"Chaos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (as to Elizabeth's part in Wyatt's rebellion) are discussed. There is no contest of day and darkness, of Truth and Error. The characters are in that perplexed condition about creeds which was their actual state after the political and social and religious chaos produced by Henry VIII. Gardiner is a Catholic, but not an Ultramontane; Lord William Howard is a Catholic, but not a fanatic; we find a truculent Anabaptist, or Socialist, and a citizen whose pride is his moderation. The native ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... does God's own hand Fix in place each grain of sand, Tiny though that grain may be Hangs on it the destiny Of a world, yea, systems whole, As they in their orbits roll; Should it from its globe remove, Worlds would clash and chaos prove. ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... were only too well founded. In the affairs of Herr Brazovics there figured so many investments apparently sound but really unprofitable, such false calculations, unsecured debts, and imaginary securities, that when order was brought into this chaos, the whole property did not suffice to satisfy the creditors. Besides, it came to light that he had used moneys intrusted to his honor: orphans' capital, church endowments, hospital funds, the deposits of his ship captains. The floods ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... from Amalfi towards Salerno. It is certainly one of the most beautiful roads in Europe, and in the whole world. The chain of rocky heights dashes with wild abruptness from its five thousand feet straight to the dark-blue sea, bristling with sharp needles and spikes of stone, rough with a chaos of brown boulders, cracked from peak to foot with deep torn gorges. In each gorge nestles a garden of orange and lemons and pomegranates, and out of the stones there blows a perfume of southern blossom through all the month of May. The sea lies dark and clear below, ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... Glow-worms placed almost touching one another. Each of them sheds its glimmer, which ought, one would think, to light up its neighbours by reflexion and give us a clear view of each individual specimen. But not at all: the luminous party is a chaos in which our eyes are unable to distinguish any definite form at a medium distance. The collective lights confuse the light-bearers into one ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... they shrilled, nodding furiously. "The Lamp of Heaven!" And several men began to rummage and overhaul the chaos of the go-down. Rudolph had given orders, that afternoon, to remove all necessary stores to the nunnery. But from somewhere in the darkness, one rioter brought a sack of flour, while another flung down a tin case of petroleum. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... and the intellectual function. The organic activity of the senses furnishes us, in sensations, the unordered, manifold material of knowledge, which is formed and unified by the activity of reason. If we except two concepts which limit our knowledge, chaos and God—absolute formlessness or chaos is an idea just as incapable of realization as absolute unity or deity—every actual cognition is a product of both factors, of the sensuous organization and of reason. But these two do not play equal parts in every cognitive act. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... exaggerating others. Jimbo himself was helpless in the matter; he could exercise no control over their antics until the doctors had once again reduced them to order; he would have to wander, lost and lonely, through the comparative chaos of disproportioned visions, generally known as the region of delirium, until the doctor, assisted by mother nature, restored him ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... surely a world was consuming in the kilns of chaos. Was ever anything so insufferably bright as the incandescent glow that brimmed those jagged clefts? That fierce crimson, was it not the hue of a cooling crucible, that deep vermillion the rich glory of a rose's heart? Did not that tawny orange mind you of ripe wheat-fields and the exquisite ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... was Germany at that time? The Koenigsberg troupe was also soon dissolved. "Some men are at once decisive in their character and their works, while others have first to fight their way through a chaos of passions. It is true however that the latter class obtain greater results," it is said in one account of this short episode. He was soon to accomplish such an achievement. In the city of Koenigsberg, the old seat ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... and there are a number of quite good yarns of the Yankee private, related in the Yankee style. But better than all the American stories I think I like that of the Bedfordshire soldier who, when asked by the writer to direct him to Blerincourt during the chaos of the great retreat, replied, "I am rather a stranger in these parts myself." Perhaps by the way I ought to make it quite clear that the title refers to the coming of the American troops, and that, although the line, "He is trampling out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... monopolies and fleece the consumer and laborer. Of all this accounts are only too numerous; and, though we should rehearse forever our statistics and our figures, we should always have before our eyes only chaos,—chaos ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the standards still rages—metric, or decimal, or no change. What each nation has is good enough for it in the opinion of many of its people. Some day an international commission will doubtless assemble to bring order out of chaos. As far as the English-speaking race is concerned, it seems that a decided improvement could readily be affected with very trifling, indeed scarcely perceptible, changes. Especially is this so with money values. Britain could merge her system with those of Canada and America, ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... in the open air save when the sun was shining. All their time had been spent in the warm and airy ways and halls and rooms of the latter-day city. It was to them that night as if they were in some other world, some disordered chaos of stress and tumult, and almost beyond hoping that they should ever ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Now with a leap we would be off, then abruptly churning the water behind us we would hold back drifting, watching our chance for another rush. Eleanore's face was glowing now, her hat was off, her neck was tense—and her blue-gray eyes, wide open, fixed on the chaos ahead, were shining with excitement. Now and then a long curling wisp of her hair would get in her eyes and savagely she would blow it back. And her lank quiet father puffed his cigar, with his gray eyes restfully on her. "The ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... arms of the chair tightly, lips slightly parted. Even under the stress of the moment Carroll was actually conscious of her feminine allure; unable to free himself of her hypnotic personality. She spoke—but he scarcely heard her words through his chaos of thought. ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing, old Duncan Tremble, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked admiringly at the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... with roses bound, Hie not to a scene of gladness— Theirs is mirth that ends in madness! All recklessly they rush to hear The dark words of that gifted seer, Who amid a guilty race Favour found and saving grace; Rescued from the doom that hurled To chaos back a sinful world.— Self-polluted, lost, debased, Every noble trait effaced, To rapine, lust, and murder given, Denying God, defying heaven, Spoilers of the shrine and hearth, Behold the impious sons of earth! Alas! all fatally opposed, The heart of erring man is closed ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... the dining-room was enough to upset the nerves of anyone, especially a sensitive young woman who prided herself on her housekeeping. All around was chaos and confusion. The usually sedate, orderly dining-room was littered with trunks, grips, umbrellas and canes enveloped in rugs—all the confusion incidental ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... of the incoming train jarred the warm air, and the crowd surged every way, creating a diversion that precluded reply. The train from the north drew in and disgorged its passengers, voluble or stolid, according to whether they were of the native subjects or the Dutch masters. Out of the scrambling chaos of chugging trains, first, second, and third-class passengers were directed or driven to their respective locations amid hoarse or shrill orders of guttural ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... came in sight of the city. They were woefully behindhand and everything delayed them. After a hundred hesitations succeeded by fierce forward dashes, after switching this way and that, they came to a final halt in a jungle of freight cars, a chaos of mysterious activities, and a dense, hot, steaming atmosphere that oppressed and sickened the men from the mountains. Lanterns sparkled and looped and circled, and fierce cries arose. Engines snorted in sullen labor, charging to and ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... appearance in the midst of that turbulent band was a sedative which soon allayed the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of social chaos arose the inchoate form of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... smoke. "Gigantic" showed in its entity followed by an unintelligible erasure. At the end this line was the legend "3 Feet High." "Verita Visitor," appeared below, and beyond it, what seemed to be the word "Void." And near the foot of the sheet the student of all this chaos could make faintly but unmistakably, "Marvelous Man-l—" the rest of the word being cut off by a broad black smear. "Monster 3 Feet." The remainder ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... like a dream for Eugene, and the sense of unreality lasted into the evening; so that, in spite of his energetic character and clear-headedness, his ideas were a chaos as he sat beside Goriot in the cab. The old man's voice was full of unwonted happiness, but Eugene had been shaken by so many emotions that the words sounded in his ears like words spoken ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... express the truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such colored mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man has found out the knowledge by which a universe was evoked from chaos: shall he not perfect that knowledge in the Law which includes the divine element by which the universe is informed? How can we love with our whole heart what we do not know with our whole mind? Clifton, I declare to you that knowledge ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sheet of data growing. Math machines whirred and chuckled and clicked. Wilson departed for San Francisco with his aching tooth. The other two worked on. By dawn they knew what they were doing. Out of the chaos of happenstance they were finding rules of order, certain formulas of ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... alchemy book, with the manuscript annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers, the Dew of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... opening in all its brightness, and then vanished. Such stars exhibited themselves only; surrounding objects did not partake of their light. There were deep wells of knowledge, but no fertilizing rills and rivulets. For the drama, society was altogether a state of chaos, out of which it was, for a while at least, to proceed anew, as if there had been none before it. And yet it is not undelightful to contemplate the education of good from evil. The ignorance of the great mass of ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Ladies and Gentlemen: I think you appreciate the chaos at the present moment in the status of investigation of the Persian walnut. When Professor Fagan reports that the number of trees in Pennsylvania exceeds 2,000, most of which he has not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... large empty oil-casks lay on the top of it, and above these, again, a vast quantity of straw matting, piled up as high as the floor of the cabin. In every other direction around was wedged as closely as possible, even up to the ceiling, a complete chaos of almost every species of ship-furniture, together with a heterogeneous medley of crates, hampers, barrels, and bales, so that it seemed a matter no less than miraculous that we had discovered any passage at all to the box. I afterward found that Augustus had purposely ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the room was transformed into a chaos of sound. There was a shrill piping as of a singing wind, and a wail that echoed hauntingly through the air as the ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... towards death and despair. Had it been a doctor of psychology, he might have been pardoned for divining in the girl a passion of childish vanity, self-love IN EXCELSIS, and no more. It is to be understood that I have been painting chaos and describing the inarticulate. Every lineament that appears is too precise, almost every word used too strong. Take a finger-post in the mountains on a day of rolling mists; I have but copied the names that appear upon the pointers, the names of definite and famous cities ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enough, lies impassably separated from it; opposed, uncommunicating, like forces in positive and negative poles. The gods of this lower world sit aloft on glittering thrones, less happy than Epicurus's gods, but as indolent, as impotent; while the boundless living chaos of ignorance and hunger welters, terrific in its dark fury, under their feet. How much among us might be likened to a whited sepulcher: outwardly all pomp and strength, but inwardly full of horror and despair and dead ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... ruins fall, And chaos o'er the sinking ball Resume primeval sway, His courage chance and fate defies, Nor feels the wreck of earth and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... the Red Chamber.—When the Heavens were opened and earth was laid out chaos prevailed! What was the germ of love? It arises entirely from the strength of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... foreign rule, mainly by Hungary, the Slovaks joined with their neighbors to form the new nation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Following the chaos of World War II, Czechoslovakia became a communist nation within Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe. Soviet influence collapsed in 1989, and Czechoslovakia once more was an independent country turning toward the West. The ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... us was singing like a tea-kettle. Everywhere we stepped we were in somebody's way. At last we were across, confronting a man in his shirt sleeves, who by dots and dashes of profanity seemed to be directing the chaos. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... shall hamper as little as may be the movements and forces operating within them. For it is by conflict, as we have now learnt, that the higher emerges from the lower, and nature herself, it would almost seem, does not direct but looks on, as her world emerges in painful toil from chaos. We do not find her with precipitate zeal intervening to arrest at a given point the ferment of creation; stretching her hand when she sees the gleam of the halcyon or the rose to bid the process cease that would destroy them; ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... timber, where the ground was sloping and rough, caused something of a mix-up, and before the Confederate colonel could bring order out of chaos, Colonel Lyon was swooping down upon him from the higher ground. The first and the third battalions were called into this action, and the Confederates ran like sheep down ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... from the secret books of the Phoenicians. He is said also to have been a pupil of Pittacus, the rival of Thales, and the master of Pythagoras. His doctrine was that there were three principles ([Greek: Zeus], or AEther; [Greek: Chthon], or Chaos; and [Greek: Chronos], or Time) and four elements (Fire, Earth, Air, and Water), from which everything that exists was formed.—Vide Smith's Dict. Gr. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... us floating jetsom and blind wreckage, what has hitherto seemed to us mere brutal lumps of primeval clay tossed to and fro by the giant hands of chaos, what has hitherto seemed to us slabs of inhuman chemistry, suddenly assumes under the pressure of this great power out of the abyss a strange and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... left alone; his mind teeming with its chaos, and still master of no other language than that barren idiom which was incapable of expressing the ideas he was meditating on. He had scarcely made a step into the philosophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelssohn had probably been lost to Germany, had not the singularity ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... toga he left visible his dress-coat of the upper society with its embroidery of gold. Men had entirely broken with the past, wishing to deny it, and not be under the yoke of its forms and rules; it was therefore necessary, out of the chaos of the republic, to create a new world, a new society, new forms of etiquette, and new fashions. Meanwhile, until these new fashions for republican France should be found, men had recourse (so as not to go back to the days ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate now. Terribly. Morton ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of His providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... ['Nature,' 1897, p. 241], the author, who is a well-known and competent critic, makes use of the short expression in regard to the more complex carbohydrates, 'Above cane sugar, higher in the series, all is chaos,' and in reference to starch, 'the subject is still enshrouded in mystery.' This 'material' complexity is at its maximum with the most complex members of the series, which are the celluloses, and we ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... Municipal and National, that they did not care to which of them especially was given the glory of striking it down. Unfortunately, however, we do not believe this. What we believe, or, rather, what we know, is that the attack on Socialism in the Thunderer arises from a chaos of inconsistent and mostly evil motives, any one of which would lose simply by being named. A jerry-builder whose houses have been condemned writes anonymously and becomes the Thunderer. A Socialist who has quarrelled with the other ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... State historians, "encouraged by the police," must make it to order; they must trace it "from the end of Louis XIV. to the year VIII," and their object must be to show how superior the new architecture is to the old one.[2340] "The constant disturbance of the finances must be noted, the chaos of the provincial assemblies,... the pretensions of the parliaments, the lack of energy and order in the administration, that parti-colored France with no unity of laws or of administration, being ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not wonder, therefore, if it is to Babylonia that the cosmological legends and beliefs of Phoenicia plainly point. The watery chaos out of which the world was created, the divine hierarchies, one pair of deities proceeding from another and an older pair, or the victory of Kronos over the dragon Ophioneus, are among the indications of their Babylonian origin. ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... wild chaos of storm and whirlwind which madly raged over the benighted earth before 'light was,' rushed to the dark caverns where the fettered earthquake lay, when order was demanded by the Father of Lights, we can not tell; but surely it is a pleasing thought for the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... through the chaos of his surging thoughts. He must call in Ruth Frazer and explain to her that he had not done what the papers said he did. Somehow he felt he owed her explanation, her of all ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... one who beheld the chaos would have turned away discouraged. But not so Ted! The disorder was of no consequence in his eyes. Through all its dinginess and confusion he saw that the roof was tight, the windows whole, and the interior quite capable of being swept out, scrubbed and put in order. ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... felt unequal to regulating and giving order to this inward chaos, and I abandoned ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... thoughtful mind of the world to-day, in the disappearance of the old sanctions of religion. When the idea of an authoritative revelation of divine truth has been finally dislodged, there are moments when moral chaos seems to impend. We are still upheld by old habits and associations, we are borne along by forces mightier than our creeds or negations, and the loyal spirit catches at moments the "deeper voice across the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... over the theoretical in the common understanding of men. In the latter, if common reason ventures to depart from the laws of experience and from the perceptions of the senses, it falls into mere inconceivabilities and self-contradictions, at least into a chaos of uncertainty, obscurity, and instability. But in the practical sphere it is just when the common understanding excludes all sensible springs from practical laws that its power of judgement begins to show itself to advantage. It then becomes even subtle, ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant
... do the upper gods "That deity confess. In doubt I stand "If here too he is known; but here I judge "His power is felt: the ancient rape, if true, "Proves love ev'n you first join'd. You I implore, "By all those regions fill'd with dread; by this "Chaos immense; your ample realm, all fill'd "With silence; once again the thread renew "Eurydice too hasty lost. To you "We all belong; a little while we stay, "Then soon or late to one repose we haste: "All hither tend; this is ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... the camp fire, and sat forward on the blankets, toasting his moccasined feet and smoking parsimoniously. When the pipe was finished he sat on, brooding into the dying flame of the fire. Slowly the worry went out of his eyes and resolve came in. Out of the chaos of his fortunes he had finally achieved a way. But it was not a pretty way. His face had become stern and wolfish, and the thin lips ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... little creature seemed to have no tears to shed. She was unresponsive to Dora's broken words of sympathy, and the grub-liners' awkward condolences—they seemed not to reach her heart at all. She heard them without hearing, for her mind was chaos as she moved silently from room to room, or huddled, a forlorn figure, on the bench where her ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... she heard of the death of her lover, pictured her denunciation of his lie. The truth would only sound lame if he were to tell it. Who would believe it? Like a man stricken dumb he descended in the lift with Green, out into the wild night in a taxicab, his thoughts a chaos. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... smoothed the locks of damp, dark hair, keeping a perfect silence as the strong man, no longer able to bear up, wept like a very child. For a time Helen felt as if bereft of reason, while earth and sky seemed blended in one wild chaos as she thought: "Oh, why couldn't it have been? Why didn't you tell her in time?" and at last she said to him; "If Katy had known it! Oh, Morris, why didn't you tell her? She never guessed it, never! If she had—if she had," Helen's breath came chokingly: ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... none, and in fact hating it." "Dear me! How could that be? But pardon me." "No offence. Doubtless the house was not to blame, But the eye watching from those windows saw, Many a day, day after day, mist—mist Like chaos surging back—and felt itself Alone in all the world, marooned alone. We lived in clouds, on a cliff's edge almost (You see), and if clouds went, the visible earth Lay too far off beneath and like a cloud. I did not ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... desirous of seeing one another; but then the means of travelling either by land or sea had been almost entirely lost, as I may say, with the loss of the arts, and there was great difficulty in getting at one another; for iron and brass and all metals were jumbled together and had disappeared in the chaos; nor was there any possibility of extracting ore from them; and they had scarcely any means of felling timber. Even if you suppose that some implements might have been preserved in the mountains, they must quickly have worn ...
— Laws • Plato
... a difficult thing to keep any room in the house orderly, and Sidney, as part of his struggle against the downward tendency in all about him, against the forces of chaos, often did the work of housemaid in the parlour; a little laxity in the rules which made this a sacred corner, and there would have been no spot where he could rest. With some success, too, he had resisted the habit prevalent in working-class homes of prolonging ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... said of the time is that it should be capable of producing so incalculably great an amount of bad art at the same time; that the walls of the Paris Salon should be so hung with inferior work every year that the important pictures are lost in chaos; and that, while this is true of the Salon, it is true to an immeasurably greater degree of the Royal Academy, of the New York Academy and every other exhibition in the world, except where a selected few paintings hang on ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... rope hurtling from a height comes rattling to the rail, to be secured to its own particular belaying-pin. Out of a seeming chaos comes order. Every rope has its name and its place and its purpose; and though we have 'sodjers' among us, before Arran is astern we are ready to take to the wind. Off Pladda we set staysails and steer to the westward, and, when the wind ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... near Mosul are to be of great importance, like the Persian wells that have their pipe-line outfall at Abadan, and that a firm and fatherly hand is necessary to keep the country in a state of trade development. Should our sphere of influence be withdrawn from Mesopotamia things will revert back to chaos. Already trouble with ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... away,—the days when Orpheus had all Nature for his audience, when the audience would not keep its seat. In those days trees and rocks may have held less firm root in the soil: it was nearer the old Chaos-times, and they had not lost the habit of the whirling dance. The trees had not found their "continental" home, and the rocks were not yet wedded to their places: so they could each enjoy one more bachelor-dance before settling into their staid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... faint stars; and thou, fair moon, 331 That wont'st to love the traveller's benison, Stoop thy pale visage through an amber cloud, And disinherit Chaos, that reigns here In double night of darkness and of shades; Or, if your influence be quite dammed up With black usurping mists, some gentle taper, Though a rush-candle from the wicker hole Of some clay habitation, visit us With thy long levelled rule ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... grateful. There was novelty and charm in a service attended wholly by men, and in the music, as mediaeval in character as the architecture of the Hall itself. Like most of his contemporaries, Leigh could by no means have formulated his religious beliefs, but in all the chaos of modern thought he still retained a certain piety, in the old Roman sense of the word, a loyalty to the traditions of his fathers which he would never have dignified ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... face and the burning radiance of her eyes, there grew into plainness against the tapestry the sad, pale face of my mother and her clear, consistent eyes. I talked—I answered—I listened—all through a humming chaos. For the teaching of the moorland farm, the ethic of the Sabbath nights lit by a single candle and sanctified by the chanted psalm and the open Book, possessed me. It was the domination of the Puritan base, and most bitterly I resented, while ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... had arrived at Louisville, system had been substituted for the chaos which had previously obtained there, and orders were issued for an advance upon the enemy with the purpose of attacking and the hope of destroying him within the limits of the "blue grass" region, and, failing in that, to drive him from Kentucky. The army moved October 1, 1862, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... battle of Verdun shattered trees, knocked down walls, annihilated villages, hollowed out the earth, dug up the plains, distorted the hills, and renewed once more that chaos of the third day, according to Genesis, on which the Creator separated the waters from the earth. Almost the entire French army filed through this extraordinary epic battle, and Guynemer, wounded and weeping with rage, ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... by turns—did not reveal itself in uncertain and fitful glimmerings—but shone with a full and steady luminosity across the troubled night of a nation's beginning. Under these broad and beneficent rays the Ship of State was guided, through a sea of chaos, to safe anchorage. The voyage across those seven eventful years was one that tried men's souls. Often, appalling dangers threatened. Wreck on the rocks of Disunion, engulfment in the mountain waves of opposition, starvation and doubt and mutiny on shipboard—these were ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... the worship of the divine in human form seems to be indicated in the war which Olympian Zeus waged with Cronos and the Titans. The origin and development of the various elements and powers of nature, Chaos, Eros, Uranus, Gaea, the Giants, Styx, Erebus, Hemera, AEther, &c, became, with the poets and philosophers after Homer, matters of speculation, of which the theogonies of Hesiod, Orpheus, Pherecydes, and ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... never knew. One moment, peace; the next chaos. One moment stillness; the next, Joseph hurtling through the air, all claws and expletives, and herself caught in a clasp which shook ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... at her rapid commands from chaos came order, the decks were cleared, and, despite wrecked topmast, round swung the Happy Despatch until her broadside bore upon the English ship. Even then Joanna waited, every eye fixed on her where she lolled, hand on hip, watching the approach of our ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... and better into best. And thus it is with the reincarnating soul. As the almost worthless grain through many seasons is slowly changed to perfect worth, the soul is by that same law of evolution slowly changed through many incarnations from the chaos of savage instincts to the law and order of the moral world. Each incarnation yields some improvement. As the seed sprouts within the darkness of the soil and, perishing there, attains its full results in the higher realm ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... phraseology can find no comparison save in the inconceivable chaos of her teachings. She goes so far as to imply that the supreme effort of a woman's spirit should suffice to bring about conception. Jesus Christ having been conceived of the Holy Ghost, she suggests that man should follow this example, and renounce the lusts of ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... home saying to himself: "Very well, I will write it alone and they shall see." Scarcely had he entered than he began to write, anger spurring him on. In an hour he had finished an article, which was a chaos of absurd matter, and took it boldly to the office. Duroy handed Forestier his manuscript. "Here is the ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... and effective; lyrics from the overwrought heart broke in dreamy sweetness from Lamartine and in simple energy from Beranger; fiction the most elaborate, incongruous, and exciting, here quaintly artistic, there morbidly scientific, revealed the chaos and the earthquakes that laid bare and upheaved life and society in the preceding epochs; the journal became an intellectual gymnasium and Olympic game, where the first minds of the nation sought exercise and glory; the feuilleton almost necessitated the novelist to concentrate upon each chapter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... financial and economic situation was as bad as possible. So complete was the financial breakdown that Secretary Memminger, utterly disheartened, had resigned his office, and the Treasury was now administered by a Charleston merchant, George A. Trenholm. But the financial chaos was wholly beyond his control. The government notes reckoned in gold were worth about three cents on the dollar. The Government itself avoided accepting them. It even bought up United States currency and used it in transacting the business of the army. The extent ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... nerve-racking delay until Sam Ogilvy's giant brother had stowed away himself and his satchel in the tonneau; then slow speed to the town limits; a swift hurling forward into space that whirled blackly around them as the great acetylenes split the darkness and chaos ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... there was nearly a month's bad weather, during which the waves came thundering in all along the coast, and no fishing-boats went out; and as no opportunity occurred for getting down to the point, which was a wild chaos of foam, the strange behaviour of ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... quantity of information for ascertaining and establishing a diagnosis. More than all other signs, the correct examination of the sediment is of importance to the physician. * * * For the medical man it is the compass which guides him in the unlimited chaos of disease and its treatment; for the patient it is the thermometer of his condition, the premonitory indication of the decrease or aggravation of his malady; and for the healthy man it is the regulator ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the actuality of which hath not its origin in God: Chaos spirituale:- [Greek text which cannot ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... vigilance. His letters testify to an unabating zeal for the English government of Irish affairs by Englishmen in the English interest. His perseverance knew no obstacles; he continued against all difficulties in his dogged and yet able manner to establish some order out of the chaos of Ireland's condition. But his government was the outcome of a profound conviction that only in the interest of England should Ireland be governed. If Ireland could be made prosperous and contented, so much more good would accrue to England. But that ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The World was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, 70 Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless— A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirred within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropped They slept on the abyss without a surge— The waves were dead; the tides ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... great surprise of my life. Anson Durand expressed his love for me and I awoke to the fact that all my preparation had been for home joys and a woman's true existence. One hour of ecstasy in the light of this new hope, then tragedy and something approaching chaos! Truly I had been through a schooling. But was it one to make me useful in the only way I could be useful now? I did not know; I did not care; I was determined on my course, fit or unfit, and, in the relief brought by this appeal to my energy, I rose and ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... gloomy lodging—she—shut herself up alone with her despair. Strange though it may seem, her anger against Jasper was slight as compared with the in tensity of her hate to Matilda. And stranger still it may seem, that as her thoughts recovered from their first chaos, she felt more embittered against the world, more crushed by a sense of shame, and yet galled by a no less keen sense of injustice, in recalling the scorn with which Darrell had rejected all excuse for her conduct in the misery ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... resembling the silvery tail of a grey mare; and truly, if the simile were extended into infinitude, which from its sublimity it would admit of, we might compare its waving, silky stream swinging over the broad face of its lofty grey rock, to the tail of the pale horse of Revelation, over the chaos of time. It was a sombre, solemn sort of a day, and the dense clouds hung curtaining down the mountain sides, like our living pall as it were—I scarcely know how—but we felt dismally until we took a dram ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... the German bombardment of Vaux Fort and village was prolonged. Enormous aerial torpedoes were hurled into the ruined houses, but in the chaos of dust and flame and smoke the French held fast, and not a position of any importance within the village or its ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... bodies as out; that turmoil of the particles goes on forever; it is, in itself, blind, fateful, purposeless; but life furnishes, or is, an organizing principle that brings order and purpose out of this chaos. It does not annul any of the mechanical or chemical principles, but under its tutelage or inspiration they produce a host of new substances, and a world of new and beautiful and ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... pretty. Amy acknowledged that she herself had thought the case hopeless all the time, and had made up her mind not to expect any beauty, but that Nell had transformed things. "Nell, you are a treasure. I am surprized that you could bring such order and beauty out of the chaos I left this morning," said Austin in his heartiest tones. And the words of cheer and praise brought a happy shine to the little girl's eyes, while her heart beat ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... only in name. There was no wall more than three feet high left standing; the whole place was shapeless, stark, blasted into nothingness. In the very centre of the mournful chaos lay three disembowelled horses and an overturned Boche ammunition waggon. The shells were still on the shelves. They were Yellow Cross, the deadliest ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... beaten track from station to station, no matter how crooked, becomes the road. Thus it is, in the fortuitous occupation of Australia, that order and arrangement may precede, and be followed only by "CHAOS come again." I arrived about sunset, at Mr. Cyrus Doyle's station near the Nammoy, where I was hospitably entertained by a man in charge of it, who rode eight miles in twenty minutes only, to borrow some ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... Christians in Protestant lands! The number of sects has so multiplied, that an earnest enquirer scarcely knows which way to turn, or where to look for the pure unadulterated truth. A spiritual darkness hangs over the non-Catholic world; and chaos seems to ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... another. Assuredly, Mrs. Woolf is not of the company on whose banner is inscribed "No discrimination!" "No culture!" "Not much thought!" She is not of that school whose grand object it is to present, as surprisingly as possible, the chaos of any mind at any ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... rival monarchs; the founder infused a soul into the vast body he was creating, by his choice of the librarian, Demetrius Phalereus, whose skilful industry amassed from all nations their choicest productions. Without such a librarian, a national library would be little more than a literary chaos; his well exercised memory and critical judgment are its best catalogue. One of the Ptolemies refused supplying the famished Athenians with wheat, until they presented him with the original manuscripts of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and in returning copies of these autographs, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... deliberations. The embarrassment of affairs was such, that the illustrious marquis was in a state of cruel anxiety. In principle he was a Republican. And yet he could see no possibility of evolving a stable Republic from the chaos into which the political world was then plunged. After much deliberation, the Republican leaders at the Hotel de Ville sent General Dubourg, as a commissioner, to the Orleanists assembled at M. Lafitte's, to confer ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... morning found Phoebe sitting in her room in the Peacock Inn, silently meditating in an effort to establish order in the chaos of her mind. Her hands lay passively in her lap, and between her fingers was an open sheet of paper whose crisp folds showed ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... commenced by Kant, and by that of literature inaugurated by Lessing and followed by the Weimar poets. We are consequently under the necessity of hearing the statements of acknowledged Rationalists who flourished during this time, and, out of the chaos, arrive at the most probable and general views entertained by ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... indistinct hordes, constantly changing the geographical limits—incessantly confounding the natural boundaries! At first sight, the whole period, the whole state of the world, seems to offer no more secure footing to an historical adventurer than the chaos of Milton—to be in a state of irreclaimable disorder, best described in the language ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... them all, modified some of their details and eliminated others, added several new personages, and thus finally constructed a complete cosmogony, the elements of which were learnedly combined so as to correspond severally with the different operations by which the world had been evoked out of chaos and gradually brought to its present state. Heliopolis was never directly involved in the great revolutions of political history; but no city ever originated so many mystic ideas and consequently exercised so great an influence upon the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... world's embrace: The moss-root smell where beeches grew, And watered grass in breezy space; The silken heights, of ghostly bloom Among their folds, by distance draped. 'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume, That cried to have its chaos shaped: Absorbing, little noting, still Enriched, and thinking it bestowed; With wistful looks on each far hill For something hidden, something owed. Unto his mantled sister, Day Had given the secret things we sought And she was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man, as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, but all of us Americans,—that was the vision and message of Washington; and that insight and that law, coming to petty, prejudiced, jealous, and disordered states, put an end to chaos and brought peace, prosperity, strength, largeness of life, and an ever broadening horizon. Let no man think of himself any longer in the first place as an American, as an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... I could disentangle individual voices from the wild chaos of strident theories that surrounded me. But at last there was silence, as one bilious-looking vellum book, old enough to have known better, had evidently caught the ear of the assembled multitudes; and then I understood that the movement had already found ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... hunting, it became rapid again, and we were compelled to make our way along the shore, while Joe endeavored to get up in the birch alone, though it was still very difficult for him to pick his way amid the rocks in the night. We on the shore found the worst of walking, a perfect chaos of fallen and drifted trees, and of bushes projecting far over the water, and now and then we made our way across the mouth of a small tributary on a kind of net-work of alders. So we went tumbling on in the dark, being on the shady side, effectually scaring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... ends; dusty bits of paper on a stand, the chief ornament of which was a black-looking derringer; coats, vests, fishing-tackle; and cheap prints, adorning the walls in the wildest disregard of effect—except, indeed, the effect aimed at were chaos. ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... habit the exertion of mind and body." Once more his enemy was not annihilated, but this contentment and high spirits seem natural to common minds, which recall that in a week he had evolved order from chaos, and had stricken a powerful, united foe, cutting his line in two, and sending one portion to the right-about in utter confusion. To the end of his life Napoleon regarded the strategic operations culminating at Eckmuehl as his masterpiece in that particular line. Jomini, his able critic, remained ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... transition; of brickfields, open spaces, poor streets inhabited by low artisans, isolated houses, sites of intended tenements, or sites of tenements which have been pulled down; it is in fact a mere chaos, where there is no order and no regularity; where there is nothing durable, or intended to be durable; though there can be little doubt that within a few years order and beauty itself will be found here, that the misery, squalidness, and meanness will have ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... break. He laid her down gently and put a heavy coat about her—one that earlier she had carried from the cabin in her effort to save him. He went to the house and grimly set to work. First he lighted a fire; then he righted the chairs and brought about some order from the chaos. He was no longer afraid of any man on God's earth; even Jim White was relegated to the non-essentials. Truedale was merely a primitive creature caring for his own! There was no turning back now—no waiting upon conventions. ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... there are chances and changes, Helping the hopeful, a hundred to one, And through the chaos, High wisdom arranges Ever success, if you'll ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... years he worked with them shoulder to shoulder, but there is no record of his having been received into their Church as a member, nor did they reordain him into their ministry. The situation would be more strange to-day than it was then, for there was apparent chaos in England, the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters before "light shone, and order from disorder sprung," and the Moravians did not care to emphasize their independence of the Anglican Church lest it injure their usefulness. In 1744, when England was threatened with a French ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... during this conversation along the bare avenue, through the lines of faint, weak-kneed young trees which had been planted with a far-off hope of some time, twenty years hence, filling up the gaps. Little Geoff, with all the chaos of ideas in his mind, a child unlike other children, just saved from the grave of his race, the last little feeble representative of a house which had been strong and famous in its day, was not unlike one of the feeble saplings which ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... error: for as Hermes' wand Charms the disorders of tumultuous ghosts; And as the strife of Chaos then did cease, When better light than Nature's did arrive: So, what could never in itself agree, Forgetteth the eccentric property, And at her sight turns forth with regular, Whose sceptre guides the flowing ocean: And though it did ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... perplex, Whom maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious deshabille behold her sit, A letter'd gossip and a housewife wit: At once invoking, though for different views, Her gods, her cook, her milliner, and muse. Round her strew'd room a frippery chaos lies, A chequer'd wreck of notable and wise. Bills, books, caps, couplets, combs, a varied mass, Oppress the toilet and obscure the glass; Unfinished here an epigram is laid, And there a mantua-maker's bill unpaid. There new-born plays foretaste ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... perfectibility. Wordsworth in The Prelude—unpublished when Browning wrote Pauline—which is also the history of a poet's mind, has described his own experience of the loss of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair. The poet of Pauline turns from political and social abstractions to real life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream; but his mood is not so sane as that of despair. He falls back, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... there, it was such a scene as you seldom see, and never want to. Nastiness beyond account, and chaos run loose in the midst of the nastiness. There were not a great many of the negroes; but by way of making what there were understand that they were free, Vaughan had had their hand-cuffs and ankle-cuffs knocked off, and, for convenience' sake, was putting them upon the rascals of ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... discovered and deciphered in 1875 by George Smith. These tell legends of the time when "nothing which was called heaven existed above, and when nothing below had as yet received the name of earth. Apsu, the Ocean, who was their first father, and Chaos-Tiamat, who gave birth to them all, mingled their waters in one, reeds which were not united, rushes which bore no fruit. In the time when the gods were not created, Lakhmu and Lakhamu were the first to appear and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... far from bliss, I heard a writhing chaos hiss; And thought, that moved in time no more, Wept ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... at last succeeded in getting some order out of the chaos. A battery was rallied on a hill and threw a sleet of steel on the charging men in gray. Some of the seasoned infantry regiments were managing to form a line and they were beginning to send back a rifle fire. Harry felt that the resistance ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to myself,—"If this chaos continues, it will drive me mad. Let me have one bit of solid earth beneath my feet, and I can stand until it subsides. Let me throw over the best bower of the heart, since all the anchors of the mind are dragging!" I summoned resolution. I made that desperate venture which no true man makes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... awe of our higher officials and of the police superintendent, who was present in the hall. Ten minutes later all had somehow got back into their places, but there was not the same good order as before. And it was into this incipient chaos that poor Stepan Trofimovitch ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... thousands in the great hall were impatiently and loudly demanding an immediate vote. More than one of the chief orators of the party,—men well known to the country—had in vain attempted to be heard. Chaos seemed to have come again at the crucial moment that McKenzie, standing upon his chair in the centre of the vast enclosure, began: "If I speak longer than two minutes, I hope that some honest half-drowned Democrat will ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... door below, his hands in his pockets and eyes of deep cogitation fixed on his sister-in-law. He was inclined to think that she had made a dreadful mess of things; yet, at the same time, he was feeling a certain elation in the chaos thus created. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick |
