"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought itself is above his comprehension. "Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or feeling so long as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them," said Hawthorne, and because of his knowledge of this fact he wrote his exquisite classics for children. The phraseology of books is frequently different from that to which the child is accustomed. He must be taught to understand thought ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... convents, they present a complex problem,—a question of civilization, which condemns them; a question of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in the world are the intellectual depths of a German symphony and the passionate declamation of an Italian recitative more thoroughly appreciated. This is the natural musical exposition of our complex and various life. This wondrous variety, which indicates possibilities not yet revealed, pleases us without being always clear to our feelings and intellect. Still, we shall not ask, with the Frenchman, "Sonate, que veux-tu?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... each part of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... George Eliot's Silas Marner and Mr. Austin Dobson's Tale of Polypheme, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk, who are prone to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic Funeral" seems to me always ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... be sufficient to say that the idea of sexual processes produces dilation of blood vessels in the sexual sphere, and that this physiological change itself becomes the source and stimulus for more vivid sexual feelings, which associate themselves with more complex sexual thoughts. These in their turn reinforce again the physiological effect on the sexual organ, and so the play goes on until the irritation of the whole sexual apparatus and the corresponding sexual mental emotions reach a height at which the desire ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... roundabout. Too roundabout; for the truths we have to tell we prefer to speak out directly and not by way of allegory. And the truths the fable has to teach are too simple to correspond to the facts in our complex civilization." No modern fabulist has duplicated in his field the success of Hans Christian Andersen in the field of the nursery story. A few fables from La Fontaine, a few from Krylov, one or two each from Gay, Cowper, Yriarte, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... must pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that the duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... exist, by making the owner less ready to listen to a professor, whose interest it is to recommend total demolition." Mr. R. P. Knight, in a note to his landscape, thus remarks on this subject: "I remember a country clock-maker, who being employed to clean a more complex machine than he had been accustomed to, very confidently took it to pieces; but finding, when he came to put it together again, some wheels of which he could not discover the use, very discreetly carried them off in his pocket. The simple artifice ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... been enduring? Well, it was very "trying" for us all, and an even stronger word might be used by the poor, the aged, and the delicate. Still, let us remember that without omniscience it is impossible to say whether any given season is good or bad. So infinitely complex are the relations of things that we are very bad judges as to what is best for us. How do we know that our past winter of discontent may not be followed by a glorious summer, and that the two may not be merely antecedent and consequent, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... subterfuges. No wonder he could afford such gorgeous collections of art, keeping aloof from his associates in crime. His treasures, like those in many European museums were bought with blood. It is curious how a complex case like this smooths itself out so simply when the key is obtained. And you, Helene, have been the genius to supply that key: my own work ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... that reason, which is the form of his being. (c. vi., s. i., n. 4, p. 111.) Whoever therefore goes about contradicting the reason that is within him (c. v., s. iii., n. 3, p. 74) is not in the way to attain to happiness. Happiness the end of man, the creature of all others the most complex, is not to be stumbled upon by chance. You may make two stones lean upright one against the other by chance, but otherwise than by a methodical application of means to the end you could not support the spire ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Pharamond, or of any other heroic novel, would be a desperate task. The great number of personages introduced in pairs, the intrigues of each couple forming a separate thread wound into the complex web of the plot, is alone enough to make any following of the story a great difficulty. On the fly-leaf of a copy of Cleopatra which lies before me, some dear lady of the seventeenth century has very conscientiously written out "a list of the ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... (f) Psychic traumata arise perhaps through a striking reaction in the emotional realm towards external occurrences. (g) Nearly all of Risch's cases were burdened with bad inheritance. He maintains that, above all, these cases show instability and psychic excitability. The entire symptom complex arises upon ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... midst of the crowd where Vogotzine's loud laugh alternated with the little cries of the Baroness, felt a complex sentiment: he wished his friends to enjoy themselves and yet he longed to be alone with Marsa, and to take her away. They were to go first to his hotel in Paris; and then to some obscure corner, probably to the villa of Sainte-Adresse, until September, when they were going to Venice, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... Tiennet, the rustic narrator, tells, in the successive veillees of a month, the romance of his youth. It is a work of a very different type to the rural tales that had preceded it, and should be regarded apart from them. It is longer, more complex in form and sentiment, more of an ideal composition. Les Maitres Sonneurs, is a delightful pastoral, woodland fantasy, standing by itself among romances much as stands a kindred work of imagination, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... likewise now come into the inheritance of the official status, with the result that all matters connected with the clan devolved upon his sole and exclusive control. In the third place, public as well as private concerns were manifold and complex, and being a man of negligent disposition, he estimated ordinary affairs of so little consequence that any respite from his official duties he devoted to no more than the study of books and the playing ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... complex result, 17; conjoint effect of moral and physical influences, 17; human freedom not to be disregarded in the study of, 20; influence of geographical surroundings, 23—of climate and natural scenery, on the pursuits and mental character ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... authorship of the tradition to the Apostles; but it is characteristic that he neither does this of such set purpose as Irenaeus and Tertullian, nor thinks it necessary to prove that the Church had presented the apostolic tradition intact. But as he did not extract from the tradition a fixed complex of fundamental propositions, so also he failed to recognise the importance of its publicity and catholicity, and rather placed an esoteric alongside of an exoteric tradition. Although, like Irenaeus and Tertullian, his attitude is throughout determined by opposition to the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... choice of music the pianolist need not pause to consider the slow evolution of the art from the simple to the more complex, since for him nothing is complex. Thus he is free to disregard all traditions, even such an absurd one, for example, as that which insists that a sonata or symphony should be played as a whole, that, if a work in this form consists of three or four movements, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... comprehend the full extent of which, a statesman would need deep reflection in the quiet of his closet, aided by considerable inquiry. It may well be supposed that persons feeling some distrust of their capacity to form, intuitively, a correct judgment on a subject so complex, and disposed only to act knowingly, would be unwilling to make so hasty a decision, and consequently be disinclined to attend such meetings. Many intelligent men, therefore, stood aloof, while the most intemperate assumed, as usual, the name of the people; pronounced a definitive and unqualified ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... duty and necessity, all was well with the dauntless, all-enterprising soul; but growing knowledge of her own heart, of other hearts, cast dark and perplexing shades upon Nettie, as upon all other wayfarers, in these complex paths. The effect upon her mind was different from the effect to be expected according to modern sentimental ethics. Nettie had never doubted of the true duty, the true necessity, of her position, till she became conscious of her vast sacrifice. ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... been asked, whether the method of 'abscissio infinti,' by which the Sophist is taken, is a real and valuable logical process. Modern science feels that this, like other processes of formal logic, presents a very inadequate conception of the actual complex procedure of the mind by which scientific truth is detected and verified. Plato himself seems to be aware that mere division is an unsafe and uncertain weapon, first, in the Statesman, when he says that we should divide ...
— Sophist • Plato
... La Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry Adams, who had sat at his feet since 1872, the question how much he owed to La Farge could be answered only by admitting that he had no standard to measure it by. Of all his friends La Farge alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast against the commonplaces of American uniformity, and in the process had vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The American mind — the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western — likes ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... has no hope of giving an adequate picture of her complex nature, so full of contrasts and opposites. She was a woman of affairs, with a wide and catholic outlook upon humanity, and yet she was a shy solitary walking alone in puritan simplicity and childlike faith. Few ham possessed such moral and physical courage, or exercised ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... most wholesome and common things, for their minds were charged with painful thoughts that clamoured for explanation, though no one dared refer to them. Hank, being nearest to primitive conditions, was the first to find himself, for he was also less complex. In Dr. Cathcart "civilization" championed his forces against an attack singular enough. To this day, perhaps, he is not quite sure of certain things. Anyhow, he took longer to ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... exists,' says a philosophical biologist of our day, 'to furnish the cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food. The higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but it is just this that is most precious and significant—all of which shows His unrolling purpose. It is the last that alone explains all that went before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the present. God before all, through all, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... which, in self-defence, he has been forced to adopt, gets into the position of a rogue. The commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," seems at first glance an extremely simple injunction; but in the light of Bjoernson's searching analysis it becomes a complex and intricate tangle, capable of interesting shades and nuances of meaning. Tjaelde, in the author's opinion, certainly does steal, when, in order to save himself (and thereby the thousands who are involved in his affairs), he speculates with other people's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... select depends both on the variety of salad served and on the personal preference of those to whom it is served. Some of these contain only a few ingredients and are comparatively simple to make, while others are complex and involve considerable work in their making. Whether simple or elaborate, however, the salad dressing should be carefully chosen, so that it will blend well with the ingredients of the salad ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 4 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... the light that was gradually waning. So satisfied was he with that distant pulse of harmony that he began weaving some verses in his head to "His Absent Lady,"—and succeeded in devising quite a charming lyric to her whose honour and renown he was ready to kill. So complex, so curious, so callous, yet sensuous, and utterly egotistical was his nature, that had Angela truly died under his murderous blow, he would have been ready now to write such exquisite verses in the way of a lament for her loss, as should have made a world ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... much of each other. This fellow, Lowe by name, interested Hanford. He was a cosmopolite; he was polished to the hardness of agate by a life spent in many lands. He possessed a cold eye and a firm chin; he was a complex mixture of daredeviltry and meekness. He had fought in a war or two, and he had led hopes quite as forlorn as the one Hanford was now engaged upon. It was this bond, perhaps, which drew ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... contents might have been virulent bacteria or toxic gas, according to the intentions of its makers. Among its brothers elsewhere in the sky this morning, there were such noxious loads. This one, however, was carrying the complex mechanism of a hydrogen bomb. Its destination was an American city; its object to replace that city with an expanding cloud of ...
— Pushbutton War • Joseph P. Martino
... what guarantee he had that any E would be listening if they did produce a review of the Eden complex, knowing he ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... other laws: it yields, in fact, as many as there are adjustments which have been effected between itself and all besides. Each new proof of design, therefore, is not a solitary fact; but one which entering as another element into a most complex machinery, indefinitely multiplies the combinations, in any one of which chance might have gone astray. From this infinite array of proofs of design, it seems to man's reason, in ordinary moods, stark madness to account for the phenomena of the universe upon any ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland's works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his life ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... be engaged, to be indefinitely adored by a consummate lover like Harold Phipps, who so beautifully shared her ambition, was an exciting and tempting proposition. Like most girls of her type, when her personal concerns became too complex for reason, she abandoned herself to impulse. She merely shut her eyes and allowed herself to drift toward a destination that was not of her choosing. Like a peripatetic Sleeping Beauty, she moved through the days in a sort of trance, waiting liberation ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... machine are far more remarkable than the resemblances to it. Prawling—if he will allow us the familiarity—is not a utilitarian. His aim is to re-establish our textile pre-eminence by reconciling monistic individualism with the fullest solidarity of the social complex. He is meticulously careful in stressing the point that the demarcations arrived at by the use of his abacus are not absolute, but conditioned by EINSTEIN'S theory of relativity. The ancillary industries, each moving ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... to realize the magnitude of his problem. This was not a tiny independent orbit-ship with a few corridors and compartments. This was a huge ship, a vast complex of corridors and compartments and holds. There was probably a crew of a thousand men on this ship ... and there was no sign where Greg and Johnny ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... sounds startling, and perhaps a little absurd. But fisheries, forests and game have more to do with each other than any one of them with mines. And, whatever his designation, such a minister would have no lack of work, especially in Labrador. But here we come again to the complex human factors of three Governments and more Departments. Yet, if this bio-geographic area cannot be brought into one administrative entity, then the next best thing is concerted action on the part of all the ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... great thought flashed out of the depths of eternity and into his brain, a thought which seemed to illumine his whole past life. In the clear light thereof he seemed instantly to read meanings in numberless events which to that hour had remained hidden. His complex, misshapen career—could it have been a preparation?—and for this? He had yearned to serve his fellow-men, but had miserably failed. For, while to will was always present with him, even as with Paul, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... this ground are the ambiguities of life carried over into that other state, its pathos and its small misunderstandings. This was a much-married man whose last spouse had been a triple widow. Even to him the situation proved mathematically complex, and the sumptuous stone to her memory bears the dizzying legend that "Enoch Nudd who erects this stone is her fourth husband and his fifth wife." Perhaps it was the exigencies of space which brought about this amazing elision; but surely, in its very apparent ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... will ask, what has this to do with poor Manuel Pereira,—or the imprisonment of free citizens of a friendly nation? We will show him that the complex system of official spoliation, and the misrepresentations of the police in regard to the influence of such persons upon the slave population, is a principal feature in its enforcement. To do this, we deem it essentially necessary to show the ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... her in the bright light of the sun. She battled with a haunting thought. She had inadvertently heard Nels's conversation with Stewart; she had listened, hoping to hear some good news or to hear the worst; she had learned both, and, moreover, enlightenment on one point of Stewart's complex motives. He wished to spare her any sight that might offend, frighten, or disgust her. Yet this Stewart, who showed a fineness of feeling that might have been wanting even in Boyd Harvey, maintained a secret rendezvous with that pretty, abandoned Bonita. Here always the hot shame, like a ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Meshed, and Shiraz were to share the fate of Persepolis and Susa, it would yet remain as a portrait of unrivalled humour and accuracy of a people who, though now in their decadence, have played an immense and still play a not wholly insignificant part in the complex drama of Asiatic politics. It is the picture of a people, light-hearted, nimble-witted, and volatile, but subtle, hypocritical, and insincere; metaphysicians and casuists, courtiers and rogues, gentlemen and liars, hommes d'esprit ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... Sentences. (a) Tell whether they are simple, complex, or compound. (b) Do any of them ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... child, as well as all other living beings, take their first steps in development. No matter how wonderful this may seem, the fact stares us in the face that the entire human child, as well as every animal with all their great future possibilities, are in their first stage a small ball of this complex homogeneous substance. Whether we consider "a mere infinitesimal ovoid particle which finds space and duration enough to multiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly, and then of the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... words and word groups (phrases and clauses) that compose it. If the thought is simple, and expressed in straightforward terms, we grasp it readily and without any conscious effort to determine these relations. If the thought is complex, the relations become more complicated, and before we are sure that we know what the writer intends to say it may be necessary to note with care which is the main clause and which are the subordinate clauses. In either case our acquiring the thought depends upon our understanding the relations ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... more thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of the institutions of the Children of the Sun than any thing which we have met in the whole of this strange and obsolete record. 'The ritual of the Incas,' says Prescott, 'involved a routine of observances as complex and elaborate as ever distinguished that of any nation, whether pagan or Christian. Each month had its appropriate festival, or rather festivals. The four principal had reference to the Sun, and commemorated the great periods of his annual progress, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... been, then, as the outcome of the complex of forces which we have been considering, a new approach to religion distinctive in our own time and in general taking three directions determined by that against which it has reacted, or perhaps more positively by the varying character of what it seeks. A pretty careful analysis ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... of Epigenesis, which makes the embryo arise, by a series of successive differentiations, from a simple homogeneous mass into a complex heterogeneous organism. ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... plate; was a monstrous imagination which he would on the spot have flourished into space. This perhaps in some sort arose from Mr Podsnap's blushing young person being, so to speak, all cheek; whereas there is a possibility that there may be young persons of a rather more complex organization. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... brightenings of interest to encourage him, the old Christian talked. When he had progressed sufficiently to round out the theory of Christianity, she had grasped a new standard. The contrast between the old and the new made itself instantly felt. On one hand was the simple and logical; on the other the complex and dogmatic. The Christian was able to measure proportionately how much should be laid upon her mind for study at once and while she still waited, he rose from ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... space and time are far from being categories or functions: they are complex posterior formations. Kant, however, looked upon density, colour, etc., as material for sensations; but the mind only observes colour or hardness when it has already given a form to its sensations. Sensations, in so far as they are crude matter, are outside the mind: they are a limit. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs, that the Italian Government considered it necessary to proceed without delay to an exchange of views and consequently to concrete negotiations with the Austro-Hungarian Government concerning the complex situation arising out of the conflict which ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... million men, and with capital and annual products exceeding a thousand {322} million dollars. Foreign trade has mounted to eight times its height of fifty years ago. The whole financial and commercial structure has become complex and intricate beyond earlier imagining. The changes, even on the material side, have not been all gain. There is many a case of reckless waste of resources to lament, many an instance of half-developed opportunity and even of slipping backwards. With the millionaire came the slum, and the advantages ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... had been otherwise," I pleaded; "but life is very complex nowadays on both sides of the Atlantic. Much that I have told Edith I have also revealed to the passport clerk at Washington and the keeper of birth records in New York. Something too I confided to the assistant-book-keeper in the War Zone Bureau at the Custom-House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... Race Cargill had been the best Terran Intelligence agent on the complex and mysterious planet of Wolf. He had repeatedly imperiled his life amongst the half-human and non-human creatures of the sullen world. And he had repeatedly accomplished the fantastic missions until his ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... legislation has not fulfilled the expectation of its friends. But this is a frequent trait of tentative legislation. It is not reasonable to expect that the first efforts to solve a problem the factors of which are so hidden and complex will be followed by ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... Now, this want of comprehensive views of chemical reactions, their why and wherefore, was bad enough as it affected the study of inorganic and metallic compounds, but what must have been the conditions for studying the complex compounds of carbon, so widely spread in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Their number is so enormous that, in the absence of any established relationships, not much more than a mere enumeration was possible for the student of this branch of chemistry. It is only within the last twenty ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... the world was too new and too exciting for that, and, besides, her life was too full, her obligations were too many to permit of distractions, agreeable or disagreeable. Nor, for that matter, was Gray the sort of man to become seriously interested in a simple person like her; he was complex, many-sided, cosmopolitan. His extravagant attentions were meaningless—And yet, one could never tell; men were queer ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... attach itself to symbols, which take the place of more complex sensations and memories. Some of the most difficult problems in politics result from the relation between the conscious use in reasoning of the symbols called words, and their more or less automatic and unconscious effect ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... have marked the ushering-in of the modern age have been far-reaching in their consequences. The old home life and home industries of an earlier period are passing, or have passed, never to return. Peoples in all advanced nations are rapidly swinging into the stream of a new and vastly more complex world civilization, which brings them into contact and competition with the best brains of all mankind. At the same time a great and ever-increasing specialization of human effort is taking place on all sides, and with new and ever more difficult social, political, educational, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... for there was a game afoot at the Pink Chalet, which he would give me news of. I was to meet him next evening at nine-fifteen at the little door in the east end of the house. 'For the love of Mike, Dick,' he concluded, 'be on time and do everything Clarence tells you as if he was me. It's a mighty complex affair, but you and he have sand enough to pull through. Don't worry about your little cousin. She's safe and out of the ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... so much as vast. But I knew that I could not make Isabel comprehend it, and (so complex a creature is man) I do not know that I wanted her to comprehend it. These were the only ones in the whole collection that I would have shown her, and I was rather glad that she did not like even these. Not ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... almost in those words: "It is because of the infinite variety of type and the complexity of modern life which the individual is called upon to encounter, that a sort of fancy dress has to be worn by all of us, as a necessary shield to our individuality and our privacy. We cannot go through the complex process of adjustment to each new type that we come across, so by common consent, we wear our domino, and respect the unwritten laws of the great bal masque that ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... desired to make known to the great public in the French language—in entering upon a question so complex and so vast as socialism, has but a single and ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... often his allies in the constant hostilities that he maintained against the Kaan. Such circumstances may have led Polo to confound Kaidu with the house of Chaghatai. Indeed, it is not easy to point out the mutual limits of their territories, and these must have been somewhat complex, for we find Kaidu and Borrak Khan of Chaghatai at one time exercising a kind of joint sovereignty in the cities of Bokhara and Samarkand. Probably, indeed, the limits were in a great measure tribal rather than territorial. But it may be gathered that Kaidu's authority extended over ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... complex tangle of ropes vigorously. Miss Rutherford, with Frank leaning on her shoulder, staggered up the beach. Just as they reached the tents the head of a young man appeared under the flapping canvas. Then his arms struggled out Priscilla seized him by ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... of Central Asia had at a very early time attained to the psychical stage of monotheism. Africa is only now emerging from the basest fetichism; the negro priest is still a sorcerer and rain-maker. The Egyptian religion, as is well known, provided for the vulgar a suitable worship of complex idolatry, but for those emancipated from superstition it offered true and even noble conceptions. The coexistence of these apparent incompatibilities in the same faith seems incapable of any other explanation than that of an amalgamation of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... in a sense, the cosmic power of the Beautiful; a power whose very growth, whose constantly more complex nature proclaims its necessary and beneficial action in human evolution. It is the power of making human beings live, for the moment, in a more organically vigorous and harmonious fashion, as mountain ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... different from his ancestors, though inheriting their physical peculiarities. They were mostly splendid animals, with faces radiant with courage and high spirits and high health. Antony's face was clearer and more refined, more complex, more suggestive. His form, equally tall, was slighter, not hampered with superfluous flesh, not so aggressively erect. One felt that the older Hallams would have walked straight up to the object of their ambition and demanded it, or, ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... The account is divided into periods that we may make just as long or as short as convenience requires. We are also to understand that it is consistent with the original text to believe that the most complex plants and animals may have been evolved by natural processes, lasting for millions of years, out of structureless rudiments. A person who is not a Hebrew scholar can only stand aside and admire the marvellous flexibility of a language which admits ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... Egyptian tale of 'The Two Brothers,' Bitiou and Anepou. This fable, as old, in actual written literature, as Moses, is a complex of half the Marchen plots and incidents in the world. It opens with the formula of Potiphar's Wife. The falsely accused brother flies, and secretes his life, or separable soul, in a flower of the mystic Vale of Acacias. This affair of the separable soul may be studied in Mr. Hartland's Perseus, and ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... the value of the rent of the house and grounds he and his family have enjoyed, the value of the chickens, eggs, vegetables, fruit, milk, meat and other produce of the farm consumed—as he proceeds the problem becomes infinitely more complex until at last he ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... according to his tastes and his caprices and his ideas—in short, as an artist? For facts cannot by reason of their own intrinsic character be divided into historical facts and non-historical facts. But any fact is something exceedingly complex. Will the historian represent facts in all their complexity? No, that is impossible. Then he will represent them stripped of the greater part of the peculiarities which constituted them, and consequently lopped, mutilated, different from what they really were. As ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... So complex has life become in these later days that the very beds we lie on and the meals we eat are controlled by patents. Every garment and piece of furniture now pays a “royalty” to some inventor, from the hats on our heads to the carpets under foot, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... particular class. All the suggestions are given in very simple form, chiefly from the standpoint of the first grade, for the reason that it is easier to add to the details of a simple problem than to simplify one which is complex. ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... parts, are visibly transferred from one place to another; the other, internal and concealed, of some of which man is sensible, while some takes place without his knowledge, and is not even to be guessed at, but by the effect it outwardly produces. In a machine so extremely complex as man, formed by the combination of such a multiplicity of matter, so diversified in its properties, so different in its proportions, so varied in its modes of action, the motion necessarily becomes of the most complicated kind; its dullness, as well as its rapidity, frequently escapes ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... that famous republic and can have no hereditary bias as to its ecclesiastical or political theories may at least attempt the task with comparative coldness, although conscious of inability to do thorough justice to a most complex subject. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... etymological mysteries must be probed. Perhaps the German professors, after the war, can usefully wreak themselves on this complex and obscure research. Meanwhile the above notes are offered not as a serious contribution to a subject so immense, but rather as a warning. The infectiousness of slang is incredible; and this gigantic inter-association of classes and clans ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... keep his bow bent; but Tazewell's mind was always on the stretch, or, in a stricter sense, was never on the stretch at all. The most intricate combination of figures he saw through at a glance; and in the arts the most complex machinery was easily understood by him, and readily made plain to others by his familiar explanations. Processes of reasoning the most elaborate seemed rather the play of his mind than a serious exercise of its powers; and ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... eloquent and human he became. From being a distant and uncomfortable person, he became at once like a near neighbour and friend. It was strange to me—as I have thought since—how he conveyed to us in few words the essential emotional note of his life. It was no violin tone, beautifully complex with harmonics, but the clear simple voice of the flute. It spoke of his wife and his baby girl and his home. The very incongruity of detail—he told us how he grew onions in his back yard—added somehow to the homely glamour of the vision ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. That such may be the case with literature, particularly the more ephemeral kinds thereof, is very likely, since literature, save in the great complex structures of epos, tragedy, choral lyric, is but the development of daily speech, and possibly as upstart, as purely passing, as daily speech itself; moreover, in its less artistic forms, requiring ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... excepted,) to come into this scheme; they obstinately insist on buying, selling, and keeping their accounts in the good old way of their fathers! that is to say, in currency, by pounds, shillings, and pence; and nothing can be more complex, as they have not a single coin in circulation of the real or nominal value of any of them. If you are to pay the sum of three shillings and fourpence halfpenny, (without having recourse to the federal scheme) you must provide yourself with three silver divisions of the Spanish ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... hear a girl as handsome as a pictorial masterpiece, and dressed like a court beauty, discourse with the knowledge, and in the language, of the oldest philosopher. But this was only one of the many surprising combinations in her complex personality. My noviciate was still ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... hostile, but helpful, though acting in opposite directions—like the opposition of the thumb and fingers in the human hand, which makes of it such a wonderful servant of the thought. They belong to the group of sisterly powers which the Creator has placed in the human soul—varied, complex, like and unlike. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... knowest this, wilt thou not think that my black angel plays me booty, and has taken it into his head to urge me on to the indissoluble tie, that he might be more sure of me (from the complex transgressions to which he will certainly stimulate me, when wedded) than perhaps he thought he could be from the simple sins, in which I have so long allowed myself, that they seem to have the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... In fact, Fandor's complex and adventurous life was very much bound up with that of the police officer, for they had worked together in solving the ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... general chart, showing the variation of the compass at the different places which he had visited. On these charts he set down lines connecting those localities at which the magnetic variation was identical. He thus set an example of the graphic representation of large masses of complex facts, in such a manner as to appeal at once to the eye, a method of which we make many ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... extended and rather complex procedure just related, it is interesting to note that the Tinguian woman is one of those mythical beings whom careless or uninformed writers have been wont to describe as giving birth to her children without bodily discomfort. Reyes [66] tells us that she cuts the umbilical cord, after which ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... eloquence he proceeded to develop the theme of the supreme value of the human factor in modern life, social and industrial. With great cogency he pressed the argument against the inhuman and degrading view that would make man a mere factor in the complex problem of Industrial Finance, a mere inanimate ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... this time that they began to play that favorite game of Greenbank, which seems to be unknown almost everywhere else. It is called "king's base," and is full of all manner of complex happenings, sudden surprises, and ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... be necessary to commence this lecture by explaining the origin of fuel; it will be sufficient if I remind you that it is to the action of the complex rays of the sun upon the foliage of plants that we mainly owe our supply of combustibles. The tree trunks and branches of our forests, as well as the subterranean deposits of coal and naphtha, at one time formed portions of the atmosphere in the form of carbonic acid gas; that gas was decomposed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... with some shame that I confess how her charm enveloped me like a magic cloud. Unfamiliar with the complex Oriental temperament, I had laughed at Nayland Smith when he had spoken of this girl's infatuation. "Love in the East," he had said, "is like the conjurer's mango-tree; it is born, grows and flowers at the touch of a hand." Now, in those pleading ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the one with which we have just dealt, arises from the erroneous assertion of the allness of God; but as the whole subject of the reality of evil will come up for treatment at a later stage, we need not now enter into its discussion. At one aspect, and one only, of this vast and complex theme we may, however, be permitted to glance for a moment before we pass on. If God dwells in us, it is frequently asked, whence comes what Paul so pathetically calls "the law of sin which is in our members"—whence come the wrongful desires and harmful ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Prana, it is likewise true that there is a simple and elementary form of auric substance to which occultists have given the simple name of the prana-aura in order to distinguish it from the more complex forms and phases of the human aura. The simplicity of the character of the prana-aura causes it to be more readily sensed or perceived than is possible in the case of the more complex phases or forms ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... crown, a robe, and a gilded chair easily to outshine in visible picturesqueness the great Emperor. His achievement, when we consider what hung upon it, is greater than Napoleon's, the narrative of his origin more romantic, his character more complex. And yet who does not feel the greatness of Napoleon?—and who does not suspect the shallowness of ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... in an island situated in the straits of the Sound. Houtman tells us they saluted him in this grotesque manner: "They raised his left foot, which they passed gently over the right leg, and from thence over his face." The inhabitants of the Philippines use a most complex attitude; they bend their body very low, place their hands on their cheeks, and raise at the same time one foot in the air ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... a higher authority, that there was an "exception" which permits one to say "wegen DEN Regen" in certain peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not extended ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fists battering and the tinkle of metal or crystal on metal. He was fighting desperately, his super mech's strength overtaxed. The unseen man's hands tore at his neck and shoulder, ripping away the synthetic flesh and baring the complex framework beneath. ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... relation in society. In later times it is only by a special favour of circumstances, as for example by the isolation of shipboard from all larger monarchies, that the heroic relation between the leader and the followers can be repeated. As society becomes more complex and conventional, this relation ceases. The homeliness of conversation between Odysseus and his vassals, or between Njal and Thord Freedman's son, is discouraged by the rules of courtly behaviour as gentlefolk become more idle and ostentatious, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the complex and difficult nature of the examination as conducted by him, he seems to doubt in regard to some of the results given in his tables In the fourteen samples which he analysed, the proportion of water ranges from 13.2 to 15.2, which is a rather higher average than is yielded by ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Clarke, the appraisers appointed under the 8th article of the treaty of 28th March, 1836, were judged to be too high; and the subject was referred for revision to Maj. Garland and myself. I this day transmitted a joint reply of the major and myself, stating how impossible it would be to revise so complex a subject without opportunities of personal examination in each case—a business which neither ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... extracts from this important speech: "Depend upon it, when you come to close quarters with this subject, when you come to measure and test the respective relations of intelligence and labor and property in all their myriad and complex forms, and when you come to represent those relations in arithmetical results, you are undertaking an operation of which I should say it was beyond the power of man to conduct it with satisfaction, but which, at any rate, is an operation to which you ought not constantly to recur; ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... provisions are a rather complex way of achieving their object, which is to enable the Court to put a seller out of business if he is convicted of an offence against the Act and if the Court believes his conduct is such as to warrant this penalty. We think that this object could be achieved by giving the Court this power ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... some one more within his own circle. The second missive from Arbillot the notary, announcing that the deceased had died intestate, and requesting the legal heir to come to Vivey as soon as possible, put a sudden end to the young man's doubts, which merged into a complex feeling, less of joy than ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... be seen, in the first place, that the present mode of smelting copper, though simple in theory, appears in practice extremely complex. For this reason, within the last twenty-five years there have, we believe, been as many patents taken out to simplify and hasten the operation. Without exception, these have been proved to be altogether inapplicable. Let us see ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... taking root where he blooms, in the pure affections, flowering in the high airs which he dreams of but sees not, or sees only in moments of inspiration from her—a being, who, more complex on her physical side, is therefore more affluent on her spiritual—who, from the established premises of science, demands not new, but the very largest deductions to reach the borders of her life—a being whose support with the earth-life ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the wireless telegraph at the service of the world than men of science of all nations began the search for the wireless telephone. But the vibrations necessary to reproduce the sound of the human voice are so infinitely more complex than those which will suffice to carry signals representing the dots and dashes of the telegraph code that the problem long defied solution. Scientists attacked the problem with vigor, and various ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... solved is of the most complex nature, and the engineers who have studied it have not been able to come to an agreement except as regards a small number of points. It may even be said that unanimity exists upon but a single point, and that is that the means ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... was so complex, peculiar, and original,—so foreign in temperament and spirit to the more representative traits of New England character,—so large, philosophic, and sagacious in vision and survey of great questions, and so dramatic and vehement in their ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... that it is not surprising the public should have been slow and unwilling to touch them. Nothing, indeed, short of the intrepid zeal of Mr. Whitbread could have ventured upon the task of remedying so complex a calamity; nor could any industry less persevering have compassed the miracle of rebuilding and re-animating that edifice, among the many-tongued claims that beset and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... causes. Situation, soil, climate, the nature of the productions, the nature of the government, the genius of the citizens, the degree of information they possess, the state of commerce, of arts, of industry, these circumstances and many more, too complex, minute, or adventitious to admit of a particular specification, occasion differences hardly conceivable in the relative opulence and riches of different countries. The consequence clearly is that there can be no common measure of national wealth, and, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... complex state of society, a class of persons comes into being who are neither protagonists, nor slaves, but observers; and they meditate on events, and seek to fathom their meaning. If the observer be imaginative, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... were undoubtedly good; and when he asserted that it was his purpose to give his father and mother merely an outline of their adventures, he was unquestionably sincere; but the outline became so extended, and assumed such a variety of complex convolutions, that there seemed to be no end to the story—as there certainly seemed to be no end to the patience of the listeners. So Dominick went, "on and on and on," as story-books put it, until the fire in the grate began to burn low; ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... Professor Erni of Yale College has been making an interesting series of experiments on fermentation—a process of which the original cause has never yet been satisfactorily explained, and is still a moot-point with chemists. They tell us it is one by which complex substances are decomposed into simpler forms, as some suppose, by chemical action; others, by development of fungi, different in different substances. Among the experiments, it was observed that the yeast ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... and a thorough knowledge of the weaknesses of the feminine temperament. But his admirers—and they were legion—declared that Sir Henry Durwood was the only man in London who really understood how to treat the complex nervous system of the present generation. These thoughts ran through Colwyn's mind as he murmured that the opinion of such an eminent specialist as Sir Henry Durwood on the case before them must naturally ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... stretched into a nipple; and the two points of the penultimate ring rise, at first slowly, and then suddenly stand up with an abrupt motion similar to that of a spring when released. In the end, these two points diverge like the horns of a crescent. Once this complex apparatus is unfolded, the tiny creature is ready to crawl upon the most ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... the ordinances of the church are performed in secret and are still more complicated. Although some of these rites and ceremonies have been revealed by apostates, yet there are others of such a character that even the bitterest seceder from the church would not dare unfold them. With this complex system conceived after the manner of the Jewish priesthood, and with the various revelations that have been added from time to time, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints stands to-day as a very curious monument to the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... American troops were marched down to boats on the strand at Brooklyn and, with all their stores, were carried across a mile of water to New York. There must have been the splash of oars and the grating of keels, orders given in tones above a whisper, the complex sounds of moving bodies of men. It was all done under the eye of Washington. We can picture that tall figure moving about on the strand at Brooklyn, which he was the last to leave. Not a sound disturbed the slumbers of the British. An army ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... or katabolic phase. Various visual substances by their anabolic or katabolic changes are supposed to produce the variations of sensation of light and colour. This theory, as will be seen, is very complex, and there are certain obstacles in the way of its acceptance. It is, for instance, difficult to see how this very quick visual process could be due to a comparatively slow chemical action, consisting of the destructive breaking-down of the tissue, followed by its renovation. Some ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Compare Franz Lachner's Suites for Orchestra.] and attempt to bolster up that old form, with its less thoughtfully arranged succession of typical dance tunes; for these have been fully developed elsewhere, and have already been embodied in far richer, more extensive and complex forms. ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... shows an infinite knowledge and infinite benevolence at work; but no one of the instances in which they found their argument, from the watch, which affords the primal illustration, to the human body, which furnishes the most complex confirmations, is a more astonishing or exquisite proof of pre-arrangement than is the adaptedness of gold and silver to the purposes of currency. Your standard or measure, for instance, must, in the first place, possess a certain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... do in the world around us. Now and then a murder or a suicide appears in his pages as it does in those of the daily papers, but hardly more frequently. In him we can study the life of Russia as he knew it, crude and coarse and at times cruel, yet full of homely virtue and aspiration. Of his complex panorama the present ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... the common element in the six kinds of Shinto which are known to exist, and some of which no foreign scholar has yet been able to examine for lack of time or of authorities or of opportunity? Even in its modern external forms, Shinto is sufficiently complex to task the united powers of the historian, philologist, and anthropologist, merely to trace out the multitudinous lines of its evolution, and to determine the sources of its various elements: primeval polytheisms and fetishisms, traditions of dubious origin, philosophical concepts from China, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... at the port of New York and the number of such suits that are almost daily instituted are certainly worthy the attention of the Congress. These legal controversies, based upon conflicting views by importers and the collector as to the interpretation of our present complex and indefinite revenue laws, might be largely obviated by ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... international: involved in a complex dispute over the Spratly Islands with China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and possibly Brunei; claim to Malaysia's Sabah State ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... which convulsed this part of the Continent; when I saw the fact that one-half of the United States was upon the one side and the other half upon the other side as to the understanding of the true theory of this Government of ours, simple as it may be to the lawyer, complex as it may be when examined more thoroughly, I was more than ever disinclined to widen the suffrage, to intrust the franchise to a larger number of people. I trembled for the success of the experiment; I hesitated ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... far as the Princess Ziska is concerned," continued the Doctor, fixing his keen, penetrative glance on Gervase as he spoke, "I frankly admit to you that I find in her material for a very curious and complex study. That is why I have come after her here. I have said she is all desire and no passion. That of itself is inhuman; but what I am busy about now is to try and analyze the nature of the particular desire that ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... the Florence of 1400; the atmosphere that of a plague stricken city in a time when man was helpless, authorities hopeless, social life in shreds and patches. The plot of the play founded on this state of affairs is rich in incident, varied and sufficiently complex in color, passion and character to furnish material for an exciting spectacular representation. The tragic element is strong, but supported and shaded by the company of roysterers, a jester, whose foolery is a ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... of the simple life—the simple life in all its varied forms, from vegetarianism to the honourable consistency of the Doukhobors. This complaint against them stands, that they would make us simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things. They would make us simple in the things that do not matter—that is, in diet, in costume, in etiquette, in economic system. But they would make us complex in the things that do matter—in philosophy, in loyalty, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... this Englishman lay his trap for Zona. He was more cruel than Prosper, rougher, necessarily more dramatic, but there was all the essence of the original drama, the ensnarement of a simple, direct mind by a complex and skillful one. Joan's surrender, Prosper's victory, were there. He wondered how Joan could act it, play the part in cold blood. Now he was condemned to live in his own imagination through Joan's tragedy. There was that first pitifulness of a tamed and broken spirit; then later, in ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... we perform certain mental operations on the symbols of number or of quantity, and, by proceeding step by step from more simple to more complex operations, we are enabled to express the same thing in many different forms. The equivalence of these different forms, though a necessary consequence of self-evident axioms, is not always, to our minds, self-evident; but the mathematician, who by long practice has acquired a familiarity ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... century has never received an adequate answer. What is a species: what is a genus or a family or an order? More or less convenient terms of classification, about which the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared deeply about the essence of classes! Science has become too complex to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits, almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers of substance, ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... occurs in nature most abundantly as the mineral fluorspar (CaF{2}), as cryolite (Na{3}AlF{6}), and in the complex mineral ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... understatement of all time. What it will do, though, is set up an inferiority complex that would wipe out ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... Ellen's wedding. Never during the last ten years had Shane forgotten it. Never had he failed to bring her some little surprise, to arrange some extra pleasure for her. For the past two weeks this thought had been with Ellen constantly, comforting her, promising her. By some complex, womanish process she had come to believe that on the twenty-first of June Shane, if alive, must come to her. As she and Jean lay awake whispering during the long, light nights, she had instilled some of her faith into the girl's ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... standing with face averted, hands clutching the rail of the control panel desperately. "I?" he whispered. "I was roaming the planes, exploring, experimenting, immersed in the pursuits that went with my insatiable thirst for scientific data and the broadening of my knowledge of this complex universe of ours. Forgetting my ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... Gospel is more than a mere utterance of certain historical facts with deductions therefrom; more than a declaration of certain doctrines with their applications. It is a highly complex intellectual, moral and spiritual act. Two men may deliver the same sermon. There may be similarity of voice, of manner, of delivery, but one of these men will preach the sermon, the other only recite it. The difference may be almost beyond definition, yet it will be felt. At the bottom ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... the dimensions of the solar system. Sirius is calculated to be a thousand times as great as the Sun, and a million times as far away. The solar system itself travels in one region of space, sailing between worlds and worlds, and is surrounded by many other systems as great and complex as itself; and we know that even then we have not reached the limits ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... clipper yacht; but the blunt head of a common, bluff, undecked sea-boat, lying aside in its furrow of beach sand. The sum of Navigation is in that. You may magnify it or decorate as you will: you do not add to the wonder of it. Lengthen it into hatchet-like edge of iron,—strengthen it with complex tracery of ribs of oak,—carve it and gild it till a column of light moves beneath it on the sea,—you have made no more of it than it was at first. That rude simplicity of bent plank, that can breast its way through the death ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... the production of dainty varied non-flesh foods, depots for the sale of these, and restaurants where both the food and preparation thereof leave nothing to be desired. Indeed, so multifarious are the contributions towards the "simple life" that it threatens to become more complex than the other. However, we need not take everything offered to us—at least, not all at once—but can select at ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... of an upper house, the Senate or Senat (100 seats; members are elected by a majority vote on a provincial basis to serve four-year terms), and a lower house, the Sejm (460 seats; members are elected under a complex system of proportional representation to serve four-year terms); the designation of National Assembly or Zgromadzenie Narodowe is only used on those rare occasions when the two houses meet jointly elections: Senate - last held 25 September 2005 (next to be held by September 2009); Sejm elections ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... you will kindly bring your work to me, I shall do my best to enlighten you in regard to the complex duty of entering ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... there being a British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... out, however, after a considerable amount of talk, that, beyond steering a ship, reefing topsails, splicing ropes, tying every species of complex knot, and other nautical matters, the two seamen could not claim to be professionally acquainted with any sort of handicraft. Somewhat discomfited, Ben at last said ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... order an artichoke. He did not know how to eat an artichoke. He had never tried to eat an artichoke, and his first essay in this difficult and complex craft was a sad fiasco. It would not have mattered if, at the table next to his own, there had not been two obviously experienced women, one ill-dressed, with a red hat, the other well-dressed, with a blue hat; one middle-aged, the other much younger; but both very observant. And even ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... than a single act of one of Shakespeare's plays. They are in all other ways equally unlike Shakespeare's plays. When you read Macbeth or Hamlet, you find yourself in a world where the interests and passions are complex and divided against themselves, as they are here and now. The action progresses fitfully, as events do in life; it is promoted by the things that seem to retard it; and it includes long stretches of time and many places. When you read Orestes, you find yourself attendant upon an imminent calamity, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... way, according to the well-known saying, 'The style is the man,' complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the world: all cautions regarding style arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... distillers of rum and manufacturers of other trade goods. In the American plantation districts it immensely stimulated the production of the staple crops. On the other hand it kept the planters constantly in debt for their dearly bought labor, and it left a permanent and increasingly complex problem of racial adjustments. In Africa, it largely transformed the primitive scheme of life, and for the worse. It created new and often unwholesome wants; it destroyed old industries and it corrupted tribal institutions. The rum, the guns, the utensils and the gewgaws were irresistible ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... means of intense musical expression which the dramatic composer may have found out in his effort to represent the tragic and extreme moments of dramatic complication. And thus the tendency of the musical art is constantly toward the complex, and toward the bringing together of relations so subtle as to have been unintelligible to earlier musicians, and unintelligible now, at first hearing, to common ears, lacking in these finer perceptions of advanced musical endowment. It is to be noticed, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... in a blue and white shirt waist and golf skirt, her slim little ankles demurely crossed, a cone of foolscap over her forearm to guard against ink spots, was writing in her journal. This was an interminable affair, voluminous, complex, that the young girl had kept ever since she was fifteen. She wrote in it—she hardly knew what—the small doings of the previous day, her comings and goings, accounts of dances, estimates of new acquaintances. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... above, association accounts to some extent for changes of meaning, but the process is in reality more complex, and usually a number of factors are working together or in opposition to each other. A low word may gradually acquire right of citizenship. "That article blackguardly called pluck" (Scott) is now much respected. It is the same word as pluck, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... Mysterious voices had always a share in producing the catastrophe, but they were always to be explained on some known principles, either as reflected into a focus, or communicated through a tube. I could not but remark that his narratives, however complex or marvellous, contained no instance sufficiently parallel to those that had befallen ourselves, and in which the solution was applicable to our ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... plot and construction. The mystery of the curious fan, and its being the key to such wealth and power is decidedly original and unique. Nearly every character in the book seems possible of accusation. It is just the sort of plot in which Hume is at his best. It is a complex tangle, full of splendid climaxes. Few authors have a charm equal to that of ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... irrespective of size, is a disputed one; the shape is a better guide at night and colour in the daytime. All markings (figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11) should be subordinate to the main colour of the buoy; the varying backgrounds and atmospheric conditions render the question a complex one. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and rule himself by circumstances, and turn and bend in any direction. He lived soberly with the serious, he was a boon companion with the gay; grave with the elders, merry with the young; reckless among the desperate, profligate with the depraved. With a nature so complex and many-sided, he not only collected round him wicked and desperate characters from all quarters of the world, but he also attracted many brave and good men by his simulation of virtue. It would have been impossible for him to have organised that atrocious attack upon the Commonwealth, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... whole structure. Every trade and business should be conducted by a society voluntarily formed of all those who choose to engage in it, electing and removing their own officials, determining their own policy, and co-operating by free arrangement with other similar bodies. A complex interweaving of such associations, with order everywhere, compulsion nowhere, is the form of society to which I look forward, and which I see already growing up within the hard skin of the older organisms. Rules there will be but not laws, rules gladly obeyed because they will have been ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... in the minds of the public, and are too intimately concerned with politics and finance, to be fitting subjects for this series of sketches. They led, however, in an indirect fashion to a singular and complex problem, which gave my friend an opportunity of demonstrating the value of a fresh weapon among the many with which he waged his life-long ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... impulse he gave it, into a national encyclopaedia, possessing an irresistible momentum. Indeed, is not the very existence of that book in its current form a witness to the same Americanism which Webster displayed, only now in a firmer, finer, and more complex form? ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... general enlightenment. He took hardly more heed of the new Lutheranism. His mind had no religious turn, and the quarrel of faiths was with him simply one factor in the political game which he was carrying on and which at this moment became more complex and absorbing than ever. The victory of Pavia had ruined that system of balance which Henry the Seventh and in his earlier days Henry the Eighth had striven to preserve. But the ruin had not been to England's profit, but to the profit of its ally. While the Emperor stood supreme in Europe ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... them to be imperative upon other people. To write "I believe" is not only less presumptuous and aggressive in such matters than to write "it is true," but it is also nearer the reality of the case. One knows what seems true to one's self, but we are coming to realize that the world is great and complex, beyond the utmost power of such minds as ours. Every day of life drives that conviction further home. And it is possible to maintain that in perhaps quite a great number of ethical, social, and political questions there is no absolute "truth" at all—at least for finite beings. To one intellectual ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Morrill's bill is a great improvement on the tariff of 1857. It is more certain. It is more definite. It gives specific duties. There is another reason why it is better than the tariff of 1857. That tariff is made up of complex and inconvenient tables. The number of tables is too great; and in some cases the same article is in two tables. Thus, flaxseed comes in with a duty of ten per cent.; and yet linseed, the same thing, yielding the same product, the same oil, is admitted duty free. The bill of Mr. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought. The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those of sins ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude |
