League ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof is multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your half-lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius. What do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the world. At his age that will cure anything. When he comes back Madame d'Aranjuez will have retired to the chaos of the unknown out of which Orsino has ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... bloody tablets, that once more the Few were throttled and trampled by the Many, then the fabled "Ragnarok" of the Sagas described only approximately the doom of the devastated South. In the financial and social chaos that followed the invasion by "loyal" hordes, rushing under "sealed orders" on the mission of "Reconstruction," and eminently successful in "reconstructing" their individual fortunes, an anomaly presented itself ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... on phantom wing; The sailor-vision voyages the skies And carries into chaos everything ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... should come home that she had forgotten to look to see if everything was all right; and she now remembered that Allison had had the car out late the night before. Everything seemed to be falling in chaos about her. The earth rose and fell in front of her excited gaze; the sun was going down; and the road ahead seemed endless, without a turning as far as ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... was a real republican, devoted to the constitution of his country and to that system of equal political rights on which it is founded. But between a balanced republic and a democracy the difference is like that between order and chaos. Real liberty, he thought, was to be preserved only by preserving the authority of the laws and maintaining the energy of government. Scarcely did society present two characters which, in his opinion, less resembled each other than a patriot and ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... seconds a calm ensued; then there blew another gust, which swept along with such mighty strength that the ocean of roofs seemed convulsed, tossing about in waves, and then disappearing in a whirlpool. For a moment chaos reigned. Some enormous clouds, like huge blots of ink, swept through a host of smaller ones, which were scattered and floated like shreds of rag which the wind tore to pieces and carried off thread by thread. A second later two clouds rushed upon ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... mental chaos it had caused, whelmed in the succeeding rush of fear, it now rose to recognition—a portentous fact. He stood stunned, the suitcase dangling from his hands, immovable in aghast wonder as if it had just come to his ears. A voice without a personality, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... imagining oneself . . . one's head against that thick tweed . . . no . . . it must be one of the things that are safe to do but dangerous to dream of doing. Oh, never, never!—But she had been trained in sincerity: and was this cry sincere? Her mind was chaos. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... Milton's work to the 17th-century "reforms" of verse and prose; the Classicism of Milton, and of the Augustans; Classic and Romantic schools contrasted in their descriptions; Milton's Chaos, Shakespeare's Dover Cliff; Johnson's comments; the besetting sins of the two schools; Milton's physical machinery justified; his use of abstract terms; the splendid use of mean associations by Shakespeare; Milton's wise avoidance of mean associations, and of realism; nature of his similes ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... woman, you would think differently. Like the sand of the desert which is blown over the meadows and turns all the fresh verdure to a hideous brown-like a storm that transforms the blue mirror of the sea into a crisped chaos of black whirl pools and foaming ferment, this man's imperious audacity has cruelly troubled my peace of heart. Four times his eyes pursued me in the processions; yesterday I still did not recognize my danger, but to-day—I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... see him beginning to ascend in the orient or east, at the highest in the meridian or south, setting in occident or west, yet is he in the lowest in septentrio or north, and yet he moveth not, it is the axle of the heavens that moveth, the whole firmament being a chaos or confused thing, and for that proof I will show this example: like as thou seest a bubble made of water and soap blown out of a quill, it is in form of a confused mass or chaos, and being in this ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... sound ridiculous, especially that quotation from Kubla Khan coming after the close of the preceding sentence; but it is only so much the more like the jumble of thoughts that made a chaos of my mind as I went home. And then for that terrible pool, and subterranean passage, and all that—what had it all to do with this broad daylight, and these dying autumn leaves? No doubt there had been such places. No doubt there ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... truth about the concrete facts of reality? Does truth in this sense not simply mean a certain order into which we bring our experience in the service of certain purposes of thought? We may approach the chaos of life experience with different purposes, and led by any one of them we may reach that consistent unity of ideas for the limited outlook which we call truth. The chemist has a right to consider everything in the world as chemical substances, and the mathematician may take the same things as ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Bibbs was left gazing upon chaos and listening to thunder. He could not reach the stairway without passing the open doors of the library, and he was convinced that the mere glimpse of him, just then, would prove nothing less than insufferable for his father. For that reason ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... of shade.' The nations of antiquity have passed off the stage with all their grandeur and littleness, and the nations of more modern times are surging and dashing to and fro, like ships in the wild chaos of ocean's storms. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... it been a doctor of psychology, he might have been pardoned for divining in the girl a passion of childish vanity, self-love IN EXCELSIS, and no more. It is to be understood that I have been painting chaos and describing the inarticulate. Every lineament that appears is too precise, almost every word used too strong. Take a finger-post in the mountains on a day of rolling mists; I have but copied the names that appear upon the pointers, the names of definite and famous cities far distant, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fearful crisis. Hadrian had built a wall from the Rhine to the Danube to arrest the incursions of barbarians; the Roman garrisons beyond the Danube were withdrawn; the Goths had advanced from the Vistula and the Oder to the shores of the Black Sea; the Jews were dispersed; a chaos of deities was in the Roman Pantheon; Grecian philosophy had degenerated; the taste of the people had become utterly corrupt; games and festivals were the business and the amusement of the people; the despotism of the emperors had utterly annulled all rights; a succession of feeble and wicked ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Pythagoras must have his pupils understand music and geometry; and by music he intended, all the arts, every department of life that came under the sway of the Nine Muses. Why?—Because, as he taught, God is Poet and Geometer. Chaos is only on the outer rim of existence; as you get nearer the heart of thing, order and rhythm, geometry and poetry, are more and more found. Chaos is only in our own chaotic minds and perceptions: train these aright, and you shall ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris |
