"Solar system" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought bitterly. There was sweat on his forehead; it had never seemed very probable to him that he might one day die—he didn't have to die in this great, wonderful world of new bodies for old, he could live on, and on, and on. He could live to see the Golden Centuries of Man. A solar system teeming with life. Ships to challenge the stars, the barriers breaking, crumbling before their very eyes. Other changes, as short-lived Man became long-lived Man. Changes in teaching, in thinking, in feeling. Disease, ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... and devotion, become acquainted with them. A series of communications is made to him concerning the invisible nature of man, about certain definite occurrences in the kingdom of which death opens the portals, and regarding the evolutions of man, the earth, and the entire solar system. What he expected was to enter the supersensible world easily, at a bound. Now he is heard to say: "Everything which I am told to study is food for my mind, but leaves my soul cold. I am seeking the deepening of my soul-life. ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... faculty confined within the periphery of the body. It can not, like the imagination, travel to immeasurable distances from the body, and in an instant of time go and return from Aldabran, or beyond the boundaries of the solar system. Its flight is confined to the world and to limits more or less restricted—the less restricted in some than in others. The will has two powers—direct and indirect. It is the direct motive power of the muscular system. It indirectly exerts a dynamic force upon surrounding ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... upon which all our conceptions depend. If we date the geological history of the Earth by thousands of years, as did our forerunners, we must shape our ideas of planetary time accordingly; and the duration of our solar system, and of the heavens, becomes comparable with that of the dynasties of ancient nations. If by millions of years, the sun and stars are proportionately venerable. If by hundreds ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... small. There is no scale of magnitude applicable to the distinction between God's will and that which is not God's will. Gravitation rules the motes that dance in the sunshine as well as the mass of Jupiter. A triangle with its apex in the sun, and its base beyond the solar system, has the same properties and comes under the same laws as one that a schoolboy scrawls upon his slate. God's truth is not too great to rule the smallest duties. The star in the East was a guide to the humble house at Bethlehem, and there are starry truths high in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... during the hour of the Sunday sermon, when I whiled away the good clergyman's discourse by sweeping the seas in my piratical schooner, and harrowing the Spanish Main. My tin soldiers were flesh and blood heroes, my kites flew nearly to the outer limits of the solar system, and I never quite lost the belief that I could dig a tunnel to China with the kitchen fire-shovel, had the cook only had sufficient scientific zeal to be willing to lend it to me for a few hours. I was very happy then, but I am equally happy now. I have never got ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Gallosh, I would answer you in the oft-quoted words of Horace—'Arma virumque cano.' The philosophy of a solar system is some times compressed within an ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... the past and the predicting of the future, no hypotheses are admissible which are not based upon the actual behaviour of things in the present. Once there was unlimited facility for guessing as to how the solar system might have come into existence; now the origin of the sun and planets is adequately explained when we have unfolded all that is implied in the processes which are still going on in the solar system. Formerly appeals were made to all manner of violent agencies to account for the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... student there. He stated that it had at different times of his life been a matter of serious consideration as to how much inflammable matter in a given time the sun used in warming the space included in the solar system. He said he expected to be able to make this ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... astronomical discoveries none has been regarded as more important than that of Neptune, the outermost known planet of the solar system. It was a rich reward to the watchers of the sky when this new planet swam into their ken. This discovery was hailed by astronomers as "the most conspicuous triumph of the theory of gravitation." Long after Copernicus even, the genius of philosophers was slow to grasp ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... outer reaches. Already, the satellite-building colony on the moon is well under way. The progress of our space program has been accelerating month by month. The expert predictions have been more and more optimistic of late. In another ten, twenty years, the solar system will be beckoning the ...
— Get Out of Our Skies! • E. K. Jarvis
... and of a heaven from it (for the human race is the seminary of heaven), cannot but believe that wherever there is an earth, there are human beings. That the planets, which are visible to our eyes, being within the boundaries of this solar system, are earths, may be clearly seen from the following considerations. They are bodies of earthy matter, because they reflect the sun's light (lumen), and, when seen through the telescope, appear, not as stars shining from ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... to ten million aspiring, education-and-property-acquiring people. In a word, the difficulty of the problem is not so much due to the facts presented as to the hypothesis assumed for its solution. In this it is similar to the problem of the solar system. By a complex, confusing, and almost contradictory mathematical process, by the use of zigzags instead of straight lines, the earth can be proved to be the center of things celestial; but by an operation so simple that it can be comprehended ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... astronomy the moon and all the planets of our solar system were supposed to be gliding along over the smooth blue firmament like a boat upon smooth water or a sleigh upon ice. The blue vault was a solid substance; hence the word firmament. In this vault were set the "fixed" stars, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... million miles from here to the sun, and all astronomers agree in saying that our solar system is only one of the small wheels of the great machinery of the universe, turning round some one great centre, the centre so far distant it is beyond all imagination and calculation; and if, as some think, that great centre in the distance is heaven, Christ came far from home when He came here. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... up that small part of the universe which we call our solar system and sums up the little we have learned regarding it. I used to think the earth the most important part of the solar system, on account of Man. So the earliest natural philosophers believed. That is like believing that the American continent was ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... striking examples as Aristotle's convulsive endeavors to make each of the senses correspond to one of the four elements in which they believed in his day, and Kepler with his fantastic efforts to prove the supremacy of the Pythagorean seven in the solar system. The object of the book was to show that the history of human knowledge is a history of false inferences and the erroneous interpretations of correctly observed phenomena, that the increase of knowledge always ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... replied Henry. "I know that some of the scientists believe they came from some other planet, perhaps even from some other solar system. I know they are like nothing ever known before on Earth. They are always inky black, something like black tar, you know, sort of sticky-looking, a disgusting sight. The weapons of mankind can't affect them. Explosives are useless and so are projectiles. ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... follows panting, through the giddy mazes of the dance. He is the sworn enemy of specialisation, as he explains in his remarkable essay on "The Twelve Men." The subject of the essay is the British jury, and its thesis is that when our civilisation "wants a library to be catalogued, or a solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity." For the judging ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence. Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four—his mother sends him to school to 'get him out of the way'—and my oldest twenty—it 'suddenly struck him' that it would be easier to go to school and get an education than follow the plough any longer. In the ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... all the members of the survey team. It multiplies and surges to its fulfillment at an exponential rate. Even within the short period of our visit the Terrans have made significant advances. They have filled their small solar system with their own kind and now they are ...
— The Demi-Urge • Thomas Michael Disch
... in his "Kuenstlerleben:" "Hector Berlioz does not belong to our musical solar system; he does not belong to the planets, neither to the large nor to the small. He was a comet, shining far, somewhat eerie to look at, soon again disappearing; but his appearance will remain unforgotten." The Requiem ("Messe des Morts") exemplifies Hiller's words. It is colossal, phenomenal, and ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... settle this point some day, but until now the experiment of the Gun Club has had no other result than that of providing our solar system with ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... whales, dragons, and other triumphal phenomena. In the market-place were seven statues in copper, personifying the seven planets, together with an eighth representing Bacchus; and perhaps there were good mythological reasons why the god of wine, together with so large a portion of our solar system, should be done in copper by Jacob Jongeling, to honour the triumph of Alexander, although the key to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Divine Being, angels and devils, the planets of the solar system (including sun and moon) and the days of the week, birds and beasts, colours, herbs, and precious stones—all, according to old-time occult philosophy, are connected by the sympathetic relation believed to run through all creation, the knowledge of which was ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... excellent little mamma had begun to wear false hair, or had lost some of her front teeth. But all this, we men of sense know to be gammon. Our mother Tellus, beyond all doubt, is a lovely little thing. I am satisfied that she is very much admired throughout the Solar System: and, in clear seasons, when she is seen to advantage, with her bonny wee pet of a Moon tripping round her like a lamb, I should be thankful to any gentleman who will mention where he has happened to observe—either he or his telescope—will he only have the goodness to say, in what part of the heavens ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... at your disposal all the magnificent lenses and the accurate machinery owned by modern observatories; but if you have not within yourself the power to build what these reveal to you, and what the books tell you, into the solar system and still larger systems, you can never study astronomy except in a blind and piecemeal sort of way, and all the planets and satellites and suns will never for you form themselves into a system, no matter what the books ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... growth of commerce. All Europe became alive with the desire for progress; many new things were invented, many old ones perfected; and before the Renaissance ended it had given us some wonderful discoveries and achievements—paper and printing; the mariner's compass; an understanding of the solar system; oil painting, music, and literature; and lastly, the ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... writer). "Do you think we shall ever be able to leave the earth and travel through space to Mars or Venus, and the other members of the Solar System?" ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... octave, is the diapason of man. These are of course very highly imaginative speculations. It is interesting to remember, however, that the system of astronomy first taught by Pythagoras was afterwards developed into the solar system by Copernicus, and is now received as the Copernican system. But, turning from grave to gay, we find that five wits have been described, viz., common sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. Of these, common sense passes judgment on all ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... the sky, When the tempest sweeps the lands, Still about, below, on high, God's great solar system stands. Never yet a star went out. What have I to fear or doubt?— I, a part of this great whole, Governed by ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with us. Kerans, a good Amharic scholar, was the interpreter on those occasions: one of them, Deftera Zenab, the King's chief scribe, (now tutor to Alamayou,) is an intelligent; honest man; but he was quite mad on astronomy, and would listen for hours to anything concerning the solar system. Unfortunately, either the explanations were faulty or his comprehension dull as each time he came he wanted the whole dissertation over again until at last our patience was fairly exhausted, and we gave him up as a bad job. His other intimate was a good-natured young man called Afa Negus Meshisha, ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... which rises so palpably to a hushed audience and a sublime andante chorus, until the Casta Diva is sung—the "inconstant moon" that then and thereafter remains fixed in the heavens as though it were a part of the solar system inaugurated by Joshua. Again the white-robed Druids filed past me, again I saw that improbable mistletoe cut from that impossible oak, and again cold chills ran down my back with the first strain of the recitative. The thumping springs essayed ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... in fact, gathered into zones or strata; that our own wicked little earth, with the whole of our peculiar solar system, is a part of such a zone; and that all this perfect geometry of the heavens, these radii in the mighty wheel, would become apparent, if we, the spectators, could but survey it from the true center; which center ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... after sentence, elaborated to the uttermost his immortal orations. It was thus that Newton pioneered his way, by the steps of an ascending geometry, to the mechanism of the Heavens, and Le Verrier added a planet to our Solar System. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... world, while professing to accept the ecclesiastical scheme of creation, as an account of that which actually was its manner of coming into existence. In the eighteenth century, Kant put forth a remarkable speculation as to the origin of the solar system, closely similar to that subsequently adopted by Laplace and destined to become famous under the ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... who is capable of consciously using his spiritual body with the same facility that we now use our physical vehicles should glide away from the earth into interplanetary space, the earth and the various other planets of our solar system would appear to him to be composed of three kinds of matter, roughly speaking. The densest matter, which is our visible earth, would appear to him as being the center of the ball as the yolk is in the center of ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... ship time, the Niccola was well inside the Theta Gisol solar system. She had previously secured excellent evidence that this was not the home of the Plumie civilization. There was no tuned radiation. There was no evidence of interplanetary travel—rockets would be more than obvious, and a magnetronic ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... machine—I use this figure for want of a better one. Every individual on the ship bears a certain relationship to the vessel; the steamer is a part of this world; this world is a cog in the machinery of the solar system; the solar system is but a small group of worlds, which is a part of and depends on, something as much vaster as the world is to this ship. This men call the Universe; but all questions of what or where ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... the bodies of the solar system are very nearly spherical they will all act upon one another, and upon bodies placed on their surfaces, as if they were so many centres of attraction; and therefore we obtain the law of gravity which subsists between spherical bodies, namely, that one sphere will act upon another with a force directly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Nature, we descend from the consideration of orb-filled space and the character of the universal elements, to trace the history of our own globe. And we find that this falls significantly into connection with the primary order of things suggested by Laplace's theory of the origin of the solar system in a vast nebula or fire-mist, which for ages past has been condensing under the influence of gravitation and ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a museum of natural history; ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of least resistance. Hence there is a driving towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of genius does not share the common man's danger of capture, nor the woman of genius the common woman's overwhelming specialization. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... divers deferential workmen who were putting the last touches there, or to observe him mid-course in affable consultation with gardeners anent the rolling of a lawn or the retrimming of a rosebush, and to mark the bearing of the man so optimistically colored by goodwill toward the solar system. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... solar system, or without it, May be a world less rationally run; There may be such a geoid, but I doubt it— ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... consideration their past life or heredity. The study of these radioactive elements has led to a new atomic theory. I suppose most of us in our youth used to imagine the atom as a little round hard ball, but now it is conceived as a sort of solar system with an electropositive nucleus acting as the sun and negative electrons revolving around it like the planets. The number of free positive electrons in the nucleus varies from one in hydrogen to 92 in uranium. This leaves room for 92 possible elements ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... the mystery of the Solar System, was excommunicated for heresy. But Christians acknowledge now that the earth goes round the sun, and the ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... "The Georgians cultivate rice. They cultivate cotton." The conjunction, though chiefly used to connect sentences, sometimes connects only words; in which capacity it is nearly allied to the preposition; as, "The sun and (add) the planets constitute the solar system." In this, which is a simple sentence, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... the Copernican picture of the world by doing away with the motionless circle of fixed stars with which Copernicus, and even Kepler, had thought our solar system surrounded, and by opening up the view into the immeasurability of the world. With this the Aristotelian antithesis of the terrestrial and the celestial is destroyed. The infinite space (filled ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... are to regard Comte as in any degree representing the scientific opinion of his time, the research into what takes place beyond our own solar system seemed then to be exceedingly ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... central luminary, and a revolution of the planetary body, there could not have been a living creature upon the face of this earth; and, while we see a living system on this earth, we must acknowledge, that in the solar system we see ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the might of Jehovah grew through the centuries and followed upon the extension of the knowledge of the Hebrews about the world in which they lived. If tomorrow morning some revolutionary astronomical discovery should convince us that the solar system is much vaster than we have ever imagined, the theist would, of course, extend the thought of the sway of God to all that solar system. If there were some method of becoming aware that the bodies of the entire ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... the low plains of the horizon, the great universe is spread out. Vega flashes overhead, beckoning to this little solar system that is rolling ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... of Sociology" was published in four parts from 1876 to 1880. It forms part of a connected series. In "First Principles" inorganic evolution—that of the stars and of the solar system—was outlined; organic evolution was dealt with in "Principles of Biology;" and in the present treatise, "Principles of Sociology," we approach super-organic evolution, and are introduced to the science of society under its ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... The thought of it was as crushing as that of interstellar distances, of the pathless void into which God threw a handful of dust and then quietly ordained that each speck should be a sun and the pivot of a solar system. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... hope you won't take it amiss, but I don't mind telling you that I always felt crowded, not only while he was in the house, but even when he was in the country. And, oh, I know I should feel as if I had ever so much more room if he was off the face of this earth—in some other planet of some other solar system." ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... question, however, need not be decided. For science assures us that the stability of the present conditions of the solar system is certified for many myriads of years to come. Whatever gradual modifications of climate there may be, the planet will not cease to support life for a period which transcends and flouts all efforts of imagination. In short, the POSSIBILITY of Progress is guaranteed ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Mr. Wardlaw Scott's horror at the Newtonian astronomy and its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of gravitation has a curiously ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... the study of the heavenly bodies. This new instrument at once revealed to him the mountains on the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and the spots on the sun, and brought the celestial bodies under observation in a way that no one had dreamed of before. In our view to-day, the planets of the solar system are worlds; we can examine their surfaces and judge wherein they resemble or differ from our earth. To the ancients they were but points of light; to us they are vast bodies that we have been able to measure and to weigh. The telescope has enabled us also ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... move. The symphony of reason and instinct is organized. The darkness grows bright. On the long ribbon of the winding road, at intervals, there are brilliant fires, which in their turn shall be in the work of creation the nucleus of little planetary worlds linked up in the girdle of their solar system.... ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... I set my inter-space coupling detectors for any objective I choose. When any one of them reacts, it trips the kickers and we emerge. During any emergency outside the Solar System I am in command—with the provision that I must relinquish command to you in case ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... details it looks ridiculous, unreal. So here, at the outset, I want to say my life has not been a tragic one—whose life is in this day of advanced techniques and universal good will?—but that, on the contrary, I have enjoyed this Earth and Solar System and all the abundant interests that it has offered me. If, lying here beneath these great lights, I could only be as sure of ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... European court during early modern times was to get both the old feudal nobility and the newly promoted commoners to revolve round the throne as round the centre of their solar system. By sheer force of character—for the Tudors, had no overwhelming army like the Roman emperors'—Henry VIII had succeeded wonderfully well. Elizabeth now had to piece together what had been broken under Edward VI and Mary. She, too, succeeded—and with the hearty goodwill ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... prepares an invocation to this god of our solar system. It is founded on the style of the Psalms, but is immeasurably inferior to most of those sublime utterances of the Psalmist of Israel. And still the sentiments breathed were ennobling in their character; ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... returned home from his last visit to Belmont agitated by many thoughts, but, generally speaking, deeply musing over its mistress. Considerable speculation on religion, the churches, the solar system, the cosmical order, the purpose of creation, and the destiny of man, was maintained in his too rapid progress from Roehampton to his Belgravian hotel; but the association of ideas always terminated the consideration of every topic by a wondering and deeply interesting inquiry when ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... its auxiliary nuclear power unit, the ship moved closer to the new solar system. In half an hour Don Howard brought Lord the lab report. Two of the planets were enveloped in methane, but the third had an earth-normal atmosphere. Lord gave the order for a landing, his voice pulsing ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... a risky universe. But the universe without God is not risky; it is a foregone conclusion; the dice are all loaded. After the lapse of millions of years which, however long they be stretched out, will ultimately end, our solar system will be gone, without even a memory left of anything that ever was dreamed or done within it. That is the inevitable issue of such a "risky" universe. When scientifically-minded men, therefore, now take a long look ahead, the Utopian visions of the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... simplicity of its basic idea, an attraction between two bodies proportionate to their mass and also proportionate to the square of the distance; through the completeness with which it explained so many of the peculiarities in the movement of the bodies making up the solar system; and, finally, through its universal validity, even in the case of the far-distant planetary systems, it compelled ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... have heard it said that a savage is a grown-up child, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage. Like the savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar system revolves, and he is himself the centre of all life on the earth. It has no meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his use; it is for his pain and his abuse. It is full of sights, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... out. They were recognisably the same as those we see, arranged in the same constellations. Mr. Cave recognised the Bear, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and Sirius: so that the other world must be somewhere in the solar system, and, at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of miles from our own. Following up this clue, Mr. Wace learned that the midnight sky was a darker blue even than our midwinter sky, and that the sun ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known prose sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality, but the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this richness of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here today and "moved on" tomorrow, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the Feringhis of the time-honoured system of Ptolemy, in favour of the new-fangled theories of Copernicus, by which the earth is degraded from its recognised and respectable station in the centre of the universe, to a subordinate grade in the solar system, seems to have been a source of great scandal and perplexity to the Khan; "since," as he remarks, "the former doctrine is supported by their own Bible, not less than by our Koran." These sentiments are repeated whenever the subject is referred ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... hopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless cosmos of his own creed. He knew well the ruthless and inexhaustible resources of our scientific civilization. He no more expected rescue from a medical certificate than rescue from the solar system. In many of his Robinson Crusoe moods he thought kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsome school-fellow who had long been dead. He thought of leaving in the cell when he died a rigid record of his opinions, and when he began to write them ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... there were many who adhered to the belief that the gold standard was correct and unchanging, and insisted that what appeared to be its aberrations were not in reality due to any fault of the gold clock, but to some convulsion of nature by which the solar system had been disarranged and the planets made to move irregularly in ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... used skilfully and systematically. One instance may suffice to show what can be done in this way. The well-known telescopist Goldschmidt (who commenced astronomical observation at the age of forty-eight, in 1850) added fourteen asteroids to the solar system, not to speak of important discoveries of nebulae and variable stars, by means of a telescope only five feet in focal length, mounted ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... political economists, goes floundering round in a sea of contradictions, now proclaiming principles almost like those of the anarchists, and again favoring extreme socialism, while all the time imagining himself an individualist. Their theories remind one of the labored attempts to explain the solar system by the old Ptolemaic method of epicycles and deferents, when the one simple law of centripetal and centrifugal force was enough to account for all the majestic movements of the universe. What other outcome can there be of this want of a regulator in economics—like a governor in machinery—than ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... brilliancy; she also engaged Mr. Marshall in some long conversations upon Ireland, and even Mr. Marshall's son, whose talent for silence seems to be so very profound, was thawed a little on Monday evening, and discussed after tea the formation of the solar system. Miss Edgeworth tells me that she is at last employed in writing for the public after a long interval, but does not expect to have her work soon ready for publication.' [There is a curious criticism of Miss Edgeworth by Robert Hall, the great preacher, which should ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... Path by which He may be directly reached, which every son of man in his progress through the ages is privileged to hear of, and to tread, if he so chooses. We find that this was so in the Venus scheme also, and we may presume it is or will be so in all the schemes which form part of our Solar system. This Path is the Path of Initiation, and the end to which leads is the same for all, and that end ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... nucleus, while uranium, the heaviest element now known, has 92 positive particles. Now before leaving the atom please note that it is as much smaller than the diagram as the latter is smaller than our solar system. ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... to the proportion of the notes in a musical scale. Hence the "music of the spheres." From what can be gathered of the astronomical doctrine of Pythagoras, it has been inferred that he was possessed of the true idea of the solar system, which was revived by Coper'nicus and fully established by Newton. With respect to God, Pythagoras appears to have taught that he is the universal, ever-existent mind, the first principle of the universe, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Creator made substantial? If the stuff of life can create, then it is fair to assume that there can be a He who created the stuff of life. It is merely a difference of degree. I have not yet made a mountain nor a solar system, but I have made a something that sits in my chair. This being so, may I not some day be able to make a ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... the bulk and strength of thee: thy Epic, unsung in words, is written in huge characters on the face of this Planet,—sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New Hollands; legible throughout the Solar System! ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... poor, and in which all must be poor in spirit to have part. If they be poor in spirit, it matters little what is their external state, or whether the world which rolls on beside or over them be the world of a solar system, or of a conquering empire, or of ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... pizen had gone into his solar system! I see scarin' didn't do no good, so I tried tender talk to wean him from the idee. I told him I thought too much on him to resk him there in such crowds. He wuz too small boneded and his head too weak to grapple with the lures and temptations that would surround ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... heard at the distance of twenty miles; while those tremendous and unutterable forces which ever issue from the throne of God, and drag the chariot wheels of Uranus and Neptune along the uttermost path-ways of the solar system, pervade the illimitable ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as they knew they knew. It is no disgrace to Homer that he had not discovered Britain; or to Virgil that he had not discovered America; or to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not know. We feel, in a sort of way, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the next destroying, the works of all the noble persons who made its intellectual or art life possible to it:—an age without honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system, if it were allowed to meddle with it.[15] In the midst of all this, you have to become lowly and strong; to recognise the powers of others and to fulfil your own. I shall try to bring before you every form of ancient art, that you may read and profit by it, not ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... settled down and balanced itself once more on the edge of the perpetual abyss into which it must fall some day; the invisible shadow of the Dark Star swept it at intervals when some far and nameless sun blazed out unseen; days dawned; the sun of the solar system rose furtively each day and hung around the heavens until that dusky huntress, Night, chased him once more ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... act (for Paradise Lost has some dramatic as well as epic construction) we follow the creation of the earth in the midst of the universe; and herein we have an echo of the old belief that the earth was the center of the solar system. Adam and Eve are formed to take in the Almighty's affection the place of the fallen angels. They live happily in Paradise, watched over by celestial guardians. Meanwhile Lucifer and his followers are ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... this book is human interest in the other worlds around us. It presents the latest discoveries among the planets of the solar system, and shows their bearing upon the question of life in those planets. It points out the resemblances and the differences between the earth and the other worlds that share with it in the light of the sun. It shows what we should see and experience if ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... other views of his time concerning what was of most importance in the doctrine of the Messiah. The last of these was of vital importance for his teaching; the first was for this teaching quite as indifferent a matter as the relations of the earth and the sun in the solar system. ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... can never be, a touching malady, but it is not wisdom. Yet there is none who may not achieve harmony; and when he has it, he is within the eternal order, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly as a flower does, or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing that is outside herself. She is exactly that which she should be; she expresses goodness, order, law, truth, honour; she transcends ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... thirty years since the spectroscope gave us for the first time certain knowledge of the nature of the heavenly bodies, and revealed the fundamental fact that terrestrial matter is not peculiar to the solar system, but is common to all the stars which are visible to us. Professor Rowland had since shown us that if the whole earth were heated to the temperature of the sun, its spectrum would resemble very closely the solar spectrum. In the nebulae, the elder Herschel saw portions of the fiery mist or "shining ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... sick man's fancy, he likened it to the mighty cry of some Titan of the Elder World vexed with misery or wrath. Higher and higher it arose, challenging and demanding in such profounds of volume that it seemed intended for ears beyond the narrow confines of the solar system. There was in it, too, the clamour of protest in that there were no ears to hear ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... harmony, and every being may attain it, has found its place in the order of the universe, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing outside itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression of right, order, law, and truth; it is greater than time, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heading? We are still at one gee and even on Mass-Time you cannot juggle apparent acceleration and spatial transition outside certain limits; we are not just orbiting but must be well outside the Solar System ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... independently originated species to a common ultimate origin,—thus, and in various other ways, largely and legitimately extending the domain of secondary causes. Surely the scientific mind of an age which contemplates the solar system as evolved from a common, revolving, fluid mass,—which, through experimental research, has come to regard light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and mechanical power as varieties or derivative and convertible forms of one force, instead of independent ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... once to the evidence of an experiment which it did not understand. But when the fact was clearly established, no man sets up his interpretation of the Bible in opposition to it. Religious men admit all the facts connected with our solar system; all the facts of geology, and of comparative anatomy, and of biology. Ought not this to satisfy scientific men? Must we also admit their explanations and inferences? If we admit that the human embryo passes through various phases, must we admit that man ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... burning life in his mind. This was his Earth, his and Grim's and Wat's, and of millions of other normal human beings. The Mercutians were interlopers, brutal conquerors. He would devote his now otherwise meaningless life to driving them off the planet, wiping them out of the solar system. A tall order, yes, but not for nothing had he fought almost single-handed against those other monstrosities on other worlds: Martians, Ganymedans, Saturnians. The Mercutians were no stronger than they. Besides, ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... spreading their fanlike fronds, and majolica glows and gleams; and fabrics, of which Morris is the actual or spiritual begetter, delight the eye. In summer-time our fireplace is indeed a thing of beauty, but, alas for the solar system! it is not a joy for ever. The sun at last recedes beyond the equinoxes, and the black bogey who has slept awakens again. Euphemia restores the fender kerb and the brazen dogs and the fireirons that will clatter; and then all the winter, whenever she sits before ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... whether you read it on the report sheet or not, but the trip of the Endore began from this same spaceport two years ago. The observatory on Pluto had reported a free planet passing within two hundred quadrillion miles of the solar system. The Endore was assigned the task of landing ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... dislike all kinds of Insects. Their cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitted industry repel me. And I am not altogether happy about the future of the Human Race; when I think of the slow refrigeration of the Earth, the Sun's waning, and the ultimate, inevitable collapse of the Solar System, I have grave misgivings. And all the books I have read and forgotten-the thought that my mind is really nothing but a sieve—this, too, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... better kingdom of humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a working power was strengthened by the advances of natural science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial restraints of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force balanced with every other. Natural law would accomplish the same result in human relations, if men would only get rid of the artificial ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... "Copperfield"), I had, of course, given out "Copperfield" to be read again. Conceive my amazement and dismay when I find the printer to have announced "Little Dombey"!!! This, I declare, I had no more intention of reading than I had of reading an account of the solar system. And this, after a sensation last night, of a really extraordinary nature in its ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... bedrooms. One of the bedrooms may be a dressing-room, if it is quite understood that a dressing-room does not mean a cupboard in which the last tenant's housemaid kept her brushes. The other four bedrooms must be a decent size and should get plenty of sun. The exigencies of the solar system may make it impossible for the sun to be always there, but it should be around when wanted. With regard to the living-rooms, it is essential that they should not be square but squiggly. The drawing-room should be particularly squiggly; the dining-room should have at least an air of squiggliness; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... triumphed Peter, "it is because they are optimists, that they suspect there must be forwarder and more luminous regions than the Solar System." ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... and Ethnographical Charts of the World. 4. Zoological and Botanical Charts of the World. 5. Isothermal Chart shewing the Temperature of the Earth's Surface. 6. Northern and Southern Celestial Hemisphere. 7. Solar System, Theory of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... world, and to say what I anticipate on the one hand, and what I fear on the other, nay, what I foresee; for that which is to come, in regard to the acts of Governments and Nations, may as certainly be predicted from history, as the revolutions of the solar system. You have it in your power to be the Napoleon of South America, as you have it in your power to be one of the greatest men now acting on the theatre of the world; but you have also the power to choose your course, and if the first steps are false, the eminence on which you stand will, ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... and the astronomical tables of Bagdad, Spain, and Samarcand, [62] correct some minute errors, without daring to renounce the hypothesis of Ptolemy, without advancing a step towards the discovery of the solar system. In the Eastern courts, the truths of science could be recommended only by ignorance and folly, and the astronomer would have been disregarded, had he not debased his wisdom or honesty by the vain predictions of astrology. [63] But ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... the crew, bronzed space-sailors out of every port in the solar system, had listened mutely. Now, one of them, a tall tube-man, ...
— The Sargasso of Space • Edmond Hamilton |
