"Chaotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with infinite patience slowly disentangled the chaotic labyrinth of threads again, and then exclaimed with a ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... not easy to say as yet what will one day be evolved from this necessarily somewhat chaotic period. What will be the fundamental ideas on which the societies that are to succeed our own will be built up? We do not at present know. Still it is already clear that on whatever lines the societies of the future are organised, they will have to count with a new power, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... dining here. It was not until I was out in the open air that I began to feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly and the bare chaotic look of the half-erected "stands." Was it in the Green Park or in Kensington Gardens or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading article that went on repeating itself ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... They had to struggle with a multitude of urgent practical affairs which left them little time for idyllic dreaming about an imaginary millennium. Their serfs had been emancipated, and what remained to them of their estates had to be reorganised on the basis of free labour. Into the semi-chaotic state of things created by such far-reaching changes, legal and economic, they did not wish to see any more confusion introduced, and they did not at all feel that they could dispense with the Central Government and the policeman. On ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... work is an unfinished one, it will remain a lasting monument to the industry of its author. He has done enough to exhibit the necessity of studying and writing history, henceforth as a science; and of replacing the chaotic fragments of narrative, called history, with which the world abounds, by a systematic statement of facts, and philosophical deductions. Some other author, with sufficient energy and industry, will—not finish the work of Mr. Buckle, but—write another in which the faults of the original ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of witches' craft repel me! I shall recover, dost thou tell me, Through this insane, chaotic play? From an old hag shall I demand assistance? And will her foul mess take away Full thirty years from my existence? Woe's me, canst thou naught better find! Another baffled hope must be lamented: ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... idea! No, but I have tried to read him, and failed. I think he had a very crude, chaotic mind ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... word for word. Culture, according to Nietzsche, was "unity of style in all the manifestations of life." Science did not necessarily include culture. Great knowledge might be accompanied with great barbarity, by the absence of style or by the chaotic confusion of all styles. Germany, according to the philosopher, had no genuine culture owing to its lack of style. "The French," he had said, "were at the head of an authentic and fruitful culture, whatever ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... be obliterated by those of the succeeding one; that which has been learned in one degree, will be forgotten in the next; and when all is completed, and the last instructions have been imparted, the dissatisfied neophyte will find his mind, in all that relates to Masonry, in a state of chaotic confusion. Like Cassio, he will remember "a mass ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... existence. They must suppose a creator then; and that he possessed power and wisdom to a great degree. As he intended the earth for the habitation of animals and vegetables, is it reasonable to suppose, he made two jobs of his creation, that he first made a chaotic lump and set it into rotatory motion, and then waited the millions of ages necessary to form itself? That when it had done this, he stepped in a second time, to create the animals and plants which were to inhabit it? As the hand of a creator is to be called ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... our solar system was once but a mighty swarm of meteorites, extending as far as the farthest planet at present. We may as well suppose its materials to have been a swarm of meteorites as to suppose a chaotic fire-mist. Mr. Lockyer supposes the clash of meteor swarms to have produced new stars, and suggests the possibility of stellar or planetary bodies coming into collision, though no observations ever made ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... this, so to speak, on the eve of a battle, when the army faces the enemy. It seems that genuine staff duties are something altogether unknown to the military senility of the army. McDowell received this corps in the most chaotic state. Almost with his own hands he organized, or rather put together, the artillery. Brigades are scarcely formed; the commanders of brigades do not know their commands, and the soldiers do not know their generals—and still they consider Scott to ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... creation of a Public Trustee for the world. The creation of a League of Free Nations must necessarily be the creation of an authority that may legitimately call existing empires to give an account of their stewardship. For an unchecked fragmentary control of tropical and chaotic regions, it substitutes the possibility of a general authority. And this must necessarily alter the problems not only of the politically immature nations and the control of the tropics, but also of the regulation of the sea ways, the regulation ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... interest by invidious and ungrateful inquiries, we can see quite enough—in its turbulence, its cruelty, arrogance, and oppression—to make us thank Heaven that "the days of chivalry are gone." And from that chaotic scene of rapine, raid, and murder, we can turn with pleasure to contemplate the truer, nobler chivalry—the chivalry of love and peace, whose weapons were the kindness of their hearts, the purity of their motives, and ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... are not in fortuitous or chaotic ways, but are doubtless in accordance with some perfect plan. We have climbed up from revolving earth and moon to revolving planets and sun, in order to understand how two or ten suns can revolve about a common centre. Let us now leap to the grander idea that all the innumerable ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... He had been sitting in a state of semi-stupor all the evening,—his chaotic mind utterly confused and bewildered by the events which had taken place;—but now, on being called, his usual audacious and irrepressible spirit came to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... deeper water, was a lurid cloud, incessantly torn in shreds of lightning, then fusing together again, once more to be rent. As yet this lurid cloud was neither stationary nor slowly adrift, like the first-mentioned one; but, instinct with chaotic vitality, shifted hither and thither, foaming with fire, like a valiant water-spout careering off ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... last." The man who really organised the movement and persuaded his coadjutors that they were engaged in a life and death struggle with Robespierre was he who, as every reader of revolutionary history knows, was busily engaged in pulling the strings behind the scenes during the whole of this chaotic period. It was the man whose iron nerve and subtle brain enabled him, in spite of a secular course of betrayals, to keep his head on his shoulders, and finally to escape the clutches of Napoleon, who, as Lord Rosebery tells us,[89] always deeply regretted that he had not ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... which is so solemnly made to precede an incantation, apparently not meant to be ridiculous, after which, a huge egg is somehow miraculously produced upon the stage, put me in mind of the very old mythologists, who thus desired to represent the chaotic state of things, when Night, Ocean, and Tartarus disputed in perpetual confusion; till Love and Music separated the ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... not yet very high; it was besides rather foggy, so that in the darkness all objects seemed mingled in chaotic confusion. At the next corner hung a votive lamp before a Madonna, but the light it gave was little better than none at all; indeed, he did not observe it before he was exactly under it, and his eyes fell upon the bright colors ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... packet, lying beside the quay in full sight of the travellers, lurched giddily at her moorings. The fourth occupant of our compartment, a sallow man with yellow whiskers, turned green with apprehension. Not so Placidia. From amongst her chaotic hand-baggage she extracted walnuts and mandarin oranges, and began eating with an appetite that was a direct challenge to the Channel. Bravery or ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... calmly, pointing to Elbow Rock: "Look there, Brian. See how the river is broken into bits. See how its smoothly flowing, onward sweep is suddenly changed to wild, chaotic turmoil; how it rages and fumes and frets and smashes itself against the rocks. But it goes on just the same. Life cannot be always calm and smoothly flowing like the peaceful Bend. But life can always go on. Life must always go on. And you will find, my dear boy, ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... undergo during the passage; the problem being a somewhat different one at any moment from what it was at the preceding moment. Still, the variations would be comparatively few were not the body, our own chaotic mass, and the field, which is, in this case, the American people, such changeable factors. As it is, the determination of the path of least resistance for our eight millions is a task which a college of scientists could ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... was brought under the action of the machine, the Ortolians recognizing them with glad exclamations, one swept into view—and as they watched, it leapt into the air, a vast column of dust, then twisting, whirling, it fell back in utter, chaotic ruin. ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... expression of the successive Ages of the world's growth. The central fountain symbolizes the nebulous world, with its innate human passions. Out of a chaotic condition came Water (the basin), and Land (the fountain), and Light (the Sun, supported by Helios, and the electroliers). The braziers and cauldrons symbolize Fire. The two sentinel columns to the right and left of the tower symbolize Earth and Air. The eight paintings of the four ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... dear reader, that the gigantic reflector of Lord Rosse, and the exquisite fifteen- inch refractors of the modern observatories, eliminate from the chaotic rubbish-heap of the surface of old Thornbush much smaller objects than such a circle as I have named. If you have read Mr. Locke's amusing Moon Hoax as often as I have, you have those details fresh in your memory. As John Farrar taught us when all this began,—and as I have said already,—if ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... critical study, but is hardly a subject of wonder. But that men gifted with exalted ability, undoubted caution, well-balanced intellect, and apparently refined reason, all of which have been appreciated and acknowledged, should propound an erroneous doctrine of a chaotic system, and proceed to the violence of civil war, on what they must know to be a false and heretical plea, can only remind us of those devils who have been pictured by the matchless art of Milton, of Dante, and of Goethe, as possessing stately intellects with perfectly vicious hearts. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... style as A Star, or in the same style as that astounding lyric which begins abruptly "Some people hang pictures up." These metres and manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His curious complicated puns ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... in an eminent sense the right man in the right place. Besides publishing, from time to time, curious and interesting documents which he discovered in his office, he called attention, by a series of vigorous pamphlets, to the chaotic condition in which the public records of Great Britain were kept. Gradually these pamphlets made an impression, and they led at length to a reform in the office. The records were rearranged, catalogued, rendered safe, and made accessible to students. This has already led to important ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... very heavens above them: a crack as of the thunder that follows close upon the bolt,—a rending and crashing as of a forest snapped through all its stems, torn, twisted, splintered, dragged with all its ragged boughs into one chaotic ruin. The ground trembled under them as in an earthquake; the old mansion shuddered so that all its windows chattered in their casements; the great chimney shook off its heavy cap-stones, which came down on the roof with resounding concussions; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I can recall of him he was not a person to meet before breakfast," yawned Francesca; "still I shall be glad of a little fresh light, for my mind is in a most chaotic state, induced by the intellectual preparation that you have made me undergo during the past month. I dreamed last night that I was conducting a mothers' meeting in Ronald's new parish, and the subject for discussion was the Small ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... taken down from the stage by an ear without a brain, and then yet more incorrectly printed; parts, nevertheless, in which it most differs from the authorized editions, are yet indubitably from the hand of Shakspere. I greatly doubt if any ready-writer would have dared publish some of its chaotic passages as taken down from the stage; nor do I believe the play was ever presented in anything like such an unfinished state. I rather think some fellow about the theatre, whether more rogue or fool we will pay him the thankful tribute not to enquire, chancing ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... unconsciously, the epigram of a French art critic a hundred years before— Il cherche toujours a faire mieux qu'il ne fait. {22} He lavished on it far more pains than on "Eothen": the proof sheets were a black sea of erasures, intercalations, blots; the original chaotic manuscript pages had to be disentangled by a calligraphic Taunton bookseller before they could be sent to press. This fastidiousness in part gained its purpose; won temporary success; gave to his style the glitter, rapidity, point, effectiveness, ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... take the measure of the situation and plan what she would do, the noise of the music suddenly ceased, and she heard a voice, though low in tone, give some sort of command. Then there was a cry, and what seemed the chaotic noise of a struggle followed; then a voice a little louder speaking, a voice of someone she remembered, though she could not place it. Something vital was happening outside, something punctuated by sharp, angry exclamations; afterwards a voice speaking soothingly, firmly, prevailed; and then ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... utterly unforeseen. He had dreamed of doing great deeds in the Corps, of course, but actually had never expected to be assigned to anything but routine work at first. His mind was a chaotic whirlpool of conjectures. How could he fit into such an organization? Why had he been selected? Surely, the fact that as a child he was supposed to have been a mind-reader wasn't enough ... or was it, ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... teachers in schools he had been asked to leave back in his ugly duckling days. How didactically, positively, they clung to their exactitudes—like frightened little children in a chaotic world too big for them to face, hanging on to mother's skirts, something ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and into their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of isolated arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my friend and I stood like the last men on earth in a city of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... minds have made. If we cannot do that even for ourselves, how much less can we do it for others! It is the subject, the thinking being who says 'I,' which, by means of its characteristic and necessary active processes, in the perception of things under the forms of time and space, converts the chaotic material of knowledge into a regular and ordered world of reasoned experience. In this sense the understanding itself imposes laws, if not upon nature, yet, at least, upon nature as we can ever know it. There is thus in Kant's philosophy a sceptical aspect. Knowledge ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... dazed by his chance discovery, he made no comment on the child's continual chatter, but let her exuberance and delight have full play while he tried to adjust himself to a realization that made all thought but a chaotic mixture of hope and doubt, of turbulent fear and determined purpose, and of one thing only was he sure. Three years of his life had been wasted. Another hour should not be lost were it in his power ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... dry, and the paint too, what there is of it, and enough rooms were finished to hold us comfortably. Mrs. John thought we should somehow feel better acquainted if we took possession while things were in a chaotic state, before the house had a chance to put on airs, and make us feel like intruders; that it would fit us better if it wasn't entirely hardened before we crawled into it. I told her 't would be a great deal ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... acts, this opening of the Corn-magazines, and arrangements for the Destitute; [Helden-Geschichte, i. 367. Rodenbeck, Tagebuch aus Friedrichs des Grossen Regentenleben (Berlin, 1840), i. 2, 26 (2d June, October, 1740): a meritorious, laborious, though essentially chaotic Book, unexpectedly futile of result to the reader; settles for each Day of Friedrich's Reign, so far as possible, where Friedrich was and what doing; fatally wants all index &c., as usual.] and of this there can be no criticism. The sound of hungry pots set ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... found by us all upon the path so plainly marked out in our text and its connections—'believe,' 'love,' 'obey.' Then the Dove of God will flutter down upon our heads and nestle in our hearts, and brooding over the solemn and solitary sea of our chaotic spirits, will bring up from it a new world glistening in fresh order and beauty, and 'very ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... that logically implies an ultimate attenuating diffusion, ridiculously absurd. Secondly, it is held that "the eating of the forbidden fruit corrupted all the vital fluids of Eve; and this corruption carried vicious and chaotic consequences into her ova, in which lay the souls of all her posterity, with infinitely little bodies, already existing."6 This form is as incredible as the other; for it equally implies a limitless distribution of souls from a limited deposit. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... looked at him in wonder. Did he mean what he said? His burning eyes seemed sincere—and yet he did not fail to accept a second helping of the mushrooms. There was power in the man. He pushed the walls of her intellectual world very wide apart. He came from a strange, chaotic region—from a land where ordinary modes and motives seemed lost or perverted. He took a delight in shocking them all. Morality was a convention—a hypocritic agreement on the part of the few to reserve freedom to themselves at the expense of the many. "Art is impossible to little ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... clergy, and that they were disposed to consider all the abuses there needing reformation in the spirit of practical compromise which had presided over and made possible the development of liberty and of progress in Holland and in England, but of which no traces are to be found in the chaotic history of the 'National Assembly' of 1789. The authors of the Avis, for example, point out, in dealing with the questions of the tithes and of the seignorial dues in Artois, that it is the unequal and irregular impact, above all, of those impositions to which most ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Chubb. To say that the unfortunate victim of the disaster was made miserable by his condition, would be to express in the feeblest manner the state of his mind. The more music there was in his stomach, the wilder and more chaotic became the discord in his soul. As likely as not, it would occur that while he lay asleep in bed in the middle of the night, the works would begin to revolve, and would play "Home, Sweet Home," for two or three hours, unless the peg happened to slip, when the cylinder would switch back again to "way ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... comes at me with unknown tongues, I shall wish him in unknown parts. I can't stand mysteries. I am a geologist, and believe that there are rocks all the way down, and that we had much better stand on them than wriggle in mere chaotic space. Good morning, Doctor. I shall come again soon; I shall keep a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... probable, that future critics may see a close similarity where we see nothing but divergence between the various productions of the Victorian age. Yet we can judge but what we discern; and certainly to the critical eye to-day it is the absence of a central tendency, the chaotic cultivation of all contrivable varieties of style, which most strikingly seems to distinguish the ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard—his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... women. For one thing the practical difficulties of the present must be faced. It is far from easy to readjust existing conditions to meet the new demands. Present social and economic conditions are to a great extent chaotic. We cannot safely cast aside, in any haste for reform, those laws, customs and opinions which it has been the slow task of our civilisation to establish, not for men only, but for women. We women have to work out many questions far more thoroughly than ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... and his immediate predecessor was usually, although not uniformly bad. The army and navy, until the last years of disorganization, were reasonably efficient, the naval engineers in particular being the best then at work in the world. The civil and criminal laws were chaotic, more from a defect of legislation than of administration. Old privileges and anomalies were supported by the government, but good jurists and magistrates were produced. Those lawyers can hardly have been incompetent in whose school were trained the framers of the Code Napoleon, the model ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... elevating associations. He boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was our fault, not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made of, and you couldn't help feeling that, if you waited awhile, all that was nebulous would be whirled into planets, and would assume the mathematical gravity of system. All through it I felt something in me that ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... actual sight the course of the march of the squadron of horse to the point of their triumphant vanishment. Despite the vehemence of the phrase the intonation was a very bleat of desperation. For it was a rich and rare opportunity thus wrested from him by an untoward fate. In all the chaotic chances of the Civil War he could hardly hope for its repetition. It was part of a crack body of regulars—Tolhurst's squadron—that he had contrived to drive into this trap, this cul-de-sac, ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... that psychic investigation is, at present at least, in a chaotic and uncertain condition, and that little beyond uncertainty and discouragement has been attained in the past. As ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... kitchens he had lost his head, and when his turn came—he had had to wait—he had yielded his place to those behind, saying that he didn't matter. And he had wasted more precious time buying bananas, though he knew that the Pembrokes were not partial to fruit. Amid much tardy and chaotic hospitality the meal got under way. All the spoons and forks were anyhow, for Mrs. Aberdeen's virtues were not practical. The fish seemed never to have been alive, the meat had no kick, and the cork of the college claret slid ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... and actions of Iraq's neighbors greatly affect its stability and prosperity. No country in the region will benefit in the long term from a chaotic Iraq. Yet Iraq's neighbors are not doing enough to help Iraq achieve ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... against the inevitable; and that message was the last. There was no more response than if he were clay, than if his muscles were the muscles of another man. In that instant, without the voicing of a word, the deed was done. That instant came the black chaotic abandon that was terror absolute. In pure physical impotence, his arms dropped dangling at his sides. The other was very near now, so near they could have touched, and the cowman tried to brace himself, tried to prepare for that which he knew was coming, which he ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... were to be entirely Stella's, whereas it had been arranged that she and Amy should share in the management. So, leaving Vava with Eva to clear away, she followed Amy to her room, which did indeed look chaotic. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... supported by enormous sums of money, munitions, and even soldiers from the Allies. Naturally, transportation is inefficient; it was horrible in the last year of the Czar's regime. Absolute separation from the rest of the world, combined with the chaotic conditions which Russia has passed through since the 1917 revolution, plus the sabotage, which until recently was quite general among the intelligent classes, including engineers, has resulted in a decrease in rolling ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... extravagances of the Court set, with whom he was enormously popular, tossed off with affected carelessness a mass of slovenly lyrics of which a few audaciously impudent ones are worthy to survive. From the equally chaotic product of Colonel Richard Lovelace stand out the two well-known bits of noble idealism, 'To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,' and 'To Althea, from Prison.' George Wither (1588-1667), a much older man than Suckling and Lovelace, may be mentioned with them as the writer in his youth of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... solemn expostulation out of the shimmering form I conjure up and call my lover. Is it quite fair, Philip? And as for your character, my hope is that, in spite of your mental pose as a sage, you have an unreasonable disposition, a chaotic temper. A long term of years with a serene, gentle-spirited man would be unbearable to me. Rather than prolong the futility of existence with one I could not provoke, even enrage, I should commit suicide. My own disposition is so equally divided ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... wearied of, and which he had been prepared to gladly resign for her. But as the months and even years had passed without any apparent diminution in her zest for these pleasures, he tried uneasily to resume his old interest in them, and spent ten months with her in the chaotic freedom of San Francisco hotel life. But to his discomfiture he found that they no longer diverted him; to his horror he discovered that those easy gallantries in which he had spent his youth, and in which he had seen no harm, were intolerable when exhibited to his wife, and he trembled between ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... country which, in a state of nature, would be more difficult for the passage of an army. About nine miles from the village, directly on their line of march, extending far away to the east and the west, there was a vast bog three miles wide. It was a chaotic region of mud and water, with gigantic trees and entangling roots. After long search a passage was found through which, by the toilsome efforts of a whole day, the army forced its way. Beyond the swamp there opened before them a smooth, luxuriant flower-enamelled ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... clothes and whirring engines and Nolan's pleasant eyes were harmoniously mingled. And when at last she started up into active consciousness again, and rushed pellmell to bed, mindful of her responsibility as a business girl, sleep came very slowly. And when it came at last, it was a chaotic jumble ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... elections in 1979 and independence (as Zimbabwe) in 1980. Robert MUGABE, the nation's first prime minister, has been the country's only ruler (as president since 1987) and has dominated the country's political system since independence. His chaotic land redistribution campaign begun in 2000 caused an exodus of white farmers, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread shortages of basic commodities. Ignoring international condemnation, MUGABE rigged the 2002 presidential election ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... assimilate the black volunteers along these lines, suffering few of the personnel problems that plagued the Army in the first months of the war. In contrast to the Army's chaotic situation, caused by the thousands of black recruits streaming in from Selective Service, the Navy's plans for its volunteers were disrupted only because qualified Negroes showed little inclination to flock to the Navy standard, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... seem to be not much more elaborate and intricate than the other. If the inherent qualities of matter have built up a solar system, they may have created, also, the first animalcule, the first fish, the first quadruped, and the first man. There has been a marked progress, in either case, from the chaotic, the rude, the imperfectly developed, up to the orderly, the complex, the matured forms. The first essays, the rude efforts, of nature have gradually been perfected. The chaotic world that was first ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... her for what she felt had been neglect, callousness on her part. Mutely, within herself, she craved his forgiveness for the appearance of that phantom which should never have come forth from out that chaotic hell which had ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... is a Song of the Tube. A ballad of sorrow, A grey sort of lay of To-day and a greyer To-morrow; A dismal, abysmal, chaotic, neurotic Creation Of one who was done after running a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... western system of physics. Your physics are without form and void; patchwork, constantly changing. There is no substantial foundation for any system of metaphysics. What you say or do in physics is fragmentary or chaotic. ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... negligent fashion Mr. Brumley had been living up to his impassioned resolve to be an unselfish lover of Lady Harman. He had been rather at loose ends intellectually, deprived of his old assumptions and habitual attitudes and rather chaotic in the matter of his new convictions. He had given most of his productive hours to the writing of a novel which was to be an entire departure from the Euphemia tradition. The more he got on with ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ravine, and indicated his approach to civilization. Then a church- steeple came in sight, and he knew that he had reached home. In a few moments he was clattering down the single narrow street that lost itself in a chaotic ruin of races, ditches, and tailings at the foot of the hill, and dismounted before the gilded windows of the Magnolia saloon. Passing through the long bar-room, he pushed open a green- baize door, entered a dark passage, opened another door with a passkey, and found himself in a dimly lighted ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... subtilty of suggestive power which place them in a unique niche, and will always preserve them as objects of the greatest interest to the musical student. There is no doubt that his increasing mental malady is evident in the chaotic character of some of his later orchestral compositions, but, in those works composed during his best period, splendor of imagination goes hand in hand with genuine art treatment. This is specially noticeable in the songs and the piano-forte works. Schumann was essentially lyrical ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... injustice. She felt for, but not with, the heretics in their errors. "She typifies her age in all that is good and noble, in artistic aspirations, in literary ideals, in pure politics—in short,—in humanity; in her is not found the chaotic vagueness which so often breaks out in license and ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... adventures in music, but they had bound his dreams together. He had felt, if the right person were near, he could have made music tell things, not to be uttered in mere words; and under the magic of certain songs, that which was creative within him, even dim and chaotic, stirred and warmed for utterance.... So fresh a surface did Bedient ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... faculty indeed brilliant, clear, prompt, not deficient in depth either, or in any kind of active valour, but wanting the stern energy that could long endure to continue in the deep, in the chaotic, new, and painfully incondite—this marked out for him his limits; which, perhaps with regrets enough, his natural veracity and practicality would lead him quietly to admit and stand by. He was not the man to grapple, in its dark and deadly dens, with the Lernaean coil of social ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... distasteful. He recollected the smell of the place, and the memory brought with it a sense of nausea. He thought of Lala Huang, and his ideas became grotesque and chaotic. Yet the solution of the mystery lay at last within his grasp, and to the zest of the investigator everything else ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the eloquent notice describing Your Girl and Mine, in the chapter on "Progress and Endowment." The metropolitan papers give their photoplay reporters as much space as the theatrical critics. Here in my home town the twelve moving picture places take one half a page of chaotic notices daily. The country is being badly led by professional photoplay news-writers who do not know where they are going, ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... feelings or exciting suspicion of the cause. She was right, although she little imagines the reason; we could never have those readings together, and I fear I must manage with far fewer visits to my studio than I had hoped for. What an accursed chaotic old world it is anyway! How grateful she is because I merely treat her father politely! It would be impossible to do anything else, now that he is himself again, and yet, by this simple, easy method, I have ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... course of a year he was asked to report, and did report with full details, upon the raising, management, and collection of the revenue, including a scheme for revenue cutters; as to the estimates of income and expenditure; as to the temporary regulation of the chaotic currency; as to navigation laws, and the regulation of the coasting trade, after a thorough consideration of a heap of undigested statistics; as to the post-office, for which he drafted a bill; as to the purchase of West Point; on the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... in a tumult as he ran down the line of cabins. From every doorway men were now stumbling, half-dressed, half-asleep. Behind them, in many cabins, alarmed, agitated women appeared. Farther on there were lanterns and a chaotic mass of moving objects. Above the increasing clamour rose the horrible, uncanny wail of a woman. Percival's blood cooled, his brain cleared. Men shouted questions as he passed, and ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... fate had been decided. I have already tried to describe a part of what took place in that hour and a half, although even now I cannot get it all straight in my mind. Races, when a great deal is at stake, are more or less chaotic: a close four miles in a college eight is a succession of blurs with lucid but irrelevant intervals. The weary months of hard work are forgotten, and you are quite as apt to think of your first velocipede, or of the pie that is awaiting ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... langour, their full- blooded bodies ached with a delicious sensation. Their hearts seemed to grow benumbed, the numbness spreading through their blood to their limbs; it deprived them of strength, and their thoughts became chaotic. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... all his works that which pleased us most was the one most completely personal in its character, which most constantly kept the reader in a state of self-reflection. In spite of all its oddities and vagaries, and the chaotic shape into which its materials have been thrown, the Sartor Resartus is a prime favourite of ours—a sort of volcanic work; and the reader stands by, with folded arms, resolved at all events to secure peace within his own bosom. But no sluggard's peace; his arms are folded, not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... sunset! The whole world, the three great spaces of sea and land and sky, were incarnadined with the glory of it. The ocean floor was a blinding red radiance, the hills were amethyst, the sky one gigantic opal, and they two seemed poised in the midst of all the chaotic glory of a primitive world. It was New Year's Day; the earth was new, the year was new, and their love was new and strong. Everything was before them. There was no longer any past, no longer any present. Regrets and memories had no place in their new world. It was Hope, ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... ratiocination, a mechanical swaying of rhetoric, are the grounds of dissertation. A pause for a few days, a visit to the country, anything that would seem designed to restore the mind to its normal state, destroys the faculty. The weary penman, who wishes his chaotic head could be relieved by being transformed even as by Puck, knows that very whirling chaos is the condition of his multitudinous periods. It seems as if some special sluices of the soul must be opened to force the pen. One ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... which we cannot refrain from putting to ourselves, is—whether we see in the rings of Saturn a finished structure, destined to play a permanent part in the economy of the system; or whether they represent merely a stage in the process of development out of the chaotic state in which it is impossible to doubt that the materials of all planets were originally merged. M. Otto Struve attempted to give a definite ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... little coffee shops were a-babble with people discussing the news from the front. None seemed to heed the remarkable procession that wended its way to the cable office. Here Coleman resolutely took precedence. He knew that there was no good in expecting intelligence out of the chaotic clerks, but he managed to get upon the wires this ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... emotion as such; and in these cases we are pushed, by the delightfulness of beauty and wonder, by the fascination of what is finer than ourselves, into deeper consciousness of our innermost, primaeval, chaotic self: the stuff in which soul has not yet dawned. We are made to enjoy what we should otherwise dread; and the dignity of beauty, and beauty's frankness and fearlessness, are lent to things such as we regard, under other circumstances, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... and culture appeared to have showered every advantage. His abilities were considerable, his ambition greater. Though intensely worldly, he was not devoid of affections. He found refuge in suicide, as many do, from want of imagination. The present was too hard for him, and his future was only a chaotic nebula. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... only memories of her first opera—confused, chaotic brilliancy, paradise revealed: and long, long afterward, the carriage flying up Fifth Avenue through darkness all gray ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... in a saturated solution, a point of crystallization had formed, round which the whole chaotic and fluctuating mass united, producing a crystal of wonderful forms. Thus, when the phenomenon of the polarisation of attention had taken place, all that was disorderly and fluctuating in the consciousness of the child seemed to be organizing itself into a spiritual creation, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... by no means so wild and imperfect as might be expected from a nation in such a chaotic and uncultivated condition. The people of Greece are hardly more civilized than the Servians, the Dalmatians, or any other of the half-savage tribes that inhabit the south-eastern corner of Europe, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... now the thing stuck in his gorge. He understood the implied obligation. Payment for his service to Aline Harley was to be given, and the ledger balanced. Well, why not? Had he not spent the night in a chaotic agony of renunciation? But to renounce voluntarily was one thing, ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... in gloom; the next instant a cloud would be rent asunder with a ripping, tearing sound, and the whole turbid, boiling sky-universe would be bathed in the ghostly light. What a weird, fantastic, chaotic world ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... and bright; it has hawkers' barrows and chaotic shop windows. It has the curiosity-stimulating, cosmopolite air of all dockside areas, but to the Englishman accustomed to the picturesque bedragglement of East End costumes, it is almost dismayingly well-dressed. Its young men have the leanness of outline that comes from an authentic American tailor. ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... cosiness,—is full of keen reminiscences to most Californians who have not outgrown the memories of that dreary interval when, in obedience to nature's wise compensations, homesickness was blotted out by sea-sickness, and both at last resolved into a chaotic and distempered dream, whose details we now recognize. The steamer chair that we used to drag out upon the narrow strip of deck and doze in, over the pages of a well-thumbed novel; the deck itself, of afternoons, redolent with the skins of oranges and bananas, ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... boastful, the cruel more merciless, the untruthful more false, the carnal more degraded. 'In vino veritas' expresses, even, indeed, to physiological accuracy, the true condition. The reason, the emotions, the instincts, are all in a state of carnival, and in chaotic feebleness. ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... must be a consequence of the fundamental chemical and physical nature of living things. The study of Variation had from the first shown that an orderliness of this kind was present. The bodies and the properties of livings things are cosmic, not chaotic. No matter how low in the scale we go, never do we find the slightest hint of a diminution in that all-pervading orderliness, nor can we conceive an organism existing for a moment in any other state. Moreover not only does this order prevail in normal forms, but again and again it is to be seen ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... a chaotic mass of rock. The clearing was illuminated by the flaring torches carried by a dusky band of men. Weird shadows leaped and played in the dense foliage, where, high above the ground, rude shelters had been made in the thick ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... entire regiments had thrown down their arms, which were lying in regular lines on the ground, as if for inspection; suppers just prepared had been abandoned; tents, baggage, wagons, cannons, half-slaughtered oxen, covered the foreground in chaotic confusion, while in the background a host of many thousand Yankees were discerned scampering for their lives as fast as their limbs could carry them, closely followed by our men, who were taking prisoners by the hundreds, and scarcely firing ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... behind her—the way she had been going. She struggled in terror, but in vain; the power bore her swiftly on, and she knew whither. Her very being recoiled from the horrible depth of the motionless pool, in which, as she now seemed to know, lived one of the loathsome creatures of the semi-chaotic era of the world, which had survived its kind as well as its coevals, and was ages older than the human race. The pool appeared—but not as she had known it, for it boiled and heaved, bubbled and rose. From its lowest depths it was moved to meet and receive ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... of whom Carranza proved the strongest, and, after an attempt at mediation in which the three chief South American powers participated, President Wilson decided to recognize him. But Mexican conditions remained chaotic and American interests in Mexico were either threatened or destroyed. In the spring of 1916 an attack on American territory led by a bandit, Francisco Villa, again roused Wilson to action. He dispatched General John J. Pershing across the border to pursue and catch Villa. ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... some girl with a penchant for you, ups and marries you. And ties you for life to the thing called a Wife,—that figment, that fraud, that illusion, Where, what will you be? And you can't find a key to the epoch's chaotic confusion. It seems Local Option is sure of adoption, and what a tyrannic majority May "opt" for one day, you're unable to say, and in vain you appeal to Authority. The Law of the Land is a labyrinth ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... cannot here enter into the grammatical arguments by which each of these translations is supported. We only wish to show what is the present state of Zend scholarship, and though we would by no means disguise the fact of its somewhat chaotic character, yet we do not hesitate to affirm that, in spite of the conflict of the opinions of different scholars, and in spite of the fluctuation of systems apparently opposed to each other, progress may be reported, and a firm hope expressed that the essential doctrines ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... theology; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible. The pagan moralists lack life and color, and even the noble stoic, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... spoke. The silent greeting, the full consciousness in each of their parts, gave a curious religious solemnity to the scene—like some familiar but stately Church mystery. Sandro busied himself mechanically with his preparations-he was a lover and his pulse chaotic, but he had come to paint—and when these were done, on tip-toe, as it were, he looked timidly about him round the room, seeking where to pose her. Then he motioned her with the same reverential, preoccupied air, silent still, to a place ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... with nothing but dislike and suspicion. Hence, hurt by their chilly attitude, we had withdrawn from their immediate neighbourhood, constructed a causeway of stepping stones to the eastern bank of the rivulet, and taken up our abode beneath the chaotic grey mists which enveloped the mountain side ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... sullenness, apparent only, the result of extreme shyness, despondency, and languor. As fast as she became more and more at her ease with me, just so fast did she become more and more engaging. She was chaotic enough, and like a different creature on different days; but I found her, though sometimes very childish, often sweet and never sour, unvaryingly patient towards her very trying aunt, and only too subservient ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various |
