"Distortion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism. The monstrous distortion of the patriotic sentiment, which is increasing, is killing off humanity. Mankind is committing suicide, and our age ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... these poems Pope was abused in the most unmeasured terms. His work was styled a mere collection of libels; he had no invention except in defamation; he was a mere pretender to genius. His morals were not left unimpeached; he was charged with selling other men's work printed in his name,—a gross distortion of his employing assistants in the translation of the 'Odyssey',—he was ungrateful, unjust, a foe to human kind, an enemy like the devil to all that have being. The noble authors, probably well aware how they could give the most pain, proceeded to attack his family and his distorted person. ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... a false syllogism. Your opponent makes a proposition, and by false inference and distortion of his ideas you force from it other propositions which it does not contain and he does not in the least mean; nay, which are absurd or dangerous. It then looks as if his proposition gave rise to others which are inconsistent either with themselves or with ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... know it if it does. Anyhow, it'll live on suppression and distortion and manipulation of news, because it'll have to, if it's ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... scene or scenery; an optical device which gave a distortion to the picture unless seen from a particular point; a relief, modelled to produce ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... it; then there came from the throat a jet of blood which Mrs. Drabdump, conscious only of the horrid gash, saw but vaguely. I covered up the face quickly with a handkerchief to hide any convulsive distortion. But as the medical evidence (in this detail accurate) testified, death was instantaneous. I pocketed the razor and the empty sulfonal phial. With a woman like Mrs. Drabdump to watch me, I could do anything I pleased. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... persistence with which the flies clustered around the mouth, lured by the alcohol-laden exhalations. He was a powerfully built man, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, with sinewy wrists and toil-distorted hands. Yet the distortion was not due to recent toil, nor were the callouses other than ancient that showed under the dirt of the one palm upturned. From time to time this hand clenched tightly and spasmodically into a ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... what he meant by that. No romance. How splendidly he had led that day! She had almost worshipped him. What blindness! What distortion! Was it really the same man standing there with those bright, doubting eyes, with grey already in his hair? Yes, romance was over! And she sat silent, looking out into the street—that little old street into which she looked day and night. A figure passed out ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... maintained as near 70 Fahr. as practicable, and is observed at intervals for at least 28 days. A third pat is exposed in an atmosphere of steam above boiling water, in a loosely-closed vessel, for 5 hours. These pats must remain firm and hard and show no signs of distortion, checking, cracking, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... manner in which he conveyed his information. He had a way of telling me of monstrous things as if they were purely normal and natural to a properly focussed eye, and as if any monstrousness they might present to me were due to some distortion imparted to them solely by the imperfection of my ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... own. Thus nature becomes your ally and sees to it with absolute certainty that you are not like other people. Following this principle of action you cannot know, nor can any one know, to just what you may attain. All true growth is from within, outward. In the tree, natural law prevents distortion or exaggeration of one part over another. In your case reason, conscience, good taste, must supervise and direct natural impulses. Thus following nature you become natural, and cease to be conventional. If you don't do this you will be either ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... another effect, familiar enough to me, who had witnessed it often before, but productive of the utmost astonishment to my passengers, who now, it seemed, beheld it for the first time. This effect was the extraordinary apparent distortion of shape and dimensions which the boat underwent. She appeared to stand as high out of the water as a five-hundred-ton ship, while her breadth remained somewhat about what it ought to be, thus assuming ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... wording of the document itself, it is palpable that Henry led the Sovereign Pontiff, to believe that Ireland was sunk in the grossest ignorance and superstition, and that, in making a descent upon it, he had only the glory and honor of the Church in view. So terrible a distortion of the facts of the case on his part, necessarily rendered all action based upon his statement morally invalid at least; and thus it is, that even those who have confidence in the genuineness of this Bull, regard it as utterly worthless, and at not all admissable into any ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... the cause of most problems affecting Muslims today, our enemies seek to expel Western power and influence from the Muslim world and establish regimes that rule according to a violent and intolerant distortion of Islam. As illustrated by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, such regimes would deny all political and religious freedoms and serve as sanctuaries for extremists to launch additional attacks against not only the United States, its allies and partners, ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... terrifying. His nose had been eaten away by the disease till it formed a sharp but irregular point: part of the muscles of the chin were contracted, and it was drawn in with unnatural seams and puckers. He was tall, gaunt, and thin, seldom smiled, and when he did, the smile produced a still further distortion. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was a grinning monkey), but it was not the features that were the most striking part. There was a half-open mouth, not in any way distorted out of its exquisite beauty by the intense expression of suffering it conveyed. Any distortion of the face by mental agony implies that a struggle with circumstance is going on. But in this face, if such struggle had been, it was over now. Circumstance had conquered; and there was no hope from mortal endeavour, or help from mortal creature to be had. But the eyes looked onward and upward ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... capable of giving other and no less useful data. It permits of comparing the resistance of bottles and of classifying them according to the degree of such resistance. After numerous experiments, it has been found that first class bottles easily support a pressure of twelve atmospheres without distortion, while in those of an inferior quality the resistance is very variable. The champagne wine industry should therefore ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... house; others convex and twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently efflorescent, like a full-blown cauliflower. But as to the persons that were attached to these noses, fancy any distortion, protuberance, and fungous embellishment that can be produced in the human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy, vaporous climate. One old ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... or in the company of half a score, in silence or in the heat of debate, Stacy had a single attitude, and this was one of distortion in repose. Now, as always, he was sitting with legs crossed, his hands hugging a knee, his eyes contemplating his left foot. In the first warm days of spring, Stacy's feet burst out with the buds, casting ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... argument; consisting altogether of the most hackneyed commonplaces of popular declamation, mingled up with panegyrics and invectives upon persons, with a few well-expressed ideas, a few striking figures, much distortion of face and contortion of body, tears, groans and sobs, with occasional pauses for recollection, and continual complaints of having lost his notes." So ended the ambition of John Randolph of Roanoke to ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... paralytic on that side, his muscles there have lost their very tone and character—they cannot move. In short, the accomplishment of any thing good is a physical impossibility for such a man. There is decrepitude as well as distortion: he could not, if he would, is not more certain than that he would not, if he could." To this sentiment the allusions ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... face there was a difference. By fleeting revealments of the face I saw that something was happening—something out of the common. There would be a sudden twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace. These twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was happening ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... be satisfactory. Reactions that are sought in an effort made by women to conform their instincts, aspirations and mental processes to those of men will be feeble or perverted, just as they would be if men should seek a similar distortion. The remedy is to let the woman's mind swing into the channel of least resistance, just as the man's always has done. Then the clubs, and the clubwomen, their exercises, their papers and their preparatory reading will all be released from the constraint that ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... him sixpence-worth of anything. He cannot even get a glass for his watch, for the watch-maker no more than anybody else dare serve him. Every feature of his extraordinary situation depicted in my first letter on "Disturbed Ireland" is exaggerated almost to distortion. ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... the page upon which the note, Johnson's or another editor's, starts; sometimes the notes extend to three or more pages. The text of Shakespeare quoted is that of the 1773 edition; this is the text that Johnson's contemporaries saw, and it would be a distortion to reprint Johnson's notes ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... can make you see it with him, and all the while can be completely self-possessed and grave without ever once becoming slow or heavy. There was an air of candour, of ingenuous simplicity, of demure propriety, about the embodiment, that made it inexpressibly funny. There was no effort and no distortion. The structure of the impersonation tingled with life, and the expression of it—in demeanour, movement, facial play, intonation and business—was clear and crisp, with that absolute precision and beautiful finish for which the acting of Jefferson has always been distinguished. He is probably the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... friends. One of the men who had suffered from Poe's too caustic pen was Rufus W. Griswold, but friendly relations had been nominally established and Poe had authorized Griswold to edit his works. This Griswold did, including a biography which Poe's friends declared a masterpiece of malicious distortion and misrepresentation; it certainly was grossly unfair and inaccurate. Poe's friends retorted, and a long war of words followed, in which hatred or prejudice on the one side and wholesale, undiscriminating laudation on the other, alike tended to obscure the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Rudolph, looking from his window, saw that on the river, by the same instinct, boatmen were stretching up their bamboo awnings. Breakfast was hardly ended, before river, and convex field, and huddling red tiles of the town, lay under a blurred, quivering distortion. The day flamed. At night, against a glow of fiery umber, the western hills broke sharp and thin as sheet-iron, while below them rose in flooding mirage a bright strip ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... because of an excess of sentiment softening into "slush," or of a morbid optimism, or of a weak-eyed distortion of the facts of life,—is perverted. It needs to be cured, and its cure is more truth. But this cure, I very much fear, is not entirely, or even chiefly, in the power of the "regular practitioner," ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... measures taken to prevent a girl's becoming a tom-boy are measures of sex-repression quite as much as of sex-differentiation. Over-reaction of sensitive little souls to lessons in modesty often causes distortion of normal sex-development. Ignorance concerning the phenomena of life is commended as innocence, while it really implies a sex-curiosity which has been too severely repressed. The young woman blushes at thoughts of love, while the young man is filled with a sense ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... great strength upon our bill, we were reluctantly compelled to forego them, and to confine ourselves to writers whose style and habit of thought, being more marked and peculiar, was more capable of exaggeration and distortion. To avoid politics and personality, to imitate the turn of mind as well as the phraseology of our originals, and, at all events, to raise a harmless laugh, were our main objects; in the attainment of which united aims, we were sometimes hurried into extravagance, by attaching much more importance ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... thou to analyze the monstrous dream By painful introversion; rather fill Thine eye with forms thou knowest to be truth: But see thou cherish higher hope than this; A hope hereafter that thou shalt be fit Calm-eyed to face distortion, and to sit Transparent among other forms of youth Who own no impulse save to ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... former owner:—"This table belonged to Henry Fielding, Esq., novelist. He hunted from East Stour Farm, 1718, and in three years dissipated his fortune keeping hounds." In 1718, it may be observed, Fielding was a boy of eleven. Probably the whole of the latter sentence is nothing more than a distortion of Murphy.] But even L1500, and (in spite of Murphy) it is by no means clear that he had anything more, could scarcely last for ever. Whether his footmen wore yellow or not, a few brief months found him again in town. That he was able to rent a theatre may perhaps be accepted as proof ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... refrain, he would try to burst the bonds which seemed to be holding him. With his children, or his wife and children, watching him with agonized faces, he would make a struggle so violent, so resolute, that even that dead body was galvanized into a ghastly distortion of tortured life. Always in vain; always the same collapse of despair and exhaustion; the chasm between thought and speech could not be bridged. They brought everything they could think of his possibly wanting; they brought to his room everyone with whom he had ever had any sort of ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... through the distortion of his legs, could move only with great pain and difficulty along a road or floor, the prodigious muscular power which nature seemed to have bestowed upon his arms, by way of compensation for deficiency in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... inward enthusiasm. She might have marked it down to his credit, and loved him a little for it, had not his rather distorted integrity impelled him to confess his transgression to the lawyers, whereas it was perfectly plain that they appreciated his distortion of the truth without having it explained to them in so many words. That virtuous little speech of his was all-illuminating; it let in a great light and laid bare the weakness that was too ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... opportunity of making observations. I was painfully struck by the considerable number of sickly or deformed persons; undoubtedly made so by a virulent complaint, which, under native treatment, almost invariably affects, in the end, the muscles and bones of the body. In particular, there is a distortion of the back, most unsightly to behold, originating in a ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native critic (in ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the attendants and friends who were either blind to their danger, or heroically despised it, fell a sacrifice to their sympathy. Even the eyes of the patient were considered a sources of contagion, which had the power of acting at a distance, whether on account of their unwonted lustre, or the distortion which they always suffer in plague, or whether in conformity with an ancient notion, according to which the sight was considered as the bearer of a demoniacal enchantment. Flight from infected cities seldom availed the fearful, for ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... his place in the tree top on the countenance of his captor, he perceived a curious distortion, which was now explained. At some time in his history the Indian had received a slash across the face, which clove the bone and cartilage of the nose and laid one of the cheeks open. The cicatrice, combined with the natural ugliness ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... put her arms round him, and her cheeks against his, while she spoke to him in caressing tones. At first his sobs were only the louder, but he made no effort to get away, and presently the outburst ceased with that strange abruptness which belongs to childish joys and griefs: his face lost its distortion, and was fixed in an open-mouthed ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D.): "Incontrovertibly the introduction of the personal equation leads to lamentable inversions, and the perceptive faculties when contemplating phenomena through the lens of ego too often conceive an accidental connotation or manifest distortion to be actuality, for the physical (or personal) too often beclouds that power of inner vision which so unerringly penetrates to the inherent truths of incorporeity and the extramundane. Yet this problem, ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... to be alone with my image in the mirror," thought Frederick. "I don't need all those distressing concave and convex mirrors which other people are. This condition in which I am is the original condition, and in the original condition one escapes the distortion to which other people's words and glances subject one. The best thing is to be silent or to speak with oneself, that is, with ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... on. As if that deed were not foul enough, he caused the old priest to carve—being skilful with the chisel—that vile distortion of his dead friend's face out of a huge boulder lying by, and then murdered him too for the Ruby's sake, and tumbled their bodies into the trough together. Such was Amos Trenoweth. Are you proud of ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that neither the President nor the Congress can properly oversee this jungle of grants-in-aid; indeed, the growth of these grants has led to the distortion in the vital functions of government. As one Democratic Governor put it recently: The National Government should be worrying about ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... the imagination of her audience she relied mainly on her own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion. Of course, her face changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious, and which she couldn't have reproduced to her mirror; it was not a play of features, but a play of lights and ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... see? They saw something at which they had been taught to laugh and make sport; they saw that which the heading of every newspaper column, the lie of every cub reporter, the exaggeration of every press dispatch, and the distortion of every speech and book had taught them was a mass of despicable men, inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, the meat ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... early Gothic art, indeed, you will find failure of this kind, especially distortion and rigidity, which are in many respects painfully to be compared with the splendid repose of classic art. But the distortion is not Gothic; the intensity, the abstraction, the force of character are, ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... in, hovered these patterns of loveliness that might bring joy to thousands. They floated in beauty round the edges of his atmosphere, but the moment they sank in to reach his mind, there began the distortion that tore their exquisite proportions and made designs mere disarrangement. Inspiration, without steady thought to fashion it, was of ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... exercising power crowds out speculation about what to do with it. Personal jealousies interrupt co-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient little store of platitudes—misunderstanding and distortion dry up the imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of publicity requires a mask which soon becomes the reality. Politicians tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism which describes him. You cannot blame politicians ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... is true to a certain degree with regard to the passions. If you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty in its most perfect state, you cannot express the passions, which produce (all of them) distortion and deformity, more or less, in the most ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... answered with a strong shudder. She saw that clearly, and her colour changed. The swift distortion showed itself about her lips again. It passed away in an instant, but it left the mouth trembling. 'I want you to be away somewhere where nobody can say a word against you. I want to see you and talk to you sometimes, and know that ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... was printed at public expense and sent out to all Government offices to serve as a guide for Russian officials and enable them to fight the "Inner enemy." It was in vain that Brafman's ignorance of rabbinic lore and his entire distortion of the role played by the Kahal in days gone-by was exposed by Jewish writers in articles and monographs; it was in vain that the Jewish members of the commission appointed by the governor-general of Vilna protested against the barbarous proposals of the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all closely into its history, at least in Italy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... That distortion of facts was too much to be endured, with Corrie listening and Flavia a witness. Gerard's chivalry momentarily lapsed and he struck back with all the effectiveness of ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... possible, by a long process of projection and calculation, to ascertain the other sizes. The rationale of the architect's geometrical drawings is that on them each plane of the building (the front, the side, the plan, etc.) is shown separately and without any distortion by perspective, and in such a manner that every portion is supposed to be opposite to the eye at once. Only the width of any object on one side can be shown in this way at one view; for the width of the return side you have to look to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... potency. The domineering, self-assertive, so-called master-morality of Nietzsche, itself akin in some respects to Bushido, is, if I am not greatly mistaken, a passing phase or temporary reaction against what he terms, by morbid distortion, the humble, self-denying slave-morality ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... company who were present when the wager was laid, he dressed himself like a neat old woman, and walking in the road where they were riding along, all of a sudden he fell down, and so well counterfeited all the distortion of the most violent fits in such a terrible manner, that Mr. Morrice was greatly affected with the poor creature's condition, ordering his servants to get down and assist her, staying himself till she was brought a little to herself, then gave her a piece of money, and ordered one of his servants ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... Seminal weakness and Wasted or Misshapen Parts go together as both cause and effect, and the one, when found, will usually very soon lead to the other. Twisting or Curving is one of the most positive signs of previous inflammation, stricture and twisting or distortion of the seminal ducts, and hence sterility or barrenness. In such especially are the remarkable effects of the Civiale Treatment the most noticeable. We can say with positiveness, and prove it by case after ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... knew less; and she chiefly erred in assuming to know that of which they frankly confessed their ignorance. Aside from a consummate facility for blundering in French, Mrs. Whaling possessed illimitable powers of distortion of her mother-tongue, and this it was that so fascinated and enraptured Blake on short acquaintance. He rushed in one morning to tell Mrs. Stannard that nothing but jealousy could have prompted her and the other ladies in concealing from him Mrs. Whaling's phenomenal gifts in this line, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... which he spat because there was a flower there. During an attack he was heard to say something about the struggle of men against being raped by ions and flowers. In these primitive elaborations we find an effort at distortion, a getting away from the absolutely crude and that the added elements which cause this distortion are in the form of ideas which imply a certain degree of philosophizing. The truly constructive delusions appear when he has ceased to dramatize these theories with himself as the hero and treats ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... various modes of vice weakens the impression of disgust which is originally felt; as we lose by degrees the horror with which an unsightly countenance was beheld at the first interview, till at length we can more than tolerate distortion, and even court deformity. Never was a more important maxim delivered by the Saviour for the guidance of his disciples, than that which respected their avoidance of the first step in transgression. "Watch ye and pray," said he, "lest ye enter into temptation." The fence ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... reflector, in average condition, the percentage seldom exceeds fifty per cent, and more frequently is lower than higher." The superiority of the refractor in regard to definition arises from the fact that any distortion at the surface of a mirror affects the direction of a ray of light three times as much as the same distortion would do at the surface of a lens. And this applies equally both to permanent errors of curvature and to temporary distortions produced by strains ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... kinds of suggestions, one after another. The detectors, however, worked because they detected the distortion of space which was as necessary for the drive of a ship as the distortion of air was necessary for the movement of a propeller-driven aircraft. None of them could see how a ship could avoid making that distortion, and none of them could figure out how to go about capturing ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... thought was an old root which grew To strange distortion out of the hill side, Was indeed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... lasting only that excessively short space of time, or, if we please, a succession of such phases by using a succession of sparks. Thus, a rifle bullet is readily photographed while in flight with scarcely perceptible distortion. A wheel revolving many hundred times a second can thus be photographed, and appears to be stationary. Dr. Schillings has applied this method to the photography of wild animals by night in the forests of tropical Africa, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... camera) states that with regard to the distance between the two positions of the cameras, he knows no good reason why the natural distance of the eyes, viz. 2-1/2 inches, should be much exceeded. "A little extra relief is obtained," he adds, "without visible distortion, by increasing the separation to about 4 or 5 inches; but if this distance be greatly exceeded, especially for near objects (I give the gentleman's own words), they become apparently diminished in size, and have the appearance of models and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... how heavy and sick at heart he was as he stood at the door to take a last fond, lingering look at Mary. He saw her sitting up in bed, her golden hair, dimmed with her one day's illness, floating behind her, her head bound round with wetted cloths, her features all agitated, even to distortion, with the ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of those flanges. It is only necessary, therefore, to make the flanges of sufficient strength to resist effectually the crushing and tensile strains to which they are exposed, and to make the web of the beam of sufficient strength to prevent a distortion of its ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... Sense, you've never got so far As to think Mercator's planisphere shows countries as they are; It won't do to measure distances; it points out how to steer, But this distortion's not for you; another is, I fear. The earth must be a cylinder, if seaman's charts be true, Or else the boundaries, right and left, are one as well as two; They contradict the notion that we dwell upon a plain, For straight away, without a turn, will bring you home again. There ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... faith in examinations, for he noticed that boys never did so well in them as in form: it was disappointing, but not significant. In due course they were moved up, having learned little but a cheerful effrontery in the distortion of truth, which was possibly of greater service to them in after life than an ability to read Latin ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... fear of the dear old grandfather, in whose love for her this disease of the brain had been engendered; but the man she had seen that night, wrapt in the game of chance, lurking in her room, and counting the money by the glimmering light, seemed like another creature in his shape, a monstrous distortion of his image, a something to recoil from, and be the more afraid of, because it bore a likeness to him, and kept close about her, as he did. She could scarcely connect her own affectionate companion, save by his loss, with this old man, so like yet so unlike him. She ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... with until it is completed. By again heating the chuck, by laying upon it a piece of red-hot iron, the work, however delicate, can be simply lifted off, and will be found perfectly free from all distortion. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... position as the leader of the Slavonic peoples, Russia chose the latter course, the only honourable one open to her. German papers and public speakers retorted that Russia is the patron and protector of assassins—a calculated distortion of the facts intended to have due effect on public opinion. On all sides it was said that Russia had given Serbia secret assurances of help which caused her to become stiff-backed and unrepentant. Fortunately, it is possible to refute the accusation through the ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... clear or soapy water. If the plants are intelligently ventilated and given, at all times, as much fresh air as possible, the red spider is less likely to appear. For mildew, which is easily recognized by its white, powdery appearance on the foliage, accompanied with more or less distortion of the leaves, the remedy is sulfur in some form or other. The flowers of sulfur may be dusted thinly over the foliage; enough merely slightly to whiten the foliage is sufficient. It may be dusted on from the hand in a broadcast way, or applied with a powder-bellows, ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... challenge boldly with the declaration that Senator Chamberlain's statement was "an astonishing and unjustifiable distortion of the truth," and must have been due to disloyalty to the Administration. Chamberlain's reply, while admitting that he might have overstated his case, was a proclamation of loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief and an appeal for getting ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... the high priest differs from other words of our Lord's antagonists, which we have been considering in recent pages, in that it is no distortion of our Lord's characteristics or meaning. It correctly understands, but it fatally rejects, His claims; and does not hesitate to take the further step, on the ground of these, of branding Him as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... when her mother was asleep, she glided down into the park, and Napoleon welcomed her with a happy smile, and arm in arm, happy as children, they wandered through the paths, laughing at their own shadows, which the light of the moon in wondrous distortion made to dance before them. They entered into a small bower, which stood in the shadow of trees, and there the young Napoleon had prepared for the young maid a very pleasing surprise. There on the table was a basket full of her favorite fruit—full of the sweetest, finest ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... simply another form of hope; and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself. Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect, and a sort of violent distortion of their true natures; but they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments; for unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind. If we only consider religious institutions in a purely human ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... dared to be familiar with him—now made his way among the guests, and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man was dead! Dead, in his new house! ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... face. Its ragged owner leaned his arm on the window-frame, and with his head in the room, said in his patois, "Ho! waiting are you? You'll have enough of the lake one day. Don't you mind watching; they'll send when you're wanted;" and twisting his yellow face into a malicious distortion, he ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... There is no distortion or perversion in this choice and use of his instrument, any more than in Fielding's adaptation of the method of Joseph Andrews to the matter of the Voyage to Lisbon. In the first place, the imaginative ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Father and Mother of us all, that there is no such thing as a really diseased stomach; that the disease is the Carnal Mortal Mind given over to the World, the Flesh and the Devil; that the mortal mind is a twist, a distortion, a false attitude, the Hamartia ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... that may be as beautiful in later age as lip-dimples are in girlhood; a fair, broad forehead, that had never learned to frown; lines about mouth and chin, in sweet, honest harmony with the record of the eyes; no strain, no distortion of consciousness grown into haggard wornness; a fine, open, contented play of feature had wrought over all like a charm of sunshine, to soften and brighten continually. Her hair had been golden-brown; there was plenty of it still; it had kept so much of the gold ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... addition to this, hates what he cannot understand. According to Isaac Taylor, "Fanaticism is enthusiasm inflamed by hatred." But Christ exaggerated nothing and hated no man. He hated sin, but no sinner. His boundless, tender love itself prevented such moral distortion. And, therefore, he is the ideal or model of human life. We do not feel that in striving to imitate even his most spiritual qualities we shall become impractical or unnatural. We do not feel this in the case of most other holy men. They become examples of one virtue by ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves
... allies, had secured fresh laurels for their crown of glory. The Russian arms were marching steadfastly toward their goal, assured of final victory against an enemy who, blinded by the hope of an easy victory, was making desperate efforts, having recourse to all kinds of subterfuges, even the distortion of the truth. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that which charms now and charms always,—true power and originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... this truth, that he might do something to counteract the distortion of the past, Mignet wrote his Histoire de la Revolution Francaise. At the moment when he came from Aix to Paris, the tide of reaction was rising steadily in France. Decazes had fallen; Louis XVIII. was surrendering to the ultra-royalist cabal. Aided by such ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... ashes.[12] That the most single-hearted handmaid of the Holy Church, whose life was one long devotion to its ordinances, should survive in this grotesque myth, might serve to point a satire upon the vanity of earthly fame. The legend in its very extravagance is a fanciful distortion of the truth. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... on shaly masses of Neocomian, modified by their pressure. More complex forms of harder rock were wrought by the streams and rains into fantastic outlines; and the transverse gorges were cut deep where they had been first traced by fault or distortion. The analysis of this aqueous action would alone require a series of discourses; but the sum of the facts was that the best and most interesting portions of the mountains were just those which were ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... mouth; he tears the flesh from his hands and arms with his teeth, pulls his hair, and beats himself against the ground, meanwhile uttering the most piercing cries, until he is quite exhausted. The cold then deprives him of all motion and feeling, his body becomes much swollen, and fearful distortion of the features is produced by the dreadful convulsions he is suffering, while the surface of his skin becomes nearly black. The only remedy the natives know of is to scourge each other, and to drink the cold water from the springs, ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... total on the earth for the first time on the 24th of June 1797. Its next appearance was on the 6th of July 1815. It has not been possible to show the tracks of totality of these two early visitations on account of the distortion of the polar regions consequent on the fiction of Mercator's Projection. It is therefore made to commence with the track of its third appearance, viz. on July 17, 1833. In consequence of those variations in the apparent sizes of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... fitter qualifications of body and mind for the propagation of a new religion. Oh, had those happy talents, misapplied to vain philosophy, been turned into their proper channels of dreams and visions, where distortion of mind and countenance are of such sovereign use, the base, detracting world would not then have dared to report that something is amiss, that his brain hath undergone an unlucky shake, which even his brother modernists themselves, like ungrates, do ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... Powers would like to exalt this distortion of history into a dogma, in order that their various peoples may not bring any unpleasant charges against them. And yet the historical truth is already pretty clear to all who look for it honestly and without prejudice. The German ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... that, with this understanding, your Majesty may be pleased to command that opportunity be not given for distortion of facts in such a way, by persons so jealous and so suspicious, who are moved alone by anger and passion to avenge themselves and procure satisfaction from the ministers who, for the service of your Majesty, have administered ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... should ne'er be over nice, Some slight distortion pays the market price. If haply lam'd by some propitious chance, Instruct in attitude, or teach to dance; Be still extravagant in deed, or word; If new, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... exclaimed Mary-'Gusta, shocked into protest by her fellow culprit's distortion of the truth. "How can you say so! What ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... from seven years old and upwards. But the roughness of the scholars bore no proportion to the roughness of the room. That had order, shape, and some decency of preparation. The poor young human creatures that clustered within it were in every stage of squalor, rags, and mental distortion. With a kind of wonder Mr. Carlisle's eye went from one to another to note the individual varieties of the general character; and as it took in the details, wandered horror-stricken, from the nameless dirt and shapeless rags which covered the person, to the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... the taffrail, and reached the boat badly wounded; he was seen lying in it when the deck was regained, and was then pierced through with many balls. Nothing could be more horrible than his appearance; the distortion of every feature, his clenched hands, and the limbs which had stiffened in the forms of agony into which pain had twisted them, were appalling. The countenance of every man on board bore evidence of the nature of the deadly conflict in which he had been engaged. ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... is likely to extend down into the palm of the hand, and from thence into the arm along the course of the tendons or sinews of the muscles. Death of the bone of the last finger joint necessitating removal of this part, stiffness, crippling, and distortion of the hand, or death from blood poisoning may ensue if prompt ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... I rose, that I might contemplate my person in the mirror, and I at once perceived the alteration which had taken place. There was a certain degree of distortion of features which I thought would never be removed. I felt, that although the sultan might respect me, I could not expect the same influence and undivided attention as before. With a heavy heart I threw myself on the couch, and planned for the future. ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things. "Mother—mother's ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... morals of which they are but the revelation. Look at the high-shouldered, ungainly child in the corner: his mother tells him to go to his book, and he wants to go to his play. Regard the swollen lips, the skin tightened over the nose, the distortion of his shape, the angularity of his whole appearance. Yet he is not an awkward child by nature. Look at him again the moment after he has given in and kissed his mother. His shoulders have dropped to ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... me. Say, you," he called,—"you with the cro'-jack eye there,—what's that name you go by? Who are you?" He spoke to the large man who had answered to "Bigpig Monahan," and who suffered from a slight distortion of one eye; but the man, instead of civilly repeating his name, answered curtly ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... most people know enough to stay out of the way of those things. Seriously, though, I didn't think the electrostatic curvature would be so slow to adjust. You see, when we build up our light-rate distortion field, other curvatures are affected. We get some gravity, some magnetic, and some electrostatic field distortion, too. You can see what happens when they don't leak their ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... The distortion of the image of his youth in his memory, to which we have referred, is based on that need of self-justification. It is all unconscious interpretation of the undeniable facts to suit the ideal which Erasmus had made of himself and to which he honestly thinks he answers. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Bayreuth. Far too much industry and ingenuity was applied to the task of chaining the imagination to matters which did not belie their epic origin. But as to the naturalism of the attitudes, of the singing, compared with the orchestra!! What affected, artificial and depraved tones, what a distortion of nature, were we made ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... party Mignon had lost no time in imparting to those who would listen to her that the Deans had treated their guest with the utmost cruelty and it was for her invalid mother's sake alone that Mary had resigned herself to remain under their roof and go on with her school. Her distortion of the truth grew with each recital and, as the autumn days came and went, she found she had succeeded in dividing the sophomore class far more effectually than she had divided it the preceding year, ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... main yield evidences of sincerity. They are exactly what we should expect from the distortion of Bruno's doctrines by a mind incapable of comprehending them. In short, they are as veracious as the image of a face reflected on a spoon. Certain gross details (the charges, for example, of having called Christ a tristo who was deservedly hung, and of having sneered at the virginity ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Then he made a long, cunning wink at him, and seemed to blow out one of his cheeks in a burlesque grimace, which, but for the horrific circumstances, would have been ludicrous. My uncle could not tell whether this was really an intentional distortion or only one of those horrid ripples and deflections which were constantly disturbing the proportions of the figure, as if it were seen through some unequal and ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... as suffragists, our hearts naturally go out to those women at the storm-center of our movement—to those women in Great Britain who are having a struggle such as women have never had in any other land. The violent criticism, the suppression and distortion of facts from which they have suffered at the hands of the politically-inspired press of their own country have made it difficult for one on this side to gain any true conception of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. The God in whom we believe is a God of moral truth, and not of mystery. Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... the few errors of Newton himself is at least of as much importance to his followers in science as the history of the progress of his real discoveries.—YOUNG, Works, iii. 621. Error is almost always partial truth, and so consists in the exaggeration or distortion of one verity by the suppression of another, which qualifies and modifies the former.—MIVART, Genesis of Species, 3. The attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors.—HUXLEY: WARD, Reign of Victoria, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... with considerable wonder and amusement. They were decidedly metropolitan in size, and carried a tremendous amount of advertising. Early in his perusal he caught the personal bias of the news. Without distortion to the point of literal inaccuracy, nevertheless by skilful use of headlines and by manipulation of the point of view, all items were made to subserve a purpose. In local affairs the most vulgar nicknaming, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... determination of her face, confronting him with this untruth, he saw enough of the last perversion and distortion of good surviving in that miserable breast, to be stricken with remorse that he ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... only once since the previous night. She lay calm and dignified in slumber—an old and devastated woman, with that disconcerting resemblance to a corpse shown by all aged people asleep, but yet with little sign of positive illness save the slight distortion of her features caused by the original attack. Rachel sat idle, prim, in vague reflection, at intervals smoothing her petticoat, or giving a faint cough, or gazing at the mild blue September sky. She might have been reading a book, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... philosophic of readers, who hates philosophy 'as toad or asp,' must yet be aware, that, where new growths are not germinating, it is no sort of praise to be free from the throes of growth. Where expansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor is it any blame that the rich fermentation of grapes should disturb the transparency of their golden fluids. Fox had nothing new to tell us, nor did he hold a position amongst men that required or would even have allowed him to tell anything new. He was helmsman ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... (METHUEN), you can begin by mentioning all the well-known figures in the journalistic world by way of easy camouflage, so as to evade the law of libel, call your hero-villain Bulmer, attach to him all the legends about actual newspaper kings, add some malicious distortion to make them more exciting and impossible, and thoroughly let yourself go. Good taste alone will decide which is the cleaner sport, and good taste does not happen to be the fashion in certain literary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... a state of extreme contraction, far exceeding the usual rigor mortis. Coupled with this distortion of the face, this Hippocratic smile, or 'risus sardonicus,' as the old writers called it, what conclusion would it suggest to ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... adorning of College chimney-pieces with the photographic portraits of all the owner's College friends, had just then come into fashion, Mr. Verdant Green's beaming countenance and spectacles were daguerreotyped in every variety of Ethiopian distortion; and, being enclosed in miniature frames, were distributed as souvenirs among ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... class of humorists is the opposite of Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. Every thing in life is reversed, as in opera bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox takes the place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they have supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental excesses, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... war, but then (to wit in the wars) their arms embroidered, or otherwise depict upon them, that every man by his coat of arms might be known from others." All this heraldic lore did not prevent the subsequent change—for a time—of the name Tabard to the meaningless name of Talbot, a distortion, however, which survives ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... better than her own sonorous native language, and when in conversation she would look me one of those dreamy glances which had at the first set my heart in agitation, it perfectly bewildered me. You needn't smile, Langley, (poor Bill's face was guilty of no such distortion,) but if your little danseuse should practice for years, she couldn't attain to the delicious glance which my handsome creole girl can give you. The heavily-fringed eyelid is just raised, so that you can look as if for an interminable distance ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... and its refracting power being less than that of the colder air, the currents are rendered visible by the distortion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... displeasure the efforts of a nurse who should attempt to make their infant walk at too early a period, are ready eagerly to embrace any system of so-called education which offers to do the same violence to the intellect; forgetting that distortion of mind is at least as much to be dreaded as that of the body, while the motives held out to encourage the little victims are not calculated to produce a moral atmosphere conducive either to good or great mental attainments. Children ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... lamp behind them. At the same time he moves the arms with wires in order to produce the effect of action. The wayang dolls are singularly grotesque. There is an interesting tradition which ascribes this distortion to a deliberate purpose. According to this account, after the Mohammedan conquest and the subsequent conversion of the Javanese to Islamism, it became necessary to reconcile the continued enjoyment of the national ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... the unconsidered things I said last night, Conscience," Stuart began again, "there were some that I must still say. It was like the illogical thread of a dream which is only the distortion of a waking thought-flow. The essence of my ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... atomicity of the Aether, it is exceedingly difficult to understand how such a property can belong to it. Atoms are exceedingly small particles, possessing the property of elasticity, or the power to recover their original shape after distortion or change of shape. If the Aether therefore be atomic, as is pointed out in Art. 44, it can at once be readily understood how the Aether as a whole can possess the property of elasticity. The atoms of the Aether must be inconceivably small, as the light-waves travel with the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... word might be rendered, "rebellion"—not the mere breach of an impersonal law, not merely an infraction of "the constitution of our nature"—but the rising of a subject will against its true king, disobedience to a person as well as contravention of a standard. It is "iniquity"—perversion or distortion—a word which expresses the same metaphor as is found in many languages, namely, crookedness as descriptive of deeds which depart from the perfect line of right. It is "sin," i.e., "missing one's aim;" in ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... say," is an interesting touch; perhaps conscience tells her midway that she does not quite believe what she is saying. So is the self-conscious recognition of her "bitter burning brain" that interprets all things in a sort of distortion.—Observe, too, how instinctively she turns to the peasant for sympathy in the strain of her emotion. It is his entrance, perhaps, which prevents Orestes from being swept away and revealing himself. The peasant's courage towards two armed men is striking, as ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... apparent termination? To say that fire exists without manifesting any of the properties of fire, such as light, heat, etc., or that the principle of life exists without consciousness, or memory, or desire, or motive, is to resign, by an awkward distortion of language, the affirmative of the dispute. To say that the principle of life MAY exist in distribution among various forms, is to assert what cannot be proved to be either true or false, but which, ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... unfolded, and the mistakes are accounted for. It seems clear that corruption arose in the very earliest age. As soon as the Gospel was preached, the incapacity of human nature for preserving accuracy until long years of intimate acquaintance have bred familiarity must have asserted itself in constant distortion more or less of the sacred stories, as they were told and retold amongst Christians one to another whether in writing or in oral transmission. Mistakes would inevitably arise from the universal tendency to mix error with truth which Virgil has so powerfully depicted ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... noiseless. The odor of the cedars and the temple-like stillness brought to Peter's mind the night of his mother's death. It seemed to him a long time since he had come running through the glade after a doctor, and yet, by a queer distortion of his sense of time, his mother's death and burial bulked in his past as if it had ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... people increased, but the Cure raised his hand to command silence, and his eyes gazed steadily at the dwarf. It might seem that he was noting the huge head, the shaggy hair, the overhanging brows, the weird face of this distortion of a thing made in God's own image. But he was thinking instead of how the angel and the devil may live side by side in a man, and neither be entirely driven out—and the angel conquer in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the November before, a slight paralysis in the face, which affected the muscles of the lower lid of one of my eyes, causing a constant irritation in the organ itself. After a time this caused a distortion of the lips, which I concealed somewhat by a moustache. But it operated, for a little while, as an effective disguise. When I came home during the winter, an old conductor on the Boston & Albany Railroad, whom ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and being rewarded at last by seeing animation and activity come back to his poor sickly little body. He will never be a robust chicken. He seems to have a permanent distortion of the spine, and his crop is one-sided; and if there is any such thing as blind staggers, he has them. Besides, he has a strong and increasing tendency not to grow. This, however, I reckon a beauty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of passion—incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the temperature of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his chances without distortion, weighed ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... truth of their content and thought. And it is not merely a question of the greater or lesser skill with which the objects of external nature are studied and copied, for, in certain stages of artistic consciousness and artistic activity, the misrepresentation and distortion of natural objects are not unintentional technical inexpertness and incapacity, but conscious alteration, which depends upon the content that is in consciousness, and is, in fact, demanded by it. We may thus speak of imperfect art, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the heart of a reformer, and especially towards women; he sees what they need, and what causes are injuring them. From the histories of Fleur de Marie and La Louve, from the lovely and independent character of Rigolette, from the distortion given to Matilda's mind, by the present views of marriage, and from the truly noble and immortal character of the "hump-backed Sempstress" in the "Wandering Jew," may be gathered much that shall elucidate doubt and direct inquiry on this subject. In reform, as in philosophy, the French ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the theatre, the power to give enormous value for a limited time to some personality, some event, some aspect, true or false, without any power of giving a specific direction to the forces this distortion may set going. Directly the press of to-day passes from that sort of thing to some specific proposal, some implication of principles and beliefs, directly it chooses and selects, then it passes from the miscellaneous to the sectarian, and out of touch with the grey indefiniteness ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... notions. We have therefore to look for the ideal of the author or of his time, in order to be on our guard against passages distorted to suit that ideal. But without special study we may calculate on the common kinds of literary distortion. Rhetorical distortion consists in attributing to persons noble attitudes, acts, sentiments, and, above all, words: this is a natural tendency in young boys who are beginning to practise the art of composition, and in writers still in a semi-barbarous stage; it ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... how about the automobile picture? That also is an unblushing fake. Of course I must prove that. In the first place, you know that the general public has come to recognise the distortion of a photograph as denoting speed. A picture of a car in a race that doesn't lean is rejected - people demand to see speed, speed, more speed even in pictures. Distortion does indeed show speed, but that, too, can ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... eyed this golden-haired virago now, and looked in vain for some trace of her wonted beauty in the stormy distortion of her face. ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... heavens. All the fearful sights he had seen rose before him. Upturned lay faces calm in death as in a child's sleep, with all camp roughnesses swept away in that still whiteness; strong men's, with that terrible scowl of battle or the distortion of agonized death on them—mangled and crushed forms—all the wreck of a fought battle, terrible in its suggestive pathos. It sank away into the minor of water voices, soft, monotonous, agonizing in its utter passivity, a brilliant arpeggio ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... one aspect (usually superficial), while quite ignoring another. They are gross, like the joy of Worcester sauce on the palate. Now, if there is one point common to all classics, it is the absence of exaggeration. The balanced sanity of a great mind makes impossible exaggeration, and, therefore, distortion. The beauty of a classic is not at all apt to knock you down. It will steal over you, rather. Many serious students are, I am convinced, discouraged in the early stages because they are expecting a wrong kind of pleasure. They have abandoned Worcester sauce, and they miss it. They miss ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... Baldacchino. Yet it is curious to observe how much of the dignity even of his later pictures, depends on such portions as the green light of the lake, and sky behind the rocks, in the St. John of the tribune, and how the repainted distortion of the Madonna dell' Impannata, is redeemed into something like elevated character, merely by the light of the linen window from which it ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... her hands. The scars of her toilsome years were upon them; the distortion of the labor she had wrought for him in his helpless infancy was set upon their joints. He was placing his liberty and his life in jeopardy for Ollie, and his going would leave mother without a stay, after her sacrifice of youth and hope and ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... ceases to bite them. The Crown-Prince there, in his horror, indignation and despair, had a lucid human judgment in him, too; loyal to facts, and well knowing their inexorable nature, Just sentiments are in this young man, not capable of permanent distortion into spasm by any form of injustice laid on them. It is not long till he begins to discern, athwart this terrible, quasi-infernal element, that so the facts are; and that nothing but destruction, and no honor that were not dishonor, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... life of God, and therefore is the medium for understanding God, and ultimately for enjoying God. The Christian life is not an arbitrary thing; it is the highest expression of humanity. Any other life is a distortion of the human ideal. People talk as though they thought that by the arbitrary will of God they were obliged to be good—a thing wholly contrary to our nature and to our present interests. But goodness is the natural unfolding of our nature as God made it: we find ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... seemed to his not very experienced heart that perhaps intense love can only show itself by something akin to degradation, by enticements which a genuinely pure nature could never descend to, by perversities which the grand simplicity and wholesomeness of goodness would certainly abhor. Then a distortion of love presented itself to his tragic investigation as the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true significance. He had said to himself, "Let the spirit die that the body may live." He had wished, he still wished, to pull down. He had a sort of demented desire ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Shakespeare, when he went to London, was about twenty-three years old, the father of a family, and the son of an ex-bailiff of the not unimportant town of Stratford, we may dismiss as a fanciful distortion the story of his holding horses at the theatre doors for stray pennies; and in the added embellishment of the story which describes this Orpheon, yet thrifty street Arab, as organising for this purpose a band of ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... way of nerves, softening of the muscles, the depression, nightmare in the day-time, visions, horrid shapes; how the victim is sometimes engulfed in a flood of waters, while faces in all imaginary varieties of distortion, grin from the waves, and terrible eyes gleam forth from ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... eclipse is in progress the Moon's passage over these spots may as well be noticed. In bygone years some amount of attention was devoted to this matter with the view of ascertaining whether any alteration took place in the appearance of the spots; distortion, for instance, such as might be produced by the intervention of a lunar atmosphere. No such distortion was ever noticed, and observations with this idea in view may be said to possess now only an academic interest, ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... Government must not use the regular troops if order could possibly be effected without this aid. "Otherwise," said he, "there would be a cry at once, 'The cat is let out; we now see for what purpose an army was raised!'" But individualistic spirits who were alarmed at this new distortion of the Government toward centralisation feared the results of using even the militia. Jefferson, having resigned his secretaryship and seeing the unusually prominent part assumed by Hamilton in the expedition, protested from his retirement at ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... due entirely to society for, according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish. The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal conditions,—where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to say, in lightning flashes, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... improvement or—when this energy is weak or distorted—their degeneration; the material forms acting as a stimulus towards the development of spiritual energy through association and environment that are favourable, or towards its weakening and distortion when these are deterrents because of their own degraded or degrading nature. If it is futile to look for salvation through the mechanism, it is equally futile to try to act directly and exclusively on the character of the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... micrometer, and to observe the number of stage micrometer divisions occupying the space in the eyepiece micrometer formerly occupied by the thread. It is essential that both thread and stage micrometer should occupy the same position in the field, for errors due to unequal distortion may otherwise become of importance. For this reason it is best to utilise the centre of the ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... regard to space-distortion. The Theory of Relativity enforces the conclusion that from the standpoint of our conventions in regard to these matters, all bodies involved in transportation undergo a contraction in the direction ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon |
