"Infinitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reflection and in the original, all the books of all nations and ages, criticising, as we go along, both originals and criticisms. Every subject, said Burke—we remember his remark, though not the very words—branches out into infinitude. The point of view draws a horizon—the goal determines a track. "The British Critics" themselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... position between such and such latitudes and longitudes, but such descriptions convey to the mind only an idea which is quite vague and general. When we say that one hundred and fifty states like Connecticut, or twenty states like New York or Illinois, spread over that infinitude of peaks and ranges, would scarcely cover them, we gain a somewhat more adequate idea of their extent. But it is only by actually traversing this wilderness of hills and mountains, east and west, north and south, that we can more fully ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Waterloo and Lisbon earthquakes, the Revolutions and the Warring Religions, all the glory and shame, the wild loves and bitter hatreds of humanity—even Birth and Death—but minor notes in the Grand Symphony, the Harmony of Infinitude, the little man who has undertaken the management of the microphone, without suspecting its significance, distracts us with the unwished for and utterly useless information that the Voice coming from beyond Time and Space, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to me,' he cried in his heart, 'for I cannot go to thee. If I were to go up and up through that awful space for ages and ages, I should never find thee. Yet there thou art. The tenderness of thy infinitude looks upon me from those heavens. Thou art in them and in me. Because thou thinkest, I think. I am thine—all thine. I abandon myself to thee. Fill me with thyself. When I am full of thee, my griefs themselves will grow golden in thy sunlight. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... meshes and meshes of harmonies, spread out, outside our narrow field of momentary vision, an endless web, like the constellations which, strung on their threads of mutual dependence, cover and fill up infinitude. ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... large number of good and plump seed; perhaps you may have seen the ripe capsules of other Vandeae, and may be able to form some conjecture what it ought to produce. In the young, unfertilised ovaria of many Vandeae there seemed an infinitude of ovules. In desperation it occurs to me as just possible, as almost everything in nature goes by gradation, that a properly male flower might occasionally produce a few seeds, in the same manner as female plants sometimes produce a little pollen. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... material pleasure, to be gained at once by one quick dash through the grave. As has, in fact, often been the case many would be prepared willingly to die now for the sake of the paradise hereafter. But Occultism gives no such prospect of cheaply and immediately gained infinitude of pleasure, wisdom and existence. It only promises extensions of these, stretching in successive arches obscured by successive veils, in an unbroken series up the long vista which leads to NIRVANA. And this too, qualified ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... reason. By the union of these two qualities man will associate the highest degree of self-spontaneity (autonomy) and of freedom with the fullest plenitude of existence, and instead of abandoning himself to the world so as to get lost in it, he will rather absorb it in himself, with all the infinitude of its phenomena, and subject it to the unity of ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... luminiferous ether—conceive a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass—an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point—there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... her for a few moments in silence, his countenance assumed an indefinable expression, and seemed to read in the countenance of the young girl an infinitude of memories and dreams. Finally, completely carried away by a feeling he could not control, he folded Aminta in his arms and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Himself, so as in a manner to divinize them, and even sometimes imparting visible external marks of their sublime spiritual exaltation. It would seem as if He desired to manifest to men in their persons, the immensity of His goodness, the infinitude of His condescension, and the magnificence of His riches. They are the specially favoured among the favoured: they form a class apart, in which God, wonderful in all ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... living ray I met, That, if mine eyes had turn'd away, methinks, I had been lost; but, so embolden'd, on I pass'd, as I remember, till my view Hover'd the brink of dread infinitude. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... entire prospect is studded over with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects—we borrow a larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... God,' leads up to that great thought that the true glory of the divine nature is its tenderness. The lowliness and death of Christ are the glory of God! Not in the awful attributes which separate that inconceivable Nature from us, not in the eternity of His existence, nor in the Infinitude of His Being, not in the Omnipotence of His unwearied arm, nor in fire-eyed Omniscience, but in the pity and graciousness which bend lovingly over us, is the true glory of God. These pompous 'attributes' are but the fringes of the brightness, the living white heart of which is love. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... was of some advantage to me. My social disposition, when not checked by some modifications of spirited pride, was like our catechism definition of infinitude, without bounds or limits. I formed several connections with other younkers, who possessed superior advantages; the youngling actors who were busy in the rehearsal of parts, in which they were shortly to appear on the stage of life, where, alas! I was destined to drudge behind ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... before to a wild spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony, which, having had its eager, stirring life at the time when Etruria was still a power in Italy, had perished in the age of the civil wars. In the absolute transparency of the air on this gracious day, an infinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with sparkling clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves—Flavian at work suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land at last. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with a tumble-down of quaint, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... stir Of cities and the ever-thickening press The poet and the worn philosopher To your bare peaks and radiant loneliness Escape, and breathe once more The wind of the Eternal: that clear mood, Which Nature and the elder ages bore, Lends them new courage and a second prime, At rest upon the cool infinitude ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... director of the observatory himself knew, they began to worry themselves regarding her revolution round the earth, whereupon twenty scientific reviews immediately came to the rescue. They pointed out to them that the firmament, with its infinitude of stars, may be considered as one vast dial-plate, upon which the moon travels, indicating the true time to all the inhabitants of the earth; that it is during this movement that the Queen of Night exhibits her different phases; that the moon is full when she ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky- way. Remembering what it was—what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light—I felt the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... older I grow the more marvellous seem to me the mere variety of form and habit in plants and animals, and the unerring certitude with which from a minute germ the whole complex organism is built up, true to the type of its kind in all the infinitude of details! It is this which gives such a charm to the watching of plants growing, and of kittens so rapidly developing their senses and habitudes!...—Yours ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... color in nature, broadly studied, leads us quickly to contemplate and adore the love of God. If God were the Almighty chiefly,—if he desired to impress us most with his omnipotence and infinitude, and make us bow with dread before him, how easily the world could have been made more somber, how easily our senses could have been created to receive impressions of the bleak vastness of space, how easily the mountains might have been made to breathe terror from their cliffs ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... ruling in the sky, the darkness on the earth.[42] The power of God displayed itself not only in the creation of the world of things, but equally in the limitations which He imposed upon each. The heavens and the earth stretched themselves out in length and breadth as though they aspired to infinitude, and it required the word of God to call a halt to ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... Glencora across the passage into what she called her dressing-room, and there found herself surrounded by an infinitude of feminine luxuries. The prettiest of tables were there;—the easiest of chairs;—the most costly of cabinets;—the quaintest of old china ornaments. It was bright with the gayest colours,—made pleasant to the eye with the binding of many books, having nymphs ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... and of the Prince's and other people's position in regard to it, has never yet been humanly set forth, otherwise the response had been different. Not humanly set forth,—and so was only barked at, as by the infinitude of little dogs, in all countries; and could never yet be responded to in austere VOX HUMANA, deep as a DE PROFUNDIS, terrible as a Chorus of AEschylus,—for in effect that is rather the character of it, had the barking once pleased to cease. "King of Prussia cannot ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... empire extends, and prolongs itself into infinitude! Christ reigns beyond life and beyond death. The past and the future are alike to Him; the kingdom of the truth has, and in effect can have, no other limit than the false. Jesus has taken possession of the human race; He has made of it a single nationality, the nationality of upright men, whom ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... impeached, took this opportunity to repeat his admonitions in the behalf of HAMET: 'What ever evil,' said he, 'thou canst bring upon HAMET, will be doubled to thyself: to his virtues, the Power that fills infinitude is a friend, and he can be afflicted only till they are perfect; but thy sufferings will be the punishment of vice, and as long as thou are vicious they ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... first enter a degree, there clings to us much that we have brought in with us, and at the end we already begin to feel symptoms of that which is to come. It is also noticeable that each degree contains within it an infinitude ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... to Mersenne that it will probably be finished in 1633, but meanwhile asks him not to disclose the secret to his Parisian friends. Already anxieties appear as to the theological verdict upon two of his fundamental views—the infinitude of the universe, and the earth's rotation round the sun.[16] But towards the end of year 1633 we find him writing as follows:—"I had intended sending you my World as a New Year's gift, and a fortnight ago I was still minded to send you a fragment of the work, if the whole of it ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... cloudless sky beyond. The slender, sweetly childish figure—with the tawny hair, I recall, all aglow with sunlight—filled the little world of our thought and vision. There was a patch of moss and rock, the green and gray of our land—there was Judith—there was an infinitude of blue space. John Cather's glance was frankly warm; 'twas a glance proceeding from clear, brave, guileless eyes—springing from a limpid soul within. It caressed the maid, in a fashion, thinks I, most brotherly. My heart warmed to the man; and I wondered that Judith should ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... mystery, but he will not unveil his; you may touch the poles of the planet, but you can never lay your hand on him. The same God that made you, made him also in His image; but if you try to bridge the gulf between you, you will learn something of God's infinitude. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... But what created mind can comprehend Thir number, or the wisdom infinite That brought them forth, but hid thir causes deep. I saw when at his Word the formless Mass, This worlds material mould, came to a heap: Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar 710 Stood rul'd, stood vast infinitude confin'd; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shon, and order from disorder sprung: Swift to thir several Quarters hasted then The cumbrous Elements, Earth, Flood, Aire, Fire, And this Ethereal quintessence of Heav'n Flew upward, spirited with various forms, That ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... our solar system, little was known of the magnitude and extent of the sidereal universe which occupies the infinitude of space by which we are surrounded. The stars were recognised as self-luminous bodies, inconceivably remote, and although they excited the curiosity of observers, and conjectures were made as to their origin, yet no conclusive opinions were arrived at with regard to their nature and ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... us was the empty infinitude; the twilight desert swept by a great cold wind; the desert that rolled, in dull, dead colours, under a still more sombre sky which, on the circular horizon, seemed to fall on it ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... destiny reigning throughout the Homeric poems, and from which even the gods are not exempt, Schlegel well observes, "This power extends also to the world of gods— for the Grecian gods are mere powers of nature—and although immeasurably higher than mortal man, yet, compared with infinitude, they are on an equal footing with himself."—'Lectures on the Drama' v. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the beach, his companions found the rudder of a ship, which had been wrecked, and said they had discovered a huge knife. "This," said he, "was the right thing to carve such a huge ham;" by which he really meant the sea, to whose infinitude, he thought, this enormous rudder matched. Also, as they passed the sandhills, and bade him look at the meal, meaning the sand, he replied that it had been ground small by the hoary tempests of the ocean. His companions praising his answer, he said that he had spoken it wittingly. Then ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the material seat of the mind is so insignificant, the mind itself is infinite, analogous to God in its capacity. Aristarchus and Metrodorus symbolise, perhaps, the spheres of literature and mathematics. This infinitude of the intellect is our real proof of God, our inner witness of the Deity. We may arrive at God by reasoning; we may trust authority; but it is only by impregnating our minds with God in Nature ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... principles which should guide and preserve each human existence, and my explanation shall be as brief and plain as I can make it. Granted that there is a Divine Mind or Governing Intelligence behind the infinitude of vital and productive atoms which in their union and reproduction build up the wonders of the Universe, we see and admit that one of the chief results of the working of this Divine Mind is Man. He is, so we have been told— 'the image of God.' This expression may be taken as a poetic ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... manner of atmospheric effects. It lay before him in the dim moonlight, indefinite; a succession of undulations running one into the other, not to be counted nor measured. All accurate notions of topography were lost; there was only landscape, dim, undeveloped, suggestive of infinitude. Standing thus in the happiness of loving and being loved, the soft indefiniteness of the landscape and the incessant hum of the field-crickets and katydids, sounds which came out of the everywhere, soothed Charlton like ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... is nothing infinite in its growth. And the long, hot years pass away and there it stands, never nearer to the infinite gold of the sun. But in the intense feeling of a man or woman is there not infinitude? Is there not a movement that is ceaseless till death comes to destroy—or ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... of observation might open upon their view, as the stellar swarms thickened and the power of human vision failed, but the uranological expedition would return no wiser than when it started, and Science would still be confronted with the same illimitability of space, the same infinitude of matter, and the same incomprehensibility of the world-arranging intelligence that lies beyond. For He who hath garnished the heavens by his spirit—who divideth the sea with his power, and hangeth the earth upon nothing—"holdeth ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... desert night set in with its dead silence, was one in which Cameron's mind was thronged with memories of a time long past—of a home back in Peoria, of a woman he had wronged and lost, and loved too late. He was a prospector for gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed infinitude, because he wanted to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... a little nearer her. She felt something as she had felt years ago when she had said to Dowie. "I want to kiss you, Dowie." Her eyes were pools of childish tenderness because she so well understood the infinitude of the friendly tact which drew her within its own circle with the light humour of its "I ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the scaly carcass of some huge serpent, extending its now harmless length from the ceiling to the floor—there an alligator, stuffed after the same fashion; and in various directions the skins of the beaver, the marten, the otter, and an infinitude of others of that genus, filled up spaces that were left unsupplied by the more ingenious specimens of Indian art. Head-dresses tastefully wrought in the shape of the crowning bays of the ancients, and composed of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... thing in God is love, and the true 'glory of God' is neither some symbolical flashing light nor the pomp of mere power and majesty; nor even those inconceivable and incommunicable attributes which we christen with names like Omnipotence and Omnipresence and Infinitude, and the like. These are all at the fringes of the brightness. The true central heart and lustrous light of the glory of God lie In His love, and of that glory Christ is the unique Representative and Revealer, because ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... requires of the painter that he even attempt to render the multitude and infinitude of Nature; but that he represent it through the chastened elements of his proper instrument, with a performance rendered distinctive and facile by study and ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... the elevation of the heights in the foreground. The greatness of the future makes the present little, but the little present is great, because its littleness is the parent of the great future. 'The child is father of the man'; and earth's narrow range widens out into the infinitude of eternity and of heaven. The only thing that gives real greatness and sublimity to our mortal life is its being the vestibule to another. Historically you will find that, wherever faith in a future life has ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Such heads are very rare in the earlier schools of art, which seldom represented the Virgin without her Child, but became favourite studies of the later painters, and were multiplied and varied to infinitude from the beginning of the seventeenth century. From these every trace of the mystical and solemn conception of antiquity gradually disappeared; till, for the majestic ideal of womanhood, we have merely inane prettiness, or rustic, or ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... inadequate representation, the philosopher views them sub specie aeterni, in their per se, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas. To construe things is to present them as they are in God. But in God all things are one; in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... infinity, infinitude, infiniteness &c. adj.; perpetuity &c. 112; boundlessness. V. be infinite &c. adj.; know no limits, have no limits, know no bounds,have no bounds; go on for ever. Adj. infinite; immense; numberless, countless, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it. It is Life,—that is, pregnant with vital energy, and capable of infinite transmutations. All things are produced by it; all is again resolved into it; it supports all things; it surrounds the world; it has infinitude; it has eternal motion. Thus did this philosopher reason, comparing the world with our own living existence,—which he took to be air,—an imperishable principle of life. He thus advanced a step beyond Thales, since he regarded the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... despond, but is never his final end. His aims are transcendental, his realm is art, his interests ideal, his life divine, his destiny immortal. All the old theories of saintship are revived in him. He is in the world, but not of it. Shadows of infinitude are his realities. He sees only the starry universe, and the radiant depths of the soul. Martyrdom may desolate, but cannot terrify him. If he be a genius, if his soul crave only his idea, and his body fare unconsciously well on bread and water, then ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The steps themselves—some forty of them—descend under a tunnel, which the shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar-ends, and ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the sooty wind hither and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... similar emotions. But that was a transient scene that quickly declined into stillness and calm: here I was told it was everlastingly the same! The mind delighted to revel in this abundance: it seemed an infinitude, where satiety, its most fatal and hated ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... has long ago realised that cleanliness, wholesome food, judicious exercise and a dry, comfortable and well-ventilated kennel are the surest safeguards of health, and that attention to these necessaries saves him an infinitude of trouble and anxiety by protecting his dogs from disease. On the first appearance of illness in his kennels the wise dog-owner at once calls in the skill of a good veterinary surgeon, but there are some of the minor ailments which he can deal with himself whilst he ought at least to ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... few minutes he thought it all over, soberly but with a stout heart; standing at a window of his bedroom in the Hotel Pless, hands deep in trouser pockets, pipe fuming voluminously, his gaze wandering out over a blurred infinitude of wet shining roofs and sooty chimney-pots: all of London that a lowering drizzle would let him see, and withal by no means a cheering prospect, nor yet one calculated to offset the disheartening ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the dazzling military trappings of the handsome cavaliers, (there was war at that time between the glorious empire of Fairydom and the weak and infatuated republic of Elfland on its southern borders, and the epaulette and spurs were the only pass to the hearts of the fair,) imbuing them with an infinitude of prismatic hues, all softened into a kind of timed starlight, exquisite as the dying voice of music. In this gorgeous saloon, at the head of which sat, well pleased, the benevolent old King Paterflor and his modest and still lovely queen ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... have denied the infinitude of God's knowledge, notably Dr. Adam Clarke. He held that God, although possessed of omnipotence, yet as He chooses not to do all things, so also although He possesses the power of knowing all things, yet He chooses to be ignorant of some things. In refuting this notion, Dr. ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... to be only for our good, giving strength, righteousness, and peace. But the same double possibility which I have been pointing out as inherent in all externals belongs here too, and a man can determine to which aspect of the many-sided infinitude of the divine nature he shall stand in relation. The glass in stained windows is so coloured as that parts of it cut off, and prevent from passing through, different rays of the pure white light. And men's moral natures, the inclination of their hearts, and the set of their wills and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of delight in the silent immensity flowing, Journeying surgelessly on through impalpable ethers of peace. How can I think of myself when infinitude o'er me is glowing, Glowing with tokens of love from the land ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... perfectly calm as Turner's calmness; and I know very few better examples of this calmness than the plate before us, uniting, as it does, the glittering of the morning clouds, and trembling of the sea, with an infinitude of peace in both. There are one or two points of interest in the artifices by which the intense effect of calm is produced. Much is owing, in the first place, to the amount of absolute gloom obtained by the local blackness of the boats on the beach; like a piece ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... would take a pair of stout New England lungs to breathe enjoyably in such an air. That is the northern coast. Mr. William Richards gives us the southern—the landscape, in fact, of Atlantic City. In his scenes we have the infinitude of soft silver beach, the rolling tumultuousness of a boundless sea, and twisted cedars mounted like toiling ships on the crests of undulating sand-hills. It is the charm, the dream, the power and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... power for good of concentrated mental delineation of the ideal. By such exercises of mind, a wholesome environment can be built up, even if at first the process seems almost mechanical. But instead of such self-building, out of an infinitude of divine material, the average man is inclined to vacate the control of his being, put his body into the keeping of his doctor, and his soul [himself] into the care ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... must ever seem to the wisest and greatest of men when brought into contact with the great things of God—that which they know is as nothing, and less than nothing, to the infinitude ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... seemed to have driven out for the moment all the other elements in his character—those baser, vainer, weaker elements that she knew so well. The change in him was a measure of the smallness of her own past influence upon him; of the infinitude of her own self-deception. Her sharp intelligence drew the inference at once, and bade her ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exact, at the other we have the human subjects in which there is no exactitude. The science of society stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate human society into societies, and made believe they competed one with another ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... blessed in heaven, and also men in this mortal life, not only know God, but also comprehend and fathom the divine nature as clearly as we know our own, and even as perfectly as God comprehends himself. This fanaticism and impiety St. Chrysostom confutes in these five homilies, demonstrating, from the infinitude of the divine attributes, and from holy scriptures, that God is essentially incomprehensible to the highest angels. He strongly recommends to Catholics a modest and mild behavior towards heretics; for nothing ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... it is a toy for babes to toss, And all its shining imagery but dross, To those that in her awful presence stand; As sun-confronting eagles o'er the land That lies below, they send their gaze across The common intervals of gain and loss, And hope's infinitude without a strand. ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... only speak An earth-born language, that does not reveal The infinitude of duty which I seek To utter ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... asked you to leave out about the Weald denudation: I told Jukes this (who is head man of the Irish geological survey), and he blamed me much, for he believed every word of it, and thought it not at all exaggerated! In fact, geologists have no means of gauging the infinitude of past time. There has been one prodigy of a review, namely, an OPPOSED one (by Pictet (Francois Jules Pictet, in the 'Archives des Sciences de la Bibliotheque Universelle,' Mars 1860. The article is written in a courteous and considerate tone, and concludes by ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... passionate exaltations of the heart which the face must not betray; the fear that we may not be understood, and the boundless joy of being so; the hesitations of the soul which recoils upon itself, and the magnetic propulsions which give to the eyes an infinitude of shades; the promptings to suicide caused by a word, dispelled by an intonation; trembling glances which veil an inward daring; sudden desires to speak and act that are paralyzed by their own violence; the secret eloquence ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... that are full of endless suggestion for himself. He may not be able to pursue any of these avenues at the moment; but he should make a mental or a written note of them, for future benefit. His daily business being learning, why should he not in time, become learned? There are, of course, among the infinitude of questions, that come before the librarian, some that are really insoluble problems. One of these is to be found among the topics of inquiry I just now suggested; namely: what is the aggregate wealth of Great Britain, or that of other nations? This is ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative superiorities. This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the vacuum beyond. It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may all be dealt with in the don't-care mood. No need of agonizing ourselves or making others agonize for these good ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... French passion of that kind. They are the universe to each other, because they lose sense for everything else. Not so with us. Everything we once loved we still love all the more ardently. The world's meaning has now dawned upon us. Through me you have learned to know the infinitude of the human mind, and through you I have come to understand marriage and life, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... traversing a distance of 91,000,000 miles, can, by falling upon the retina, and acting as a stimulus, not only produce a contraction of the pupil, but excite thoughts which analyze that ray, instantly spanning the infinitude of trackless space! The same penetrative faculties, with equal facility, can quickly and surely discern the morbid symptoms of body and mind, become familiar with the indications of disease, and classify them scientifically among the phenomena of nature. The symptoms of disease which follow ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... had served to develop a hunger which no law or its keeping could fill. Must not the imperfection of his keeping of the commandments, even in the lower sense in which he read them, have helped to reveal how far they were beyond any keeping of his, how their implicit demands rose into the infinitude of God's perfection? ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the mountains found an outlet in prolific literary output, and a system of art and ethics destined to leaven the mass of human thought, the infinitude and grandeur of mountain scenery had a dispersive effect on Javelle's mind. I can so well understand him. He wandered over the chain of Valais—my mountains (each worshipper has his special idols)—the Dent du Midi, the Vaudois Alps, and ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Infinitude and my heart together had not space enough for a single thought but of him. To ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... tumbling like falling giants; like Titans stricken by invisible tumors implanted in their vitals. It lasted ten minutes. What infinitude of horror came to proud and lordly Manhattan Island in those momentous ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... House of Commons—it was said that so great was its intricacy that only three men understood it— Mr. Gladstone himself, his Attorney-General for Ireland, and Mr. T. M. Healy. So far from shrinking from, he seemed to revel in, the toil of mastering an infinitude of technical details. Yet neither did he want boldness and largeness of conception. The Home-Rule Bill of 1886 was nothing less than a new constitution for Ireland, and in all but one of its most essential features had been practically ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... final piece of sculpture, at the end of the gallery, is a copy of the Laocoon, considered very fine. I know not why, but it did not impress me with the sense of mighty and terrible repose—a repose growing out of the infinitude of trouble— that I had ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in a tone the intensity of which forced her to lift her eyes to his. Molly did not see the glance, for the infinitude of her own experiences led her to find the moment favorable for gazing out of the window in a sort of rapt admiration for the Insel rose-bushes in the foreground and the placid ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... perishable a possession do they rely who set before themselves bodily excellences! Can ye ever surpass the elephant in bulk or the bull in strength? Can ye excel the tiger in swiftness? Look upon the infinitude, the solidity, the swift motion, of the heavens, and for once cease to admire things mean and worthless. And yet the heavens are not so much to be admired on this account as for the reason which guides them. Then, how transient is the lustre of beauty! ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... the Philippines will be greater with the United States than they can ever hope to be standing alone, if so be that they can stand alone at all. It has retarded the development of the Islands and has checked progress. It forces into the background the fact that with an infinitude of work lying before Americans and Filipinos alike, if the Islands are to have their full value in the world's economy, the best way to do this work is for Americans and Filipinos to labor together, each contributing his share to the common result. Upon this ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... poisoned the earth, the waters, and the living creatures, flocks and herds, and the babes that know not their right hand from their left—neither Memphis, Gomorrah, nor Cahors are themselves likely to recognize: but, as I pause in front of the infinitude of the evil that I cannot find so much as thought to follow—how much less words to speak!—a letter is brought to me which gives what perhaps may be more impressive in its single and historical example, than all the general evidence gathered ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Among the infinitude of white substances, the artist finds that there are but three white pigments—those of lead, zinc, and baryta. The first possesses the greatest opacity, while the second and third are most durable. The last, however, has so many objectionable qualities, that the number of eligible ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself."—CARLYLE. ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... correlation, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action of external conditions, and so forth. The study of domestic productions will rise immensely in value. A new variety raised by man will be a more important and interesting subject for study than one more species added to the infinitude of already recorded species. Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation. The rules for classifying will no doubt become simpler when we have a definite object in view. We possess ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... women? Has that intellectual strength weakened her heart? Has she no charm? Can she descend to those tender nothings by which a woman occupies, and soothes and interests the man she loves? Will she not cast aside a sentiment when it no longer responds to some vision of infinitude which she grasps and contemplates in her soul? Who can scale the heights to which her eyes have risen? Yes, a man fears to find in such a woman something unattainable, unpossessable, unconquerable. The woman of strong mind should remain a symbol; as a reality she must be feared. ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... not God to be a Spirit, not one who hath parts extended in length and breadth, or whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole: and if it be infinite, it must be less in such part as is defined by a certain space, than in its infinitude; and so is not wholly every where, as Spirit, as God. And what that should be in us, by which we were like to God, and might be rightly said to be after the image of God, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... his fellow-creatures one smallest glimpse of the glory of what he saw, his ardour was so emboldened by help of the very mystery at whose sight he must have perished had he faltered, that his eyes, unblasted, attained to a perception of the Sum of Infinitude. He beheld, concentrated in one spot—written in one volume of Love—all which is diffused, and can become the subject of thought and study throughout the universe—all substance and accident and mode—all so compounded that ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... complementary and counter force, with which it acts in union and concert, and which exactly counteracts its pulling power and influence, it would soon draw star to star, and world to world, crashing and heaping them together in ruinous and dire confusion. So that, instead of the infinitude of worlds which now exist, which flash and sparkle in the heavens, and in their intricate, elaborate, and mazy motions move through the vast infinity like stately armies on the march, there would only be one agglomeration of matter, a silent and solitary ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... steam-tug. Grievous had been the wailing of the passengers at parting with their kinsfolk on the quay; but, somewhat stilled by this time, they leaned in groups on the bulwarks, or were squatted about on deck among their infinitude of red boxes and brilliant tins, watching the villa-whitened shores gliding by rapidly. Only an occasional vernacular ejaculation, such as 'Oh, wirra! wirra!' or, 'Och hone, mavrone!' betokened the smouldering remains of emotion in the frieze coats and ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... and to have satisfaction rendered to Him? He could only make Himself man without ceasing to be God, in order that as man He should offer to God a reparation to which as God He would give the character of infinitude. It was therefore absolutely necessary that at a given moment man should become God, which could only be done upon the condition that ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... gloomy streets of the Marais for the first time since the previous autumn, and entering the smiling and picturesque valley of Montmorency; on seeing it in the morning light, its endless horizons receding from view; and then lifting a charmed gaze to eyes which expressed no less infinitude mingled with love? ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... the guardroom than he was surrounded by a crowd of courtiers who had been awaiting him, and was fain to proceed to the work of issuing the orders connected with his post, or to receive respects, communications, solicitations, presentations, recommendations, embraces—to observe that infinitude of relations which surround a favorite, and which require constant and sustained attention, for any absence of mind might cause great misfortunes. He thus almost forgot the trifling circumstance which had made him uneasy, and which he thought might after all have only been a freak ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... again and again that he wanted his mother. He was seated on a small stone pillar, a stalagmite in a limestone cavern, where there were many such pillars and pendants of like material hanging from the roof, all most dimly glimpsed in the torch-light against an infinitude of blackness. The men who had brought him hither, and others whom he had not heretofore seen, were busied about a dismantled stone furnace, gathering up such poor belongings as had escaped the wreckings of the revenue force. Now and then a glitter from the fragments ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... himself to a finite capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry; between religion—making up the deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry—passionate for the instruction of reason; between religion—whose element is infinitude, and whose ultimate trust is the supreme of things, submitting herself to circumscription, and reconciled to substitutions; and poetry—ethereal and transcendent, yet incapable to sustain her existence without sensuous incarnation. In this community of nature may be perceived also the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... we be young or old Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation and desire, And something evermore ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... had lived since their childhood upon the frigid seas, in the very midst of their mists, which are vague and troubled as the background of dreams. They were accustomed to see this varying infinitude play about their paltry ark of planks, and their eyes were as used to it as those of ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... nearest, the most visible, that which all could appreciate, was insignificant. Another movement was the one of real importance. Above that of the monotonous rotation, ever around the same axis, was that of translation, which dragged the globe through the infinitude of space in eternal travel, never re-passing through ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... where maple, elm or oak Have spread their boughs and verdant foliage, And have felt the cool, refreshing breezes Which blew from off thy stream in Summer's heat. There I would indulge, awhile, my fancy; Give her the reins, and let her soar aloft Into the vast infinitude of space, Or try to tie her down to ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... morality, without ceasing to be, in any respect, a moral man, we may break some links of that network of traditions spun for us by our teachers at so much an hour, and which throws a hood over us as it is thrown over a falcon, to keep it from flying in the infinitude of space. I respect every sincere belief, even hat which I look on as a prejudice, and I insist that my own be respected. As a conclusion of my profession of faith, I am willing to admit that even a republican convinced of the justness ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... grows stronger, healthier, and more capable of high effort. But dispense with the Spirit of the Whole, and every movement, though it SEEM forward, is in truth BACKWARD;—study involves bewilderment,—science becomes a reeling infinitude of atoms, madly whirling together for no purpose save death, or, at the best, incessant Change, in which mortal life is counted as nothing:—and Nature frowns at us, a vast Question, to which there is no Answer,—an incomprehensible Force, against ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was the child, of all others, to live with an ancient grandmother. Annie's treasures were few, but they were all contained in her green box. She never wanted occupation; she was either dressing her doll or finding pretty verses in her Bible, marking the places with an infinitude of minute pieces of paper. It was a great delight to me to have this little ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... lay on his back, and he could hear, slowly drawing near and nearer, the wheezing intake and output of the sick wolf's breath. It drew closer, ever closer, through an infinitude of time, and he did not move. It was at his ear. The harsh dry tongue grated like sandpaper against his cheek. His hands shot out—or at least he willed them to shoot out. The fingers were curved like talons, but they closed on empty air. Swiftness and certitude ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... all the summer morning, recurring to a few of the infinitude of subjects we used to compare notes upon; though we were neither of us given to wordiness, and never talked but when we had something to say. Often—as on this day—we sat for hours in a pleasant dreaminess, scarcely exchanging a word; nevertheless, I could generally ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Pater, we may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, "The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other the image." [Footnote: The Romantic Movement, p. 129.] That is, to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... What offense shall be regarded as a breach of a treaty, or as a violation of respect and honor, must remain indefinite, since many and various injuries can easily accrue from the wide range of the interests of the States and from the complex relations of their citizens. The State may identify its infinitude and honor with every one of its single aspects. And if a State, as a strong individuality, has experienced an unduly protracted internal rest, it will naturally be more inclined to irritability, in order to find an occasion ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... lift. Then followed Colombia and Ecuador on the west; and, successively, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, ending at last in the south with Patagonia, a cold arid land, bleak and desolate. I marked the littoral cities as we progressed on that side, where earth ends and the Pacific Ocean begins, and infinitude. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... selfishness, quiet uncompromising cruelty, and genuine devotion to art. The scene and the actors in this little Italian drama stand out before us with the most natural clearness; there is some telling touch in every line, an infinitude of cunningly careless details, instinct with suggestion, and an appearance through it all of simple artless ease, such as only the very finest art can give. But let the poem speak ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the dry, sweet-smelling grass to the cliff edge on a fresh morning, with a deep blue sky overhead and a sea below of ultramarine broken up with an infinitude of surfaces reflecting scraps of the cliffs and the few white clouds. Falling on our knees, we look straight downwards into a cove full of blue shade; but so bright is the surrounding light that every ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... generations as boundless as shall spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores wait for the result. The importance of everything that is doing for the improvement of this country is fast swelling to infinitude. These, dear sir, are some of my dreams, I fear I must call them, rather than waking thoughts. It seems to me not a little to know the age and country we live in. I think, and think, and think that something must be done, and often [138] I feel, and feel, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... human soul struggles toward the light, toward God, and the Infinite. It is especially so in its afflictions. Words go but a little way into the depths of sorrow. The thoughts that writhe there in silence, that go into the stillness of Infinitude and Eternity, have no emblems. Thoughts enough come there, such as no tongue ever uttered. They do not so much want human sympathy, as higher help. There is a loneliness in deep sorrow which the Deity alone can relieve. Alone, the mind wrestles with the great problem ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... climbs towards the summit he is aware of "Earth's most exquisite disclosures, heaven's own God in evidence"; he stands face to face with Nature—"rather with Infinitude." All through his mountain ascent the vigour of life is aroused within him; and, as he returns—there is ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... an irregular and sagging rule-of-thumb tendency. The white wall-paper evidently concealed squared logs. The present inhabitants, being possessed at once of rather homely tastes and limited facilities, had over-furnished the place with an infinitude of little things—little rugs, little tables, little knit doilies, little racks of photographs, little china ornaments, little spidery what-nots, and ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... never impressed the imagination more than when approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless lights flaring, as Tennyson says "like a dreary dawn." The most impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks, quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a province of brick and stone. Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or of the Monument can anything like a view of the city as a whole be obtained. It is indispensable, however, to make one ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... the universe and man," says Cousin, "there remains in God something unknown, impenetrable, incomprehensible. Hence, in the immeasurable spaces of the universe, and beneath all the profundities of the human soul, God escapes us in this inexhaustible infinitude, whence he is able to draw without limit new worlds, new beings, new manifestations. God is therefore to us incomprehensible."[110] And without making ourselves in the least responsible for Hamilton's "negative" doctrine of the Infinite, or even responsible ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... that the eternities beget chaos, and that the immensities are at the mercy of the divine ananke. Infinitude crouches before a personality. The mercurial essence is the prime mover in spirituality, and the thinker is powerless before the pulsating inanity. The cosmical procession is terminated only by the ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... herbage, block the course of the river in some places in such profusion, that its entire bed seems to be taken up by them. For a distance of seventeen miles the main body of water is broken up into an infinitude of small channels in its width of two miles; several of the streams thus formed present, apparently, a tempting course to the navigator, so calm and safe do they appear, but they conceal ledges of hidden reefs, and are unexpectedly forced into narrow passages obstructed by granite boulders. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to me while I look at it the ultimate expression. At any rate, during the hour that I sat gazing along the high vista of Bourges the interior of the great vessel corresponded to my vision of the evening before. There is a tranquil largeness, a kind of infinitude, about such an edifice; it soothes and purifies the spirit, it illuminates the mind. There are two aisles, on either side, in addition to the nave—five in all—and, as I have said, there are no transepts; an omission ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... render the verdict. We might more safely and properly say that they will render a number of verdicts, all in their way and sphere just and true, since in no one of the arts so much as in this of all times and all nations is it so difficult to subject the infinitude of styles and fancies to one rigid canon. That the Greek vase is an absolute exemplar in grace and elegance of form every one hastens to concede. But who would hesitate to give up a part of what the Greeks have bequeathed us rather than lose the marvellous filigree in clay of "Henri Deux," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... but—Spring?—Hand in hand with Spring, Sabbath descends from heaven unto earth; and are not their feet beautiful on the mountains? Small as is the voice of that tinkling bell from that humble spire, overtopped by its coeval trees, yet is it heard in the heart of infinitude. So is the bleating of these silly sheep on the braes—and so is that voice of psalms, all at once rising so spirit-like, as if the very kirk were animated, and singing a joyous song in the wilderness to the ear of the Most High. For all things are under his care—those that, as we dream, have no ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... an infinitude of questions, her bright quick eyes seeming to extort and gain more than the mere verbal answers. She talked a good deal, throwing more light than Agatha had ever before received on the manners, characters, and history of the Harper family, the Dugdales, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... outward man. In spite of my desire to do so, it was at that time literally impossible for me to associate with them, since our ideas were too wholly at variance. For me, life's meaning and charm contained an infinitude of shades of which they had not an inkling, and vice versa. The greatest obstacles of all, however, to our better acquaintance I felt to be the twenty roubles' worth of cloth in my tunic, my drozhki, and my white linen ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... woods, will evoke their yet undetected, haunting spirits? Who peer with her in prying scrutiny into nature's laws, and challenge the whispers of poetry from the voiceless throat of matter? Who laugh merrily over the stupid guesswork of pedants, that never mingled with the infinitude of nature, through love exhaustless and all-embracing, as we have? Poor ...
— The Man In The Reservoir • Charles Fenno Hoffman
... the church ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race they perfectly agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures;—God become man; the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude: it is the child of the visible mother and the invisible father, Nature and Spirit: it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... or that—to so much happiness, or even so much virtue. What title-deeds could I show for such a right? Straightway it seemed as if the centre of a whole system of dissatisfaction were removed, and as if the system collapsed. God, creating from His infinite resources a whole infinitude of beings, had created me with a definite position on the scale, and that position only could I claim. Cease the trick of contrast. If I can by any means get myself to consider myself alone without reference to others, discontent will vanish. I walk this Old St. Pancras Road ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... was obviously to the general interest that they should become acquainted, and if possible establish friendly relations, with any human inhabitant who might be sharing their own strange destiny in being rolled away upon a new planet into the infinitude of space. All difference of race, all distinction of nationality, must be merged into the one thought that, few as they were, they were the sole surviving representatives of a world which it seemed exceedingly ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... Spirit, and how does He have His sport with all created things? The fire is in the wood; but who awakens it suddenly? Then it turns to ashes, and where goes the force of the fire? The true guru teaches that He has neither limit nor infinitude. Kabr says: "Brahma suits His language to the understanding ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... pony's back, for her fear of the desert became constantly greater. It was almost as if it would snatch her away in a moment more if she stayed there longer, and carry her into vaster realms of space where her soul would be lost in infinitude. She had never been possessed by any such feeling before ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... soul have been prepared, the next step is concentration, aspiration. Then it is borne in upon the poet that in the infinite and in the eternal alone can we find rest, can we find ourselves; and towards this infinitude we must strive with ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... device of the clockmaker's pendulum, and uses the earth for its bob; that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that the total of all our epochs is but the moment between the toss and the catch, has ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... great themes compose his argument: the miserable insignificance of all that is human—human reason, human knowledge, human ambition; and the transcendent glory of God. Never was the wretchedness of mankind painted with a more passionate power. The whole infinitude of the physical universe is invoked in his sweeping sentences to crush the presumption of man. Man's intellectual greatness itself he seizes upon to point the moral of an innate contradiction, an essential imbecility. 'Quelle chimere,' he exclaims, 'est-ce donc que l'homme! quelle nouveaute, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... existing for the conception, by the complete determination of it which it has furnished, and the ceaseless testing of the conclusions of a reason often deceived by sense, and not always in harmony with its own ideas. The attributes of necessity, infinitude, unity, existence apart from the world (and not as a world soul), eternity (free from conditions of time), omnipresence (free from conditions of space), omnipotence, and others, are pure transcendental predicates; and thus ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... by no naked sight. Shall mind's eye strive Achingly to companion as it may The supersubtle effluence, and contrive To follow beam and beam upon their way Hand-breadth by hand-breadth, till sense faint—confessed Frustrate, eluded by unknown unguessed Infinitude of action? Idle quest! Rather ask aid from optics. Sense, descry The spectrum—mind, infer immensity! Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed— Which, in the large, who sees to bless? Not I More than yourself: so, good my friend, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... century; and there is scarcely one which is not thoroughly tainted by the artifices which have over-run our writings in metre since the days of Dryden and Pope. Energy, stillness, grandeur, tenderness, those feelings which are the pure emanations of Nature, those thoughts which have the infinitude of truth, and those expressions which are not what the garb is to the body but what the body is to the soul, themselves a constituent part and power or function in the thought—all these are abandoned for their opposites,—as if our countrymen, through successive generations, had ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the nature of electricity. And immediately connected therewith arises the momentous and primary question as to the nature of the ether, of the properties of the medium that fills all space, its structure, its rest or motion, its infinitude or finitude. It becomes every day more manifest that this question rises above all others, that a knowledge of what the ether is would reveal to us not only the nature of the old 'imponderables,' but also of the old 'matter' itself and its most ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... followed; her lips spoke no word, but the heaving bosom had a rhetoric all its own and told me that a new life, begotten not of mine, was throbbing there. An alien life it seemed to me, a soul's expansion beyond the province of my own, an infinitude which denied the sway of even a father's love. At ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... he who thinks with mortal ken To pierce Infinitude which doth enfold Three persons in one substance. Seek not, then, O Mortal race, for reasons, but believe And be content, for had all been seen No need there was for Mary to conceive. Men have ye known who thus desired ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... and demonstrative, reasonings which were far from conclusive. For I do not find that any one has yet given a probable explanation of the first and most notable phenomena of light, namely why it is not propagated except in straight lines, and how visible rays, coming from an infinitude of diverse places, cross one another without hindering one another ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... and untroubled, then Brahma becomes perceptible like a smokeless fire of blazing flames or the Sun of effulgent radiance. Indeed, one then beholds in oneself one's soul like lightning fire in the skies. Everything then appears in it and it appears in everything in consequence of its infinitude. Those high-souled Brahmanas that are possessed of wisdom, that are endued with fortitude, that are possessed of high knowledge, and that are engaged in the good of all creatures, succeed in beholding ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... hardly a wonder they should have had little gods. No matter how high the vault of the inclosing sphere; limited at all it could not declare the glory of God, it could only show his handiwork. In our day it is a sphere only to the eyes; it is a foreshortening of infinitude that it may enter our sight; there is no imagining of a limit to it; it is a sphere only in this, that in no one direction can we come nearer to its circumference than in another. This infinitive sphere, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... on in order to get to moorings; or again, in putting out to sea; [18] you know the host of sails and cordage, rigging [19] as they call it, she requires for sailing; the quantity of engines and machinery of all sorts she is armed with in case she should encounter any hostile craft; the infinitude of arms she carries, with her crew of fighting men aboard. Then all the vessels and utensils, such as people use at home on land, required for the different messes, form a portion of the freight; and besides all this, the hold is heavy ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal to the fancy of man, or provision for his service: cold juice, or glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or force, softness and strength, in all ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... a wave, or the outline of the foliage of a large tree; but in these cases, when care is at fault, carelessness will help, and the dash of the brush will in some measure give wildness to the churning of the foam, and infinitude to the shaking of the leaves. But chance will not help us with the mountain. Its fine and faintly organized edge seems to be definitely traced against the sky; yet let us set ourselves honestly to follow it, and we find, on the instant, it has disappeared: and that for two reasons. ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... confidence, it lives also by hope—that form of confidence which turns toward the future. All life is a result and an aspiration, all that exists supposes an origin and tends toward an end. Life is progression: progression is aspiration. The progress of the future is an infinitude of hope. Hope is at the root of things, and must be reflected in the heart of man. No hope, no life. The same power which brought us into being, urges us to go up higher. What is the meaning of this persistent instinct which pushes us on? The true meaning is that something ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... he knows It not, knows It. He who thinks he knows It, knows It not. The true knowers think they can never know It (because of Its infinitude), while the ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... now to explain those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God or the Being eternal and infinite; not indeed to explain all these things, for we have demonstrated that an infinitude of things must follow in an infinite number of ways,—but to consider those things only which may conduct us, as it were, by the hand to a knowledge of the human mind and ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... so different from other organs of respiration that it was impossible to use one word for the two. The arrangement of the gills varies considerably in the different species, but their general form is the same everywhere. They are composed of a number of plates, consisting of an infinitude of leaflets, arranged like a fringe, and suspended by bony arches, into which plates and leaflets the blood pours from ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... became apparent that there was great need of mathematical growth, since mathematics was no longer to be used merely as mental Indian clubs or dumb-bells, where a limited assortment would answer all practical needs, but as an implement of mental penetration into the infinitude of barriers which have checked progress along various lines and seem to require an infinite variety ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper |
