"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... had, and has, a certain success. Its infinitesimal treatment being a nullity, patients are never hurt by drugs, when it is adhered to. It pleases the imagination. It is image-worship, relic-wearing, holy-water-sprinkling, transferred from the spiritual world to that of the body. Poets accept it; sensitive and spiritual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... uncompromising and ordered strength, as he took stock of the vast courtyards and the stony lengths of imprisoning walls, he got an idea of that formidable organisation called a regiment, which itself is but an infinitesimal part of that great whole we call an army. Appreciating as he now did the importance, the immutability, the regularity of the movements of the military machine, with its wheels within wheels, Fandor ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... juncture. At that spot, where you seem to see a speck of something in motion, is an immense mass-meeting. Look sharper, and you will see a mite brandishing his mandibles in an excited manner. That is the great Mr. Soandso, defining his position amid tumultuous and irrepressible cheers. That infinitesimal creature, upon whom some score of others, as minute as he, are gazing in open-mouthed admiration, is a famous philosopher, expounding to a select audience their capacity for the Infinite. That scarce discernible pufflet of smoke and dust is a revolution. ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... work, no added income for either of them, saving two trifles, for five long months. Once Lewisham won twelve shillings in the prize competition of a penny weekly, and three times came infinitesimal portions of typewriting from a poet who had apparently seen the Athenaeum advertisement. His name was Edwin Peak Baynes and his handwriting was sprawling and unformed. He sent her several short lyrics on scraps of paper with instructions ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... conscience to bear, and being very uncomfortable sometimes when you do. But as for recognising the mystic solemnity of all these days of yours in that they are welded together, and are all tending to one end, and that each passing moment contributes its infinitesimal share to the awful solemn whole—that has seldom entered your minds, and for a great many of you it has never had any effect in restraining or ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... which the cone hung, and the thing sank an infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared about him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within, flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... optimistic words of Phoebe rang in the ears of the big doctor as he bent over Mother Bab's sightless eyes and began the tedious operation. His hands moved skilfully, with infinite precision, cutting to the infinitesimal ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... He had no experience of children of that early age. His own daughters had been some years older before he began to notice them. He could but wonder at this quick and eager brain animating so infinitesimal a body. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... exceeding smallness of the creatures thus preyed upon, and consider the fact that each little thing must obtain food by making war upon some creatures still smaller than itself, we are led almost in spite of ourselves into that mysteriously metaphysical question—infinitesimal divisibility; which may be translated thus—the endless division and subdivision of atoms. This subject has puzzled the heads of the profoundest philosophers of all ages; we will not, therefore, puzzle our readers with ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... He asked a multitude of questions, most of them pointless, some naive, and Melinda dug into her infinitesimal fund of knowledge and gave. The little man scribbled furiously, clucking ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey
... than 250,000,000 years: the being who commenced the task at the time that our solar system could have been no more than a formless nebula, would not yet have reached the end."[92] Biology, with its protoplasmic elements, its plastids, gemmules, hypotheses on hereditary transmission by means of infinitesimal subdivisions; the theory of evolution, which speaks off-hand of periods of a hundred thousand years; and many other scientific theses that I omit, offer fine material for the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... think not. There are others whose mannerisms plague me too. For instance, TRUBERRY, whom I meet occasionally, has a wild and venomous habit of relating to me his infinitesimal jokelets. That I could pardon. But when, having related one, he bursts, as he always does, into a helpless suffocation of purple laughter, the savage within me awakes and I murder TRUBERRY in fancy to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... tore the letter in two, the halves into quarters, the quarters into infinitesimal squares. He took a pinch of them and extended his arm, dropping the particles of paper upon the current of the wind. They rose, fell, eddied, swam, and rose again, finally to fall on the roofs below. Again ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... there were taxes to pay, and there would be repairs every little while to eat up the infinitesimal income which was left her, when all the expenses of her mother's long illness and death were paid. They had been spending their principal. It could not have been helped. In all, she knew, she had something like two hundred dollars a year remaining. Not enough to board her if she ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... out of her chair and crossed to the door; even in action her broad, squat figure infinitesimal to the room's proportions. When she opened the door the dignity of great halls lay in waiting. She crossed the wide vista to a closed door, a replica of her own, and knocked, waited, turned the crystal knob, knocked, waited. ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... infringes on our rights," Dora informed me. "I have never heard him say an angry word to a nurse. He just has a way of smiling at one, as if he were beholding an infinitesimal infant totally incapable of understanding. The sarcasm of it is utterly fierce and the nurse goes off, red and shaken, and feels like killing him. Don't you think we've got just as good a right as any whipper-snapper of a new ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed her to great advantage. Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart- burning, and almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company. Mrs. Hob had said her say at Cauldstaneslap. "Daft-like!" she had pronounced it. "A jaiket that'll no meet! Whaur's the sense of a jaiket that'll no button upon you, if it should come to ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found that the world contained a great number of people. Despite the 1,500 millions amongst whom we 'live and move and have our being' we are apt to think that we alone are important, which is not conceit but a mere proposition demonstrating that man is a universe in himself while being but an infinitesimal part ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... results of your monopoly? Quousque tandem! How long are we going to stand this scandal of international illiteracy and ignorance, fraught with such ominous peril for the future? How long is this nation going to be hoodwinked by an infinitesimal minority of reactionary dons and obscurantist parsons, determined to force a smattering of Greek down the throats of a reluctant youth? How long is modern culture to be kept back under the vain pretence of maintaining the culture of antiquity, but in ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... all the earnestness of his nature and his very young fears was strenuously resolved to watch himself narrowly in his intercourse with his too fascinating relative; little recking how infinitesimal is the power of a man's free-will upon the conduct ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... beside the rapids, Damon geologised, finding the marks of ancient glaciers, and bits of iron-ore, and pockets of sand full of infinitesimal garnets, and specks of gold washed from the primitive granite; and I fished, picking up a pair of ouananiche in foam-covered nooks among the rocks. The swift water was almost passed when we embarked again and ran down the last ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... drawing-room window in daytime, now showed a uniform dull grey, lifeless. The cellar was formidable below, and the stairs curved upwards into the formidable. But he climbed them. The house seemed full of inexplicable noises. When he stopped to listen he could hear scores of different infinitesimal sounds. His spine thrilled, as if a hand delicate and terrible had run down it in a caress. All the unknown of the night and of the universe was pressing upon him, but it was he alone who had created the night and the universe. He reached his room, the room in which he meant to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... squaws who walk behind the Indian, and whom he has captured in battle or bought for a few axes or lengths of tobacco, and over whom he exercises the despotic right of life and death, are probably all three of infinitesimal value in his eyes, compared with the value of his single, free wife to one of our ancient, monogamous German ancestors; while the hundred wives and concubines purchased by a Turkish pasha have probably not even an approximate value in his eyes, when compared with ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... and examined the picture. It was almost finished, in that last stage where the artist can play with his creation, fondly touching and perfecting infinitesimal details, knowing that the thing has really been "pulled off." And it was triumphantly done! Even to Milly's untutored eyes, the triumph of it was indubitable. There the Russian stood on her thin, lithe haunches, her head tipped a little back disdainfully as in life, the open ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... the loose one hundred meter cable that attached it to its anchor, and which had had fifteen meters of slack when the ship first began its infinitesimal movement, ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... they knew what plans of ours this dashed away. But our disappointment is truly an infinitesimal drop in the great waves of triumph and despair surging to-night in ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... comfortable of sleeping-places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curled over his nose. There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable murmurings now and again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the ship. But for such infinitesimal stirrings of sound—carefully recorded for this exact purpose—the feel of the ship would have been that of ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... me. I mean that when you see a Woman, you ought—besides inferring her breadth—to see her length, and to SEE what we call her HEIGHT; although the last Dimension is infinitesimal in your country. If a Line were mere length without "height," it would cease to occupy Space and would become invisible. ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... we find him grappling closer and closer with the Homoeopathists, and meeting them manfully on their own ground. 'We will not,' says he, 'give in to the absurdity of attempting to counteract a disease by a medicine that produces the same disease; but something good may be learned from your infinitesimal system. To that system you owe the fact that you are now at large: if you had given doses like ours of such medicines, you would have been in the hands of the turnkey or the mad-doctor long ago. Your cures have been effected by your giving so little as not ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... would be like, standing up there in front of all the world and getting married. And then—afterwards! Why on earth do you think that you would have been happy with this girl? What do you know about her except that she is a beauty? I grant you she's that, but are you aware of the infinitesimal part looks play in married life? My dear chap, better is it for a man that he marry a sympathetic gargoyle than a Venus with a streak of hardness in her. You know—and you would admit it if you were honest with yourself—that this girl is hard. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... out upon the water, slipping by infinitesimal gradations across its mirror surface. The Mayorunas had become quiet. The whites waited in silent suspense for they knew not what. Far out in the forest a jaguar gave his coughing roar at intervals. Little by little the Red Bone ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly the instructions that had ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... account, and they are in very many cases too slow in producing visible results for an age so impatient as ours. The over-civilization of the nineteenth century cannot wait for wealth to be amassed by infinitesimal gains, and we are in haste to SPECULATE upon the powers of nature, as we do upon objects of bargain and sale in our trafficking one with another. But there are still some cases where the little we know of a life, whose workings are ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... moved—haltingly and slowly, it is true, and with frequent stoppages. None the less, we moved; progress was definitely being made in the direction of the seaboard, and in contemplation of this fact one found an infinitesimal measure of consolation, gleaming, so to speak, against a dark cloud of forebodings, like one lone starry orb in a storm-envisaged firmament. During the early part of our journey I could not fail to give heed to the amazing attitude maintained by the young ladies. Repeatedly, as we paused on a siding ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... and philosophical, and—Havelock Ellish, Martin, dear," she admonished him, pending a minute operation with an infinitesimal hairpin. "It isn't your lay a bit. Just concentrate your mind on one thing, and that's being ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... listened to the infinitesimal noises of the night, straining their ears in the stillness. The river wound past them with a faint, sibilant sound like a child chuckling in its sleep; an owl hooted somewhere in the far-off sanctuary of the trees. Betty drew her breath with ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... science, and the mathematics in no way lagged behind. The discoveries of Johann Kepler and Bonaventura Cavalieri were the foundation upon which Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz erected that wonderful edifice, the Infinitesimal Calculus (q.v..) Many new fields were opened up, but there was still continual progress in pure algebra. Continued fractions, one of the earliest examples of which is Lord Brouncker's expression for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... millions of it at least were so appropriated as to better enable them to pay the large general tax for the aggregate sum. No one hears any complaint regarding the sum necessary to support the General Government, except by those in remote districts, who have but an infinitesimal interest involved, but an imaginary part of the sum to pay, and who, producing but little, and having nothing to do, assume the right to manage the affairs of those who really have something at stake. The American ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... the future I would promise to be careful, if it were worth avoiding the misunderstanding of men who won't take a joke. Meanwhile, I can only state that when Alpine travellers indulge in a little swagger about their own performances and other people's incapacity, they don't mean more than an infinitesimal fraction of what they say, and that they know perfectly well that when history comes to pronounce a final judgment upon the men of the time, it won't put mountain-climbing on a level with patriotism, or even with excellence in the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... and these all possess the qualities which in his judgment go to constitute a parable. Some that are included can scarcely be distinguished by logical definitions from some that are excluded; but so far am I from considering this a defect, that I deem it a necessary result of the impalpable infinitesimal graduation by which the fully-formed parable glides down into the brief detached metaphorical aphorism, in the words of the Lord Jesus during the period ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... ill-disciplined as to prefer such immediate and tangible rewards as a half-crown for their vote, a donation to their football club or local charity, or a gracious word from an interested lady, to their distant and infinitesimal share in the direction of national government. This participation is, in fact, so minute to the individual voter and so intangible in its operation, that a high degree of education is required to appreciate its value; and ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... an existence from the debris of this city. Others have waded ankle-deep in the crowd; but he, a grimy, infinitesimal molecule, had been at the bottom wholly submerged, where the light of idealism is not supposed to penetrate. Grit had been a junkman; his business address—a vacant lot; his only asset—a junk-cart across the top of which he had strung a belt of jingling, jangling bells that had called ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... another, continually remaining invisible. After I had witnessed the unequaled sights, I paused to complete my memoranda and now, as I review my jottings, I am at a loss to know what few things I should select to try to make intelligible to my fellow-men who live on this infinitesimal speck which is our world. First, let me ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... sorrowful monochrome, that became slowly embrowned by the dusk. A star appeared, and another, and another. They sparkled amid the yards and rigging of the two coal brigs lying alangside, as if they had been tiny lamps suspended in the ropes. The masts rocked sleepily to the infinitesimal flux of the tide, which clucked and gurgled with idle regularity in nooks and ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... reply. He was carefully observing the infinitesimal approach of a certain star to the meridian line, marked by a thread across the circle's aperture. When that point of light should cross the thread it would be midnight, and July 22, 1916, would be gone forever. Every midnight the indicating ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... story. It hit me right between the eyes. I knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... little feet on the polished floor. Margaret-Mary in a diminutive blue dressing gown and infinitesimal slippers, with her curls brushed tidily up from the back of her neck and skewered with a hairpin, came over and laid her hand on his knee. "Dus a 'itte 'tory?" she asked ingratiatingly. She ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... planes, permits the determination of the image of any object for any system (see LENS). The Gaussian theory, however, is only true so long as the angles made by all rays with the optical axis (the symmetrical axis of the system) are infinitely small, i.e. with infinitesimal objects, images and lenses; in practice these conditions are not realized, and the images projected by uncorrected systems are, in general, ill defined and often completely blurred, if the aperture or field of view exceeds certain limits. The investigations of James Clerk Maxwell ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... general reader is wise in his generation. But with the painful biographer, toiling in the immeasurable sand of thankless research, often foot-sore and dry of throat, these trivialities assume exaggerated proportions; and to those who remind him—as in a cynical age he is sure to be reminded—of the infinitesimal value of his hard-gotten grains of information, he can only reply mournfully, if unconvincingly, that fact is fact—even in matters of mustard-seed. With this prelude, I propose to set down one or two minute points concerning Henry Fielding, not ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... been of service to mankind on the whole, that it possesses one-tenth of the soul-forming properties claimed for it in the advertisement—which I take to be a generous estimate—its effect upon the world at large still remains infinitesimal." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... quartz, and that which finds it in sand, gravel, or soil. The former process is the universal and familiar one of all rock mining, following the rich veins into the bowels of the earth with pick and powder, crushing the rock and separating the infinitesimal atoms of metal ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... now I mind me; it was received on the morning of the gale, when I was absorbed in delicate investigations. It is still legible. From poor dear Casimir! It is as well," he chuckled, "that I have educated him to patience. Poor Casimir and his correspondence—his infinitesimal, timorous, idiotic correspondence!" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... things—he might have been a successful theatrical manager, or only an artistic one—he might have been a naval commander, or a psychoanalyst, or a Christian Science healer—he might have imparted to the United States Senate that infinitesimal something which would probably have proved to be the greatest comfort, especially in the ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... to trust me?' he asked, and it is to be supposed that he was able to detect an infinitesimal acquiescent movement ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... new life:—cleaning pans, washing jars, sorting herbs, scouring pails, running numberless infinitesimal errands, doing everything that nobody else liked, hard-worked from morning to night, and called up from her hard pallet to recommence her toil before she had realised that she was asleep. Ursula's temper, ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... that arable soil, waters of the ocean and streams, and the atmosphere contain traces of alcohol; and that this compound, formed by the fermentation of organic matters, is everywhere distributed throughout nature. We should add that only infinitesimal quantities are involved—reaching only the proportion of millionths—yet the fact, for all that, offers a no less powerful interest. The method of analysis which has permitted the facts to be shown is very elegant and scrupulously exact, and is worthy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be specifics, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Rowland walked away to an isolated eminence some five miles from the inn and murmured to the silent rocks that she was ungrateful. Listening nature seemed not to contradict him, so that, on the morrow, he asked the young girl, with an infinitesimal touch of irony, whether it struck her that his deflection from his Florentine plan had been ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... her, and seldom ceased the incessant twist, twist of the shining steel among the white cotton meshes. She might put down the needles and lace into the spool-box long enough to open oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and coal into infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the knitting was snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and the worn, white, blue-marked fingers, half enclosed in kid-glove stalls for protection, would writhe and twist in and out again. Little girls just learning to crochet ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having; and that, on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life; in a word, we must bear and forbear—abstinere et sustinere; and if we fail to observe this rule, no position of wealth or power ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of the air and its frictional inertia when running in the form of wind cause the current to proceed on its course after a very slight check, which in point of time is momentary and in its effects almost infinitesimal. This being the case, and the principal expense attendant upon the construction of ordinary wind-engines being due to the need for providing a large diameter of wind-wheel, with all the attendant ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... Malmaison was a minute square, not as large as a postage-stamp. With thumb and forefinger I could have spanned the distance between Soissons and Laon. Clouds of smoke were rising from Allemant to Craonne, and these were constantly added to by infinitesimal puffs in black and white. I knew that shells of enormous calibre were wrecking trenches, blasting out huge craters; and yet not a sound, not the faintest reverberation of a gun. Here was a sight almost ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... thinking of Alsina Teeswater. And in the second place, never, never on the prairie, have I watched a railway-train come in or a railway-train pass away without feeling lonesome. It reminds me how big is the outside world, how infinitesimal is Chaddie McKail and her unremembered existence up here a thousand miles from Nowhere! It humbles me. It reminds me that I have in some way failed to mesh in with the bigger machinery ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... second time Elias took from an infinitesimal crack in his money drawer another handful of change which he grudgingly counted into the ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... it looked a part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the Brewster's ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... of importance, El Diario de Manila, and about a decade later the principal organ of the Spanish-Filipino population, El Comercio, which, with varying vicissitudes, has continued down to the present. While rigorously censored, both politically and religiously, and accessible to only an infinitesimal portion of the people, they still performed the service of letting a few rays of light into the Cimmerian intellectual gloom of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... of this earthquake recording machine the maker must so suspend a heavy body that when its normal position is disturbed in the most infinitesimal degree no reactionary force will be developed tending to restore it to its original position. The inventor has never been found who could accomplish this suspension of a body to perfection. The seismograph of to-day, however, has reached a ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... dreary, red-sky planet in Mousset, a thing squirmed heavily out of a stagnant sea and blinked stupidly at the remarkable above-water cosmos it had discovered. Suns flamed and spouted flares. Small dark stars became an infinitesimal fraction of a degree colder. There was a magnetic storm in the photosphere of a sun which was not ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... everything presses towards one single, desperate blow, the more readily stratagem comes to the aid of his boldness. Let loose from all further calculations, freed from all concern for the future, boldness and stratagem intensify each other, and thus collect at one point an infinitesimal glimmering of hope into a single ray, which may likewise serve to ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... powers, she did not even languish to any perceptible degree. Nevertheless, the detriment was there, a steadily cumulative factor, and at the end of any given period of pressing the commerce of the nation, emasculated by these continuous if infinitesimal abstractions from its vitality, was substantially less in bulk, substantially less in pounds sterling, than if it had been allowed to run ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... come, until the darkness had become as intense as before; and Leslie was beginning to think that after all nothing was going to happen, when the whole scene became suddenly illuminated by a vivid flash of sheet lightning that for an infinitesimal fraction of a second seemed to set the entire visible firmament ablaze, and caused every detail of the brig's hull and equipment to imprint a clear and perfectly distinct picture of itself upon the retina. ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... seem to show the impracticability on any considerable scale of a second possible expedient, namely, borrowing abroad. The amount that could be raised in any foreign market at this moment, in comparison with the sum required, is practically infinitesimal, and, if it were possible on any considerable scale, we should again have to face the prospects of ending the war a debtor country, with a huge annual drain on our goods and our services, which would flow abroad in the payment ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... herself; but she could not do it. The knife in passing through the loaf would make the portion to be parted with less by one third than the portion to be retained. Half a pound of salt butter would reduce itself to a quarter of a pound. Portions of meat would become infinitesimal. When standing with viands before her, she had not free will over her hands. She could not bring herself to part with victuals, though she might ruin herself by retaining them. Therefore, by the order of the master, were the servants placed ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... feeling far from normal, he put me out on the bank while he rowed up stream for his clothes and returned to take me home. Having encased himself in some serviceable tweeds and a blue guernsey, he rolled me in his coat ere beginning to demolish the homeward mile—an infinitesimal bagatelle to such a magnificent pair of arms. I enjoyed the play of the broad shoulders and ruddy cheeks, and did not talk, neither did he. He was an athlete, not a conversationalist, while I was ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... maintenance of social existence, it may be proper to say that "Providence," operating through men, has generated morality. Within the limits of a fraction of a fraction of the living world, therefore, there is a "moral" providence. Through this small plot of an infinitesimal fragment of the universe there runs a "stream of tendency towards righteousness." But outside the very rudimentary germ of a garden of Eden, thus watered, I am unable to discover any "moral" purpose, or anything but ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... more than inquiring glances at his trencher; for it is always what is not done that a man sees. If one chair-round escapes dusting, it is that chair-round which he particularly notices. In his mind then are two ideas: one is of the whole long day, the other of that infinitesimal undone duty. The remark visible on his countenance is this: "The whole day, and no time to ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... unison rises at intervals through the day. The ground on which we stand is slightly furrowed with the little ridges of last year's ploughing: but it has not yet been broken this spring, and it is covered with millions of infinitesimal flowers, blue and purple and yellow and white, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... had taken up his residence, this leader, in spite of his fire-eating declarations, soon fled to the Legation Quarter and besought an asylum. His men held out until two in the afternoon, when their resistance collapsed and the cease-fire sounded. The number of casualties on both sides was infinitesimal, and thus after eleven days' farce the Manchu dynasty found itself worse off than ever before. It is necessary, however, not to lose sight of the main problem in China, which is the establishment of a united government and a cessation of internecine ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... much,' she answered, surlily, measuring an infinitesimal distance on her finger with her thumb, which she pinched against it, the gesture ending with a snap of defiance, and a smile that ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... herself on the eve of some miraculous cure. But the saint was scarcely canonised before his claims to beatitude were impugned. One year Lady Hampshire never quitted Leamington; another, she contrived to combine the infinitesimal doses of Hahnemann with the colossal distractions of the metropolis. Now her sole conversation was the water cure. Lady Hampshire was to begin immediately after her visit to Montacute, and she spoke in her sawney voice of factitious enthusiasm, as if she pitied ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... She made infinitesimal lists, and put them into her shopping bag, or stuck them in her mirror, but Wolf laughed at them all. And instead of disposing of them, they developed a demoralizing habit of wandering out into Broadway, in their old fashion, ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... solid; ponderable. But the space they now claimed was not empty! Solid rock was here, yielding no space to anything! Like the little materialization bombs, this was nature outraged. The ground and the solid rock heaved up, broken and torn, invisibly permeated and strewn with the infinitesimal atomic particles of what a moment before had been the ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... of the bird, which in turn develops its already improved legs by its individual efforts, and transmits the improved tendency. Generation after generation this is repeated, until the sum of the infinitesimal variations, all in the same direction, results in the production of the long-legged wading-bird. In a similar way, through individual effort and transmitted tendency, all the diversified organs of all creatures have been ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... trouble him when he was concocting these pains and penalties for duplicity. Certainly, when the two persons in question came face to face at the turning of the pack-horse road towards the city, logic played an infinitesimal part in ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... danger. The poison has evidently been administered in infinitesimal doses. But you cannot too soon withdraw yourself from all those who now surround you. Life is not to be tampered with. The poisoner may take it into his head to increase ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... treatment of the 3-1/8 quadrature—remember, homoeopathic, similia similibus,[390] not infinitesimal—and at the imputation thrown upon it, I asked myself, what is vulgarity? No two agree, except in this, that every one sees vulgarity in what is directed against himself. Mark the world, and see if anything be so common as ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... this thing, of effecting this creation, this separation from himself such that will in the creature shall be possible—I imagine, I say, the difficulty of such creation so great, that for it God must begin inconceivably far back in the infinitesimal regions of beginnings—not to say before anything in the least resembling man, but eternal miles beyond the last farthest-pushed discovery in protoplasm—to set in motion that division from himself which in its grand result should be individuality, consciousness, choice, and conscious choice—choice ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... artistic aristocracy of Paris, as in all great towns, a herd of idle people on the watch for new fashions—in art, as well as in dress—who wish to single out certain of them for no serious reason at all. But, in spite of their pretensions, they have only an infinitesimal share in the changes of artistic taste. The origin of these changes is in the Parisian brain itself—a brain that is quick and feverish, always working, greedy of knowledge, easily tired, grasping to-day the splendours of a work, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... loved to have books. The tribe of scholars, foreign as well as native, who coveted them was numerous. Every library now has its quota of humbler copies of the classics, often on paper, in the Roman or the more cursive Italic hand, not written by a professional scribe. Often these are of infinitesimal value, transcripts of extant copies of no greater age; but there is always the possibility that they may be a competent scholar's own careful apograph of some ancient MS. which a Poggio had unearthed at St. Gall, and which has since vanished. A glance at the apparatus criticus ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially appreciates,—something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. "Here are some authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian Monastery on the back. One of them is a ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... without effort of my superior usefulness; there was no time to lose. I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called Earth. Now the part is played, and I am to be withdrawn. That my human heart is torn with insupportable anguish, matters not at all. I leave ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself—given herself away. How ludicrously pathetic some women are! You do them some ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... and looked out on the sleeping city, on the peaceful Arno which was bathed in silvery moonlight, and on the old, irregular houses, thinking what struggles and agonies this place had witnessed in past times, and realizing what an infinitesimal bit of the world's sufferings she was called to bear. Sometimes she lighted a candle and read, sometimes prayed, but for the most part just lay still, silently enduring, learning, though she did not think it, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... fingers were tearing the note now into infinitesimal shreds, and, with it, the newspaper clipping. The newspaper itself he crumpled up and tossed into the corner. He crossed the room, replaced the make-up box in its hiding place, put back the movable section of the base-board, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... no means a beauty. But neither was she plain. She had a long, rather distinguished face, with a marked nose and a wide thin-lipped mouth. Her plentiful fair hair, a little dull and ashy in colour, was heaped up above her forehead in infinitesimal curls and rolls which did great credit to her maid, and gave additional height to the head and length to a thin white neck. Her light blue eyes were very direct and observant. Their expression implied both considerable knowledge of the world and a natural inquisitiveness. Many ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lie close to the main shaft, but when rosin is rubbed along the hair small particles get fixed under the scales causing them to stand up somewhat like the teeth of a saw. These erected scales act on the string like so many infinitesimal plectra and thus produce in perfection the sustained sound attempted in a grosser manner by the tremolo of the mandoline. It is simply a rapid series of shocks. A moment's consideration will suffice to realize that continuous pressure on ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... philosophists; some of the former so full, that it would require, as the rabbis say of a certain pedigree in the Book of Chronicles, four hundred camel loads of commentaries to expound the difficulties in their text; others so empty, that nothing can approximate so nearly to the notion of an infinitesimal ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... ye materialists! ye worshippers of Chance! Is it indeed the infinitesimal doings of pigmies that bring about the great upheavals of the earth? Do ye not rather see God's will in that fall of rain? God's breath in those dying heroes who fell on Mont Saint Jean? do ye not recognise that it was God's finger ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... closely in the broad daylight, on the deck of the steamer, however, I began to see that her face was marked by innumerable small lines, which followed the shape of her features like the carefully traced shadows of an engraving; they crossed her forehead, they made labyrinths of infinitesimal wrinkles about her eyes, they curved along the high cheek-bones and the somewhat sunken cheeks, and they surrounded the mouth and made shadings on her chin. They were not like ordinary wrinkles. They looked as though they had been drawn with infinite precision and care by the hand of a cunning ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... eyes of man, he has not changed himself a hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to those who do so, for the wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful operation of the mind. And I think I should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and find wrong as wrong for me as for ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like it at all," Mangan said, frankly. "People will think the book has something to do with the American civil war. However, don't take my opinion at all. My connection with literature is almost infinitesimal—I'm merely a newspaper hack, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... girls have been of appalling frequency. We have proved a great number of them, but they only represent an infinitesimal proportion of those which we could have taken up. Owing to a sense of decency, which is deserving of every respect, the victims of these hateful acts usually refuse to disclose them. Doubtless fewer would have been committed if the leaders of an army whose discipline ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... human events is that of social astronomers who are watching them from another planet. But because the inequalities of the earth are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer. The Alps for the astronomer may be an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer are all the dykes of Holland? But they are everything to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... accidental variation, however minute, implies the working of a great number of small physical and chemical causes. An accumulation of accidental variations, such as would be necessary to produce a complex structure, requires therefore the concurrence of an almost infinite number of infinitesimal causes. Why should these causes, entirely accidental, recur the same, and in the same order, at different points of space and time? No one will hold that this is the case, and the Darwinian himself will ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... sciences, With a patented reel and a patented hook And a number of other appliances; And the thirty-fifth cast, which he vowed was the last (It was figured as close as a decimal), Brought suddenly out of the water a trout Of measurements infinitesimal. ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... From that point, from that position, there is a work to be done, which can be done from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes, because it must see all things; and there are things no eyes can see but these, no other hands do. This point is an infinitesimal part of the whole; but without its full and proper functioning, the Whole falls short in that much:—because of your or my petty omissions, the Universe limps and goes lame.—Into this position, as into all others impartially, the One Life which is Tao flows, adapting ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... each one of them, to comprehend that in the vast organism of an army at war the individual unit does not count. To himself he may be of prime importance and first consideration, but in the general carrying out of the scheme he is a mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm—an infinitesimal, utterly inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without thought. Thus we diagnosed their mental poses. Along toward five o'clock a goodish string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars seven hundred ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... who is the first to set foot on a vast new continent was theirs, magnified a hundredfold. For they were the first to set foot on a vast new planet! An entire new world, containing heaven alone knew what forms of life, what monstrous or infinitesimal creatures, lay before them. Even the profound awe they had experienced when landing on the moon was dwarfed by the solemnity of this occasion; just as it is less soul stirring to discover an arctic continent ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the wish to reveal your gratitude by giving them out again; for the wise man is aware that we retain spiritual qualities only as we give them away. Let your light shine. To him that hath shall be given. The exercise of wisdom brings wisdom; and at the last the infinitesimal quantity of man's knowledge, compared with the Infinite, and the smallness of man's Sympathy when compared with the source from which ours is absorbed, will evolve an abnegation and a humility that will lend a perfect Poise. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.... Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.... Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... some infinitesimal truth of the sublime and horrible change war had wrought in the souls of soldiers. That change was too great for any mind but the omniscient to grasp in its entirety. War had killed in some soldiers a belief ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Carrie Samstag, even in her lovely pink night-dress, a crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed, unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... First, a Rodebush-Michalek super-pump[A] then, backing that, an ordinary mercury-vapor pump, and last, backing both the others, a Cenco-Hyvac motor-driven oil pump. In less than fifty hours that case will be as empty as a flapper's skull. Just to make sure of cleaning up the last infinitesimal traces, though, I'm going to flash a getter charge of tantalum in it. After that, the atmosphere in that case will be tenuous—take ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... liquid into three nearly equal parts, while myriads of rainbows hovered in the clouds of spray. Two things especially struck the observers: the water made but little curve or sweep on passing over the edge, and then rushed down to the abyss at almost lightning speed, shivering itself to infinitesimal particles on striking any rock or projection at the side. Its behaviour was, of course, due to its weight, and to the fact that on Jupiter bodies fall 40.98 feet the first second, instead of sixteen feet, as ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... occurred an infinitesimal but telling incident which served to dissipate whatever growing qualms may have disturbed Lilly over the rearing of her child in this ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst |
