"Euclid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... French thinkers. The mischief of the later speculation of the eighteenth century in France was that men argued about the complex, conditional, and relative propositions of society, as if they had been theorems and problems of Euclid. And M. Taine himself is, as we say, compelled to change his term when he comes to the actual facts and personages of the revolutionary epoch. It was the geometric, rather than the classic, quality of political reasoning, which introduced ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... started historical debates, and new views were presented which furnished both amusement and instruction. One colonel, more redoubtable in battle than in dialectics, who had been shot through from breast to back, gravely informed us that the geometer Euclid was an early English writer! A kindly visitor, Dr. Holbrook, made me a present of Hitchcock's Elementary Geology. It was not quite up to date, having been published about twenty-five years before, but I found ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... and waters and Sicilian seas, than to follow the beaten track of ordinary education. It was vastly more entertaining to translate the impassioned prose of Aristaenetus into impassioned verse, especially in collaboration with a cherished friend, than to yawn over Euclid and to grumble over Cocker. The translation of Aristaenetus, the boyish task of Sheridan and his friend Halhed, still enjoys a sort of existence in the series of classical translations in Bohn's Library. It is one of the ironies of literature that fate ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... with Grammarians: what he has said on Rhetoric, with Cicero and Aquila; on Logic, with Porphyry, Aristotle, Cassiodorus, Apuleius; on Geography, with Strabo, Mela, Solinus, Ptolemy, but chiefly Pliny; on Arithmetic, with Euclid; on Astronomy, with Hygin, and the rest who have treated that subject; on Music, with Cleonides, ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... study has rather prepared him for more profound insight into those relations. Thus it is with the body of truth. In spite of Mr. Verity I affirm that there are truths that have not in themselves any element of religion whatever. The forty-seventh proposition of Euclid will be taught by a Jesuit precisely as it is taught in the London University; geography will affirm certain principles and designate places, rivers, mountains—that no faith can remove and cast into unknown seas. These subjects and others are taught in our most bigoted schools in separate hours ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... "the Banquet."[488] Of these listeners, however, we can not now speak. Our business is with those only who imbibed his philosophic spirit, and became the future teachers of philosophy. And even of those who, as Euclid of Megara, and Antisthenes the Cynic, and Aristippus of Cyrenaica, borrowed somewhat from the dialectic of Socrates, we shall say nothing. They left no lasting impression upon the current of philosophic thought, because their systems were too partial, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... better worth aiming for. It's a good enough thing to have in addition, but as to its being the sum and substance, the Alpha and Omega, of any sensible woman's life, that's all foolishness. Let's have done with it and order in the lights. I want to get at Euclid again. It will never do for that conceited Yale brother of mine to get ahead of me. Shall I ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... my discoveries are mostly about as evident as any thing in Euclid, still, as they are new to the world, and require, previous to their being received as truths, the disagreeable admission that we have been hitherto in error; some art, besides down-right logical persuasion, will be necessary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... the barn, Or at the loom, had done their needful work, Came to his schoolroom in the murky night, And found the fire aglow, the candles lit, And the good master waiting for his men. Here mathematics wiled him to their heights; And strange consent of lines to form and law Made Euclid like a great romance of truth. The master saw with wonder how the youth All eagerly devoured the offered food, And straightway longed to lead him; with that hope Of sympathy which urges him that knows ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... open, used to listen to stories like the Yarn we have read of the marvellous adventures of Livingstone.[50] Sometimes Mr. Mackay would stop and draw triangles and circles with his stick. Then Alec would be learning a problem in Euclid on this strange "blackboard" of the road. He learned the Euclid—but he preferred the ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... not that any pundit of literature hath better succeeded than the nameless, fameless man—or woman, was it?—or haply some innocent shrewd child—who whilom did enunciate that MAN IS A WRITING ANIMAL: true as arithmetic, clear as the sunbeam, rational as Euclid, a discerning, just, exclusive definition. That he is "capable of laughter," is well enough even for thy deathless fame, O Stagyrite! but equally (so Buffon testifies) are apes and monkeys, horses and hyenas; whether perforce of tickling or sympathy, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... mind itself, could be of avail after death—could be carried out of the world—which power, riches, glory, cannot. The greatest service which any philosopher could perform for the human race, would be to demonstrate the certainty of a future existence, in the same satisfactory manner that Euclid demonstrates the truths of geometry. We cannot help believing Euclid if we would, and the truths he has established concerning lines and angles, influence us whether we will or not. Whenever the immortality of the soul ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform soul,"—the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,—are fully dilated upon in the addition to the original ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. One would state with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but nevertheless he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... a sly look, and giving me a poke in the ribs, "I've had to do with mines before now, and know what they are. I'll let nobody but you into my pet scheme; you shall go shares if you like. The scheme is as plain as a problem in Euclid: if the German is right, and there are mines, why, the mines will be worked. Then miners must be employed; but miners must eat, drink, and spend their money. The thing is to get that money. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of antiquity; such is the best practice of modern continental Europe, and such is the requirement of nature in all ages. He who does not learn cannot teach. Socrates professed to know only this, that he knew nothing. Plato was a disciple of Socrates and Euclid; a pupil in the school of Pythagoras; and, as a traveller, under the disguise of a merchant and a seller of oil, he visited Egypt, and thus gained a knowledge of astronomy, and added something to his learning in other departments. He ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... only looks as if Euclid had been round. But answer my question.... Oh, we can see it! Very well, then; show me which way it lies. Is it visible—the actual bridge itself, I mean—not the place ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... how Walter is making out," thought the doctor. Then, after a pause, he resumed, with a sudden inspiration: "Why shouldn't I know? I'll go over to Euclid to-morrow with out giving Walter any intimation of my visit, and see ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... the royal bench Of British Themis, with no mean applause, Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws, Which others at their bar so often wrench, To-day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench In mirth that after no repenting draws; Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause, And what the Swede intend, and what the French. To measure life learn thou betimes, and know Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; For other things mild Heaven a time ordains, And disapproves that care, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... trisection of the angle by aid of the straight line and circle, used as in Euclid, has never been solved—no reward was ever offered ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... it is the physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare speaks to the blood like wine or music; it is with exultation, with intoxication, that we see or read Antony and Cleopatra, or even Richard II. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. These people who are seen so clearly, moving about in a well-realised world, using probable words ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the pot to call the kettle black; and it is true that the standard of veracity throughout the country is by no means high. But this can scarcely be termed a vice, for the Andalusians see in it nothing discreditable, and it can be proved as exactly as a proposition of Euclid that vice and virtue are solely matters of opinion. In Southern Spain bosom friends lie to one another with complete freedom; no man would take his wife's word, but would believe only what he thought true, and think no worse of her when he caught her fibbing. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... had our small parish in Sussex we taught her ourselves, and her father brought her on in Latin and Euclid. Do you know anything of those, Miss Sandbrook? not that ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and free, Her bright course of glory for ever shall run: For brave Caledonia immortal must be; I'll prove it from Euclid as clear as the sun: Rectangle-triangle, the figure we'll choose, The upright is Chance, and old Time is the base; But brave Caledonia's the hypothenuse; Then ergo, she'll match ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... I refer to learning the three "R's" or to working out those angular puzzles invented by Euclid, whose problems would only stop in my brain one at a time—that is to say, when I had mastered one perfectly, and could repeat and illustrate it throughout upon slate with pencil, upon paper with pen, upon blackboard with chalk, the process of acquiring ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... has nothing, and from whom shall be taken the little that he hath. As to arguments against Home Rule, I do not think it a case for argument. That the thing is bad is self-evident; and self-evident propositions, whether in Euclid or elsewhere, are always the most difficult to prove. Ask me to prove that two added to two make four, ask me how many beans make five, and I gracefully retire. Ask me to show that Home Rule will be bad for Ireland, and I will make ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... prelection was interrupted. The Professor stood before them with his mouth wide open, and could not proceed till he rang for his servant to come and shut it. In the meantime the mischievous disciples of Euclid had ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... little children, had always had the same occupations, Henrietta learning Latin, marbles, and trap-ball, and Frederick playing with dolls and working cross-stitch; and even now the custom was so far continued, that he gave lessons in Homer and Euclid for those which he received in Italian and music. For present amusement there was no reason to complain; the neighbourhood supplied many beautiful walks, while longer expeditions were made with Mrs. Langford in the pony ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to say that it was the best that he could do in that particular direction (very probably Euclid), but if only he might be allowed to try his hand in quite another direction, he might do something very fine indeed. He never, of course, had a chance of saying this, nor would such a declaration have greatly benefited him, because, for Mr. ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... mountains inspired the boy. What was Newton making his calculations from which to deduce his fundamental laws, or Galileo watching the stars from his Florentine tower? This young captain was Archimedes and Euclid, Newton and Galileo, all in one. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... beginning of April, 185-, that the excitement occasioned by the published accounts of the Victoria "Diggings," induced my brother to fling aside his Homer and Euclid for the various "Guides" printed for the benefit of the intending gold-seeker, or to ponder over the shipping columns of the daily papers. The love of adventure must be contagious, for three weeks after (so rapid were our ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... ceased to be the center and Alexandria took its place. At Alexandria there was a great library which contained over five hundred thousand volumes or rolls. There also was the museum or university, in which many learned men were at work. The best known of these men was Euclid, who perfected the mathematics which we call geometry, and Ptolemy, whose ideas about geography and the shape and size of the globe Columbus carefully studied before he set out on his great voyage. Alexandria was also a center of trade and commerce. From Alexandria, because ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... local wheelman comes gallantly to the rescue, and explains my natural ignorance of Cleveland's city laws, and I breathe the joyous air of freedom once again. Three members of the Cleveland Bicycle Club and a visiting wheelman accompany me ten miles out, riding down far-famed Euclid Avenue, and calling at Lake View Cemetery to pay a visit to Garfleld's tomb. I bid them farewell at Euclid village. Following the ridge road leading along the shore of Lake Erie to Buffalo, I ride through a most beautiful farming ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... thought himself secure against his lady's rage for dancing; for, although he was ashamed of it, the princess of Babylon was, by the grace of God, six or seven months advanced in pregnancy; and, to complete her misfortune, the child had fallen all on one side, so that even Euclid would have been puzzled to say what her figure was. The disconsolate lady, seeing Miss Hamilton and Mrs. Wetenhall set out every morning, sometimes on horseback and sometimes in a coach, but ever attended by a gallant ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "Euclid Avenue, with its broad lawns, and with Wade Park as the fitting climax of its spacious beauty, is the most attractive driveway in the United States, which is saying a ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of Dante that lured me into what little learning I possess." ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... his Broadview trip so that he would create the necessary impression among strangers was one which called for corrugated brows. The solution of it was not to be found in any of the teacher's few text-books; it quite upset Euclid's idea that things which were equal to the same thing were equal to one another—when it came to finding enough parts to make a respectable whole! For among the four bachelors was not one whole suit of clothes sufficiently presentable for social events. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... itself enables the American visitor to find them without difficulty. Passing eastward towards the heart of the city, one notes on the left hand the imposing pile of St. Paul's, an enormous church with a round dome on the top, suggesting strongly the first Church of Christ (Scientist) on Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... merit was celebrated in the attestations of the princes and doctors of Constantinople. One of these attestations is still extant; and the emperor Cantacuzene, the protector of his adversaries, is forced to allow, that Euclid, Aristotle, and Plato, were familiar to that profound and subtle logician. [89] In the court of Avignon, he formed an intimate connection with Petrarch, [90] the first of the Latin scholars; and the desire of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Susy, with much complacency. "These architects' things don't look any more like houses than they do like the first proposition in Euclid; and the poor ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... powers as the parliament of this country has possessed ever since the Revolution, two parliaments to the deliberate sense of which the Sovereign must conform. If they differ, how can he conform to the sense of both? The thing is as plain as a proposition in Euclid. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in a little flash, and then stood with her back half turned, her eyes fixed on the carpet, as if she were puzzling out a proposition in Euclid, somewhere hidden in its ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... Letters). (CAMBRIDGE.) The many; the multitude; who take degrees without being entitled for an honor. All that is REQUIRED, are three books of Euclid, and as far as Quadratic Equation's in ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... a text-book written by a Greek called Eucleides in the fourth or third century B. C.[1] That text-book lasted over two thousand years. Now, of course, people have discovered a number of faults in Euclid, but it has taken them all that time ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... freshmen—although I have not set my heart on your plying at Blackfriars Bridge, nor winning the hand of the daughters of Horse-ferry as the 'jolly young waterman,' or old Doggett's Coat and Badge. But all things in degree; and therefore I rejoice a hundred times more at your position in the college Euclid examination." ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... geniuses that ever appeared in the world, descended from an ancient family in Lincolnshire, where he was born in the year 1642. His powers of mind were wonderfully comprehensive and penetrating. Fontenelle says of him, "that in learning mathematics, he did not study Euclid, who seemed to him too plain and simple, and unworthy of taking up his time. He understood him almost before he read him: a cast of his eye on the contents of the theorems of that great mathematician, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... education is possible only on that condition. Boys were never taught the rule-of-three until after they had learnt addition. They were not set to write exercises before they had got into their copybooks. Conic sections have always been preceded by Euclid. But the error of the old methods consists in this, that they do not recognise in detail what they are obliged to recognise in general. Yet the principle applies throughout. If from the time when a child is able to conceive two things as related in position, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... physic. The sages of Greece were translated and illustrated in the Arabic language, and some treatises, now lost in the original, have been recovered in the versions of the East, [56] which possessed and studied the writings of Aristotle and Plato, of Euclid and Apollonius, of Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen. [57] Among the ideal systems which have varied with the fashion of the times, the Arabians adopted the philosophy of the Stagirite, alike intelligible or alike obscure for the readers of every age. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... you know little about it! What! will you sacrifice these glorious tresses to a hard and joyless course of study? For none can study Euclid with me with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... or Asia. How did it get there? Clearly its seeds were either washed by the waves or carried by birds, and thus deposited on the nearest European shores to America. But if Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace had been alive in pre-Columban days (which, as Euclid remarks, is absurd), he would readily have inferred, from the frequent occurrence of such unknown plants along the western verge of Britain, that a great continent lay unexplored to the westward, and would promptly have proceeded to discover and annex it. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... glance of an eye, to fathom a man's inmost thoughts. Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had arrived at them they might well consider ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... course, much of this omnivorous reading is from habit, and, invita Minerva, cannot be dignified by the name of study,—that stiff, steady, persistent, uncompromising application of the mind, by virtue of which alone the Pons Asinorum can be crossed, and the Forty-Seventh Problem of Euclid—which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the world; Professor Huxley says this means knowing literature. Literature is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed in a book. Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia are thus literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature. But by literature Professor Huxley means belles lettres. He means to make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Euclid long since observed, that the less cannot comprehend that which is the greater. True, however, as this is, it is also sometimes true that the greater cannot comprehend the less. Hanky went musing to his own room and threw himself into ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... arrival at Friendly Bay we should have to understand Aunt Caroline, and that, as Euclid says, is absurd. Therefore we shall have to take the arrival for granted. The only light which she herself ever shed upon the matter was a statement that she "had a feeling." And feelings, to Aunt Caroline, were the only reliable things in a strictly ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... "loved in return." At first, indeed, he had a kind of delight in his thoughts—in the eager pressure forward, to whatsoever conclusion, of a rigid intellectual gymnastic, which was like the making of Euclid. Only, little by little, under the freezing influence of such propositions, the theoretic energy itself, and with it his old eagerness for truth, the care to track it from proposition to proposition, was chilled out ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... reached Western Europe from Italy only in the sixteenth century.[232] It was, no doubt, owing to the absence of a sound system of numeration that the mathematical talent of the Greeks was directed chiefly to geometry, in which science Euclid, Archimedes, and others made such brilliant discoveries. It is, however, during the last three centuries only that the civilised world appears to have become conscious of the possession of a marvellous faculty which, when supplied with the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... philosophies. This work he never completed. He wrote a treatise on music which was used as a text-book as late as the present century; and he translated the works of Ptolemy on astronomy, of Nicomachus on arithmetic, of Euclid on geometry, and of Archimedes on mechanics. His great work in this line was a translation of Aristotle, which he supplemented by a commentary in thirty books. Among his writings are a number of works on logic and a commentary on the 'Topica' of Cicero. In addition to these, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... propositions that bear very closely upon the problems involved in locating the position of a floating object with regard to the coast, by observations taken from the object. They are Euclid I. (32), "The three interior angles of every triangle are together equal to two ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. One would state with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... then do a simple problem out of Legendre (the French Euclid), and M. Laferte would look on with deep interest and admiration, but evidently no comprehension whatever. Then he would take the pen himself, and draw a shapeless figure, with A's and B's and C's and D's stuck all over it in impossible ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... have been only the penance and the terror,—the Threshold and the Phantom? Vain man! look to the commonest elements of the common learning. Can every tyro at his mere wish and will become the master; can the student, when he has bought his Euclid, become a Newton; can the youth whom the Muses haunt, say, 'I will equal Homer;' yea, can yon pale tyrant, with all the parchment laws of a hundred system-shapers, and the pikes of his dauntless multitude, carve, at his will, a constitution not more vicious than the one ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and he was too patriotic to cast a thought away upon French. As he was engaged for the arithmetical and mathematical departments, it would have been perhaps as well if he had known a little of algebra and Euclid; but, as from the first day he honoured me with a strict though patronising friendship, he made me soon understand that we were to share this department of knowledge in common. It was quite enough if one of the two knew ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... ones. Here is a handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books—('on several occasions')—that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romantic than Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... them. People always differ and contend most about things of which they know the least. Did we all attach the same meaning to the same words, our opinions would all be the same, as true as the forty-fifth problem of Euclid. How important, then, that children should always be taught the same meaning of words, and learn to use them correctly. Etymology, viewed in this light, is a most important ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... facts—then I may find them out, as I find out mathematical truths, without instruction from God. I do not ask God to tell me that one and one make two. I do not ask him to reveal to me the demonstrations of Euclid. I thank him for the mind to perceive. But I perceive mathematical relations without his telling me, because they exist independent of his will. If, then, moral truths, if right and wrong, if rectitude and sin, are, in like manner, ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... have I been so careful in bringing down with great particularity these distinctions? Because in my judgment there are certain logical consequences following from them as necessarily as various corollaries from a problem in Euclid. If we are at war, as I think, with a foreign country, to all intents and purposes, how can a man here stand up and say that he is on the side of that foreign country and not be an enemy to his country? ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has found them in Euclid ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... emotional reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid."[76] ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... impressions of an active life. Our attainments are frequently limited to the elements of every science, and seldom reach to that enlargement of ability and power, which useful knowledge should give. Like mathematicians, who study the Elements of Euclid, but, never think of mensuration; we read of societies, but do not propose to act with men; we repeat the language of politics, but feel not the spirit of nations; we attend to the formalities of a military discipline, but know not how to employ numbers of men to obtain ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... speeches will be very helpful. Two or three of Roscoe Conkling's arguments after he left the Senate are models of perspicuity. Mr. Potter's argument in the legal tender cases is a model—it is Euclid stated in terms of the law. Webster's arguments you will study, of course. Blackstone is one of the clearest writers who ever illustrated the great science to which you and I are devoted. Perhaps as great a logician ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... a premise the definition "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points," and the further statement that "AB is a straight line between A and B," and conclude that the line AB represents the shortest distance between two points A and B. In a manner similar to this Euclid built his whole mathematical system upon the basis of definitions and postulates, a system the complexity and thoroughness of which has caused all students of mathematics at one time or another to marvel and admire. But, of course, a definition is little more ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... disputes commenced, the adulterations crept in. The spontaneity, the fire and zeal of the self-sacrificing itinerant preachers gave place to the paralyzing logic then pervading the Roman Empire, and which had sent its curse down the ages to the modern sermon; the geometrical rules of Euclid were made to solve the secrets of the universe. The simple faith of the cross which had inspired the martyr along the bloody way from Ephesus to the Circus at Rome was formalized by degrees into philosophy: ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which is larger than Om, the supply (lR) will exceed the demand (lQ) and the price will fall downwards towards Om. Thus, again, we have deduced Law III from Laws I and II with the form and precision of a proposition in Euclid. Now, when once the eye has become familiar with this diagram, it ought to be impossible for the mind to lose even momentarily its grip on the fact that demand and supply are both dependent upon price. For these curves do not represent any particular amounts; they represent a series ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... who venerates those people, and who spends all that season in study of their language that he should spend in putting oxygen into his blood and lime into his bones? The sensuous Greek loved beauty; he did not care to puzzle his brain when he could please it instead. Euclid and Apollonius, indeed, carried the positive science of mathematics to great height, but physical science is the growth of comparative to-day; with habits of thought hampered by priesthoods and systems, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Ballarat, with the determination of never leaving her. Selina was a spinster, as her hand had never been sought in marriage, and her personal appearance was certainly not very fascinating. Tall and gaunt, she was like a problem from Euclid, all angles, and the small quantity of grey hair she possessed was screwed into a hard lump at the back of her head. Her face was reddish in colour, and her mouth prim and pursed up, as if she was afraid of saying too much, which she need not have been, as she rarely spoke, and ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... was, however, one methodic discipline, highly commended of old but seldom perhaps seriously pursued with the like object by men of forty, even self-taught men, which he did pursue. Some time during these years he mastered the first six Books of Euclid. It would probably be no mere fancy if we were to trace certain definite effects of this discipline upon his mind and character. The faculty which he had before shown of reducing his thought on any subject ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... to send me—to school again? I am not sure I should like that, Carrie. I didn't want to leave, but I don't think I should like to go back to Caesar, and Euclid, and all ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... say you are not convinced by my pamphlet I am afraid that I am a very arrogant person; but I do assure you that, in the fondest moments of self-conceit, the idea of convincing a Russell that he was wrong never came across my mind. Euclid would have had a bad chance with you if you had happened to have formed an opinion that the interior angles of a triangle were not equal to two right angles. The more poor Euclid demonstrated, the more you ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... figures could be removed from the paper, turned over and laid down again,—the so-called "method of superposition," now generally regarded as quite allowable. Of course, a figure can be treated in this way only in imagination and for this season, probably, the method was not employed by Euclid. Its use, however, leads always to true results, as anyone may see; and it was quite characteristic of Professor Newcomb that he should have taken it up, not having the fear of ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... history, political economy, or political philosophy, without which it is as absurd to have an opinion upon what are called politics as it would be to have an opinion upon an astronomical problem without having learned Euclid. ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... earliest commercial grapes. The fruit resembles that of Concord, of which it is probably a seedling. Notwithstanding many defects, Early Ohio is grown somewhat commonly, although its culture is on the wane. The variety was found in 1882 by R. A. Hunt, Euclid, Ohio, between rows of Delaware ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... classics was extended. A text-book on Rhetoric accompanied the classical readings. The dialectics of Ramus made the prelude to Logic, instead of the three treatises of the old Logic. The Mathematics included Euclid. Geography and Cosmography were taken up. Then came a course of Moral Philosophy on an enlarged basis. With the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, were combined Cicero's Ethical works and certain Dialogues of Plato. Finally, in the Physics, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... But George explained that, according to Euclid, a plane can touch a sphere only at one point, and that person only who stands at that point, with respect to the centre of the ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... finger. "Good night!" he ejaculated. "Have I been giving a display of my unequalled talents for the benefit of the man who has caused me more sleepless nights than Euclid himself? Here is poor old George Robey been ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... understood in the civilized world. That he should hate the German with all his heart and soul is in the order of things. We talk about the mystical Germans, but German self-conscious mysticism is like a problem of Euclid beside the natural, unexpressed dreaminess of the Czech. The German mystic goes to work at once to expound his "system" in categories, dressing it up in a technology which in the end proves to be the only mystery in it. The Bohemian ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... number of American Eskimo. Fairway rock, a little way east of Ratmanoff island, is not inhabited. The comparatively short distance between the two continents and the intermediate islands has suggested the utilisation of the latter as supports for a leviathan railway bridge, a theory which (as Euclid would remark) is obviously "absurd." For no bridge could withstand the force of the spring ice in Bering Straits for one week. On the other hand, the boring of a tunnel from shore to shore is not entirely without the range of possibility, but of this, and of other ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... tone of a serious science like Euclid seems rather frivolous," said Mrs. Gradinger. "I may observe—" but here mercifully the observation was checked by the entry ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... flecks of shade and glints of light, and a sense of unmistakable privilege. There was physiology, which was scarcely work, and astronomy, which I found so exhilarating that I fell ill over it. Alas, truth compels me to add that Mathematics, with a big M and stretching on through the books of Euclid, darkened my young horizon with dull despair; and that chemistry—but the facts are too humiliating to relate. My father used to say that all he ever got out of the pursuit of this useful science in his college days—and he was facile valedictorian—was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... successful electric light, Charles Francis Brush, was born on his father's farm in Euclid, Cuyahoga County, in 1840, and still pursues in Cleveland the studies which have literally illumined the world. One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where the girlhood ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... can no more be taught thus, than can science in any other direction. I know [10] not how to teach either Euclid or the Science of Mind silently; and never dreamed that either of these partook of the nature of occultism, magic, alchemy, or necro- mancy. These "ways that are vain" are the inventions of animal magnetism, which would deceive, if possible, [15] the very elect. We will charitably ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... now, except that the Prince poured out his third glass of brandy. Everybody was intent on the dialogue. Ogilvie, his hand clasping his wife's under the skirt of the napery, looked so intently at the Colonel that his face was like a figure in a Euclid book. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... instruments, and below her is sitting Tubal-Cain, who is beating with two hammers on an anvil and is standing with his ears intent on that sound. Geometry has the square and the compasses, and below, Euclid. Astrology has the celestial globe in her hands, and below her feet, Atlas. In the other part are sitting seven Theological Sciences, and each has below her that estate or condition of man that is most appropriate to her—Pope, Emperor, King, Cardinals, Dukes, Bishops, Marquises, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... prices naturally go up once more, and we get a long figure for all that we hold. That's what I mean by making 'a corner in diamonds.' There is no room in it for any miscalculation. It is as certain as a proposition of Euclid, and as ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... than those of any other of the philosophers of antiquity; for which reason he is familiarly called, in the modern masonic lectures, "an ancient friend and brother," and an important symbol of the order, the forty-seventh problem of Euclid, has been consecrated to ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... questions still came on. If he had answered a single thing correctly it would have been a different matter, but he knew nothing. I believe he did know what twice two was, but that was the one question the Doctor did not ask him. As to French, Latin, Grammar, and Euclid, the clock on the wall knew as much of them as Bramble. It came ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... consider an appropriate time for beginning. You are to tilt with certain giants, called Grammar, Geography, and History. And if you succeed with them, you are to combat certain dragons and griffins, named Virgil, Euclid, and so forth. And if you conquer them, you may eventually rise above your present humble sphere, and perhaps become a parish clerk or a constable—who knows? Make good use of your opportunities, my lad! Pursue the path of learning, and there ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... that I should conquer Gerald at the examination, nothing appeared to him more easy; he was pleased to think I had more talent than my brother, and talent, according to his creed, was the only master-key to unlock every science. A problem in Euclid or a phrase in Pindar, a secret in astronomy or a knotty passage in the Fathers, were all riddles, with the solution of which application had nothing to do. One's mother-wit was a precious sort of necromancy, which could pierce every mystery at first sight; and all the gifts of knowledge, in his ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seeing no consequence which could be drawn from them, was just as willing to admit them as not; but his premises once admitted, the demonstration, however distant, followed as certainly, as cogently, as inevitably, as any demonstration in Euclid. ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... Try to separate from the mass of their statements that which is common to Socrates, Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, Bunyan—yes, and George Eliot: of course you do not believe that this something could be written down in a set of propositions like Euclid, neither will you deny that there is something common, and this something very valuable.... I shall be sorry if the boys ever give a moment's thought to the question of what community they belong to—I hope they will belong to the great community." I should ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Covent Garden was a mathematical problem over which Euclid would have shed bitter tears and hastily retired to his arbors and citron tables. Thirty years previous (to the thirteenth of May, not Euclid) some benighted beggar invented the Chinese puzzle; and tonight, many a frantic policeman would have preferred ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... effected in the stomach; that the eye is the organ of sight; that the jaws of a vertebrated animal never open sideways, but always up and down; while those of an annulose animal always open sideways, and never up and down—I am enumerating propositions which are as exact as anything in Euclid. How then has this notion of the inexactness of Biological science come about? I believe from two causes: first, because in consequence of the great complexity of the science and the multitude of interfering conditions, we are very often only enabled to predict approximately ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... very numerous. The most important are:—Euclid's Elements; Euclid's Data; Optical Lectures, read in the public school of Cambridge; Thirteen Geometrical Lectures; The Works of Archimedes, the Four Books of Apollonius's Conic Sections, and Theodosius's Spherics, explained in a New Method; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the use of sound in the vituperation, and having to deal with an ignorant scold, determined to overcome her in volubility, by using all the sesquipedalia verba which occur in Euclid. With these, and a few significant epithets, and a scoffing, impudent demeanor, he had for once imposed ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... necessary as a business qualification. I recalled the fact that one of the best business men, in a mediocre station of life, whom I had ever known, could not write his own name and his wife had to count his money for him. So I threw away my Euclid and tried something else; but I would voluntarily tire of each study in a little while, or drop it at the counter-suggestion of some friend. Thus I changed from one course to another as a weather-cock is veered by the ever-changing ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... harsh-tempered or unkind man—quite the contrary, but he thought Tom a stupid boy, and determined to develop his powers through Latin grammar and Euclid to the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the will of my Father'; that man, and that man alone, feels no pressure that is pain from the incumbency of the necessity that blessedly rules His life. When 'I will' and 'I choose' coincide, like two of Euclid's triangles atop of one another, line for line and angle for angle, then comes liberty into the life. He that can say, not with a knitted brow and an unwilling ducking of his head to the yoke, 'I must do it,' but can ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... did not succeed in obtaining the post but, had he done so, he "would have made," so Froude his biographer thinks, "the school of Astronomy at Edinburgh famous throughout Europe."[16] When fifty-two, Carlyle said that "the man who had mastered the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he had done before."[17] I may cap this with some words of Emerson, who in much of his thought resembled Carlyle: "What hours of melancholy my mathematical works cost! It was long before I learned that ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... any of the definitions laid down as premises in Euclid's Elements; the definition, let us say, of a circle. This, being analyzed, consists of two propositions; the one an assumption with respect to a matter of fact, the other a genuine definition. "A figure may exist, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... convinced by much experiment How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies, I give thanks For a new relish, careless to inquire My pleasure's pedigree, if so it please, Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art. The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness, Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, 250 The one thing finished in this hasty world, Forever finished, though the barbarous pit, Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout As if a miracle could be encored. But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the end of his twenty-first year he spent all his time between Pavia and Milan. By this date he had made sufficiently good use of his time to let the world see of what metal he was formed, for in the year following he had advanced far enough in learning to dispute in public, to teach Euclid in the Gymnasium, and to take occasional classes in Dialectics and Elementary Philosophy. At the end of his twenty-second year the country was convulsed by the wars between the Spaniards and the French under Lautrec, which ended in the expulsion of the last-named and ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Read papers, etc. Finished Blair's Dissertation on Ossian. Finished Trachiniae. Did 3 props. of Euclid. Question: Was deposition of Richard II. justifiable? Voted no. Good debate. Finished the delightful ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... had received under Count Platen now proved very serviceable. He passed the examination with great distinction, and in the course of it, to the surprise of the examiners, showed that he could repeat Euclid verbatim,—not by the exercise of the memory, which in Ericsson is not remarkably retentive, but from his perfect mastery of geometrical science. There is no doubt that it is this thorough knowledge of geometry to which he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "I were to show you a proposition of Euclid which you had never seen before, and say to you, 'Now, Davie, this is one of the most beautiful of all Euclid's propositions, and you must immediately admire it, and admire Euclid for constructing it!'—what ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt. Presently returning, less the pattens (and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short), she set the kettle on the fire. In doing which she ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... to note and learn and remember in those days! A bit of moss with that curiously measured angular cut in it, as if the wood folk had taken to studying Euclid,—how wonderful it was at first! The deer had been here; his foot drew that sharp triangle; and I must measure and feel it carefully, and press aside the moss, and study the leaves, to know whether it were my big buck or no, and how long since he had passed, and whether ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... then had Grace—many a mathematical schoolmaster, to whom Euclid was no longer a mystery, became, for her sake, puzzled in the problem of love, and earnestly besought her to solve the question he gave, with the simple statement of yes. But still her heart was adamant, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... than in form, the old manuscript begins by telling of the number of unemployed in early days and the necessity of finding work, "that they myght gete there lyvyngs therby." Euclid was consulted, and recommended the "onest craft of good masonry," and the origin of the order is found "yn Egypte lande." Then, by a quick shift, we are landed in England "yn tyme of good Kinge Adelstonus day," who is ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of him to what had its first existence inside him—that is, in his mind, made it far easier for him to understand the relations of things that go to make up a science. A boy who could put a box together must find Euclid easier—the Second Book particularly—than one who had no idea of the practical relations of the boundaries of spaces; one who could contrive a machine like his water-wheel, must be able to understand the interdependence of the parts of a ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... journey that a spotted fly-catcher, sitting on a gatepost, made a Euclid figure at her in midair as she passed. She had not power to fight the bird's beak, and her poison-dagger was useless here; nor do fly-catchers often miss. This, however, was an occasion when one of them did—by an eighth of an inch—and ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... would praise the man,— Nor one whit more, if he contended That gift of his, from God descended. Ah friend, what gift of man's does not? No nearer something, by a jot, Rise an infinity of nothings Than one: take Euclid for your teacher: Distinguish kinds: do crownings, clothings, Make that creator which was creature? Multiply gifts upon man's head, And what, when all's done, shall be said But—the more gifted he, I ween! That one's made Christ, this other, Pilate, And this might be all that ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of home-making I have set down in my mind certain first principles, like the axioms of Euclid, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... being told it was comedy, and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow. Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and morals, for he had read AEsop; he had a wonderful disposition to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid that were read to him in play, and he would make lines and demonstrate them. As to his piety, astonishing were his applications of Scripture upon occasion, and thus early, he understood ye historical part of ye Bible and New Testament to a wonder, how Christ came ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... I have not learned what would qualify me to instruct girls. But I do thoroughly understand bookkeeping, write a good hand, have gone through Euclid, and know as much of the classics as nine out of ten young men in my rank of life. But my uncle cared very little for the classics. I know a good deal of chemistry and mineralogy, but uncle was most pleased ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... school, like Xenophanes. He did not bequeath a system of doctrines; he rather attempted to awaken inquiry, for which his method was admirably adapted. He had his admirers, who followed in the path which he suggested. Among these were Aristippus, Antisthenes, Euclid of Megara, Phaedo of Elis, and Plato, all of whom were disciples of Socrates, and founders of schools. Some only partially adopted his method, and all differed from each other. Nor can it be said that all of them advanced science. Aristippus, the founder of the Cyreniac School, was ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... It looks as if she had carried it about, as another little girl might have carried a doll. She soon displayed a remarkable memory, and great quickness of apprehension. When she was quite a young child, she learned with facility several of the problems of Euclid. As she grew older, she acquired the French, Italian, and German languages; became a clever pianoforte player; and showed a true taste and sentiment in drawing. But, as soon as she had completely vanquished the difficulties of any one branch ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... the same method that boys are trained in. Boys must study and work in a boy's way, and girls in a girl's way. They may study the same books, and attain an equal result, but should not follow the same method. Mary can master Virgil and Euclid as well as George; but both will be dwarfed,—defrauded of their rightful attainment,—if both are confined to the same methods. It is said that Elena Cornaro, the accomplished professor of six languages, whose statue adorns and honors Padua, was educated like a boy. This means ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... with all the deference that is due to the judgment of so great a man, is not so properly a definition of wit as of good writing in general. Wit, as he defines it, is "a propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the subject." If this be a true definition of wit, I am apt to think that Euclid was the greatest wit that ever set pen to paper. It is certain there never was a greater propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the subject than what that author has made use of in his Elements. I shall only appeal to my reader if this definition agrees with any ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... color, harmony, and form, and actually seeing the external world about a fulcrum which sustains one's own aesthetical creation. In the mind of one who "learns the things of others" we may find, as in a sack of old clothes hanging over the shoulders of a hawker, solutions of the problems of Euclid, together with the images of Raphael's works, ideas of history and geography, and rules of style, huddled together with a like indifference and a like sensation of "weight." While, on the other hand, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... not a Taste for this Elevation of Stile, and are apt to ridicule a Poet when he departs from the common Forms of Expression, would do well to see how Aristotle has treated an Ancient Author called Euclid, [8] for his insipid Mirth upon this Occasion. Mr. Dryden used to call [these [9]]sort of Men ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... is overruled, because of a recent accident in which one had been upset, and it is determined that a Spanish palfrey of easy paces shall be provided for Sidonius. At six supper is served; and then the curtain falls, the letter relapsing into normal matters—inquiries for a Euclid, regrets at being unable to send to Pancratius Hyginus ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... to claim that we are in possession of a "given" with ultimate and indisputable authority; it is another to convince men that we really do possess it. Locke's efforts at deduction fall lamentably short of the model set by Euclid. "Professor Sidgwick's well-known moral axiom, 'I ought not to prefer my own lesser good to the greater good of another,' would," writes Westermarck, [Footnote: Op. cit., Volume I, chapter i, p. 12.] "if explained to a Fuegian or a Hottentot, be regarded by him, not as self-evident, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the principles of music and drawing, Galileo found it necessary to acquire some knowledge of geometry. His father seems to have foreseen the consequences of following this new pursuit, and though he did not prohibit him from reading Euclid under Ostilio Ricci, one of the professors at Pisa, yet he watched his progress with the utmost jealousy, and had resolved that it should not interfere with his medical studies. The demonstrations, however, of the Greek mathematician had too many charms for the ardent mind of Galileo. ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... subject, we should be inclined to think the Psalms of David especially witty, and to agree with the pretentious young lady who, being asked what she thought of Euclid, replied at a hazard that "It was the wittiest book she had ever read." But it seems probable from other passages in Pope's works that he did not here intend to give a full definition, but only some characteristics. Moreover, in former ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... their principles of action. Even when we have general propositions we need not use them. Thus Dugald Stewart showed that the axioms need not be expressly adverted to in order to make good the demonstrations in Euclid; though he held, inconsistently, that the definitions must be. All general propositions, whether called axioms, or definitions, or laws of nature, are merely abridged statements of the particular facts, which, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... curious almanac are Latin and French enigmas, mathematical questions and paradoxes. The concluding paragraph for the dedication of that day is entitled "Truth's Moral Euclid"; the ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... stuff themselves with knowledge in order to pass a particular examination, or to gain a particular honor, and who afterwards forget their knowledge, as fast as they have acquired it. There is a well authenticated instance of a student who actually learned the six books of Euclid by heart, though he could not tell the difference between an angle and a triangle. The memory of such men is quickened like that of the parrot. They learn purely by rote. Real mental attention, the true digester of knowledge, is never roused. The knowledge which they gorge, is never ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... been judiciously explained, but I could not penetrate them without aid. At length I caught a glimpse of the principle of decimals. I thought I had made a discovery as confidently as Pythagoras did when he demonstrated the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid. I was proportionately annoyed when I afterwards discovered that I had been anticipated in finding out that 'a decimal is a fraction whose denominator is a unit with as many ciphers annexed as the numerator has places,' or rather ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... result. Brooding over this disappointment, the idea of trying solid figures suddenly strikes him. "What have plane figures to do with the celestial orbits?" he cries out; "inscribe the regular solids." And then—brilliant idea—he remembers that there are but five. Euclid had shown that there could be only five regular solids.[4] The number evidently corresponds to the gaps between the six planets. The reason of there being only six seems to be attained. This coincidence assures him he is ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... a loaf, sallied out himself into the town and purchased a small and very cheap quantity of groceries. With these he returned in triumph to his rooms, and, with the utmost satisfaction, partook of his first college meal, with a Euclid open on the ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... theologians, we don't expect it, and have no right to. You don't give each other any quarter. I have had two religious books sent me by friends within a week or two. One is Mr. Brownson's; he is as fair and square as Euclid; a real honest, strong thinker, and one that knows what he is talking about,—for he has tried all sorts of religions, pretty much. He tells us that the Roman Catholic Church is the one 'through which alone we can hope for heaven.' The other is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Pastorals mostly may have Actions, nay, and Unity of Action; yet are they Actions no more proper for a Poem, than a Proposition of Euclid, turn'd into Verse, would be. There is nothing, (not even the telling how the Sow and Pigs swallow'd their Wash, and fought the while,) but might be call'd one Action, with a Beginning, Middle and End. So that 'tis nothing to have unity of Fable, if ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... signification constitutes the most solemn part of his instruction, presupposes an acquaintance at least with the art of reading. And the Master Mason is expressly told in the explanation of the forty-seventh problem of Euclid, as one of the symbols of the third degree, that it was introduced into Masonry to teach the Brethren the value of the arts and sciences, and that the Mason, like the discoverer of the problem, our ancient Brother Pythagoras, should be a diligent ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid is unanimously ascribed to him by the ancients. Dr. Wotton, in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, says, "It is indeed a very noble proposition, the foundation of trigonometry, of universal and various use in those curious ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip can blether to his ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... as a romance, and as reliable as a proposition of Euclid. Clio never had a more faithful disciple. We advise every reader whose means will permit to become the owner of these fascinating volumes, assuring him that he will never regret the investment.—Christian Intelligencer, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... labour, which, to all appearance, could only rank him among compilers and reviewers, for his work is formed of such materials as they might use. He had never studied any science; he confessed that he could never demonstrate the first problem in Euclid, and to his last day ridiculed that sort of evidence called mathematical demonstration. He had but little taste for classical learning, for he quotes the Latin writers curiously, not elegantly; and there is reason to suspect ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... a one through the tangled maze of Euclid problems and their like, and when John walked along by his side in ease and pleasure, Mr. Dayton was delighted; and when he came to see ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... from the horizon to the point overhead. In an observatory set exactly in this position, some of the calculations or geometrical constructions, as the case may be, involved in astronomical problems, are considerably simplified. The first problem in Euclid, for example, by which a triangle of three equal sides is made, affords the means of drawing the proper angle at which the mid-day sun in spring or autumn is raised above the horizon, and at which the pole of the heavens is removed from the point overhead. Relations ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... better send them home, or send them anywhere,' said the colonel; 'and give his attention to Sophocles and Euclid. Light poetry does not amount to anything; it is worse than waste ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... extraordinary behavior. "It was thus with" Abraham. "The manner in which Abraham made progress in penmanship, writing on slabs and trees, on the ground and in the snow, anywhere that he could find a place, reminds us forcibly of Pascal, who demonstrated the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid in his boyhood, without the aid of a teacher." We not only are not forcibly reminded of Pascal, but we are not reminded of Pascal at all. The boy who imitates on slabs mechanical lines which he has been taught, and he who originates mathematical problems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... any phenomenon can be accounted for—design or chance; what is not purposed must be accidental. Does, then, nature impress us as the outcome of chance? If we saw a faultlessly executed mathematical diagram illustrating a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... difficulties, none of which escaped me, traced as many lines upon my forehead as if I had been commanded to solve at once all the propositions in Euclid. She shall love me! these words flashed unceasingly before my eyes; but the means to attain this end? No satisfactory plan came to me. Women are so capricious, deep, and unfathomable! It is, with them, the thing soonest done which is ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... canonicals, as a divine of the Church of England. Never have I heard religious discourses better adapted to an audience of men, who, like sailors, are chiefly, if not only, to be moved by the plainest of precepts, and demonstrations of the misery of sin, as conclusive and undeniable as those of Euclid. No mere rhetoric avails with such men; fine periods are vanity. You can not touch them with tropes. They need to be pressed ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... am well, father," said Tom; "I wish you'd ask Mr. Stelling not to let me do Euclid—it brings on the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Pisa for the summer months—for it was then a seaside place—and among the suite was Ostillio Ricci, a distinguished mathematician and old friend of the Galileo family. The youth visited him, and one day, it is said, heard a lesson in Euclid being given by Ricci to the pages while he stood outside the door entranced. Anyhow, he implored Ricci to help him into some knowledge of mathematics, and the old man willingly consented. So he mastered Euclid, and passed on to Archimedes, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... affectionate. Lave us laugh an' sing th' octopus out iv existence. Betther blue but smilin' lips anny time thin a full coal scuttle an' a sour heart. As Hogan says, a happy peasanthry is th' hope iv th' state. So lave us warble ti-lire-a-lay—' Jus' thin Euclid Aristophanes Madden on th' quarther deck iv th' throlley car give a twisht to his brake an' th' chief ixicutive iv th' nation wint up in th' air with th' song on his lips. He wint up forty, some say, fifty feet. Sicrety Cortilloo says ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... of the focus and state that the long waves have to pass through the epicenter or some such spot underground. Anyway, all the brass agrees that something is going on in inner space not according to Hoyle or Euclid or anybody else and that we three characters might just hit on ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious admirer of Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... ballroom of the Hotel Taftoftia, during Christmas week, William K. Spriggs, Ph.D., held a number of fashionable audiences spellbound with his marvellously lucid dances in Euclid and Algebra up to Quadratics. Perhaps the very acme of the Terpsichorean art was attained in the masterly fluency of body and limbs with which Mr. Spriggs demonstrated that the sum of the angles in any triangle is equal to two right ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... agree? Surely, yes. There is a difference between the germ and the unfolded flower. There is a difference between principles and the complete development of these. I suppose you may say that all Euclid is in the axioms and definitions. I suppose you may also say that when you have learned the axioms and definitions, there are many things yet to be said, of which you have not grown to the apprehension. And so ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the political movement in literature, have been shown to be less those of a jurisconsult than of a geometer.[211] Social truths, with all their profound complexity, were handled like propositions in Euclid, and logical deductions from arbitrary premises were treated as accurate representations of real circumstance. The repulse of geometry to its proper ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... bitterly, and again and again answered them in his writings. "I have been in my time pretty well master of five languages," he says in one place. "I have also, illiterate though I am, made a little progress in science. I have read Euclid's Elements. . . . I have read logic. . . . I went some length in physics. . . . I thought myself master of geography and to possess sufficient skill in astronomy." Yet he says I am ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Evan exaggerated matters. Everyone who is homesick paints home in beautiful colors and daubs every other place with mud-grey. He forgot lamplight hours when he had wrested groans from Virgil and provoked the shade of Euclid, and remembered only the good old friends and the favorite studies of school-days. He did not know that Time would bring familiarity with bank routine and that he would learn to like the brainless labors of a clerk. He only knew that he felt hungry, empty; that he had given ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen |
