"Congeries" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... death will be revealed; show why and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than what it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left in any other change. One is not in its ultimate essence more miraculous that another; it may be more striking—a greater congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but not more miraculous; all change is qua us absolutely incomprehensible and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its phenomena, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... spellbound until it was as the vision of an unfathomed sea, an ocean tide of light, where the shimmering foam was the rise and fall of single and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on the shores of converging universes. I gazed on this wealth and congeries of far -flung worlds, in which some that appeared the most insignificant and twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer would be the last, were actually so great that beside them our own poor little world was but as a mole hill to earth's ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... Menzies in his recent book, Brahmanism and Buddhism. Sir Alfred Lyall's employment of the term Brahmanism rather than Hinduism, is in keeping with his description of Hinduism, which he defines as the congeries of diverse local beliefs and practices that are held together by the employment of brahmans as priests. The description is a true one; the term Brahmanism represents what is common to the Hindu castes ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Boston there are farms enough imagined every year to make another New England. Could the fairest fancies of that congeries of minds be embodied and exhibited, we should see green meadows sparkling with morning dew,—silver-slippered rivulets skipping into musical abysses,—quiet pasture-lands shimmering so sleepily in the sun that the lazy flocks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Hohenfriedberg Gallows-Hill just now); a combination of stagnant pools and carp-ponds, the ground much occupied hereabouts with what they name Carp-Husbandry. Which is all drained away in our time, yet traceable by the studious:—quaggy congeries of sluices and fish-ponds, no road through them except on intricate dams; have scrubby thickets about the border;—this also is very strong ground, if Weissenfels thought of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... down in the chilly dew. It was now nearly eleven o'clock, and a half bottle of water was issued, enough merely to whet the consuming thirst which gripped everybody. Tunics were disentangled from the damp congeries on our backs and we had ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... steeple is then truly a starward-pointing finger; the canopy of blue smoke seems like a sort of Lifebreath: for always, of its own unity, the soul gives unity to whatsoever it looks on with love; thus does the little Dwelling-place of men, in itself a congeries of houses and huts, become for us an individual, almost a person. But what thousand other thoughts unite thereto, if the place has to ourselves been the arena of joyous or mournful experiences; if perhaps the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... the congeries of life which we call a society or a nation. The energy which moves this great mass in ceaseless effort to realise some common aspiration, often has its origin in the unknown solitudes of a village life. And thus the history of some efforts, not forgotten, which emanated ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Amsterdam, at the present day, you may see many such quaint old rows. But in Amsterdam you have an evil-smelling air, while in Yarmouth it is ever fresh and crisp, and redolent, as it were, of the neighbouring sea. The market-place and the big church were at the back of this congeries of quays and rows, and the sea and the old pier were at quite a respectable distance from the town. I fancy the Yarmouth of the London bathers has now extended down to the sandy beach, and the rough and rude old pier has given place ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... given to a congeries of morasses in Kildare, King's County, Queen's County and Westmeath, Ireland. Clane Bog, the eastern extremity, is within 17 m. of Dublin, and the morasses extend westward almost to the Shannon. Their total area is about 238,500 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Cathedral. This was well enough at first, but even then there was no provision for the students' lodgings. They could not live in colleges, as there were none; in fact, the only university buildings in existence, which probably served various ceremonial occasions, was a congeries of buildings called the Carolinum, after its founder. These buildings stood in the Old Town, and there were probably others used for university purposes dotted about the town, as is the case to-day. Still, the students remain unhoused. There must have ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... they have notions of an universal one before this; and of lands, of which they have now no other knowledge than what is mentioned in the tradition. Their most remote account reaches to Tatooma and Tapuppa, male and female stones or rocks, who support the congeries of land and water, or our globe underneath. These produced Totorro, who was killed, and divided into land; and after him Otaia and Oroo were begotten, who were afterward married, and produced, first, land, and then a race of gods. Otaia is killed, and Oroo marries a god, her son, called Teorrhaha, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... another relic of departed grandeur, and beyond the Place Neuve on our right come upon a great portal which opens on a vaulted passage leading to one of the most bewildering and extraordinary congeries of ruined monastic buildings in France, now inhabited by a population of poor folk—two hundred families, it is said—who, since the Revolution, have settled in the vast buildings of the once famous and opulent Charterhouse of Villeneuve. Founded by Innocent ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... are a congeries of independent tribes in the valley of the White Nile. They are essentially a pastoral people, passionately devoted to the care of their numerous herds of oxen, though they also keep sheep and goats, and the women cultivate small quantities of millet and sesame. For their crops ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the manufacturing districts and an explanation was made of the difficulty of similar efforts in London because it was really a "congeries of cities," with no such solidarity of interests as characterized "the North[1133]." Without London, however, the movement lacked driving force and it was determined to create there an association which should become the main-spring of further activities. Spence, Beresford Hope, and Lord ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... floor of the hall, and the louvre is still to be seen in the roof above.[K] The end of the hall was formed of oak panneling, with lattice-work above, the use of which will presently appear. A part of this paneling was formed of doors, which led by winding stairs up to a curious congeries of small rooms formed among the spaces between the walls and towers, and under the arches above. Some of these rooms were for private apartments, and others were used for the offices of buttery, kitchen, laundry, and the like. At the end of ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty, hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... is a picturesque congeries of red-tiled houses massed round a square chateau. The town indeed looks a mere appendage of this chateau, so conspicuous is the ancient stronghold of the Vivarais. Livron, perched on a hill, looks very pretty. Soon we come to perhaps the grandest ruin cresting the bank of the Rhone, the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... now, as it were, before us, in that vast congeries of peoples we call India, a long, slow march in uneven stages through all the centuries from ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Deity to furnish the directive wisdom for a scavenger cart; when they have taught a two-legged moon-calf to glibly read in certain dead languages things it can in nowise comprehend —patiently pumped into it a whole congeries of things that defy its mental digestive apparatus—that it is actually educated, if not enlightened. And perhaps it is— after the manner of the trick mule or the pig that plays cards. The attempt of Gulliver scientists to calcine ice into gunpowder were not more ridiculous ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... notions of his talents and his merit. Attached as lie was to the romance of his solitary hours, he was startled at finding, that, except in the tallow and wax candles that flickered, not from the presence of a ghost, but from want of snuffing, there was no foundation in real life for any of that congeries of pleasing pictures and descriptions contained in those volumes, from which he had formed his study. Finding, however, some compensation in his gratified vanity, he was about to relinquish his dreams, when the extraordinary being we have above described, crossed ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... a steel bow, whose piercing fleche seemed sparkling with impatience to spring from his finger and flesh itself in the heart of the intruder. The hauberk and halberd, lance and casque, arquebuse and sword, were suspended in friendly congeries; and fragments of costly stuff swept from ceiling to floor, crushed and soiled by the heaps of rusty firelocks, cutlasses, and gauntlets thrown upon them. In one place, a little antique bust was half hid in the folds ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... as a principal ground in the battle—not yet at an end, but now in a more or less languid condition—between the believers in conglomerate epic, the upholders of the theory that long early poems are always a congeries of still earlier ballads or shorter chants, and the advocates of their integral condition. The authorship of the poem, its date, and its relation to previous work or tradition, with all possible excursions and alarums as to sun-myths and so forth, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... secured in those fertile plains. Malaria, due to the absence of subsoil drainage, is ubiquitous, and the standard of vitality extremely low. Bengal has always been at the mercy of invaders. The earliest inroad was prompted by economic necessity. About 2000 B.C. a congeries of races which are now styled "Aryan" were driven by the shrinkage of water from their pasture-grounds in Central Asia. They penetrated Europe in successive hordes, who were ancestors of our Celts, Hellenes, Slavs, Teutons and ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... understand and measure its nature and power. For Brahmanism, through all ages, has not been without a definite tendency, an underlying philosophy and pervasive fundamental beliefs. It is indeed more a congeries of faiths than a simple religion, like Christianity. And yet, amid all its hosts of contradictions and ways of salvation and sects and cults there have sounded, as a diapason through all the centuries, the fundamental teachings of Vedantism. A few doctrines such as pantheism, ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... are indeterminate in their figures: The primative particles of all bodies, especially of salts, are perfectly constant in their specific forms; but the cristals which form in our experiments are composed of congeries of minute particles, which, though perfectly equal in size and shape, may assume very dissimilar arrangements, and consequently produce a vast variety of regular forms, which have not the smallest apparent resemblance to each other, nor to the ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... present year (1874) Mr. Parker obtained several more nests of this species, all built in the low jungle that fringes the mud-banks of the congeries of channels and creeks that are known in Calcutta by the name ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... fitness of an international agreement whereby the interchange of messages over connecting cables may be regulated on a fair basis of uniformity. The world has seen the postal system developed from a congeries of independent and exclusive services into a well-ordered union, of which all countries enjoy the manifold benefits. It would be strange were the nations not in time brought to realize that modern civilization, which owes ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... but Mr Banks and Dr Solander continued their walk along the shore, and at a little distance saw another Ewharre-no-Eatua, and a tree of the fig kind, the same as that which Mr Green had seen at Otaheite, in great perfection, the trunk, or rather congeries of the roots of which, was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... implies an indivisible identity. The sensuous perception of a plurality of parts supposes the rational idea of an absolute unity, which has no parts, as its necessary correlative. For example, extension is a congeries of indefinitesimal parts; the continuity of matter, as empirically known by us, is never absolute. Space is absolutely continuous, incapable of division into integral parts, illimitable, and, as rationally known by us, an absolute unity. The cognition of limited ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... cultivate courtesy! Surely this could not be if a tender conscience of the persons and spiritual rights of others were not wanting. If there be any real significance in politeness, if it be not a mere empty and therefore altogether hypocritical congeries of customs, it ought to have its birth, cultivation and chief exercise at home. Of course there are the manners suitable to strangers and those suitable to intimates, but politeness is the one essential of both. I ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... because they contradict themselves. They offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which it cannot repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in the lump' (p. 570). So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of 'understanding' (as he conceives that function), turns his back ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... a fancy some lean to and others hate— That, when this life is ended, begins New work for the soul in another state, Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins: Where the strong and the weak, this world's congeries, Repeat in large what they practised in small, Through life after life in unlimited series; Only the scale's to be changed, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... combined with this excursion; this is a really pleasant and, as yet, unspoilt village. One feels nervous for its future, but the good taste of the inhabitants, combined with the formidable barrier of the hills, will, it is hoped, prevent it ever becoming a mere congeries of tea gardens and like amenities. The fine cruciform church has a central tower and is Early Perpendicular; built by Baron de Poynings in the late fourteenth century it has many interesting details. Note the old ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... colony of cliff-swallows (Hirundo flavicolla) takes time by the forelock and begins to build one of its honeycomb-like congeries of nests in December. This species was dealt with ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... mass of men and animals was once more in motion. The troops were in utter disorganisation; the baggage was mixed up with the advance guard; the camp followers were pushing ahead in precipitate panic. The task before the wretched congeries of people was to thread the stupendous gorge of the Khoord Cabul pass—a defile about five miles long, hemmed in on either hand by steeply scarped hills. Down the bottom of the ravine dashed a mountain torrent, whose edges were lined with thick layers of ice, on which had formed glacier-like masses ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... ago, were matters largely of speculation. "Now," in the words of Professor Lee, "we recognize that, with its living and its non-living substances inextricably intermingled, the body constitutes an intensive chemical laboratory in which there is ever occurring a vast congeries of chemical reactions; both constructive and destructive processes go on; new protoplasm takes the place of old. We can analyze the income of the body and we can analyze its output, and from these data we ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler |
