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Orbit   Listen
noun
Orbit  n.  
1.
(Astron.) The path described by a heavenly body in its periodical revolution around another body; as, the orbit of Jupiter, of the earth, of the moon.
2.
An orb or ball. (Rare & Improper) "Roll the lucid orbit of an eye."
3.
(Anat.) The cavity or socket of the skull in which the eye and its appendages are situated.
4.
(Zool.) The skin which surrounds the eye of a bird.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Orbit" Quotes from Famous Books



... a permanent order the foundation and copestone of which would be French supremacy. England would of course rush to the assistance of Sweden, the only land now left in Europe that had never fallen into the orbit of the French system. At that moment Spain and Portugal, abandoned to their fate, must drop into French hands. If England should still prove resolute, then an expedition to Egypt would sail from Corfu, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... to you like just such a bit of iron as the other,—and lo! it leaves them all,—the tugging of the mighty earth; of the ghostly moon that walks in white, trailing the snaky waves of the ocean after her; of the awful sun, twice as large as a sphere that the whole orbit of the moon would but just girdle,—it leaves the wrestling of all their forces, which are at a dead lock with each other, all fighting for it, and springs straight to the magnet. What a lucky thing it is for well-conducted persons that the maddening elective affinities ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the meat now extant is eaten up: but it is not certain that meat is good for men: and if it is really good, then they will invent a meat: for they will be her sons, and she, to the furthest cycle in which the female human mind is permitted to orbit, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... only use it. If what you say of him is true, rest easy. She is not in his orbit. She will not be impressed by an adventurer ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath

... its pristine beauty! What better consolation can a man ask, for not having gotten to land at the apogee point of his orbit?" ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke

... each system in gradation roll Alike essential to th' amazing whole, The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall. 250 Let earth, unbalanced, from her orbit fly, Planets and suns run lawless through the sky; Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurl'd, Being on being wreck'd, and world on world; Heaven's whole foundations to their centre nod, And Nature trembles to the throne of God. All this ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... a diminution of his fears. He had entirely underrated James Polder; the latter was an immense sight steadier than Mariana. His thoughts strayed momentarily to Harriet, back again in her public orbit. He could imagine that she had found Harrisburg insuperably dull, the hours with only Cherette empty after the emotional debauches of the plays elected by Vivian Blane. Yes, this young Polder would stand admirably firm. Mariana frowned at the cobalt smoke of her cigarette. "I am in a very ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... over the treaty by which the United States is to be bound to arbitrate its sovereign functions—for policies are matters of sovereignty. . . . The aberrations of the social movement are neither progress nor retrogression. They represent merely a local and temporary sagging of the line of the great orbit. Tennyson knew this when he wrote that fine and noble 'Maud.' I often read it, for to do so does me good." After quoting one of Poe's stories the letter continues: "The world will come out all right. Let him who believes in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... Universe, Creator, God, That while in part I realize thy power I know it has an equal in the love Which bowed the heavens and consecrated earth When the Messiah came to save mankind, And in its proper orbit reinstate A fallen world, which shall one day become The fairest 'mid the sisterhood of orbs, The most renowned because the dearest bought,— The best beloved, because the ransom given Was all that God ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson

... I expected. I went to Lowndes Square, and they told me I should find you here, so I came away as soon as dinner was over. They were dressing for some grand affair, and wanted me to come with them, but of course I must come to see if you had really achieved bringing bright Phoebe from her orbit.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... harmony in space, presides over everything. We find it in the arrangement of the scales of a fir-cone, as in the arrangement of an Epeira's limy web; we find it in the spiral of a Snail-shell, in the chaplet of a Spider's thread, as in the orbit of a planet; it is everywhere, as perfect in the world of atoms as ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... upon the plan we have imagined. The earth is a globe, the planets are globes, and several of them larger than our earth: the earth has a moon; several of the planets have satellites: the globe we dwell in moves in an orbit round the sun; so do the planets: upon these premises, and no more, we hold ourselves authorised to affirm that they contain "myriads of intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity." Having ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... course of the human mind is marked out, and each succeeding phasis in which it exhibits itself appears inevitable—the human race cannot be considered, as Vico and Herder were, perhaps, inclined to look upon it, as a mass without intelligence, traversing its orbit according to laws which it has no power to modify or control. On such an hypothesis, Wisdom and Folly, Justice and Injustice, would be the same, followed by the same consequences and subject to the same destiny—no certain laws ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... ill-balanced if you try, and your question is not in the least irrelevant. The Copernican system is true, and illustrates my position exactly. There is a heavenly body, radiant with light and beauty, that attracts me irresistibly. The moment I came within her influence my orbit was fixed." ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... after trying for a time to revolve in due orbit around the mind of the Rev. Hugh Maccleary, as projected in a sermon which he had botched up out of a commentary, failed at last and flew off into what the said gentleman would have pronounced 'very dangerous speculation, seeing no man is to go beyond what is written in the Bible, which contains ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... turn around, and return to base did not come until their second hop had brought them into the Mars orbit. Then it came from space police in charge of shipping traffic at ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... be described as a planet than a star, for her thoughts had started to revolve round Irene in a fixed orbit. As regards her half of the bargain she was absolutely content. She adored her buddy, and blessed the lot that had coupled their names together. She had not before made a real friend, and Irene's ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... been and is carried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopp'd than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv'd, the fervid, the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... that it would cease to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions—an evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of spirit. ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always alone, and ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... gentleman, however, who, though he was not of the Beaufort party, could still not be considered among the lesser luminaries. He was a planet with an orbit of his own. This gentleman had ridden up to the hotel one afternoon on a fine horse, accompanied by a handsome, gloomy boy on another animal as fine, and followed by a well-dressed young negro carrying various necessary trappings, and himself mounted ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... rested till he had opened to some intent of the Maker therein. Things, therefore, in his view are no longer empty and hollow like old cast-off shoes, but pieces of sublime design. A beetle is sustained by earth, air, fire, and water, needs the sun and the sea, winter and summer, earth's orbit and parallax, needs whatever has been made, to set him on his legs. He carries the world in little, and is a creeping black body of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... The moon always presented only one side, the same side, to us in the old days. How about it now? If I'm not mistaken, things have shifted up there. We're looking now at some other face of it. And if that's so it means a far bigger disarrangement of the solar system and the earth's orbit and lots of things than ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... thought it was spasmodic—unrelated," he went on thoughtfully, counting his words, it seemed, "but not now. No. I believe there is a law—a big law—they follow, an orbit so extended that any examples one may collect count for too little to help. They seem to vary..." he stared at the siphons and rings ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... deflected a little from its course by some unknown cause, it had not reached its mark, though it had approached near enough to be affected by the Lunar attraction; and that, its rectilineal motion having become circular, it should henceforth continue to describe a regular orbit around the Moon, of which in fact it had become the Satellite. The dispatch went on ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... upon a separate pathway, Whose life's orbit once had touched, whose hearts were knitted By the common bond of dauntless love and courage; But the patriot and the poet sing their story, And their names are linked ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman

... and her grandfather vaguely noted these changes, they as vaguely set them down to her growing womanhood. In any case, they held it was not for them to comment upon a woman or upon a woman's ways. And a girl like Guida was an incomprehensible being, with an orbit and a system all her own; whose sayings and doings were as little to be reduced to their understandings as the vagaries of any star in the Milky Way or the currents in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of London, and with an umbrella sticking out under his arm, in the finest weather. He has not sacrificed to the Graces, nor studied decorum. With him every thing is projecting, starting from its place, an episode, a digression, a poetic license. He does not move in any given orbit, but like a falling star, shoots from his sphere. He is pragmatical, restless, unfixed, full of experiments, beginning every thing a-new, wiser than his betters, judging for himself, dictating to others. He is decidedly revolutionary. He may have given up the reform of the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... me—astonishment at the last two words of her remark. I was already familiar with the Zens' enormous intelligence, knowing Yurt as I did ... but imagine thinking to qualify years with my when just out of nowhere a visitor from another planetary orbit pops up! And there had been no special stress given the distinction, just clear, ...
— Zen • Jerome Bixby

... and looking only to what is contained in the present Canon, we see the same tendency to compel all nature to attest the divinity of the writer's hero. At the nativity a star leaves its orbit and leads the Persian astrologers to the divine child, and angels come and converse with shepherds, and a whole train of like celestial phenomena occurs at various stages of his earthly career, which closes amid earthquakes, a pall of darkness over the whole scene, a supernatural war of the elements, ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott

... linings of the wings are pure white with the exception of a brown spot on the tips of the great interior coverts. The bill is strong, curved from the base, moderately compressed towards the tip, with a very obtuse ridge. The facial disk is small, and incomplete above the orbit. The egrets are more than two inches long, each composed of six or seven feathers, and situate behind the upper end of the black band bounding the face. The folded wings fall about three inches and a half short of the tail, which is rounded, the outer feathers being an inch shorter ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various

... of the sun and the planets. These may be put on a frame of little sticks and turned round. This causes the tides. Those at the ends of the sticks are enormously far away. From time to time a diligent searching of the sticks reveals new planets. The orbit of a planet is the distance the stick goes round in going round. Astronomy is intensely interesting; it should be done at night, in a high tower in Spitzbergen. This is to avoid the astronomy being interrupted. A really good astronomer ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock

... moment, another hawk—red-tailed like himself, but much larger—was seen soaring upwards. This was evidently his mate—for the female of these birds is always much larger than the males. The two soon came together, and wheeled above the tree, crossing each other's orbit, and looking downward. The squirrel now appeared doubly terrified—for he well knew their intent. He began to run around the trunk, looking outward at intervals, as though he intended to leap off and ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... where two great, rectangular arteries of the city cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane. All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure of existence was square measure. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... youngest child of the family, was a boy of fifteen. He generally kept with his tutor. When he left him, he sought his cousin Shirley. This boy differed from his sisters. He was little, lame, and pale; his large eyes shone somewhat languidly in a wan orbit. They were, indeed, usually rather dim, but they were capable of illumination. At times they could not only shine, but blaze. Inward emotion could likewise give colour to his cheek and decision to his crippled ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... misfortune not long afterwards to lose his eyesight, was receding from the arena on which he had acted so remarkable a part during the preceding fourteen years; and Mr. Fox and his adherents, returning again to their own natural orbit, were vindicating their integrity and consistency in the maintenance of a constitutional Opposition. Faction, weakened and dismembered, had fallen before ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... my only doctor," replied Mr. Clark, who, twenty years younger than Jan Coggan, revolved in the same orbit. He secreted mirth on all occasions for special discharge at ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... that the earth, from some attractive power exercised by the passage of an enormous dark body through space, became tilted or inclined to its orbit more than before, and that this, while it lasted, altered the flow of the magnetic currents, which, in an imperceptible manner, influence the minds of men. Hitherto the stream of human life had directed itself to the westward, but ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... Paratime Commission and the Space Patrol were experimenting with a new technique for throwing a spaceship into paratime. They used the cruiser Ardrath, Kalzarn Jann commanding. Went into space about halfway to the Moon and took up orbit, keeping on the sunlit side of the planet to avoid being observed. That was all right. But then, Captain Kalzarn ordered away a flight of antigrav disks, fully manned, to take pictures, and finally authorized a landing in the western mountain range, Northern Continent, Minor Land-Mass. ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper

... criticizing Coleridge, that for his part he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as he must look at away up in the heavens. Such a man, one would say, would never look at the moon, because she never turns her other side to us. The light which comes from ideas which have their orbit as distant from the earth, and which is no less cheering and enlightening to the benighted traveller than that of the moon and stars, is naturally reproached or nicknamed as moonshine by such. They are moonshine, are they? Well, then, do your night-travelling when there is no moon to light ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... Polaris shot toward Earth in a long, curving arc. Moments later, when the huge round ball of the mother planet loomed large on the scanner screen, Roger's voice reported over the intercom, "Academy spaceport control gives us approach orbit 074 for touchdown on Ramp ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell

... Mallory. The rod was set to cancel 118 pounds. The bag weighed less than twenty. It will go miles beyond the reach of any airplane before it settles into an orbit around earth." ...
— Lighter Than You Think • Nelson Bond

... evening was cloudy. Jupiter reported nothing new except that Neptune had deviated from its course and tended to pursue an erratic and puzzling new orbit. ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei

... to contain the sacred fire, in a circular form, imitating thereby not the shape of the earth, but that of the entire universe, in the midst of which the Pythagoreans place the element of fire, which they call Vesta and the Unit. The earth they say is not motionless, and not in the centre of its orbit, but revolves round the central fire, occupying by no means the first or the most honourable place in the system of the universe. These ideas are said to have been entertained by Plato also in his old age; for he too thought that the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... vertebrates. 8. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. 9. The thick mists which prevail in the neighborhood of Newfoundland are caused by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. 10. The power which brings a pin to the ground holds the earth in its orbit. 11. Death is the black camel which kneels at every man's gate. 12. Our best friends are they who tell us of our faults, and ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... be Whilst nights do take their augmentations, Either because the self-same sun, coursing Under the lands and over in two arcs, A longer and a briefer, doth dispart The coasts of ether and divides in twain His orbit all unequally, and adds, As round he's borne, unto the one half there As much as from the other half he's ta'en, Until he then arrives that sign of heaven Where the year's node renders the shades of night Equal unto the periods of light. For when ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... traverses the distance BA in the same time as light passes from the star to his eye, the star will E appear in the direction AS. Since, however, the observer is not conscious of his own translatory motion with the earth in its orbit, the star appears to have a displacement which is at all times parallel to the motion of the observer. To generalize this, let S (fig. 3) be the sun, ABCD the earth's orbit, and s the true position of a star. When the earth ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... well out beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith

... with them now, and natural; and—when not absorbed with study—talked freely in a slow magnetic way that compelled listeners. The early reticence had given place to the full sway of an enthusiast, and everyone within his orbit felt the influence of a peculiarly ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... Olympus, father of victory, champion of Themis; thou tyrannous to them that oppose thee with force; thou leader of just men, thou master of manlihood, thou that whirlest thy flaming sphere among the courses of the seven stars of the sky, where thy fiery steeds ever bear thee above the third orbit of heaven; do thou listen to me, helper of mortals, Giver of the bright bloom of youth. Shed thou down a mild light from above upon this life of mine, and my martial strength, so that I may be of avail to drive away bitter cowardice from my head, and to curb the deceitful rush ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... is universally conceded by the scientific world that these glacial epochs, however many of them there may have been in the past and however few there may be in the future, depend, for their occurrence, upon the maxima of eccentricity in the earth's orbit about the sun. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... or in my room in Wentworth Hall, or in my office in Jersey City. I only knew that the page, illuminated by a drop gas-light, was before me, and on it the record of that brilliant triumph of the human intellect, the deduction of a planet's entire orbit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... nobleman celebrated for his adventures, his horses, and his fortune, more than sufficed to make him forget his troubles. What rapture to become that illustrious nobleman's acquaintance, perhaps his friend! To move in the same orbit as this star of the first magnitude which would inevitably cast some of its lustre upon him! Now he would be a somebody in the world. He felt that he had grown a head taller, and Heaven only knows with what disdain ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... through one of these pretty material strokes. Where then is Philosophy? But who can be philosopher and the fervent admirer of a glorious lady? Ask again, who in that frowzy garb can presume to think of her or stand within fifty miles of her orbit? ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... speaker's eye. A hundred years before we would have snuffed him out in contumely and disgrace. But men listened to him and paid high for the privilege. And those who hated this man and feared him most, went, too, to listen, so as to answer him and thereby keep the planet from swinging out of its orbit and sweeping on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... spiritual which are the heart of our life. The iceberg of the northern seas is less than its unseen foundations; the lava stream is less than the molten sea whence it issues; the apple falling to the ground, and the moon circling in her orbit, are less than the great invisible force which controls their movements and the movements of all the things that do appear. The crime is not so great as its motive, nor yet as its results; the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... direction in which the inference points, if we are careful to set out the logical conditions with complete impartiality. But the ulterior question remains, whether, so far as science is concerned, it is here possible to point any inference at all: the whole orbit of human knowledge may be too narrow to afford a parallax for measurements so vast. Yet even here, if it be true that the voice of science must thus of necessity speak the language of agnosticism, at least let us see to it that the language is pure[18]; let ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... uniform external pressure to produce rotation on an axis,—that the action or oscillation of the fluid surfaces, a consequence of the rotation, constantly changes the mechanical centre of the mass, so as thereby to drive forward the mathematical centre in an orbit,—and that this is the purpose and effect of the tides, increased by the action and re-action of the fluid and solid parts. That centripetal and centrifugal forces so created, are necessarily varied by the diverse arrangements ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... avenue that he investigated seemed to be jammed full of young men clamoring for a chance. The skilled trades had their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions, they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday world. And he was in between, like a ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... back in his easy-chair, wrapped in contemplations of his future greatness. The mysterious light appeared more brilliantly than before, dancing, to all appearance, up and down the lane, crossing from side to side, and moving in an orbit as ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... Captain, loudly. "Nice work, Johnny. We're smack in orbit. The automatics couldn't have done it better. For once it feels good to be out in space again. Cut your jets now. You ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn

... astronomy,—his "profession," as he called it, in distinction to his "recreations" and minor scientific amusements,—may be seen from the titles of one or two of his papers: "On the Secular Variations and Mutual Relations of the Orbits of the Asteroids" (1860); "Investigation of the Orbit of Neptune, with General Tables of Its Motion" (1867); "Researches on the Motion of the Moon" (1876); and so on. Of this work Professor Newcomb himself says, in his "Reminiscences of an Astronomer" (Boston, 1903), that it all tended toward one result,—the solution of what he calls "the great problem ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... the great race there was a scene of unparalleled excitement, for there had been much wagering for some weeks and several of the runners were heavily backed. Orbit came with a rush in the market and touched four to one; Merry Monarch was at eights, a good price, for the Baron was a popular idol ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould

... way the motions of these bodies about their centres and about the sun. The most characteristic and invariable of these movements is that by which each of the planetary spheres, as well as the satellites, describes an orbit around the gravitative centre which has the most influence upon it—the sun. To conceive the nature of this movement, it will be well to imagine a single planet revolving around the sun, each of these bodies being perfect ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... more want or suffering in this weary world? no more need of blankets or dispensaries? Each is happy, comfortable, and self-cultured in his proportion. A universal harmony prevails. Like the planets, self-revolving, and moving, each in his chosen orbit, they shout and sing for joy. How much better this than to be eccentrically darting off in search of somebody's tears to wipe, somebody's wounds to bandage,—who, indeed, would have neither wounds nor grief, if they would follow my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... The first has on each side of it. The disk has an uraeus on each side. The second winged symbol of the god consists of a beetle with outstretched wings, which holds between his forelegs the solar disk, and between his hind legs the symbol of the orbit of the sun. ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge

... humble commuter who is accustomed to travelling via Brooklyn is diverted from his accustomed orbit, and goes by way of the Pennsylvania Station, what surprising excitements are his. The enormousness of the crowd at Penn Station around 5 P.M. causes him to realize that what he had thought, in ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... seen by the great Lick telescope, if they were all in solid gold, would not nearly pay the amount. A single sphere to pay the whole amount, if placed with its centre at the sun, would have its surface extending 563,580,000 miles beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, the farthest ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... the unknown beings had moved a small asteroid—the phantom satellite Nestria—into orbit about the earth. Later they had sent strange samples of the animal life of their planet, aboard orbiting missiles, to be studied by the Swifts. They had also helped Tom, Bud, and Mr. Swift a number of times when their lives were ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton

... Caesar's previous life had been leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link. This was the LAST link—merely the last one, and no bigger than the others; but as we gaze back at it through the inflating mists of our imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of Neptune. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... was approaching. Aunt Merce considered my present state a hopeless one. She was outside the orbit of the family planet, and saw the tendency of its revolutions, perceiving that father and mother were absorbed in their individual affairs. She called mother's attention to my non-improvement, and proposed that I should return ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... attempt to institute a definite comparison between them and the known relations is felt at once to be absurd. The question discussed, being the most ultimate of all possible questions, must eventually contain in itself all that is to man unknown and unknowable; the whole orbit of human knowledge is here insufficient to obtain a parallax whereby to institute ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... composite society of artists, amateurs, and writers who visited Lincoln came there only for him. The house they had rented was rented only for him. The journeys they made were for him. In short, Lydia was borne away, like Florent, in the orbit of the most despotic force in the world—that of a celebrated talent. An entire book would be required to paint in their daily truth the continued humiliations which brought the young wife to detest that talent ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... President Bearwarden and Ayrault assented. They were steering for an apparently hard part of the planet's surface, about a degree and a half north of its equator. "Since Jupiter's axis is almost at right angles to the plane of its orbit," said the doctor, "being inclined only about one degree and a half, instead of twenty-three and a half, as was the earth's till nearly so recently, it will be possible for us to have any climate we wish, from constantly warm at ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... separation of the Union in any contingency. Let none speak now of peace or compromise with armed treason. Let none think of constructing separate nationalities out of the broken and bleeding fragments of a dismembered Union. No; far better that our wrecked and blasted earth should swing from its orbit, disintegrate into its original atoms, and its place remain forever vacant in the universe, than that we should survive, with such memories of departed glory, and such a burning sense of unutterable infamy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... flagstaff; top mast, topgallant mast. ceiling &c. (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c. (angel) 244[obs3]; batophobia[obs3]. satellite, spy-in-the-sky. V. be high &c. adj.; tower, soar, command; hover, hover over, fly over;orbit, be in orbit; cap, culminate; overhang, hang over, impend, beetle, bestride, ride, mount; perch, surmount; cover &c. 223; overtop &c. (be superior) 33; stand on tiptoe. become high &c. adj.; grow higher, grow taller; upgrow[obs3]; rise &c. (ascend) 305;send ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... Alien body bearing zero-one-five, one-point-seven degrees over plane of the ecliptic. On intersecting orbit. Change course two degrees, hold for fifteen seconds, then resume original heading. Will compensate for change ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell

... Saturn. In this way were formed successively all the planets and satellites of the present solar system. The original diameter of our earth was equal, of course, to the present diameter of the moon's orbit. In the case of Saturn, the two rings formed around it happened to be of unusual homogeneity and equal thickness, so that they were not broken up, but have preserved their primitive shape. A ring was formed from the sun in the space between the present orbits of Mars ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... that term and you have the parabola, which vainly seeks in infinity its lost second focus; you have the trajectory of the bombshell; you have the path of certain comets which come one day to visit our sun and then flee to depths whence they never return. Is it not wonderful thus to formulate the orbit of the worlds? I thought so then ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... as any comet when I first swing out o' my regular orbit, an' I rode on an' on, sometimes puttin' up for the night at a ranch house an' sometimes campin' out in the open, where I'd lay till dawn gazin' up at the stars an' wonderin' how things were goin', back at the Diamond Dot. I mooned on until at last ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... different seas and suns changed us. The law that is over us decreed that we must become strangers one to the other; and for this we must reverence each other the more, and for this the memory of our past friendship becomes more sacred. Perhaps there is a vast invisible curve and orbit and our different goals and ways are parcel of it, infinitesimal segments. Let us uplift ourselves to this thought! But our life is too short and our sight too feeble for us to be friends except in the sense of this sublime possibility. So, let us believe in our stellar friendship though ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore

... inhabitant of Undern, Andrew, revolved in his own orbit, and was entirely unknown to his master. He cut the yews—the peacocks and the clipped round trees and the ones like tables—twice a year. He was creating a swan. He had spent twenty years on it, and hoped to complete it in a few more, when the twigs that were to be the ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... that silver spiral going out from Venus and around the table to the orbit of Saturn? Well, if Venus stops within that six-inch zone where the spiral starts and if Saturn is near where it ends, ...
— Fee of the Frontier • Horace Brown Fyfe

... saw that grim possibility. Barreling around Earth in a narrow orbit with a speed of something near or over 12,000 miles an hour the tiny new moon had, since his ascent, charged directly into his downward free fall. It was a chance in a thousand for a direct hit, except for one added factor—the moonlet exerted enough gravity pull out of ...
— Shipwreck in the Sky • Eando Binder

... miles, this dim spot which men call earth, this great globe and all its dwellers, this ever-spinning planet, revolves around the sun once every year, that revolution being both the cause and the measure of that space of time. Its orbit is not a circle; it is an ellipse, but not very far removed from the circular path. The terrestrial axis is not at right angles to that ellipse, else there were no seasons; it is somewhat inclined. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... if an outer planet were in the right place at the right time, we'd need fuel—a lot of fuel—to get into a braking orbit. And if we could, who'd come get us? No ship has gone ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley

... was angry disdain in Layroh's resonant voice. "They who slumber here are a race born far from this planet. They are the Shining Ones of Rikor. Rikor is a tiny planet circling a wandering sun whose orbit is an ellipse so vast that only once in a hundred thousand years does it approach your solar system. Rikor's sun was nearly dead and the Shining Ones had to find a new home soon or else perish. Then their planet swung near the Earth, ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells

... to make it most formidably the strongest. Most sincerely do I grieve at what has happened. It has upset all my wishes and theories as to the influence of marriage on your life; for, instead of bringing you, as I expected, into something like a regular orbit, it has only cast you off again into infinite space, and left you, I fear, in a far worse state than it found you. As to defending you, the only person with whom I have yet attempted this task is myself; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... meshes of the Creole dandies, not offensively, but as the law of his volume and momentum dictates, and they yield the pas to his superior weight and metal. They are civil, and he is civil, but they do not like one another, for all that. That Zodiac passed, they continue their own summery orbit of charm and conquest. He tends toward the aureal spheres and the green and pleasant banks of issue. The colonel is not here for pleasure, though he takes a little pleasure, as is his way, seasonably; but he means business, and that several ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various

... the present or the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton

... story has made a jump from June to October, and during that time my relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was her setting had developed in many directions. She came and went, moving in an orbit for which I had no data, going to London and Paris, into Wales and Northampton, while her stepmother, on some independent system of her own, also vanished and recurred intermittently. At home they obeyed ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... in any shape. He was not in Lady Lufa's set, and therefore not much drawn to conjecture what might be going on. In the glamour of literary ambition, he took for granted that Lady Lufa allotted his world a higher orbit than that of her social life, and prized most the pleasures they had in common, which so few were capable ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce secret deviation. The general tendency was to take for the whole of life the slit seen between the blinders of habit: and in his walk down that narrow vista Granice cut a correct enough figure. To a vision free to follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... which had received him, got rid of him. He went his way, vaguely, out of his orbit among the towns, stumbled into another convent where he employed himself in taking care of the animals, whom he adored, and he rose into a perpetual ecstasy, revealing himself as the most singular of wonder ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... The orbit of each and every one of these transplanted Britons is tea, and this in its primal form. They can have no concern with Steel common. Amalgamated copper or Erie 4's, and to them the jargon of stock ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... the weight of the grapnel and the two ropes, rushing up once more through the air. For a time he remained crouching, and when at last he looked out again the little town was very small and travelling, with the rest of lower Germany, in a circular orbit round and round the car—or at least it appeared to be doing that. When he got used to it, he found this rotation of the balloon rather convenient; it saved ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... upon the genius of the producer. The performers and the dumb objects are on equal terms in his paint-buckets. The star-system is bad for the stage because the minor parts are smothered and the situations distorted to give the favorite an orbit. It is bad for the motion pictures because it obscures the producer. While the leading actor is entitled to his glory, as are all the actors, their mannerisms should not overshadow the latest inspirations of the creator of ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... the countenance of Planchet, whom he had not seen for a year. The shrewd Planchet had acquired a slight protuberance in front, but his countenance was not puffed. His keen eye still played with facility in its deep-sunk orbit; and fat, which levels all the characteristic saliences of the human face, had not yet touched either his high cheek-bones, the sign of cunning and cupidity, or his pointed chin, the sign of acuteness and perseverance. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... isolation, stand apart from all surrounding him. I would have had him go on steadily, feeding his mind with congenial love, hopefully confident that if he only nourished his existence into perfect life, Fate would, at fitting season, furnish an atmosphere and orbit meet for his breathing and exercise. I wished he might adore, not fever for, the bright phantoms of his mind's creation, and believe them but the shadows of external things to be met with hereafter. After this steady intellectual growth had brought his powers to ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... fresh mystery. The orbit of this planet was assuredly interior to the orbit of the earth, because it accompanied the sun in its apparent motion; yet it was neither Mercury nor Venus, because neither one nor the other of these has ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... beholds the birth and progress of stars, and learns one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos. The elder encourages the younger, and shows him how: they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself, and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars, and sweeps through the ceaseless rings, and shall never ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... any man be happier? No man can be supremely happy long; and this General's strategic felicity and his domestic were fatally cut down almost together. The Cause of Liberty, too, now at the top of its orbit, was—But let us ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... from the earth was the first thing to be attended to. Now, the mean or average interval between the centres of the two planets is 59.9643 of the earth's equatorial radii, or only about 237,000 miles. I say the mean or average interval. But it must be borne in mind that the form of the moon's orbit being an ellipse of eccentricity amounting to no less than 0.05484 of the major semi-axis of the ellipse itself, and the earth's centre being situated in its focus, if I could, in any manner, contrive to meet the moon, as it were, in its perigee, the above mentioned distance would be materially ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... they guard with Death's remorseless face, And hurl the sun around the realms of space E'en swifter than the lightning, while it goes Along its orbit, guided by their blows. Dire tempests rise above from their dread blows, And ever round a starry whirlwind glows; The countless stars thus driven whirl around, With all the ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... looked like a young girl. There was something very sweet and appealing in Moya's slim indefinite figure of youth, with its suggestion of developing lines, but most men ceased to look at her when Joyce swam within the orbit ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine

... we have but to imagine the existence of a very probable condition, namely, the unequal diffusion of this light-yielding element, to catch a glimpse of a reason why our sun may, in common with his solar brotherhood, in some portions of his vast stellar orbit, have passed, and may yet have to pass, through regions of space, in which the light-yielding element may either abound or be deficient, and so cause him to beam forth with increased splendour, or fade in brilliancy, just in proportion to the richness or poverty of this supposed light-yielding ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... most commonly situated over the position of the anterior fontanelle, in the region of the occipital protuberance, or at the lateral angle of the orbit. As it frequently lies in a gap in the skull, it may be connected by a pedicle with the dura mater, and is liable to be mistaken for ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... Earth. More than twice the distance of the Moon. The globe had gone that far with accelerating velocity so that now the pointers marked a hundred thousand miles an hour—out beyond the Moon, heading for the orbit-line of Mars. Now the size-change pointers were stirring. Unit One, the size this globe had been as it rested on Earth, fifty feet in height, and some thirty feet at its mid-section bulge. Already that ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings

... least unsuccessful parts of the play are also by far the most unimportant. The capacity of the author seems to shrink and swell alternately, to erect its plumes and deject them, to contract and to dilate the range and orbit of its flight in a steadily inverse degree to the proportionate interest of the subject or worth of the topic in hand. There could be no surer proof that it is neither the early nor the hasty work of a great or even a remarkable poet. ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... barrier between Clive and this family was withdrawn. The young folks who loved him were free to see him as often as he would come. They were going to Baden: would he come, too? He was glad enough to go with them, and to travel in the orbit of such a lovely girl as Ethel Newcome, whose beauty made all the passengers on all the steamers look round and admire. The journey was all sunshine and pleasure and novelty; and I like to think of the pretty girl and ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... people. There was none of the concerted action to be observed at warping, or simultaneous motion of birds in air and fishes in water; but each unit of the shining army dashed on its own erratic orbit, flying and circling, rushing hither and thither, and sooner or later returning to join the queen upon ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... her eccentric, and be interested and amused by her vagaries; and I do not see why she should not be allowed the same excuse as it is, only St. Catherine's is not the place for her. Here all must move in the common orbit, to save confusion. So I shall write to her mother, and get her to take her from the school at the end of the term in the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... 30 or so months following the opening of the space age, as signaled by the launching of Sputnik I in October 1957, the United States put 21 satellites into orbit out of 42 attempts. Two out of five deep-space probes were successful. The degree of success for all major launchings ran better than 50 percent. The American effort has been based on a broad scope of inquiry and includes long-range communications, weather reporting, navigation and surveillance ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics

... orbit in the skies, Did'st thou behold that sacrilegious tower, Which reared its massive form on Babel's plain, Built by misguided and presumptuous men, In vain and ineffectual attempt To ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... One chapter more of life's history closed, One more bead told on the chaplet of time, One further stride in Earth's orbit sublime;— Linked to the measureless chain of the past, One added day, ... ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... greater now that Germany is ruled by this man-chameleon. Let William do what he will, let him change colour as he likes, our hatred for Prussia remains unshaken and immutable. But acquiescence in his performances will draw us into his orbit and expose us to those same dangers which he incurs, dangers which, were we wise, we should know how to turn to ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam

... wore the three-orbit insignia of a major, was lean and trim. His short-cropped hair covered his head like a gray fur skull cap. One cheek was marked with the crisp whiteness of an old ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin

... two suns in one sphere, swinging on through space side by side. Two centuries of calculations have brought out the fact that it takes forty-four years for the light of Castor to reach us, and that a thousand years are consumed in one circuit of its orbit." ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... a scroll?' Are not 'the rocks to melt, the stars to fall, and the moon to be turned into blood?' Is not fire the next grand cyclic consummation of all things here below? But I come fully prepared to answer such objections. Your argument betrays a narrow mind, circumscribed in its orbit, and shallow in its depth. 'Tis the common thought of mediocrity. You have read books too much, and studied nature too little. Let me give you a lesson today in the workshop of Omnipotence. Take a ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes

... from corner of west wall, almost under a point projecting from it, 4 feet below surface, was a cranium from which the upper jaw, one orbit, and part of the right parietal were missing; with it were a lower jaw, a clavicle, a sternum, the bones of the left arm, and some phalanges, all in good condition, except the ulna, which was broken. No other bones were present. The skull lay ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... indispensable of blessings. But to enlarge upon this thought would carry us too far from the immediate topic; nor is it desirable to follow with the feeble flight of our imagination the heaven-embracing orbit of this theme. A hint is all that can be given, which each must follow out for himself. We have only attempted to indicate what regions await the genius of the new Columbus; nor does the conjecture seem too bold that perhaps they are not so ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... In a village the slightest unusual bustle makes a riot. Everybody is curious to know the cause of the alarm, and whether the wheels of the world are running out of their orbit. In the middle of the great dusty market-place some stunted locust trees were hanging their faint, dried foliage, and from far off one could already see that underneath these miserable trees a tall, handsome, young ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various

... masses. Independence of personal action, in the Western sense, is still almost inconceivable. The individual of every class above the lowest must continue to be at once coercer and coerced. Like an atom within a solid body, he can vibrate; but the orbit of his vibration is fixed. He must act and be acted upon in ways differing little from those of ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... no means satisfied with his experiments in planetary distances. Somewhere, he felt sure, either in his orbit or hers, there must be a point where Dorothy would be less insensible to the attraction of atoms in the mass. Thus far, she had reversed the laws of the spheres, and the greater had followed the less. When she had first begun to hold ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... pink planet Wenus, as I need hardly inform the sober reader, revolves round the sun at a mean distance of [character: Venus sigil] vermillion miles. More than that, as has been proved by the recent observations of Puits of Paris, its orbit is steadily but surely advancing sunward. That is to say, it is rapidly becoming too hot for clothes to be worn at all; and this, to the Wenuses, was so alarming a prospect that the immediate problem of life became the discovery of new quarters notable for a gentler climate and more copious ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas

... disguised protectorate may be infinitely preferable to virtual annexation. The protectorate of Tunis has given far less trouble to France than the colony of Algeria. And for all practical interests and purposes, Austria-Hungary has become a German dependency. She has been drawn into the orbit of the Triple Alliance. She follows the political fortunes of the predominant partner. She almost forms part of the German Zollverein, in that her tariffs are systematically favourable to her northern neighbour. But above ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... independence, soon swung out of Birdie's orbit and made friends for herself. For her it was a night of delirium, and her pulses hammered in rhythm to the throbbing music. In one day life had caught her up out of an abyss of gloom and swung her to a dizzy pinnacle of delight, where she ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... to-morrow, a year hence, and for evermore. On all things here below they pass immutable judgments, which go to make up a body of tradition into which no power of mortal man can infuse one drop of wit or sense. The lives of these persons revolve with the regularity of clockwork in an orbit of use and wont which admits of no more deviation or change than their opinions on matters religious, political, ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac

... There have been a great many theories about comets, but there is only one of them in which I have placed any belief. You know that as a comet passes around the sun, its tail is always pointed away from the sun, so that no matter how rapidly the head shall be moving in its orbit, the end of the tail—in order to keep its position—must move with a rapidity impossible to conceive. If this tail were composed of nebulous mist, or anything of that sort, it could not keep its position. There is only one theory which could account for this ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... precession of the equinoxes. This etheric sun-globe is revolving around Alcyone with other etheric globes having suns for their centers and solar systems of prakritic globes within them in a great year of 5,640,000,000 of our common years. Its orbit has a diameter of ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson

... wandering comet into the harmonies of heaven! Better task than that of astrologers, and astronomers to boot! Who among them can "loosen the band of Orion"? But who amongst us may not be permitted by God to have sway over the action and orbit of the human soul? Your ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... any of these sickly and insignificant things. But—in defiance of Tom, the chauffeur—to go out with the Field Ambulance as an ambulanciere, and hunt for wounded men, and in the intervals of hunting to observe the orbit of a shell and the manner of shrapnel in descending. To be left behind, every day, in an empty mess-room, with a bad pen, utterly deprived of copy or of any substitute for copy, and to have to construct war articles out of your inner ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair

... is this by a moral law which embraces and binds together individuals and generations in an established tradition and mission, a moral law which suppresses the instinct to lead a life confined to a brief cycle of pleasure in order, instead, to replace it within the orbit of duty in a superior conception of life, free from the limits of time and space a life in which the individual by self-abnegation and by the sacrifice of his particular interests, even ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years. Those larger planets held our little one to its orbit, and lent it their brightness. Happy indeed is the infancy which is surrounded only by ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom

... "General Rothwell! Let me remind you that two weeks ago I didn't even know Earth existed, and since accidentally happening across your sun system and learning of your trouble I have had my entire trading fleet of a hundred ships in orbit about this planet while all your multitudinous political subdivisions have filled the air with talk ...
— Alien Offer • Al Sevcik

... mathematical precision, she measures with her eye the space to which she is restricted by the curiosity of the by-standers. Rapid as lightning, she springs forward till the measure recalling her to the place she left, she traces her orbit, like a planet, at the same time revolving on her axis. Sometimes her "light, fantastic toe" will approach within half an inch of your foot; nay, you shall almost feel her breath on your cheek, and still ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... died down the men crept closer to inspect the results. The heat had melted the snow for many yards outside the orbit of fire, revealing a border of dull and sodden grass. Beyond this border a blackened crater had eaten its way straight down to the reclaimed earth below. Shouting and rejoicing greeted this evidence ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts and were trying to shoot down ...
— The Repairman • Harry Harrison

... minutes after he had left her kitchen! Somehow she could not look upon him as a stranger. She had given him food; she had talked to him; she had even laughed with him. He was not like those dead she had seen in her reportorial days. Her orbit and Johnny Two-Hawks' had indeterminately touched; she had known old Gregory, or Gregor, who had been this unfortunate young man's friend. And he had hoped they might ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... like satellites round her, Burned in her orbit of splendor and fear, One like the Pleiad of mystical story Shot terror-stricken beyond ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis

... and it tends to all symmetry and finish. It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing perfectly the impelling and restraining forces; by a felicitous adjustment of the centripetal and centrifugal, ensuring to human nature its proper orbit. It is the golden girdle wherewith every institution like this should bind her garments of strength and beauty ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... thrust into my hands by an attendant loaded with dishes. Let me see—what shall I have? "Lamb's head and peas." Have never tried this dish. Might be good. Waiter (who seems to be revolving, like the planetary system, in an orbit) reaches me, and I shout what I want. He replies, "Sorry, Sir, just off," and vanishes. Look up something else. "Liver and bacon." Not had it for years! Used to like it. On reappearance of the planetary waiter, give my order. He nods and vanishes. Wait patiently. Rather annoyed ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various

... in a geometrical ratio, so that in time, the intellectual progress of a day in the future, must exceed that of a century in the past. Knowledge is enthroned as king, and grand truths and new ideas are his ministers. Science takes the diameter of the earth's orbit as a base line and unit of measurement, and with it spans immensity, and triangulates the nebulous systems amid the shadowy verges of receding space. Its researches are cosmical upon the earth and the heavens, and all the elements minister to its progress. Sink to the lowest ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... not the saying a witness to the presence in that wondrous and gentle career of an element entirely unlike what exists in the most of mankind? Here was a new star in the heavens, and the law of its orbit was manifestly different from that of all the rest. That is what 'eccentric' means—that the life to which it applies does not move round the same centre as do the other satellites, but has a path of its own. Away out yonder somewhere, in the infinite depths, lay the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... not the inclination of the axis of the universe, but of the Milky Way, which probably is the real axis and lies 27 north of the heavenly equator, while the inclination of the earth's axis to the orbit of the sun is 23. But you have forgotten the third Pyramid, that of Menkheres, the base of which is 107 great ells broad. This number 107 we find again three or five times in the universe; there are 107 smaller suns between the earth and the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass, I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... and triple systems of stars, the theories for the explanation of the extraordinary, not to say fantastic, shapes discerned in some of the nebulous systems—whirls and spirals radiating through spaces as vast as the orbit of Neptune;[A] the glimpses at systems beyond that to which our sun belongs;—these are all splendid results, which may fairly be attributed to the school of Herschell, and will for ever insure no secondary place to that name in the annals ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett

... to consider myself the most prompt and particular man living," he said, gaily; "but I believe you are going to make one several notches above me. I am really curious to know what has thrown you out of your orbit this afternoon." ...
— Three People • Pansy

... Rangifer. Most deer have canine teeth in the upper jaw, though they are absent in the moose, in the distinctively American type and a few others. The cleaned skull always shows a large vacuity in the outer wall in front of the orbit, which prevents the lachrymal bone from reaching the nasals. No deer has a gall bladder. There are many other distinctions, but as all have exceptions they are of value ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various



Words linked to "Orbit" :   point of apoapsis, front, pallet, orbiter, inclination of an orbit, horizon, scope, circle, preserve, geostationary orbit, lap, sphere, lacrimal bone, province, environment, range, confines, spectrum, skull, area, sweep, compass, circulate, apoapsis, ambit, eye socket, political arena, reach, geosynchronous orbit, field, orbit period, electron orbit, orbital, realm, cavum, political sphere, distaff, orbital cavity, arena, retrograde, ballpark, revolve, extent, approximate range, contrast, internationalism, orb, itinerary, land, responsibility, purview, internationality, kingdom, bodily cavity, periapsis, palette, gamut, celestial orbit, cavity



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