"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... weeks ago, and has been running ever since in the machine shop. It is a magnificent creature of steel, all of Pratt & Whitney's super-best workmanship, and as nicely adjusted and as accurate as a watch. In construction it is as elaborate and complex as that machine which it ranks next to, by every right—Man—and in performance it is as ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... population of the civilized world is massed in villages and cities for reasons that have nothing to do with either civilization or self-defence. The causes that bring about the massing of urban population are many and their operation is complex. In general, however, it is to facilitate one or more of several things, namely—the receiving, distribution, and transportation of commodities, the manufacture of products, the existence of good harbors, and the existence of minerals ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... Keeling atoll and of the atolls in the Low Archipelago, in the general steepness of the reefs of the Maldiva and Chagos atolls, and in the perpendicularity of those rising out of water always tranquil, we may discern the effects of uniform laws; but from the complex action of the surf and currents, on the growing powers of the coral and on the deposition of sediment, we can by no means follow out all ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... wherever it occurred, even in cases where it had no connection with the sky or heavenly things. The same process was applied to other signs with similar results: after having merely denoted ideas, they came to stand for the sounds corresponding to them, and then passed on to be mere syllables—complex syllables in which several consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and one vowel, or vice versa. The Egyptians had carried this system still further, and in many cases had kept only one part of the syllable, namely, a mute ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to analyze the impression his old love made upon him. His feelings were of so complex a nature, he was anxious to keep his more magnanimous impulses active, and he strove hard to convince himself that she was still the same to him as she had been before they had ever parted. But, alas! though the heart be warm and generous, the eye is a merciless critic. And the man who ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... genetic part will follow the imagination in its development as a whole from the dimmest to the most complex forms. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved. This language, in spite of the complex influences which went to the making of the nationality of France, was of a simple origin. With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin. The influence of the pre-Roman Celts is almost ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... valleys and penetrates the deepest recesses of nature, so Theology gradually retires before the advance of Science, which first conquers and brings under the rule of natural law the simplest and least complicated branches, such as Mechanics and Astronomy; then attacks the more complex, such as Chemistry and Physiology; and, last of all, advances to the assault of the most difficult, such as Ethics and Sociology; until, having emancipated each of them successively from their previous connection with supernatural beliefs, it effects the entire elimination of Theology, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... plant builds itself up into a large and various fabric of root, stem, leaves, flowers, and fruit, every one moulded within and without in accordance with an extremely complex but, at the same time, minutely defined pattern. In each of these complicated structures, as in their smallest constituents, there is an immanent energy which, in harmony with that resident in all the others, incessantly works towards the maintenance ,of the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... ink (alchiber) were more complex. Lampblack was first made by the burning of oil, tar or rosin, which was then commingled with gum and honey and pressed into small wafers or cakes, to which water could be added ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... first cross street toward Lexington Avenue: "It's a privilege for a fellow to know that sort of a girl—so many surprises in her—the charmingly unexpected and unsuspected!—the pretty flashes of wit, the naive egotism which is as amusing as it is harmless. . . . I had no idea how complex she is. . . . If you think you have the simple feminine on your hands—forget it, Boots!—for she's as evanescent as a helio-flash and as stunningly luminous as a searchlight. . . . And here I've been ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... he submitted his modified plan to the adjutant-general of the army. [Footnote: Id., p. 744.] It had grown more complex with the passage of time. The eastern line of the department had been moved forward so as to bring the South Branch of the Potomac and the Cow-pasture branch of the James River under Rosecrans's command. He now planned four separate columns. The first was to move up the south branch of the Potomac ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... true relation to the human aggregate,—how insignificant his part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... did her that injustice which the best among us are apt to do to those whom we do not feel interest enough in to study with that closeness which can alone give comprehension of the intricate and complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so marvelously ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... anarchy of detached scenes, more effective as detached than as related. Shakespeare alone had the comprehensive energy of impassioned imagination to fuse into unity the almost unmanageable materials of his drama, to organize this anarchy into a new and most complex order, and to make a world-wide variety of character and incident consistent with oneness of impression. Jonson, not pretending to give his work this organic form, put forth his whole strength to give it mechanical regularity; every line ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... particular country, or to insulated groups of events. Before there could spring up the idea of universal history, it was necessary that there should be a broader view of mankind as a whole. The ancient Stoics had a glimpse of the race as a family, and of the nations as forming one complex unity. The conquests and extended dominion of Rome first suggested the idea of universal history. Polybius, a Greek in the second century B.C., had watched the progress of Rome, in its career of conquest, until "the affairs of Italy and Africa," ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... gathered together many prints—those of Hogarth especially, and in early states. He had a singular interest, such as may also be seen in the author of The Ring and the Book, in investigating and elucidating complex criminal cases.[5] He was a lover of athletic sports and never knew ill-health. For the accumulation of riches he had no talent and no desire, but he had a simple wealth of affection which he bestowed generously on his children and his friends. "My father," ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... he heard in the town that Dom Diego de Balthasar had been arrested by the Inquisition for Judaism. The news brought him a more complex thrill than that shock of horror at the treacherous persistence of a pestilent heresy which it excited in the breast of his fellow-citizens. He recalled to mind now that there were thirty-four traces ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... throws it back, and gradually lifts the lip of the valve out of water, until the valve stands vertical, it then closes the valve tightly round a globule of air, around which it folds, by means of the most complex and delicate machinery. The valve is then bent over until it touches the edge of the float nearest the head, and when it is in this position, the portion of it which is inflated with air looks like ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in her fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks that fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature as well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms the simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind. Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts. Jane's hair was of a reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in her grandfather's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it must 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 for satisfaction ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... watershed between the Upper Elbe and Middle Oder; Glatz on our left,—with the rain of its mountains gathering to a Neisse River, eastward, which we know; and on their west or hither side, to a Mietau, Adler, Aupa and other many-branched feeders of the Elbe. Most complex military ground, the manoeuvrings on it endless,—which must be left ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lower and middle frontal convolutions, the base and posterior end of the upper convolution, and the base of the corresponding portion of the falciform lobe were involved. The sensory and motor functions of the arm were retained in a relative degree. There was power of simple movements, but complex movements were awkward. The tactile ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... is a very adaptable one and can be run in a great number of different ways. It can be as simple or as complex ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... unsophisticated race, whose faults were the result of their enslaved position, while such virtues as they had were all their own. They might be compared, he thought, much to their advantage, with more complex civilizations. There was no hint of anything like the Beit system of publishing in existence amongst them; the great Yahoo nation would surely never feed and encourage a scabby Houyhnhnm, expelled ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... indignation. Let us add that a child has the faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; the distant fading boundaries which amplify painful subjects escape him. A child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until later that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit of life. Then he confronts ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... me. Not to the brawlers in Hyde Park. The life of civilized beings is a very complex thing. It isn't filled by good intentions nor even by the cardinal virtues. The function of the older societies is to hand on the best things the world has won, so that those who come after, instead of having to go back to barbarism, may start from where the best of their day left off. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... are known to us by their remains. The palace of Tiryns occupied the entire southern end of the citadel, within the massive walls above described. Its ruins were uncovered in 1884- 85. The plan and the lower portions of the walls of an extensive complex of gateways, open courts, and closed rooms were thus revealed. There are remains of a similar building at Mycenae, but less well preserved, while the citadels of Athens and Troy present still more scanty traces of an analogous kind. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... of them is made, Are by created virtue' inform'd: create Their substance, and create the' informing virtue In these bright stars, that round them circling move The soul of every brute and of each plant, The ray and motion of the sacred lights, With complex potency attract and turn. But this our life the' eternal good inspires Immediate, and enamours of itself; So that our ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... held close to alternately sniffing nostrils Sadie Corn was running her eye over the complex report sheet of the floor clerk who had just gone off watch. The report was even more detailed and lengthy than usual. Automobile Show Week meant that the always prosperous Magnifique was filled to the eaves and turning them away. It meant twice the usual number of inside telephone ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... weariness or that his dauntless soul dwelt in a physical body. He was looking out at the window, but it was obvious that he did not see the green landscape flashing past. Harry knew that he was making the most complex calculations, but like Dalton he ceased to wonder about them. He put his faith in Old Jack, and ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... forward a lever, the slide which covered a door rose ponderously on a blinding, incandescent core, and the beam thrust forward into the blaze, turning round and round in the emptying of the box. It was withdrawn, the slide dropped, and the machine retreated, its complex movements controlled by a single engineer at crackling switches where the power leaped in points of ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the case in Figure 478. The genera Poteriocrinus, Cyathocrinus, Pentremites, Actinocrinus, and Platycrinus, are all of them characteristic of this formation. Other Echinoderms are rare, a few Sea-Urchins only being known: these have a complex structure, with many more plates on their surface than are seen in the modern genera of the same group. One genus, the Palaechinus (Figure 480), is the analogue of the modern Echinus, but has four, five, or six rows of plates in the interambulacral ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... people, the stand they generally take for order and system, and the force and intelligence they naturally bring to bear on the many questions of social and moral well-being constantly arising to be dealt with by the masses of their people—one who has noted the complex working of the moral and intellectual forces largely represented by the graduates of such schools, will not wonder at the interest manifested by all classes in the conferring even of ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... Marconi placed 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
... every phase of activity it will require every kind of man—manufacturer, scientist, mechanic, and flier. It offers problems more interesting and more complex than almost any others in the world. The field is new and virgin, the demand world-wide, and the rewards great. For the flier there is all the joy of life in the air, above the chains of the earth, reaching out to new, unvisited ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... and the white-hot passion expressed by this means makes the thing a miracle. There is nothing like it in Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin. Here we are entirely free of the Weberesque four-bar phrases; the rhythms are subtle and complex, though to the ear they sound clear and simple enough. When the curtain goes up we see a sort of tent arranged on the deck of a ship. From aloft a sailor chants a wild sea-song, unlike any sea-song ever chanted ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... as you think, Master Jack," said Wolston; "those who take the trouble to study Nature, observe an admirable gradation and easy progression from a simple to a complex organization. There is no race or species that is not connected by a perceptible link with that which precedes and that ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... said, when he spoke, was, "Walk," and the remark was made to his horse. Lady Bel slackened, too. They were in the midst of great beauty—complex, almost chaotic, beauty, such as ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... up his mind that the exploration of that unknown shore could wait a more convenient season. He was now deeply absorbed in the complex problem of directing and managing his raft. As he pulled his spear through the water, and noted the additional effect of its flat head, the conception came to him of something that would get a more propulsive grip upon the water than was possible to a round pole. Furthermore, he was quick to ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... further in his now famous paper published in the New Shakespeare Society's Transactions (1880-82). But these two, and those who have followed them, have erred, on the one hand in implying that euphuism was much more complex than it is in reality, and on the other by confining their attention to single sentences, and so failing to perceive that the euphuistic method was applicable to the paragraph, as a whole, no less than to the sentence. And it is upon these two points that Mr Child's essay is so specially ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... he perceived the injustice and the crass folly of his estimate of her character, and with this perception came a broader and deeper realization of her greatness as an actress. Her real self now became more complex than his wildest imagined ideal of her. That this sweet and reflective girl should be the actress was as difficult to understand as that The Baroness should be at heart a good woman. For five ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... in our freedom from the things that make your social life of to-day a complex problem," she replied. "In the first place I never had to worry much over Adam. When he was not out getting the raw material for our daily meals he was most generally at home, for the very excellent reason that there was no other place to go. We hadn't any ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... chief. Although among the savages, the chief has absolute power of life and death over his slave, yet there is an entire absence of ceremony between them. Mr. Burchell has remarked the same thing in Southern Africa, with the rude Bachapins. Where civilization has arrived at a certain point, complex formalities soon arise between the different grades of society: thus at Tahiti all were formerly obliged to uncover themselves as low as the waist in presence of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... characteristic of the genius of the Greeks, that they have taken the natural emotions excited by the birth of spring, and by connecting them with the worship of Dionysus have given them expression and form; so that what in its origin was a mere burst of primitive animal spirits is transmuted into a complex and beautiful work of art, the secret springs and fountains of physical life flowing into the forms of a spiritual symbol. It is this that is the real meaning of all ceremonial, and this that the Greeks better than any other people understood. Their religion, one ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... a more liberal spirit among the clergy and people of the Pays de Vaud. His system of logic, which in the last editions has swelled to six tedious and prolix volumes, may be praised as a clear and methodical abridgment of the art of reasoning, from our simple ideas to the most complex operations of the human understanding. This system I studied, and meditated, and abstracted, till I have obtained the free command of an universal instrument, which I soon presumed to exercise on my catholic ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... to her appointed hole. What an ending! All the talent, the incipient genius, that had been in her, thrust away with the greatest possible despatch, buried out of sight in the hideously hard, cold earth. Snuffed out like a candle, and with as little ceremony, was all the warm, complex life that had made up this one, throbbing bit of humanity: for what it had been, not a soul alive now cared. And what a night, too, for one's first night underground! Brr!—At the thought of it, he drank another cup of coffee, and a fiery, stirring liqueur. But the sense of depression ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... not trench on the sphere of the higher religions, not only because my knowledge of them is for the most part very slight, but also because I believe that a searching study of the higher and more complex religions should be postponed till we have acquired an accurate knowledge of the lower and simpler. For a similar reason the study of inorganic chemistry naturally precedes the study of organic chemistry, because inorganic compounds are much simpler and therefore ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... implanted in him by nature (von der Natur in mich gelegter Ernst), which, he says, "exerted its influence [on him] at an early age, and showed itself more distinctly in after years." This side of his complex nature did not escape the notice even of his youthful contemporaries. "Goethe," wrote one of them from Leipzig, "is as great a philosopher as ever." Here again we see in the boy the father of the man. Increasingly, as ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... upon the bride; the sight of her filled him with a curious stir of emotion. Alarm, desire, affection, respect—and a queer element of reluctant dislike all played their part in that complex eddy. The grey dress made her a stranger to him, made her stiff and commonplace, she was not even the rather drooping form that had caught his facile sense of beauty when he had proposed to her in the Recreation Ground. There was something too that did not please him in the angle of her ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... jacket was a silklike scarf, clear, light blue—the blue of Terra's cloudless skies on certain days, so different from the yellow shield now hanging above them. A small case of leather, with silhouetted designs cut from hide and affixed to it, designs as intricate and complex as the embroidery on the jacket—art of a high standard. In the case a knife and spoon, the bowl and blade of dull metal, the handles of horn carved with horse heads, the tiny wide-open eyes set ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... were lit. Maria still looked, however, out of the window; the lights in the house windows, and red and green signal-lights, gave her a childish interest. She forgot entirely about herself. She turned her back upon herself and her complex situation of life with infinite relief. She did not wonder what she would do when she reached Ridgewood. She did not think any more of herself. It was as if she had come into a room of life without any looking-glasses, and she was no longer visible to her own consciousness. She did not look ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... blond mustache, and prominent blue eyes) fidgeted uneasily. There must be some way, he felt, of moderating this half-chilly, half-critical atmosphere on the part of the smaller Madigans. But children were riddles to him, and the solutions his small experience offered were either too simple or too complex. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... or such quasi-acids as phenolic substances, that if such bodies were present they would combine with the basic parts of those precipitated salts as soon as the latter were formed, and all would be precipitated together as one complex compound. Just such peculiar quasi-acid, or phenolic substances are Alizarin, and most of the natural adjective dyestuffs, the colouring principles of logwood, cochineal, Persian berries, etc. Hence these substances will be combined and carried down with ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... themselves in choice of Colour: if the Cut betoken Intellect and Talent, so does the Colour betoken Temper and Heart. In all which, among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant, indubitable, though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect: every snip of the Scissors has been regulated and prescribed by ever-active Influences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a superior order ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of wide modification to suit it to specific uses. The questions asked may require but a short and simple answer, such as can be given by a primary pupil. They may also require a long and complex answer which will test the powers of the most advanced student. The questions may be detailed and searching, covering every point of the lesson, as when we are testing preparation. They may deal only with certain related truths, as when we "develop" ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... consisted of upwards of ten thousand springs, formed so as to give the greater impetuosity to the vehicle, and were more complex than a dozen clocks like that of Strasburgh. The external of the chariot was adorned with banners, and a superb festoon of laurel that formerly shaded me on horseback. And now, having given you a very concise description of my machine for travelling into Africa, which you must allow to be far ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... sending him their cards. When we see, therefore, these heroic ladies riding forth in the social battle's magnificently stern array, our hearts render them the homage due to the brave. When we consider how complex their military equipment has grown, we fancy each of these self-devoted mothers to be an Arnold Winkelried, receiving in her martyr-breast the points of a dozen different cards, and shouting, "Make ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Maid? In the first place they wouldn't know how to obey her or anybody else, and in the second place it was of course not possible for them to take her military character seriously—that country-girl of seventeen who had been trained for the complex and terrible business of war—how? ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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, ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... cloth, and when he raised his glass to drink, which he did often enough to fill up the time, his hand shook so as almost to spill his wine. Seeing him so nervous, she began to experience a kind of pity for him—some such complex feeling as a very humane person might have for a reptile he has been taught to loathe and fear when seeing it in pain—and at length surprised him by asking if he lived in Kingston. He replied that he ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Byron married her[224:1]—and in what did it result? . . . But that Browning should in any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge Byron as anything but the most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. Thus, ever in perplexity, I must abjure the theory of Byronic merit. There lurks in this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who doesn't"—hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one of ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... bells; bells without fear, bells excessive and bells innumerable; bells worthy of the ecstacies that are best thrown out and published in the clashing of bells. For bells are single, like real pleasures, and we will combine such a great number that they may be like the happy and complex life of a man. In a word, let us be noble and scatter our bells and reap a harvest till our town is famous in its bells,' So now all the spire is more than clothed with them; they are more than stuff or ornament: ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... 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 ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... profess to understand it yet. This case of yours is very complex, Sir Henry. When taken in conjunction with your uncle's death I am not sure that of all the five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled there is one which cuts so deep. But we hold several threads in our ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... age on age, Thro' storm and peace, thro' shine and gloom, thro' warm And pregnant periods of teeming birth, And seething realms of thunderous overthrow,— In the obscure and formless dawn of life, In gradual march from simple to complex, From lower to higher forms, and last to Man Through faint prophetic fashions,—stands declared The God of order and unchanging purpose. Creation, which He covers, Him contains, Even to the least up-groping atom. His The impulse and the quickening germ, whereby All things strive upward, ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... xvi.) Next, this law must be analysed into its causes. Mr. Mill gives three forms which this third stage of analysis may assume in science. (Id. vol. i. b. iii. ch. xii.) Probably in history it will generally assume the one of the three in which the complex result is analysed into its simpler component elements. (Id. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... and all, a mysterious network or chain, that binds star to star, and world to world, blending all into one entire, vast and complete unity. It decides all their orbits and distances, regulates and controls all their motions, from the most simple even to the more complex and intricate, ultimately producing that wondrous and beauteous order, unity and harmony that everywhere pervade and blend all the universe into one grand and ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... able fully to express, the complex idea of Satan, as distracted between a thousand thoughts, all miserable—tossed between a thousand winds, all hot as hell—'pale ire, envy, and despair' struggling within him—fury at man overlapping anger at God—remorse and reckless desperation wringing each ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... don't know about his home life, pre-war and probable post-war troubles, isn't worth putting on any demobilisation paper. And each time we tackled him we got a different idea of the KING'S movements—HIS MAJESTY must have had an extraordinarily complex ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... Disputes: complex maritime and air (but not territorial) disputes with Greece in Aegean Sea; Cyprus question; Hatay question with Syria; ongoing dispute with downstream riparians (Syria and Iraq) over water development plans for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; Kurdish question among Iran, Iraq, ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... it had long been a question, which of those many trunks was the original and true one; a matter that had puzzled the wisest heads among his subjects; and in vain had a reward been offered for the solution of the perplexity. But the tree was so vast, and its fabric so complex; and its rooted branches so similar in appearance; and so numerous, from the circumstance that every year had added to them, that it was quite impossible to determine the point. Nevertheless, no sooner did the nine blind ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... matter of fact, I do believe that to be the case," said the Chemist earnestly. "I believe that every particle of matter in our universe contains within it an equally complex and complete a universe, which to its inhabitants seems as large as ours. I think, also that the whole realm of our interplanetary space, our solar system and all the remote stars of the heavens are contained within the atom of some other universe ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... consideration, admit, each man for himself, the reality of his own existence. There is such a thing therefore as human nature; for he is a specimen of it. Now the idea of human nature, or of man, is a very complex thing. He is in the first place the subject of sensible impressions, however these impressions are communicated to him. He has the faculties of thinking and feeling. He is subject to the law of the association of ideas, or, in other words, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... rated by societal value. If we take societal value as the criterion of the classification of society, it has the advantage of being germane to the interests which are most important in connection with classification, but it is complex. There is no unit of it. Therefore we could never verify it statistically. It conforms, in the main, to mental power, but it must contain also a large element of practical sense, health, and opportunity (luck). On the simplest analysis, there are four elements,—intellectual, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... admires all that is great and noble in the history of 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
... morning she did not even care to play. She went into the parlor and touched a few notes, but her heart was heavy and sad. Life was growing too complex. ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... glorious facts inspired in me an admiring veneration; yet it is not that sentiment, strong as it was, which resumes for me the force and the significance of his personality. It is over borne by another and complex impression of awe, compassion, and horror. Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me the unfortunate and miserable (but heroic) being who once upon a time had ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Browning's writings, appear singularly appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in London. It would seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken, had blent with his being from the first. What fitter birthplace for the poet whom a comrade has called the "Subtlest Assertor of the Soul ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... there walks but one On earth at this late day. And what of the chapter so begun? In that odd complex what was done? Well; happiness comes in full to none: Let peace lie on lulled lips: I ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... secrecy, argue that the matter is one of life or death. The attack upon Mr. Warren further shows that the enemy, whoever they are, are themselves not aware of the substitution of the female lodger for the male. It is very curious and complex, Watson." ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... women created by the local color generation there were certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most part they are merely typical or conventional—as selfish as gold and as hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation—as Mary Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large—came nearer to reality by its representation of a type ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... of ideal as well as of method. In early days the College was filled with men saturated with the spirit of the Renaissance; casting aside the studies of the Middle Ages, they returned to the literature of Greece and Rome. The ideals of the present day are not less high, but more complex and less easy to state briefly; the aim is perhaps rather to add to knowledge than to acquire it for ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... Colonial School's sprawling five-mile complex of buildings and tropical parks, the second student shift was headed for breakfast, while a larger part of the fourth shift moved at a more leisurely rate toward their bunks. The school's organized activities were not much affected by the hour, but the big exercise quadrangle ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... all his faults and failings, in spite of the strange tissue of complex aims and motives which swayed his course, Lodovico Sforza was a man of great ideas and splendid capacities, a prince who was in many respects distinctly in advance of his age. His wise and beneficial schemes for the encouragement ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... other, and doubtless allied, stocks are implicated. If, as is very probable, there have been migrations of differentiated peoples from the mainland into the islands, the Bornean peoples may be of more complex origin than the earlier generalisations might suggest. The dissecting out and the tracing of the migrations of these peoples is the work of ethnography, somatology can be of little assistance; all that I have done is to provide a certain amount of material for the use of ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... complex of empirical data, there may be several theories, which differ from one another to a considerable extent. But as regards the deductions from the theories which are capable of being tested, the agreement between the theories may be so complete that it becomes difficult to find any deductions in which ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... exaggerating, as minds do when the heart is intensely moved, yet it discerned much truth. And it was very strange, but his now acute consciousness of a personal hatred coming to him from out of the darkness of this almost secret chamber, and of its complex causes, causes which nevertheless would surely never have produced the effect he felt but for the startling crisis of that day, this acute consciousness of a personal and fierce hatred bred suddenly in Artois a new sensation of something ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... desperate enterprise during the earlier watches of that night, and all had fallen down in more or less degage and reckless attitudes. Here a fat fist, doubled; there a fatter leg, protruded; elsewhere a spread eagle was represented, with the bedclothes in a heap on its stomach; or a complex knot was displayed, made up of legs, sheets, blankets, and arms. Subsequently the tall but faithful guardian had gone round, disentangled the knot, reduced the spread eagle, and straightened them all out. They now lay, stiff and motionless as mummies, roseate as the morn, deceptively ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the distribution of gratuitous supplies of food, from the routine of the public offices. So complex were the details which the under-officials were obliged to observe, that men actually perished while a useless routine correspondence was being conducted. It was satirically said by an English observer, "the delivery ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is clothed and those in which the 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 ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... practice waiting before God? If He is in us, why does He not manifest to us continually, why does His power not always motivate our actions? Why do we have to practice His presence, and why is this practice so difficult? To answer these questions we are forced to adopt a somewhat complex and non-habitual view of ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... those of the hand and the chisel, the sixteenth century, even in France, is, in the quality of taste, far greater than the two succeeding centuries: it is neither meagre nor massive, heavy nor distorted. In art its taste is rich and of fine quality,—at once unrestrained and complex, ancient and modern, special to itself and original. In the region of morals it is unequal and mixed. It was an age of contrasts, of contrasts in all their crudity, an age of philosophy and fanaticism, of scepticism and strong faith. Everything was at strife and in collision; ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... status was, however, a complex of seeming inconsistencies. Yet it was so well understood that we rarely get any hints as to the exact details. It is only by collecting a vast mass of statements as to what actually occurred that we can deduce some idea ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... undertook to solve the three complex issues involved, convinced that these were so interwoven as to form one web. Skillful assistants were intrusted with particular lines of investigation. Double shifts were employed in watching each of the Laniers. A trusted lieutenant, skilled ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... experience to 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
... smilingly surrendered their souls to oblivion! Death when honor was involved, was accepted in Bushido as a key to the solution of many complex problems, so that to an ambitious samurai a natural departure from life seemed a rather tame affair and a consummation not devoutly to be wished for. I dare say that many good Christians, if only they are honest enough, will confess the fascination of, if ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... the Adventurer caused her mind to swerve sharply off at a tangent. Where he had piqued and aroused her curiosity before, he now, since last night, seemed more complex a character than ever. It was strange, most strange, the way their lives, his and hers, had become interwoven! She had owed him much; but last night she had repaid him and squared accounts. She had told him so. She owed him nothing more. If a sense of gratitude had once caused her to look upon ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... use of. There is no one in high authority to check the reform spirit and even local boards are often among the advocates of change. In the third place, by multiplying studies, the common school course has grown more complex and heterogeneous. The old reading, writing, arithmetic, and grammar could not be shelved for the sake of the new studies and the same amount of time must be divided now among many branches. It is not to be wondered at if all the studies are treated in a shallow and fragmentary way. Some ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... 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 that is in the deep sea, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... poet addresses himself, in all his conceptions, to the common nature of us all. Art is a lofty tree, and may shoot up far beyond our grasp, but its roots are in daily life and experience. Every bosom contains the elements of those complex emotions which the artist feels, and every head can, to a certain extent, go over in itself the process of their combination, so as to understand his expressions and sympathize with his state. But this requires exertion; more or less, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... does not encourage a distrait mental attitude. Also it goes far to explain otherwise unexplainable visitations. Truly, as Hobley says in his unexcelled work on the A-Kamba, "the life of a savage native is a complex matter, and he is hedged round by all sorts of rules and prohibitions, the infringement of which will probably cause his death, if only by the intense belief he has in the rules which guide ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... supplanting me, for her head was bent absorbedly over something he carried in his hands. With some trepidation I called out, "Hi!" But answer there was none. Then again I called, "Hi!" but this time with a sickening sense of failure and of doom. She replied only by a complex gesture, decisive in import if not easily described. A petulant toss of the head, a jerk of the left shoulder, and a backward kick of the left foot, all delivered at once—that was all, and that was enough. The ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... development it is customary to assume some badge of insignia of honour that will serve as a conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and which at the same time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of which it is the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as human relations grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life undergo a process of elaboration and selection; and in this process of elaboration the use of trophies develops into a system of rank, titles, degrees and insignia, typical examples of which are ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... pensive. I'm puzzled, and a little worried," returned Grace. "Our latest arrival is a most complex study." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower |
