"Natural phenomenon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It is concerned with the artistic qualities of a given artist only in so far as he exerts influence over his successors by those qualities. It is essentially scientific, for it treats the artist as science treats any other natural phenomenon, that is, as the effect of previous causes and the cause of subsequent effects. Its function is one of classification, and with interpretation or appreciation it has nothing ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden of the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... are unsophisticated, you will resume your carriage and return to the city; but if you are au fait, you will cross the high-road, cross the pastures, and wind down a damp, mossy wood-path to the steps of Montmorency,—a natural phenomenon, quite as interesting as, and more remarkable than, the Falls,—especially if you go away without seeing it. Any river can fall when it comes to a dam. In fact, there is nothing for it to do but fall; but it is not every river that can carve out in its rage such wonderful stairways as this,—seething ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Hawthorne an allegoric meaning is usually something deeper and subtler than this, and seldom so openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems—the Beleaguered City, for example—may be definitely divided into two parts; in the first, a story is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the second, the spiritual application of the parable is formally set forth. This method became with him almost a trick of style, and his readers learned to look for the haec fabula docet at the end as a matter of course. As for the prevailing ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... "Observations Concerning God's Works in Nature" (Betrachtungen uber die Werke Gottes in der Natur), which he recommended to the priests for wide distribution among the people. He saw the hand of God in even the most insignificant natural phenomenon. God was to him the Supreme Being whom he had jubilantly hymned in the choral portion of the Ninth Symphony in the words of Schiller: "Brothers, beyond you starry canopy there must dwell a loving Father!" Beethoven's relationship to God was that of a child toward his loving father to whom he ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... maintains that primitive man is highly interested in natural phenomena, and that this interest is essentially of a theoretic, contemplative and poetical character. To writers of this school every myth has as its kernel or essence some natural phenomenon or other, even though such idea is not apparent upon the surface of the story; a deeper meaning, a symbolic reference, being insisted upon. Such famous scholars as Ehrenreich, Siecke, Winckler, Max Muller, and Kuhn have long given us this ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... other goblins who amuse themselves by plaguing mankind, and he made them responsible for the catastrophe of the Motala. It would have been vain to try and convince him that the Fire-Maidens did not exist, and that the flame, so suddenly appearing among the ruins, was but a natural phenomenon. No reasoning could make him believe it. His companions were, if possible, more obstinate than he in their credulity. According to them, one of the Fire-Maidens had maliciously attracted the MOTALA to the coast. As to wishing to punish her, as well try to bring the tempest to justice! The ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... seemed to stand quite aloof from my work; whereas the sight of the thickly crowded auditorium agitated me so much, that I was unable even to glance at the body of the audience, whose presence merely affected me like some natural phenomenon—something like a continuous downpour of rain—from which I sought shelter in the farthest corner of my box as under a protecting roof. I was quite unconscious of applause, and when at the end of the acts ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... to many who had been supposedly converted—air, earth, and water still remained thronged with demons. The vast and sunless wilderness was peopled with goblins and fairies. No natural phenomenon occurred except by their agency. Where the sun went after it had set, where the moon hid, the stars, the four great winds, the eight thunders—all remained mysteries to these red children of the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Was it a natural phenomenon, an excavation produced by internal cataclysms or by the imperceptible action of the rushing sea and the soaking rain? Or was it a superhuman work executed by human ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... beforehand, as a threatening sign from Him; as though man's deserts had any connection with the courses of the sun and moon. The Bishop and all the priests of the province were to head the procession, and thus a simple natural phenomenon was forced in the minds of the people into a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it gives meanings to the hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird, Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis Mountains, cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist is regarded by some good judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history produced ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... "I'm aware of that natural phenomenon," answered Donald, somewhat curtly. "But ... Great Scott, can't I describe a fifteen—no, sixteen-year-old little savage, without all you people imagining that I'm going to be such a fool as to fall in love ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... and historic associations. Ruins of the Chateaux of Montfaucon and Vaite, to be seen on the way. At Baume-les-Daines, visit the ancient Abbey Church, now turned into a public granary, also the valley of the Cuisancin, last, the Glaciere de la Grace-Dieu, a natural phenomenon of great ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the disappearance of the strange vessel is but short-lived; explained by that very natural phenomenon—a fog. Not the haze already spoken of; but a dense bank of dark vapour that, drifting over the surface of the sea, has suddenly enveloped the barque within ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... the mountains," and procure good weather and successful hunting; and they attach unusual significance to the echoes which haunt the precipices. This superstition may also have arisen, in part, from a natural phenomenon of a singular nature. In the most calm and serene weather, and at all times of the day or night, successive reports are now and then heard among these mountains, resembling the discharge of several pieces of artillery. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... of augury, or divination, and vainly strove to impose upon the human mind a superstition which it had just thrown off. In order to mortify the Christians, he resolved to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem, and restore the Jews to their ancient seat. But some natural phenomenon interposed; the workmen were driven away by balls of fire, and Julian abandoned ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... no doubt about it! This monster, this natural phenomenon that had puzzled the learned world, and over thrown and misled the imagination of seamen of both hemispheres, it must be owned was a still more astonishing phenomenon, inasmuch as it was a simply ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... that of every day after the sunset. There is, as it were, a tint of sadness spread over the whole of nature. One becomes accustomed to it, and yet while we know that the occultation of the Sun by the Moon is a natural phenomenon, we can not escape a certain sense of uneasiness. The approach of some extraordinary spectacle ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... You soon become conscious of the careful way a Negro follows his idea. Certain customs of his you can, by the exercise of great patience, trace back in a perfectly smooth line from their source in some natural phenomenon. Others, of course, you cannot, the traces of the intervening steps of the idea having been lost, owing partly to the veneration in which old customs are held, which causes them to regard the fact that their fathers ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... explain that the barbarian notion which it is here intended to convey by the term "animate" is not the same as would be conveyed by the word "living". The term does not cover all living things, and it does cover a great many others. Such a striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are recognised as "animate"; while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous animals, such as house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not ordinarily apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively. As here used the term does not ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... and enriched with new examples from time to time that the original is well-nigh lost. This was the classical work on the subject in the VIIth century before our era, and the astronomers-royal, to whom applications were accustomed to be made to explain a natural phenomenon or a prodigy, drew their answers ready-made from it. Astronomy, as thus understood, was not merely the queen of sciences, it was the mistress of the world: taught secretly in the temples, its adepts—at least, those who had passed through the regular ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... noted man, however, in the world's history) so long ago laid beneath that stone, since she took such wonderful pains to "keep his memory green." Perhaps the proverbial phrase just quoted may have had its origin in the natural phenomenon here described. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... one of the famous Wetherill brothers and trader at Kayenta, Arizona, is the man who discovered Nonnezoshe, which is probably the most beautiful and wonderful natural phenomenon in the world. Wetherill owes the credit to his wife, who, through her influence with the Indians finally after years succeeded in getting the secret of the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... 'I do not think there is much use in talking to you, but I wish you to understand that all I said was, that the rainbow, or iris, is a natural phenomenon occasioned by the refraction ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The most attractive natural phenomenon encountered on the whole trip was found at the Soda Springs, near Bear River in Idaho. Some of the springs, in fact, are right in the bed of the river. One of them, Steamboat Spring, was spouting at regular ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... my return from the Lyapinsky house, I related my impressions to a friend. The friend, an inhabitant of the city, began to tell me, not without satisfaction, that this was the most natural phenomenon of town life possible, that I only saw something extraordinary in it because of my provincialism, that it had always been so, and always would be so, and that such must be and is the inevitable condition of civilization. In London it is even worse. Of course there is ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... changes to palpable rain so does this vague cognisance become a comprehensible revelation by being resolved into a shower of words on occasion by some process psychically analogous to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to babes like Beth, but ill-observed, and not at all explained, because man has gone such a little way beyond the bogey of the supernatural in psychical matters that he is still befogged, and makes up opinions on the subject like a divine when miracles ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... thoughts about himself, in the very centre of his mind and occupying nearly the whole of it, was the vast thought, the obsession, of his own potential power and its fulfilment. George's egotism was terrific, and as right as any other natural phenomenon. He had to get on. Much money was included in his scheme, but simply as a by-product. He had to be a great architect, and—equally important—he had to be publicly recognized as a great architect, and recognition could not come without money. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... "but we were both a bit scared yesterday, old chap, and the more I think of this dog business the less I like it. It was mere conceit on my part that made me say it was bound to be some natural phenomenon merely because I couldn't understand how the effect could have ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux |
