"Orbit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... philosophers as in the discovery of Divine Right, and the intruding Imperialism of Rome. The like effects are visible everywhere, and one generation beheld them all. It was an awakening of new life; the world revolved in a different orbit, determined by influences unknown before. After many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society 11, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... completeness, and it tends to all symmetry and finish. It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing perfectly the impelling and restraining forces; by a felicitous adjustment of the centripetal and centrifugal, ensuring to human nature its proper orbit. It is the golden girdle wherewith every institution like this should bind her garments of strength and beauty ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... immutable judgments, which go to make up a body of tradition into which no power of mortal man can infuse one drop of wit or sense. The lives of these persons revolve with the regularity of clockwork in an orbit of use and wont which admits of no more deviation or change than their opinions on matters religious, political, moral, ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... ladder of fortune. From the moment he had so bitterly experienced the weight of sovereign power, his efforts were directed to attain it for himself; the wrong which he himself had suffered made him a robber. Had he not been outraged by injustice, he might have obediently moved in his orbit round the majesty of the throne, satisfied with the glory of being the brightest of its satellites. It was only when violently forced from its sphere, that his wandering star threw in disorder the system to which it belonged, ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... Wentworth Hall, or in my office in Jersey City. I only knew that the page, illuminated by a drop gas-light, was before me, and on it the record of that brilliant triumph of the human intellect, the deduction of a planet's entire orbit from observations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... as the chemical plant went into service. We need not consider how much struggle and heartbreak had gone into meeting that schedule. As for the battleship, she appeared because the fact that a Station in just this orbit was about to commence operations was news important enough to cross the Solar System and push through many strata of bureaucracy. The heads of the recently elected North American government became suddenly, fully aware of what had ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... to halt, turn around, and return to base did not come until their second hop had brought them into the Mars orbit. Then it came from space police in charge of shipping ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... surreptitious act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. etc.) as a continuous circle (A.) giving to all collectively the unity of their common orbit; but likewise supplies, by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central power, which renders ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... There is always that terrible 'either—or.' To live for Christ is the antagonist, and only antagonist of life for self. To live for self is death. To live for Jesus is the only life. There are two centres, heliocentric and geocentric as the scientists say. We can choose round which we shall draw our orbit, and everything depends on the choice which we make. To seek 'the things of Jesus Christ' is sure to lead to, and is the only basis of, care for men. Religion is the parent of compassion, and if we are looking for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... getting supper, I was trundling along a strange road, the sole owner of a Parnassus (probably the only one in existence), a horse, and a dog, and a cartload of books on my hands. Since the morning of the day before my whole life had twisted out of its accustomed orbit. I had spent four hundred dollars of my savings; I had sold about thirteen dollars' worth of books; I had precipitated a fight and met a philosopher. Not only that, I was dimly beginning to evolve a new philosophy of my own. And all this in order to prevent Andrew from buying a lot ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... mother and son, were gone. Doggie bore the triple loss with equanimity. Then Peggy Conover, hitherto under the eclipse of boarding-schools, finishing schools and foreign travel, swam, at the age of twenty, within his orbit. When first they met, after a year's absence, she very gracefully withered the symptoms of the cousinly kiss, to which they had been accustomed all their lives, by stretching out a long, frank, and defensive arm. Perhaps if she had allowed the salute, there would have been an ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... seldom healed. The services rendered to it are the most unreal of all services, and yet they are the very ones that meet with lasting gratitude. It is scarcely a vice, and yet all the vices are drawn into its orbit and, in proportion as they become more refined and artificial, tend to be nothing more than a means of satisfying it. The outcome of social life, since it is an admiration of ourselves based on the admiration we think we are inspiring in others, it is ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... into the solar system anyhow, anywhere, from any direction: they come within the attractive influence of the sun; obey his laws whilst within that influence; make one close approach to him, passing rapidly across our sky; and then depart in an orbit which will never bring them to his neighbourhood again. Some chance of direction, some compelling influence of a planet that it may have approached, so modified the path of Halley's comet when it first entered the solar ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... right; for that reason, he was a dangerous man. Prison was the place for him, but probably a prison outside the Jovian confederacy. Perhaps one of the prison ships that plied to the edge of the System, clear to the orbit of Pluto. Or would the prison on ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... force. I might venture to say as much of many other remarks by this great observer. He tells us that the comet was very visible in the telescope on the 21st of February, 1808; now, on that day, its distance from the sun amounted to 2.7 times the mean radius of the terrestrial orbit; its distance from the observer was 2.9: "What probability would there be that rays going to such distances, from the sun to the comet, could, after their reflection, be seen by an eye nearly three times more distant from the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... stair and pounded with his fists on that door. He seemed unable to move. At rare intervals feet passed on the sidewalk outside, just at his elbow, so to say, and yet somehow, to-night, immeasurably far away. Beyond the orbit of the moon. He heard Rugg, the policeman, noting the silence of the shop, muttering, "Boaz is to bed to-night," as ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... had this knowledge and given no sign till now. What, after all, was it to a hero that the family circle of an obscure individual such as he should have momentarily intersected the hero's own orbit? School has this distinction—families take a back place; one is judged on one's own individual merits. Peter would much rather think that Urquhart had come to see him because he had put his arm out and Urquhart had put it in (really though, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... he, "I believe the whole central portion of the earth is one great diamond. When it was moving about in its orbit as a comet, the light of the sun streamed through this diamond and spread an enormous tail out into space; after a time this ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... this established and regulated order and to find a place for her was like trying to fit a new spoke into a revolving wheel. It cannot be done; and with Rosalie it could not be done. The established wheel went on revolving in its established orbit and the new spoke, which was Rosalie, lay outside and watched it revolve. Intrusions within the circumference of the wheel commonly resulted in a sharp knock from one of the spokes. No one was in any degree ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... distance of 0.27 siriometers ( 4.26 light years). This distance is obtained from the annual parallax with great accuracy, and the result is moreover confirmed in another way (from the study of the orbit of the companion of [alpha] Centauri). In the year 1916 INNES discovered at the observatory of Johannesburg in the Transvaal a star of the 10th magnitude, which seems to follow [alpha] Centauri in its path in the heavens, and which, in any case, lies at the same distance from the earth, or somewhat ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... progress of stars, and learns one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos. The elder encourages the younger, and shows him how: they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself, and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars, and sweeps through the ceaseless rings, and shall ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... existence of a very probable condition, namely, the unequal diffusion of this light-yielding element, to catch a glimpse of a reason why our sun may, in common with his solar brotherhood, in some portions of his vast stellar orbit, have passed, and may yet have to pass, through regions of space, in which the light-yielding element may either abound or be deficient, and so cause him to beam forth with increased splendour, or fade in brilliancy, just in proportion to the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... round, like the planet Mercury in the curvature of its orbit, Jishnu (Arjuna) once more slew large number of the samsaptakas. Afflicted with the shafts of Partha, O king, men, steeds, and elephants, O Bharata, wavered and wandered and lost colour and fell down ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... training, Dominus illuminatio mea, a claim too often falsified in the habit and tempers of life. It was a small sphere, but it was a conspicuous one; for there was much strong and energetic character, brought out by the aims and conditions of University life; and though moving in a separate orbit, the influence of the famous place over the outside England, though imperfectly understood, was recognised and great. These conditions affected the character of the movement, and of the conflicts which it caused. Oxford claimed to be eminently the ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... that, in consequence of the axis of the earth not being perpendicular to the plane of its orbit round the sun, the poles are alternately directed more or less towards that great luminary during one part of the year, and away from it during another part. So that far north the days during the one season grow longer and longer until ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... over Valleyview tonight. Or better yet, suppose I show you something else." She pointed to a region of the heavens just to the left of the statue's turned-up nose. "You can't see them from here," she said, "but around that insignificant yellow star, nine planets are in orbit. ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... I came away as soon as dinner was over. They were dressing for some grand affair, and wanted me to come with them, but of course I must come to see if you had really achieved bringing bright Phoebe from her orbit.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it was yet incomplete. She herself was made aware that a great change was even now coming to pass. She understood the transformation little, if at all; but it seemed as though, somehow, a new sense were taking hold of her. And, indeed, a new light had floated into her little orbit. Was it too bright as yet for her to see it for what it was? It flooded everything about her, and bathed the world in other hues than the old time. Disaster had followed on disaster in the days that had just gone by, but nevertheless—she knew not how—it was ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... is opened, too much for the head of a low-lander to bear; for it not only takes in a view of a great part of the mountain beneath, but of the kingdoms of Arragon, Valencia, the Mediterranean Sea, and the islands; but as it were, one half of the earth's orbit. The fatigue to clamber up to it is very great; but the recompense is ample. This hermitage looks down upon a wood above a league in circumference, in which formerly some hermits dwelt; but at present ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... of her dressing-gown in her fingers for a moment. His last speech seemed to have been outside the orbit ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... when the sun and moon act in the same direction, we have the spring tides. The planets, those apparently little wandering points in the heaven, yet affect, by their attraction, the motion of our earth in her orbit, quickening it when she is approaching them, retarding it when she ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... the Captain, loudly. "Nice work, Johnny. We're smack in orbit. The automatics couldn't have done it better. For once it feels good to be out in space again. Cut your jets now. You can check ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... a tight orbit. Out beyond us will be five transports full of I-A marines and a Class IX Monitor with one planet-buster. You're calling the shots, God help you! First, we want to know if they have the Delphinus ... and if so, where it is. Next, we want to know ...
— Missing Link • Frank Patrick Herbert
... community already moved in an orbit around her, and whose parents had, according to a familiar phrase, an even more circumscribed course around her little finger—for Bessie Hall to rail at fate was deliciously absurd, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... dust Even to the starry world, with thousand rounds, 100 Builds itself up; on which the unseen powers Move up and down on heavenly ministries— The circles in the circles, that approach The central sun with ever-narrowing orbit— These see the glance alone, the unsealed eye, 105 Of Jupiter's glad children ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... note on this passage of the "Confessio," think that it might refer to Crom Cruagh, which possibly represented the sun, surrounded by the signs of the twelve months, through which it describes its orbit during the year. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... numbers on the nose of the ship told part of the story. Ten exploring fingers thrust in turn out into the blackness of space. RS 3's fate was known—she had blossomed into a pinpoint of flame within the orbit of Mars. And RS 7 had clearly gone out of control while instruments on Terra could still pick up her broadcasts. Of the rest—well, ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... bounded by the orbit of Uranus, a gaseous matter was diffused at a high temperature. By laws, the origin of which we have not yet traced, the condition of the diffused heat was changed, and the particles of the gaseous matter, condensed and agglomerated ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... fellows rarely drift outside the groove of our fixed orbit. One by one we drop out, and as each one passes beyond it shortens the orbit of the others. The circle is always contracting—never expanding. The last one of us will be found in his dotage never venturing beyond ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... in the orchestra sometimes, they give occasionally something classical and great, performed in a masterly manner. Indeed, all the music of New York seems to revolve now round the Ullman-Thalberg centre. They sweep all into their orbit. With the Harmonic Society, they give Sunday oratorios, promising "The Messiah," "Creation," "Elijah," David's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... decree! Formed to connect, to blend, to associate, and to cooperate; bearing the same course, with kindred energies and harmonious sympathy, each perfect in its own lovely sphere, each moving in its wider or more contracted orbit, with different, but concentering, powers, guided by the same influence of reason, and endeavoring at the same blessed end—the happiness of the individual, the harmony of the species, and the glory of the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... actors, the movie show upon the genius of the producer. The performers and the dumb objects are on equal terms in his paint-buckets. The star-system is bad for the stage because the minor parts are smothered and the situations distorted to give the favorite an orbit. It is bad for the motion pictures because it obscures the producer. While the leading actor is entitled to his glory, as are all the actors, their mannerisms should not overshadow the latest inspirations of the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... fortunes of a general election brought Mr. Gladstone into relations that for many years to come deeply affected his political course. As a planet's orbit has puzzled astronomers until they discover the secret of its irregularities in the attraction of an unseen and unsuspected neighbour in the firmament, so some devious motions of this great luminary of ours were perturbations due in fact to ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... understand me, reader, as though I meant great appetites,) passions moving in a great orbit, and transcending little regards, are always arguments of some latent nobility. There are, indeed, but few men and few women capable of great passions, or (properly speaking) of passions at all. Hartley, in his mechanism of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the heavenly body much the nearest to us, of course we see farther into its secrets than into those of any other planet. We have calculated its distance from us at 237,000 miles. Of course by doubling this distance, and adding to it the diameter of the earth, we get the diameter of the circle, or orbit, in which the moon moves around the earth. In other words the diameter of this orbit is about 480,000 miles. Now could the sun be brought in contact with this orbit, and had the latter solidity to mark its circumference, it would be found that this ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... he was to convince and convert by a single broadside of truth, as it were, moved in such an eccentric orbit, that the doctor could never bring his heavy artillery to bear upon him. Neither coaxing nor scolding on the part of the mother could bring about the formal interview. At last, however, it was secured by an accident, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... courage; only use it. If what you say of him is true, rest easy. She is not in his orbit. She will not be impressed by an adventurer ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... me—superior wages, lighter toils, a greater sense of the dignity of man—are not productive of any change in society. Give these advantages to the whole mass of the labouring classes, and what in the small orbit is the desire of the individual to rise becomes in the large circumference the desire of the class to rise; hence social restlessness, social change, revolution, and its hazards. For revolutions are produced but by the aspirations of one ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the men, who were examining the mash in tubs in the further recesses of the place. They were lighted by a lantern which, swinging to and fro as they moved, sometimes so swiftly as to induce a temporary fluctuation threatening eclipse, suggested in the dusk the erratic orbit of an abnormally magnified fire-fly. It barely glimmered, the dullest point of white light, when the rich flare from the opening door of the furnace gushed forth and the whole rugged interior was illumined with its color. The inadequate ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious or an irreligious eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own orbit well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika's cheek, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... extremes. If we adopt the magnificent argument of Dr. Croll, which seems to me still to hold its ground against all adverse criticism,[5] and regard the Glacial epoch as coincident with the last period of high eccentricity of the earth's orbit, we obtain a result that is moderate and probable. That astronomical period began about 240,000 years ago and came to an end about 80,000 years ago. During this period the eccentricity was seldom less than .04, and at one time rose to .0569. At the present ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... have displayed themselves; for while there is a law of necessity in the evolution of languages, while they pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from which they can be no more turned aside by the will of men than one of the heavenly bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines of ours, there is a law of liberty no less; and this liberty must inevitably have made itself in many ways felt. In the political and social condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... flagstaff; top mast, topgallant mast. ceiling &c. (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c. (angel) 244[obs3]; batophobia[obs3]. satellite, spy-in-the-sky. V. be high &c. adj.; tower, soar, command; hover, hover over, fly over;orbit, be in orbit; cap, culminate; overhang, hang over, impend, beetle, bestride, ride, mount; perch, surmount; cover &c. 223; overtop &c. (be superior) 33; stand on tiptoe. become high &c. adj.; grow higher, grow taller; upgrow[obs3]; rise &c. (ascend) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... manufactured in Belfast, for though Ulster enterprise is proverbial, I should never have anticipated it as taking this particular line. There is one peculiarly fascinating machine in which a mechanical pestle, moving in an eccentric orbit, twists the flat leaf into the familiar narrow crescents that we infuse daily. The tea-plant is a pretty little shrub, with its pale-primrose, cistus-like flowers, but in appearance it cannot compete with the coffee tree, with its beautiful dark glossy foliage, its waxy white ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... so," Ghopal Singh said. "Now, Mr. Ambassador, there's a liner in orbit two thousand miles off Luna, which has been held from blasting off for the last eight hours, waiting for you. Don't bother packing more than a few things; you can get everything you'll need aboard, or at New Austin, the planetary capital. We have a man whom Cooerdinator Natalenko ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... Harrigans. They had money; all that was required was social recognition. She found it a battle within a battle. The good-natured reluctance of her husband and the careless indifference of her daughter were as hard to combat as the icy aloofness of those stars into whose orbit she was pluckily striving to steer the family bark. It never entered her scheming head that the reluctance of the father and the indifference of the daughter were the very conditions that drew society nearward, ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... how it is possible therefore for the refined spiritual essence to actuate the gross material substance. If you 'were empowered by a secret wish to remove mountains or to control the planets in their orbit,' would such extensive authority be one whit more inexplicable than the supposed ability of your will to raise your hand to your head or to cause your foot ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... beam clear, whensoever bright Selene having bathed her lovely body in the waters of Ocean, and donned her far-gleaming, shining team, drives on her long-maned horses at full speed, at eventime in the mid-month: then her great orbit is full and then her beams shine brightest as she increases. So she is a sure token and a ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... ancient times—long before the flood—two very large and wonderful reptiles. Of them we present striking illustrations. One of them has been named the Ichthyosaurus, which means Fish Reptile. Its head somewhat resembled that of the crocodile, except that the orbit was much larger, and had the nostril placed close to it, as in the whale, and not near the end of the snout. It had four paddles and a powerful tail, and was very active in its ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... dinner which began with coffee and ended with oysters on the half-shell, he would have given the unusual meal a most animated consideration, although he might have utterly withheld any subsequent approbation. As a general thing, he revolved in an orbit where one might always be able to find him, were the proper calculations made. But if any one drew a tangent for him, and its direction seemed suitable and interesting, he was perfectly willing ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... is put out as soon as it is kindled, nor yet a blaze caused by a quantity of air being suddenly allowed to rush upwards, but that they are heavenly bodies, which from some failure in their rotatory power, fall from their orbit and descend, not often into inhabited portions of the earth, but for the most part into the sea, whereby they escape notice. This theory of Anaxagoras is confirmed by Daimachus in his treatise on Piety, where he states that for seventy-five days before the stone fell a fiery ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... when hardened by being chilled in cold water, does not become condensed, but slightly expanded from its bulk when annealed and soft. Here an increase of hardness is accompanied by a decrease of density. The gradual development of a network of cracks over the face of a chilled anvil orbit while being used in tilt hammers was mentioned. Such minute cleavages became more marked as the chill is worn down by work and from grinding. Traces of the same occurrence are observable over the surface of much worn chilled rolls ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... wears a crown. 9. The thick mists which prevail in the neighborhood of Newfoundland are caused by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. 10. The power which brings a pin to the ground holds the earth in its orbit. 11. Death is the black camel which kneels at every man's gate. 12. Our best friends are they who tell us of our faults, and help ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... happen to him, when Olga was set as a shining star in this firmament? Already he revolved about her, he was aware, like some eager delighted little moon, drawn away from the orbit where it had encircled so contentedly by the more potent planet. And the measure of his detachment from that old orbit might be judged precisely by the fact that the process of detachment which was already taking place was marked by no sense ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... the Constitution it had not been thought possible to divide sovereignty, or at least to have two different sovereignties moving as planets in the same orbit. Therefore, all previous federated governments had been based upon the plan that a league could only effect its will through the constituent States and that the citizens in these States owed no direct allegiance to the league, but only to the States of which they were members. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... science, the possibilities of profit have suddenly become immoderate. The whole of the human world, throughout its length and breadth, has felt the gravitational pull of a giant planet of greed, with concentric rings of innumerable satellites, causing in our society a marked deviation from the moral orbit. In former times the intellectual and spiritual powers of this earth upheld their dignity of independence and were not giddily rocked on the tides of the money market. But, as in the last fatal stages of disease, this fatal ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... first, his horns, his beams, broke through the darkness imperfectly; then he swells to a circle, and comes nearer and nearer to perfect dawn; at last he appeared on the horizon, in the east, formed beautifully, and his orbit was perfected; i. e., his orbit could be traced continuously ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... chronicle of the world. On this elaborate work he was working down to A.D. 726. We have the authority of Ideler for saying that this is a complete guide to the calculation of times and festivals. He treats of the several divisions of time; and under the months, he speaks of the moon's orbit (c. xvii.), and its importance for the calendar, and the relation of the moon to the tides (c. xxix.); then of the equinoxes and solstices, the varying length of the days, the seasons of the year, the intercalary day, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... a town about seven miles distant from us, described at first a very erratic orbit amidst the contiguous villages before it finally struck into the high-road of enlightenment, and thence performed its journey, in the full eyes of man, at the majestic pace of six miles and a half an hour. My father with his pockets full of books, and a quarto of "Gebelin ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could be thrown; it would be impossible to jump; there would cease to be waves on the ocean; and the moon would come tumbling to the earth. The earth would stop spinning; so there would be no change from day to night; and it would stop swinging about in its orbit and start on ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... two weeks passed. Then, one day, a comet of amazing brilliancy shot suddenly into our social orbit, and things happened. That this interesting stellar phenomenon was a Russian grand duke, a nephew of the Czar, but added to the piquancy ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... this moment, Saunders knew no more, than those who had just been questioning him of the particular situation of the ship, in which he floated as indifferent to the whereabouts and the winds, as men sail in the earth along its orbit, without bethinking them of parallaxes, nodes, ecliptics, and solstices. Aware that it was about time for the captain to be heard, he sent a subordinate on deck, with a view to be ready to meet the usual questions from his commander. A couple of minutes were sufficient to put ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... it deduces the obliquity of the ecliptic, it finds terrestrial latitudes by the gnomon, describes climates, shows how ordinary may be converted into sidereal time, gives reasons for preferring the tropical to the sidereal year, furnishes the solar theory on the principle of the sun's orbit being a simple eccentric, explains the equation of time, advances to the discussion of the motions of the moon, treats of the first inequality, of her eclipses, and the motion of her nodes. It then gives Ptolemy's own great discovery—that which has made his name immortal—the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... officer, listening to the report of one of the airdyne pilots, returned from his afternoon survey flight. A couple of girl lieutenants from Signals, going over the script of the evening telecast, to be transmitted to the Cyrano, on orbit five thousand miles off planet and relayed from thence to Terra via Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, the Trans-Space News Service man, was with them. Like Selim and herself, he was a civilian; he was advertising the fact with a white shirt and a sleeveless blue sweater. And Major ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... Amiens or some other town where they could have a "binge." They drank many cocktails and roared with laughter over, bottles of cheap champagne, and flirted with any girl who happened to come within their orbit. If not allowed beyond their tents, they sulked like baby Achilles, reading novelettes, with their knees hunched up, playing the gramophone, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... in his easy-chair, wrapped in contemplations of his future greatness. The mysterious light appeared more brilliantly than before, dancing, to all appearance, up and down the lane, crossing from side to side, and moving in an orbit as eccentric ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... some of the most notable pages in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried there, the fact so excited Emerson that he could not sleep. It was like the perturbation of a planet in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Emerson seems to have spent much time at the court-house to hear and study him: "Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get settled down to writing until he has well gone from the county. He is a natural Emperor of men." He adjourned the court ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... hardly needed at all; its place has been taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions—an evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... voluptuous wave of enjoyment seemed floating about the place, enfolding them all—save him. For as he watched and listened his face grew darker and his heart heavier. He felt himself out of place, outside the orbit of these people, very little in sympathy with them. He looked at the woman sitting at the next table, elegantly dressed, laden with jewels, whose laughter was incessant and speeches pointless—her companion found her interesting enough, but Douglas was ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... followed his narrow orbit of vision he soon saw his firearm, which had slipped from him in his ride over the precipice and fallen near where he ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... positions are the same from whatever part of the earth they are seen; but attempts have been made to detect the amount of variation in their places, when observed from opposite points of the earth's orbit, the minute result of which is termed the annual parallax; and the former effect, due to the observer's station on our globe, is called ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... at my watch, Garth seemed dissatisfied with our progress. "It must be farther than they've figured. I'll stick at twenty-five times light speed, and slow down after we get there by taking an orbit." ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... travels from east to west, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning. The history of the world has an east in an absolute sense, for, although the earth forms a sphere, history describes no orbit round it, but has, on the contrary, a determinate orient—viz., Asia. Here rises the outward visible sun, and in the west it sinks down; here also rises the sun of self-consciousness. The history of the world is ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... us, that we are "free." There are others, like those through which the young adventurer was now passing, when we experience a feeling of utter helplessness amidst cosmic forces and believe ourselves to be straws in a mighty wind or ill-fated stars borne along a predestined orbit. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... the path described by it in its annual revolution about the sun, is, so to speak, a flattened circle, somewhat elongated, called an ellipse. The axis of the earth is not perpendicular to the plane of the orbit, which is an imaginary flat surface enclosed by the line of the earth's revolution, but is inclined to it at an angle of 23 deg. 28', which angle is called the obliquity of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the path or way among the fixed stars which the earth ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... upon as the cognate or allied studies of the subjective department of human knowledge are, Psychology, Logic, Ontology, Ethics. The debates in a society like the present will generally be found to revolve in the orbit thus chalked out. It is the sphere of the most animated controversies, and the widest discordance of view. The additional branch most nearly connected with the group is Sociology, which under that name, and under ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... external politics, as in business, even if he covers his purposefulness with an air of polite indifference. Once convinced that the colonies were worth keeping, he bent to the work of drawing them closer within the orbit of London with marvelous skill and persistence. In this campaign, which no one could appreciate until he had been in the thick of it, social pressure is the subtlest and most effective force. In 1897 and 1902 it was Mr. Chamberlain's personal insistence that was strongest, but ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two observations from distant points of the earth's orbit,—in midsummer and midwinter, for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well as of the clergy. Teachers and students of theology get a certain look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Empire in Asia as well as in Europe, to the seeming satisfaction of both French and British interests. But the adjustment—even if it had been forced upon Turkey—could, by the nature of things, be only temporary. Owing to her geographical situation, Greece must inevitably move within the orbit of the Power ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... oppose thee with force; thou leader of just men, thou master of manlihood, thou that whirlest thy flaming sphere among the courses of the seven stars of the sky, where thy fiery steeds ever bear thee above the third orbit of heaven; do thou listen to me, helper of mortals, Giver of the bright bloom of youth. Shed thou down a mild light from above upon this life of mine, and my martial strength, so that I may be of avail to drive away bitter cowardice from ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... years before we would have snuffed him out in contumely and disgrace. But men listened to him and paid high for the privilege. And those who hated this man and feared him most, went, too, to listen, so as to answer him and thereby keep the planet from swinging out of its orbit and sweeping on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... enough with our news!" Gresth laughed. "A system—a delightful system—discovered. A system of many close-grouped planets. Why think—from one side of that system to the other is less of a distance than from Ansthat, our first planet's orbit, to Insthor's orbit! That sun, as we know, is steady and warm. All will be well, when we have eliminated that rather peculiar race. Odd, that they should, in some ways, be so nearly like us! Nearly Sthorian in build. I would not have expected ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... own axis in a given time; and each moves round the sun, in an orbit nearly circular, and in a time proportioned to its distance. Their velocities, directed by an established law, are perpetually changing by regular accelerations and retardations."—Ib., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... lay outside of his Orbit and beyond his Ken, the same as Tatting or Biology. His conception of a keen and sporty game was Pin Pool or Jacks Only with ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... we soon came to see little of our new acquaintances. A small private income and the trivial wage commanded by society verses in this country (so different in many respects from Abyssinia) confined us to a much narrower orbit. But we were invited pretty often to their dinners, and the notes I have given you were taken on these occasions. Last night there were potentates at Mrs. Seely-Hardwicke's—several imported, and one of British growth. To-day—but you shall hear ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... thro' other systems, By huger alien spheres, Each in its orbit travelling, The timeless skeins unravelling Of a law with no ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... was beating down slantingly, as if we were in a southern latitude, instead of in the far Northland. It was swinging around, its orbit ever visible and rising higher and higher each day, frequently mist-covered, yet always peering through the lacework of clouds like some fretful eye of fate, guarding the mysterious Northland and jealously watching the pranks of man. Far to our right the rays decking the prisms ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... ill-calculating party, has recourse to arms, not from any generous policy, but because she sees herself outwitted by Napoleon, who refuses to cede to her Hanover in perpetuity. Prussia begins the war and calls on Saxony, who always moved in her orbit, to join her. To the Elector of Saxony this war (in 1806) appeared then ill-timed and too late; but with that good faith, nevertheless, which invariably characterized him, he remained faithful to his engagement and furnished his quota ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... United States Secret Service remained standing near the door until Ned reached his side. Then he lifted a single glass, inserted it in his eye-orbit and stood gazing at the boy who had advanced ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... into the decaying position of a mere court of registry, possessing great privileges, on condition that it never exercises them; while the other chamber that, at the first blush, and to the superficial, exhibits symptoms of almost unnatural vitality, engrossing in its orbit all the business of the country, assumes on a more studious inspection somewhat of the character of a select vestry, fulfilling municipal rather than imperial offices, and beleaguered by critical and clamorous millions, who cannot comprehend why ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind, 105 Omnific. His most holy name is Love. Truth of subliming import! with the which Who feeds and saturates his constant soul, He from his small particular orbit flies With blest outstarting! From himself he flies, 110 Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze Views all creation; and he loves it all, And blesses it, and calls it very good! This is indeed to dwell with the Most High! Cherubs and rapture-trembling Seraphim 115 Can ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... eight hundred within the last eight years. This discovery implies stupendous motion; every fixed star is a sun like our own, and we can imagine these wheeling orbs to be surrounded by cool planets, the abode of life, as well as ours. If the orbit of a binary system lies edgewise toward us, then one star will hide the other each revolution, moving across it and appearing on the other side. Several instances of this motion are known; the distant suns having made more than a complete circuit since ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... see nothing!—but I confess to you I see nothing distinctly. What sort of an 'orbit' would you propose ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... a company of seraphs gathered round this form so bright, And unfurled their snowy pinions in those realms of crystal light, Sweeping swiftly onward, onward with their music-breathing wings, Till they passed the distant orbit where the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... al-Ghayb," somewhat like the "Himalayan Brothers" of modern superstition. See Herklots (Qanoon-e-Islam) for a long and careful description of these "Mardan-i-Ghayb" (Pers.), a "class of people mounted on clouds," invisible, but moving in a circular orbit round the world, and suggesting the Hindu "Lokapalas." They should not be in front of the traveller nor on his right, but either behind or on his left hand. Hence tables, memorial couplets and hemistichs are required to ascertain the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... don't you see there would be no more want or suffering in this weary world? no more need of blankets or dispensaries? Each is happy, comfortable, and self-cultured in his proportion. A universal harmony prevails. Like the planets, self-revolving, and moving, each in his chosen orbit, they shout and sing for joy. How much better this than to be eccentrically darting off in search of somebody's tears to wipe, somebody's wounds to bandage,—who, indeed, would have neither wounds nor grief, if they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... *outwit Saturn anon, to stint the strife and drede, Albeit that it is against his kind,* *nature Of all this strife gan a remedy find. "My deare daughter Venus," quoth Saturn, "My course*, that hath so wide for to turn, *orbit Hath more power than wot any man. Mine is the drowning in the sea so wan; Mine is the prison in the darke cote*, *cell Mine the strangling and hanging by the throat, The murmur, and the churlish rebelling, The groyning*, and the privy poisoning. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... the afternoon of the fourth day that two things happened—one that he had prepared himself for, and another so unexpected that for a space it sent his world crashing out of its orbit. With St. Pierre's wife he had gone again to the ridge-line for flowers, half a mile back from the river. Returning a new way, they came to a shallow stream, and Marie-Anne stood at the edge of it, and there was laughter ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... the notables. It seemed the fat and handsome captain had taken a fancy to him. And it was as Peter had deduced earlier. These passengers were stodgy Dutchmen, each with a little world of his own, and forming the sole orbit of that little world. For the most part they were plantation owners escaping the seasonal heat for the cool breezes of a vacation in Japan, boastful of their possessions, smug in their Dutch self-complacency, and somewhat gluttonous ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... if a change for the better were hopeless and impossible. The great statesmen, the eminent divines, the reverend judges, the learned lawyers, the wealthy landholders and merchants are all leagued together to repel innovation. But the earth still moves in its orbit around the sun; decay and change and death pursue their inevitable course; the child is born and grows up; the strong man grows old and dies; the law of flux and efflux never ceases, and lo! ere men are aware of it, all things have become new. Fresh eyes look upon the world, and it is changed. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... might not be tremendous in size by earth standards of construction, but the two hundred thirty-two foot wheel represented sixty-four million pounds of very careful engineering and assembly that had been raised from Earth's surface to this thirty-six-hour orbit. ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... science announced nearly five centuries ago, it is easy to understand how Copernicus could have anticipated other phases of our knowledge, as he did in his declarations that the figure of the earth is not a sphere, but is somewhat irregular, and that the orbit of the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... ourselves, in one form or another, continual here on the round world. For when Laplace, through the acceleration of the moon, dropping her ten seconds a hundred years towards us, discovered the change in the earth's orbit,—swinging as it does from ellipse to circle and back again to ellipse, vibrating like a mighty pendulum, the "horologe of eternity" itself, with tremendous oscillations, through the depths of space,—he taught us ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... farming. Were we to say that God had so constituted the human mind that routine will tire and disgust it, we should say in effect that he never intended the farmer's life to be one of routine. Nature has done all she can to break up routine. While the earth swings round its orbit once a year, and turns on its axis once in twenty-four hours,—while the tide ebbs and flows twice daily, and the seasons come and go in rotation, every atom changes its relations to every other atom every moment. Influences ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to look for his father's asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly—like an arrow piercing the earth—to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre that ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the sun has set, arriving on the 16th at his greatest eastern elongation, or apparent distance from the centre of the system, as seen from the earth in 20 deg. Leo; and in aphelio, or that point of his orbit most distant from the sun, on the 22nd; he becomes stationary on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... dimmed. Then came that period of mad strife, of blind antagonism, in which we hurt each other by rough contact. Finally, we were driven far asunder, and, instead of revolving together around a common centre, each has moved in a separate orbit. For years that dark period of pain has held the former period of brightness in eclipse; but of late gleams from that better time have made their way down to the present. Gradually the shadows are giving away. The first state is coming to be felt more and more as ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... unnoticed it is! We only know motion by the jolts. The revolution of the earth and its rush along its orbit are unfelt by us. We are constantly startled to feel how long ago such and such a thing took place. The mother sees her little girl at her knee, and in a few days, as it seems, finds her a woman. How immense is our life ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... little shock, it came to her that they were going, as a mass, nowhere except from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn; that they were exactly like the crowd of sea gulls, each individual rotating in its own little orbit, and that the wonderful coloured and spangled crust called Civilization was nothing more than the excretion of individual ambitions, desires ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... of the earth, around which the island in the air was following its orbit, gave them plenty of light as yet, for the sun was still in such a position that its light was reflected from the earth upon the fast-traveling island in ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... physiological point of view, to the secretory glands which form the digestive fluids are those which furnish lubricating fluids, the lachrymal gland, and Harderian glands in the orbit internally to the eye, and posterior and anterior to it respectively, the sebaceous glands (oil glands) connected with the hair, and the anal and perineal glands. The secretions of excretory glands are removed from the body; chief among them are the sweat glands ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... champions, or has been essentially help'd, though often harm'd, by them. It has been and is carried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopp'd than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv'd, the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... that tonight he has been busy with the computation of the orbit of a distant star up to the very minute when his wife brought in his tie and collar. And then arm and arm they have set out for the party, where they will sit until the ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... persuasion abandoned them; Mercury contains statesmen and men of affairs; Venus those who have been over-much swayed by indulgence in earthly love. It must be observed that, according to the astronomy of the time, the shadow of the Earth, cast into space by the Sun, extended as far as the orbit of Venus. The spirits in these three spheres therefore form a group by themselves: being distinguished by the fact that they had allowed earthly cares and pleasures to obtain too strong hold of them, to the injury of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... information from Scott's signal, raised his hand quickly. "Not at all," he exclaimed, leaning forward to emphasize his words and adding the full orbit of his eye to his sincerity of manner. "Not at all, Satt. This is all friendly, all friendly. But," he coughed slightly, as if in apology, "if Henry shouldn't turn up ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... orbit, even theories and religions. Certain forms of fanaticism come with the centuries—every new heresy is old. All extremes cure themselves, for when matters get pushed to a point where the balance of things is in danger of being disturbed, a Reformer appears and utters his stentorian protest. This ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... beings had moved a small asteroid—the phantom satellite Nestria—into orbit about the earth. Later they had sent strange samples of the animal life of their planet, aboard orbiting missiles, to be studied by the Swifts. They had also helped Tom, Bud, and Mr. Swift a number of times when their lives ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... he in his astronomical observations, that he would steal away from the room during an interval of the performance, give a little turn at his telescope, and contentedly return to his oboe. Thus working away, Herschel discovered the Georgium Sidus, the orbit and rate of motion of which he carefully calculated, and sent the result to the Royal Society; when the humble oboe player found himself at once elevated from obscurity to fame. He was shortly after appointed Astronomer Royal, and by the kindness of George ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... Tower end shall the fray." Scowl'd the broad sun o'er the links of green Liddisdale, Red as the beacon-light tipp'd he the wold; Many a bold martial eye Mirror'd that morning sky, Never more oped on his orbit of gold! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the mundus Post-Rosseanus; for as to the absolute dimensions, when stated in miles, leagues or any units familiar to the human experience, they are too stunning and confounding. If, again, they are stated in larger units, as for instance diameters of the earth's orbit, the unit itself that should facilitate the grasping of the result, and which really is more manageable numerically, becomes itself elusive of the mental grasp: it comes in as an interpreter; and (as in some ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... horses, or sat in the high buggies, round-shouldered and content, and smoked and chewed and spat, and were, withal, supremely happy. Whole family circles, the young father proudly carrying the baby, the mother holding as many as possible by the hand, revolved in an aimless but joyous orbit. Old women in plaid shawls gathered in groups near the piper's avenue, and talked ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... keen-worded opposition, playful, merciless precision, Mocking the romance of Youth, Standing on the sphere of Truth, He on worldly wisdom's plane Rolled it to and fro amain.— Doubtless there it could not lie, Or walk an orbit but the sky.— I, who glowed in every limb, Knowing, could not answer him; But I longed yet more to be What I saw he could not see. So I thank him, for he taught What his wisdom never sought. It were ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... chair and went to the clothes tree to put on his coat. The elbows were shiny from leaning on his desk. "It might be cheaper at that," he said. "The first six are launched in only two orbits. Three telstars in each orbit, separated by one hundred and twenty degrees. Two launches of a repair man might do it, with careful handling. Is that ...
— The Trouble with Telstar • John Berryman
... months, the chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl in Madeira's orbit. ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... The rod was set to cancel 118 pounds. The bag weighed less than twenty. It will go miles beyond the reach of any airplane before it settles into an orbit ...
— Lighter Than You Think • Nelson Bond |
