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Measurable   Listen
adjective
Measurable  adj.  
1.
Capable of being measured; susceptible of mensuration or computation.
2.
Moderate; temperate; not excessive. "Of his diet measurable was he." "Yet do it measurably, as it becometh Christians."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Measurable" Quotes from Famous Books



... indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... essayed on August 5th, 1908. Accompanied by twelve observers the vessel ascended and travelled without incident for eight hours. Then a slight mishap demanded attention, but was speedily repaired, and was ignored officially as being too trivial to influence the main issue. Victory appeared within measurable distance: the arduous toil of many patient years was about to be rewarded. The airship was within sight of home when it had to descend owing to the development of another motor fault. But as it approached the ground, Nature, as if infuriated at the conquest, rose up in ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... the moment of her entry he had been lying back in an office-chair, so that only a merely nominal section of his upper structure was visible. Now he reared his impressive length until his head came within measurable distance of the ceiling. He had a hatchet face and a receding chin, and he gazed at Jill through what she assumed were the "tortoiseshell cheaters" referred to by her recent ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... Took part in a debate or two and then off to the North Pole in a balloon. Managed to see a good deal of snow and ice, and fancy we caught a sight of the Pole itself. Sent home (by parachute) to one of my Magazines, "How I got within Measurable Distance ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various

... gainsaid, but the whole tangle grew denser. It struck our young man that he had never seen his subject before, and yet somehow this revelation was not produced by the sense of actually seeing it. What was revealed was the difficulty—what he saw was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there—except that he couldn't catch them—which he had not hitherto counted in or presumed to handle. This baffling effect, eminently in ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... Energy, but the transmutations measured are operations of the real thing-in-itself postulated by Science. The existence of such Energy is suggested to me primarily in my experience of my own activity in which I recognise my power of doing work—a quantifiable and measurable thing, homogeneous with the Energy in respect of which Science states the relations and conditions of all physical phenomena. My most incessant mental act is that by which, on the analogy of my own active experience, I refer all ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... crews, usually assembled at the last moment, and that it was more than probable that the Belle Julie's officers had not yet had time to individualize the units of the main-deck squad. Therefore, he might take the name and place of the disabled Gavitt with measurable safety. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... prayer in sickness, distress, and doubt are by no means measurable by the degree to which the primary causes thereof are made to disappear. There is a real conquest of trouble, even while trouble remains. It is sometimes a great source of strength, also, merely to realize that one is fully understood. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... omits such products as maple sugar, malt sugar, milk sugar, and others having commercial or chemical uses on a limited scale. But it is only with the crystallized sucrose, the familiar sugar of the market and the household, that we are dealing here. The output of the other sugars is measurable in hundreds or even thousands of pounds, but the output of the sugar of commerce is measured in millions of tons. Long experience proves that the desired substance is most readily, most abundantly, and most cheaply, obtained from the juices of ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson

... of a truth, with its resultant false beliefs, must produce mischief, even though the beginning of that mischief might be as inconceivable as the end. She made no distinction between the subtlest philosophical misconception and the vulgarest lie. The evil of Cashel's capture was measurable, the evil of a lie beyond all measure. She felt none the less assured of that evil because she could not foresee one bad consequence likely to ensue from what she had done. Her misgivings pressed heavily upon her; for her father, a determined sceptic, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... died out with Horace himself, halved the field with the hexameter. For the remaining literature of the Empire, for that of the Middle Ages so far as it followed classical models, and even for that of the Renaissance, which carries us down to within a measurable distance of the present day, the hexameter as fixed by Virgil, and the elegiac as popularised by Gallus and rapidly brought to perfection by his immediate followers, are the only two poetical forms ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... measurable by its wants. Is there to you no meaning in the singularity that power in full degree to speculate upon the future was given to man alone? By the sign as I see it, God meant to make us know ourselves created for another and a better ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... of Great Men (a little soiled). Rare. 30s." He was in the middle of the Vs now and within measurable distance of the end. Business being slack in the front shop, he finished earlier than usual, and actually found himself with nearly a whole hour upon his hands before dinner. He had half a mind to spend it at his club, the Junior Journalists', ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... Wolvercote was surprised to learn that this was Mrs. Stewart's husband. She had no idea a Don could be so young and good-looking. Judging of Dons solely by the slight and slighting references of her undergraduate relatives, she had imagined them to be weird-looking men, within various measurable distances of the grave. ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... experiments upon objectively measurable traits have been conducted, the specific differences that individuals display have comparatively nothing to do with the fact that an individual happens to be a man or a woman. These experiments have been conducted with boys ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... for hounds of both sexes under the age of eighteen months. In the Open dog class there appeared the names of no fewer than two fully-fledged champions, and two other fully developed hounds that were already within measurable reach of championship honours; besides several other Wolfhounds of high repute and proved prowess as prize-winners at shows. In the Open bitch class there was one champion entered, and four or five others of whom great things had been ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... there is an original and a secondary, or derivative, form of the superstition, and it is our object to trace out which is which. Do the rags deposited at wells symbolise offerings to the local deity? If so, they bring us within measurable distance of a cult which rests upon faith in the power of natural objects to harm or render aid to human beings. Does the question of first-foot rest upon the colour of the hair or upon the sex of the person? I think, looking at all ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... upon his imagination, never fully entered his understanding. Few minds, it seems, can conceive of any deity as other than some anthropomorphic extension of themselves, for the idea is too greatly blinding to admit human thought within a measurable distance even of a faintest conception. The true, stupendous nature of the forces these letters in the opening syllable clothed, Spinrobin unquestionably never apprehended. Miriam, with her naked and undefiled intuitions, ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... ignores the discrepancies between precept and practice, and the influence which practice has exerted upon theory; on the other hand, however, it confines a subject, otherwise impossibly large, within measurable limits. The chief emphasis has been laid upon the sixteenth century, the period of the most enthusiastic experimentation, when, though it was still possible for the translator to rest in the comfortable medieval conception of his ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... as Hartley could see, Captain Trimblett was again within measurable distance of such a catastrophe. For a moment he struggled wildly for speech, and then, coming to the conclusion that nothing he could say would do him any good, he swung on his heel and walked off. Hartley, with ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs

... because of Gautama's teaching.[55] Very early in its history Japanese Buddhism welcomed womanhood to its fraternity and order,[56] yet the Japanese ama, bikuni, or nun, never became a sister of mercy, or reached, even within a measurable distance, the dignity of the Christian lady in the nunnery. In European history the abbess is a notable figure. She is hardly heard of beyond the Japanese nunnery, even by ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... not yet arrived in England at the complete secularization of our elementary schools; but we are, in the opinion of some and in the wish of others, within measurable distance of the Paradisiacal terminus of secularism and secular reform; and therefore, with the thought of what has been going on and is still going on in France, we may do well to look for a few moments ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... the same, six weeks later, toward the middle of June, the moment when Mrs. Prest undertook her annual migration, I had made no measurable advance. I was obliged to confess to her that I had no results to speak of. My first step had been unexpectedly rapid, but there was no appearance that it would be followed by a second. I was a thousand miles from taking tea ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James

... speak only of what has been done under the inspiration of that prophecy, I should have little that is definitely measurable to present, but in making a catalogue of the averting advice of that prophecy, I am giving intimation of what will in all probability be done. For the people of that valley are not wittingly going to give their once fertile lands as stones, even to the sons ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... tell him the truth; so she said, "Yes." Then Thorstan said in a voice which did not sound like his, "That is another reason why I must go." And then they looked at each other for a measurable space of time—and then Thorstan got ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett

... fierce joy of it like wine: Light unto light made answer, as a flag Answers when men tell tidings from one crag Unto another, and from peak to peak The good news flashes. Scarcely could he speak Measurable words, so high his wild thought whirled: "Bride, Goddess, Helen, O Wonder of the World, Shall I come for thee?" Her tender words came soft As dropping rose petals on garden croft Down from the wall's sheer height—"Come soon, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett

... getting something worthless for their money, that they would not spend it for artistic fiction, or indeed for any fiction all, except Mr. Clemens's, which they probably supposed bad. Some good books of travel had a measurable success through the book agents, but not at all the success that had been hoped for; and I believe now the subscription trade again publishes only compilations, or such works as owe more to the skill of the editor than the art of the writer. Mr. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the emperor a sanctity which he had not in the minds of men universally, or which even to the writer's feeling was exaggerated, but because it was expressed coarsely, and as a physical power: now, every thing physical is measurable by weight, motion, and resistance; and is therefore definite. But the very essence of whatsoever is supernatural lies in the indefinite. That power, therefore, with which the minds of men invested the emperor, was vulgarized ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... training and self-discipline they have passed in pursuit of interior ideals, of which when attained astral clairvoyance is but an individual circumstance, are many, but still a small minority as compared with the modern cultivated world. But as time goes on, and within a measurable future, some of us have reason to feel sure that the numbers of those who are competent to exercise astral clairvoyance will increase sufficiently to extend the circle of those who are aware of their capacities, till it comes to embrace all the intelligence and culture ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... A-ya, nor the unsleeping Loob had lost sight of the object of their journey. Every straight and slender sapling and seedling of hard grain they tested, but hitherto they had found nothing that came within measurable distance of ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils—restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve. Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable, correct results. The zeal for "answers" is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... the VICOMTE, I did laugh once at the small Coquelin de Voliere business, and was perhaps a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy foot - within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I love; and, above all, in this ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... much-persecuted one to join the circle of his hearers without on every occasion making the customary offering. In this manner a well-intentioned pursuit of riches has insidiously led this person within measurable distance of the bolted dungeon for those who do not meet their just debts, while the only distinction likely to result from his assiduous study of the customs and methods of those high in power is that of being publicly bowstrung as a warning to others. Manifestedly the pointed finger ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah

... limitability. The infinity of God is not a quantitative, but a qualitative infinity. The miscalled eternity and infinity of nature is an indefinite extension and protension in time and space, and, as quantitative, must necessarily be limited and measurable, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... their maximum in the commencing century, but that in all probability they, and not only they, but their water-born prototypes in the East also, are destined to such a process of dissection and diffusion as to amount almost to obliteration, so far, at least, as the blot on the map goes, within a measurable further ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... enemies. He served afterwards as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, dying in 1873. He was another man whose life was embittered by failure to attain the prize of the presidency. Three times he tried for it, in 1860, in 1864, and in 1868, but he never came within measurable distance of it. For he lacked the capacity for making friends, and repelled rather than attracted by a studiously impressive demeanor, a painful decorousness, and an unbending dignity, which was, of course, no true dignity at all, but merely a bad imitation of it. In a word, he lacked the saving ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... the burnished abundance of her hair; of noting the grace and dignity of her pose, and speculating as to the nature of her thoughts. His wife's reckless impulse on that fateful September day was bringing him now within measurable distance of a very human danger. The deep, passionate heart of him, crushed and stifled during the past five years, was in no safe state to be brought into contact with a lighted match. But of this danger he was, by his very nature, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... inasmuch as that alone is measured by time which has beginning and end in time. Hence, if the movement of the heavens lasted always, time would not be of its measure as regards the whole of its duration, since the infinite is not measurable; but it would be the measure of that part of its revolution which has beginning and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... tells me that when my time does come, the convulsion will be tremendous! When I love, it will be with the accumulated fervor of sixty-six years! But I have an ideal—a semi-transparent Being, filled with an inorganic pink jelly—and I have never yet seen the woman who approaches within measurable distance of ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... filling the last three hundred years have been as follows: (1) A rapid extension of physical science and with it of every other form of acquaintance with demonstrable and measurable things. (2) The rise, chiefly in the new Protestant part of Europe (but spreading thence in part to the Catholic) of what we call today "Capitalism," that is, the possession of the means of production by the few, and their ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc

... York could not have entered the city's main thoroughfare at any point better calculated to bewilder and astound than the very corner where Curtis had picked up the cab. On both sides, from the level of the street to a height often measurable in hundreds of feet, nearly every building blazed with electric signs. Many of the devices seemed to be alive. Horses galloped, either in Roman stadium or modern polo-ground; a girl's skirts were fluttered by a rain-storm; a ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... importance of the Acts of the French Philosophes recorded in whole acres of typography is fast exhausting itself, that the famed Encyclopaedical Tree has borne no fruit, and that Diderot the great has contracted into Diderot the easily measurable. The humoristic method is a potent instrument for working such contractions and expansions at will. The greatest of men are measurable enough, if you choose to set up a standard that is half transcendental and half cynical. A saner and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... bringing a vibrating magnetic needle suspended over it rapidly to rest; and that on causing the disk to rotate the magnetic needle rotated along with it. When both were quiescent, there was not the slightest measurable attraction or repulsion exerted between the needle and the disk; still when in motion the disk was competent to drag after it, not only a light needle, but a heavy magnet. The question had been probed and investigated with admirable skill by both Arago ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... Italian troops against their hereditary foes, and it did much to stimulate Italian confidence and enthusiasm for the war. Some further progress on the Carso was made during the autumn, and great Italian victories were announced in September, October, and November; but the Italians were never within measurable distance of capturing the key of the Carso at the Hermada, and Trieste was a very distant prospect until other causes had brought about the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire. When at the end of August Italy at last ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... tested by varying the relations of these to each other. This I did quite elaborately, and proved that such constant errors as exist are small compared with inevitable accidental errors, as, for example, that there was no measurable correction for capillarity, that the calculated volume of the "meniscus" was correct, etc. It is essential in making a measurement that the temperature of the room should change as little as possible, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various

... chances of escape, they were very poor. A strong guard constantly surrounded the prison, and such attempts at escape as were made were rarely successful. The only one that had measurable success is that which we have to describe, in which a body of prisoners played the r[^o]le of rats or beavers, and got out of Libby by ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... not a fire-side in the island which was not disturbed as by a local or private trouble; men of all estates, conditions, and tempers were affected apparently in equal degrees. Yet was the event by none received as an open and measurable affliction: it had indeed features bold and intelligible to every one; but there was an under-expression which was strange, dark, and mysterious—and, accordingly as different notions prevailed, or the object was looked at in different points of view, we were astonished like men ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart and seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... promotion and disease prevention. The report signals the growing consensus that the Nation's health strategy must be refocused in the 1980's to emphasize the prevention of disease. Specifically, the report lays out measurable and achieveable goals in the reduction of mortality which can ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... within measurable distance; the Liberal Peace Crusade was strenuously canvassing the country in favour of coming to a definite ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that what appears ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rigorously domestic; whilst in facing the contingencies of persecutions that might arise under the rapid succession of changing emperors, they faced a perpetual anxiety more trying to the fortitude than any fixed and measurable evil. Here, certainly, we have a guarantee for the deep faithfulness of early Christians, such as never can exist for more mixed bodies of professors, subject to no ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... level. It was later discovered that the meter of the detector in the north shelter had not retained its zero calibration setting, and radiation at the north shelter had not reached levels high enough to result in measurable exposures of the personnel who had been positioned there. However, fallout activity was later detected in the north shelter area, proof that part of the cloud did head in that direction. This also explains why the monitoring device detected ...
— Project Trinity 1945-1946 • Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer

... proportionals has been much disputed. The most received explanation is that of Martin, who supposes that Plato is only speaking of surfaces and solids compounded of prime numbers (i.e. of numbers not made up of two factors, or, in other words, only measurable by unity). The square of any such number represents a surface, the cube a solid. The squares of any two such numbers (e.g. 2 squared, 3 squared 4, 9), have always a single mean proportional (e.g. ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... mean quality. Physically they are the best people of the Archipelago, and under this head would be remarkable anywhere else in the world. Now, the Spaniards, with a few exceptions, made no systematic, continuous attempt to civilize these peoples; or, if they did, no measurable results have come down to our own day, even Villaverde's efforts, genuine as they were, having left almost no trace. So far from having done anything for the hillmen, the record of the Spanish at the very few points garrisoned by them is one of injustice and robbery, and ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... this terrible condition. But it can be done, and this Scheme will do it, if it is allowed a fair chance. Not all at once? True! It will take time, but it will begin to tell on the restering mass straight away. Within a measurable distance we ought to be able to take out of this black sea at least a hundred individuals a week, and there is no reason why this number should not ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... determination, because they belong so. They think the poem is a trick of invention, too. They think that of almost everything that they see in print. Their incredulity is marvelously credulous! There is no end to that which mortals may contrive; but the limit is such a measurable one to that which can really be! We slip our human leash so easily, and get outside of all creation, and the "Divinity that shapes our ends," to shape ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... that wit must be left to take care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous examination and collation of the facts of every case intrusted to him, which his clients will mainly demand: this it is which he is to be paid for; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them as his chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that industry and conscientiousness ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... preliminary character. There is here little scope yet for the presentation of definite scientific results. However it may be in the physical universe, in the cosmos of science our knowledge must be nebulous before it constellates into definitely measurable shapes, and nothing is gained by attempting to anticipate the evolutionary process. Thus it is that here, for the most part, we have to content ourselves at present with the task of mapping out the field in broad and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... 575 the first really historical King of Wu paid visits to the Emperor's court, to the court of his suzerain the King of Ts'u, and to the court of Lu: probably the Hwai system of rivers would carry him within measurable distance of all three, for the headwaters almost touch the tributaries of the Han, and the then Ts'u capital (modern King-thou Fu) was in touch with the River Han. He observed when in Lu: "We only know how to knot our hair in Wu; what could ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... achieved so much, spent his whole life in visible and external activities—talking, reading, writing, governing; and was admired, and, indeed, admirable in them all. But of the wisdom which realizes how essentially inferior all measurable doing, however triumphant, is to being, which is immeasurable, the wisdom which is occupied with the ultimate issues of life and death, he had apparently as little as any man who ever lived. He seems {41} always to have been one of those active, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey

... of Morristown he led his small but gallant band; and through an eventful winter, by the high effort of his genius, whose matchless force was measurable only by the growth of difficulties, he held in check formidable hostile legions, conducted by a chief experienced in the arts of war, and famed for his valor on the ever memorable Heights of Abraham, where fell Wolfe, Montcalm, and since our much-lamented ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... to a gentleman whose talent for losing at cards had not the merit of being incidental to an obliging disposition. The Count Gemini was not liked even by those who won from him; and he bore a name which, having a measurable value in Florence, was, like the local coin of the old Italian states, without currency in other parts of the peninsula. In Rome he was simply a very dull Florentine, and it is not remarkable that he should not have cared to pay frequent visits to a place where, to ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... lecturers, that, until they have delivered a discourse from ten to twenty times, they are themselves unable to measure its power; so that a performance which is offered at first timidly and with many doubts comes at length to be delivered confidently, and with measurable certainty of acceptance and success. The grand interest of a lecturer is in his new audience, in his experiment on an assembly of fresh minds. The lecture itself is regarded only as an instrument by which a desirable and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... him from hoping too much and being too greatly disappointed. It recalls him to the proportions of the job. He gets something done by not attempting everything. ... And it clears him up. We get him to look into himself, to see directly and in measurable terms what it is that puts him wrong and holds him back. He's no ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... of energy was now extremely significant. Living forces had been considered as standing apart from the rest of nature. Vital force, or vitality, had been thought of as something distinct in itself; and that there was any measurable relation between the powers of the living organism and the forces of heat and chemical affinity was of course unthinkable before the formulation of the doctrine of the correlation of forces. But as soon as that doctrine was understood it began to appear at once that, to a certain extent at least, ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... even three persons at the same time, quite independently of one another, showing how narrowly we are bound by the fetters of our early education. If the figures in the above Table may be accepted as fairly correct for the world generally, it shows, still in a measurable degree, the large effect of early education in fixing our associations. It will of course be understood that I make no absurd profession of being able by these very few experiments to lay down statistical constants of universal application, but ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... and violating solemn engagements by acting as its ministers, and that in order to preserve the respect of honest men they should leave it—that the question of change, far off as it had once seemed, came within "measurable distance"? The generation to which they belonged had been brought up with strong exhortations to be real, and to hate shams; and now the question was forced on them whether it was not a sham for the ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... or Bunsen burners for the consumption of acetylene for use in lighting by the incandescent system and in heating have been so much improved that they seem to be within measurable reach of a state of perfection, there appears to be but little use at the present time for a modified or diluted acetylene which formerly seemed likely to be valuable for heating and certain other purposes. Nevertheless, the facts relating to this ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... part of a second they found themselves within measurable distance of TOBY's own Planet. And here the Dog ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various

... waves, which, speeding from the centre of disturbance, finally stir the sedges on the river's bank, so do the vibrating atoms generate in the surrounding aether undulations, which finally stir the filaments of the retina. The motion thus imparted is transmitted with measurable, and not very great velocity to the brain, where, by a process which the science of mechanics does not even tend to unravel, the tremor of the nervous matter is converted into ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... exhilarating. I have just had a talk with our mutual friend Cadell, the Signal Officer of this brigade, and we have decided that we are fed up with it. For one thing—after two months' experience of shell fire the sound of a shell bursting within measurable distance makes you start and shiver for a moment—reflex action of the nerves. That is annoying. We both decided we would willingly change places with you and take a turn at defending your doubtless excellently executed ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... the day, most generous sir, is liable, congruent, and measurable for the after-noone: the word is well culd, chose, sweet, and apt I doe assure ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... I were alarmed. We knew that Snarley Bob when disturbed at such a moment was apt to be exceedingly dangerous, and we remembered that it was precisely such a disturbance as this which had brought him some years ago within measurable distance of committing murder. Nor was his demeanour reassuring. The instant he saw us, he rose from the shaft of the cart on which he had been seated, smoking his pipe, and took a dozen rapid steps out of the shed. ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks

... nineteenth century. But the augmentation of income has in one special way been purchased by a diminution of capital. The industrial movement has been based on an immense expenditure of coal and iron; and in America and Great Britain the coal and iron which can be cheaply obtained are within measurable distance of exhaustion. As these supplies diminish, the industrial leadership of America and Great Britain must disappear, unless they can employ their activities in other forms of industry. Those, therefore, who desire that the English-speaking countries should ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... all thought of vicarious atonement, and say, 'But what shall be done with my sin? Who shall put it away? Where is its sacrifice? If without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin, where is the shed blood?' These views are neat, measurable, occasionally pathetic, and frequently beautiful, but they do not include the agony of the whole occasion and situation. They are aspect theories, partial conceptions. They do not take in the whole temple from its foundation to its roof. No man ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans

... ninety millions of miles in length, not only vanishes from sight before we reach the distance of the great mass of stars, but becomes such a mere point that when magnified by the powerful instruments of modern times the most delicate appliances fail to make it measurable. Here the solar motion comes to our help. This motion, by which, as I have said, we are carried unceasingly through space, is made evident by a motion of most of the stars in the opposite direction, just as passing through a country on a railway we see the houses ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... Dam—I said I would wait twenty years for you, if necessary. I would and I will, but don't make me do it, darling. Realize how happy I should be if I could only come and sew and cook and scrub and work for you. Can you understand that life is only measurable in terms of happiness and that my happiness can only be where you, are? If you weren't liable to these seizures I could bear to wait, but as it is, I can't. I beg and beseech you not to make me ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... perdition. There was none to cry Timbul save Macready, except Miss Helen Faucit, who gained a brilliant triumph as Lady Carlisle. The part of Charles I. was enacted so execrably that damnation for all was again and again within measurable distance. "The Younger Vane" ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house. There was not even any extraneous aid to a fortunate impression. The house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the "scenery" commonplace and sometimes ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... never proposed to her, nor came within a measurable distance of doing so. A man so prone, as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind. Miss Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... ghost I ever came across, or, rather, came within measurable distance of, never appeared at all so far as ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... that does not attach to such symbolism as all thought involves. Nor are they merely "hypothetical," though like all thought they are subject to correction.[142:7] The scientist does not merely assert that the equation for energy is true if nature's capacity for work be measurable, but that such is actually the case. The statistician does not arrive at results contingent upon the supposition that men are numerable, but declares his sums and averages to be categorically true. Similarly scientific laws ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... the room with glad relief; he had lived so long during the last few minutes that a golden wedding seemed within measurable distance. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... that locomotive smoke and gas do not kill people outright; but that their influence though not immediately measurable is to shorten life cannot, I submit, be successfully combated.... A few years ago I made some calculations based on the records of ten years' operation of the railroads in this state, and found that if a man should spend his whole time day and ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... the eleven rear ships of the French (D, r) to run off to leeward, having received the fire of only part of their enemy, while the English van had undergone that of nearly the whole French fleet. These ships, however, were thus thrown entirely out of action for a measurable and important time by being driven to leeward, and would have been still more out of position to help any of their fleet, had not De Grasse himself been sent to leeward by Hood's division cutting the line three ships ahead of him. The thirteen ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan

... I think I hardly knew how often till I came to read through my diary in cold print. But all the time I was conscious, and am still more so now, of K.'s greatness. Still more so now because, when I compare him with his survivors, they seem measurable, he remains immeasurable. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton

... case, of a multitude of points of light less brilliant than the stars, the distance between which became constantly wider, but which for some time were separately so small as to present no disc that any magnifying power at my command could render measurable. In the meantime, the extremities visible through the other windows were constantly widening out till lost in the spangled darkness. By and by, it became impossible with the naked eye to distinguish the ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable, but no less profound is the sapping of confidence across our land, a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower ...
— Inaugural Presidential Address - Contributed Transcripts • Barack Hussein Obama

... History of England," Lingard's "Anglo-Saxon Church," and Cardwell's "Documentary Annals," though none of them as good as Frost, are works of considerable merit; but on the whole I think Arvine's "Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious Anecdote" is perhaps the one book in the room which comes within measurable distance of Frost. I should probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too seductive title. "I am not curious," as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, "but I like to know," and I might be tempted to pervert the book from its natural uses and open ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... explain the marvel of such spider-like spinning, Estelle, I may tell you that seventeen and a half pounds of Catherine's yarn would have sufficed to stretch round the equator of the earth. No machine-spun yarn has ever come within measurable distance of this astounding feat, and I have never heard of any spinner in Europe or America equalling it; yet even this has been beaten when we ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... chemical, as I have done the electrical, influences of the forest, and treat them both alike, if not as unimportant agencies, at least as quantities of unknown value in our meteorological equation. [Footnote: Schacht ascribes to the forest a specific, if not a measurable, influence upon the constitution of the atmosphere. "Plants imbibe from the air carbonic acid and other gaseous or volatile products exhaled by animals or developed by the natural phenomena of decomposition. On the other hand, the vegetable pours into the atmosphere ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... effect of labor is continually to eliminate scarcity and opinion as constitutive elements of value, and, by necessary consequence, to transform natural or indefinite utilities (appropriated or not) into measurable or social utilities: whence it follows that labor is at once a war declared upon the parsimony of Nature and ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... extraordinary number of reflex and associated movements, sensations, and actions, besides those relating to the lacrymal glands. When a bright light strikes the retina of one eye alone, the iris contracts, but the iris of the other eye moves after a measurable interval of time. The iris likewise moves in accommodation to near or distant vision, and when the two eyes are made to converge.[23] Every one knows how irresistibly the eyebrows are drawn down under an intensely bright light. The eyelids also involuntarily ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... this change in popular feeling toward trade unions was so gradual as not to be measurable, but some of its stages can be distinguished. Perhaps the first very noticeable step in the general acceptance of trade unions, other than their mere legalization, was the interest and approval given to the formation ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... himself, had he been alive and on this historic ground and chairman of that convention, could scarce have quelled the tumult aroused by this name and this speech—much less General Doby. Although a man of presence, measurable by scales with weights enough, our general has no more ponderosity now than a leaf in a mountain storm at Hale—and no more control over the hurricane. Behold him now, pounding with his gavel on something which should give forth a sound, but doesn't. Who is he (to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... under relation: if we assume a term to be out of all relation, it ceases to be an object of thought—it can neither be classified nor unclassified; it is beyond reason. Mathematics can proceed with its investigations only so long as it treats all quantities as measurable; it must wholly cease its calculations if an infinite term be introduced. To claim that analysis represents the complete normal action of the intellect in reasoning, is ultimately to claim that the initial point of thinking is the summum genus of ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter

... necessity of asking questions by indicating verbs with his finger. His Greek examination led to an argument between Jeremiah and Dr. Dowbiggin on the use of the aorist, from which the minister-elect of Kilbogie came out an easy first; and his sermons were heard to within measurable distance of the second head by an exact quorum of the exhausted court, who were kept by the clerk sitting at the door, and preventing MacWheep escaping. His position in the court was assured from the beginning, and fulfilled the function ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... length without breadth, and A surface is length and breadth, without thickness. Mr. Smith asserts that these definitions are false, and sustains his position by numerous demonstrations in the pure Euclidean style. He declares that every mathematical line has a definite breadth, which is as measurable as its length, and that every mathematical surface has a thickness, as measurable as the contents of any solid. His demonstrations, on diagrams, seem to be eminently clear, simple, and conclusive. The effects of this discovery and these demonstrations ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various

... lines in reference to Shakespeare but to Milton. Where will you find the person who to-day thinks Milton comes within any measurable distance of the greatest genius among the sons of earth who was called by ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence

... brightest in the heavens, is about six times as far off as alpha Centauri. His probable diameter is twelve million miles, and the light he emits two hundred times more brilliant than that of the sun. Yet, even through the telescope, he has no measurable diameter; he looks merely like a very ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the prime conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far off from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know, can be stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... imports, our farms without farmers, our houses without tenants—the boasted wealth of England will have vanished like a splendid dream of the morning, and the children of the rich will have become even as the children of the poor; all this may be within measurable distance, and may very well happen before the death of men who are now no more than middle-aged. Considering this, as well as the other points in favour of the scheme before us, it may be owned that it is best to look after the boys and girls ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... gates of the Ecole Militaire, the realization flashed upon Herzl that anti-Semitism was deep-rooted in the heart of the people—so deep, indeed, that it was impossible to hope for its disappearance within a measurable period of time. Precisely because he was so sensitive to his honor as a Jew, precisely because he had proclaimed, in the New Ghetto, the ideal of human reconciliation, and had taken the ultimate decision to stand ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... of which are outside of time, as he himself says (Confess. xii, 12). Thus, then, the creation of either is set down before there was any day. But it may also be said, following other holy writers, that the works of distinction and adornment imply certain changes in the creature which are measurable by time; whereas the work of creation lies only in the Divine act producing the substance of beings instantaneously. For this reason, therefore, every work of distinction and adornment is said to take ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... sentence as It is unthinkable, it is simply impossible to group the elements into any other and smaller "words" than the three indicated. Think or thinkable might be isolated, but as neither un- nor -able nor is-un yields a measurable satisfaction, we are compelled to leave unthinkable as an integral whole, a miniature bit of art. Added to the "feel" of the word are frequently, but by no means invariably, certain external phonetic characteristics. Chief of these is accent. In many, perhaps in most, ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... medium-steel bars were used. A 10-ft. panel, with a beam of 14-ft. span, and a slab 6 in. thick (not including the top coat), with 1/2-in. round bars, 4 in. on centers, was loaded to 900 lb. per sq. ft., at which load no measurable deflection was apparent. The writer wished to test it still further, but there was not enough cement—the material used for loading. The load, however, was left on for 48 hours, after which, no sign of deflection appearing, not even an incipient ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... in the other implications of such a scene, would he act? Until now his part in the inevitable frictions of matrimony had been conditioned by a tenderness toward Fanny and a measurable supporting belief that he was generally to blame. She had reduced him to the compounding of excuses; after her attack, drawing away, she had managed to make him follow her. Not cheaply, with the vulgarity ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... statelier edifice, 'eternal in the heavens.' To die in Christ is not to die, but becomes a mere change of condition and of place, to be with Him, which is far 'better.' So an Apostle who was coming within measurable distance of his own martyrdom, even whilst the headsman's block was all but in his sight, said: 'He hath abolished death,' the physical fact ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... intended 'digging up the hatchet,' as they termed it in their euphonious language, as soon as the spring came round! However, I wouldn't place much credence in their statement, I assure you. Those Crows are such curs that they would say anything rather than venture 'within measurable distance,' as the phrase goes, of a possible enemy." And ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson

... experiments have been made with the single treatment tube, containing an ointment destructive of all forms of venereal disease microbes, whether used before or after connection. The Pennsylvania Department of Health is within measurable distance of finding a solution of this problem—the production of a cheap, portable, easily applied and thoroughly ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout

... call the material universe, but would not necessarily be discontinuous with the psychical phenomena which we find manifested in connection with the world of matter. The transfer of matter, or physical energy, or anything else that is quantitatively measurable, into such an unseen world, may be set down as impossible, by reason of the very definition of such a world. Any hypothesis which should assume such a transfer would involve a contradiction in terms. But the hypothesis of a survival of present ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... had done a good deed. We are queer creatures all of us, whether we are bad or good. From that moment I gave my servants orders to lay the table for eight persons every day, and told them that I was only at home to Goudar. I spent money madly, and felt that I was within a measurable distance of poverty. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... undesirable arrangement is not repeated in the new system, the sumphs being connected in such a way as not to modify the section of the tube, nor consequently the pressure of the air. The presence of the siphons and stop valves did not seem to affect the pressure to any measurable extent. The following table contains a list of the more important mains tested, and it may be mentioned that the resistance, due to the reservoirs, was at first partially included. The trials were carried out while the mains were not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various

... go in consciousness, the less suitable become these schemes of separation and fixity existing in spatial and numerical forms. The inner world is that of pure quality. There is no measurable homogeneity, no collection of atomically constructed elements. The phenomena distinguished in it by analysis are not composing units, but phases. And it is only when they reach the surface, when they come in contact with the external world, when ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy

... that Melloni, with his newly-invented "thermopile," [1] succeeded in making the lunar heat sensible; and in 1835, taking his apparatus to the top of Vesuvius, he obtained not only perceptible, but measurable, results, getting a deviation of four or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... people are, the more will they abound in all those conveniences, comforts, and satisfactions which money will buy; and, other things being equal, the increase of competency and the decline of pauperism will be measurable ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... nations, as a step towards the final extinction. It is useless to deny that it really is a serious matter if there is danger of the speedy disappearance of the human race from the earth by its own voluntary and deliberate action, and that within a measurable period of time—for if it were an immeasurable period there would be no occasion for any acute anxiety—the last man will perish from the world. This is what "Race-Suicide" means, and we ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... course—couldn't use it if we could. What we need and are going to get is a material of about two and a half million specific gravity. Got to have it for lenses and controls for the fifth-order forces. Those rays go right through anything less dense without measurable refraction. But I see Rovol's giving me a nasty look. He's my boss on this job, and I imagine this kind of talk's barred during the period of relaxation, as ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... literary machine! The editor's phrase very nearly hits off the situation. As we have the linotype to set up the written words with a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In this connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from myself, written a propos a certain chameleonesque writer whose deservedly popular ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... He has manifestly made a careful study of their ways, with which he now and then betrays that curiously intimate acquaintance to which we are accustomed in a Richardson or a Balzac. How accurate are such incidental remarks as this, that women are "full measurable" in such matters as sleep—not caring for so much of it at a time as men do! How wonderfully natural is the description of Cressid's bevy of lady-visitors, attracted by the news that she is shortly ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... hatred. She had not reached the point of wishing definitely that he should suffer, but the sight of Etta—beautiful, self-confident, carelessly possessive in respect to Paul—had brought her within measurable distance of it. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... wondering, as men have probably wondered since the ages began, how it is that women seem to begin life with as great a knowledge of the world as we manage to acquire towards the end of our experience. Marguerite made her statements with a certain careless aplomb, and these were usually within measurable distance of the fact, whereas a youth her age and ten years older, if he be of a didactic turn, will hold forth upon life and human nature with an ignorance of both which is ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... relations were friendly, certainly, but they were relations of convenience and mainly of a business, or at least of a literary nature. He was twenty-six years my senior, and the discrepancy of experience and attainments was not measurable. With such conditions friendship must be a deliberate growth; something there must be to bridge the dividing gulf. Truth requires the confession that, in this case, the bridge took a very solid, material ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... spirit produced by this solemn scene, he is induced to attend a "retreat," or series of spiritual exercises, to be conducted by a Jesuit in a house of their Order. "Grace" had apparently not finally triumphed, because he was within measurable distance of expulsion owing to the indifference of his behaviour. However, the preacher took him seriously in hand, and after one more stirring appeal to absolute self-surrender to the Cross, or, in plain language, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... those who demand of poetry a usefulness more easily measurable than that of recreation. In their opinion, it is improvement rather than pleasure which is the end of art, or at least improvement as well as pleasure. In this, indeed, the poet himself is inclined to agree: "He who mingles the useful with the pleasant by delighting and likewise improving ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman

... important things—some of the most important things in life—with which it has nothing whatever to do. It will be well to recall Mr. Balfour's words at the opening of the National Physical Laboratory: "Science depends on measurement, and things not measurable are therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded, from its attention. But Life and Beauty and Happiness are not measurable. If there could be a unit of happiness, politics might begin to be scientific." It follows that there are a number of subjects on which the ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... considering that each day was another step towards liberty—freedom from the tyranny of the wind. In a sense, the endless surge of the blizzard was a slow form of torture, and the subtle effect it had on the mind was measurable in the delight with which one greeted a calm, fine morning, or noted some insignificant fact which bespoke the approach of a milder season. Thus in August, although the weather was colder, there were the merest signs of thawing along the edges of the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... can't tell me what language he speaks?" Felix asked with a despairing gesture. It was terrible to stand thus within measurable distance of the secret which might, perhaps, save Muriel's life, and yet be perpetually balked by wheel within wheel of more ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... and dispositions not less unhesitatingly than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge. They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... remarks, I shall now proceed to a calm, temperate and dispassionate narration of the various occurrences leading up to a climax that left me for a measurable space prone on the bed of affliction, and from which I have but newly risen, ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... there are different levels of culture in the same body of believers. It is, after all, a much more superficial difference than it sounds—a difference of language and symbolism for the same realities. Where language fits close, as it does to things measurable by our senses, divergency makes the difference between truth and error; but where it is question of the substitution of one analogy or symbol for another, the more elegant is not necessarily the more truthful; nor when we consider the infinite ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... more or less extended real landscape: it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the scene will group themselves—this ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... Protestants in the North are sick of being fooled by one English party after another. The landlords, or what's left of them, are beginning to discover that they have been bought and sold. The Bishops, England's last line of defence, are overreaching themselves, and we are within measurable distance of the day when the Church will be put into her proper place. There is not so much as a shoneen publican in a country town left who believes in the ranting of O'Rourke and his litter of blind whelps. Ireland is simply crying out for light and leading, and the Croppy ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... that gigantic brain to learn that science was rapidly reaching a point where his favourite gems might become all at once a mere drug in the market. Depreciation is the one bugbear that perpetually torments Sir Charles's soul; that winter he stood within measurable distance of so appalling ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... velocities be as the times, and the total space passed through be as the squares of the times, then the total space passed through must be as the squares of the velocity; and as the vis viva or mechanical power inherent in a falling body, of any given weight, is measurable by the height through which it descends, it follows that the vis viva is proportionate to the square of the velocity. Of two balls therefore, of equal weight, but one moving twice as fast as the other, the faster ball has four ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... time had counted, if the thing was measurable, she would have been afraid of losing hold of Rodney Lanyon. She held him now by a single slender thread, and the thread was Bella. She "worked" it regularly now through Bella. He was bound to be all right as long as Bella was; for his possibilities of suffering were thus ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair

... energies through all the small channels that his wealth opened and his talents made easy to him. He had no large knowledge of any subject, though he had looked into many just far enough to replace absolute unconsciousness of them with measurable ignorance. Never having enjoyed the sense of achievement, he was troubled with unsatisfied aspirations that filled him with melancholy and convinced him that he was a born artist. His wife found him selfish, peevish, hankering after change, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... commercial relations. With all due respect to the sagacity and ability of our ruling demagogues, I should not wish them to be quoted as typical Americans. The domination of such persons has an effect which is by no means measurable by their personal acts. What they can do is of infinitesimal importance. But the mischief is that they incline every one of us to believe, as Emerson puts it, in two gods. They make the morality of Wall Street and the White House seem to be a different thing from that of our ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... mentioned are Professor Pickering's estimates, based on the amount of light the little satellites reflect, for they are much too small to present measurable disks. Deimos is 14,600 miles from the center of Mars and 12,500 miles from its surface. Phobos is 5,800 miles from the center of the planet and only 3,700 from the surface. Deimos completes a revolution about the planet in thirty hours ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... brought him within measurable distance of a declaration which he meant to make, but for which he was ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... in those days of less constant communication, within measurable distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in old times lived or met together in that outlying region ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... ether was supposed to be at rest, such motion was indistinguishable from absolute motion. The motion of the earth relatively to the ether should have been different at different points of its orbit, and measurable phenomena should have resulted from this difference. But none did, and all attempts to detect effects of motions relative to the ether failed. The theory of relativity succeeded in accounting for this fact. But it was necessary incidentally ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz

... an apparently paradoxical conclusion. He is undertaking an impossible problem when he starts from the buyers' desire of an 'utility.' Therefore he turns from the buyers to the sellers. The seller has apparently a measurable and definable motive—the desire to make so much per cent. on his capital.[328] Ricardo, unfortunately, speaks as though the two parties to the bargain somehow represented mutually exclusive processes. 'Supply and demand' determine the value ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... citadel of his soul. His spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear. It is clear that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable distance of Carlylean gloom. He was twenty-four when he wrote thus, from ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... evil that is said of the wood-chuck, too, he does in reality a much smaller amount of damage to man than one would imagine from the outcry against him. Occasionally, it is true, a chuck will begin nibbling at early pease, or beans, and do real, measurable harm, but the injury which he inflicts on the farmer in the hay-fields is generally much exaggerated. In the "south field" that year, there were two acres of red clover, where not less than seven or eight wood-chucks dug new holes and threw out mounds of yellow earth, which in some places ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... stars of different brightness. The telescope not having been invented, he could not use a telescopic-sight as we now do in gunnery. This not only removes the difficulty of focussing, but makes the minimum visible angle smaller. Helmholtz has defined the minimum angle measurable with the naked eye as being one minute of arc. In view of this it is simply marvellous that, when the positions of Tycho's standard stars are compared with the best modern catalogues, his probable error in right ascension is only ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... in just the same sense as the researches of physical philosophers have shown that heat is convertible into electricity, that electricity is convertible into magnetism, magnetism into mechanical force or chemical force, and any one of them with the other, each being measurable in terms of the other,—even so, I say, that great law is applicable to the living world. Consider why is the skeleton of this horse capable of supporting the masses of flesh and the various organs forming the living body, unless it is because of the action of the same forces of cohesion ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... possible turn of the alliance groupings in Europe—the growing influence of Russia, the extension of that influence to the Asiatic populations on her borders, (Japan and Russia are already in alliance,) so that within the quite measurable future we may be confronted by a military community drawing on a population of 500,000,000 souls, autocratically governed and endowed with all the machinery of destruction which modern science has given to the world. A Russo-Chino-Japanese alliance might on behalf of the interest ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... this, that in the former the directions and grandeur cannot be estimated by or stated in figures with the same precision as in the latter. If a want, a faculty, is a quantity capable of degrees, the same as pressure or weight, this quantity is not measurable like that of the pressure or weight. We cannot fix it in an exact or approximative formula; we can obtain or give of it only a literary impression; we are reduced to nothing and citing the prominent ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... The measurable failure of this struggle in France, teaches the necessity of due preparation before a people can advance to the permanent possession and enjoyment of their rights. The American colonists had been trained to rational conceptions of freedom, by lessons of wisdom and ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward

... that Aristarchus has in mind here the moon, the earth, and the sun as spheres to be circumscribed within a cone, which cone is made tangible and measurable by the shadows cast by the non-luminous bodies; since, continuing, he clearly states in proposition nine, that "when the sun is totally eclipsed, an observer on the earth's surface is at an apex of a cone comprising the moon and the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... pence. Even when the injury is the greatest that human beings are capable of inflicting on the one side, and enduring on the other; even when an enemy has killed the body and ceased then, because he has no more that he can do, it is still a measurable thing. Love in a finite being's heart may swell high over it, and exult in bestowing forgiveness on the murderer with the victim's dying breath. In the beginning of the Gospel a vivid example of that very thing stands recorded: "Lord," said Stephen ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot



Words linked to "Measurable" :   measurability, important, measure, immeasurable, magnitude, of import



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