"Infinitesimally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... human longings and what human desperation our religions are built. For one gleam of hope that we should meet again—what would I not have given? But it never came. The trend of my thought made all such hopes impossible. I have grown charier of the word 'impossible' now. We know so infinitesimally little. I had to learn to live on comfortless. All that was strongly personal in me died. All care about myself went out suddenly, as in other cases I think it goes out slowly, beaten down by the continued buffetings of life. I gave myself to my work, and then a curious decentralizing process ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... rock were illumined more and more faintly as the embers died down. A silence fell upon them. In the banskians close behind them an owl hooted softly, a cautious, drumming note, as though the night-bird possessed still a fear of the newly dead day. The brush gave out sound—voices infinitesimally small, strange quiverings, rustlings that might have been made by wind, by breath, by shadows, almost. Overhead the tips of the spruce and tall pines whispered among themselves, as they never commune by day. Spirits seemed to move among them, sending down to Jeanne's ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... waiting? Let us, then, remind ourselves that excess and precipitation are more than wasteful,—they are directly destructive. The fire that blazes beyond bounds not warms the house, but burns it down, and only helps infinitesimally to warm the wide out-of-doors. Any live snail will out-travel a wrecked locomotive, and besides will leave no trail of slaughter on its track. Though despatch be the soul of business, yet he who outruns his own feet comes to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... making land seemed to me infinitesimally remote by this time, yet in case I had such almost inconceivable luck, it was well to make some preparations for having a run for my money in an enemy country. I took off my uniform coat, transferring everything I wanted to keep from its pockets ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... follow one another so closely, in an excess of accumulation, that they produce a feeling almost of suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses of stone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is cold ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Minister was now ready, and we emerged into the glare of lights and faces to find Mr. S. already standing in the water up to his knees. Feeling as small as one of our microscopical specimens, almost infinitesimally tiny as I descended into his Titanic arms, I was handed down the steps to him. He was dressed in a kind of long surplice, underneath which—as I could not, even in that moment, help observing—the air gathered in long bubbles which he strove to ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... and hot. The windows are open, indeed, but only the infinitesimally small chink that church-windows ever do open. The pew-opener sedulously closes the great door after every fresh entrance. I kneel simmering through the Litany. Never before did it seem so long! Never did the chanted, "We beseech ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... his heart. They wee both so lovable, so noble! That they should miss in a great measure the best of life seemed such a grievous pity! The chances that either of them would renounce atheism were, he could not but feel, infinitesimally small. Much smaller for the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence, January, 1868, p. 1, in which he says, in regard to the influence of the maternal mind over the foetus in utero: 'The chances of these instances, and others which I have mentioned, being due to coincidence, are infinitesimally small; and though I am careful not to reason upon the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc, I cannot—nor do I think any other person can, no matter how logical may be his mind—reason fairly against the connection ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... its way through a chink in the roof, fell upon them in their crevice, it was the little sister this time that stirred and fluttered under its ghostly touch. She stretched one wing clear out upon the beam, and it was with difficulty that she restrained herself from giving vent to one of her infinitesimally thin squeaks, tiny as a bead that would drop through the ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... out the time with a number of small flourishes, with skirmishes at outposts, half in earnest half in jest, with long dispositions which end in nothing with positions and marches, which afterwards are designated as skilful only because their infinitesimally small causes are lost, and common sense can make nothing of them, here on this very field many theorists find the real Art of War at home: in these feints, parades, half and quarter thrusts of former Wars, they find the aim of all theory, the supremacy of mind over matter, and modern ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz |
