"Complicating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there is some complication, as rheumatism or other severe affection, complicating and preventing their recovery, special treatment is required. We are always ready to advise in regard to such cases when consulted either by mail ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... was nearly empty. He found her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so very much," he said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke as if to a child. His passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential impressions of her. "I would give all I possess to have it so," he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... her. As his faculties unfold she adds quality after quality to his list: progressing from hardness and softness to roughness and smoothness, from colour to polish, from simple bodies to composite ones—thus constantly complicating the problem as he gains competence, constantly taxing his attention and memory to a greater extent, constantly maintaining his interest by supplying him with new impressions such as his mind can assimilate, and constantly gratifying him by conquests over such small difficulties as ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... by any electoral arrangement, I am sorry to say. We are unable however to countenance the creation in a permanent form of a nominated Second Chamber. But in view of the position of native affairs, in view of the disadvantage of complicating the elections, to which all classes in the Transvaal have been so long looking forward, and most particularly because of the extra delays that would be involved in the creation of a new elective body, the Cabinet have resolved for this Parliament ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... advances take place in OECD nations; only a small portion of non-OECD countries have succeeded in rapidly adjusting to these technological forces; the accelerated development of new industrial (and agricultural) technology is complicating already grim environmental problems ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... critics had derived from a somewhat inadequate interpretation of Aristotle and of the practise of the Greek tragedians. These principles concentrated the interest of the play upon a single central situation, in order to emphasize which, subordinate characters and complicating under-plots were avoided as much as possible. There was little or no action upon the stage, and the events of the plot were narrated by messengers, or by the main characters in conversation with confidantes. Further, the ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... generations just preceding. Physically and nervously, the woman of to-day is not fitted to bear children as frequently as was her mother and her mother's mother. The high tension of modern life and the complicating of woman's everyday existence have doubtless contributed to this result. And who of us can say, until a careful scientific investigation is made, how much the rapid development of tuberculosis and other grave diseases, even among the well-nurtured, may be due to the depletion of the physical capital ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... a second time to his brain. He went out quickly, for fear of complicating the affair by a display of ill-humor. As soon as he was out he began to reflect. "The king," said he, "will not receive me, that is evident. The young man is angry; he is afraid of the words I may speak to him. Yes; but in the meantime, Belle-Isle ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... they were as pleased as schoolboys, and had to be kept back from plunging into the forest and complicating matters by losing themselves. They had not gone far before Smith uttered a shout, and on the party hurrying up he was ready to point in the direction of a piled-up clump ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... created in his own body, as he complained for more than a fortnight before, of nervous and feverish symptoms, which indicated a serious disease threatening him. The contagion of scarlatina may have made the case more dangerous by complicating it; but, be this as it may, it is certain that the symptoms were such from the beginning that a cure must have appeared most improbable at first sight to any physician of any school; and if there was a possibility of saving his life, ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... and customs, they shared two disadvantageous conditions: industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were subject races. Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine nationalities. These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another complicating and intensifying the struggle. But because of this very intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers and sisters. To ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... a practical moral end; that the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been made not only useless for mischief, but even useful for good; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a domestic with a foreign war;—all these results, any one of which might suffice to prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large—mindedness, and the unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it seemed, had lifted ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... she had been so ungratefully betrayed. Marie and her counsellors were, however, by no means a match for the astute and far-reaching Richelieu, who had, by encouraging the belligerent tastes of the King, and still more by so complicating the affairs of the kingdom as to render them beyond the comprehension and grasp of the weak monarch, and to reduce him to utter helplessness, succeeded in making himself altogether independent of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... my lords, have found out a method of complicating errours which none of their predecessors, however stigmatized for ignorance and absurdity, have hitherto been able to attain; they have been able to reconcile the extremes of folly, and to endanger the publick interest at the same time, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... study of languages, together with the imperfect material and the complicating conditions that have arisen by the spread of civilization over the country, combine to make the problem one ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... fact the most rational conclusion which we may draw from them is that they point back to a distant and generalized ancestor, who possessed them all, but that in the distribution of his physical estate, so to speak, these heirlooms have not come down alike to all descendants. There is again a complicating possibility that some may be no more than adaptive or analogous characters, similarly produced under like conditions of life, but quite independent of a common origin, and it is seldom that we know enough of the history of development of any species to conclude ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... country those for whom there is no economic place. Our immigration laws have allowed many to come to America for whom there is no place, and charity has kept them alive here, knowing the while that they are forcing down the standard of living among our poor, and complicating the problem incalculably at every turn. But, as concerns interstate emigration, and the migration from country to city, charity should not be so helpless. It is within our power to refuse, by charitable aid, to settle the man who cannot settle himself in ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... insect, on the bosom of Nature. There was a place for all. Why confine oneself by the bonds which others had invented, tyrannizing over the future of the men who were to come after them? The dead, ever the accursed dead, trying to meddle in everything, complicating our existence! ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the Cardinal laughed. "Aren't you complicating the question of mixed marriages with ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... damage; but may I suggest, Sir, that some worthier memorial is due to this pioneer of woman's higher activities? I have thought of a plain obelisk on Shakespeare's Cliff, a locality of which he was ever fond; or a small and inconspicuous lighthouse might, without complicating the navigation of this part of the Channel, serve to remind Englishmen of one who diffused so much light during his all too brief career. Choice, however, would depend on the funds available, and might be left to an influential ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... went on recruiting for his brigade. Indeed, he commended himself to Fremont, who, in his capacity as major-general of volunteers and in charge of the Western Military District, assigned him to duty in Kansas, thus greatly complicating an already delicate situation and immeasurably heaping up difficulties, embarrassments, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... an interesting one, to judge from all signs. For one item his sister, Lady Tressilvain, was impending from Paris—also his brother-in-law—complicating the humour of the visitation. Malcourt's marriage to an heiress was the perfectly obvious incentive of the visit. And when they wrote that they were coming to New York, it amused Malcourt exceedingly to invite them to Luckless Lake. But he said nothing ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... insensible to the caress. His immobility repelled these pleadings. Freya had traveled much through the world, had gone through shameful adventures, and would know how to free herself by her own efforts without the necessity of complicating him again in her net. The story that she had just told was nothing to him but a ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... we were looking over the theatrical offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator at the hotel, when whom should we meet but "Auntie," the patrician relative of the Gilded Youth. She recognized us in our civilian clothes, and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of complicating our formal greetings with gaiety. Auntie's troubled face would have caught Henry's quick sensitive eyes. But Auntie's voice brushed aside the levity ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... weather man as the year without a summer, we found a great difference in our Major, Greenriver, and Giles nuts from tree to tree as to size and maturity. This question of compatibility between stock and scion is of the utmost importance and it impedes investigational work, complicating comparisons we are trying to make. Some of our new varieties which we are trying out might be checked immediately if we knew the effect of the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... be. He heard a new voice, the squeak of a cane chair suddenly pushed back, looked up to see the Major in an attitude of false delight and out came Mrs. Cooper Jekyll followed,—as he inwardly exclaimed,—"by the gentle Alice Palgrave, by all that's complicating! Well, I'm jiggered." ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Complicating any military solution to the western fighting were the old rivalries among the states for control of the western lands. Virginia had to establish county government in Kentucky in order to head off North Carolinian Richard Henderson's ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... but, somehow, before he was fully aware of what he was saying, he had begun to pour into Major Selby's sympathetic ears the story of his romance. Encouraged by the other's kindly receptiveness, he had told him all—his love for Jill, his hopes that some day it might be returned, the difficulties complicating the situation owing to the known prejudices of Mrs Waddesleigh Peagrim concerning girls who formed the personnel of musical comedy ensembles. To all these outpourings Major Selby had listened with keen attention, and finally had made one of those luminous suggestions, so simple yet so shrewd, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... main purpose, to the neutral civilian, seemed certainly to be the wayward pleasure of complicating his life; and in that line it excelled in the last refinements of ingenuity. Instructions began to shower on us after the lull of the first days: instructions as to what to do, and what not to do, in order to make our presence tolerable and our persons secure. In the first place, foreigners ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... disquisitions on Homer—one wishes they were preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the pedants, according to their ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... chicaning Traitors according to others. And so there has arrived what we once foreshadowed: with Religion, or with the Cant and Echo of Religion, all France is rent asunder in a new rupture of continuity; complicating, embittering all the older;—to be cured only, by stern surgery, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... "A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... merely manage property for the benefit of others. Capitalists who become such through trading in money are a temporarily necessary evil. They may not be evil at all if their money goes to production. If their money goes to complicating distribution—to raising barriers between the producer and the consumer—then they are evil capitalists and they will pass away when money is better adjusted to work; and money will become better adjusted to work ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... a progressive civilization are constantly complicating the dependence and interrelation of various sections of our country. Roads, railroads, canals, and lines of telegraph, by their connections and intersections, are so many bonds of union between the various districts of our country—so many bonds of union between the various States ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ages with the universality of their studies and their knowledge, and that frightfully laborious life of theirs; which may help us to understand the habits and ways of a semi-barbarous society, but can never exist in ours. He does not see, the innocent dreamer, that civilization, by strangely complicating all social conditions, absorbs for business, for interests, for pleasures, thrice as much time as a less advanced society required for the same purposes. Look at the savage in his hut; he hasn't anything to do. Whereas we, with the Bourse, the opera, the newspapers, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... in claiming the island at this time is considered of the highest importance, as it is feared that it may have been claimed merely for the sake of complicating Hawaiian ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... at the best, would have seemed to be but some trick for not communicating it. The effect of a reserve so merely, so meanly defensive would in most cases, beyond question, sufficiently discredit the cause; wherefore, though it was complicating to be perpetually treated as an infinite agent, the outrage was not the greatest of which a brave man might complain. Complaint, besides, was a luxury, and he dreaded the imputation of greed. The other, the ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... character. It is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere's plays were rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of Macbeth and Julius Caasar, substituting rime for blank verse. In conjunction with Dryden, he altered the Tempest, complicating the intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda—a youth who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" Timon of Athens, and Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to King Lear, which turned the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sharpers, quacks, and cheating traders, who disgrace the American name. This is not an anomaly. It is but the inexorable result of a pseudo-religion. Outward observance, worship, Sabbath-keeping, and the various forms, are engrafted in the mind; and thus, by complicating the true duties which man owes to his fellow-man, obscure or take precedence of them. The latter grow to be esteemed as only of secondary ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... happened to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... The situation grew more and more complicated; it was no longer merely her word against his, and yet I could not doubt the truth of any statement she had made to me. There was a mystery here unexplained, involving the dead, and strangely complicating the lives of ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... the law of 1899, and now no one in the country speaks of the impracticability of proportional representation. Count Goblet d'Alviella states that "all the objections that were brought against the system before its introduction have been set at naught. The proportional method instead of complicating, as was foretold, both the voting and the counting, has worked with greater ease than the old one. The electors understood at once what they were to do, and the counters made fewer mistakes than before." Wurtemberg furnishes another instance of the ease with which the new system can be introduced. ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... our calculation. The Rob Roy had been carried by two tides; one this way, the other that. She had sailed on three different tacks, that is, in various angular directions, and with different speeds, and these complicating forces had acted for times very uncertain. Where is she now? an all-important question for settling the start point in a night cruise, and on ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... what a delightful life they lead! they are always doctoring and increasing and complicating their disorders, and always fancying that they will be cured by any nostrum which ...
— The Republic • Plato
... this, Secinaro would tell him everything, and somehow this seemed to him a point to his advantage. By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... This was complicating matters, and making things interesting indeed. The Indians, leaving the boys their guns loaded with ball, and enjoining perfect silence upon them, took up their own weapons and noiselessly withdrew. ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... it is best they should. I am afraid I'll have to explain to my wife, because she saw your apprehension. But nobody else need know. Except—I must tell Dr. Lavendar, of course; but not until after the funeral. There is no use complicating things. But other people can just think it was an accident. It was, in one way. He was insane. Everybody is, who does—that. Poor Samuel! Poor Mrs. Wright! I could not leave them; but I thought you had gone home, or I would have come. Mrs. Richie, promise ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... the frog, causes it to contract upon the puncture, and to largely obliterate the hole made. What, therefore, may look to be but a simple injury to the horn alone may in reality be the only evidence of a stab complicating the sensitive structures. It thus behoves the veterinary surgeon to follow up and carefully cut out any unnatural-looking mark in the horn, more especially if the horn is discoloured, or if blood is extravasated into its fibres, or there is moisture ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... stock across the boundary, and leaving them in friendly pastures, under sympathetic laws, go away to look for a new place. But it became abundantly clear that the influx of outsiders into Basutoland could not continue at the rate it was then proceeding without seriously complicating the land question in Basutoland, where chieftains are constantly quarrelling over small ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... we talked for a long time but we didn't come to anything in the end. There's something mystical about the proud man, in your sense. Perhaps you are right from your point of view, but if you take the matter simply, without complicating it, then what pride can there be, what sense can there be in it, if a man is imperfectly made, physiologically speaking, if in the vast majority of cases he is coarse and stupid and deeply unhappy? We must stop admiring one another. We must ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov |
