"Rarefied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certainly realised. So notable a lion as the Dictator was asked everywhere, and everywhere that he went he met the Langleys. In the high political and social life in which the Dictator, to his entertainment, found himself, the hostilities of warring parties had little or no effect. In that rarefied air it was hard to draw the breath of party passion, and the Dictator came across the Langleys as often in the houses of the Opposition as in Ministerial mansions. So it came to pass that something almost approaching to an intimacy sprang up between John ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... and now the face could not accord by a suitable motion; but it was felt that the influx was into the brain, and that this was acted upon in like manner. Lastly, they spoke in such a manner that the speech fell only into the interior understanding; its fluency was like that of rarefied air. I was sensible of the influx itself, but not distinctly of the particulars. These several kinds of speech were circumstanced like different fluids—the first kind was like flowing water; the second like water of less density; the third like the atmosphere respectively; and the fourth ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... been the purpose to write a rhetoric. The many fine distinctions and divisions, the rarefied examples of very beautiful forms of language which a young pupil cannot possibly reproduce, or even appreciate, have been omitted. To teach the methods of simple, direct, and accurate expression has been the ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... questions, sentiments, moralities, her education, in the atmosphere of lecture-rooms, of seances, her familiarity with the vocabulary of emotion, the mysteries of "the spiritual life." She had learned to breathe and move in a rarefied air, as she would have learned to speak Chinese if her success in life had depended upon it; but this dazzling trick, and all her artlessly artful facilities, were not a part of her essence, an expression of her innermost preferences. What was a part of her essence was the extraordinary generosity ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... he went to Les Bains that next evening that the world had somehow changed into another dimension, so much clearer the air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole Mediterranean, which washed Genoa and Naples and Sicily, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... wonderful evenings that occur only in the Caucasus. The sun had sunk behind the mountains but it was still light. The evening glow had spread over a third of the sky, and against its brilliancy the dull white immensity of the mountains was sharply defined. The air was rarefied, motionless, and full of sound. The shadow of the mountains reached for several miles over the steppe. The steppe, the opposite side of the river, and the roads, were all deserted. If very occasionally mounted men appeared, the Cossacks in the cordon and the Chechens in their aouls ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... supposed by some that they are made of the most attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass through one of them we would be unconscious of the contact. Others have imagined them to be mere smoke-wreaths, faint mists, so rarefied that the substance of one a hundred million miles long could, like the genie in the Arabian story, be inclosed in one of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... and hope," said I, "will with difficulty exist in such an atmosphere as you create. It is a sublime altitude, doubtless, but no ordinary 'spiritual' beings can breathe that rarefied air. It is for the honor of Shaftesbury and some few other Deists, that they aspired to this transcendental virtue! You are imitating them. I fear you will not be more successful. Once leave a man to conclude, or even to suspect, that he and his cat end together, and, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... instantly rushed in, and filled almost half of the phial, and very little more was absorbed afterwards. In this case the water in the phial had probably absorbed a considerable part of the fixed air, so that the inflammable air was exceedingly rarefied; and yet the whole quantity that must have been rendered non-elastic was ten times more than the bulk of the water, and it has not been found that water can contain much more than its own bulk of fixed air. But in ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... titles, possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... grateful shadow of the little church on the cliff, but, above all, in the release from mental tension, and the ease of feeling after the strain of thought, she found the highest form of pleasure she had tasted, the most rarefied, the most intense. The St. Valentine's Day of her development was approaching, and her heart had begun already to practise the notes of the song-significant into which she would burst ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... excited them with the prospect of abundant trout; and why fish in your own lake when you may take a tramp of several miles through the woods to another? They begged Clavering to go with them, and as man cannot exist for long in the rarefied atmosphere of the empyrean without growing restive, he was feeling rather let down, and cherished a sneaking desire for a long day alone ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... cloud heights for a day or two," went on Mr. Sharp. "I want you, to gradually get used to the rarefied atmosphere, Mr. Damon. Tom and I are getting to be old hands at it. But, if you think you can stand it, I'll go up about a ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... affair, but, under Mrs. Hading's treatment, it became rarefied. A chef for the supper had been commanded from Johannesburg, a string orchestra for the dance from Salisbury, and exquisite bridge prizes were being sent from a jeweller's at the Cape. The hotel dining-room was to be ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... some writers alluded to by Augustine (Gen. ad lit. ii, 4), that waters resolved into vapor may be lifted above the starry heaven, is a mere absurdity. The solid nature of the firmament, the intervening region of fire, wherein all vapor must be consumed, the tendency in light and rarefied bodies to drift to one spot beneath the vault of the moon, as well as the fact that vapors are perceived not to rise even to the tops of the higher mountains, all to go to show the impossibility of this. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... professor, "it will not only grow rapidly colder as we rise, but, if we remain outside, we shall also find it increasingly difficult to breathe as we reach the more rarefied air; whereas, by remaining inside, we shall be sheltered from the cold and shall be able to breathe the denser air which we ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... entirely beyond the useful and necessary routine of life,—and in the end these things may prove too much for you." Here he dropped my hand. "You bring with you a certain atmosphere which is too rarefied for ordinary mortals—it has the same effect as the air of a very high mountain on a weak heart—it is too strong—one loses breath, and the power to think coherently. You produce this result on Miss Harland, and also to some extent on me—even slightly on Mr. Harland,—and poor Swinton alone does ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... this weakness of the lad's and that his parents had been somewhat doubtful if he could endure the rarefied air of that high region. If he could it would cure that other weakness of his lungs and they hoped for the best. She was frightened by his appearance and inwardly resolved to oppose any sort of fun which might bring on a return of this attack. She had already heard her ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... know why the same Body seems greater (without adding to it) one time, than another; they say, when it seems lesse, it is Condensed; when greater, Rarefied. What is that Condensed, and Rarefied? Condensed, is when there is in the very same Matter, lesse Quantity than before; and Rarefied, when more. As if there could be Matter, that had not some determined Quantity; when ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... rested upon, the thought forced itself upon us that with all its scenic beauty, this valley and plain of Anahuac has for centuries been cursed with crime and barbarism. The whole scene is inclosed by a grand circle of mountains, just far enough away to clothe them in charming purple. The rarefied atmosphere adds distinctness and brilliancy of coloring to everything. Two of these sky-reaching elevations are of world-wide reputation, namely, Mount Popocatepetl ("the smoking mountain"), and Mount Ixtaccihuatl ("the white ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... of the Scotch Novels has been a considerable recommendation to them. They are a relief to the mind, rarefied as it has been with modern philosophy, and heated with ultra-radicalism. At a time also, when we bid fair to revive the principles of the Stuarts, it is interesting to bring us acquainted with their persons ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... her husband's absence should continue long enough to amount to positive desertion. But she never allowed her mind to dwell much upon the thought; still less did she deliberately hope for such a result. Her regard for Winterborne had been rarefied by the shock which followed its avowal into an ethereal emotion that had little to do with living ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the 3500 feet that remained between us and our goal. The whole hillside was a perfect wild garden. Columbines, potentillas—yellow, bronze, and crimson—primulas, anemones, gentian, arnica, and quantities of unknown blossoms gave us ample excuse for lingering panting in the rarefied air, as we struggled through brushwood first, and then over loose rocks and finally slopes of shelving snow, before we found ourselves on the crest of the mountain, shivering slightly in the raw, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... knees. Sometimes the foot could find no bottom, and when we withdrew it we found a yawning azure-tinted crevasse. The guides called such places mines, and feared them greatly. The air every instant grew more rarefied; my mouth was dry; I suffered from thirst, and to quench it swallowed morsels of snow and kirsch-wasser, the very odour of which became at last insupportable, though I was sometimes compelled to drink it by the imperative orders of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... is the rarefied air our spirits breathe on great heights of achievement; as vital to our moral nature as the pure mountain element, which stimulates our lungs, is to our physical being. In sorrow, faithfully borne, the glory and the blessing of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... and the slender streams suddenly become furious rivers, which often sweep away the improvements of man, and change the face of the country in a single night. During the dry season the inhabitants depend upon the sea-breeze which blows in over the heated land to replace the rarefied air. It blows from six in the morning to three in the afternoon, in the eastern part of the island; in other parts, from nine to three. But frequently a furious northeast wind interrupts this refreshing arrangement: the air becomes hard ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may partly be that ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... unto herself. The soil out of which Fairlands is made is much richer, it is said, than the common dirt of her sister cities less than fifteen miles distant. A difference of only a few feet in elevation seems, strangely, to give her a much more rarefied air. Her proudest boast is that she has a larger number of millionaires in proportion to her population than any other city in ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... rose to investigate further I experienced the same ridiculous catastrophe that had met my first attempt to walk under Martian conditions. The lesser attraction of this smaller planet and the reduced air pressure of its greatly rarefied atmosphere, afforded so little resistance to my earthly muscles that the ordinary exertion of the mere act of rising sent me several feet into the air and precipitated me upon my face in the soft and brilliant grass of this ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... advanced, they seemed glad to pause from time to time, that they might recover their breath; for the air, becoming more and more rarefied, made respiration somewhat difficult and the ascent fatiguing. Before they had reached an altitude of 600 feet they noticed a sensible diminution of the temperature; but neither cold nor fatigue deterred them, and they were resolved to persevere. Fortunately, ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... not among the people generally, but rather among learned travelers, because in earlier times the northern light was declared to be an effect of atmospheric electricity, on account of the luminous manifestation of the electricity in rarefied space, and the observers found it easy to hear what they wished to hear. Recent experiments with very sensitive electrometers have hitherto, contrary to the expectation generally entertained, yielded only negative results. The condition of the electricity in the atmosphere* ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... one, or any brand Of theologic lore; nor think too well Of generally accepted heaven and hell. But faith and knowledge build at Love's command A beauteous heaven; a heaven of thought all clarified Of hate and fear and doubt; a heaven of rarefied And perfect trust; and from the heaven I cry: 'God reigns on ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... us, where we are, mere bubbles; and if we raise our eyes and look above, all there is blue. Behold that diadem of stars! Here the tints of earthly impressions disappear; standing on this nature rarefied by space do you not feel within you something deeper far than mind, grander than enthusiasm, of greater energy than will? Are you not conscious of emotions whose interpretation is no longer in us? Do you not feel your ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... stay-at-home, the milk-sop, the learned pundit, the pious prayer-monger, any thing but the ladies' man. Yes: it is little wonder that Mrs. Tracy's heart clave to Julian, the masculine image of herself; while it barely tolerated Charles, who was a rarefied and idealized likeness of the absent and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and capabilities far in advance of ours, they may be conceived to have grappled with the stupendous problem of keeping their world in a habitable condition as long as possible. Supposing them to have become accustomed to live in their rarefied atmosphere (a thing not inconceivable, since men can live for a time at least in air hardly less rare), the most pressing problem for them is that of a water-supply, without which plant life cannot exist, while animal life in turn depends for its existence ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... great ships across the ocean; it is so with the lifting power required to raise balloons in the air. A balloon goes up quite easily for a certain distance, but after a certain distance it refuses to go up any farther, because the air is too rarefied to float it and sustain it. And, therefore, I would say let us ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... warm climates is, that the air expanding with the heat, while the lungs remain of the same capacity, they must take in a smaller quantity by weight, though the same by measure, of oxygen, the supporter of life; but if, in addition to the air being rarefied, it be also still further distended by the vapour of water being mixed with it, it is evident that a certain number of cubic inches by measure, or the lungs full, will contain a less weight of oxygen than ever; so little, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines And yet water it was and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor—such would be your respective roles! That's genius, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... reached the cold, crisp, deliciously rarefied air outside, he took off his hat and involuntarily looked up at the stars blazing thick in the deep-blue midnight sky. With solemn voice he said to his partner: "Well, 'Spot,' right here Mart Haney's saloon business ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Italian warfare against the Austrians was carried on has been sufficient to entail enormous difficulties and a great additional strain, due actually to difficult breathing in a rarefied atmosphere. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... distal fragment, cast a comparatively faint shadow, and there may even be a clear space between the fragments. When the parts are exposed by operation, the bone is found to be soft and spongy and the ends of the fragments are rarefied and atrophied; sometimes they are pointed, and occasionally absorption has taken place to such an extent that a gap exists between the fragments. The bone is easily penetrated by a bradawl, and if an attempt is made to apply plates, the screws ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... phenomena of light were inexplicable until the existence of an imponderable substance—an ether—was recognised, so mediumistic phenomena seemed mysterious until the now fully established fact was recognised, that between the particles of ether there exists another still more rarefied imponderable substance not subject to the law of ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... zone the earth is pleasant underneath, nothing can be more glorious than the heavens above. Being under the parallel of 18 deg. N. lat., of course we have a full view of all the northern heavens, and of all the southern heavens, except 18 deg. about the South Pole. The rarefied atmosphere gives peculiar brilliancy to the stars; and on a clear night—and most nights are clear—the heavens are indeed flooded with white fire, while, according to the season of the year, Orion and his northern company appear with a lustre unwonted ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... most copious revelation of his personality. But this is true—that the most personal expression of all for any man is in verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of composition—we will not say "more difficult"—some kind of effort or struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest shape. Such emotions as a man has to express will be, perhaps not more perfectly, but at any rate ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... action of the atmospheric currents, when blowing through an open window upon smoke. What do you see? Sometimes the impression is strong upon your ocular belief that the window is driving the smoke in. You can hardly be convinced of the contrary—scarcely when five or seven minutes has absolutely rarefied the smoke so much that a book-lettering previously invisible has become even legible. And at last, when the fact, the result, the experience, has corrected the contradictory theory of the eye, you begin to suspect, without any aid from science, that there were ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey |
