"Incommensurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The beautiful youth, to whom she had secretly devoted herself, had become to her a guardian angel. Was it not he who led her into those loftier regions, where suffering ceased beneath the weight of incommensurable infinity? and now a certain air of triumph about Beatrix disturbed her. No woman gains an advantage over another without allowing it to be felt, however much she may deny having taken it. Nothing was ever more strange in its course than the dumb, moral struggle which ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... help thinking men in the perpetual difficulty that arises from the fact that the universe can be seen in many different fashions and expressed by many different systems of terms, each expression within its limits true and yet incommensurable with expression upon a differing system. There is a sort of stratification in human ideas. I have it very much in mind that various terms in our reasoning lie, as it were, at different levels and in different planes, and that we accomplish a large amount of error ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... regarded as a man, as an Englishman, and as a great talent. His good qualities belong chiefly to the man, his bad to the Englishman and the peer, his talent is incommensurable. All Englishmen are, as such, without reflection properly so-called; distractions and party-spirit will not permit them to perfect themselves in quiet. But they are great as practical men. Thus, Lord Byron could never attain reflection on himself, and on this account his maxims in general ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... American hulks transported to our continent. It was the immense, the profound, the incommensurable peasantry of the financier and the parvenu, beaming, like a pitiful sun, upon the idolatrous town which wallowed on the ground the while it uttered impure psalms before the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... considerably? No; it is not better to do the one than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death,—as Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowise left undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable: the one is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to a dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... been, were such as no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite; and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them. Between money and such services, if done by abler men than I am, there is no common principle of comparison: they are quantities incommensurable. Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animal life. It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must, indeed, sustain, but never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have not had more than sufficient. As to any noble use, I trust I know how to employ as well as he a much greater ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the constructions given in Figure 252 is nowhere more apparent than in the drawing of the epicycloids, when, as in the case in hand the base and generating circles may be of incommensurable diameters; for which reason we have, in Figure 254, shown its application in connection with the most rapid and accurate mode yet known of describing those curves. Let C be the centre of the base circle; B, that of ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... divisible by 11, if two families be deducted; or once more, we may compare the ignorance of solid geometry of which he complains in the Republic and the puzzle about fractions with the difficulty in the Laws about commensurable and incommensurable quantities—and the malicious emphasis on the word gunaikeios (Laws) with the use of the same word (Republic). These and similar passages tend to show that the author of the Republic is also the author of the Laws. They are echoes of the ...
— Laws • Plato
... or excellence upon which we range the various kinds of living creatures, putting ourselves at the top—not merely in obedience to a pardonable vanity, but, as has hitherto been supposed, in obedience to a trustworthy intuition which, without attempting to apply a common measure to things incommensurable, judges life to be higher than death; consciousness than unconsciousness; mind than mere sensation; and in general, what includes and surpasses, than what is included and surpassed. We see that the organic world presupposes the ministry of the inorganic; and the animal world, that of the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... hold over the hearts of the English people is growing all the time, remains in an uncovenanted condition. The problem of his statue is still, and, so far as England is concerned, seems likely long to be, unsolved. Put him high or low, in the line of kings or out of it, he is hopelessly incongruous, incommensurable, and out of place. He is in fact the man of the New World; his institutions in the main embody the organic principles of New World society: at Washington, not at Westminster should ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... true there is no pulse, no beat of heart nor stir of breath, yet neither is there the sombre grotesqueness of the last pose. But the difference between life and death is here so small that it is incommensurable, the point of the mathematicians only. I shall hold this little hand in mine, and, with a hand upon her forehead, call her by name; for, you know, Akron, one's name has a power beyond every other word to reach the closed ears of the ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... colonizing of whole new continents, California gold discoveries, Central American canals, Russian armies, and whatever else may have some little claim to influence upon the destinies of mankind—is nothing compared with the incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... objecting arguments. She paused again, and thought; then she said, "Mankind is made up of classes of very various mental complexion, as distinct from each other as the colours which meet the eye. Red and blue are incommensurable; and in like manner, a Magian never can become a Greek, nor a Greek a Coelicolist. They do but make themselves fools ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the cycle in which the changes of the weather would run through their course. According to the present theory, it is not likely such a cycle will ever be discovered. There are too many secular, as well as periodic influences combining, to produce the effect; and the times are too incommensurable. Lately, Mr. Glaisher has presented a paper to the Royal Society, giving about fourteen years from observation. Others have lately attempted to connect the changes of the seasons with the solar spots, as well as with ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... sound critic returns to think of Michelangelo, not as Parlagreco and Lombroso show him, nor even as the minute examination of letters and of poems proves him to have been, but as tradition and the total tenor of his life display him to our admiration. Incalculable, incomprehensible, incommensurable: yes, all souls, the least and greatest, attack them as we will, are that. But definite in solitary sublimity, like a supreme mountain seen from a vast distance, soaring over shadowy hills and misty plains into the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... you in other cases, when a point is once evidently proved, withhold your consent on account of objections or difficulties it may be liable to? Are the difficulties that attend the doctrine of incommensurable quantities, of the angle of contact, of the asymptotes to curves, or the like, sufficient to make you hold out against mathematical demonstration? Or will you disbelieve the Providence of God, because there may be some particular ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... therefore be wrong. Women know very little of man, but there is one thing they feel with unfailing certainty, and that is whether their sex is of great or of small significance to him. (I am only alluding to the general effect of men on women, not to genuine personal love which is always incommensurable.) The greater the importance a man attaches to women, the more readily do they respond to his influence. They are attracted by his erotic will, not by one or the other of his spiritual or physical qualities. Women cannot resist a man to whom they mean much, everything. It is as ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... population, and there too there was present a slight social distinction between the old gods (Indigetes) and the new-comers (Novensides), though it is open to question how strongly this distinction was felt. The new gods thus far were not incommensurable with the old ones. They formed a tolerably harmonious circle, and there was not felt to be any need of new priesthoods; the old priests were sufficient to look after them all. There were a few new names, and a few new temples or altars, ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter |
