"Millionth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of sixes on a single throw of two dice being 1/36, the chance of sixes ten times in succession is 1 divided by the tenth power of 36; in other words, such a concurrence is only likely to happen once in 3,656,158,440,062,976 trials, a number which no dice-player's experience comes up to a millionth part of. But if, instead of sixes ten times, any other given succession of ten throws had been fixed upon, it would have been exactly as unlikely that in any individual's experience that particular succession had ever occurred; ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... she wanted you to have it, and she didn't expect you to pay her bequests with it. In my opinion," he burst out, in a wrathful recollection of his own sufferings from Mrs. Lander, "she didn't give you a millionth part of your due for all the trouble she made you; and I want Mr. Orson ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... He then got into his stride and gave me twenty minutes' Czecho-Slovakism when I was dying to discover whether HOBBS had scored his two-millionth run. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... give to the poor, and which the cook's wife thought I was giving to her? In the majority of cases, it is that portion of my substance which it is impossible even to express in figures to Semyon and the cook's wife,—it is generally one millionth part or about that. I give so little that the bestowal of any money is not and cannot be a deprivation to me; it is only a pleasure in which I amuse myself when the whim seizes me. And it was thus that the cook's wife understood it. If I give to ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... I think I, even I (an insect compared with this creature), have set my life on casts not a millionth part of this man's. But, after all, a crown may be not worth dying for. Yet, to outlive ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... identification with the Supreme Soul was the Emancipation they sought. No other religion has ever been able to preach such a high ideal. The Hindu's concern is with Eternity. He regards his existence here as having the duration of but the millionth part of a moment. How to prevent re-birth and attain to an identification with the Supreme Soul is the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... would counsel you to learn to know what's o'clock as soon as possible. Consider what a sad thing it would be to go out of the world not knowing what's o'clock. A millionth part of the trouble required to learn Chinese would, if employed, infallibly teach ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... and he described elaborately the true method of securing it,—namely, by scraping, instead of by the ordinary process of grinding. At the same meeting he exhibited a machine of his invention by which he stated that a difference of the millionth part of an inch in length could at once be detected. He also there urged his favourite idea of uniformity, and proper gradations of size of parts, in all the various branches of the mechanical arts, as a ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... problem was inexplicable. Any idea that we might be affinities, soul-mates destined for each other from the beginning of time, was disposed of by the fact that my attraction for her was apparently in inverse ratio to hers for me. For possibly the millionth time in the past five years I tried to picture in my mind the man Sheridan, that shadowy wooer to whom she had yielded so readily. What quality had he possessed that I did not? Wherein lay the magnetism that ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... gland, act on it, and the tentacle bends. The pressure exerted by the particle of hair, weighing only 1/78740 of a grain and supported by a dense fluid, must have been inconceivably slight. We may conjecture that it could hardly have equalled the millionth of a grain; and we shall hereafter see that far less than the millionth of a grain of phosphate of ammonia in solution, when absorbed by a gland, acts on it and induces movement. A bit of hair, 1/50 of an inch in length, and therefore much larger than ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... the Convention, 1792-5, were taken those measurements, the outcome of which was the metric system. Two mathematicians, by name Delambre and Mchain, were charged with the necessary calculations, the mtre, or a ten-millionth part of the distance between the poles and the equator (32,808 English feet), being made the unit of length. Uniformity of weight followed, and became ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... thousand miles from anywhere, he had disapproved. He had pointed out that John was not doing what Fate expected of him. A miracle, in the shape of a six-figure wedding present from Mrs. Oakley, who had never been known before, in the memory of man, to give away a millionth of that sum, had happened to him. Fate, argued Smith, plainly intended him to stay in New York and spend his ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... spark in remoteness. Instantly it was vastly more than a spark. It was a globe of deadly, blue-white incandescence. It flamed brilliantly as all the Isis's fuel and the warheads on all its unexpended missiles turned to pure energy in the hundred-millionth of a second. It was many times brighter than a sun. Then it was not. And the violence of the explosion was such that there was not even glowing metal-vapor where it had been. Every atom of the ship's ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... something about this Angus did not understand. At night in the Lone Lands, among a thousand hill pockets and shoestring draws, it would be only a millionth chance that would bring a man and woman together unexpectedly. He pushed home questions, for he was not one to slough any of the responsibilities that belonged to him as ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... a Greek statue, or an Italian cameo—you have not only exquisite beauty, but also exquisite precision. You get the thought into your mind with the accuracy and precision of the words that express numbers in the multiplication table. Ten times one are ten—not ten and one one-millionth. Having got the idea into your mind with the precision, accuracy, and beauty of the Latin expression, you are to get its equivalent in English. Suppose you have knowledge of no language but your own. The thought comes to you in the mysterious ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... prone to believe that their happiness and well-being were to be secured by means of institutions rather than by their own conduct. Hence the value of legislation as an agent in human advancement has usually been much over-estimated. To constitute the millionth part of a Legislature, by voting for one or two men once in three or five years, however conscientiously this duty may be performed, can exercise but little active influence upon any man's life and character. Moreover, it is every day becoming more clearly understood, that the function of Government ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... I do not live in the magnificent villa Vilquin; there is not in my veins, thank God, the ten-millionth of a drop of that chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from Germany, on the other from the south of France; my mind has a Teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... numbers. But there are more irrational numbers than there are whole numbers or fractions. There are probably exactly as many points in space as there are irrational numbers, and exactly as many points on a line a millionth of an inch long as in the whole of infinite space. There is a greatest of all infinite numbers, which is the number of things altogether, of every sort and kind. It is obvious that there cannot be a greater number than this, because, if everything has been taken, there ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Mr. Danley—but that wouldn't work on a small rock. You took too long. What would you have done on a rock with a millionth of a ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... obtained a grant of a railway, the only industrial enterprise which in these days promises to make good the fabulous prospects that Law once held out to the eternally deluded Parisians, in the fantastic Mississippi scheme. As I look at it, a millionth part of a railway is worth fully as much as an acre of waste land on the banks of the Ohio. We make in our case a deposit, on a mortgage, which is an advance, as you see, since we gain at least ten, fifteen, twenty, or a hundred livres' worth of iron in exchange for our money. Well, within a week ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... so, sincerely regretting it, I want—not to compensate, not to repay her for the unpleasantness, but simply to do something to her advantage, to show that I am not, after all, privileged to do nothing but harm. If there were a millionth fraction of self-interest in my offer, I should not have made it so openly; and I should not have offered her ten thousand only, when five weeks ago I offered her more, Besides, I may, perhaps, very soon marry a young lady, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... salts of ammonia and other chemicals was even more wonderful. "It is an astonishing fact that so inconceivably minute a quantity as the one twenty-millionth of a grain of phosphate of ammonia should induce some change in a gland of Drosera sufficient to cause a motor impulse to be sent down the whole length of the tentacle; this impulse exciting movement often through an angle of above 180 deg.. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... the perfected microscope has opened to us a world of magnificent smallness and minuteness. The latter has shown us that a drop of water is a world of minute living forms who live, eat, fight, reproduce, and die. The mind is capable of imagining a universe occupying no more space than one million-millionth of the tiniest speck visible under the strongest microscope—and then imagining such a universe containing millions of suns and worlds similar to our own, and inhabited by living forms akin to ours—living, thinking men and women, identical in every respect to ourselves. Indeed, as some philosophers ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... improved 900 times as much again before the moon could be brought within the sphere of its influence. A wireless telegraphic signal, transmitted across a distance equal to the diameter of the earth, would be reduced to a mere sixteen-millionth part if it had to travel over the distance to Mars; in other words, if wireless telegraphy attained the utmost excellence now hoped for it—that is, of being able to girdle the earth—it would have to be increased a ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... be told that such measurements as these have been made at all, but the astonishment grows when one hears the results. It appears from Clerk-Maxwell's calculations that the mean free path, or distance traversed by the molecules between collisions in ordinary air, is about one-half-millionth of an inch; while the speed of the molecules is such that each one experiences about eight billions of collisions per second! It would be hard, perhaps, to cite an illustration showing the refinements of modern physics better than this; unless, indeed, one other ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... or proportionate to them. That which does appear occasionally is the smallest possible fraction of that which the acting matter could produce if arranged so as to act voltaically, probably not the one hundred thousandth, or even the millionth part, and is very probably altogether different in ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... waters, the terrestrial globe is fairly regular, and in relation to its volume its surface is smoother than that of an orange. The highest summits of the Himalaya, the profoundest depths of the somber ocean, do not attain to the millionth part ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... to gaze at herself in the looking-glass. For the millionth time she wished she were pretty like Kitty Allen. And Kitty would wear her pink dotted mull to the party. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... heart, alas! goes bare. Oh, I would rather shiver in the snow— My heart downed softly with Tecumseh's love— Than sleep unprized in warmest couch of fur. I know your love is wide, and, for that I Share but a millionth part of it, and feel Its meagreness, I plead most eagerly For this poor white, whose heart is full of love, And gives ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair |
