"Archimedes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... splendors rest? It is no gigantic Atlas, as the Greeks fancied, that upholds the celestial sphere; all the constellations are kept from falling by an impalpable energy that uses no muscles and no masonry. The ancient mathematician, Archimedes, once said, "Give me a foot of ground outside the globe to stand upon, and I will make a lever that will lift the world." The invisible lever of gravitation, however, without any fulcrum or purchase, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... of uranium. He estimated that nature had stored more uranium in but one of the abutments of this cliff than in all the known mines of the entire world. This radioactive mountain was the fulcrum by which this modern Archimedes had moved the earth. The vast amount of matter disintegrated by the Ray and thrown off into space with a velocity a thousandfold greater than the blast of a siege gun produced a back pressure or recoil against the face of the cliff, which thus became the "thrust block" of the force which had ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... between breakfast and dinner. The guilelessness of the supernumerary does not last long. A youth enlightened by gleams by Parisian life soon measures the frightful distance that separates him from the head-clerkship, a distance which no mathematician, neither Archimedes, nor Leibnitz, nor Laplace has ever reckoned, the distance that exists between 0 and the figure 1. He begins to perceive the impossibilities of his career; he hears talk of favoritism; he discovers the intrigues of officials: he sees the questionable means ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... When Archimedes, long ago, Spoke out so grandly, "dos pou sto— Give me a place to stand on, I'll move your planet for you, now,"— He little dreamed or fancied how The sto at last should find its pou For woman's faith ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of small glass did behold, He smil'd, and to the gods these words he told. "Comes then the power of man's art to this? In a frail orb my work new acted is, The poles' decrees, the fate of things, God's laws, Down by his art old Archimedes draws. Spirits inclos'd the sev'ral stars attend, And orderly the living work they bend. A feigned Zodiac measures out the year, Ev'ry new month a false moon doth appear. And now bold industry is proud, it can Wheel round its world, and rule the stars by man. Why at Salmoneus' ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... a later age imitated and surpassed Archytas. But even Archimedes was not free from the prevailing notion that geometry was degraded by being employed to produce anything useful. It was with difficulty that he was induced to stoop from speculation to practice. He was half ashamed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... learning. But there is just that power in the love of knowledge, and it was this that caused Lincoln to derive happiness from doing what would have been a source of misery to David. Some of the most marked instances of self-forgetfulness recorded are connected with the pursuit of knowledge. Archimedes was so much in love with the studies of his profession, that, etc., etc. Professor Heyne, of Goettingen," etc., etc., etc.—A clearer explanation than this we have rarely met with outside the realm ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... its self-indulgence? It is the drunkenness of drugs, and woe be unto him that crosseth the threshold of its dream-curtained portal, for though gifted with the strength of Samson, the courage of Richard and the genius of Archimedes, he shall never return, and of him it is written that forever he ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... anxious, for it knows not the dangers of the way which it travels. Of the private habits of the persons who have been peculiarly distinguished by their genius, our information is small; but the little that has been recorded for us of the chief of them,—of Sophocles, Archimedes, Hippocrates; and in modern times, of Dante and Tasso, of Rafaelle, Albrecht Duerer, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Fielding, and others,—confirms this observation.' Schiller himself confirms it; perhaps more strongly than most of ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... of the Bath.—One of the most valuable discoveries made by Archimedes, the famous scholar of Syracuse, in Sicily, relates to the weight of bodies immersed in water. Hiero, King of Syracuse, had given a lump of gold to be made into a crown, and when it came back he suspected that the workmen had kept back some of the gold, and had made up the weight by adding more ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... as year after year the weather-beaten ships returned from their venturesome pilgrimage, the first glimpse of home that greeted them was likely to be the beacon-light in the tower where the master sat poring over problems of Archimedes or watching the stars. For Henry, whose motto was "Talent de bien faire," or (in the old French usage) "Desire[381] to do well," was wont to throw himself whole-hearted into whatever he undertook, and the study of astronomy and mathematics he pursued so zealously as to reach a foremost ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... attention—my best-bound quarto—is spread upon a piece of bedroom-furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face from the book with an almost ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... perfect emotional solitude, close study, absolute chastity and celibacy, and at last the merging of the personal into the impersonal. This austere life is the secret of all greatness. You know how Archimedes when threatened with death by the vandalistic invaders of his country raised his head and said 'Please do not disturb my circles' and nothing more. This man was practising Yoga unconsciously. You must be able to lose all consciousness of this relative ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... canals, there are still abundance of high lands which cannot receive the benefit of the Nile's overflowing; this want is supplied by spiral pumps, which are turned by oxen, in order to bring the water into pipes, which convey it to these lands. Diodorus speaks of a similar engine invented by Archimedes in his travels into Egypt, which is ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... they would poll at cockcrow if they might; they dance on the morning. As for their chagrin at noon, you will find descriptions of it in the poet's Inferno. They are for lifting our clay soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great mathematicians. They have perchance a foot of our earth, and perpetually do they seem to be producing an effect, perpetually does the whole land roll back on them. You have not surely to be reminded that it hurts them; the weight is immense. Dr. Shrapnel, however, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tongues. The truth is that no powers of mind constitute a security against errors of this description. Touching God and His ways with man, the highest human faculties can discover little more than the meanest. In theology the interval is small indeed between Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage. It is not strange, therefore, that wise men, weary of investigation, tormented by uncertainty, longing to believe something, and yet seeing objections to every thing, should submit themselves ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the early aviators. Durer was his parallel and Roger Bacon—whom the Franciscans silenced—of his kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared. And half the alchemists ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... on. My infancy was one sickening round of glory. Did I build a house of bricks four courses high? Archimedes wasn't in it with me. Did I sing a nursery rhyme to a tune all one note? Apollo was a dabbler in music beside me. Did one of my first teeth drop out without my knowing it? Casabianca on the burning deck couldn't ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... a great mass of earth, in which there grew not merely flowers and shrubs, but tress also of the largest size. Water was supplied from the Euphrates through pipes, and was raised (it is said) by a screw, working on the principal of Archimedes. To prevent the moisture from penetrating into the brick-work and gradually destroying the building, there were interposed between the bricks and the mass of soil, first a layer of reeds mixed with bitumen, then a double layer of burnt brick cemented ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... destroy the ships of war, and to join me at Palermo; leaving one or two ships to cruise between Capri and Ischia, in order to prevent the entrance of any English ships into the Bay of Naples. On the 23d, at seven in the evening, the Vanguard, Samnite, and Archimedes, with about twenty sail of vessels, left the Bay of Naples, The next day, it blew much harder than I ever experienced since I have been at sea. Your lordship will believe, that my anxiety was not lessened ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... greenhouse could be dilated into a crystal palace, and with two common materials—glass and iron—he raised the palace of the genii; the brightest idea and the noblest ornament added to Europe in this century—the koh-i-noor of the west. Livy's definition of Archimedes goes on the ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... the way, did you ever hear of my machine for teazing wool? Wonderful invention! horse labor entirely superseded: a little steam, and a man or two,—give me these, and I'll teaze the whole world. Wonderful the progress of the human intellect since the time of Archimedes!—But no doubt you are acquainted with my ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... date is better known to the reader than those I am preparing for him. When the magistrates of Syracuse were showing to Cicero the curiosities of the place, he desired to visit the tomb of Archimedes; but, to his surprise, they acknowledged that they knew nothing of any such tomb, and denied that it ever existed. The learned Cicero, convinced by the authorities of ancient writers, by the verses of the inscription which he remembered, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... tradition, a new standard of clear and precise thought which affects even literary expression, a flow of mathematical and physical discoveries so rapid that ten years added more to the sum of knowledge than all that had been added since the days of Archimedes, the introduction of organised co-operation to increase knowledge by the institution of the Royal Society at London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris, Observatories—realising Bacon's Atlantic dream—characterise the opening ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... very irritable and always thinking that the other shades were laughing at him or trying to take advantage of him. There were two, however, whom he hated with a fury that tormented him far more seriously than anything else ever did. The first of these was Archimedes who had instituted a series of experiments in regard to various questions connected with mechanics and had conceived a scheme by which he hoped to utilise the motive power of the stone for the purpose of lighting Hades with ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... is it "little" in relation to? If in relation to what there is to know, then all human knowledge is little. If in relation to what actually is known by somebody, then we must condemn as "dangerous" the knowledge which Archimedes possessed of mechanics, or Copernicus of astronomy; for a shilling primer and a few weeks' study will enable any student to outstrip in mere information some of the greatest teachers of the past. No doubt, that little knowledge which thinks itself to be great may possibly be a dangerous, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... consequences—differences that follow from the fundamental difference. It did happen to the ancients accidentally to experiment with a view to measuring, as also to discover a law expressing a constant relation between magnitudes. The principle of Archimedes is a true experimental law. It takes into account three variable magnitudes: the volume of a body, the density of the liquid in which the body is immersed, the vertical pressure that is being exerted. And it states indeed that ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... wherever it was possible, tunnels were constructed, and the water drained off to a lower level.[1036] In the deeper mines this, of course, could not be done, and such workings had to be abandoned, until the invention of the Archimedes' screw (ab. B.C. 220-190), when the water was pumped up to the surface, and so got rid of.[1037] But before this date Phoenicia had ceased to exist as an independent country, and the mines that had once been hers were either no longer worked, or had ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... contemplation where the present world has no part: He has no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never expect to remove the earth he rests upon, while he has no support beside for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand. To talk of bearing pain and grief, without any sort of present or future hope, cannot be purely greatness of spirit; there must be a mixture in it of affectation, and an alloy of pride, or perhaps is ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... designate the hidden forces of nature; or, it is a mathematical point, which has neither length, breadth, nor thickness. A philosopher [David Hume] has very ingeniously said in speaking of theologians, that they have found the solution to the famous problem of Archimedes; a point in the heavens from ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... against Arjuna the great arithmetician and is asked to express numbers greater than 100 kotis.[56] In reply he gave a scheme of number names as high as 10^{53}, adding that he could proceed as far as 10^{421},[57] all of which suggests the system of Archimedes and the unsettled question of the indebtedness of the West to the East in the realm of ancient mathematics.[58] Sir Edwin Arnold, {16} in The Light of Asia, does not mention this part of the contest, but he speaks of Buddha's training at the hands ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... divinity to my lords the {10} bishops, who proposes to send ship, by the force of steam, with all the velocity of a ball from the mouth of a cannon, and who pretends by the power of his steam-impelled oars to beat the waters of the ocean into the hardness of adamant; or to the burning-glasses of Archimedes, recorded in their effects by credible writers, actually imitated by Proclus at the siege of Constantinople with Archimedes' own success, yet boldly pronounced by some of our best judges, demonstrably impracticable in themselves, and lately demonstrated by some ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... illustrate like a fact. But the philosophers are wrong, as they generally are, even in the commonest things; because they seldom look beyond their own tenets, unless through captiousness, and because they argue more than they meditate, and display more than they examine. Archimedes and Euclid are, in my opinion, after our Epicurus, the worthiest of the name, having kept apart to the demonstrable, the practical, and the useful. Many of the rest are good writers and good disputants; but unfaithful suitors of simple science, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... to death. Then Euclid, who was a Megarensian, and had attended the lectures of Socrates before this decree, disguising himself in a woman's dress, used to go from Megara to Athens by night to hear Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent and excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who would not declare his name, nor lift his head from the diagram he had drawn, by which he might have prolonged his life, but thinking more of study than of life dyed with his life-blood the figure ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... the strained and peculiar condition of affairs in Atchison county. Archimedes Speck lived on the Stranger Creek, several miles below the residence of the writer. He was a man of magnificent physical development, and was a pronounced Free State man. His wife's people originally came from North Carolina, and she was proud of ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... the surface; they were to be sought for and traced through frightful depths, where very often floods of water stopped the miners, and seemed to defeat all future pursuits. But avarice is no less patient in undergoing fatigues, than ingenious in finding expedients. By pumps, which Archimedes had invented when in Egypt, the Romans afterwards threw up the water out of these pits, and quite drained them. Numberless multitudes of slaves perished in these mines, which were dug to enrich their masters; who treated them with the utmost barbarity, forced them by heavy stripes ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... as soon as they knew the Toxidae had arrived at the Imperial camp. Every night these Skipetars who could cross the moat betook themselves to Kursheed's quarters. One single man yet baffled all the efforts of the besiegers. The chief engineer, Caretto, like another Archimedes, still carried terror into the midst ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that he was bred up a scholar, and not only versed in the law of Mahomet, but acquainted with all kinds of polite learning. For this reason he is not at all surprised when Dorax calls him a Phaeton in one place, and in another tells him he is like Archimedes. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... of belief in science, of respect for scientific pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open new paths through the great field of the inductive sciences by observation, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of this allied force, and did not learn until afterward that it was Grantline. The Cometara had fallen upon the Moon Apennines, not very far from where my old Planetara still lay, near the base of Archimedes. But Grantline and a few of his companions, with their powered suits, had struggled free from the gravity pull of the wreckage; and a few hours later, a ship out from ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... When you hear Archimedes' conundrum, Like enough you'll be wanting to try Whether one little girl contra mundum Can't lift the ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... of their author, also show us in what estimation we should hold the higher orders of being. "We may even perceive a rational nature in men, if we refer to such examples as PLATO, ARISTOTLE, HIPPARCHUS, ARCHIMEDES, and many others. If, therefore, in such a colluvies as the human body, (for by what better name can we characterize a mixture of blood, bile, and phlegm,) a mind is formed of such great and excellent faculties, what must we think of the excellence ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... see it partially carried out by an enterprising company in this city, whose enormous vans will remove the whole furniture of a drawing-room, almost as it stands, without packing. My chief difficulty is with the fulcrum; but that is a difficulty that met the philosopher of old. You have heard of Archimedes, William—the man who said he could make a lever big enough to move the world, if he could only get a fulcrum to rest it on. But Archimedes was weak in that point. He ought to have known that, even if he did get such a fulcrum, he would still have required another world as long as his ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... A woman does not always know why she is in love. It is rarely that a man falls in love without some selfish purpose. A husband should discover this secret motive of egotism, for it will be to him the lever of Archimedes. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... increasing intellectual power; he thought that where the greatest advance in intellect is supposed to have been made this might be wholly due to the cumulative effect of successive acquisitions of knowledge handed down from age to age by written or printed books; that Euclid and Archimedes were probably the equals of any of our greatest mathematicians of to-day; and that we are entitled to believe that the higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been approximately stationary during the whole period of human history. This ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Great Britain was never forged. About that time the substitution of the Screw for the paddle-wheel as a means of propulsion was attracting much attention. The performances of the Archimedes, as arranged by Mr. Francis P. Smith, were so satisfactory that Mr. Brunel, after he had made an excursion in that vessel, recommended the directors to adopt the new propelling power. After much discussion, they yielded to his strongly-urged advice. The consequence was, that ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... children learn their geometry from a book written for the schools of Alexandria two thousand years ago. Modern astronomy is the natural continuation and development of the work of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy; modern physics of that of Democritus and of Archimedes; it was long before modern biological science outgrew the knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... become less scanty, even voluminous, and they are more legible. The books are full of the great names of her visitors and of those native to her island. We read of the Tyrants, of AEschylus and Pindar, of Theocritus and Archimedes; of the great siege when the Athenians failed to take the city; of Cicero coming to view the locality when preparing his speeches against Verres; of the five parts into which ancient Siracusa was ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... changes, where so many brave orators are; where so many grave philosophers; Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates. Where so many heroes of the old times; and then so many brave captains of the latter times; and so many kings. After all these, where Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes; where so many other sharp, generous, industrious, subtile, peremptory dispositions; and among others, even they, that have been the greatest scoffers and deriders of the frailty and brevity of this our human life; as Menippus, and others, as many as there have been such as he. Of all these ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... Archimedes said that if you would give him room to stand on, he would move the earth. One truth leads to another; each discovery renders possible another, and, what is more, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... himself, and even seriously racking his brain to find a direction for this single force four times multiplied, with which he did not doubt, as with the lever for which Archimedes sought, they should succeed in moving the world, when someone tapped gently at his door. D'Artagnan awakened Planchet and ordered him to ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Gorham's exposition of his conception of the Archimedes lever, as opposed to that which Allen Sanford had heard his father give. To Gorham the power of the lever depended upon the strength of the imaginative ideals, and the "cold, hard cash" was simply the necessary fulcrum upon which ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... elementary works of geometry, Galileo passed to the writings of Archimedes; and while he was studying the hydrostatical treatise[3] of the Syracusan philosopher, he wrote his essay on the hydrostatical balance,[4] in which he describes the construction of the instrument, and the method by which Archimedes detected ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... two educations—one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives himself." Archimedes said, "Give me a standing-place and I will move the world." But Goethe more happily says, "Make good thy standing-place and move the world." Circumstances may afford a standing-place, but self-reliance ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... was remarkable for the rapid advance of scientific knowledge. Most of the mathematical works of the Greeks date from this epoch. Euclid wrote a treatise on geometry which still holds its place in the schools. Archimedes of Syracuse, who had once studied at Alexandria, made many discoveries in engineering. A water screw of his device is still in use. He has the credit for finding out the laws of the lever. "Give me a fulcrum on which to rest," he said, "and I will move the earth." ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... a serene indifference to hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and excursions ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Syrians to offices of importance, and the latter under the patronage of their masters continued their studies of Greek science and philosophy and translated those writings into Syriac and Arabic. Among the authors translated were, Hippocrates and Galen in medicine, Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy in mathematics and astronomy, and Aristotle, Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias in philosophy. In many cases the Greek writings were not turned directly into Arabic but as the translators were Syrians, the versions were made first into Syriac, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... devil could I imagine that Aramis had become so clever an engineer as to be able to fortify like Polybius, or Archimedes?" ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... allies. He stayed in the south, however, trying to gain the alliance of the king of Macedon, and stirring up Syracuse to revolt. Marcellus, who was consul for the third time, was sent to reduce the city, which made a famous defence, for it contained Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of his time, who devised wonderful machines for crushing the besiegers in unexpected ways; but at last Marcellus found a weak part of the walls and surprised the citizens. He had given orders that Archimedes ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws, Which others at their bar so often wrench, To-day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench In mirth that after no repenting draws; Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause, And what the Swede intend, and what the French. To measure life learn thou betimes, and know Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; For other things mild Heaven a time ordains, And disapproves that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... collection," says Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we find in his works," and "wonderfully accurate considering the manner in which they were obtained;" yet he failed to understand the real nature of the famous experiment of Archimedes. And so with the larger features of his teaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he had emancipated himself from the power of words and of common prepossessions; how for one reason or another he had failed to call himself to account in the terms he employed, and the assumptions on ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... two best gifts of worldly fortune, a lace with nothing but brass and a pocket with nothing but copper in it, has a brilliant, if a short, career before him, and will be sure to gain the character of ability; for if ambition but find selfishness to work upon, it has that leverage which Archimedes wished for. But time makes sad havoc with this false greatness, with this reputation which passes for fame, and this adroitness which passes for wisdom, with merely acute minds. When Plausibility and Truth divided the world between them, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... for an Archimedes new, Of moral powers possess'd, The world to move, and quite expel That traitor from ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... instruments. Perhaps only an expert should deal—even in the few sentences required for our purpose—with such matters as the calculation of the capacity and proportional relations of cylinders, or with the mechanics and hydrostatics of Archimedes. That philosopher so far understood the laws of applied force that he had boasted: "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the world." What he and others had learned concerning fluid pressure, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... vegetable increase proceeds under a different law from that which governs animal increase, but that, through an accident of position, the experiment cannot be tried in England. Surely the levers of Archimedes, with submission to Sir Edward B. Lytton, were not the less levers because he wanted the locum standi. It is proper, by the way, that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look for Coleridge's skirmishings with Malthus. They ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Paul's eyes,—tears drawn from an honorable man by the shame of this discussion as much as by the peremptory speech of Madame Evangelista, threatening rupture,—and the old man stanched them with a gesture like that of Archimedes when he cried, "Eureka!" The words "peer of France" had been to him like a ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... made at Mr. Smith's request, by Mr. Pilgrim, of the Archimedes; the original experimental vessel in which this mode of propulsion was first tried upon the large scale. Mr. Pilgrim has been long versed in all that relates to the mechanism of this instrument, and is indeed a most expert ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley
... of his experiment are tormenting the surface of the globe; and amongst them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin. Through this mighty labyrinth of sounds, which Archimedes, aided by his arenarius, could not sum or disentangle, one solitary infant's feet are distinctly recognized on the banks of the Tigris, distant by four hundred and forty days' march of an army or a caravan. These feet, these steps, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... out; And you will be perhaps surprised to find All things pursue exactly the same route, As now with those of soi-disant sound mind. This I could prove beyond a single doubt, Were there a jot of sense among Mankind; But till that point d'appui is found, alas! Like Archimedes, I leave ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... above two hundred and fourteen years, for it was so great that they could not by any device get it so much as above the ground, although they used all the means that are found in Vitruvius de Architectura, Albertus de Re Aedificatoria, Euclid, Theon, Archimedes, and Hero de Ingeniis; for all that was to no purpose. Wherefore, condescending heartily to the humble request of the citizens and inhabitants of the said town, he determined to remove it to the tower that was erected for it. With that he came to the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... would like to see her a city of two, three, four millions of inhabitants, something fabulous, colossal, unknown down to our day, and its public establishments adequate to its population.... Archimedes proposed to lift the world if he could be allowed to place his lever; for myself, I would have changed it wherever I could have been allowed to exercise my energy, perseverance, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... devil could I imagine that Aramis had become so clever an engineer, as to be able to fortify like Polybius or Archimedes?" ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... The creed of Archimedes, erst of Sicily, And of D'Israeli ... forti nil difficile, Is likewise mine. Pygmalion was a fool Who should ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... with an expression of countenance which Archimedes might have worn when he made his ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... city is natural to men, in all times, if they live or have lived in a metropolis noted for dignity or prowess. Caesar boasted of his native Rome; Lycurgus of Sparta; Virgil of Andes; Demosthenes of Athens; Archimedes of Syracuse; and Paul of Tarsus. I should suspect a man of base-heartedness who carried about with him no feeling of complacency in regard to the place of his residence; who gloried not in its arts, or arms, or behavior; who looked with no exultation upon its evidences ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... of his contemporaries. His scheme was enthusiastically applauded, and furiously attacked. The friends of improvement extolled him as the greatest of all the benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In spite of these eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not left undefended. There were fools in that age who opposed the introduction ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... those who have wrought strongly upon opinion or practice in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke. I take none but names known out of their {6} fields of work; and all were learned as well as sagacious. I have chosen my instances: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Archimedes, as perhaps you have never heard, needed only a lever to move the world. Such a lever I had put into the hands of Delphine, with which she might move, not indeed the grand globe, with its multiplied attractions, relations, and affinities, but the lesser world ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... to have their origin there, or in any strict sense to form a part of the peculiarly Alexandrian literature. The founder of the mathematical school was the celebrated Euclid (Eucleides); among its scholars were Archimedes; Apollonius of Perga, author of a treatise on Conic Sections; Eratosthenes, to whom we owe the first measurement of the earth; and Hipparchus, the founder of the epicyclical theory of the heavens, afterwards called the Ptolemaic system, from its most famous expositor, Claudius ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Syracuse uncaptured. The second was the siege by Timoleon, who took the city almost without a blow. The third was the siege by the Romans, in which the genius of one man, the celebrated mathematician and engineer Archimedes, long set at naught all the efforts of ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... we may, that even in imperfect plots there are less degrees of nature, by which some faint emotions of pity and terror are raised in us; as a less engine will raise a less proportion of weight, though not so much as one of Archimedes's making; for nothing can move our nature, but by some natural reason, which works upon passions. And, since we acknowledge the effect, there must be something in ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... whose knowledge had but yesterday culminated in the assurance that it was impossible to know anything, could now assert with positive conviction, that the human soul could exist apart from the matter it had animated. He had thus gained that fixed footing outside the earth which Archimedes had demanded to enable him to move it; and he should soon be able to exert his power over departed souls, whose nature he now understood as well as—ay, and better than—Serapion. Korinna's obedient ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... into five species, being transmitted through the medium of the senses. The facts of moral sensibility, on the contrary, owe nothing to the body. What is there in common between the pleasure of Archimedes in discovering the laws of weight and the filthy gratification of Apicius in ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... 'natural selection' or survival of the fittest. Yet it was just that lever dexterously applied, and carefully weighted with the whole weight of his endlessly accumulated inductive instances, that finally enabled our modern Archimedes to move the world." ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... with the needy. Only last night he reminded me of an illustration of the vanitas vanitatum of human fame and national gratitude, to be found over yonder in the necropolis. Less than a hundred and forty years after his death, Archimedes was so completely forgotten by the city he had immortalized, that Syracuse denied he was buried on her soil; and a foreigner had the honor of clearing away rubbish and brambles, in order to show the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... When Archimedes, or some other gentleman, said that he could unfix the earth had he a point of resistance for his lever, he illustrated, by a hypothesis of physics, the law of the generation of aristocracies. Aristocracies begin by having a leg to stand on, or by getting a finger in the pie. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... this, he dealt with metaphysics as we should with a problem from Euclid, and expected by rigorous reasoning to discover the truth. He, like Archimedes, had wished for a standing place from which to use the lever, that should overturn the world; but, having a sure standing place in the indubitable fact of his own existence, he did not possess sufficient ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... added Mr Barlow, "of how much use a superiority of knowledge is frequently capable of making individuals. But a still more famous instance is that of Archimedes, one of the most celebrated mathematicians of his time. He, when the city of Syracuse was besieged by the Romans, defended it for a long time by the surprising machines he invented, in such a manner that they began to despair of taking it." "Do pray," said Tommy, ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... then From saving women falls to killing men. Another such had left the nation thin, In spite of all the children he brought in. His pills as thick as hand grenadoes flew; And where they fell, as certainly they slew: His name struck everywhere as great a damp, As Archimedes' through the Roman camp. With this, the doctor's pride began to cool; For smarting soundly may convince a fool. But now repentance came too late for grace; And meagre famine stared him in the face: ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... "When Archimedes so long ago Spoke out so grandly, 'Dos pou sto— Give me a place to stand on; I'll move your planet for you now,' He little dreamed or fancied how The sto at last should find its pou For woman's faith to ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... pleased your return. Approach Mid-Northern hemisphere, region of Archimedes, forty thousand toises[C] off ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... pleased your return. Approach Mid-Northern Hemisphere region of Archimedes, forty thousand off ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... and mechanical principles which were known to Europeans at this time. More than one learned essay has been written to prove the mechanical indebtedness of the modern world to the ancient, particularly to the works of those mechanically minded Greeks: Archimedes, Aristotle, Ctesibius, and Hero of Alexandria. The Greeks employed the lever, the tackle, and the crane, the force-pump, and the suction-pump. They had discovered that steam could be mechanically applied, though ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... from the bottom of the Adriatic, where the ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago. Even Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention revived by Leonardo da Vinci and by him attributed to Archimedes.[8] The Congreve rocket is said to have an Eastern origin, Sir William Congreve having observed its destructive effects when employed by the forces under Tippoo Saib in the Mahratta war, on which he adopted and improved the missile, and brought out ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... attempt made with so much energy would have succeeded, had it not been for one person then at Syracuse. That person was Archimedes, a man of unrivalled skill in observing the heavens and the stars, but more deserving of admiration as the inventor and constructor of warlike engines and works, by means of which, with a very slight effort, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... Negro. Gentleness is a wonderful agency in managing a Negro: I know it tells powerfully upon white folks. The psalmist, addressing his Maker, says, "Thy gentleness hath made me great." It is a mighty lever; it moves the world; it moved it before Archimedes; it moves it still; but peevishness, fault-finding, scolding, cursing, premature censure, haughty and assuming ways, sullenness, ill-temper, whether in the field, the kitchen, the nursery, or parlor, will legitimately result in thriftlessness, revolt, departure, and contempt for ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... broken, and Hippocrates and Epicydes undertook the government of the city. No course was left to the consul except to undertake a siege; but the skilful conduct of the defence, in which the Syracusan engineer Archimedes, celebrated as a learned mathematician, especially distinguished himself, compelled the Romans after besieging the city for eight months to convert the siege into a blockade ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the imprisoned vapor throw open the lid of a teakettle, and lo! a steam engine came puffing from his brain. And now many a huge monster of Corliss, beautiful as a vision of Archimedes and smooth in movement as a wheeling planet, sends its thrill of life and power through mammoth plants of humming machinery. The fiery courser of the steel-bound track shoots over hill and plain, like a mid-night meteor through the fields of ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... 'You have. Archimedes, Newcomen, Watt, Telford, Stephenson, those are your father's direct ancestors. Have you forgotten them? Have you forgotten your father, and the railways he made over half Europe, and his great energy and skill, and all connected with him as ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... elsewhere—a fiction of his own for state purposes, apparently, backed by the use of artificial mirrors. Nizami tells that Alexander invented the steel mirror, by which he means, of course, that improved reflectors were used for telescopy in the days of Archimedes, but not early enough to have assisted Jamshid, who belongs to the fabulous and unchronicled age. In the romance of Beyjan and Manija, in the "Shah Nama," this mirror is used by the great Khosru for the purpose of discovering the place of the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... hearty love of God and man. This is the only true religion; and I would to God our country was full of it. For it is the only spice to embalm and to immortalize our republic. Any politician can sketch out a fine theory of government, but what is to bind the people to the practice? Archimedes used to mourn that though his mechanic powers were irresistible, yet he could never raise the world; because he had no place in the heavens, whereon to fix his pullies. Even so, our republic will never be ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... striking, on account of its size and situation, is that large one which is called Archimedes, and is about fifty miles in diameter; and you will notice that a rugged mass of mountains and high hills extends from it to a distance of over a hundred miles on the south. The floor of this walled plain is only about 600 feet below the general ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below upwards, was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Thus cheered, he has returned to his task with a smile, which perhaps had something of doubt in it, but which, nevertheless, evinced a resolution to try again. I have seen the boy's eye brighten, and at length, with a pleasure of which the ecstasy of Archimedes was but a simple expansion, heard him exclaim, 'I have it, sir.' The consciousness of self-power, thus awakened, was of immense value; and animated by it, the progress of the class was truly astonishing. It was often my custom to give the boys their choice of pursuing their propositions ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the stars, not only those that are fixed, but also those which are improperly called wandering; and the man who has acquainted himself with all their revolutions and motions is fairly considered to have a soul resembling the soul of that Being who has created those stars in the heavens: for when Archimedes described in a sphere the motions of the moon, sun, and five planets, he did the very same thing as Plato's God, in his Timaeus, who made the world, causing one revolution to adjust motions differing as much as possible in their slowness and velocity. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... along my own way in such matters as these. I can depend upon myself for having no go-ahead theories that I would rashly bring into practice. My only wish is to have the opportunity of cultivating some intercourse with the hands beyond the mere "cash nexus." But it might be the point Archimedes sought from which to move the earth, to judge from the importance attached to it by some of our manufacturers, who shake their heads and look grave as soon as I name the one or two experiments that I should ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... certain Seignior Seignioroni, a surgeon of Seville, has recently invented an admirable substitute for the clumsy, old-fashioned tourniquet. As I understand it, it is something like a pair of calipers, working with a small Archimedes screw—a very clever invention, according to all accounts. For the padded points at the end of the arches"—arching his forefinger and thumb—"can be so worked as to approximate in such a way, as to—but you don't attend ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... too, many less celebrated men have written treatises on the laws of symmetry, such as Nexaris, Theocydes, Demophilus, Pollis, Leonidas, Silanion, Melampus, Sarnacus, and Euphranor; others again on machinery, such as Diades, Archytas, Archimedes, Ctesibius, Nymphodorus, Philo of Byzantium, Diphilus, Democles, Charias, Polyidus, Pyrrus, and Agesistratus. From their commentaries I have gathered what I saw was useful for the present subject, and formed it into one complete treatise, ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... write a thousand lines of as light a subject. Socrates (whom the oracle pronounced the wisest man of Greece) sometimes danced: Scipio and Laslius, by the sea-side, played at peeble-stone: Semel insanivimus omnes. Every man cannot with Archimedes make a heaven of brass, or dig gold out of the iron mines of the law. Such odd trifles as mathematicians' experiments be artificial flies to hang in the air by themselves, dancing balls, an egg-shell that shall climb ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... said to have remarked, in view of the marvelous mechanical devices of Archimedes, that he would henceforth doubt nothing that had been asserted by Archimedes. This spirit of unbounded confidence in those who have exhibited unusual mathematical ability is still extant. Even our large city papers sometimes speak of a mathematical genius who could solve every ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... immediately to his imitation of Archimedes, only relaxing the intensity of his attention to the text (which blurred into jargon before his fixed gaze) when he heard that light laugh again. He pursed his lips, looked up at the ceiling as if slightly puzzled by some profound question beyond the reach of womankind; solved ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... our attention is universally allowed to be necessary to the successful labour of the understanding; but we may further observe, that this abstraction is characteristic in some cases of heroism as well as of genius. Charles the Twelfth and Archimedes were very different men; yet both, in similar circumstances, gave similar proofs of their uncommon power of abstracting their attention. "What has the bomb to do with what you are writing to Sweden," said the hero to his pale secretary ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... as they pronounce it here. The question was, Could such a name be fitly borne by a young lady at the Convent of the Stigmata? Half the population here have names as unchristian quite—Norma, Odoacer, Archimedes—my housemaid is called Themis—but Dionea seemed to scandalize every one, perhaps because these good folk had a mysterious instinct that the name is derived from Dione, one of the loves of Father Zeus, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... colleges and churches, afterwards expressing the great delight and profit which he had derived from his visit. He was entertained while there by Mr. Robertson, an eminent mathematician, then superintending the publication of an edition of the works of Archimedes. The architectural designs of buildings that most pleased him were those of Dr. Aldrich, Dean of Christchurch about the time of Sir Christopher Wren. He tore himself from Oxford with great regret, proceeding by Birmingham on his way home ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... the first circuit all the mathematical figures are conspicuously painted—figures more in number than Archimedes or Euclid discovered, marked symmetrically, and with the explanation of them neatly written and contained each in a little verse. There are definitions and propositions, &c. &c. On the exterior convex wall is first an immense drawing of the whole earth, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... thinking of Archimedes?" he asked. "What he said was 'Eureka' and what he found out ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... gives himself up to work of this kind is entitled to address your public prosecutor in the words of Archimedes, when, at the sacking of Syracuse, he was set upon, sword in hand, by the savage soldiery while drawing and studying his mathematical figures in the sand: ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... serve in the same battalion with architects' clerks on the one hand, or students at law on the other,—you may have, in your algebra class, a goldsmith who is afraid of being snobbish if he speaks to a map-engraver, or a tailor who does not presume to address an opinion on Archimedes' square to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... men]. To that place then we must remove, where there are so many great orators, and so many noble philosophers, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates; so many heroes of former days, and so many generals after them, and tyrants; besides these, Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes, and other men of acute natural talents, great minds, lovers of labor, versatile, confident, mockers even of the perishable and ephemeral life of man, as Menippus and such as are like him. As to all these consider that they have long been in the dust. ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... abstract pleasure resulting from the exertion of intellectual superiority and the discovery of truth and the bestowing benefits and blessings upon society, which induced men to sacrifice all their common enjoyments and all their privileges as citizens to these exertions. Anaxagoras, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Galileo Galilei, in their deaths or their imprisonments, offer instances of this kind, and nothing can be more striking than what appears to have been the ingratitude of men towards their ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... is of very remote origin. Aristophanes in his comedy "The Clouds," which is a satire aimed at the science and philosophy of his period (488-385 B. C.), mentions the "burning lens." Nearly every one is familiar with an achievement attributed to Archimedes in which he destroyed the ships at Syracuse by focusing the image of the sun upon them by means of a concave mirror. The ancient Egyptians were proficient in the art of glass-making, so it is likely that the "burning-glass" was employed by ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... known as the "Principle of Archimedes," runs to the following effect:—"Every body plunged into a liquid loses a portion of its weight equal to the weight of the fluid which it displaces." Everybody has verified this principle, and knows that objects are much lighter in water than out of it; a body plunged into water being acted ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion |
