"Infinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corroding etchings of Laforgue is germane to men in whom irony and pity are perpetually disputing. We think of Heine and his bitter-sweetness. Again with Zarathustra, Laforgue could say: "I do not give alms. I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the sixth sense of infinity. A cosmical jester, his badinage is well-nigh dolorous. His verse and prose form a series of personal variations. The lyric in him is through some temperamental twist reversed. Fantastic dreams overflow his reality, and he always dreams with wide-open eyes. Watteau's ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... important. The endeavor, therefore, to judge of the relative beauty or interest of the sciences is utterly hopeless. Let the astronomer boast of the magnificence of his speculations, the mathematician of the immutability of his facts, the chemist of the infinity of his combinations, and we will admit that they all have equal ground for their enthusiasm. But the highest standard of estimation is that of utility. The far greater proportion of mankind, the uninformed, who are unable to perceive ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... on the steps of the terrace, or paced up and down, watching the scene. Just beyond their crest was the frowning mass of Mount Misery. The crystal flood poured down from above, and the moon was rising over the distant hills. The sea had the look of infinity. There might be ships at anchor before Basseterre or Sandy Point, but the shoulders of the mountain hid them; and below, the world looked as if the passions of Hell had let loose—the torches flared and crackled, and the trees took on hideous shapes. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... that sense only—which can satisfy the human heart. Time is too short, this planet is too small, and this mortal body is too weak for the surging thoughts, the unintelligible desires of the soul. Nothing less than infinity can hallow emotions: their passingness—which seems the rule in the fever and turmoil of city life—is not their abatement but their degradation. Change they must, but perish utterly they ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on the point in question. Here again we may trace the same isolation and the same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. There was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle Ages. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family. Something of the same sort must have ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... through which they have naturally and inevitably passed? Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation upon which all law, civilisation, religion and progress ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... house and outbuildings were black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient growth upon the walls looked green and fresh, as if they were the newest things and afterthought of Time. The usually mirrored surface of the river was blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole landscape had a completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the impression that the earth was wet through like a sponge; while the summit of a wooded hill, about a mile distant, ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... creatures offers to our contemplation an infinity of wonders far greater than this matter of a locust's wing; but in general they pass unperceived, obscured as they are by the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... before, the descendants of the population that had migrated across space had repeated on the third planet the devastation of the fourth. The ancestors of Verkan Vall's people had discovered the principle of paratime transposition and had begun to exploit an infinity of worlds on other lines of probability. The people of the First Level Dwarma Sector, reduced by sheer starvation to a tiny handful, had abandoned their cities and renounced their technologies and created for themselves a farm-and-village ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness; finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but completeness manifested in ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... sharply now that he stopped a moment to listen, with one hand quickly raised to his forehead. Basil was whistling—whistling joyously. Foreboding touched the boy like the brush of a bird's wing, and death and sorrow were as remote as infinity to him. At the barn-door the lad ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... conception that clearly required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount of filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that there was opposition—why there should be was another matter—and that the opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had doubtless occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question of the essence and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself to demand the light of experience; so that to the growth of experience, truly, the treatment of the subject had yielded. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... America appealed to me so strongly as the gigantic prairies," he said at last. "You were so deeply moved by our trip to Africa, Boy, that you must remember the impression of vastness and infinity the great desert made upon us. Well, in the glorious West of America it is as if the desert had sprung to life, and from every grain of sand had been born a blade of grass, waving and fluttering with the joy of new birth. Oh, it is truly wonderful, Paul! Once I went there with the soil of ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... ready for the march. His senior infantry regiment, the 67th, would fain have gone, but the good old corps was weak from casualties and sickness, and the gallant Knowles denied himself in the interests of his men. The two Highland regiments, the 72d and 92d, had done an infinity of fighting and marching, but both had received strong drafts, were in fine condition, and were not to be hindered from following the chief whom, though not of their northern blood, the stalwart sons of the mist swore by ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it. Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and in her, beauty ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... and more strange as he gazed. The men's bodies swayed very little, and their arms all along the line looked misty, and seemed to stretch right away into infinity, so far away was the last rower from the prow. The water flashed with the moonlight on one side, and gleamed pallidly on the other as the blades stirred it; and then they grew more misty and more misty, but kept on plash—plash—plash, and the paddles ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... life which was simply living. It must be a life, through which some benefit was conferred upon my fellow-creatures. This was mainly delusion. I had not then learned to correct this natural instinct to be of some service to mankind by the thought of the boundlessness of infinity and of Nature's profuseness. I had not come to reflect that, taking into account her eternities, and absolute exhaustlessness, it was folly in me to fret and fume, and I therefore clung to the hope that I might employ myself in some way ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... exist. How is it to be established? or, by what criterion is it to be ascertained? If there is no such criterion, it must, in all cases, be the result of chance. If so, the chances against it are as infinity to one. The idea, therefore, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wasn't afraid. Well, it wasn't so. I muddled the whole thing. And the consequence is, I've got to keep on being muddled. It's as if you began a chemical experiment wrong. You might go on messing with it to infinity. You ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... We must see the great King's Son, or die! Come, Thou that com'st! Our wish is this, That the body might die, and the soul, set free, Swell out, like an infant's lips, to the kiss Of the Lover who filleth infinity!" ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... to develop and to age, is the same that has caused it to pass through the phases of the embryonic life. The development of the embryo is a perpetual change of form. Any one who attempts to note all its successive aspects becomes lost in an infinity, as is inevitable in dealing with a continuum. Life does but prolong this prenatal evolution. The proof of this is that it is often impossible for us to say whether we are dealing with an organism growing old or with an embryo continuing to evolve; such is the case, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... sir? What woman question? I know no more of woman questions than of man questions, I am afraid. There is an infinity of questions you may ask about all human beings. People ask them all the time. Personally, I don't; it is less trouble not to. There people are; you can take them or leave them, for what they're worth. Why ask questions about them? There is ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... Carmen, "requires infinite time in which to completely express itself. So time ceases to be, and we find that all real things exist now, in an endless present. Now, the ideas of infinite mind range throughout the realm of infinity, but the greatest idea that the creative mind can have is the idea of itself. That idea is the image and likeness of the infinite creative mind. It is the perfect reflection of that mind—its perfect expression. That idea is what the man Jesus ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of his own, amongst the frightful precipices of the Alps. Such retired gentlemen's servants, or such publicans either, as honest A—-, are not every day to be found. His grounds, principally laid out by his own hands, exhibited an infinity of taste, and his house, into which I looked, was a perfect picture of neatness. Any tourist visiting Llangollen for a short period could do no better than take up his abode at the hostelry of ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... at all unreasonable about this assumption, for the amount of energy in a swiftly moving body capable of being transformed into heat if the body be arrested is relatively enormous. Thus it is calculated that a pound of coal dropped into the sun from the mathematician's favorite starting-point, infinity, would produce some six thousand times the heat it could engender if merely burned at the sun's surface. In other words, if a little over two pounds of material from infinity were to fall into each square yard of the sun's surface each hour, his observed heat ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... are antiquated in July; the trimmings of July are passees by September; side-combs, back-combs, puffs, rats, and all sorts of such matters, are in a distracted race of improvement; every article of feminine toilet is on the move towards perfection. It seems to me that an infinity of money must be spent in these trifles, by those who make the least pretension ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... were, under another aspect than that torturing intoxicating aspect of art—one that fortified and calmed. All his scientific curiosities which had been so long laid to sleep revived. His first returning joy came from a sense of the inexhaustibleness and infinity ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... climate, sometimes from the privations to which he was subjected, now from the rough character of the country he constantly compelled to traverse in his spiritual journeys, anon from the violence of colonists or Indians.... It will be seen that readers who expect an infinity of enjoyment from these missionary adventures will not be disappointed." ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... essential to the maintenance of civil society, and gave it such a form, that for many ages God was nowhere so much feared as in that republic. The effect of this was to render easy any enterprise in which the senate or great men of Rome thought fit to engage. And whosoever pays heed to an infinity of actions performed, sometimes by the Roman people collectively, often by single citizens, will see, that esteeming the power of God beyond that of man, they dreaded far more to violate their oath than to transgress the laws; ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... notion of so vast an expanse, but an idea of it may be obtained from the fact, that, if the swiftest racehorse ever known had began to traverse it at full speed at the time of the birth of MOSES, he would only yet have accomplished half his journey. Vast as is the solar system, it is only one of an infinity of others which may be still more extensive. Our sun is supposed to be a star belonging to a constellation of stars, each of which has its accompaniment of revolving planets; and the constellation itself with similar constellations to form revolving clusters ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... consort would depart, the bellowing of her trumpet fading away in the distance, and they would remain again in the deep hush, amid the infinity of stagnant vapour. Everything was drenched with salt water; the cold became more penetrating; each day the sun took longer to sink below the horizon; there were now real nights one or two hours long, and their gray gloaming was ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... time went on, discord entered in; at length the good was minimized and the evil everywhere diffused, and there was a danger of universal ruin. Then the Creator, seeing the world in great straits, and fearing that chaos and infinity would come again, in his tender care again placed himself at the helm and restored order, and made the world immortal and imperishable. Once more the cycle of life and generation was reversed; the infants grew into young men, and the young men ...
— Statesman • Plato
... Nature's Ruler and substitute our own. With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. Our horizon is the universe. We spy on the Divine and try to surprise His secrets, or to sneak into His confidence by stealth. We make God the eternal a puppet. We measure infinity with a foot-rule. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... One, and Infinite. The true quality of the Infinite does not appear; for the human mind, however highly analytical and exalted, is itself finite, and the finiteness in it cannot be laid aside. It is not fitted, therefore, to see the Infinity of God, and thus God, as He is in Himself, but can see God from behind in shadow; as it is said of Moses, when he asked to see God, that he was placed in a cleft of the rock, and saw His hinder side. It is enough to acknowledge God from things finite, that is, created, ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... subsisted! To these superstitious observances may be added, accidental rencounters, words spoken by chance, and afterwards turned into good or bad presages; forebodings, prodigies, monsters, eclipses, comets; every extraordinary phenomenon, every unforeseen accident, with an infinity of chimeras of ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... eating, amusing themselves, some sitting, some lying down, going and coming, hanging about near the ladies of the Embassy, to examine the details of their dresses too. If instantaneous photography had existed in those days, what an infinity of charming and picturesque groups might have been snatched. I did venture to make one or two rapid sketches on the sly; but there were too many eyes upon me, and besides it was an abuse of the toleration which was being shown us. I could ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... was born upon this planet in a somewhat lonely fashion. A few human beings out of all infinity stood by to care for him. He was brought up with hills and stars and a neighbour or so, until he grew to man's estate. He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and there, on the rim of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and earth that had always been the edge of life to him before, he ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... earth beneath, counsellor there is none now that would take a brief from me: all are silent." Is it, indeed, come to this? Alas! the time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away into infinity, but yet I will search in it for somebody to take your brief: I know of somebody that will be your counsel. Who is this that cometh from Domremy? Who is she that cometh in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... his favorite theory that there was method in what seemed chance; principles underlying luck; measures for infinity; clues to all combinations. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... deeds no more, till again the lakes melt and the trees bud. This it is that gives them their strange majesty, and clothes their brief summer, their laughing fields of flowers, their thickets of red raspberry and slopes of strawberry, their infinity of gleaming lakes and foaming rivers—rivers that turn no mill and light no town—with a charm, half magical, ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... through the crowded streets, with a horrible grief in one's heart, and a dizzy aching in one's head; to push by happy, careless, busy creatures, and have a dreadful question shoot across one's brain of eternity,—of infinity,—which is answered by nothing but a vague though acute sense of suffering;—to meet the vacant stare, or the bow of recognition, when the head is splitting and the heart breaking;—who is there that has known all this? I have; and dreams have not pictured ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... Calamianes consists of an infinity and indeterminate number of islands, large and small, and most of them very fertile. [72] Those best known and best supplied with the products of commerce which might make them rich are [here] set down. But their lack of attention [to these products] reduces the natives ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... women to praise his sweet poetry from morning to night. I hardly know whether it is my fault, or the effect of a weakness in Leigh Hunt's character, that I should be sensible of a regret of this nature, when, at the same time, I sincerely believe that he has found an infinity of better things in the world whither ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... bishop, "they cleared up an infinity of abuses. They were temperate, at all events! Too temperate in some matters, I am inclined to think; they did not always allow for human weakness. They went straight ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... bookcase was built. We had all forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, where ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... item of the Greeks, a mutual loan or transfer of the idioms or properties of each nature to the other—of infinity to man, passibility to God, &c. Twelve rules on this nicest of subjects compose the Theological Grammar of Petavius, (Dogmata Theolog. tom. v. l. iv. c. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... who will not disappoint him. A story of a hero who adventures into sinister places, disregards repeated warnings to "go back ere it is too late" (or the American for that entrancing formula), meets there a Distressed Damsel and kisses her as introduction, and finally, after an infinity of perils, is left with the D.D. as his B.B., or blushing bride—this I state emphatically to be not only Romance, but a most excellent brand of that article. What however Mr. CULLEY seems most to fear is that we shall think that McCoy himself and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... first no other object than to read their manuscript to the Athenaeum at Lyons, of which they were members. They were earnestly solicited to print it, and published it in 1802. The authors speak of birds only. They describe an infinity of methods practised by others, and compare them to their own, which, without doubt, are preferable, but too slow to satisfy the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... and saw evening close in upon her in that broad forest home, and heard for the first time the mournful notes of the whippoorwill, and the harsh scream of the jay in the distant woods, she was oppressed with a sense of vastness, of infinity, which she never before experienced, not even on the ocean. She remained long in prayer, and when she lay down to sleep beside her matron-friend, no words were spoken between them. The elder, overcome ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... manifestations necessary for its development. Hence it is organization as well as expansion, and it may be thereby considered, at least virtually, equal to the very nature of the human will, which in its evolution recognises no barriers, and which realises itself by proving its infinity. ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... evening when we arrive, and we seek no impressions. A comfortable omnibus winds us up an infinity of turns, through an apparent infinity of streets, and we are at the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... so harassed at the present moment by an infinity of troubles of my own that I am almost callous to those of other people. They say that prosperity makes a man selfish. I have never tried that, but I am quite sure that adversity does so. Nevertheless I am anxious about those bills ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... matter of mine. God, the great conservative power of the Universe, when he established the right, saw to it that it should always be the safest and best. He never laid upon a poor finite worm the staggering load of following out into infinity the complex results of his actions. We may rest on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom, confident that it is enough for us to do justice, he will see ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... foaming into the tubs which have been set out to receive it. The old unpainted shingles and boards of the mansion and out-houses are black with the moisture which they have imbibed. Looking at the river, we perceive that its usually smooth and mirrored surface is blurred by the infinity of rain-drops; the whole landscape—grass, trees, and houses—has a completely water-soaked aspect, as if the earth were wet through. The wooded hill, about a mile distant, whither we went to gather whortleberries, has a mist upon its summit, as if the demon of the rain were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the old story of the gambler on the Mississippi steamboat who listened attentively to the persuasive arguments of a life-insurance agent; he "allowed" that he was willing to bet on almost any kind of game, but declined to take a hand in one where he had to die to win. It is painful to think of the infinity of petty economies, of all the grievous deprivations, the positive hardships, undergone in so many millions of families, day by day, and year by year, to secure these policies of insurance; but, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... not to be wondered at, if we consider whence it arose. It is plain that it was derived from the constant custom of princes, heroes, and great men, of fighting in battle upon chariots. Homer has an infinity of examples of this kind. This custom being admitted, it is natural to suppose it very agreeable to these heroes, to have their charioteers as expert as possible in driving, as their success depended, in a very great measure, upon the address of their drivers. It was anciently, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... little that these three grand phases of ascetic existence subdivide themselves into an infinity of stages; which are degrees according to Saint Bonaventure, dwelling places according to Saint Teresa, steps according to Saint Angela; they may vary in length and number, according to the will of the Lord and the temperament of those who go through them. It is not disputed that ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... swarm in the streets. I at first imagined that some great assembly was just dismissed, and wanted to stand aside till the multitude should pass; but this human tide continues to flow, without interruption or abatement, from morn till night. Then there is such an infinity of gay equipages, coaches, chariots, chaises, and other carriages, continually rolling and shifting before your eyes, that one's head grows giddy looking at them; and the imagination is quite confounded with splendour and variety. Nor is the prospect by ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... an infinity of trees covered with the brightest blossoms; one, with large scarlet flowers, most gorgeous in their colouring, and one whose blossoms are so like large pink silk tassels, that if hung to the cushions of a sofa, you could ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... sovereign throws his portals wide, Admitting every guest, excluding none; As freely as the firmament the world, So mercy must encircle friend and foe. Impartially the sun pours forth his beams Through all the regions of infinity; The heaven's reviving dew falls everywhere, And brings refreshment to each thirsty plant; Whate'er is good, and cometh from on high, Is universal, and without reserve; But in the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... those ideas which man cannot of himself grasp or understand. Man, they say, is limited in capacity; he can, therefore, not comprehend the infinite. A greater fault than this could not be committed by a thinking being. For infinity being unending, it is incapable of being limited; it rejects definition, which belongs, by its nature, to finite things. For definition means the placing of bounds, and that which is infinite can have no bounds. The man, therefore, who seeks to bound ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... contents, as it assuredly did not; it may be that he quailed before the minute and almost undecipherable handwriting. But similar notebooks are in my possession, and there are, happily, in these days typists—you pay them by the hour, and it means an infinity of time and patience—who will copy the most minute and the most obscure documents. There are some of the notebooks of the Scottish tour of 1858 before me, and what is of far more importance—Borrow's letters to his wife while on this tour. Borrow lost his mother in ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... it cannot complete, the new birth: eternity does this; for progress is the law of infinity. Only through the sore travail of mortal mind [20] shall soul as sense be satisfied, and man awake in His likeness. What a faith-lighted thought is this! that mortals can lay off the "old man," until man is found to be the image of the infinite good that we name ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Prince, hastily drawing out his poniard and sabre, struck off the head of Antinmour. His train did the same to all those who composed the divan; and running directly into the city, an infinity of heads were flying off without knowing who caused this disorder. After this great execution, the ambassador and his train made themselves visible, and declared to the people in the public square that there was no other method of avoiding certain death but ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... man fails to see the infinity of space between Modernism and Orthodoxy, or to apprehend the fact that daily they are drawing farther apart! Time holds no promise ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... when rounding the Horn. It was likely enough that we should manage to bring the dogs safely through the tropics once, but whether we should succeed in doing so twice was more doubtful; and so on to infinity. It is easier to imagine than to describe how awkward all this was, and how cunningly one had to choose one's words to avoid saying too much. Among inexperienced men there would have been no great difficulty, but it must be remembered that on the Fram pretty ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... been chosen as the scene and stage of that transcendent act whereby the Deity had consecrated humanity for ever to himself? Now it turns out that the physical origin of this world of ours is precisely that of others, while, so far from being the centre of the universe, it is but a speck in infinity, positively invisible from any of the million suns that light the eternal way from our own central orb to the infinities that range beyond. The ecclesiastical mind of those days astutely fastened on the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will indeed take an infinity of trouble to put together the ashes of a burned note, and will give the owner a new note or the value in coin, if satisfied of the integrity of the old one. The bank authorities preserve specimens of ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... than a statue noticeable only for its beauty or its truth to life. We all know that wunderthaetige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemaelde. In architecture alone, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, their vague but potent feelings of infinity, their yearning towards a deity invisible, but localised in holy things and places, found artistic outlet. Therefore architecture was essentially a medieval art. The rise of sculpture and painting indicated the quickening to life of new faculties, fresh intellectual interests, and a ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... no attention to their silent companion who sat quietly looking through the quartz windows at the diamond-bright stars, tacked against the blackness of infinity. ...
— The Stutterer • R.R. Merliss
... Old Ocean was Infinity of ages ere we breathed Existence—and he will be beautiful When all the living world that sees him now Shall roll unconscious dust around the sun. Quelling from age to age the vital throb In human hearts, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... there is implanted in man such a lively feeling of his total inability to exhaust it by himself alone, as with that of religion. A sense of religion has no sooner dawned upon him, than he feels the infinity of its nature and the limitation of his own; he is conscious of embracing but a small portion of it; and that which he cannot immediately reach he wishes to perceive, as far as he can, from the representations of others who have experienced it themselves, and to enjoy it with them. Hence, he is ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Quite often Sylvia Crane used to appear from her road and join them, and walk along with Charlotte. Barney used to look at her moving down the road at Charlotte's side, as at the merest supernumerary on his own tragic stage. But every tragedy has its multiplying glass to infinity, and every actor has his own tragedy. Sylvia Crane that winter, all secretly and silently, was acting her own principal role in hers. She had quite come to the end of her small resources, and nobody, except the selectmen of Pembroke, ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... things—time—language— the earth—the bounds of the sea—the stars of the sky, and everything "about, around, and underneath" man, except man himself. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment.' Byron, vol. v. p. 66. WRIGHT. Sir Walter Scott said 'that he had more pleasure in reading London, and The Vanity of Human Wishes than any other poetical composition he could mention.' Lockhart's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... night descends, The black sails fade into the sky: Is this not, where the sea-line ends, The shore-line of infinity? ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... the word 'death' he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, till he had learned to speak of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word 'God' in a pulpit; and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or further than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... "slanting indeterminates," yet full of the power and the passion of the moment. They flitted between the idle boom and the deck, and up the gleaming sky in all the sizes that distance grades between nearness and infinity. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... into the murmur of a crowd, which merged curiously into the whir of an automobile. But it was dark again and the spots of light in the darkness reappeared. One, two, three, a dozen she counted and then they vanished. She was alone, an atom in the expanse of infinity, but the darkness and the perfume now oppressed, suffocated her, and she tried to escape. But she moved her limbs with difficulty, and a weight sealed her eyelids. She struggled up against it and managed to rise upon one elbow and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... there, Arthur," said the other, better pleased; "if even by common arithmetic we can multiply as we can reduce almost infinitely, the Great Reckoner must take count of all; and the small is not small, or the great great, to his infinity." ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and, except for the towers and spires of the churches, it is practically featureless. To the north the horizon is brought closer by the rounded outlines of the wolds; everywhere else you seem to be looking into infinity, ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... property," he continued with a frown, "is that lying on its side it signifies infinity. So eight erect is really—" and suddenly his made-up, naturally solemn face got a great glow ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... a madman's dream, there came One fair swift flash to me Of distances, of streets a-flame With joy and agony, And further yet, a moon-lit sea Foaming across its bars, And further yet, the infinity Of wheeling ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... and there were traces of lava. Sulphur springs sometimes stopped their way, and they had to go round them. In some places the sulphur had formed crystals among other substances, such as whitish cinders made of an infinity of little ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... Gore). Our versions of Eastern names are so different from the originals that when the two are placed together there appears to be no likeness between them, and the different positions which they take up in the alphabet cause the bibliographer an infinity of trouble. Thus the original of Xerxes is Khshayarsha (the revered king), and Averrhoes is Ibn Roshd (son of Roshd). The latter's full name is Abul Walid Mohammed ben Ahmed ben Mohammed. Artaxerxes is in old Persian ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... we harbor such opinions of Infinity; as long as we imagine the heavens to be filled with such tyranny, so long the sons of men will be cringing, intellectual cowards. Let us think, and let us honestly express ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... lonely fastnesses of the splendid freedom, know full well what surging recollections of danger and daring, of success and defeat, of action in which one faces and laughs at death, and calm in which one sounds the unutterable depths of very infinity—thronged the old trader's soul. Indeed, when he spoke, it was as if the sentence of my own life had been pronounced; and my whole being rose up to salute destiny. I take it, there is in every one some secret and cherished desire for a chosen vocation to which each looks forward ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... must acknowledge. Still there is an infinity of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was Vic Gregg, no despicable fighter himself, and the other was no less than the invincible little sheriff himself. To imagine the sheriff beaten in the speed of his draw or the accuracy of his shot was to imagine the First Cause, Infinity, or whatever else is inconceivable; nevertheless, there were such possibilities as bullets fired at night through the window, and attacks from the rear. So Rickett waited, and held its breath and kept his eyes rather more ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... he could hear only creaks and breathings. Never had the old house seemed so like a living creature. For nearly forty years it had held all that he had loved and known, all he had been sure of. Outside of it was the strange, the new, the uncertain, the vast unknown, stretching away to infinity.... ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... learn more and more to depend on himself; to seek more for the Infinite within. It is from this source alone that he ever gains the power to solve his practical difficulties. No one should give up when there is always the resources of Infinity. The cause of failure is that men search in the wrong direction for success, because they are not conscious of their real powers that when used are capable of ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... union, communication, or duties. If there be no duties between man and his God, there is no religion for man. Thus, in saying God is infinite, you annihilate religion for man, who is a finite being. The idea of infinity is to us an idea without model, without archetype, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... reasoned and to which the terms of his description apply. If we therefore take his ideas on this point as the criterion of truth, we shall be driven to the alternative either of taking refuge at once in the arms of monarchy, or of splitting ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt. Some of the writers who have come forward on the other side of the question seem to have been aware ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... secondary bodies, all their combinations, all their movements, all the beings that vegetate, that live, that feel, that think, that function in all the globes, you will have but to increase the number of chances; multiply this number in all eternity, up to the number which our feebleness calls 'infinity,' there will always be a unity in favour of the formation of the world, such as it is, by movement alone: therefore it is possible that in all eternity the movement of matter alone has produced the entire universe such as it exists. It is ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... against your being right both in form and colour with a given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely increased—and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that, while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or wrong, colour is wholly relative. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... up on that June morning, and the old sensation of a pause before advance was upon her, and the strange solemnity which was almost a terror, from the feeble clutching of her mind at the comprehension of infinity. She looked at the morning sunlight coming between the white slants of her curtains, an airy flutter of her new dress from the closet, her valedictory, tied with a white satin ribbon, on the stand, and she saw quite ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... be given out and pronounced at the next Greek kalends, that is, never. As you know that they do more than nature, and contrary to their own articles. The articles of Paris maintain that to God alone belongs infinity, and nature produceth nothing that is immortal; for she putteth an end and period to all things by her engendered, according to the saying, Omnia orta cadunt, &c. But these thick mist-swallowers make the suits in law depending before them both infinite and immortal. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... are, lying comfortably upon your back-what is left of it-in the cool dark, and with the smell of the fresh earth all about you. Your soul goes knocking about amongst an infinity of shadowy things, Lord knows where, making all sorts of silent discoveries in the gloom of what was yesterday an unknown and mysterious future, and which, after centuries of exploration, must still be strangely unfamiliar. The nomadic ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... hear in full discourse the man who could reduce religion to a single word and leave it comprehensible, Constantine drew a breath of relief, and said, smiling, "Of a surety, O Prince, there was never a Faith which, with such appearance of simplicity in definition, is capable of such infinity of meaning. I am full of questions; and these listening, my lords of the court, are doubtless in a similar mood. What sayest thou, O my most orthodox Confessor?" The Father bowed until the hem of his blazing ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... creatures, of justice, and mercy, and liberality, and truthfulness, to the love of God as their archetype, and yet be perfectly obtuse to aesthetic beauty; and thus again we see that high aestheticism is compatible with low morality, and conversely. Doubtless when produced to infinity, all perfections are seen to converge and unite in God, but short of this, they retain their distinctness and opposition. At the same time, it cannot for a moment be denied that keenness of moral, and of aesthetic perception, act and react upon ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... to sew it aloft to some leaf of the Tree of Life, like the nest of Jean Paul's tailor-bird, that it may swing there, above the hum and dust of matter, swayed and sung to sleep by the expanding breath of Infinity! Oh, yes!" cried Clarian, while his cheek glowed warmer, his eye flamed brighter, and his voice flowed on with a rhythmic throb, "oh, yes, I know it all, now! The Idea is awake, and dwells in my soul, at once master there and slave. I leap out of this base Present: I stand panting and glowing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Mr. Gryce!" she gasped in horror. "Fairy Bread is outselling Puffyloaves by an infinity factor. So far this morning, there has not been one single delivery of Puffyloaves to any sales spot! Complaints about non-delivery are pouring in from both ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... have made very proud places for themselves in England by what you call "journalism." In France it is the one road to eminence. Cannot you imagine, besides, what capital fun it is to be able to talk to scores of people you were never introduced to? to tell them an infinity of things on public matters, or now and then about themselves; and in so many moods as you have tempers, to warn them, scold, compassionate, correct, console, or abuse them? to tell them not to be over-confident or ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... and easy for the French to talk, that they generally use all the words they can to express their meaning, besides an infinity of gestures. Thus, when they wish to say yes, they often repeat the yes four or five times, in a very ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... according to Hufeland, is the result of nineteen accidental defects in the constitution), just as it is frustrated daily in millions of crushed germs in which the same metaphysical life-principle struggles to exist; there is no other consolation in this than that there is an infinity of space, time, and matter, and consequently inexhaustible opportunity, at the service of the will ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... other, trying to crowd into their eyes an infinity of strange passionate messages, though their features were all awry with nausea and the premonition ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... manifested some new attribute of divinity, of which as yet thou, nor I, nor any creature, may have an opportunity to contemplate. All this has lain in the purpose of God, in order to increase the happiness of His creatures; for all the other attributes of the Almighty, such as Infinity, Omnipresence, Omnipotence, awaken only awe in the mind of the finite; but those attributes which He manifests in His triumph over sin and Satan, are what truly awaken love, and through love, above all, is the happiness of the creature advanced. When God has thus manifested all His attributes ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... the shelter of the log against which he had inclined his rifle; but the blow came too soon. He was aware only of the rush of air as he leaped, an instant's hovering at the crest of a depthless chasm, then the sense of a mighty, resistless blow hurling him into infinity. ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... and Jesus, who strode over it, left his footprints in it. The next gust of wind disturbed it, the "stone-snow" was whirled about, and the dark stones were laid bare. Men are engulfed in those sand-fields, which, broken by blocks of stone, stretch away into infinity. Witness the bones which may be seen here and there, remains of dead beasts, and also legs and skulls of men who perished as hermits, or became the prey of lions. Such skulls with their grinning teeth, ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... in numeration. No idea is more obvious or simple than that of unity, or one. By the continual addition of this, first to itself to make two, and then to each higher combination successively, we form a series of different numbers, which may go on to infinity. In the consideration of these, the mind would not be able to go tar without the help of words, and those peculiarly fitted to the purpose. The understanding would lose itself in the multiplicity, were it not aided by that curious concatenation of names, which ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the presence of that army the red Notting Hills and the green Bayswaters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its presence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an ant-hill under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck's brutal arithmetic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was quite a fair matter for discussion. But it was a matter of history. At the foot of Church Street, opposite Kensington Church, they ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... vapors that resemble a sea. We are now alone in space with the moon, which looks like another balloon travelling opposite us; and our balloon, which shines in the air, appears like another, larger moon, a world wandering in the sky amid the stars, through infinity. We no longer speak, think nor live; we float along through space in delicious inertia. The air which is bearing us up has made of us all beings which resemble itself, silent, joyous, irresponsible beings, intoxicated by this stupendous flight, peculiarly alert, although motionless. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... with white and carmine tints; his eyes glow with an irresistible charm. That figure of his! The elegance of the palm tree, both straight and flexible. And the infinity of grace as he waltzed ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... through the light of what followed, I have never been able to visualize Maggie moving down the hall. It has always been a menacing figure, rather shadowy than real. And the hail itself takes on grotesque proportions, becomes inordinately long, an infinity of hall, fading ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... nothing, and the sponger much, to do with Pleasure—I will soon show you. I take it that Pleasure means, first, bodily tranquillity, and secondly, an untroubled soul. Well, the sponger attains both, Epicurus neither. A man who is busy inquiring into the earth's shape, the infinity of worlds, the sun's size, astronomic distances, the elements, the existence or non-existence of Gods, and who is engaged in incessant controversies about the end—he is a prey not merely to human, but to cosmic perturbations. Whereas ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... year in all her crowded life opened with such a mountain of things to be attended to—suffrage conventions, council meetings, the great Woman's Congress at the World's Fair, State campaigns, Industrial School matters, lecture engagements—the list seemed to stretch out into infinity, and it is no wonder that it appalled ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... real, and human. Thus with the Greek, a vast ocean, like that they know, encircles the whole earth, and fixes its bounds and the limits which man shall not pass; the Northerns compassed it about with a vast serpent of immense size, which bounded infinity and space, time and eternity, thereby mirroring, in some degree, as it were, the ancient symbol for time and space without end, the snake biting his own tail, the circle with no one beginning nor end. The heaven of the Greeks is the summit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the spiral is such that, starting from any point on one of its faces, a circle is described extending to a similar point on the opposite side. The diameter of the circles described decreases from infinity as the points from which they start recede from the center toward the circumference. From points near the circumference these circles or curves are very small. To illustrate this to you, the reverser now in circuit with spiral C will be replaced by a simple make and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... people have a notion as to how God looks. Anything that has not extension is as nothing to our imagination. Yet we know that our minds are real, though we cannot attribute extension to mind. Divisibility is of matter; if the infinite mind has parts, then infinity ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... to the body; whence, as also from I:xxi. and other places, it is plain that our mind, in so far as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking, which is determined by another eternal mode of thinking, and this other by a third, and so on to infinity; so that all taken together at once constitute the eternal and infinite ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... instantly to blaze with conflagrations, or rather by an infinity of mines sprung in its heart. Thick whirlwinds of smoke, pierced at intervals by flashes and long lines of flame, covered the doomed city. The blackness of darkness at one moment enveloped it. Again it blazed forth ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... though it worked through other channels. And for the persons in command of this power, a certain appareil de vie was necessary, taken for granted. So much income, so many servants, such and such habits—these things imposed themselves. Life became a soft and cushioned business, with an infinity of layers between it and any hard reality—a round ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
