"Infinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Flora. 'We all know it is a pity; but it would be a far greater pity to break it off now—and do Tom an infinity of harm. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will indeed take an infinity of trouble to put together the ashes of a burned note, and will give the owner a new note or the value in coin, if satisfied of the integrity of the old one. The bank authorities preserve specimens of this kind as curiosities, minute fragments gummed in their proper position ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... was entrusted to the Sieur Despagnet and I: we dedicated four months to the search, during which happened an infinity of unknown things, strange, and out of all belief, of which books written on the subject have never spoken: such for instance, as that the devil came and held his meetings at the gates of Bordeaux, and in the quarter of the Palais Gallien, which fact was declared ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... experienced, is not of long duration. There is doubtless something solemn and imposing in the aspect of a boundless horizon, whether viewed from the summits of the Andes or the highest Alps, amid the expanse of the ocean or in the vast plains of Venezuela and Tucuman. Infinity of space, as poets in every language say, is reflected within ourselves; it is associated with ideas of a superior order; it elevates the mind which delights in the calm of solitary meditation. It is true, also, that every view of unbounded space bears a peculiar ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... had not been a prosperous one; but "he re-quickened justice, which had been a long while dead," says a chronicler devoted to the Duke of Burgundy; "he put an end to the tyrannies and exactions of the men-at-arms, and out of an infinity of murderers and robbers he formed men of resolution and honest life; he made regular paths in murderous woods and forests, all roads safe, all towns peaceful, all nationalities of his kingdom tranquil; he chastised the evil and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... There was no change in this night from that other one of ages and ages ago. There were the same stars, like fierce eyes of pale fire, robbed of softness by the polar cold; there were the same cloudless blue space, the same hissing flashes of the aurora leaping through its infinity, the same trees that had listened to his moaning prayers on that night when he ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... the peculiar character belonging to the tract of country situated between the two rivers, which consists of a vast tract of low, level land, projecting considerably into the sea, and intersected by an infinity of small branches from the principal rivers. In these and other respects, it appears to bear a considerable resemblance, according to the best descriptions of that coast which we possess, to the Deltas at the mouths of the Nile, the Ganges, and such other great rivers, as by depositing ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... festival was loud With drum and brass among the crowd Of panic revellers, whose cries Affront the quiet of the skies; Whose dancing lights contract the deep Infinity of night and sleep To a narrow turmoil of troubled fire. And I have found my heart's desire In beechen caverns that autumn fills With the blue shadowiness of distant hills; Whose luminous grey pillars bear The stooping sky: calm is the air, Nor any sound is heard to mar ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... virtue of curing disease, charmed the pilgrim more than a statue noticeable only for its beauty or its truth to life. We all know that wunderthaetige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemaelde. In architecture alone, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, their vague but potent feelings of infinity, their yearning towards a deity invisible, but localised in holy things and places, found artistic outlet. Therefore architecture was essentially a medieval art. The rise of sculpture and painting indicated the quickening to life of new faculties, fresh intellectual interests, and a ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... climbed up on to the heights of the Sahara. It had pleased Margaret to feel that her feet were pressing the sands of the great African desert. She had never dreamed that their valley was actually a rift in the rocks of the Sahara, that ocean of sand which travels on and on to infinity. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... an antechamber in an infinity. One became giddy there at looking forwards, and giddy at looking backwards, and there stood a crowd of anxious, pining beings, who were waiting and hoping for the time when the gates of grace should be opened. They ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... were pestered all day by vast numbers of mosquetoes, which are not much unlike the gnats in England, but much more venomous in their stings. At sunset, when the musquetoes retired, they were succeeded by an infinity of sand-flies, which made a mighty buzzing, though scarcely discernable by the naked eye; wherever these bite, they raise a small lump attended by painful itching, like that arising from the bite of an English harvest bug. The only light in which this place deserves our consideration ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... and for ever dread kept getting the upper hand: now it was a floating keg again and again making me dash away now one of the packages hurried in by the tide; while the strange drippings and hollow whisperings were magnified into an infinity of horrors. Every monster with which imagination has peopled the sea seemed to be there to attack me—strange serpent or lizard like beasts, slimy and scaled, thronging along the ceiling or up the sides, swimming around me, or burrowing through the sand. More than once I actually ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... another aspect than that torturing intoxicating aspect of art—one that fortified and calmed. All his scientific curiosities which had been so long laid to sleep revived. His first returning joy came from a sense of the inexhaustibleness and infinity ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... even as those superior Intelligences have investigated (or, if preferred, are alleged to have investigated), and remotely as they may have searched by the help of inference and analogy, even They have failed to discover in the Infinity anything permanent but—SPACE. ALL IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. Reflection, therefore, will easily suggest to the reader the further logical inference that in a Universe which is essentially impermanent in its conditions, nothing can confer permanency. Therefore, no possible substance, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... find in your reasoning very remarkable contradictions. You acknowledge for instance the infinity of space and time, and in spite of this you say that there was a time before the world was a year old. I do not understand that. We must assume for matter, for that is no doubt what you mean by the term 'world,' the same eternity as for space and time, whose ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... what on the earth I sought as fruitlessly— The world I knew, the heaven I scorned Lost in infinity: Alone, and on the ageless breath Of cosmic whirlwinds spun, I hurtle through the outer dark ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... bound to add) precisely the same calibre as, in the sister realm of drama, made the name of Manchester at one period a word of awe. Why do these young Mancunians recollect to such stupendous purpose? Here is Mr. AGATE, with an introduction of forty-four pages, all about time and infinity, before he can get his protagonist so much as started anywhere at all. It is a little like one of those demon-scenes out of the pantomimes he describes so lovingly—"Do so! May safety and success attend on Crusoe." But of course ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... said for a time. Marise lost herself in the outdoor wideness of impression that always came to her under a night sky, where she felt infinity hovering near. She was aware of nothing but the faint voice of the pines, the distant diminuendo of the frog's song, the firm elastic quality of the ground under her feet, so different from the iron rigidity of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... shall begin to fancy presently that Douce Davie Deans has turned infidel, and shall expect to hear of 'right-hand failings off and left-hand defections.' But tell me, if you would have me think you rational, is not your meaning this:—that the New Testament contains, amidst an infinity of rubbish, the statement of certain 'spiritual' truths which, and ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... abstract form of one of the great principles of modern political economy, and the nearest approach to it to be found in an ancient writer. (2) The resolution of wealth into its simplest implements going on to infinity is a subtle and refined thought. (3) That wealth is relative to circumstances is a sound conception. (4) That the arts and sciences which receive payment are likewise to be comprehended under the notion of wealth, also touches a question of modern political economy. ...
— Eryxias • An Imitator of Plato
... the shelter of some projecting rock, or the entrance of a cavern. There when the sun is shrouded in clouds, and the blackness almost of night falls like a pall over the mountains, when the wind howls around the summits, and the thunder with its infinity of reverberations rattles, and bounds from crag to crag throughout the chain, seeming to make the very rocks tremble and totter, then affrighted he hears in the winds the flapping of the wings of that monstrous bird of the mountains whose age is a thousand ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... were a terrible encumbrance to us on the march. But Stuart determined not to abandon them, and they were dragged on—a line stretched to infinity! ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Plato's allegory it is easy to arrive at an understanding of the state of humanity at the present time. Imagine very imperfect, very undeveloped beings, possessing, however, an infinity of latent potentialities; imagine them born in a dark cavern where they swarm pell-mell, passing their time chiefly in devouring one another. Every moment this cavern is entered, and a certain number of these poor beings are taken out of it and carried into the light of ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... thought of it undoes me—with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals, bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of—of infinity. And nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one thinks too much of one's clothes. I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... the clouds gathered and formed an army which stormed the zenith and threatened to overwhelm the pure light of the planet. The lesser stars vanished, two or three falling in their haste and losing themselves forever in infinity. The night ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... morning, O thou smitten child, Scorned, scourged and persecuted and reviled— Athirst and famishing, none pitying thee, Crowned with the twisted thorns of agony— No faintest gleam of sunlight through the dense Infinity of gloom to lead thee thence— Wait for the morning:—It will come, indeed, As surely as the night hath ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... ministers. Sometimes, as in the case of Lord Randolph Churchill, a strong personality, moved by a new idea, tears the structure to pieces. But the Chief Secretary knows no such limitations from without. Theoretically, he may be produced to infinity in any direction; he is all in every part. But, as a matter of fact, through the mere necessity of filling so much space his control becomes rarefied to an invisible vapour; he ends by becoming nothing in any part. With its ultimate principle reduced to the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... jungle they came, flitting in gay inconsequence, steering a course of "slanting indeterminates," yet full of the power and the passion of the moment. They flitted between the idle boom and the deck, and up the gleaming sky in all the sizes that distance grades between nearness and infinity. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the earth itself! And yet when it rises to the surface of the world it becomes only a sunny, murmuring river, which dances along among green banks and bushes; and, being noticed by the careless passer-by, who cannot see the deep infinity of waters of which it is the symbol, and knows not even whether they exist, is termed "a pretty stream of thought and fancy, but one that hath ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... drowsy fog my body creeps back to me. It is the white time before dawn. Moonlight, watery, pellucid, lifeless, ripples over the world. The grass beneath it is gray; the stars pale in the sky. The night dew has fallen; An infinity of little drops, crystals from which all light has been taken, Glint on the sighing branches. All is purity, without ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... and I am encountering '' some of those fair ladies who would fain usurp your place, sometimes bedecked with jewels rare, and sometimes, as Racine says, "<——— dans le simple appareil D'une beaute, qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil.>' "Madame de Grammont, for instance, takes an infinity of trouble respecting my choice of your successor, which she is resolved shall be either herself or one of her choosing. I protest to you that I find all these plots and counterplots very amusing; and can only say, that ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... The impetus which causes a living being to grow larger, to develop and to age, is the same that has caused it to pass through the phases of the embryonic life. The development of the embryo is a perpetual change of form. Any one who attempts to note all its successive aspects becomes lost in an infinity, as is inevitable in dealing with a continuum. Life does but prolong this prenatal evolution. The proof of this is that it is often impossible for us to say whether we are dealing with an organism growing old or with an embryo continuing to evolve; ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... in the dying light of day, a man comes slowly, painfully into the picture. What an atom in that infinity of awful grandeur. One little life in all that desert of snow and ice. And what a life. The poor wretch was swathed in furs; snow-shoes on his feet, and a long staff lent his drooping figure support. His whole attitude told its own tale of exhaustion. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... sill, the importunate robin lay supine, his little heart beating no more behind the shabby finery of his breast, but his glazing eyes half-open as though even in death he were still questioning. Above him and all around him brooded the genius of infinity, dispassionate, inscrutable, grey. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... of a conic section moves along the axis of the curve to infinity, banished by the mutual consent of the individual particles which compose the curve, or the nation, a figure is formed, called a parabola. This is the curve which the most erratic bodies in the universe describe ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... belongs to many of the Fathers. . . . They admitted, with good intentions no doubt, yet most inconsiderately, a great error in regard to morals, and pernicious to Christianity; an error which, through all succeeding ages to our times, has produced an infinity of mistakes and evils of various kinds. Jesus, our Savior, prescribed one and the same rule of life or duty to all His disciples. But the Christian doctors, either by too great a desire of imitating ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... As he now went up the weary and perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... authorship of and supremacy over Nature precisely where it was." He adds, in the words of Dr. Buckland, "Such an aboriginal constitution, so far from superseding an Intelligent Agent, would only exalt our conceptions of the consummate skill and power that could comprehend such an infinity of future uses under future systems, in the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... case, thought I, why the craving within me to distinguish myself? Surely it does not occur fortuitously, but is intended to rouse and call into exercise certain latent powers that I possess? and then with infinite eagerness I set about attempting to discover these latent powers. I tried an infinity of pursuits, botany and geology amongst the rest, but in vain; I was fitted for none of them. I became very sorrowful and despondent, and at one time I had almost resolved to plunge again into the whirlpool of dissipation; it was a dreadful resource, it ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... electro-magnets of Arago's extraordinary experiments, and perhaps a few others. Still it appeared unlikely that these could be all the effects which induction by currents could produce; especially as, upon dispensing with iron, almost the whole of them disappear, whilst yet an infinity of bodies, exhibiting definite phenomena of induction with electricity of tension, still remain to be acted upon by the induction ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... midst of demonstrations of joy. Now that he had arrived among his subjects there, that joy burst out anew. There was such a crowd in the streets that sixty people were stifled! All along the line of route were an infinity of coaches filled with ladies richly decked. The streets through which he passed were hung in the Spanish fashion; stands were placed, adorned with fine pictures and a vast number of silver vessels; triumphal arches were built from ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... conceived that the earth is flat and of limitless extent. By this it is not meant to imply that he had a distinct conception of infinity, but, for that matter, it cannot be said that any one to-day has a conception of infinity that could be called definite. But, reasoning from experience and the reports of travellers, there was nothing to suggest to early man the limit of the earth. He did, indeed, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... seen the comet moving with its immense train of light through the sky; this likewise has a system supplied with living beings and their existence derives its enjoyment from the diversity of circumstances to which they are exposed; passing as it were through the infinity of space they are continually gratified by the sight of new systems and worlds, and you can imagine the unbounded nature of the circle of their knowledge. My power extends so far as to afford you a glimpse ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... undoubtedly have undertaken for the removal of the exiled deputies; admitting the exigency, under all its relations, as it appeared to him to exist, and the then circumstances of the times with all their bearings and dependencies, branching out into an infinity of collateral considerations and involving in each a variety of objects, political, physical, and moral; and these, again, under their distinct and separate heads, ramifying into endless subdivisions, which it was foreign to his purpose to consider, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... mostly over the same ground as the first. I dilly reached my last Boyd station, in the pretty and varied Pyrenees district—a sheep station, then under charge of my friend James M. Hamilton. Here the hospitalities were equal, but all the rest sadly below The Gums, and an infinity underneath Dunmore. But Hamilton promised us compensation in a visit to the more comfortable residence of a squatting neighbour, Mr. John Allen. The master was not at home, but the mistress received us with squatting welcome. She was a young South Australian ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... word death he had often seen separate & conjunct with other words, till he had learned to skill of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word God, in a Pulpit, and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a scull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or further than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the Sounding Board. [But the] epitaphs were trim and sprag & patent, & pleased the survivors of Thames Ditton above the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... is attraction toward all matter, generated by the vibrations of all the constituent electrons in parallel planes. It is directed along a line perpendicular to the plane of vibration at its center, and approaches infinity as the angle theta approaches the limit of Pi divided by two. Therefore, by shifting the axis of rotation or the plane of vibration thus making theta vary between the limits of zero ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... nestle, brown with flecks of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity. Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their slow curves against the sky, And one black bird circles ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... everything is heightened and thinned, Renan asks what would have happened to Giotto if he had been told to paint his frescoes in churches from which flat spaces had entirely disappeared. "Once we have exhausted the grand idea of infinity which springs from its unity, we realise the shortcomings of this egoistic and jealous architecture, which only exists for itself and its own ends, regnant dans le desert."[40] The churches of Umbria and Tuscany were as frames in which space was provided for all the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... atoms, those almighty tools that do every thing of themselves, without the help of a workman. When the atoms, says he, descend in infinite space (very ingeniously spoken, to make high and low in infinity), they do not fall plumb down, but decline a little from the perpendicular, either obliquely or in a curve; and this declination, says he, from the direct line is the cause of our liberty of will. But, I say, this declination of atoms ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... ratio; and there comes a time when the progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings two young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer together, into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an infinity between the moment when all is told and that which went ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a simple, loving soul, giving no trouble in its passage; dropping the toils, expanding with infinity. Not utterly gone; immortality is assured us in the ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... drowsing lovers, or thy perilous hair; Nor for that face that might indeed provoke Invasion of old cities; no, nor all Thy freshness stealing on me like strange sleep. Nor for this only do I love thee, but Because Infinity upon thee broods; And thou art full of whispers and of shadows. Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say So long, and yearned up the cliffs to tell; Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, What the still night suggesteth to the heart. Thy voice is like to music heard ere ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... here. The Scripture declares, again and again that God is Love. Also, the Scripture is clear in regard to His infinity. In fact our reason would almost carry us so far. For if all things had a Creator, that Creator must have had no beginning. But we take it that God will be freely conceded to be infinite in His being, and in the qualities ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... that will amount at last to the segregation of these mingled tints into recognizable distinct masses again. It is not a monotony, but an utterly disorderly and confusing variety that makes this grey, but Democracy, for practical purposes, does really assume such a monotony. Like 'infinity', the Democratic formula is a concrete-looking and negotiable symbol for a negation. It is the aspect in political disputes and contrivances of that social and moral deliquescence the nature and possibilities of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... attaineth not unto wisdom is eager to harm that man who, with single heart, accepted the exalted promise. There is no end to the infinity of the ocean of birth and death for those men who raven to destroy the doctrine that is mighty to save them if they ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... was now of little use as regarded naval operations, she was the first steamer which had entered the Pacific, and might, had she not been repudiated by the Government, have formed the nucleus of a force which would have prevented an infinity of disasters which shortly after my departure from Chili befel the cause of independence, ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... conquest swept over the land of the Five Rivers. Even Islam did not break the power of caste, and very distinct traces of caste still survive amongst the Mahomedan community itself. But nowhere has caste been so much shaken as in the Punjab, for the infinity of sub-castes into which each caste has resolved itself gives the measure of its disintegration. Sikhism still represents the most successful revolt against its tyranny in the later history of Hinduism. Hence the relatively slight ascendency enjoyed by the Brahmans ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... required of him, and went on at a very steady well-behaved pace, up the hill, across the common, and into the town, where, leaving him at the inn, they walked into the street, and Beatrice, after an infinity of searching, succeeded in obtaining certain grey cotton velvet, which, though Fred asserted that donkeys had a tinge of lilac, was certainly not unfit to represent their colour. As Fred's finances were in a much more flourishing state since New Year's day, he proceeded to delight the ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moved forward again by road. An advance must slow down while communications were improved. The XXth Corps inherited from the XXIst Corps the track between Beit Likia and Biddu which had been prepared with an infinity of trouble and exertion, but this and the main Latron-Jerusalem road were the ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... crept round the causeway—a legacy of the Incas—to behold the expanse of the Pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine, the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling of infinity ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... having squared the circle without knowing it, or intending to do it. In the Protest presently noted he discovered that "the force taken as 1 is equal to the sum of all its fractions ... thus 1 1/4 1/9 1/16 1/25, &c., carried to infinity." This the mathematician instantly sees is equivalent to the theorem that the circumference of any circle is double of the diagonal of the cube ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... as a towering mountain peak in the Alps. Every drop of water in the ocean is an epitome of the chemistry of the whole ocean; every drop is subject to precisely the same laws as dominate the united infinity of billions of drops that make that miracle of Nature, men call the Sea. No matter how humble the calling of the individual, how uninteresting and dull the round of his duties, he should do his best. He should ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... this planet only. In reality, for the inhabitants of the Earth, "low" is the inside, the center of the globe, and "high" is what is above our heads, all round the Earth. The Heavens are what surround us on all sides, to Infinity. ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... full of myriads of tiny sacs, each containing eight pretty seeds. A glance through the microscope at the contents of one of these teats, a speck only just visible to the eye, reveals an astounding world: an infinity of procreative wealth in an atom. Ah, what a beautiful thing life is, even on a chip of rotten bark no bigger than a finger-nail! What a garden! What ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... materialism of his age had crusht in his heart all expansive force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were: "Sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal sleep." He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts have the brand of immortality. If he had believed, in God, he might have died ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... them, and left their offspring to remain under the badge of shame. When carefully looked at it was but a scant cure, and threw the responsibility of illegitimacy where it did not belong, but it was a mighty step nevertheless. The distance from zero to unity is always infinity. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... intelligible. I had overtaken the fish on the bank and had wheeled in the line again, but he was only collecting himself for a fresh rush, and the next minute it seemed as if the bottom had been knocked out of the pool and an opening made into infinity. Round flew the wheel again; fifty yards were gone in as many seconds, the rod was bending double, and the line pointed straight down; straight as if there was a lead at the end of it and unlimited space in which to sink. "Ah, didn't I tell ye so?" said Pat; "what will we do now?" Too late ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... extremely dangerous, tearing men to pieces, or crushing them with a single blow of the head; they are less to be dreaded in woods than elsewhere, because their horns often catch in the branches, and give time for the persons pursued to escape by flight. The skins of these animals serve for an infinity of purposes, and even cruses are made of them for holding water or liquors. The animals on the coast of Malabar are all wild, and strangers are not prevented from hunting them for ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... it did now; that the act of breathing, of seeing, of looking on wonders in which his hands had taken no part in the making, would fill him with the indefinable pleasure which had suddenly become his experience. He wondered, as he still stood gazing into the infinity of that other world beyond the Saskatchewan, if romance was really quite dead in him. Always he had laughed at romance. Work—the grim reality of action, of brain fighting brain, of cleverness pitted against other men's cleverness—had almost brought ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... which was situated on a limited terrace, the great altitudes of the mountain rose into the infinity of the night. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... luminaries[552] which are self-effulgent and which possess splendour like that of the Sun or the fire. Know this, O giver of honours, that possessed of far-famed splendour, even these last do not behold the limits of the firmament in consequence of the inaccessibility and infinity of those limits. This Space which the very gods cannot measure is full of many blazing and self-luminous worlds each above the other. Beyond the limits of land are oceans of water. Beyond water is darkness. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... contemplation is the long line of the horizon on a calm day at sea, or the long, horizontal line of a desert plain! The lack of variety, with all the energy and vitality that accompany it, gives one a sense of peace and rest, a touch of infinity that no other lines can convey. The horizontal lines which the breeze makes on still water, and which the sky often assumes at sunset, affect us from ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... moon, how calmly you look down upon me, sublime and lovely at the same time! When I gaze at you, moving so quietly, floating in infinity, and contemplating reflect thyself in finiteness, I think of you, oh Charlotte, who stands above me like the moon so bright and mild, and I envelop myself in your rays, and my spirit becomes ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... itself. There is something of the spirit of Pythagoras in what one of the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, said: "It is said that human nature is something small and limited, and that God is infinite, and it is asked how the finite can embrace the infinite. But who dares to say that the infinity of the Godhead is limited by the boundary of the flesh, as though by a vessel? For not even during our lifetime is the spiritual nature confined within the boundaries of the flesh. The mass of the body, it is true, is limited by neighbouring ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... of living creatures offers to our contemplation an infinity of wonders far greater than this matter of a locust's wing; but in general they pass unperceived, obscured as they are by the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... brain that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... holy one, as you observe," I continued. "He did an infinity of good, and through all the Terror kept himself from the guillotine. He brought me up and gave me such education as I have. It was in his house in the country at Dammarie, near Melun, that I made the acquaintance of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... expressing in human language that which is truly "incomprehensible,"—incomprehensible in the old sense, as in the Athanasian Symbol, "Immensus Pater, immensus Filius, immensus Spiritus sanctus"; till, indeed, men forgot, for all practical purposes that infinity transcends the grasp of finite minds (in fact, as well as in placidly accepted and then immediately neglected theory); and can be apprehended only, and that imperfectly, by the best aspirations of a heart, set of fixed purpose on that ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... Moral of the principal Episode, which shews us how an innumerable Multitude of Angels fell from their State of Bliss, and were cast into Hell upon their Disobedience. Besides this great Moral, which may be looked upon as the Soul of the Fable, there are an Infinity of Under-Morals which are to be drawn from the several parts of the Poem, and which makes this Work more useful and Instructive than any other ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... terrace, or paced up and down, watching the scene. Just beyond their crest was the frowning mass of Mount Misery. The crystal flood poured down from above, and the moon was rising over the distant hills. The sea had the look of infinity. There might be ships at anchor before Basseterre or Sandy Point, but the shoulders of the mountain hid them; and below, the world looked as if the passions of Hell had let loose—the torches flared and crackled, and the trees took on hideous shapes. Once a battalion of the pale venomous-looking ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... these two lives or faculties are perpetual with every man from infancy even to the end of his life, and afterwards to eternity; because there is no end to knowledge, still less to intelligence, and least of all to wisdom; for there is infinity and eternity in the extent of these principles, by virtue of the Infinite and Eternal One, from whom they are derived. Hence comes the philosophical tenet of the ancients, that everything is divisible in ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... infinity of people on board from the King to go along with him. My Lord, Mr. Crewe, and others go on shore to meet the King as he comes off from shore, where Sir R. Stayner, bringing his majesty into the boat, I hear that his majesty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... with men of science and men of letters. In spite of the limitations just referred to it is certain that as he surveyed the broadening horizon of the world of knowledge, he must have felt the student's spasm of agony when he first realized the infinity of research and the awful brevity of time. His reflections on old age give proof enough of this. If he missed the labour in the full harvest-field, the glimpse of the distant mountain tops, suffused for the first time by the new light, he missed likewise the wearing labour ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... fancy. He would detect infant damnation and argument for sprinkling in the deep boom of the Presbyterian bell, and instant dissent in the querulous note of the Baptist, whose echo droned "i-m-m-e-r-s-i-o-n" to infinity. This was the cue for a jaunty flaunting of apostolic succession on the part of the Episcopalian sexton, only to be himself reminded by the First Methodist that there were bishops and bishops. So on, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... may also apply the same process as in Fig. 1; D T becomes a tangent at D to the circumference, and the asymptotes coincide with the axis of the hyperbola, of which one branch reduces to the right line A P extending from A to infinity on the left, and the other reduces to the right line B G Q, extending from B to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... however, I have given only a sketch of the latter part of the Franco-German War. To have entered into details on an infinity of matters would have necessitated the writing of a very much longer work. However, I have supplied, I think, a good deal of precise information respecting the events which I actually witnessed, and in this connexion, perhaps, I may have thrown some useful ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... all that was best in European literature, and his peculiar subject, with only gods and angels (Adam and Eve are scarcely human, even after the fall) for characters and selected portions of eternity and infinity for time and place, gave him the tendency to artificiality and strain to the outmost verges of sublimity, and to extraordinary involution of phrase and idea—for all of which he must have a suitable prosody. He chose blank verse when the poetical fashion was ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... but we are so weak we have to talk; To talk—to touch. Why can't I rest in knowing I would give my life to reach you? That has—all there is. But I must—put my timid hands upon you, Do something about infinity. Oh, let what will flow into us, And fill us full—and leave us still. Wring me dry, And let me fill again with life more pure. To know—to feel, And do nothing with what I feel and know— That's being good. ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... Power That rules all action and all tides of thought, And all the secret courses of the stars; The Power that still establishes on earth Desire and worship, through the radiant laws Of Duty, Love and Beauty; for through these As through three portals of the self-same gate The soul of man attains infinity, And enters into Godhead. So he gained On earth a fore-taste of Nirvana, not The void of eastern dream, but the desire And goal of all of us, whether thro' lives Innumerable, by slow degrees, we near The death divine, or from this breaking body Of earthly death we flash at once to God. Through ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... that the other party is an ego, and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness, which can expand or contract without reference to reason or record—a potential infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side the German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these Teutons ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... morning. This was Christmas Day. We were going to the trenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospect of straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, in an inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into my northerly ear, and the A.S.C. motor-car driver, who was mad, kept missing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint. One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but whose father was the devil and his mother an ass, plunged into ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... absurdity to ascribe several attributes to one substance: for nothing in nature is more clear than that each and every entity must be conceived under some attribute, and that its reality or being is in proportion to the number of its attributes expressing necessity or eternity and infinity. Consequently it is abundantly clear, that an absolutely infinite being must necessarily be defined as consisting in infinite attributes, each of which expresses a ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... have are few, and those designed by nature for the SUPPORT and comfort of life, and not to penetrate into the INWARD ESSENCE and constitution of things. Besides, the mind of man being finite, when it treats of things which partake of infinity, it is not to be wondered at if it run into absurdities and contradictions, out of which it is impossible it should ever extricate itself, it being of the nature of infinite not to be comprehended ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... I am lucky to get off with this." She held up her right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand had struck the road. Arnold took it delicately in his own thin fingers to examine it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch. He looked at it with anxiety so obviously deep and troubled, that Hilda silently smiled. She who had been battered, as she said, twice round the world, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... witnesseth, No doubt of changeless goodness wakes, No link of cause and sequence breaks, But, one with nature, rooted is In the eternal verities; Whereby, while differing in degree As finite from infinity, The pain and loss for others borne, Love's crown of suffering meekly worn, The life man giveth for his friend Become vicarious in the end; Their healing place in nature take, And make life sweeter ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... yonder crosses. Truth and Merit have other symbols than success; and in this mortal race, all competitors may enter; and the field is clear for all. Side by side, Lies run with Truths, and fools with wise; but, like geometric lines, though they pierce infinity, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... passage 'The True, knowledge, infinite is Brahman' intimates certain qualities of Brahman, viz. true being, knowledge, infinity!—Not so, we reply. From the circumstance that all the terms of the sentence stand in co-ordination, it follows that they convey the idea of one matter (sense) only. If against this you urge that the sentence may convey the idea of one matter only, even if directly expressing a ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... small transient life when trying to contrast itself with his broad and Infinite Being. We are constantly speaking of two things wherewith we find ourselves related—space and time: and what are they? We hardly know. We know but something like this: space is a measured distance in infinity; time a ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... Joe pictured to himself. They were trying to realize a dream men have dreamed for decades—the necessary space platform that would be the dock, the wharf, the starting point from which the first of human space explorers could start for infinity. The idea that anybody could want to halt such an ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... moon is at its height, The evening primrose greets its light With grace and joy: then opens up The mimic moon within its cup. Tall trees, as high as Babel tower, Throw down their shadows to the flower— Shadows that shiver—seem to see An ending to infinity. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... unto me, And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you, In setting my Virginia's spirit free. My mother—my own mother, who died early, Was but the mother of myself; but you Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, And thus are dearer than the mother I knew By that infinity with which my wife Was dearer to ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... created the spurs of the fighting-cock and the legs of the greyhound. He will find out what genius is, and the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be recognized. In the new science of psycho-analysis he has already begun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into the light of day; it may be that in the evidence of telepathy which the psychic researchers are accumulating, he is beginning to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... species, and this tendency must make itself felt; for though the doctrine of chances or averages can never be trusted to on a limited scale, yet, if applied to high numbers, the results come nearer to what theory demands, and, as we approach to an infinity of examples, become strictly accurate. Now the scale on which nature works is so vast—the numbers of individuals and the periods of time with which she deals approach so near to infinity, than any cause, however slight, and however liable to be veiled and counteracted ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... personal, and loved life; and she stood out that death was unthinkable—that she had the sense of infinity within her. Thyrsis strove to make her see that one was to wreak one's hunger for infinity at each moment, and not put it off to any future age; that life was a thing for itself, and needed no sequel to justify it. "It is a free gift, and we have no claim upon it; we must ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... too divine colour seized and shaped forth solid forms, and thence away to others in uttermost distances where the incredible flickering gleam of new heights arose, that soared, or stretched their white uncertain curves in sky like wings traversing infinity. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... parts in which, each bit fits into every other. For it was only by such disregard of minutiae that the theme could be handled at all. The impression of vastness, the sense that everything, as Bishop Butler says, "runs up into infinity," would have been impaired if he had drawn attention to the details of his figures. Had he had upon his canvas only a single human incident, with ordinary human agents, he would have known, as well as other far inferior artists, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... him, knowing what subject he would like best to talk upon, how his opinion stood towards the question between Paschal and Soame Jennings about number and numeration? as the French philosopher observes that infinity, though on all sides astonishing, appears most so when the idea is connected with the idea of number; for the notion of infinite number—and infinite number we know there is—stretches one's capacity still more than ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... "origin of the universe," we can only succeed in multiplying impossibilities of thought "by every attempt we make to explain its existence." No one has pointed out more clearly than Mr. Spencer that "infinity" is not a conception, but the negation of one. The pity is that he did not realise that in taking up this position he was on exactly the same level of criticism that Atheists have pursued. For them the universe is an ultimate fact; all that we can do is to ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... qualities of infinitude? Add a great many bricks together, and they form a pyramid as huge as the peak of Teneriffe. Add all the common minds together that the world ever produced, and the mind of a Shakspere towers over the whole, in all the grandeur of unapproachable infinity. That which is infinite admits of neither increase nor diminution. Is it not so with genius of a certain altitude? Homer, Milton, Shakspere, were perhaps men of equal powers. Homer was, it is said, a beggar; Shakspere an illiterate wool-comber; Milton skilled in ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... his unlived youth seemed to be dancing in Philip Romilly's veins when he awoke the next morning to find an open porthole, the blue sea tossing away to infinity, and his steward's ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... himself. The lapse of ages changes all things—time—language— the earth—the bounds of the sea—the stars of the sky, and everything "about, around, and underneath" man, except man himself. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment.' Byron, vol. v. p. 66. WRIGHT. Sir Walter Scott said 'that he had more pleasure in reading London, and The Vanity of Human Wishes than any other poetical composition he could mention.' Lockhart's Scott, iii. 269. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... man fails to see the infinity of space between Modernism and Orthodoxy, or to apprehend the fact that daily they are drawing farther apart! Time holds no promise of even a ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... This is, of course, doubtful; but it is sure to mean an infinity of discoveries about the country ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... We had all forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... most splendid joke had been made, and before we had done we were out of the village and in the open country beyond, and could see my house and garden far away behind, glittering in the sunshine; and in front of us lay the forest, with its vistas of pines stretching away into infinity, and a drive through it of fourteen miles before we reached the sea. It was a hoar-frost day, and the forest was an enchanted forest leading into fairyland, and though Irais and I have been there often before, and always thought it ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... lake Superior, and an infinity of others, lesser and greater have to be discovered, for which I approve of M. the Marquis of Denonville's saying, often repeated:—that the King of France, our monarch was not high lord enough to open up such a vast country, as we are only beginning to enter ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... those bright creatures, named Spirits of Knowledge,[5] who o'er Time And Space and Thought an empire claimed, Second alone to Him whose light Was even to theirs as day to night; 'Twixt whom and them was distance far And wide as would the journey be To reach from any island star To vague shores of Infinity ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and preached. He was observed to decline with the utmost care whatever might gain him the applause of men, seeking only to please God, and to advance his glory. He chiefly resorted to cottages, and country villages, instructing an infinity of poor people. His piety, his charity to the poor, his disinterestedness, his care of the sick and those in prison, endeared him to all: but nothing was so moving as his meekness, which no provocation was ever capable of disturbing. He conversed among all ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to say not so much Ave atque vale, as Vale atque ave. In all this rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical progression of which we ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... it looks good to the scout, he signals back, and they leave the warp anchored for a sort of permanent gateway until we can get a transport beam built. But we can't control the directional and dimensional scope of the warp. There are an infinity of ways it can go, until we have a guide beam transmitting from the other side. Then we can just scan a segment of space with the warp, and the ...
— Circus • Alan Edward Nourse
... through which they have naturally and inevitably passed? Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation upon which all law, civilisation, religion and progress ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having undone it, he would never have tormented himself with the memory of it as of a deed of sacrilege. But Rossetti had both affection enough to do it and weakness enough to have it undone. After an infinity of self-communions he determined to have the grave opened, and the book extracted. Endless were the preparations necessary before such a work could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had to be consulted. At length preliminaries were complete, and one night, seven and a half years ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... logician, scientist, Ignore as moonshine; but which are, no less, Actual, proven, and, in their dignity And grasp and space-defying attributes, Worthy to qualify a deathless spirit To have the range of an infinity Through an unending period—at once A promise and a proof of ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... consequently as regards the existence of these things. His causality must be subject to conditions and even to the condition of time; and this would inevitably bring in everything contradictory to the notions of His infinity and independence. On the other hand, it is quite easy for us to draw the distinction between the attribute of the divine existence of being independent on all time-conditions, and that of a being of the world of sense, the distinction being ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... as a parcel of insects devouring one another on a little atom of clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own being, and of that of Babylon. His soul launched out into infinity, and, detached from the senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when afterwards, returning to himself, and entering into his own heart, he considered that Astarte had perhaps died for him, the universe vanished ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... level of the heart to which at times we momentarily attain! Oh, that we could shake loose the prisoned pinions of the soul and soar to that superior point, whence, like to some traveller looking out through space from Darien's giddiest peak, we might gaze with spiritual eyes deep into Infinity! ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... are, and admirable as are his talents, his expression of our retired corner of the universe, seems a little improper. When a little emmet, standing on its ant-hill, could get a peep into infinity, how could he think he saw a corner in it?-a retired corner? Is there a bounded side to infinitude! If there are twenty millions of worlds, why not as many, and as many, and as many more? Oh! one's imagination cracks! I ]one, to bait within distance of home, and rest at the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... myself to my new suit. Then I went to the county fair, where were gathered people from all the townships, and my poor mind had a mighty struggle trying to grasp the immensity of the thing. I felt much the same as when I was trying to understand the mathematical sign of infinity. And when I came upon the statement, in my geography, that there are eighty-eight counties in our State, the mind balked absolutely and refused to go on. I felt as did the old gentleman who saw an aeroplane for the first time. After watching ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... that we can apprehend neither the beginning nor the end of our personality, which comes up out of infinity as an island out of the sea, so gently, that none can say when it is first visible on our mental horizon, and fades away in the case of those who leave offspring, so imperceptibly that none can say when it is out of sight. But, like the island, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... June morning, and the old sensation of a pause before advance was upon her, and the strange solemnity which was almost a terror, from the feeble clutching of her mind at the comprehension of infinity. She looked at the morning sunlight coming between the white slants of her curtains, an airy flutter of her new dress from the closet, her valedictory, tied with a white satin ribbon, on the stand, and she saw ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... now, one after the other, in a slow-moving decrescendo, until they constituted a solemn chorus played in moderato, melting at last into the lovely and serious main theme, which in the finale streamed away and beyond into infinity, dying out on an ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... firmaments, each one containing its countless systems. Oh! Louis, God is infinite—what if these wondrous creations have no limit, but circle beyond circle spread out to all eternity! We may see the infinity of our Maker in the smallest leaf. There is nothing lost. What we destroy ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... Mephistopheles, and in part to a weird investiture of spiritual mystery with which he has artfully environed the whole production. The substance of the piece is the love story of Faust and Margaret, yet beyond this is a background of infinity, and over and around this is a poetic atmosphere charged with suggestiveness of supernatural agency in the fate of man. If the gaze of the observer be concentrated upon the mere structure of the piece, the love story is what he will find; and that is all he will find. Faust ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... arisen and been decided in the Supreme Court of the United States. But if the number is already so great, what will it be a century or two hence? Let it be remembered, too, that each of these legislative questions may give rise to many others connected with them, and that each one may be multiplied to infinity in the courts of justice. Thus, if protecting duties for the encouragement of manufactures are unconstitutional, the duty claimed on every bale of imported goods may be ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... does us an infinity of harm: he encourages us to display all the worst points of the female character; he cheats us of our due amount of homage from many a noble heart, and perhaps robs us of our own dignity and self-respect. Yet such is the creature we encourage in our blind vanity, and whilst we ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... than I took: my life—you feel How less than nothing were the giving you The life you've taken! But I thought my way The better—only for your sake and hers: And as you have decided otherwise, Would I had an infinity of lives To offer you! Now say—instruct me—think! Can you, from the brief minutes I have left, Eke out my reparation? Oh think—think! For I must wring a partial—dare I say, Forgiveness from ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... little village, seven or eight houses together and no more, with a crazy little wooden steeple to its church all twisted awry, large barns, and comfortable hedgerows of the Northern kind; and from it one looked out westwards over an infinity of country, following low crest after low crest, down on to the French plains. I went into the inn of the place to drink, and found the cobbler there complaining that wealth disturbed the natural equality of men. Then I wandered out, pacing this point and that which I knew accurately from my ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... not at all,—so subtly that none can feel the flowing of its tides, yet so swiftly that no life-time would suffice to count the number of the oscillations which it makes within the fraction of one second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... repetition. We see it at its task of research in the groping attempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it triumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, of the least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and spaces does not offer two ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... endless. Although I was perfectly conscious during the intermissions between the paroxysms, all power of measuring time was lost: seconds appeared to be hours—minutes grew to days—hours stretched out to infinity. I would look at my watch, and then after an hour or two, as I thought, would look again and find that scarcely a minute had elapsed. The minute-hand appeared motionless, as though graven in the face itself: the laggard second-hand moved so slowly that it seemed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... for twenty years or more, to enforce throughout every part of the United Kingdom obedience to the law of the land. This effort can only be justified by the equally strenuous determination (which must involve an infinity of trouble) to give ear to every Irish complaint, and to see that the laws which the Irish people obey are laws of justice, and (what is much the same thing) laws which in the long run the people of Ireland will feel to be just. To carry out this course of action is difficult for all governments, ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... be mysterious, as you say, you have only yourself to blame for it." Porthos pronounced these words with an amount of confidence which, for a man who was unaccustomed to his ways, must have revealed an infinity of sense. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... He didn't leave the library until a maid announced that lunch was ready and the fact of her return. At the table they spoke but little; Lee Randon was enveloped in a luxurious feeling—where Savina was concerned—of security; there was no need to hurry; the day lengthened out into the night and an infinity of happy minutes and opportunities. They discussed, however, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... will which sways my steering gear remained in place for ever: then my pedals would revolve of themselves, and never cease, and no hideous brake should tear the perpetuity of my motions. Then, oh then I should be immortal. I should leap through the world for ever, and spin to infinity, till I was identified with the dizzy and timeless cycle-race of the stars and the ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... consort would depart, the bellowing of her trumpet fading away in the distance, and they would remain again in the deep hush, amid the infinity of stagnant vapour. Everything was drenched with salt water; the cold became more penetrating; each day the sun took longer to sink below the horizon; there were now real nights one or two hours long, and their gray gloaming was ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti |
