"Infinitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fruit, which is now maturing, produces a large number of good and plump seed; perhaps you may have seen the ripe capsules of other Vandeae, and may be able to form some conjecture what it ought to produce. In the young, unfertilised ovaria of many Vandeae there seemed an infinitude of ovules. In desperation it occurs to me as just possible, as almost everything in nature goes by gradation, that a properly male flower might occasionally produce a few seeds, in the same manner as female plants sometimes produce a little ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... that the idea of any portion of space where it is not is inconceivable. It is one of those intuitive perceptions from which the human mind can never get away that this primordial, all-generating living spirit must be commensurate with infinitude, and we can therefore never think of it otherwise than as universal or infinite. Now it is a mathematical truth that the infinite must be a unity. You cannot have two infinites, for then neither would be infinite, each would be limited by the other, nor can you ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... people present a little good, undefinable as the faint influences of starlight, to sit under that "high embowed roof," within that vast artistic isolation, through whose mighty limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to feel the awful infinitude of the parent space out of which it is scooped. I dare also say that the tones of the mellow old organ spoke to something in many of the listeners that lay deeper far than the plummet of their self-knowledge had ever sounded. I think also that the prayers, the reading of which, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... vultures that hover about in long, sailing, steady circles. What multitudes of vultures there are. Overhead, far up in the liquid ether, you see them circling round and round like dim specks in the distance; farther and farther away, till they seem like bees, then lessen and fade into the infinitude of space. No part of the sky is ever free from their presence. When a kill has been perceived, you see one come flying along, strong and swift in headlong flight. With the directness of a thunderbolt he speeds to where his ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass—an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point—there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... judgment in choosing and in eliminating and by skill and ingenuity to substitute a complete harmony for her incomplete and unsatisfactory reality. But everywhere Nature is the great teacher, for her world is full of an everchanging infinitude of expressions of light. Mankind needs only to study these with an attuned sensibility to be able eventually to play the music of light for those who are ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... dark street the lights of the Bridge flashed suddenly upon them, swung in high festoons across an infinitude of night. Above, a few majestic stars, new coined, gleamed in ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... soul struggles toward the light, toward God, and the Infinite. It is especially so in its afflictions. Words go but a little way into the depths of sorrow. The thoughts that writhe there in silence, that go into the stillness of Infinitude and Eternity, have no emblems. Thoughts enough come there, such as no tongue ever uttered. They do not so much want human sympathy, as higher help. There is a loneliness in deep sorrow which the Deity alone can relieve. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... question in a tone the intensity of which forced her to lift her eyes to his. Molly did not see the glance, for the infinitude of her own experiences led her to find the moment favorable for gazing out of the window in a sort of rapt admiration for the Insel rose-bushes in the foreground and ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... shadow of death from them to an uncertain, but always narrow, distance, never takes away from them their intuition of its approach; the extending to them of a few hours more or less of light abates not their acknowledgment of the infinitude that must remain to be known beyond their knowledge,—done beyond their deeds: the unprofitableness of their momentary service is wrought in a magnificent despair, and their very honour is bequeathed by them for the joy of others, as they lie down ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... effects, the infinitude of change, is something not to be believed by any who has not seen it. No view that I am acquainted with in the world is at all comparable to this for delicacy, charm, exquisiteness, dainty coloring, and bewildering rapidity ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... calm awes me with its awful stillness. No anxious doubts or fears disturb my breast; I only ask some little wave of language, To stir this vast infinitude of rest. ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... would have been So far reduced by breakings in old days That from them nothing could, at season fixed, Be born, and arrive its prime and top of life. For, lo, each thing is quicker marred than made; And so whate'er the long infinitude Of days and all fore-passed time would now By this have broken and ruined and dissolved, That same could ne'er in all remaining time Be builded up for plenishing the world. But mark: infallibly a fixed bound Remaineth stablished ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... and in the original, all the books of all nations and ages, criticising, as we go along, both originals and criticisms. Every subject, said Burke—we remember his remark, though not the very words—branches out into infinitude. The point of view draws a horizon—the goal determines a track. "The British Critics" themselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... without the aid of another, if they appreciated the tremendous power for good of concentrated mental delineation of the ideal. By such exercises of mind, a wholesome environment can be built up, even if at first the process seems almost mechanical. But instead of such self-building, out of an infinitude of divine material, the average man is inclined to vacate the control of his being, put his body into the keeping of his doctor, and his soul [himself] into the care of his ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... to think kindly," replied Felix, "you were spoken to yesterday about the state of my soul. Those who read it so fluently know more than I do about my inner being, for, during the last few days I have felt strange, inexplicable feelings within me. Never have I doubted God, but, in contact with that infinitude where he has permitted my thought to follow the traces of his work I seem to have gathered a sense of him less vague, more immediate; and this has led me to ask myself whether an honest and upright life is the only homage ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... comes, and the shade of leafage falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal to the fancy of man, or provision for his service; cold juice, or flowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm; and all ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... is committed against an infinite Being. Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil! I was aghast that I could have believed it. Now that it was no longer laid upon me as a duty to uphold the infinitude of God's retaliation on sin, I saw that it was an immorality to teach that sin was measured by anything else than the heart and will of the agent. That a finite being should deserve infinite punishment, now was manifestly as incredible as that he should deserve ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... not betray; the fear that we may not be understood, and the boundless joy of being so; the hesitations of the soul which recoils upon itself, and the magnetic propulsions which give to the eyes an infinitude of shades; the promptings to suicide caused by a word, dispelled by an intonation; trembling glances which veil an inward daring; sudden desires to speak and act that are paralyzed by their own violence; ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... is a wonderful and a merciful word. It indicates the infinitude of Christ's patient forgiveness and perseverance. We tire of searching. 'Can a mother forget' or abandon her seeking after a lost child? Yes! if it has gone on for so long as to show that further search is hopeless, she will go home and nurse her sorrow in her heart. Or, perhaps, like ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... than he was surrounded by a crowd of courtiers who had been awaiting him, and was fain to proceed to the work of issuing the orders connected with his post, or to receive respects, communications, solicitations, presentations, recommendations, embraces—to observe that infinitude of relations which surround a favorite, and which require constant and sustained attention, for any absence of mind might cause great misfortunes. He thus almost forgot the trifling circumstance which had made him uneasy, and which he thought might after ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... "there remains in God something unknown, impenetrable, incomprehensible. Hence, in the immeasurable spaces of the universe, and beneath all the profundities of the human soul, God escapes us in this inexhaustible infinitude, whence he is able to draw without limit new worlds, new beings, new manifestations. God is therefore to us incomprehensible."[110] And without making ourselves in the least responsible for Hamilton's "negative" doctrine of the Infinite, or even responsible for the full import of his ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... none shall ever know that royalty For what it is till he has realized His best friend in himself. 'T is then, perforce, That man's unfettered faith indemnifies Of its own conscious freedom the old shame, And love's revealed infinitude supplants Of its own wealth ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... few moments in silence, his countenance assumed an indefinable expression, and seemed to read in the countenance of the young girl an infinitude of memories and dreams. Finally, completely carried away by a feeling he could not control, he folded Aminta in his arms and clasped her to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... search of the squire, who retreating among the surrounding damsels, made sad havoc among them, scarcely leaving a pretty pair of lips unvisited. Oh Nicholas! Nicholas! I am thoroughly ashamed of you, and regret becoming your historian. You get me into an infinitude of scrapes. But there is a rod in pickle for you, sir, which shall be used with good effect presently. Tired of such an unprofitable quest, Dame Tetlow came to a sudden halt, addressed the piper as Nicholas had addressed him, and receiving a like answer, summoned ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... done with telling me her news. It has rebuked me, it has aroused and comforted me. Objections of all kinds I might make, how many objections to superficies and detail, to a dialect of thought and speech as yet imperfect enough, a hundred-fold too narrow for the Infinitude it strives to speak: but what were all that? It is an Infinitude, the real vision and belief of one, seen face to face: a "voice of the heart of Nature" is here once more. This is the one fact for ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... speak alike of mightier energy, Received and pass'd along. The life that flows Through space and time, bursts in a loftier source. What's spaced and timed is bounded, therefore shows A power beyond, a timeless, spaceless force, Templed in that infinitude, before Whose light-veil'd ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... his life Ramel remarked that there were some lips that were more desirable, more smiling than others, that there was hair in which it must be delicious to bury the fingers like in fine silk, and which it must be delightful to kiss, and that there were eyes which contained an infinitude of caresses, and he had spelled right through the eclogue, which at length revealed true happiness to him, and he had had a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to his fellow-creatures one smallest glimpse of the glory of what he saw, his ardour was so emboldened by help of the very mystery at whose sight he must have perished had he faltered, that his eyes, unblasted, attained to a perception of the Sum of Infinitude. He beheld, concentrated in one spot—written in one volume of Love—all which is diffused, and can become the subject of thought and study throughout the universe—all substance and accident and mode—all so compounded that they become one light. ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Revolution, was an avowed and most reckless Atheist;[129] yet he ascribes to Nature most of the attributes which are usually supposed to belong to God, such as self-existence, eternity, immutability, infinitude, and unity; and if the intellectual and moral attributes may seem to be omitted, as they must be, to some extent, in any system of Atheism, yet thought, design, and will, are expressly ascribed to Nature.[130] And the only difference between the Theist and the Atheist is said ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the last century; and there is scarcely one which is not thoroughly tainted by the artifices which have over-run our writings in metre since the days of Dryden and Pope. Energy, stillness, grandeur, tenderness, those feelings which are the pure emanations of Nature, those thoughts which have the infinitude of truth, and those expressions which are not what the garb is to the body but what the body is to the soul, themselves a constituent part and power or function in the thought—all these are abandoned for their opposites,—as ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind. In so far as we are mere spectators and connoisseurs ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... soul have been prepared, the next step is concentration, aspiration. Then it is borne in upon the poet that in the infinite and in the eternal alone can we find rest, can we find ourselves; and towards this infinitude we must ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... fill us with serious thought, even in our times of quietness and peace. I understand not the most dangerous, because most attractive form of modern infidelity, which, pretending to exalt the beneficence of the Deity, degrades it into a reckless infinitude of mercy, and blind obliteration of the work of sin; and which does this chiefly by dwelling on the manifold appearances of God's kindness on the face of creation. Such kindness is indeed everywhere and always visible; but ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the moment all the other elements in his character—those baser, vainer, weaker elements that she knew so well. The change in him was a measure of the smallness of her own past influence upon him; of the infinitude of her own self-deception. Her sharp intelligence drew the inference at once, and bade her pride ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... worn philosopher To your bare peaks and radiant loneliness Escape, and breathe once more The wind of the Eternal: that clear mood, Which Nature and the elder ages bore, Lends them new courage and a second prime, At rest upon the cool infinitude Of Space and Time. ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... contradict themselves; in the idea of the race they perfectly agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures;—God become man; the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude: it is the child of the visible mother and the invisible father, Nature and Spirit: it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... imagination, for several nights he had hardly slept. No sooner had he lain down in darkness than every form of mortal anguish beset his thoughts, passing before him as though some hand unfolded a pictured scroll of life's terrors. He seemed never before to have realised the infinitude of human suffering. Hour after hour, with brief intervals of semi-oblivion, from which his mind awoke in nameless horror, he travelled from land to land, from age to age; at one moment picturing some dread incident of a thousand years ago; the next, beholding with intolerable vividness ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the Prussian soldier yield; though sometimes, like the mastiff galled by inroad of distracted weasels in too great quantity, he may have his own difficulties. Witness Colonel Retzow and the Magazine at Pardubitz ("daybreak, May 24th") VERSUS the infinitude of sudden Tolpatchery, bursting from the woods; rabid enough for many hours, but ineffectual, upon Pardubitz and Retzow. A distinguished Colonel this; of whom we shall hear again. Whose style of Narrative (modest, clear, grave, brief), much more, whose ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... are in a manner associated, or have a sort of natural affinity. If such be its tendency, what moral responsibility rests upon the man who shall recommend it, either by professional advice, or by his own example! What an infinitude of moral evil must follow in its train, if drunkenness be its legitimate effect! What woes, what sorrows, what wounds without cause, may spring into existence at your bidding, when you prescribe the habitual use of this baneful plant! By such a prescription ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... especially perplexed him to find, in spite of himself, that his cell was small, whereas, when viewed by the eye of faith, he ought to consider it immense, because the infinitude of God ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... "conception," of the "spiritual faculty" to "the degraded types,"—that for unnumbered ages—for aught we know, myriads of ages—man has been slowly crawling up, a very sloth in "progress" (poor beast!), from the lowest Fetichism to Polytheism,—from Polytheism, in all its infinitude of degrading forms, to imperfect forms of Monotheism; and how small a portion of the race have even imperfectly reached this last term, let the spectacle of the world's religions at the present moment proclaim! From the more imperfect forms of Monotheism, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... and in the same quantities as at present. In short, the meteorological conditions thousands of miles off, on all sides, would be more or less revolutionized. Thus, without taking into account the infinitude of modifications which these changes would produce upon the flora and fauna, both of land and sea, the reader will perceive the immense heterogeneity of the results wrought out by one force, when that force expends itself upon a previously complicated ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... cavaliers, (there was war at that time between the glorious empire of Fairydom and the weak and infatuated republic of Elfland on its southern borders, and the epaulette and spurs were the only pass to the hearts of the fair,) imbuing them with an infinitude of prismatic hues, all softened into a kind of timed starlight, exquisite as the dying voice of music. In this gorgeous saloon, at the head of which sat, well pleased, the benevolent old King Paterflor and his modest and still lovely ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... that it goes from bad to worse; for it is to be remarked, that when we first enter a degree, there clings to us much that we have brought in with us, and at the end we already begin to feel symptoms of that which is to come. It is also noticeable that each degree contains within it an infinitude of others. ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... as I can see, there is no quality in the human intellect which is fit to be applied to the solution of the problem. It entirely transcends us. The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence. The phenomena of matter and force lie within our intellectual range, and as far as they reach we will at all hazards push our enquiries. But behind, and above, and around all, the real mystery of this universe lies unsolved, and, as far as we are concerned, is incapable of solution. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Which seeks to surge and join with the answering sea in the other individual. When the sea of individual blood which I am at that hour heaves and finds its pure contact with the sea of individual blood which is the woman at that hour, then each of us enters into the wholeness of our deeper infinitude, our profound fullness of being, in the ocean of our ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... exchange his pictures, however good, for windows through which he could see the scenes themselves. This does not quite meet the point, for it may be only a preference of quantity to quality. The window gives an infinitude of pictures; the painter, whatever his merit, but one. A fair comparison would be to place by the side of the Turner drawing a photograph of the scene, which we will suppose taken at the most favorable moment, and complete in color as well as light and shade. Whoever should then prefer the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... each in turn speedily examined, realised, and, so to speak, exhausted; and this once done, there was no greater occupation to the mind in the continuance of strange than in that of familiar scenery. The infinitude of surrounding blackness, filled as it were with points of light more or less brilliant, when once its effects had been scrutinised, and when nothing more remained to be noted, afforded certainly a more agreeable, but scarcely a more interesting or absorbing, outlook ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... considering it in its Niceties of Anatomy, lets us see how absolutely necessary Labour is for the right Preservation of it. There must be frequent Motions and Agitations, to mix, digest, and separate the Juices contained in it, as well as to clear and cleanse that Infinitude of Pipes and Strainers of which it is composed, and to give their solid Parts a more firm and lasting Tone. Labour or Exercise ferments the Humours, casts them into their proper Channels, throws off Redundancies, and helps Nature ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... faithful yet for all, my brave bright peer, In that rare light you hold so true and good; And find me something clearer than the clear White spaces of Infinitude. ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... concentration of his mental powers he acquired a thorough and accurate knowledge of the country from the Frozen Ocean to the frontiers of Persia and China, and of all its manners and customs. The prisoner who meditates escape, he says, is absorbed in an infinitude of details and calculations, of which it is only possible to give the final result. Slowly and painfully, little by little, he accumulated the indispensable articles—disguise, money, food, a weapon, passports. The last were the most ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... considering it in its niceties of anatomy, lets us see how absolutely necessary labour is for the right preservation of it. There must be frequent motions and agitations, to mix, digest, and separate the juices contained in it, as well as to clear and cleanse that infinitude of pipes and strainers of which it is composed, and to give their solid parts a more firm and lasting tone. Labour or exercise ferments the humours, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... never imprest the imagination more than when approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless lights flaring, as Tennyson says, "like a dreary dawn." The most impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks, quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a province of brick and stone. Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or of the Monument can anything like a view of the city as ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... begins again with a low, liquid monotone, mounting by degrees and swelling into an infinitude of melody—the whole grove dilating, as it were, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... ambitious and hungry greed of men for reputation or self-display. That desire is altogether ignoble and selfish when it is found in human hearts; and it would be none the less ignoble and selfish if it were magnified into infinitude, and transferred to the divine. But to say that God's glory is His great end, is surely but another way of saying that He is love. The love that seeks to bless us desires, as all love does, that it should ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... alone brings the heavens near, and reveals the brotherhood or sisterhood of worlds. It alone makes man at home in the universe, and shows us how many friendly powers wait upon him day and night. It alone shows him the glories and the wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellar infinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiar ground—we cannot get away ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... about us was the empty infinitude; the twilight desert swept by a great cold wind; the desert that rolled, in dull, dead colours, under a still more sombre sky which, on the circular horizon, seemed to fall on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... decrying it, I am sure that there is no one, even among those who make its study a profession, who does not confess that all that men know is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be known; and that we could be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us. (Descartes: Discourse on the Method, Philosophical Works. Translated ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... is never his final end. His aims are transcendental, his realm is art, his interests ideal, his life divine, his destiny immortal. All the old theories of saintship are revived in him. He is in the world, but not of it. Shadows of infinitude are his realities. He sees only the starry universe, and the radiant depths of the soul. Martyrdom may desolate, but cannot terrify him. If he be a genius, if his soul crave only his idea, and his body fare unconsciously well on bread ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... shore, no rocks of thought against which to break in speech. He sat down on the topmost point; and slowly, in the silence and the loneliness, from the unknown fountains of the eternal consciousness, the heart of the child filled. Above him towered infinitude, immensity, potent on his mind through shape to his eye in a soaring dome of blue—the one visible symbol informed and insouled of the eternal, to reveal itself thereby. In it, centre and life, lorded the great sun, beginning to cast shadows to the south and east from the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... mountains found an outlet in prolific literary output, and a system of art and ethics destined to leaven the mass of human thought, the infinitude and grandeur of mountain scenery had a dispersive effect on Javelle's mind. I can so well understand him. He wandered over the chain of Valais—my mountains (each worshipper has his special idols)—the Dent du Midi, the Vaudois Alps, and the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... and from which even the gods are not exempt, Schlegel well observes, "This power extends also to the world of gods— for the Grecian gods are mere powers of nature—and although immeasurably higher than mortal man, yet, compared with infinitude, they are on an equal footing with himself."—'Lectures on ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... serpent, extending its now harmless length from the ceiling to the floor—there an alligator, stuffed after the same fashion; and in various directions the skins of the beaver, the marten, the otter, and an infinitude of others of that genus, filled up spaces that were left unsupplied by the more ingenious specimens of Indian art. Head-dresses tastefully wrought in the shape of the crowning bays of the ancients, and composed of the gorgeous feathers of the most splendid ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... washin'." He didn't look at the clock, because they "didn't have one." He volunteered no explanations as to how he expected mother to know the time, but, perhaps, like many other mites of his kind, he had unbounded faith in the infinitude of a mother's wisdom. His name was Arvie Aspinall, please sir, and he lived in Jones's Alley. ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... gray universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... such and such latitudes and longitudes, but such descriptions convey to the mind only an idea which is quite vague and general. When we say that one hundred and fifty states like Connecticut, or twenty states like New York or Illinois, spread over that infinitude of peaks and ranges, would scarcely cover them, we gain a somewhat more adequate idea of their extent. But it is only by actually traversing this wilderness of hills and mountains, east and west, north and south, that we can more fully comprehend its extent ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... that it will probably be finished in 1633, but meanwhile asks him not to disclose the secret to his Parisian friends. Already anxieties appear as to the theological verdict upon two of his fundamental views—the infinitude of the universe, and the earth's rotation round the sun.[16] But towards the end of year 1633 we find him writing as follows:—"I had intended sending you my World as a New Year's gift, and a fortnight ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... doctrine of the extermination of an infinitude of connecting links between the living and extinct inhabitants of the world, and at each successive period between the extinct and still older species, why is not every geological formation charged with such links? Why does not every collection of fossil remains ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... little nearer her. She felt something as she had felt years ago when she had said to Dowie. "I want to kiss you, Dowie." Her eyes were pools of childish tenderness because she so well understood the infinitude of the friendly tact which drew her within its own circle with the light humour of its "I don't ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were alive! At Oxford indeed, owing to circumstances, I had felt some similar emotions. But that was a transient scene that quickly declined into stillness and calm: here I was told it was everlastingly the same! The mind delighted to revel in this abundance: it seemed an infinitude, where satiety, its most fatal and hated enemy, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... a night there came to Euler, As eager-eyed he stared upon a star, And fought the far infinitude, a toiler Like to himself and me, for things that are Buried from the eyes alone Of men whose sight is made of stone, And led him out in ecstasy, Over the dim boundary By the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Of usurpation, when the light of sense 600 Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours; whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; 605 With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. Under such banners militant, the soul Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... superior of two bone or money getters acquaints the inferior with the good points of a bad bargain. Buffon, at the beginning of his Natural History, is unable, even, to give any line of demarcation between vegetable and animal substances, and perplexes the mind with an infinitude of faulty attempts, in turn showing the weak spot in each. "For man ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... and concert, and which exactly counteracts its pulling power and influence, it would soon draw star to star, and world to world, crashing and heaping them together in ruinous and dire confusion. So that, instead of the infinitude of worlds which now exist, which flash and sparkle in the heavens, and in their intricate, elaborate, and mazy motions move through the vast infinity like stately armies on the march, there would only be one agglomeration of matter, a silent and solitary ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... hath parts extended in length and breadth, or whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole: and if it be infinite, it must be less in such part as is defined by a certain space, than in its infinitude; and so is not wholly every where, as Spirit, as God. And what that should be in us, by which we were like to God, and might be rightly said to be after the image of God, I ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... regarded as a breach of a treaty, or as a violation of respect and honor, must remain indefinite, since many and various injuries can easily accrue from the wide range of the interests of the States and from the complex relations of their citizens. The State may identify its infinitude and honor with every one of its single aspects. And if a State, as a strong individuality, has experienced an unduly protracted internal rest, it will naturally be more inclined to irritability, in order to find an occasion ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... exact, at the other we have the human subjects in which there is no exactitude. The science of society stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate human ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being. The sharply etched global outlines faded somewhat at the farthest edges; there I could see a mellow radiance, ever-undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the dry, sweet-smelling grass to the cliff edge on a fresh morning, with a deep blue sky overhead and a sea below of ultramarine broken up with an infinitude of surfaces reflecting scraps of the cliffs and the few white clouds. Falling on our knees, we look straight downwards into a cove full of blue shade; but so bright is the surrounding light that every detail is microscopically ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the air. But presently it ceases to grow. There is nothing infinite in its growth. And the long, hot years pass away and there it stands, never nearer to the infinite gold of the sun. But in the intense feeling of a man or woman is there not infinitude? Is there not a movement that is ceaseless till death comes to ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... infinitude of fearful adventures, the history of which would fill many columns of this newspaper, I finally arrived at the Seal Rock Point at a quarter to ten—two hours and a half out from San Francisco, and not less gratified than surprised that I ever got there at all—and anchored my noble Morgan to a boulder ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... is invented; we look again, and there are more and new stars—but, still farther on in the infinite depths, the blur of light. Higher and higher goes the power of telescope after telescope, but all that they reveal is a bewildering infinitude of more new stars—and beyond that again ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Spring, Sabbath descends from heaven unto earth; and are not their feet beautiful on the mountains? Small as is the voice of that tinkling bell from that humble spire, overtopped by its coeval trees, yet is it heard in the heart of infinitude. So is the bleating of these silly sheep on the braes—and so is that voice of psalms, all at once rising so spirit-like, as if the very kirk were animated, and singing a joyous song in the wilderness to the ear of the Most High. For all things are under his care—those that, as we dream, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... philosophy has ever explained this inexplicable mystery, for it cannot be understood by the embodied Soul, whose vision and comprehension are dulled by the grossness of its physical envelope. Even the illuminated Soul that quits its prison house, to bathe in the light of infinitude, can only recollect flashes of the Vision Glorious once ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... the Won't and Will, Yes, and that Doubt Infinitude might fill - It took nine Tailors once to make a Man; It took nine more to make him pay ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... feminine miseries. They hold Sir Charles Grandison in horror. What can be more contrary to their nature than a tranquil, perfect love? They want emotions; happiness without storms is not happiness to them. Women with souls that are strong enough to bring infinitude into love are angelic exceptions; they are among women what noble geniuses are among men. Their great passions are rare as masterpieces. Below the level of such love come compromises, conventions, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... which satisfies itself that in expressing the perfection of humanity, it unfolds divinity. The third era of Christian art, conscious that the divine lies beyond the human, fails in aspiring to express infinitude. ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... chiefly, in Great Britain and the colonies, who are sworn to secrecy, and of course communicate intelligence to this sacred congregation of all that can be conceived capable of comprehension within the infinitude of its affairs. We must, therefore, either believe that the court of Rome is not in earnest, and that this apparatus of universal jurisdiction is but a shadow,—an assumption which is contrary to all experience,—or we must understand that the spies ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... standing in rampant defence of his own brand-new coronet, emulative of the well-gilt lion which supports that miracle of ingenuity rather than research, his brightly emblazoned coat-of-arms; whose infinitude of charges and quarterings do honour to the inventive genius of the Herald's Office, and are enough to make the Rouge Dragon of three centuries ago claw out the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... with the eye of a devout seer, or even critic, but through a pair of mere anti-Catholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of infinitude, with suns for lamps and eternity as a background, whose author is God and whose purport leads to the throne of God, but a poor, wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... justice, and though He withdrew Himself from the sight and understanding of man, His image, He was nevertheless a living, thinking, moving Being, though His span of existence was eternity, His mind omniscience, His sphere of sovereignty infinitude. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... color in nature, broadly studied, leads us quickly to contemplate and adore the love of God. If God were the Almighty chiefly,—if he desired to impress us most with his omnipotence and infinitude, and make us bow with dread before him, how easily the world could have been made more somber, how easily our senses could have been created to receive impressions of the bleak vastness of space, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... the order of Science, unless that requirement should express the claims [10] of the divine Principle. Infinite Principle and infinite Spirit must be one. What avail, then, to quarrel over what is the person of Spirit,—if we recognize infinitude as personality,—for who can tell what is the form of infinity? When we understand man's true birthright, that [15] he is "born, not ... of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," we shall understand that man is the offspring of Spirit, and not of the flesh; recognize ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... and Ecuador on the west; and, successively, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, ending at last in the south with Patagonia, a cold arid land, bleak and desolate. I marked the littoral cities as we progressed on that side, where earth ends and the Pacific Ocean begins, and infinitude. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... arises not from the extent, but from the narrowness of our capacity, To aspire is our privilege, and a privilege which we are by no means slack to use, without considering that the operations of infinitude are even more incomprehensible in their minuteness than in their magnitude, and that, therefore, to be always looking from the minute towards the vast, is only a proof of the finite nature of our present capacity. The loftiest intellect may, without abasement, be employed ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... their treasure neither moth nor rust can corrupt; their jewel is imperishable. If she loves—He is looking in her eyes, holding to her his hands. Slowly the girl meets his glance. A long look, one long, silent look, infinitude in its assurance, its glow wrapping her, blue and smiling as heaven itself, reaching him like the evening star seen through tears,—a word, a touch, had profaned with a trait of earthliness so remote, so spiritual a betrothal. He goes, and still the upward-smiling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... creations: the entire prospect is studded over with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects—we borrow a larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky- way. Remembering what it was—what countless systems there swept space like a soft ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... seem to the wisest and greatest of men when brought into contact with the great things of God—that which they know is as nothing, and less than nothing, to the infinitude of which ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... from the living ray I met, That, if mine eyes had turn'd away, methinks, I had been lost; but, so embolden'd, on I pass'd, as I remember, till my view Hover'd the brink of dread infinitude. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... the more eloquent and spirited portion of a trenchant argument concerning—the revealed doctrine of a superior sex, the social evils of female domination, church-headships considered as to type and antitype, improper influences, necessary hindrances, anomalous example, feminine infirmities, and an infinitude more such various objections springing out of this fertile subject. Thereafter might have come the historical view, evils and perils, for the majority of instances, following in the wake of such mastery. However, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... that the eternities beget chaos, and that the immensities are at the mercy of the divine ananke. Infinitude crouches before a personality. The mercurial essence is the prime mover in spirituality, and the thinker is powerless before the pulsating inanity. The cosmical procession is terminated only by ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the clockmaker's pendulum, and uses the earth for its bob; that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that the total of all our epochs is but the moment between the toss and the catch, has ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... estimate our loss, because it draws upon infinitude; there was so much growth yet possible to this soul; to all that she was not she might yet have enlarged; and while at first her audience had limits, she would in a calm and prosperous future have become that which she herself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... changing years. The cross is the symbol of a passing experience. The end, the attainment, is figured to us by that face of Nature which is the face of God, with the strength of the mountains, the gladness of the sunlight, the freedom of the sky, the infinitude of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... the authoress goes, sowing right and left the most transparent absurdities and misstatements with what Carlyle well calls 'a composed stupidity, and a cheerful infinitude of ignorance.' Who should know, if not she, to be sure? Had not Byron told her all about it? and was not ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... ever in some little corner than to occupy a brilliant second place in the whole universe; he prefers to be an atom, eternal and conscious of himself, rather than to be for a brief moment the consciousness of the whole universe; he sacrifices infinitude to eternity. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Universe, in the cosmos of which our earth is but an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not be missed in the ratchet wheel which fits into the grand ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... or ideal of the soul. They mean distinct, stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not a mere flux of vibrations or complex of reactions to environment, continuous with environment, merging away with an infinitude ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... studied the saddle. Then her gaze dimmed, lengthened, went beyond into infinitude. The pupils of her eyes drew down to tiny points of black against the ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... remembering it need never be put there again, went in and locked the door. Suddenly he felt deadly sick. He went to the couch, lay down and closed his eyes on the blackness before them. If he had a wish, in this infinitude of desolation, it was that he might never open them again on the dark defiles of this world. It was dusk when he did open them, and for a minute he had difficulty in remembering why he was there and the blow that had struck him down to ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... God is love, and the true 'glory of God' is neither some symbolical flashing light nor the pomp of mere power and majesty; nor even those inconceivable and incommunicable attributes which we christen with names like Omnipotence and Omnipresence and Infinitude, and the like. These are all at the fringes of the brightness. The true central heart and lustrous light of the glory of God lie In His love, and of that glory Christ is the unique Representative and Revealer, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... fire-brigade which could prevent the undue spread of the devouring element into neighboring houses, let that reform it! In such odor is the Foreign Office too, if it were not that the Public, oppressed and nearly stifled with a mere infinitude of bad odors, neglects this one,—in fact, being able nearly always to avoid the street where it is, escapes this one, and (except a passing curse, once in the quarter or so) as good as ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... meant, thinking it would make her happier; but she and I are wiser now. We know that we never can be happier than we were in the old house at Norton Bury, or in this little Longfield. By making her lady of Beechwood I should double her responsibilities and treble her cares; give her an infinitude of new duties, and no pleasures half so sweet as those we leave behind. Still, of herself and for ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of God,' leads up to that great thought that the true glory of the divine nature is its tenderness. The lowliness and death of Christ are the glory of God! Not in the awful attributes which separate that inconceivable Nature from us, not in the eternity of His existence, nor in the Infinitude of His Being, not in the Omnipotence of His unwearied arm, nor in fire-eyed Omniscience, but in the pity and graciousness which bend lovingly over us, is the true glory of God. These pompous 'attributes' are but the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... most likely Susan bearing him company, and the little maiden head of the house left all by herself in the solitary parlour,—passed on one by one, each more tedious than the other. It seemed impossible that such heavy hours could last, and prolong themselves into infinitude, as they did; but still one succeeded another in endless hard procession. And Nettie shed back her silky load of hair, and pressed her tiny fingers on her eyes, and went on again, always dauntless. She said to herself, with homely ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... me,' he cried in his heart, 'for I cannot go to thee. If I were to go up and up through that awful space for ages and ages, I should never find thee. Yet there thou art. The tenderness of thy infinitude looks upon me from those heavens. Thou art in them and in me. Because thou thinkest, I think. I am thine—all thine. I abandon myself to thee. Fill me with thyself. When I am full of thee, my griefs themselves will grow golden in thy sunlight. Thou holdest them and their cause, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... void, and darkness was upon the {9} face of the deep." Only, be it observed, that while in the primitive Biblical idea this formless void precedes in time an ordered universe, in Anaximander's conception this formless infinitude is always here, is in fact the only reality which ever is here, something without beginning or ending, underlying ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... conception, by the complete determination of it which it has furnished, and the ceaseless testing of the conclusions of a reason often deceived by sense, and not always in harmony with its own ideas. The attributes of necessity, infinitude, unity, existence apart from the world (and not as a world soul), eternity (free from conditions of time), omnipresence (free from conditions of space), omnipotence, and others, are pure transcendental ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... in light and glory unapproachable, parent of angels and of men! next thee I implore omnipotent king, redeemer of that lost remnant, whose nature thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting love! and thee the third subsistence of the divine infinitude, illuminating spirit, the joy and solace of created ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... fulfilment of the nature of man, the promise made good, the career established, the influence sent out. A universe of mind-stuff and a civilising force constantly causing change, for change is growth, constantly compelling expression of that change—to conceive it is to conceive infinitude. And the purpose? Development, always development. To that end the individual perishes, to that end the race is conserved, to that end the peril and the sacrifice, and the agony of triumph in the overcharged heart at its last bound. And what is this ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... you an infinitude of thanks, brother pals," said he, glancing round the assemblage; and bowing to the president, "and to you, most upright Zory, for the honor you have done me in associating my name with that city. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... who thinks with mortal ken To pierce Infinitude which doth enfold Three persons in one substance. Seek not, then, O Mortal race, for reasons, but believe And be content, for had all been seen No need there was for Mary to conceive. Men have ye ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... and that what they learn in their situations, and what habits they there acquire, they take for good or evil into their own homes; and in this way an ignorant careless mistress may be doing an infinitude of harm to her sister women in a lower position than herself. On the other hand, a mistress who understands thoroughly the management of a house, by wisely training her servants in habits of order and ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... own out, I would—knowing which, I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now! 300 Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou—so wilt thou! So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown— And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath, Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 305 death! As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved Thy power, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning |
