"Infinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the morning, O thou smitten child, Scorned, scourged and persecuted and reviled— Athirst and famishing, none pitying thee, Crowned with the twisted thorns of agony— No faintest gleam of sunlight through the dense Infinity of gloom to lead thee thence— Wait for the morning:—It will come, indeed, As surely as ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... originates a conception, of course, but is always open to a fair offer in the way of a suggestion from any body, and adopts it with the blind zeal of a proselyte. It follows that chance occurrences may bother him for the moment, but he is saved an infinity of trouble by being independent of foresight and memory. To this last defect there is one exception. If he is crossed, or vexed, or injured, he cherishes against the offender a dull, misty, purposeless sort of resentment, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... will always appear the most important. The endeavor, therefore, to judge of the relative beauty or interest of the sciences is utterly hopeless. Let the astronomer boast of the magnificence of his speculations, the mathematician of the immutability of his facts, the chemist of the infinity of his combinations, and we will admit that they all have equal ground for their enthusiasm. But the highest standard of estimation is that of utility. The far greater proportion of mankind, the uninformed, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... health expresses the unity of the vital functions and is accordingly joyful. Life's tragedies occur, not to demonstrate their own reality, but to reveal that eternal principle of joy in life, to which they gave a rude shaking. It is the object of this Oneness in us to realise its infinity by perfect union of love with others. All obstacles to this union create misery, giving rise to the baser passions that are expressions of finitude, of that separateness which is ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... taught the people which were good for food, which of virtue as medicines, and which were poisonous and to be shunned. Thus they journeyed westward, imparting knowledge and doing good works, until they reached the western ocean, the great Pacific, whose waves seem to stretch westward into infinity. There, "having accomplished all they had to do in this world, they ascended into Heaven," once more to form part of the Infinite Being; for the venerable authority whom I am following is careful to add, most explicitly, that "these Indians believed for a certainty that ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... there be for us? We came from nothing, we go back to nothing—we are resolved into the elements which renew the earth for new comers. The wheel of progress is always revolving—for the mass there is eternity, infinity—no beginning, no end; but for the individual, his little span of life ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... continual growth. They go back beyond the common ancestor, into the unfathomable strata of the races that have lived, to the first being; and they will put forth new shoots without end, they will spread and ramify to infinity, through future ages. Look at our tree; it counts only five generations. It has not so much importance as a blade of grass, even, in the human forest, vast and dark, of which the peoples are the great secular ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... rules all action and all tides of thought, And all the secret courses of the stars; The Power that still establishes on earth Desire and worship, through the radiant laws Of Duty, Love and Beauty; for through these As through three portals of the self-same gate The soul of man attains infinity, And enters into Godhead. So he gained On earth a fore-taste of Nirvana, not The void of eastern dream, but the desire And goal of all of us, whether thro' lives Innumerable, by slow degrees, we near The death divine, or from ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... indefinite succession of ages is "virtually infinite," "lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name," at least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially and completely metaphysical in character, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... perceptual objects, but perceiving subjects. And the conception of spiritual substance, once accredited, may then be extended to account for social relations and to fill in the nature of God. The latter extension, in so far as it attributes such further predicates as universality and infinity, implies still a third epistemology, and threatens to pass over into rationalism. But the knowledge of one's fellow-men may, it is claimed, be regarded as immediate, like the knowledge of one's self. Perceptual and volitional activity ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... merchant, "that it is now fourteen years since the first ocean telegraph of any importance was laid,—when I remember that the first cable was laid after an infinity of personal effort on the part of those who had to raise the capital,—when I mention that it was really a work of house-to-house visitation, when sums of 500 pounds to 1000 pounds, and even 10,000 pounds were raised by private subscription, ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... thinking is no more in the brain than in the hair, although the brain may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not corporeal, it is not of this world; its existence is eternity, its residence is infinity.' I forbear to discuss the rationality of their belief, and pass on straightway to thine; if, indeed, I am to consider as one, belief ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward the building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal, because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm—that young fools such ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... all matter, generated by the vibrations of all the constituent electrons in parallel planes. It is directed along a line perpendicular to the plane of vibration at its center, and approaches infinity as the angle theta approaches the limit of Pi divided by two. Therefore, by shifting the axis of rotation or the plane of vibration thus making theta vary between the limits of zero ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... in the words of Dr. Buckland, "Such an aboriginal constitution, so far from superseding an Intelligent Agent, would only exalt our conceptions of the consummate skill and power that could comprehend such an infinity of future uses under future systems, in the original ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... expanse of marble-topped tables. He sat down at a marble-topped table. On the marble-topped table next to him were twenty-four sugar-basins, and on the next to that a large number of brass bells, and on another one an infinity of cruets. A very slatternly woman was washing the linoleum in a corner of the floor. Two thin, wrinkled girls in shabby black were whispering together behind the counter. The cash-den was empty. Through the open door he could keep an eye on his motor-bicycle, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... his unlived youth seemed to be dancing in Philip Romilly's veins when he awoke the next morning to find an open porthole, the blue sea tossing away to infinity, and his steward's cheerful face ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... graduated rise of examples between them. Down came a blow: "What! put necessary and contingent propositions together! It's absurd!" I pointed out that the two kinds of necessity are but such extremes of probability as 0 and [infinity] are of number, and illustrated by an urn with 1 white and n black {247} balls, n increasing without limit. It was frankly seen, and the point yielded; a ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... character to their civilisation than that of a refined and ennobled sensuality. Of course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity, and some obscure recollections will always remind him of the home he has lost; but we are now speaking of the predominant ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... sea is peopled by an infinity of animals soft or gelatinous grouped as moluscs, worms or zoophytes, of which some live isolated, others in society. The greatest part of these animals are unknown, and their study is very important, as they give ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... getting the upper hand: now it was a floating keg again and again making me dash away now one of the packages hurried in by the tide; while the strange drippings and hollow whisperings were magnified into an infinity of horrors. Every monster with which imagination has peopled the sea seemed to be there to attack me—strange serpent or lizard like beasts, slimy and scaled, thronging along the ceiling or up the sides, swimming around me, or burrowing through ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... and Fate sweeps you along like spray upon the gale, yet you go unwilling. In your impatience you have flown to learning for refuge, and it has completed your overthrow, for it has induced you to reject as non-existent all that you cannot understand. Because your finite mind cannot search infinity, because no answer has come to all your prayers, because you see misery and cannot read its purpose, because you suffer and have not found rest, you have said there is naught but chance, and become an atheist, as many have done before you. Is ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... proceeding to the details of the experiment to be recorded, review, very briefly, former interpretative tendencies. Zeising found that the golden section satisfied his demand for unity and infinity in the same beautiful object.[5] In the golden section, says Wundt,[6] there is a unity involving the whole; it is therefore more beautiful than symmetry, according to the aesthetic principle that that unification of spatial forms which occurs without marked effort, which, however, embraces the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... journeyed through the forest, always in the centre of a vast circle of scattered pines, upon the outer edge of which the trees grew dense and dark, stretching away into infinity. Our road wandered in and out among the prostrate victims of many a summer tempest: now we were winding around dark "bays" of sweet-gum and magnolia; now skirting circular ponds of delicate young cypress; now crossing narrow "branches" sunk deep in impenetrable "hummocks" of close-crowded oak and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Taylor put some things to soak and, closing down the top of the stationary washtubs, went to the window. The view was not intriguing, and yet she hung there: roofs and more roofs, a countless number reached out toward infinity, with pebbles and pieces of broken glass glittering in the sunlight; chimneys sharply outlined by shadow; and on every roof, except one, clothes-lines, from which white cotton and linen flapped in the wind at the side of faded overalls and red woollen ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... of all the problems that were connected with such pseudo-propositions. All the problems that Russell's 'axiom of infinity' brings with it can be solved at this point. What the axiom of infinity is intended to say would express itself in language through the existence of infinitely many names with ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... less than one-fifth, and the eight great-grandparents for about six hundredths, and so on, the contribution of each generation becoming smaller with ascent, but each one having, in the average of many cases, a certain definite though small influence, until infinity. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... verdant. As she sat at her window and saw evening close in upon her in that broad forest home, and heard for the first time the mournful notes of the whippoorwill, and the harsh scream of the jay in the distant woods, she was oppressed with a sense of vastness, of infinity, which she never before experienced, not even on the ocean. She remained long in prayer, and when she lay down to sleep beside her matron-friend, no words were spoken between them. The elder, overcome with fatigue, soon sank into a peaceful slumber; but the young enthusiast lay long awake, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Johnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, his dread of illness, his terror of death. Johnson's horror of annihilation was insupportable. He so revelled in life, in the contact and company of other human beings, that he once said that the idea of an infinity of torment was preferable to the thought of annihilation. He wrote, in his last illness, to his old ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... disappoint him. A story of a hero who adventures into sinister places, disregards repeated warnings to "go back ere it is too late" (or the American for that entrancing formula), meets there a Distressed Damsel and kisses her as introduction, and finally, after an infinity of perils, is left with the D.D. as his B.B., or blushing bride—this I state emphatically to be not only Romance, but a most excellent brand of that article. What however Mr. CULLEY seems most to fear is that we shall think that McCoy himself and the whole setting (New Mexican ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... glorious side of His character. They draw distinctions between 'grace' and 'glory,' and think that the latter applies mainly to what I might call the physical and the metaphysical, and less to the moral, attributes of the divine nature. We adore power, and when it is expanded to infinity we think that it is the glory of God. But my text delivers us from all such misconceptions. If we rightly understand it, then we learn this, that the true heart of the glory is tenderness and love. Of power that weak man hanging on the Cross is a strange embodiment; but if we learn that there is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... planet, Mars, a hundred thousand years before, the descendants of the population that had migrated across space had repeated on the third planet the devastation of the fourth. The ancestors of Verkan Vall's people had discovered the principle of paratime transposition and had begun to exploit an infinity of worlds on other lines of probability. The people of the First Level Dwarma Sector, reduced by sheer starvation to a tiny handful, had abandoned their cities and renounced their technologies and created for themselves a farm-and-village ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... back, and fell headlong into a vat of molten iron. The thought of what happened then horrifies the imagination. Yet it was all over in two or three seconds. Multiply the individual instance by unnumbered millions, stretch the agony to temporal infinity, and we confront ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... never needs be an end to the subdivisions of the distance, nor consequently to those of the time in which it is performed. But an unlimited number of subdivisions may be made of that which is itself limited. The argument proves no other infinity of duration than may be embraced within five minutes. As long as the five minutes are not expired, what remains of them may be divided by ten, and again by ten, as often as we like, which is perfectly compatible with their being only five minutes altogether. It proves, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the air, his biological limitation and weakness is that he cannot stop there. Hosts of unclean birds and crapulous insects can pass through the sky, but they cannot pass any communication between it and the earth. But the army of man has advanced vertically into infinity, and not been cut off. It can establish outposts in the ether, and yet keep open behind it its erect and insolent road. It would be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon-ball at the moon; but would it not be grander to build ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... amongst a similar number of human beings. But the worst of all was the evil expression of their countenances, plainly denoting that they were familiar with every species of crime; and it was not long before I found that their countenances did not belie them. After they had asked me an infinity of questions, and felt my hands, face, and clothes, they retired to their homes. My meeting with these wretched people was the reason of my remaining at Badajoz a much longer time than I originally intended. I wished to ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... described. I already knew that the papers were probably in the room, but I had no desire to rip up all the planking and skirting in search of them. I let him take them, therefore, from the hiding-place, and so saved myself an infinity of trouble. Is there any other point which ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable suns, attended each by a cortege of planets, and scattered—how, we know not—through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples? The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... these superstitious observances may be added, accidental rencounters, words spoken by chance, and afterwards turned into good or bad presages; forebodings, prodigies, monsters, eclipses, comets; every extraordinary phenomenon, every unforeseen accident, with an infinity of chimeras of the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the climate, sometimes from the privations to which he was subjected, now from the rough character of the country he constantly compelled to traverse in his spiritual journeys, anon from the violence of colonists or Indians.... It will be seen that readers who expect an infinity of enjoyment from these missionary adventures will not be ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness; finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but completeness manifested in parts, infinity ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... confronts us, as to whether Kepler's Laws are equally true in their application to the sun? Now the sun is one of the host of stars that move in the vast infinity of space, and if it can be proved that Kepler's Laws hold good in relation to one star, as they do in relation to all planets and satellites, then such a result will have a most important bearing ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... learnt, all goes smoothly until we reach those studies in which the notion of infinity is employed—the infinitesimal calculus and the whole of higher mathematics. The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of which our own age has to boast. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... like an Amazon through space, attended by her legions and battalions of stars. So slight, so fragile and sweet a woman!— with a precious world of love pent up in her heart . . . yet alone— quite alone on this night of splendid luminousness and majestic suggestions of infinity,—an infinity so monstrous and solitary to the one delicate creature, whose whole soul craved for a perfect love. Alas, for this "perfect love," of which all the dearest women dream! Where shall they find it?—and how shall they win it? Too often it comes when they may not have ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of splendors rivaling the Arabian Nights. Now they saw him! And the amazement can scarcely be described. He dined with the Great Electress Sophia, afterwards first Queen of Prussia, and she wrote of him: "Nature has given him an infinity of wit. With advantages he might have been an accomplished man. What a pity his ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... felt death's mark branding in, and her family spoke of her recovery! What folly it was to come into this gay little world where she had no rights at all! Maria Jones wondered why she had not died at sea. To be floating in that infinity of blue water would be better than this. She pictured herself in the weighted sack,—for we never separate ourselves from our bodies,—and tender forgiveness covering all her mistakes as the multitude of ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... enigma, and lose itself in the waters of the Pacific; and nearer, the snow-born Thompson bursts forth from the ice to begin its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Nature, rioting in her grandest mood, exclaimed with voices of grandeur, solitude, sublimity, beauty, and infinity, 'Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... man fails to see the infinity of space between Modernism and Orthodoxy, or to apprehend the fact that daily they are drawing farther apart! Time holds no promise ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... what on the earth I sought as fruitlessly— The world I knew, the heaven I scorned Lost in infinity: Alone, and on the ageless breath Of cosmic whirlwinds spun, I hurtle through the outer dark Toward ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation upon which all law, civilisation, religion ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... civilized world, I will close this part of my essay with the following quotation from Knight's strong, erudite, and exhaustive treatise: "The ancient theologists ... finding that they could conceive no idea of infinity, were content to revere the Infinite Being in the most general and efficient exertion of his power—attraction; whose agency is perceptible through all matter, and to which all motion may, perhaps, be ultimately ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... persons—in her drawing, her books, her endless knitting and sewing for the wounded. She was puzzled that Bridget stayed so long in town, but alack! she could do very well without Bridget. Some portion of the savour of life, of that infinity of small pleasures which each day may bring for the simple and the pure in heart, was again hers. Insensibly the great wound was healing. The dragging anguish of the first year assailed ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... darkness like a criminal pursued by the impalpable. Now and then a red light flickered in a porch instead of a white one. But there was no surcease from the sinister spell until suddenly they emerged into a long, wide, illumined thoroughfare of shut shops that stretched to infinity on either hand. And a vermilion motor-bus meandered by, and this motor-bus was so sad, so inexpressibly wistful, in the solemn wilderness of the empty artery, that the two women fled from the strange ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... which have been set out to receive it. The old unpainted shingles and boards of the mansion and out-houses are black with the moisture which they have imbibed. Looking at the river, we perceive that its usually smooth and mirrored surface is blurred by the infinity of rain-drops; the whole landscape—grass, trees, and houses—has a completely water-soaked aspect, as if the earth were wet through. The wooded hill, about a mile distant, whither we went to gather whortleberries, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... excited, he says, religious awe. What he will not suppose is that the earliest small and timid steps were not unaided by such objects as the fetichist treasures—stones, shells, and so forth, which suggest no idea of infinity. Stocks he will admit, but not, if he can help it, stones, of the sort that negroes and Kanekas and other tribes use as fetiches. His reason is, that he does not see how the scraps of the fetichist can appeal to the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... the empty spaces, Death, walking very silently, Shall fear the glory of our faces Through all the dark infinity. ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... wagged his tail-stump with sleepy content. As I bent lower and stared closer into those humid eyes of his, it seemed as though I were staring down into a bottomless well, through a peep-hole into Infinity, so deep and wonderful was that eye, that dusky pool of love and trust. It was like seeing into the velvet-soft recesses of a soul. And I could stare into them without fear, just as Bobs could stare back without shame. That's where dogs are slightly different from ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... it was antagonistic to many French customs, and, in many ways, to the national temperament. The result is what might have been expected, namely, that it has only been carried out in rare instances, and with an infinity of trouble. It might have been made the subject of an edict without being included in the Code. The State might have given a holiday on Sunday to all its officials, employees and workmen. It might have been made ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... entrance of a cavern. There when the sun is shrouded in clouds, and the blackness almost of night falls like a pall over the mountains, when the wind howls around the summits, and the thunder with its infinity of reverberations rattles, and bounds from crag to crag throughout the chain, seeming to make the very rocks tremble and totter, then affrighted he hears in the winds the flapping of the wings of that monstrous bird of the mountains ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... sighing fitfully; the clouds gathered and formed an army which stormed the zenith and threatened to overwhelm the pure light of the planet. The lesser stars vanished, two or three falling in their haste and losing themselves forever in infinity. The night ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... some sitting, some lying down, going and coming, hanging about near the ladies of the Embassy, to examine the details of their dresses too. If instantaneous photography had existed in those days, what an infinity of charming and picturesque groups might have been snatched. I did venture to make one or two rapid sketches on the sly; but there were too many eyes upon me, and besides it was an abuse of the toleration ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... the Prince, he leaned against the parapet, and disposed himself to listen. The city was already sunk in slumber; had it not been for the infinity of lights and the outline of buildings on the starry sky, they might have been ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tell," she answered ambiguously, "but I have been thinking of leaving you; you have been already too hospitable and too kind to me. I have given you an infinity of trouble, and I should wish to take a carriage tomorrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find her, although I dare ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... it, and the eyes are enlightened by it; when the things of earth become at once eternal and fixed and of infinite value, and at the same instant of less value than the dust that floats in space; when there no longer appears any distinction between the finite and the eternal, between time and infinity; when the soul for that moment at least finds that rest that is the magnet and the end of all human striving; and that comfort ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.' 'A day in Thy courts is better than a thousand.' We all know how strangely elastic time is, and have sometimes been amazed when we remembered what an infinity of joy or sorrow we had lived through in one tick of the pendulum. When men are dreaming, they pass through a long series of events in a moment's space. When we are truly awake, we live long in a short time, for life is measured, not by the length ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Fathers. . . . They admitted, with good intentions no doubt, yet most inconsiderately, a great error in regard to morals, and pernicious to Christianity; an error which, through all succeeding ages to our times, has produced an infinity of mistakes and evils of various kinds. Jesus, our Savior, prescribed one and the same rule of life or duty to all His disciples. But the Christian doctors, either by too great a desire of imitating the nations ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... literally crammed full from top to bottom. There is scarcely any periodical or transactions of any learned society which they are unable to complete, and in many instances—Punch, for example—they have at least a dozen complete sets, besides an infinity of odd numbers and parts. It is scarcely necessary to point out that Messrs. George's business has very little to do with the locality in which their shops are situated. They are the wholesale firm of the trade, and the larger ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... All the infinity of the whole world of colour being in his own hands, and the difficulty of dealing with it laid as a burden upon his own shoulders, as he combines, modifies, mixes, and ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... are not either self-sufficing or gallant enough to travel great roads without cringing,—clear-eyed, unafraid. They are finely made, but not nobly made,—in that sense. They will therefore have a too urgent need of religion. Few primates have the courage to face—alone—the still inner mysteries: Infinity, Space and Time. They will think it too terrible, they will feel it would turn them to water, to live through unearthly moments of vision without creeds or beliefs. So they'll get beliefs first. Ah, poor creatures! The cart before the horse! Ah, the blasphemy (pitiful!) of their seeking high ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... the magistrate, was still tossed about by an infinity of doubts. If he should once take the girl as his wife, he could never unmarry himself again. He could not do so at least without trouble, disgrace, and ruinous expense. As for revenge, he thought that he might still have a certain amount of that pleasure in repudiating his promised ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... trying to the patience in the course of months; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken identity of colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun touches it with roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue. But, when all is said, these fields ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... light, vaporous, veiled, discreet; it lends its charm to hidden things, invites curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to the speculations of conscience. In short, it partakes of sentiment, emotion, uncertainty, indefiniteness, and infinity; of dreams and of the ideal. And this is why it is, as it ought to be, the poetic and natural atmosphere in which Rembrandt's ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... mind of man! Frail, untrustworthy, perishable—yet able to stand unlimited agony, cope with the greatest forces of Nature and build against a thousand years. Passion can blind it—yet it can read in infinity the difference between right and wrong. Alcohol can unsettle it—yet it can create a poem or a harmony or a philosophy that is immortal. A flower pot falling out of a window can destroy it—yet it can ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... Ferdinand and Isabella, of Spain. Of one place, named by him Puerto Santo, he said: "The amenity of this river, and the clearness of the water, through which the sand at the bottom may be seen; the multitude of palm-trees of various forms, the highest and most beautiful that I have met with, and an infinity of other great and green trees; the birds in rich plumage, and the verdure of the fields, render this country, most Serene Princess, of such marvellous beauty, that it surpasses all others in graces and charm, as the day doth the night in lustre. For which reason I often ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... churches, that are not mere storehouses of theology, Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt,—the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic formula of infinity,—the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to unity beyond space; the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... with. I must not omit to add, that we were pestered all day by vast numbers of mosquetoes, which are not much unlike the gnats in England, but much more venomous in their stings. At sunset, when the musquetoes retired, they were succeeded by an infinity of sand-flies, which made a mighty buzzing, though scarcely discernable by the naked eye; wherever these bite, they raise a small lump attended by painful itching, like that arising from the bite of an English ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... creatures offers to our contemplation an infinity of wonders far greater than this matter of a locust's wing; but in general they pass unperceived, obscured as they are ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Alas! that blissful PRIVATE LIFE—that close centre round the core of being in the individual man—so long missed and pined for, slipped from him, as it were, the moment it reappeared; hurried away, as the circle on the ocean, which is scarce seen ere it vanishes amidst infinity. Suddenly both hands were still; the head fell back. Joy had burst asunder the last ligaments, so fretted away in unrevealing sorrow. Afar, their sound borne into that room, the joy-bells were pealing triumph; mobs roaring out huzzas; the weak cry of John ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tired brain that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a dream of sadness and the sea, And I will turn again, if yet I may, To where the rolling rondure of the deep Broadly affront the sky's infinity. Sleeping or waking, knew I naught but this; Sorrow and Love, above a desolate main, From the sheer battlements of opposite clouds, Kissed, and embraced, and parted company.... This is the self-same bay where we put in, Yonder the restless keel did gore ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... awakened in torment—a racking headache, deadly thirst, a mouth suggestive of a bird-cage, all, in fact, that a man might expect who had partaken too freely of raw and fiery whisky. He felt, indeed, extremely and overpoweringly unwell, as, with an infinity of trouble, he groped his devious way to the open air, and to the burn that went singing by. Here, after drinking copiously, he lay till grey dawn, groaning, the thundering of the linn incessantly jarring his splitting head. Then, when there was light enough, the unhappy man rose on unsteady feet, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... "Morris accomplished an infinity of good in the twenty years during which he wielded the editorial pen. Perhaps no other man in the United States was so well qualified for the noble task he set himself at the outset of his career as editor. American literature was in its infancy, and subject to all the weaknesses of that ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... judgement," he said, throwing a bottle so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end. "People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy; not sure... I think things are too close together... packed up; for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun's a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth's a star, too close to be seen at all... too ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... that clearly required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount of filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that there was opposition—why there should be was another matter—and that the opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had doubtless occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question of the essence and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself to demand the light of experience; so that to the growth of experience, truly, the treatment of the subject ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... extraordinary peculiarity of these addresses from the stump was the immense protuberance they exhibited of the personal pronoun. In Mr. Johnson's speech, his "I" resembles the geometer's description of infinity, having "its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere." Among the many kinds of egotism in which his eloquence is prolific, it may be difficult to fasten on the particular one which is most detestable or most laughable; but it seems to us that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... will not set the reader against her—the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity. Its very situation—withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St. Pancras—implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... called war. The great industrial centers show us what ruthlessness may mean, more cruel and more dangerous than the worst deeds of our border fighting men. As for the criminal records of our great cities, they surpass by infinity those of the rudest wilderness anarchy. Their nature at times would cause a hardened desperado of the West to ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... being so-not, however, because his prices were so high, but because he worked so slowly-I began to be employed by certain noblemen, for whom, among other things, I made a medal in competition with that great artist, and it had four figures, upon which I had expended an infinity of labour. These men of quality, when they compared my piece with that of the famous Caradosso, declared that mine was by far the better executed and more beautiful, and bade me ask what I liked as the reward of my trouble; for since I had given them such ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... to Schiller announcing his intention of once more taking up his unfinished Faust, Schiller replied: 'My head grows dizzy when I think of it. The subject of Faust appears to supply such an infinity of material.... I find no circle large enough to contain it.' Goethe answered: 'I expect to make my work at this barbarous composition, this Fratze [i.e. caricature, as he often called it] less difficult than you imagine. I shall ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... supposing it were to be constantly repeated. It was after midnight on Wednesday when the two reached the corner parlor. Dorothy sat in a cane armchair, while Katherine threw herself into a rocking-chair, laced her fingers behind her head, and gazed through the open window at the misty infinity beyond. ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... man who could reduce religion to a single word and leave it comprehensible, Constantine drew a breath of relief, and said, smiling, "Of a surety, O Prince, there was never a Faith which, with such appearance of simplicity in definition, is capable of such infinity of meaning. I am full of questions; and these listening, my lords of the court, are doubtless in a similar mood. What sayest thou, O my most orthodox Confessor?" The Father bowed until the hem of his blazing stole ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar door and closed it. I heard it go into the pantry, and the biscuit-tins rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump against the cellar door. Then silence that passed into an infinity of suspense. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... editorial intent, perhaps, in that grouping of Lady Sylvia and the Cosmos; but she was pleased to come upon the word Cosmos. It was one of her pet words. It had struck her ear and imagination when she first encountered it, last spring, in Psychology IV-A. Cosmos—what an infinity of meaning lay behind the two-syllabled sound! And the sound of it, too, sung itself over in your mind, rhythmic and fascinating. There was such a difference in words; some were but poor, bald things, neither ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... reach are luminaries[552] which are self-effulgent and which possess splendour like that of the Sun or the fire. Know this, O giver of honours, that possessed of far-famed splendour, even these last do not behold the limits of the firmament in consequence of the inaccessibility and infinity of those limits. This Space which the very gods cannot measure is full of many blazing and self-luminous worlds each above the other. Beyond the limits of land are oceans of water. Beyond water is darkness. Beyond darkness is water again, and beyond the last is fire. Downwards, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of course; and it still breaks through in the prevailing Anglo-Saxon type. To this, the Celt has brought his poetry and mysticism. To it, the Latin has contributed his art instinct; and not art instinct alone but in an infinity of combinations, the dignity of the Spaniard, the spirit of the French, the passion of ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... his anchor by tradition. To him it is the shining light away in the mists of antiquity; it is the strong sun over the living world; it is the pillar of fire over the widening seas and worlds of the unknown; it is the expanse of infinity. When he is lost in its mystery he adverts to the wonder about him, for all that is wonderful is touched with it, and all that is lovely is its expression. It is in the breath of the wind, pure and bracing from the mountain top. It is in the song of the lark ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... If I could have plunged into a light wave and been transported instantaneously to Dona Rita's door it would no doubt have saved me an infinity of pangs too complex for analysis; but as this was impossible I elected to walk from end to end of that long way. My emotions and sensations were childlike and chaotic inasmuch that they were very intense and primitive, and that I lay very ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... dreams that wove a network round my wakeful life for many years past. The outlook is endless, for the goal is at infinity. The realisation cannot be through one life or one fortune but through the co-operation of many lives and many fortunes. The possibility of a fuller expansion will depend on very large endowments. But a beginning ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... out to you, William," continued Mr. Seagrave, "the infinity of his creative power, displayed in endless variety. Amongst the millions of men that have been born, and died, if ever yet were there seen two faces or two bodies exactly alike; nay, if you could examine the leaves upon the trees, although there ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... alone in his house; he saw Ellen moving about that quiet upper room; he saw Cusick lying on the ground beside the smoldering heap that had been the barn, and staring up with eyes that saw only the vast infinity that was the sky. All the struggling and the fighting, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to the Bible. The Infinity and Self-Existence of the Universe. Disproved by Its Evident Limits. Its Composite Materials. Its Steady Loss of Heat. Buffon's Explosion of Planets. The Nebular Theories. The Fiction of Homogeneous Matter. The Contradictory Theories. The Perpetual Motion Machine. Contrary to Facts of Astronomy. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... on account of their knowledges, are more conceited than others; wherefore they were told that, although they know innumerable things, there is yet an infinity of things which they do not know; and that even were the knowledges with them to increase to eternity, they would still be unable to attain to so much as an acquaintance with the generals of all things. They were told ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... grant for the sake of argument that there is a Creator, and therefore a scheme of creation. How much can we, dwellers upon a world which is but as a grain of sand washed hither and thither by the tide-flow of the ocean of Infinity, know about the workings of the Will in obedience to which, as some of us believe, that tide ebbs and flows through the uncounted ages of Eternity, and over the measureless expanse of Infinity? Faced with such a colossal ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... abstract form of one of the great principles of modern political economy, and the nearest approach to it to be found in an ancient writer. (2) The resolution of wealth into its simplest implements going on to infinity is a subtle and refined thought. (3) That wealth is relative to circumstances is a sound conception. (4) That the arts and sciences which receive payment are likewise to be comprehended under the notion of wealth, also touches a question ...
— Eryxias • An Imitator of Plato
... should come across one of those vulgar fussy Comets, disposed to be rude and take improper liberties. These Comets, by the way, are public nuisances, very much like the mounted messengers of butchers in great cities, who are always at full gallop, and moving upon such an infinity of angles to human shinbones, that the final purpose of such boys (one of whom lately had the audacity nearly to ride down the Duke of Wellington) seems to be— not the translation of mutton, which would certainly find its way into human mouths ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... makes his appearance and affords abundance of merriment for our sportsmen. He is just turned out of the hands of his valet, and presents the very beau-ideal of his caste—"quite the lady," in fact. His hat is stuck on one side, displaying a profusion of well-waxed ringlets; a corresponding infinity of whisker, terminating at the chin, there joins an enormous pair of moustaches, which give him the appearance of having caught the fox himself and stuck its brush below his nose. His neck is very stiff; and the exact Jackson-like fit of his coat, which almost nips him ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... hastily drawing out his poniard and sabre, struck off the head of Antinmour. His train did the same to all those who composed the divan; and running directly into the city, an infinity of heads were flying off without knowing who caused this disorder. After this great execution, the ambassador and his train made themselves visible, and declared to the people in the public square that ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... native land, to have lived three years in an inhospitable climate, to have passed so many days in deep mines, so many nights over an earthenware stove in the midst of an infinity of bugs and a multiplicity of serfs, and to see himself set aside for a twenty-five-louis Colonel whom he himself had brought to life by soaking ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... matter of mine. God, the great conservative power of the Universe, when he established the right, saw to it that it should always be the safest and best. He never laid upon a poor finite worm the staggering load of following out into infinity the complex results of his actions. We may rest on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom, confident that it is enough for us to do justice, he will see to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... these things. At least I never can, though you seem to possess strange gifts of divination. I remember that you once expounded to me that either affinity or infinity was at the root of these ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... course of "slanting indeterminates," yet full of the power and the passion of the moment. They flitted between the idle boom and the deck, and up the gleaming sky in all the sizes that distance grades between nearness and infinity. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... pilgrimage through foreign climes he had at length wandered into the midst of a strange and peculiar civilization—a boundless desert of wild-looking streets, a waste of colossal palaces, of gilded churches and glistening waters, all perpetually dwindling away before him in the infinity of space. He sees a people strange and unfamiliar in costume and expression; fierce, stern-looking officers, rigid in features, closely shaved, and dressed in glittering uniforms; grave, long-bearded priests, with square-topped black turbans, their flowing ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... distance from where she sat, to the fools' end of the table; then hers slowly fell; slowly, and she passed a hand, whereon shone the king's ring, across her brow; looked up, as though once more to span infinity with her gaze, when her eyes fell short and met the duke's. Deliberately ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Still there is an infinity of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ever behold streets ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... distant range of hills were scattered close-set roofs, and you could divine that the sea of houses rolled afar off behind the undulating ground, into the fields hidden from sight. It was as the ocean, with all the infinity and mystery of its waves. Paris spread out as vast as the heavens on high. Burnished with the sunshine that lovely morning, the city looked like a field of yellow corn; and the huge picture was all simplicity, compounded of two colors only, the pale blue of the sky, and the golden reflections ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... and even he who outdoes his predecessor in swelling the titles of his divinity, is sure to be outdone by his successor in newer and more pompous epithets of praise. Thus they proceed, till at last they arrive at infinity itself, beyond which there is no further progress; And it is well if, in striving to get further, and to represent a magnificent simplicity, they run not into inexplicable mystery, and destroy the intelligent nature of their deity, on which alone any ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... infinity of things to be done, and to the Squire himself the world appeared to require more of happy activity than at any previous time of his life. He got up early, and was out about the place before breakfast. He had endless instructions to give to everybody about the estate. The very air of the place was ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... union, communication, or duties. If there be no duties between man and his God, there is no religion for man. Thus, in saying God is infinite, you annihilate religion for man, who is a finite being. The idea of infinity is to us an idea without model, without ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... was uniformly kind, if with a sort of sneer she could not understand; and he pillaged an infinity of Genoese and Venetian ships—which were notoriously the richest laden—of jewels, veils, silks, furs, embroideries and figured stuffs, wherewith to enhance the comeliness of Melicent. It seemed an all-engulfing madness with this despot daily to aggravate his fierce desire of her, to nurture ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... invention, Mr. Edison no longer withheld the news of what he had been doing from the world. The telegraph lines and the ocean cables labored with the messages that in endless succession, and burdened with an infinity of detail, were sent all over the earth. Everywhere the utmost enthusiasm ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... a more than human importance in the world. My heart was like dust under your feet. You produced on me the effect of moonlight on a summer's night, when around us we find nothing but perfumes, soft shadows, gleams of whiteness, infinity; and all the delights of the flesh and of the spirit were for me embodied in your name, which I kept repeating to myself while I tried to kiss it with my lips. I thought of nothing further. It was Madame Arnoux such as you were with your two children, tender, grave, dazzlingly ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... mathematics, to the science of pure deduction. The primary Being is a unity, one in all, comprising within itself the multiplicity of elements from which all mundane things are composed. It is only in infinity that the perpetual changes of things can take place. Thus Anaximander, an original but vague thinker, prepared ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, where the wrongdoing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... accuracy, as, from the amount of ramming to get the ball to its place, it has become so misshapen that it is a mere lump of lead, and no longer a rifle-ball. My double-barreled No. 10 rifles are two-grooved, and an infinity of trouble they gave me for the first two years. Many a time I have been giving my whole weight to the loading rod, with a ball stuck half-way down the barrel, while wounded elephants lay struggling ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... therefore take his ideas on this point as the criterion of truth, we shall be driven to the alternative either of taking refuge at once in the arms of monarchy, or of splitting ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt. Some of the writers who have come forward on the other side of the question seem to have been aware of the dilemma; and have even been ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... ships and at last, early one day, Captain Barrington called the boys on deck and, with a wave of the hand, indicated a huge white cliff, or palisade, which rose abruptly from the green water and seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... living creature. For nearly forty years it had held all that he had loved and known, all he had been sure of. Outside of it was the strange, the new, the uncertain, the vast unknown, stretching away to infinity.... ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... Time—are purely relative, and that from this arise those pseudo-conceptions which we call the infinitely extended and the infinitely lasting. Under our present limitations it is impossible for us to grasp the whole of any Truth, if we could do that, there would be no such mystery of Infinity to puzzle us; we could, as it were, see all around it, but that is again looking through another window. We are now considering relativity. If we cut off the very end of the point of the finest needle, we get so minute a particle of steel that it is hardly visible to the naked ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... paint, stone, tale, and rhyme, Stuffed love's infinity, And sucked all lovers of ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... every transport round the coast was steering full steam to Imbros. In less than no time we saw a regatta of skedaddling ships. So dies the invasion of England bogey which, from first to last, has wrought us an infinity of harm. Born and bred of mistrust of our own magnificent Navy, it has led soldiers into heresy after fallacy and fallacy after heresy until now it is the cause of my Divisions here being hardly larger than Brigades, whilst the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. On the Rhymer himself our artist has bestowed an infinity of pains, preserving (no easy task) some resemblance to the original portrait, while he dresses his conception in the manly form and comely features indispensable to ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... the craving within me to distinguish myself? Surely it does not occur fortuitously, but is intended to rouse and call into exercise certain latent powers that I possess? and then with infinite eagerness I set about attempting to discover these latent powers. I tried an infinity of pursuits, botany and geology amongst the rest, but in vain; I was fitted for none of them. I became very sorrowful and despondent, and at one time I had almost resolved to plunge again into the whirlpool of dissipation; it was a dreadful resource, it ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow |
