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Earthquake   Listen
noun
Earthquake  n.  A shaking, trembling, or concussion of the earth, due to subterranean causes, often accompanied by a rumbling noise. The wave of shock sometimes traverses half a hemisphere, destroying cities and many thousand lives; called also earthdin, earthquave, and earthshock.
Earthquake alarm, a bell signal constructed to operate on the theory that a few seconds before the occurrence of an earthquake the magnet temporarily loses its power.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Earthquake" Quotes from Famous Books



... that the most frequent and evident of these causes are variations of atmospheric pressure and local storms. With regard to earthquake shocks as a cause of such fluctuations of level, it is a singular and significant fact that since Forel has established the delicate self-registering apparatus on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, no less than twelve earthquake shocks have ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... running the board. Hetty had decided that one earthquake a day was enough and had gone to bed. Barney bewildered but happily pleased at so much company, sat on the edge of a chair and avidly watched and listened, not understanding a thing he saw or heard. At the back of the room, Johnny hunched over ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael

... certain that the particular result on which Brande calculates will not take place. But short of that, he has still enough explosive matter stored to cause an earthquake. We are not safe within a radius of fifty miles. It will be a ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... cannon, such a cannon as none of the Cossacks had ever beheld before. It looked horrible with its wide mouth, and a thousand deaths poured forth from it. And as it thundered, the three others followed, shaking in fourfold earthquake the dully responsive earth. Much woe did they cause. For more than one Cossack wailed the aged mother, beating with bony hands her feeble breast; more than one widow was left in Glukhof, Nemirof, Chernigof, and other cities. The loving woman will hasten ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... the gentleman with the plaster regarding me with a great and very apparent curiosity. My lord, meanwhile, wore a propitiatory but doubtful air, as though he prayed but hardly hoped a gracious reception for me. Thus we all stood a moment in complete silence, I invoking an earthquake or any convulsion of nature that should rescue me from my embarrassment. Certainly the King did not hasten to do me this kindly service. He grew grave and seemed displeased, nay, he frowned most distinctly, but then he smiled, yet more as though he must than ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope

... something that we, the peoples of Europe, create by our ignorance and temper, by the nursing of old and vicious theories, by the poorness and defects of the ideas our intellectual activities have developed during the last generation or two, but something that "comes upon us" like the rain or the earthquake, and against which we can only protect ourselves by one thing: more arms, a ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... of the husbandman perishes in an hour. Jupiter, not satisfied with his own waters, calls on his brother Neptune to aid him with his. He lets loose the rivers, and pours them over the land. At the same time, he heaves the land with an earthquake, and brings in the reflux of the ocean over the shores. Flocks, herds, men, and houses are swept away, and temples, with their sacred enclosures, profaned. If any edifice remained standing, it was ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... very streets of Rome seemed to echo her name—though it was only old women calling out "rags" ('cenci')—he was tempted from his airy flights to throw himself for once into the portrayal of reality. There was no need now to dip "his pen in earthquake and eclipse"; clothed in plain and natural language, the action unfolded itself in a crescendo of horror; but from the ease with which he wrote—it cost him relatively the least time and pains of all his works—it ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... 37 ft. 8 in. in height, and the uppermost one 29 ft. 9 in. It was entirely constructed of limestone from the neighbouring mountains. The blocks are small, and badly cut, the stone courses being concave to offer a better resistance to downward thrust and to shocks of earthquake. When breaches in the masonry are examined, it can be seen that the external surface of the steps has, as it were, a double stone facing, each facing being carefully dressed. The body of the pyramid is solid, the chambers ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... when I was but a boy, and never could I forget how it was as though all things one had deemed solid and secure had suddenly become treacherous as Severn ooze. And now it was to me as though an earthquake had shaken my thoughts of men. For, till that day, never had I found cause to distrust anyone who was friend of mine. Now could I ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler

... so. The Jesuits are ruining the country, they're corrupting the youth, but they are tolerated because they trace a few scrawls on a piece of paper when there is an earthquake." ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... that the earthquake had done away forever with the underground labyrinth of the Chinese quarter—those thousands of pens inhabited by creatures that shunned the light of day, those mole-holes which served as headquarters for a subterranean agitation, the mysterious methods of which ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... broken stool, took his hand in moist and quivering fingers, and touching the warts one by one, recommenced his mumble. It had proceeded for a minute or so, when a crash, which, following as it did on the dead stillness, an earthquake could scarce have equalled, elicited a scream from Mrs. Jenny and brought the wizard to his knees with ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray

... Loose thy lips from out the rein; Lift thy wisdom to disdain; Whatso law thou canst not see, Scorning; so the end shall be Uttermost calamity! 'Tis the life of quiet breath, 'Tis the simple and the true, Storm nor earthquake shattereth, Nor shall aught the ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides

... be but little liable to the great convulsions of nature, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, &c. There has been but one shock of an earthquake experienced by the present inhabitants since they have settled the country. This shock happened on the 22d May, 1817, at 25 minutes past three o'clock in the morning. The duration of the shock was about 45 seconds. It was attended ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher

... President RAFSANJANI, with limited progress. Relatively high oil prices in recent years have enabled Iran to amass some $22 billion in foreign exchange reserves, but have not eased economic hardships such as high unemployment and inflation. In December 2003 a major earthquake devastated the city of Bam in southeastern Iran, ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... with Russia unless the latter were definitely attacked; and France was weakened by the widespread strikes of 1907-8 and the vehement anti-militarist agitation already described. Further, Italy was distracted by the earthquake at Messina, and armed intervention was not to be expected from the Campbell-Bannerman Ministry. Bulgaria and Roumania were pro-Austrian. Turkey alone could not hope to reconquer Bosnia, and a Turco-Serb-Russian league was beyond the range of practical politics. These material ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... "Earthquake," said Addison at last. "I've heard the old Squire say that one sometimes comes in Maine, when there ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... the Ark of Safety rose higher upon its great platform, its huge metallic ribs and broad, bulging sides glinting strangely in the unbroken sunshine—for, as if imitating the ominous quiet before an earthquake, the July sky had stripped itself of all clouds. No thunder-storms broke the serenity of the long days, and never had the overarching heavens seemed so spotless and ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... like those of that youth who poises the stone above Florence, and looks out upon the circle of the hills. It might be that huge heave of flank and chest and throat in "The Slave," which is like an earthquake lifting a whole landscape; it might be that tremendous Madonna, whose charity is more strong than death. Anyhow, your thoughts would be something worthy of the man's terrible paganism and his more terrible Christianity. Who but God could have graven ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton

... some distance, two rifle-shots were distinctly heard, and the calm of the picture was as rudely and suddenly disturbed as if an earthquake had happened. The peaceful peasants stooped, throwing away the spade, and in exchange each had a Martini rifle in his hand, which he rapidly loaded from the bandolier of cartridges round his waist. Men rushed out of the slumbering cottages, and a ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... painful position for Paul and Silas. But they were not unhappy. They prayed to God, and sang praises to Him; and they sang so heartily that the other prisoners heard them. It was midnight, and all was dark in the prison. But suddenly there was an earthquake; so that the foundations of the prison were shaken, all the doors were opened, and every one's bonds were loosed. All the prisoners might have run away had they been minded to ...
— Mother Stories from the New Testament • Anonymous

... in the Fortune. In an instant she disappeared, and with her the blockhouse against which she had struck, with all of its garrison, a large portion of the bridge, and all the troops stationed upon it. The ground was shaken as if by an earthquake, houses fell miles away, and the air was filled with a rain of mighty blocks of stone, some of which were afterwards found a league away. A thousand soldiers were killed in an instant, the rest were dashed to the ground, stunned and bewildered. The Marquis of Richebourg and most of Parma's ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... hurry - ('Twas call'd the Circus then, but now the Surrey). Who burnt (confound his soul!) the houses twain Of Covent Garden and of Drury Lane? {10} Who, while the British squadron lay off Cork, (God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!) With a foul earthquake ravaged the Caraccas, And raised the price of dry goods and tobaccos? Who makes the quartern loaf and Luddites rise? Who fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies? Who thought in flames St. James's court to pinch? {11} Who burnt the wardrobe of poor Lady Finch? ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... long and well—perhaps their stomachs were too empty. The Chartists stirred again, and renewed their not unreasonable or treasonable demands; but all in vain. There is really something awful about the strength and solidity and impassivity of England. When the French monarchy went down in the earthquake shock of that wild winter, and a republic came up in its place, it surely would have been no wonder if a vast tidal-wave of revolution caused by so much subsidence and upheaving had broken disastrously on the English shores. But it did not. The old sea-wall of loyalty and constitutional ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... learned men say so, what shall we do with the sixth day, on which our blessed Saviour expired on the cross; darkness for three hours had covered the earth, and the vail of the Temple was rent from top to bottom, and there was such an earthquake throughout vast creation that we have only to open our eyes and look at the rent rocks for a clear and perfect demonstration that this whole globe was shaken from centre to circumference, [35]and the graves of the dead were opened. Matt xxvii: 50, 53. You may answer me that Popery has honored that ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign - 1847 edition • Joseph Bates

... was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... wrote: "The large, three-story house, corner of Broadway and Fourth Street, occupied for several years by Mrs. Seton as a boarding-house, fell today at two o'clock, with a crash so astounding that the girls, with whom I was sitting in the library, imagined for a moment that it was caused by an earthquake. Fortunately the workmen had notice to make their escape. No lives were lost and ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... not god-born? The gods, my Semele, In charity oft lend their strength to man; Ne'er do the deities their terrors lend— Death and destruction is the godhead's seal— Bearer of death to thee were Zeus unveiled! (He extends his hand. Thunder, fire, smoke, and earthquake. Music accompanies the spell here ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... for a few seconds. Then he suddenly started, staggered backwards, uttered a loud choking, gurgling, nameless cry, and fell back on the floor like a mass of rock shaken from its foundations by an earthquake. The room shook again with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... and two performances a day, rain, shine, snow or earthquake," was the emphatic answer. "Come over to my tent in half an hour. I have ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... observed, "in whatever mood she went away this morning, you have evidently succeeded in doing what I have never seen any one else do—breaking through her indifference. I shouldn't have thought that anything short of an earthquake would have ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... war service. She said: "It need not apply to the battle field alone, but we should help all those who need our help." So the American Red Cross passed an amendment to the effect that its work should apply to all suffering from fires, floods, famine, earthquake, and other forms of disaster. This amendment was ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford

... now. You see it is a large manuscript. I will therefore choose some of those that bear upon the subject of which we have been talking. A detailed account of the crucifixion follows here, which I could not bring myself to read aloud. The eclipse is in it, and the earthquake, and the white faces of the risen dead gleaming through the darkness about the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... greatest command of our Master? No. For instead of loving God, we fear Him, and lay every evil that befalls us at His door. If there be a cyclone, a flood, a cloudburst, a railroad disaster, a conflagration, an earthquake, an epidemic, we say it is the will of God. Oftentimes we labor long and faithfully to accomplish a desired result, and just as we think we have success in our hands, we fail, and all our hopes and desires are destroyed; again we say, it is the will of God. If we see any of our brethren ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter

... the cities, as if in the midst of an earthquake, and there is hardly a man engaged in mercantile operations (I might say not one) who ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... wish to hear about the earthquake at Misenum. After my uncle had left us on that day, I went on with my studies until it was time to bathe; then I had supper and went to bed. But my sleep was broken and disturbed. There had been many slight shocks, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... voices mutter From Sinai's earthquake-shattered, height, While desert phantoms rise and flutter In wreaths ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... reference to its advance in the world. Destructive work is noisy, constructive work is silent. God was in 'the still small voice,' not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire. Christ's own career, how silent it was! Drums are loud and empty. The spread of the kingdom was unnoticed by the world's great ones—Caesars, philosophers, patricians, and it silently ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... hundred of the townspeople. Hasten, then, we pray you, your royal feet, that you may see and believe our statement, lest if we may not stop the noble young cacique in this his dangerous sport, your royal city of Tezcuco shall be disturbed and overturned as if by an earthquake." ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... Sentimentalist must have had his exquisite memories, even then, as he sat brooding over his dull mechanical work, he whose burning eloquence about Liberty and Justice and Simplicity and Nature was already sowing the seed of the earthquake. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from sleep, And the water began to heave and the weather to moan, And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew, And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew, Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags, And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain, And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags To be lost ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... constantly issues from near the top of the Pic, they have had no earthquake or eruption of a volcano since 1704, when the port of Garrachica, where much of their trade was formerly carried on, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... room?" cried my uncle. "Your lasting health and good luck, young gentleman!" said the old man, bowing politely to me, as I happened to sneeze;[3] but he immediately added, "They are the stones and plaster of the partition wall which fell in at the great shock." "Have you had an earthquake?" blazed up my uncle, now fairly in a rage. "No, not an earthquake, worshipful Herr Justitiarius," replied the old man, grinning all over his face, "but three days ago the heavy wainscot ceiling of ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... and stood at attention. This admirable man's face was constructed not with a view to the easy interpretation of emotions. I doubt if an earthquake in Carlton House Terrace and the vicinity could have ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... us swear that we will fight to the last ditch, that we will strike blow for blow, that we will use every weapon at our command, and that we will never surrender! Roll up a united Socialist vote in California that will shake the Pacific Coast like an earthquake, and back it up with a general strike that will paralyze the continent.... Let the sturdy toilers of the Pacific Coast raise the ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... the poet saith—why 'if?' Why doubt a fact so clearly proven, stubborn, stiff? The heavy griefs and burdens of the world around, The hideous tyranny by which mankind is ground, The earthquake, tempest, rush of war, and wail of woe, Are all as though they were not—if I do not know! Wrapped in my robe of ignorance, what can I miss? Am I not saved from all—and more than all—of this? Do I not revel in ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... begged for even the smallest mitigation of misery, and the vials of wrath were poured out upon me. In my anguish I cried, 'Roll on, ye eternal ages!' But why? They will be no nearer through. 'O Lord, how long?' With an earthquake, that seemed to shake the very throne, came back the reply, 'Forever! Forever!' I sank down in unutterable agony. Then I awoke, and lo, it was all a dream. The darkness of night was yet around me; a cold sweat covered ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary

... o'er France hath passed, With thunder-stroke and whirlwind's blast; Rain unmeasured, and hail, there came, Sharp and sudden the lightning's flame; And an earthquake ran—the sooth I say, From Besancon city to Wissant Bay; From Saint Michael's Mount to thy shrine, Cologne, House unrifted was there none. And a darkness spread in the noontide high— No light, save gleams from the cloven sky. On all who ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... the country. During the north-west monsoon the explosions are extremely violent; the forked lightning shoots in all directions, and the whole sky seems on fire, whilst the ground is agitated in a degree little inferior to the motion of a slight earthquake. In the south-east monsoon the lightning is more constant, but the coruscations are less fierce or bright, and the thunder is scarcely audible. It would seem that the consequences of these awful meteors are not so fatal there as in Europe, few instances occurring of lives being ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... to Helen, and here all was satisfactory. There had been no discussion, none of the theological argument that her letters had given him cause to dread, which had made him feel a quiver in that solid rock of custom that a long-quieted earthquake had once shaken to its centre. He felt in a vague way that his niece was not quite so near and familiar, and there was a subtile reserve, which did not show itself in words or any check in the expression of her love, but which was certainly ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... term That fills old myth, and typifies the fight 'Twixt wrathful evil and the force of right. The dragons of the prime, fierce saurian things With ogre gorges and with harpy wings, Fitted their hour; the haunts that gave them birth, The semi-chaos of the early earth, The slime, the earthquake shock, the whelming flood, Made battle ground for the colossal brood. But now, when centuries of love and light Have warmed and brightened man's old home; when might Is not all sinister, nor all desire Fierce appetite, that all-devouring fire,— When life is not alone a wasting scourge, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various

... became a Frohman star and remained one for eleven years. He and Frohman were constantly exchanging witty telegrams and letters. Frohman sent Collier to Australia. At San Francisco the star encountered the famous earthquake. He wired Frohman: ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... fifty-five, Georgius Secundus was then alive,— Snuffy old drone from the German hive; That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible earthquake-day That the Deacon finished ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... and forgive me, I am afraid I do!" he said sorrowfully. "I see the shadow of the storm before it draws nigh,—I feel the terror of the earthquake before it shakes down the edifice! No, the world is not with Christ to-day!—and unhappily it is a fact that Christ's ministers in recent years have done more to sever Him from Humanity than any other power could ever have succeeded in doing. Not by action, but by inertia!—dumbness—lack ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... altered and the chin was shorn of its beard, while the veil no longer might protect the modesty of the women. The impression made by such a succession of shocks upon a nation so bigotedly attached to its ancestral ways was comparable only to an earthquake rocking Old Russia ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... but Pliny remained tranquil and retired to rest. Meanwhile, broad flames burst forth from the volcano, the blaze was reflected from the sky, and the brightness was enhanced by the darkness of the night. Repeated shocks of an earthquake made the houses rock to and fro, while in the air the fall of half burnt pumice-stones menaced danger. He was awakened, and he and his friend, with their attendants, tied cushions over their heads to protect them from the falling stones, and walked out to see if they might venture on the water. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... human observation, or, which is more probable, that no accurate measurement of the subject, by which this quantity of decrease might have been ascertained, had been taken and recorded. It must be also evident, that a very small operation of an earthquake would be sufficient to render every means of information, in this manner ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... those celestial, atmospheric, or terrestrial phenomena that the public around him ascribed to the agency and purposes of the gods, should be understood as being produced by physical causes. An eclipse, an earthquake, a storm, a shipwreck, unusual rain or drought, a good or a bad harvest—and not merely these, but many other occurrences far smaller and more unimportant, as we may see by the eighteenth chapter of the Characters ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... catastrophic. But there is another side to the matter. The study of history may so expose the injustices of the past and their intrenchments that the student reaches the conclusion that nothing but an earthquake—an earthquake in men's ideas at the very least—can avail to set things right; that the best thing that could happen would be an explosion so terrible as to make it possible to break completely with the past, and ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various

... devotions had done from her childhood upwards. Even now, it was little that she thought of herself: her recovered Philip filled her mind—he who had been a stranger—who had been living in a world of which she could conceive nothing—who had suddenly vanished from her companionship, as if an earthquake had swallowed him up—and who was now all her own again, by her side, and to be lived for. Amidst this security, this natural and delightful state of things, that restless uneasiness—now jealousy, and now self-abasement—which she had called her own vanity and selfishness, disappeared, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... in the human witness to have nature when she begins misbehaving do her worst. One longs to have her go all lengths, and this perhaps is why an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, of violent type is so satisfactory to those it spares. It formed the secret joy of the great blizzard of 1888, and it must form the mystical delight of such a London fog as we had experienced. But you see the blizzard once in a generation or a century, while ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... servant, "Bring me the book marked 'Ephemeris' from my dressing-room, with a pen and ink.—We will put that down," continued he; and when the servant brought the book he wrote for a moment, reading aloud as he did so, "Great annular eclipse of the sun—slight shock of an earthquake felt in Cardigan—Sherbrooke talks ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... of Deucalion, king of Thessaly, the course of the river Peneus was stopped, probably by an earthquake. In the same year so great a quantity of rain fell, that all Thessaly was overflowed. Deucalion and some of his subjects fled to Mount Parnassus; where they remained until the waters abated. The children of those who were preserved are the stones of which the Poet here speaks. The Fable, probably, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... What an earthquake there would be if our clergymen where only to become inoculated with that sort of simple sincerity I His disciples and followers did that for him as has been done in ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener

... remember the remark of the child Goethe, when his young reason was perplexed by attempting to reconcile the terrible earthquake at Lisbon with the idea of infinite goodness? 'God knows very well that an immortal soul cannot suffer from mortal accident.' With similar faith there came to me tranquil restoration. The deluge of passion rolled back, and from the wreck of my Eden arose a new and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... in the public mind such a sensation as an earthquake would have created; and the country rung with it from one end of the land to the other, from north to south, and from east to west. This is an ample demonstration, as we shall by and by see, of what can be done by one member in that House, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt

... [*Ed. Did. v, 3], an accidental being has no cause, least of all a natural cause, such as is the power of a heavenly body, because what occurs accidentally, neither is a being properly speaking, nor is one—for instance, that an earthquake occur when a stone falls, or that a treasure be discovered when a man digs a grave—for these and like occurrences are not one thing, but are simply several things. Whereas the operation of nature has always some one thing for its term, just as it ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... me; and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like ourselves. But in Richard there is no human complexity. His is the fearful simplicity of the lightning, the battering-ram, the earthquake, forces whose achievements are terrible and whose inner existence a blank. Richard hammers his bloody way through life like the legendary Iron Man with his flail, awe-inspiring as a destructive agency, not as ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... Gopher soup; rattlesnake hash; squirrel saute; fricasseed opossum; pumpkin pie. That's your sort! Blue coat and brass buttons. White Marseilles waistcoat. France saved by Marseilles waistcoat. Organize earthquake to swallow London. JOHN BULL trembles. Tours trembles. Italy trembles. Leaning tower of Pisa changes base and slopes other way. Tired of France. Change base and slope other way. PUNCHINELLO for the throne of Spain! Down with AOSTA! Down with effete monarchies! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various

... against that calamity. That flood will no more return to cover the earth. But is it possible that in the bosom of civilisation itself may be engendered the malady which shall destroy it? Is it possible that institutions may be established which, without the help of earthquake, of famine, of pestilence, or of the foreign sword, may undo the work of so many ages of wisdom and glory, and gradually sweep away taste, literature, science, commerce, manufactures, everything but ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... no time and no necessity for any one to do anything. The situation itself vanished in the financial crash as a building vanishes in an earthquake—here one moment and gone the next with only an ill-omened, slight, preliminary rumble. Well, to say 'in a moment' is an exaggeration perhaps; but that everything was over in just twenty-four hours is an exact statement. Fyne was able to tell me all about ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... up at the speaker and stood mute: the clerk did the same; Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had rolled under his feet; taking a firmer footing, and not turning his head ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... abhisarika,[20] were she dying for her lover, must notwithstanding observe times and seasons, choosing for her expedition only proper opportunities, such as are afforded by a winter night, or a dense fog, or the confusion caused by a whirlwind or an earthquake or an uproar, or a revolution in the state, or an illness of the king, or a festival, when all the citizens are drunk, or sleeping, or when the city is on fire. But as it is, not one of these occasions ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown

... anguish, how much incalculable misery has been prevented; in short, how many human beings have been saved from an untimely grave, by the timely interposition of the PRESS! It has said, let it be so, and it was so; its thunders have been heard, and the oppressor trembles like the earthquake: it has overthrown, yea, totally demolished the sharp-edged sword of the ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... the tempest and of thee! How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! And now again 'tis black,—and now, the glee of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth" ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... idea was that one of the larger mountains in the neighbourhood had fallen on top of him. Then he thought that there must have been an earthquake. Then it gradually dawned upon him that he had been hit by a mere common soldier with a pike. Then he ...
— William Tell Told Again • P. G. Wodehouse

... the moral effect of Alaric's capture of Rome was portentous, and shook the very foundations of civilization throughout the world. To Jerome, in his cell at Bethlehem, the tidings came like the shock of an earthquake. Augustine, as he penned his 'De Civitate Dei,' felt the old world ended indeed, and the Kingdom of Heaven indeed at hand. And in Britain the whole elaborate system of Imperial civil and military government seems to have crumbled ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... when unhappily, In a most inadvertent manner, I said that Southwell was not peculiarly to my taste; but however, I merely expressed this in common conversation, without speaking disrespectfully of the sweet town; (which, between you and I, I wish was swallowed up by an earthquake, provided my Eloquent mother was not in it). No sooner had the unlucky sentence, which I believe was prompted by my evil Genius, escaped my lips, than I was treated with an Oration in the ancient style, which I have often so pathetically described ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero

... up for five paces, for six, for ten. Then suddenly the cry of harps is in my ear and something like an earthquake quivers through my limbs. And this sound grows into a mighty crunching and waxes into thunder which sounds afar and returns from the distance in ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann

... balance and equilibrium among the parts is disturbed, the strain gradually increases until a violent break ensues in the form of social conflicts, insurrections, revolutions and war; it is a fact that the readjustment that follows, as after an earthquake, does indeed establish a kind of new equilibrium, but it is an equilibrium born of violence, and it is destined to be again disturbed periodically without end, unless by some science and art of Human Engineering progress in all the great ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... It was the earthquake period, caused by internal convulsions, which suddenly modified the unsettled features of the terrestrial surface. Here, an intumescence which was to become a mountain, there, an abyss which was to be filled with an ocean or a sea. There, whole forests sunk through the earth's crust, ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne

... played the harp in scientific raptures whilst it was burning. I am so far of Nero's way of thinking that I have often said, when consulted by despairing sanitary reformers, that what London needs to make her healthy is an earthquake. Why, then, it may be asked, do not I, as a public-spirited man, employ incendiaries to set it on fire, with a heroic disregard of the consequences to myself and others? Any vivisector would, if he had the courage ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw

... it means to me and you To see it even as God Evolved it when the world was new! When Light rose, earthquake shod, And slow its gradual splendor grew ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... understood to be 'the first-born of the dead,' if so many preceded Him unto that resurrection. Now if reply be made that this is said by anticipation, so that the monuments be understood to have been opened by the earthquake while Christ was still hanging on the cross, but that the bodies of the just did not rise then but after He had risen, the difficulty still arises—how is it that Peter asserts that it was predicted ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... are not compelled to face the scorching furnaces; we do not have to forge the iron that resists the invading cyclone and the leveling earthquake. We could quit cold and let wild nature kick us about at will. We could have cities of wood to be wiped out by conflagrations; we could build houses of mud and sticks for the gales to unroof like a Hottentot village. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... frankness that befits? Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech Perished in a tumult many years ago, Accused,—our learning's fate,—of wizardry, Rebellion, to the setting up a rule {250} And creed prodigious as described to me. His death, which happened when the earthquake fell (Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss To occult learning in our lord the sage Who lived there in the pyramid alone), Was wrought by the mad people—that's their wont! On vain recourse, as I conjecture it, To his tried virtue, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... heightens when we come close abreast the great town of Messina which, on the 20th of December 1908, suddenly became world-famous owing to the awful misfortune which befell it. All educated people knew Messina by name previously, but it was not until the Italian wires flashed the story of the earthquake which had wrought destruction so swiftly and dramatically that it will always be ranked as among the most appalling that ever happened, that everyone with one consent turned their attention to Messina, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... in the day. By half-past six in the evening it was black as the densest night, the murk only being lighted by the constant flashes of lightning. The air was highly electrified and the wireless was made silent. During the evening the island was shaken by many light earthquake shocks and several people from St. Paul came to take refuge on the Bear. At midnight a fine dust was falling steadily, but by six bells of the middle watch it had lessened and when the sun rose the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... Revolutionary fires are paling and seem to be dying out everywhere on the surface, but the peoples are still deeply stirred. The King of Prussia is getting ready to seize his sceptre again and the Emperor of Russia to draw his sword. There has been an earthquake at Havre, the cholera is at Fecamp; Arnal is leaving the Gymnase, and the Academy is nominating the Duke de ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... he? With that deepest he had no developed relation. There were worlds of thought and feeling already in motion in Hester's universe, while the vaporous mass in him had hardly yet begun to stir. To use another simile, he was living on the surface of his being, the more exposed to earthquake and volcanic eruption that he had never yet suspected the existence of the depths profound whence they rise, while she was already a discoverer in the abysses of the nature gradually yet swiftly unfolding in her—every discovery attended with fresh light for ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... most noble, most dangerous kind of prodigality; but, nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, as a justifiable luxury. In the same way, I began by interpreting Wagner's music as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of soul. In it I thought I heard the earthquake by means of which a primeval life-force, which had been constrained for ages, was seeking at last to burst its bonds, quite indifferent to how much of that which nowadays calls itself culture, would thereby be shaken to ruins. You see how I misinterpreted, you see also, what I bestowed upon ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... was in the midst of his elaborate work, which was composed to form the literary character of a son, that he experienced the most terrible affliction in the domestic life of genius—the successive deaths of his wife and his only child. It was a moral earthquake with a single survivor amidst the ruins. An awful burst of parental and literary affliction breaks forth in Quintilian's lamentation,—"My wealth, and my writings, the fruits of a long and painful ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... I replied. "I trust soon to be able to make you have a perfect earthquake when I shew you Old Barbe Rouge's 'Petites fees.' Fenetre will not do. Now what are we standing near that commences in French with ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... the general powers of the universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it already.—Why,—said the Professor,—they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!] ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... revenues come mainly from import duties. Economic development is hindered by dependence on relatively few commodity exports, vulnerability to natural disasters, and long distances from main markets and between constituent islands. A severe earthquake in November 1999 followed by a tsunami, caused extensive damage to the northern island of Pentecote and left thousands homeless. Another powerful earthquake in January 2002 caused extensive damage in the capital, Port-Vila, and surrounding areas, and also was ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... if you persist in treating me as though I had just lost the whole of my relatives in an earthquake or a wreck at sea, I shall explode. I've had a bad knock, but I don't want it continually rubbing into me. The world will go on—even although my engagement is broken off. And ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... centurion, and they that with him were watching Jesus, on seeing the earthquake, and the things that were done, were exceedingly afraid, saying: Truly this was the Son ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various

... have wished him dead; but I believe I had no thought of compassing his death. Neither did the idea come upon me at once, but by very slow degrees, presenting itself at first in dim shapes at a very great distance, as men may think of an earthquake or the last day; then drawing nearer and nearer, and losing something of its horror and improbability; then coming to be part and parcel - nay nearly the whole sum and substance - of my daily thoughts, and resolving itself into a question ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens

... What if earthquake be about to try the towers which lions dare no longer attack: if man be destined to live once more, in the new-born readiness for death? Is the time at hand, when the new faith shall be broken up as the old has been; ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements—they came blinking out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures let loose by an earthquake—and of young students who had eschewed delight and lived laborious days for knowledge and art which had been overthrown by war's brutality. All classes and types of life in Paris were mixed up in this retreat, and among them were men I knew, so that I ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... human on our street, but it takes a bit more study to get at the secret. There is a certain reticence about us. It would take an earthquake to cause much fraternization along Pine Street. Perhaps it is because three houses out of every four bear the tablets of doctors. The average layman fears to stop and speak to his neighbour for fear it will develop into a ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... the Goths: they were buried with it themselves; which is a caution we are not told that they ever took. You remember in Titus's time there were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with an earthquake. Well, this was one of them, not very considerable, and then called Herculaneum. (195) Above it has since been built Portici, about three miles from Naples, where the King has a villa. This under-ground city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... ''AndreV dussebeiV kai apotropaioi, andreV ek sktouV anadunteV, thV gar 'Esperiou moiraV uphrcon gennhmata, (Phot. Epist. p. 47, edit. Montacut.) The Oriental patriarch continues to apply the images of thunder, earthquake, hail, wild boar, precursors of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... The sky was overcast and day was breaking. He rose higher on his elbow to look more carefully. Everywhere that his eye could reach toward the horizon the earth seemed in motion, rising and falling in great waves. Was it an earthquake? He rubbed his eyes. It seemed as if everywhere thousands of heads were tossing, and from this continual tossing and trampling came the thunder and vibration. Moreover, the caboose was not moving; of this he felt sure. Amazed, and only half-awake, he concluded ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman

... operation. As the diggers, underneath the corpse, deepen the cavity into which it sinks, tugged and shaken by the sextons, the grave, without their intervention, fills of itself by the mere downfall of the shaken soil. Useful shovels at the tips of their claws, powerful backs, capable of creating a little earthquake: the diggers need nothing more for the practice of their profession. Let us add—for this is an essential point—the art of continually jerking and shaking the body, so as to pack it into a lesser volume and cause it to pass when passage is obstructed. We shall ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... following the same direction, winds away from the road in a slower and wider current than before. To the left, the outskirts of the Dauphine Alps form a singularly wild and fantastic barrier, sometimes rising in abrupt pinnacles, and sometimes rent as if by an earthquake into precipices of some thousand feet of sheer perpendicular descent. The vale inclosed between these rough walls, and in the centre of which the Isere unites itself to the Rhone, appears a perfect garden in point of richness, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... his comrades fly; "Make way for Liberty!" they cry, And through the Austrian phalanx dart, As rushed the spears through Arnold's heart; While, instantaneous as his fall, Rout, ruin, panic, scattered all; An earthquake could not overthrow A city with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... the dead, nor the living; so—I am "firm as the marble, founded as the rock," [1] till the next earthquake. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... we pass between the hills which have been shaken by earthquake and torn by convulsion, we find that periods of perfect repose succeed those of destruction. The pools of calm water lie clear beneath their fallen rocks, the water-lilies gleam, and the reeds whisper among ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... at such a picture as that upon the opposite page, might reasonably stand in awe of the national bird of our country; but I will state that it is my firm belief that a child runs quite as much risk of being swallowed up by an earthquake as it does of being ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... a morning visit to an American friend, a Southerner and a Christian, when the door was suddenly thrust open and a fiendish-looking man rushed in, vociferating, "Have you heard the news? Old Abe is assassinated! Seward too! Johnson escaped. Now if God will send an earthquake and swallow up the whole North—men, women, and children, I will ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... after ten minutes of this mild dissipation, the pastime flagged; Union Mills was beginning to rub his leg, when a distant rumble shook the earth. The men looked at each other; the diversion was complete; a languid discussion of the probabilities of its being an earthquake or a blast followed, in the midst of which the Right Bower, who was working a little in advance of the others, uttered a warning cry and leaped from the race. His companions had barely time to follow before a sudden and inexplicable rise in the waters of the creek sent a swift irruption of ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... of the crew of the Japanese cruiser Asama. Rescue work in the earthquake in Italy. Wireless message frustrates a German plot to blow up a French steamer. Fire in a New York factory—rescue of the inmates. Inhuman treatment of Belgian women and children. British officer praises the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education

... element in luck Is genuine, solid, old Teutonic pluck. See yon tall shaft? It felt the earthquake's thrill, Clung to its base, and greets the ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various



Words linked to "Earthquake" :   quake, kerfuffle, commotion, tremor, seism, geological phenomenon, earth tremor, flutter, submarine earthquake, to-do, hurly burly, shock, temblor, seismic disturbance



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