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Complicated   /kˈɑmpləkˌeɪtəd/   Listen
Complicated

adjective
1.
Difficult to analyze or understand.  "Complicated Middle East politics"



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"Complicated" Quotes from Famous Books



... Ambihuasca, tobacco, red pepper, a bark called "barbasco," from a tree of the genus Jacquinia, and a plant of the name "sarnango." Of all these the juice of the Ambihuasca is the most powerful ingredient, but the making of this species of poison is a most complicated process. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... sidling, limping, hobbling, and jumping, are by no means walking. If he sits,—he fidgets, twists his legs under his chair, throws his arm over the back of it, and puts himself into a perspiration, by trying to be at ease. It is the same in the more complicated operations of life. Behold that individual on a horse! See with what persevering alacrity he hobbles up and down from the croupe to the pommel, while his horse goes quietly at an amble of from four to five miles in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various

... was for warming purposes, and certainly, at first sight, complicated, but they soon grasped all the details, and understood how, by the use of a small furnace, water was to be heated, and to circulate by the law of convection, so as to supply warmth all through public buildings, ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn

... story is told of a clock, on one of the high cathedral towers of the older world, so constructed that at the close of a century it strikes the years as it ordinarily strikes the hours. As a hundred years come to a close, suddenly, in the immense mass of complicated mechanism, a little wheel turns, a pin slides into the appointed place, and in the shadows of the night the bell tolls a requiem over the generations which during a century have lived, and labored, and been ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... treaty—as might well have been seen—the misunderstanding between the two countries in relation to the fisheries became more and more complicated. The treaty seems to have considered only the cod-fishing, and even from that point of view we paid an enormous price for the poor privilege of drying fish on the Newfoundland coast, by abandoning the right of mackerel fishing within three marine miles of all other ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... suddenly attacked his adversary with an impetuosity which nearly gained him a certain victory; but Ruy Lopez, recalled to himself by this vigorous effort, defended himself bravely. The game became more and more complicated. The Bishop strove to gain a mate which he saw, or believed he saw, at hand, whilst Don Gusman played with the eagerness of certain victory. Everything was forgotten, and time passed unnoticed. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... minute's rest and to listen for the baying of Frazier's bloodhound; and he wondered, in a purely detached and scientific way, whether he had sufficient strength and acuteness left for another such grapple. It was merely an engaging speculation, and was complicated with his determination to perform another task before his work was done. It would nearly break his heart to be stopped now. Likely the dog would not attack him, but merely hold him at bay until ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... pursue this Thought still farther; Every living Creature, considered in it self, has many very complicated Parts, that are exact copies of some other Parts which it possesses, and which are complicated in the same Manner. One Eye would have been sufficient for the Subsistence and Preservation of an Animal; but in order to better his ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... than love for a woman! No man gets out of that business without complications, and when the woman is half a child, an idealist, precocious, an angel with a devil lurking somewhere about her, it's the most complicated thing ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell

... instantly decided on, for a Rajput does not merely accept service; he repays it, feudal-wise, and smites hip and thigh for the honor of his men. The vengeance would be sure to follow purely Eastern lines, and would be complicated; it would no doubt take the form of siding in some way or other with his brother the Maharajah. There would be instant, active doings, for that was Mahommed Gunga's style! The fat would be in the fire months, perhaps, before ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... seized, was bold enough to dispute the alleged purpose of the perplexed maze of rooms and passages, with which the walls of the ancient palace were perforated; but the fact was undeniable, that in raising the fabric some Norman architect had exerted the utmost of the complicated art, which they have often shown elsewhere, in creating secret passages, and chambers of retreat and concealment. There were stairs, which were ascended merely, as it seemed, for the purpose of descending again—passages, which, after turning and winding for a considerable ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... Pelly had met at Peshawar in January, 1877. The meeting, unfortunately, ended in a rupture, owing to Sher Ali's agent pronouncing the location of European officers in any part of Afghanistan an impossibility; and what at this crisis complicated matters to a most regrettable extent was the death of Saiyad Nur Mahomed, who had been in ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts

... receive officials, the ideal tent would be one of the same material, but of larger proportions, and comprising two parallel vertical partitions and surmounted by a ridge roof. The round form of Kirghiz and Mongol tents is also very comfortable, but it requires a complicated and inconvenient wooden frame-work, owing to which it takes some considerable time to raise up the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... that a dial was exceedingly complicated and difficult to make, or to understand; and, in fact, it is difficult to make one that shall be exact in its indications. He did not think it possible that ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott

... nature. Some of his evil practices also had of late begun to shed their legitimate fruit on John Webster, and to teach him something of the meaning of those words, "Be sure your sins shall find you out." This complicated matters considerably. He consulted his cash-books, bank-books, bill-books, sales-books, order-books, ledgers, etcetera, etcetera, again and again, for hours at a time, without arriving at any satisfactory result. He went to his ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne

... is but dead matter; the productive efficiency is in the vital energy of the intelligent laborer. The most complicated and ingenious tool ever made is useless without the operator. It is as helpless as the wire without the electric current; as helpless as the body without its life, for the body is but man's tool, preserved, ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... as much as in that of their golden flashes. Each roving star had a tide in its light that rose and ebbed as it moved, so that it seemed to push itself on by its own radiance, ever waxing and waning. In wide, complicated dance, they wove a huge, warpless tapestry with the weft of an ever vanishing aureate shine. The lady, an Englishwoman evidently, gave a little sigh and looked round, regretting, apparently, that her husband was not by her side to look on the loveliness that woke a faint-hued ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... purposely put a bullet through one of our back windows. The whole township has been chafing him about it, and the local rag has risen to a sarcastic paragraph, which is exactly what we wanted. The trap-door over the pit is now practically finished. It's too complicated to describe, but Stingaree has only to march into the bank and 'stick it up,' and the man behind the counter has only to touch a lever with his foot for the villain to disappear through the floor into a prison it'll take ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... be an illusionist pure and simple and does not indulge in sleight-of-hand at all. In this case the comparison with the Indian Jadoo-wallah is not a fair one, as the latter has not the means to purchase the complicated mechanism necessary for up-to-date illusions as shewn ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson

... All these complicated and jarring circumstances must have suggested to Godwin that another marriage might he the best expedient, and he accordingly set to work in a systematic way this time to acquire his end. Passion was not the motive, and probably ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... supported from the funds of the State, and at the same time forbidding the support from this fund of schools in which "any religious sectarian doctrine or tenet shall be taught, inculcated, or practiced." The Free School Society, resenting and distrusting this new (and in some respects complicated) arrangement, continued its separate activity for eleven years; but in 1853, the unsectarian character of the public schools of New York having been established beyond question, the society and the board of education were by common consent amalgamated by statute. At the final ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond

... immediately and wrote to Mr. Vining, asking him to explain the signs. I received another paper and a table of signs by return mail, and I set to work to learn the notation. But on the night before the algebra examination, while I was struggling over some very complicated examples, I could not tell the combinations of bracket, brace and radical. Both Mr. Keith and I were distressed and full of forebodings for the morrow; but we went over to the college a little before the examination began, and had Mr. Vining explain ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... unfortunate occurrence in the library at the Groves'; his indignation at Mrs. Grove was complicated, puzzled, by the whole loss of the detached self-possession which, he had thought, was her most persistent characteristic. Her expression, in memory, specially baffled him; under other, accountable, circumstances he should ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... explanation of this complicated calendar system I must refer the reader to my former paper. But at present we shall need only an understanding of the tables here given. I shall, as I proceed, refer to Table I, leaving the reader who prefers to do so to refer to the list of days marked Table II, ...
— Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts • Cyrus Thomas

... interior trials was in the remembrance of God's promise "to be with those who are in tribulation" (Ps. xc. 15), and truly He was with hers in hers, and by His almighty grace brought her so triumphantly through them, that amidst her complicated sufferings, she never failed in her fidelity to her Lord; never omitted the smallest duty or fell into the slightest impatience. He who does not permit His creatures to be tried beyond their strength, granted her relief when she least expected it. In the restored light, she clearly saw that the ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... Mind only as a group of activities which are never exhibited to us except through the medium of motions of matter. In all our experience we have never encountered such activities save in connection with certain very complicated groupings of highly mobile material particles into aggregates which we call living organisms. And we have never found them manifested to a very conspicuous extent save in connection with some of those specially organized aggregates which have vertebrate skeletons ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... conflicting rights must be harmonized by the Central State, and it must at the same time provide from the common resources for the common defence and welfare. The questions growing out of such relations are the most complicated known to politics. It seems that a Justiciar State acting upon the advice of properly constituted administrative tribunals, which habitually act judicially and whose function is to decide all questions according to law and justice is much more ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow

... l. 2. The importance of the nectarium or honey-gland in the vegetable economy is seen from the very complicated apparatus, which nature has formed in some flowers for the preservation of their honey from insects, as in the aconites or monkshoods; in other plants instead of a great apparatus for its protection a greater secretion ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... study lamp looking up some complicated case, his books about him, Jane's sad face came before him. "Has she not had trouble enough," he said to himself, "parted from Lucy and with her unsettled money affairs, without having to face these gnats whose sting she cannot ward off?" With this came the thought ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... Abbot, with a complicated play of wrinkled forehead, eyebrows, and lips, as if he were swallowing a mouthful ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro

... chess life is! Here's a simple play made complicated. How serenely I moved toward the coveted checkmate, to find a castle towering in the way! I came in here to await young Montaigne. He fails to appear. Chance brings others here, and lo! it becomes a new game. And D'Herouville will be out of hospital ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... yielded to General Halleck as he had before yielded to General McClellan, though certainly with much less reluctance. At the same time the question was not considered wholly by itself, but was almost necessarily complicated with the question of deposing McClellan from the command. For the inconsistency of discrediting McClellan's military judgment and retaining him at the head ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... before, both for physical and sentimental reasons, this last experience quite demoralized Miss Dwyer, and she sat down and cried. Now, a few tears, regarded from a practical, middle-aged point of view, would not appear to have greatly complicated the situation, but they threw Lombard into a panic. If she was going to cry, something must be done. Whether anything could be done or not, something ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw the "natural" so happily embodied about us—and in female maturity, or comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence—this was because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so little there to threaten it. The complicated, as we were later on to define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently by their effects—observing thus that a sense more subtly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... give us caution enough to beware the treachery of our desires, and to distinguish true and entire pleasures from such as are mixed and complicated with greater pain. For the most of our pleasures, say they, wheedle and caress only to strangle us, like those thieves the Egyptians called Philistae; if the headache should come before drunkenness, we should have a care of drinking too much; but pleasure, to deceive us, marches before ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... have his anxiety roused till midnight, at least, by his brother's failure to return from the complicated feat of decoying the drunkard from the distillery. Thad trembled to think what might happen to himself in the interval. If the volume of water pouring down through the sink-hole should increase to any considerable extent, he would be drowned here like a rat. Was he to have his wish, and ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... on S. Mark's Gospel is assigned to VICTOR. The differences between this text and that of Cramer (e.g. at fol. 320-3, 370,) are hopelessly numerous and complicated. There seem to have been extraordinary liberties taken with the text of this ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... Paris was a silent one. Every one was occupied with his own thoughts. Prince Metternich sat in a corner talking with the impervious diplomat; I wondered if he were relating the salad's complicated relationships. We all bade one another good-by, adding, with assumed enthusiasm, that we hoped to meet soon again, when perhaps we were rejoicing in the thought that we would not do so for a long time ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... that he discovered the association of various forms of disease of the kidney with anasarca and albuminous urine. In no direction was the harvest of this combined study more abundant than in the complicated and confused subject of fever. The work of Louis and of his pupils, W.W. Gerhard and others, revealed the distinction between typhus and typhoid fever, and so cleared up one of the most obscure problems in pathology. By Morgagni's method of "anatomical thinking," Skoda in Vienna, Schonlein ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... early history of the dragon-story and all the ingredients which in the Old World went to the making of it have been preserved in American pictures and legends in a bewildering variety of forms and with an amazing luxuriance of complicated symbolism and picturesque ingenuity. In America, as in India and Eastern Asia, the power controlling water was identified both with a serpent (which in the New World, as in the Old, was often equipped ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... imaginative spinster, consumed with the love of Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I am pretty sure she had not in her nature those depths of unutterable thought which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures. Those features, in especial, had a misleading eloquence; they rested upon you with a far-off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which was certainly not always a key to the spirit of their owner; and I suspect that a young lady could not really have been so dejected and disillusioned ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... life!" he says, as he pursues a frisky tin pan in one direction, and arrests the gambols of the ladle in another; while the wicked sea, meanwhile, with another lurch, is upsetting all his dishwater. I can see how these daily trials, this performing of most delicate and complicated gastronomic operations in the midst of such unsteady, unsettled circumstances, have gradually given this poor soul a despair of living, and brought him into this state of philosophic melancholy. Just as Xantippe made a sage of Socrates, this ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... several characters, sometimes as many as eight or ten, are required to express a word, which word, after all, represents only one single object or idea. But notwithstanding this apparent simplicity, the system of symbolical writing proved to be, when extensively employed, extremely complicated and intricate. It is true that each idea required but one character, but the number of ideas and objects, and of words expressive of their relations to one another, is so vast, that the system of representing them by independent symbols, soon lost itself in an endless ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... return thanksgivings to the wise Legislature, who had thus restored them to the condition of men, and enabled them to exhibit the moral effects of the change. Such, in the opinion of the writer, would be a radical cure for several of the complicated and deep-rooted diseases which now afflict British society; at least, it is a remedy without cost or sacrifice; and, as such, an homage due from affluence and power to indigence and misfortune. Such a plan would draw from the over-peopled towns, that destitute portion of the population, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... field of zoology his scalpel revealed the complicated structure of the reproductive organs of the Centipedes (Millepedes), hitherto so confused and misunderstood; as also certain peculiarities of the development of these curious creatures, so interesting from the point of view of the zoological philosopher (4/10.), ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... entirely dissolved and converted into short fibers. The rags are for this purpose first cut into pieces, which are again reduced by special machines. The rags are cut in a rag cutting machine, which was formerly constructed similar to a feed cutter; later on, more complicated machines of various constructions were employed. It is not our task to describe the various kinds, but we remain content with the general remark that they are all based on the principles of causing revolving knives to operate upon the rags. The careful cleansing of the cut rags, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... it from me to seek complexity in so simple a soul as was that of this young Hungarian peasant girl. Elsa Kapus had no thought of self-analysis; complicated sex and soul problems did not exist for her; she would never have dreamed of searching the deep-down emotions of her heart and of dragging them out for her mind to scrutinize. The morbid modern craze for intricate and composite emotions was not likely to reach ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... esteemed peculiar to himself. Confiding to the experience of others is a ground of security which may prove fallacious; and the danger can with certainty be obviated only by avoiding its source. And considering the various and complicated changes of the human frame, under different circumstances and at different ages, it is neither impossible nor improbable that the substances taken into the system at one period, and even for a series of years, with apparent impunity may, notwithstanding, at another period, ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum

... across sheets of paper in search of figures, Rachel tactfully withdrew, not from the room, but from the conversation, it being her proper role to pretend that she did not and could not understand the complicated details which they were discussing. She expected some rather dazzling revelation of men's trained methods at this "business interview" (as Louis had announced it), for her brother and father had never allowed her the slightest knowledge of their daily ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... complicated plot to this play," explained Mr. Pertell, in issuing his instructions. "Mr. Bunn has some valuable papers, and Paul, as the villain, takes them from his pocket in the station. That ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope

... "how beautiful nature is and how simple things are in a state of nature. It's only when man interjects himself onto a scene that things get complicated. Take Flora for instance. Before Grandfather came here, it must have been a pleasant place with the simple natives happy in their paradise. But that's all changed now. We have taken over—and they, like other lesser creatures on other worlds, have ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... veiling himself in the rapidly encroaching shades of darkness, and it is time to say good-night to this fair night, and to go to our cabin. Beautiful Sicily! may this not be our final leave-taking! We found no poetry below, and in a short time are driven back from the cabin by its complicated nuisances, to moonlight contemplation, and catching cold. An hour elapses—a town not to be forgotten by the Neapolitans is just ahead. The moon shines brightly on its high-perched castle, and we have scarce stopped the paddles, when our deck is invaded by a new freightage of passengers, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... mounted his uncle's dusty staircase, and found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment. The coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent, so Popinot put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned whose appearance made those laugh who did not know the secrets of his private ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac

... relish the job; and, despite his remonstrances, gave him my eight-bore to carry, I having the .570-express. Then we set out for the tree. It was very dark, but we found it without difficulty, though climbing it was a more complicated matter. However, at last we got up and sat down, like two little boys on a form that is too high for them, and waited. I did not dare to smoke, because I remembered the rhinoceros, and feared that the elephants might wind the tobacco ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard

... like a smith. Our strong men were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were too strong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The smith broke upon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself. Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story of our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II. to his rival. He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... happiness, removes family friction, and causes all the complicated wheels of the home-machinery to move on noiselessly and smoothly. It promotes union and harmony, expunges all selfishness, allays petulant feelings and turbulent passions, destroys peevishness of temper, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... often happens, that has proved a weakness and a strength to it: a weakness because embarrassed with subtle, complicated, insoluble questions wherein mankind will always be involved, it was forced to engage in endless discussions wherein the bad or feeble reasons advanced by this or that votary compromised the whole work; a strength because whoever brings a rule of life is ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... veiled lady was entering that sanctum from the photographer's hall. The secret of the two double rings of the push button admitted her to the "packing room," where an innocent-faced young German lad stood guard over the complicated system of letter boxes, telegraph racks, and telephones in that ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... deceased, could pretend to judge what sort of marriage would turn out well for a young girl who preferred Casaubon to Chettam. In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... dying," said the physician. "There is some moral malady which has made great progress, and it has complicated her physical condition, which was already dangerous, and made still more so by her great imprudence. To walk about barefooted at night! to go out when I forbade it! on foot yesterday in the rain, to-day in a carriage! She must ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... to the excess observable in the vaulted roofs of the fifteenth century. Sculptured bosses often occur at the intersections. In the nave of York Cathedral, finished about A. D. 1330, the groining of the roof is less complicated than that of the choir of the same cathedral, constructed between A. D. 1360 and A. D. 1370[106-*]. Small structures are more simply vaulted. In a chantry chapel adjoining the north side of the chancel of Willingham Church, Cambridgeshire, is a very acute-pointed ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam

... score is a vastly more complicated matter than directing a chorus singing four-part music, and the training necessary in order to prepare one for this task is long and complicated. In addition to the points already rehearsed as necessary for the conductor in general, the leader ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens

... showing the period of Jewish slavery, is another of the charges against me. That slavery extended over a period of 215 years; and he proceeded to substantiate this statement by being through a long and somewhat complicated genealogical table. If I made any misstatement I was misled by the new testament. Mr. Talmage may settle with St. Paul. If you can depend on what my friend Paul says, the Jews, in 215 years, increased from seventy persons till they had 600,000 men of war. I know it isn't so, and so does any man ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... doubts in the matter, and because they furnish a striking and valuable illustration of the relations existing from the most remote tunes between widely separated races, and maintained until the present time. In no other way can we account for the practice of the extremely difficult and complicated operation of the vitrification of bard rocks in districts so far apart as Norway and Scotland, Germany and the midlands ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... and all complicated figures which require the use of toys or papier-mache articles are not in vogue in New York. In Paris these trifles, such as vegetables and heads of animals and other gewgaws, pass for favors, as well as to lend a variety to the cotillon. ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain

... of tones employed was narrow, and the habits of mind in the people employing them apparently calm and almost inactive. As time passed on more and more tones were added to the musical scales, and more and more complicated relations recognized between them, and the music thereby became more diversified in its tonal effects, and therein better adapted for the expression of a more energetic or more sensitive action of mind and feeling. This has been the general course of the progress, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... complicated again. Perhaps she had hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy. Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her. She peeped at Phil. He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... taken the auto we no longer go out. It is much too complicated anyway, as one has to show a passport at every bridge and corner. Every acre of land is infested with soldiers. It is interesting, however, to see what they do and how they turn everything to some use. Men are sent from Germany to repair railroads, build bridges, put ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow

... is sometimes almost ludicrous when the consequent is long and complicated, and when it precedes the antecedent or "if-clause." "I should be delighted to introduce you to my friends, and to show you the objects of interest in our city, and the beautiful scenery in the neighbourhood, if you were here." Where the "if-clause" ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott

... du Departement has a rather more complicated record than its companion piece in Les Parisiens en Province, L'Illustre Gaudissart. It appeared at first, not quite complete and under the title of Dinah Piedefer, in Le Messager during March and April 1843, and was almost immediately published ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... treatment of fevers was excellent, for he recognized that fever was an effort of Nature to throw off morbid materials. His recipes are not so complicated, but more sensible and effective than those of his immediate successors. He understood the use of enemas and artificial feeding. In cases of insanity he recognized that improvement followed the use of narcotics in the treatment of the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... caused by, the deterioration in the quality of the cells of the body, and they call this change a breaking-down process by which the finer and more highly differentiated cells, such, for example, as the nerve-cells, and others which have high and complicated duties to perform, are displaced by cells of an inferior type, which they name conjunctive cells, much as the common sparrow drives away the songbirds from the home garden and, usurping the place ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower

... while, with your eyes open, you are wilfully kindling these wars, and then closing your eyes and blindly rushing into them,—do you imagine that, while in the very nature of things your own Southern and South-western States must be the Flanders of these complicated wars, the battle-field upon which the last great conflict must be fought between slavery and emancipation,—do you imagine that your Congress will have no constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of slavery, in any way, in the states of this confederacy? Sir, they ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... each of the twenty-five States there are also orders, distinctions and decorations. These orders in turn are divided into numerous classes. For instance, a man can have the Red Eagle order of the first, second, third or fourth class, and these may be complicated with a laurel crown, with an oak crown, with swords and with stars, etc. Even domestic servants, who have served a long time in one family, receive orders; and faithful postmen and other officials who have never appeared on the police books for having made statements against the ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard

... given a glimpse of the complicated system of railroads, built in large part since the war and to supply the armies with food and other necessaries. These roads were all laid hurriedly, but they seem to be in good condition and are invaluable to the French. Some of them have been laid with rails taken ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.

... The Queen held out for giving only four thousand foot and four hundred horse, and for deducting the garrisons even from this slender force. As guarantee for the expense thus to be incurred, she required that Flushing and Brill should be placed in her hands. Moreover the position of Antwerp complicated the negotiation. Elizabeth, fully sensible of the importance of preserving that great capital, offered four thousand soldiers to serve until that city should be relieved, requiring repayment within three months after the object should have been accomplished. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Saint-Sulpice, and once more attended mass in front of the Virgin's altar. It was Desplein, sure enough! The master-surgeon, the atheist at heart, the worshiper by chance. The mystery was greater than ever; the regularity of the phenomenon complicated it. When Desplein had left, Bianchon went to the sacristan, who took charge of the chapel, and asked him whether the gentleman were a ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac

... Gospels, leaving untouched a mass of minor discrepancies. We find the principal of these when we compare the three synoptics with the Fourth Gospel, but there are some irreconcilable differences even between the three. The contradictory genealogies of Christ given in Matthew and Luke—farther complicated, in part, by a third discordant genealogy in Chronicles—have long been the despair of Christian harmonists. "On comparing these lists, we find that between David and Christ there are only two names ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... out till five o'clock: he was having tea in a cake-shop near the top of Wesley High Street with his nurse and Mr. Thrush, who, not unexpectedly, had arrived in Welsley. The first meeting between his father and mother would not be complicated by ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... Army of the Potomac, near Chesterfield Station, the heavy battles around Spottsylvania had been fought, and the complicated manoeuvres by which the whole Union force was swung across the North Anna were in process of execution. In conjunction with these manoeuvres Wilson's division was sent to the right flank of the army, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... out certain incidental questions, which, without being absolutely essential, would render the subject more complicated, and by making such concessions and assumptions as may be fairly supposed to be without ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... his new machine under the notice of the leading printers in Germany, but they would not undertake to use it. The plan seemed to them too complicated and costly. He tried to enlist men of capital in his scheme, but they all turned a deaf ear to him. He went from town to town, but could obtain no encouragement whatever. Besides, industrial enterprise in Germany was then in a measure paralysed ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... along their front, saw intense activity on all sides. The abandonment of Petersburg by Lee was now plainly imminent, and the preventing of his army's escape was the paramount object. The whole vast field of operation about the besieged city became a seething theater of complicated movement, and the Second Connecticut, under frequent orders for immediate advance, was formed in line at all hours of the day or night, and excited by a thousand rumors and orders given and revoked, but it did not finally leave its quarters ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill

... by the sudden change on the infant's countenance, which became, if possible, redder than before, and puckered up into such a complicated series of wrinkles that all semblance to humanity was well-nigh lost. Suddenly a hole opened on the surface and a feeble ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne

... and it is, thanks to his exertions, coupled with those of Mr. Washburne, that the matter has at length been satisfactorily arranged. I need hardly observe that the Foreign-office has done its best to render the question more complicated. It has sent orders to Mr. Wodehouse to provide for the transport of British subjects, without sending funds, and having told Lord Lyons to take the archives with him, it perpetually refers to instructions contained in despatches ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... from above on the performer, who was not conscious at the moment of being so observed. On the old man went, waxing more and more energetic, till at last he swayed himself into the centre of the hall, and gave expression to the vehemence of his feelings in a complicated sort of movement which he intended for a jump or spring, but which brought him down on all fours, amidst a burst of irrepressible laughter from the young people who were looking on. A little disconcerted, Harry was just recovering his feet, when the parrot, who had learned a few short phrases ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... do you mean?" asked Bob. "It is being done every day! There's nothing complicated about it. It's just a question of cutting and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... unreasonable to admit into our scheme all the grand peculiarities of Christianity, and having admitted, to neglect and think no more of them! "Wherefore" (might the Socinian say) "Wherefore all this costly and complicated machinery? It is like the Tychonic astronomy, encumbered and self-convicted by its own complicated relations and useless perplexities. It is so little like the simplicity of nature, it is so unworthy of ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... of a working vocabulary of clicked words, he was able to follow Loketh's speech so that translation through the dolphins was not necessary except for complicated directions. Also, he had a more detailed briefing of the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... the tone is pleasant and the airs played on them fascinating, although somewhat monotonous in the end, repetitions being continually effected. Then there is the harp with five strings, if I remember right, and the more complicated sort of lute with twenty-five strings, the kossiul; a large guitar, and a smaller one; the kanyako being also in frequent use. Most of these instruments are played by women; the flutes, however, are also played ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... said his face changed when he heard the news. I didn't dare to look up when the Jonkheer came and made me nice wishes, for fear he might be looking sad; and there was a heavy sound in his voice, I thought. Oh dear, life's very complicated, isn't it?" ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... furnish some general principles to enlighten and direct the policy of future legislators? The discussion, however, to which the question leads is of singular difficulty; as it requires an accurate analysis of by far the most complicated class of phenomena that can possibly engage our attention; those which result from the intricate and often from the imperceptible mechanism of political society—a subject of observation which seems at first view so little commensurate to our faculties, that it has been ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... learned that evolution means a common ancestry of living forms that have come to differ in the course of time; our common reason has shown us also that organisms are in a true sense complicated chemical mechanisms adapted to meet the conditions under which they must operate. We come now to the evidences offered by the organic world that evolution is true and that natural forces control its workings. Clearly the examination of the matter of fact is independent of the question of ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... printed by steam. If they attempted violence, he said, there was a force ready to suppress it; but if they were peaceable their wages should be continued until employment was found for them. He could now print 1,100 sheets an hour. By-and-by Koenig's machine proved too complicated, and Messrs. Applegarth and Cowper invented a cylindrical one, that printed 8,000 an hour. Then came Hoe's process, which is now said to print at the rate of from 18,000 to 22,000 copies an hour (Grant). The various ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... first established in 1720, under which certain Chinese merchants at Canton became responsible to the local authorities for the behaviour of the English merchants, and to the latter for all debts due to them, had been so complicated by various oppressive laws, that at one time the East India Company had threatened to stop all business. Lord Amherst, however, accomplished nothing in the direction of reform. From the date of his landing ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... to me, I understand, Mr. Norgate," he began, "on behalf of some friends in America, not directly, but representing a gentleman who in his letter did not disclose himself. It sounds rather complicated, but please talk to me. I ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the Cow.—Plummer quotes other illustrations of such mechanical passports to the Land of the Blessed (VSH, i, p. xciii). The main purpose of this whole incident is doubtless to explain the origin of a precious relic, preserved at Clonmacnois. Its history is involved in some doubt: it is complicated by the fact that there exists a well-known manuscript, now preserved in the library of the Royal Irish Academy, written at Clonmacnois about A.D. 1100, and called the Book of the Dun Cow, from the animal of whose hide the vellum is said to have been made. But whether this book has any ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous

... Chiboque. I offered the shell presented by Shinte, but Ionga Panza said he was too old for ornaments. We might have succeeded very well with him, for he was by no means unreasonable, and had but a very small village of supporters; but our two guides from Kangenke complicated our difficulties by sending for a body of Bangala traders, with a view to force us to sell the tusks of Sekeletu, and pay them with the price. We offered to pay them handsomely if they would perform their promise of guiding us to Cassange, but they knew ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... reckoned, and the manner of their death noted, poor Bowring may count for more than some of his friends who died at home from a constitutional inability to enjoy all the good things fortune set before them, complicated by a disposition incapable of being satisfied with only a part of the feast. But at the time of this tale they counted for more than he; for they had been constrained to leave behind them what they could not ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford

... two chapters, ninth and tenth, of SAMOA in time for the mail, and feel almost at peace. The tenth was the hurricane, a difficult problem; it so tempted one to be literary; and I feel sure the less of that there is in my little handbook, the more chance it has of some utility. Then the events are complicated, seven ships to tell of, and sometimes three of them together; O, it was quite a job. But I think I have my facts pretty correct, and for once, in my sickening yarn, they are handsome facts: creditable to all concerned; ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... position is more complicated. On the whole I think it would be your duty to convene a court-martial and have the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various

... essential reforms followed: the recognition rather than the toleration of the Christian religion; the abolition of the system of farming the taxes; and, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the religious was complicated by an agrarian question, the conversion of the Christian peasants into free proprietors, to rescue them from their double subjection to the great Mussulman landowners. In Bosnia and Herzegovina also elected provincial councils were to be established, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... ruin drew nearer the point which, if reached, would place The King's Basin forever beyond the reclaiming power of men. Frantic appeals for help were made to the government, but before the ponderous machinery of state, with its intricate and complicated wheels within wheels, could unwind a sufficient quantity of red tape the work of the pioneer ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... circumstances, for a woman of her talents cannot fail to pick up a good deal of interesting, and perhaps useful, information; and as she is not subject to the operation of the same passions and prejudices which complicated and disturbed her position in England, she is able to form a juster estimate of the characters and the objects of public men. She says Paris is a very agreeable place to live at, but expresses an unbounded contempt for the French character, and her lively sense of the moral ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... civilization of the world. The best one can do is to estimate, as intelligently as possible, the national characteristics of the peoples engaged, basing one's hopes and fears upon the psychology of the two races rather than upon purely political and statistical studies of the complicated questions involved in the present war. The Russian people have had literary spokesmen who for more than a generation have fascinated the European audience. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no such national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or Tolstoy. They ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn

... our engineers into the ultronic order, I am told, necessitated the use of most elaborate, complicated and delicate apparatus, as well as the expenditure of most costly power, but once established there, all necessary power is developed very simply from tiny batteries composed of thin plates of metultron and katultron. These two substances, developed synthetically in much the same manner ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan

... Platform to Earth and back again. In the ship Chief Bender, Mohawk and steelman extraordinary, talked to the Shed and to one Charley Red Fox. They talked in Mohawk, which is an Algonquin Indian language, agglutinative, complicated, and not to be learned in ten easy lessons. It was not a language which eavesdroppers were likely to know as a matter of course. But it was a language by which computations could be asked for, so that ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster

... and this though the language taught and learnt is a highly developed instrument for reading, writing, speaking, and literary expression. This dead weight includes most of the unintelligent memorizing, all exceptions, all complicated systems of declension and conjugation, all irregular comparison of adjectives and adverbs, all syntactical subtleties (cf. the sequence of tenses, oratio obliqua, the syntax of subordinate clauses, in Latin; and the famous conditional sentences, with the no less ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... reappeared with the dented case that Soames guessed was a communication device of some sort. They carried it to the new tripod. One of them carried, also, a complicated structure of small rods which could be an antenna-system to transmit radiation of a type that ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... He also studied the movements of the sun and the moon, and framed theories to account for the incessant changes which he saw in progress. He found a much more difficult problem in his attempt to interpret satisfactorily the complicated movements of the planets. With the view of constructing a theory which should give some coherent account of the subject, he made many observations of the places of these wandering stars. How great were the advances which Hipparchus ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... by which they are carried on, and who, according to the ordinary arrangement, is either alone interested, or is the person most interested (at least directly), in the result. To exercise this control with efficiency, if the concern is large and complicated, requires great assiduity, and often no ordinary skill. This assiduity ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... grace and glory of republics. We understand that this is already the case in New Zealand and Colorado and Wyoming. It is too soon, perhaps, to look for the effect of suffrage on the female character in Denmark; it may be mixed, because there the case is complicated by the existence of a king, which may contaminate that civic virtue by the honor which is the moving principle in a monarchy. And now," we turned lightly to our visitor, "what is the topic you wish us ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... Hussars were a few thousand gentlemen of Jewish extraction who lived across the border, and answered to the name of Pathan. They had once met the regiment officially and for something less than twenty minutes, but the interview, which was complicated with many casualties, had filled them with prejudice. They even called the White Hussars children of the devil and sons of persons whom it would be perfectly impossible to meet in decent society. Yet they were not above making their aversion fill their money-belts. The regiment possessed ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... deputy should return to their seats by the porch rail. My original plan of warning the women of the house of their peril was blocked, completely overturned by the presence of these men. The situation had thus been rendered more complicated, more difficult to solve, and I could only act on impulse, or as guided by these new conditions. Beyond all question, those I had hoped to serve were already aware of their position—someone had reached them before me—and two, at least, were already in hiding. Why the third, the one most deeply ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... thought that in the complicated and wonderful mechanism of man there lies a species of almost involuntary muscular power which enables him to act in all cases of sudden danger with a degree of prompt celerity that he could not possibly call forth by a direct act ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne

... keep the peace with each other and their employer; three begin a possible discord, which possibility increases with four, and becomes certain with five or six. Trained housekeepers, such as regulate the complicated establishments of the Old World, form a class that are not, and from the nature of the case never will be, found in any great numbers in this country. All such women, as a general thing, are keeping, and prefer to keep, houses of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... some drill or dance or complicated game that you have seen, which lends itself to the kind of description in the selection. In your work, try to emphasize the contrast between the background and the moving figures; the effects of light and darkness; ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... and priests unto God." It is certainly far more natural, far more reasonable, to suppose that the scriptural phrase "the blood of Christ" means "the death of Christ," with its historical consequences, than to imagine that it signifies a complicated and mysterious scheme of sacerdotal or ethical expiation, especially when that scheme is unrelated to contemporaneous opinion, irreconcilable withmorality,and confessedly nowhere plainly stated in Scripture, but a matter of late and laborious construction ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... Useguhha, the fortifications of which are equal to any met with in Persia. The area of the town is about half a square mile, while four towers of stone guard each corner. There are four gates, one in each wall, which are closed with solid square doors of African teak, and carved with complicated devices. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... Isakipoika, with the addition of the name of his residence, wherever that may be; and his family name will be changed as often as his house. There may be a dozen different names in the course of one generation, and the list soon becomes too complicated and confused for an uneducated memory. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Finn knows very little except about what happened during his own life, or, at best, his father's. I never heard the Kalewala spoken of, and doubt very much whether it is known to the natives ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... souls, blinded by passion, have misunderstood the scope of our reforms and have not given credit to a Government just born. On the other hand, the war which broke out in Europe has all the more complicated our position. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... has also continued to find advocates in every country, even in the United States, where it seems to die hard, no matter how much is done to discredit it. Percolation devices are subdivided into the simple drip pots and the continuous percolation machines, as represented by numerous complicated and high-priced contrivances on the market. Gradually, however, true coffee lovers are realizing that the best results are to be obtained through simple percolation or simple filtration. There are good ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... These complicated disasters roused Antony from his lethargy. He sailed to Tyre, intending to take the field against the Parthians; but the season was too far advanced, and he therefore crossed the AEgean to Athens, where he found Fulvia ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various

... Le Moyne," said Pardee; "I have assumed a somewhat complicated relation to this matter, acting under the spirit of my instructions, which makes it desirable, perhaps almost necessary, that I should confer directly with the present owner of this ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... with a very complicated expression of face; but he was taking off his boot at the moment, and maybe it pinched ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner

... beauty, which is nevertheless great, but for painstaking. Knowing but one style of making a book beautiful, they lavished much time and loving care to achieve their end. The detail is extraordinarily minute and complicated. "I have counted," writes Professor Westwood, "[with a magnifying glass] in a small space scarcely three-quarters of an inch in length by less than half an inch in width, in the Book of Armagh, no less than 158 interlacements ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... successfully with them. Mick Maggott lived in such a manner that no one near him would have thought that he knew what whisky meant. His self-respect had returned to him, and he was manifestly 'boss.' There had come to be necessity for complicated woodwork below the surface, and he had shown himself to be a skilled miner. And it had come to pass that our two friends were as well assured of his honesty as of their own. He had been a veritable godsend to them,—and would remain so, could ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... the full and somewhat complicated history of Le Bien-Etre du Blesse, quoting from many of Madame d'Andigne's delightful letters. But there is no space here and I will merely mention that my own part as the American President of Le Bien-Etre du Blesse is to provide ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... in collecting the full amount of the rents from her tenants. I suppose that made the bookkeeping complicated, which must have been wearing on her nerves; and hence her temper. We lived, on Dover Street, in fear of her temper. Saturday had a distinct quality about it, derived from the imminence of Mrs. Hutch's visit. Of course I awoke ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin



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