"Cosmic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hours later, Belgian soldiers lifted the old man into a train that was carrying the wounded down to Havre. In his hand the collector held the precious book. Excitement and sorrow had broken his heart. His mind also wandered. He was no longer able to understand the cosmic terror and blackness. A noble officer, himself wounded, put his coat under the old man's head and made a pillow and bade him forget the German beast, the bomb shells, the blazing city. But all these foul deeds and all dangers now were as ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to hasten whose coming we are all making the world so irresistibly attractive, will be endowed, let us hope, with a sense of humor. With that, he can read history as a cosmic joke-book, and not as the Biography of the Devil, as many of us moderns, besides Jean Paul, have found it. How long it has taken, and how much blood has been spilt before this or that most obvious folly has been abolished! ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... faces which remain innocent to the end of the chapter, in spite of the complete knowledge of life which appertains to mothers. In days of suffering and anxiety, like these of the great war, Thirza Pierson was a valuable person. Without ever expressing an opinion on cosmic matters, she reconfirmed certain cosmic truths, such as that though the whole world was at war, there was such a thing as peace; that though all the sons of mothers were being killed, there remained such a thing as motherhood; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... begins it on the atmic plane. All planes below the atmic are one plane for him. He begins his Samadhi on a plane to which the mere man cannot rise. He begins it on the atmic plane, and thence rises stage by stage to the higher cosmic planes. The same word, samadhi, is used to describe the states of the consciousness, whether it rises above the physical into the astral, as in self-induced trance of an ordinary man, or as in the case of a Jivan-mukta when, the consciousness being already centred in ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... than its end. He contemplates the spectacle of love, and love for him remains a spectacle. He does not even believe his body his own; he feels the vital whirlwind passing through him—lent to him, as it were, for a moment, in order that he may perceive the cosmic vibrations. He is a mere thinking subject; he retains only the form of things; he attributes to himself the material possession of nothing whatsoever; he asks nothing from life but wisdom. This temper of mind makes him incomprehensible to all that loves ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... world, past or present. Now if we examine this belt, and compare the different parts of it with one another, we shall be struck by a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it grow steadily more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation of spirit, that one is tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather than to human causes. It is as marked as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to blonde toward the pole. In like manner, the sense of self ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... so. But there are still a thousand ways. A meteor, perhaps; a bit of cosmic dust—there are many shattered comets. Our chemistry is earthly. There are undoubtedly new elements that we don't know of. Perhaps in ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... seemed very small compared with two minutes forty seconds of observation of a total eclipse. One was terrestrial, the other cosmic. ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... cooperative. It points to the conclusion that all life is single in its essence, but various, ever-varying and interactive in its manifestations, and that men and all other living animals are active workers and sharers in a vastly more extended system of cosmic action than any of ourselves, much less of them, can possibly comprehend. It also suggests that they may contribute, more or less unconsciously, to the manifestation of a far higher life than our own, somewhat as . . . the individual cells of one of the more complex animals contribute to the manifestations ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship's air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? ...
— The Stoker and the Stars • Algirdas Jonas Budrys (AKA John A. Sentry)
... planets were first maligned as wanderers, celestial tramps; and this gossip continued until recent years when at last it appeared that they are bodies of regular and irreproachable habits, eccentric in appearance only, doing a cosmic beat with a time-clock at each end, which they have never failed to punch at the ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... that might have been the shouting of some playful god hurling great suns through the net of stars. It was like the deepest notes of all the organs in the world combined in one; summoning, majestic, cosmic! ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was typical: the course of cosmic life is divided into cycles, each seventy-two thousand solar years in length; during the first half of each cycle, when creation newly comes from the hands of Deity, mankind's estate is happily ideal, but then ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Philosophy have fortunately for their own religious life and experience, but unfortunately for their philosophical consistency, declined to follow in their steps. A God who is 'beyond good and evil,' can be no fitting object of {105} worship to men who wish to become good, just, merciful. If the cosmic process be indifferent to these ethical considerations, we had better (with honest Agnostics like Professor Huxley) make up our minds to defy it, whether it call ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... as our enemy's, is encircled by a wide ring of floating cosmic debris," the alien said. "In both instances, the rings are remnants of what once may have been satellites. In the ring which encircles us, we have successfully secreted refrigerated, lead-sheathed stores of male sperm, ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... "By the side of Mr. Drax Homer, Edgar Allan Poe is a fumbler, and Gaboriau the veriest tiro. In these supremely arresting pages Mr. Drax Homer voices the cosmic mystery with unerring skill, and ranges over the whole gamut of the gruesome. He is the Napoleon of sensation, the Julius Caesar ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... concerned with making philosophical generalizations, or scientific laws, about the world in general. His natural, or unnatural, phenomena were simply saturated with moral significance: not that he saw any connexion between the ethical process and the cosmic process, but, like every one of his contemporaries, he employed the facts of animal and vegetable life to point a moral or to help out a sermon. The arguments he used appear to us puerile in their old-world dress, and yet similar ones are to be heard to-day ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... and trustworthy person asserts that what was mistaken for silver is merely a sparkling shell, the error of a Sudra no less than of a Brahmana comes to an end; in the same way a Sudra also will free himself from the great cosmic error as soon as the knowledge of the true nature of things has arisen in his mind through a statement resting on the traditional lore of men knowing the Veda. Nor must you object to this on the ground that men knowing the Veda do not instruct Sudras, and so on, because the text, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... kissed by the Priestess of the Thin and Deadly Blood— With the kiss that men call Lightning, and yet I did not die, For the kiss was a message from God; I felt it and understood, And I knew how He looked on the cosmic light and called it "Good"; I thrilled with a vibrant joy; I ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... NO molecules. Another mechanism for NO production in the lower atmosphere may be lightning discharges, and while NO is quickly washed out of the lower atmosphere by rain, some of it may reach the stratosphere. Additional amounts of NO are produced directly in the stratosphere by cosmic rays from the ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... a powerful mass-energy converter. We could use the cavity radiator and use cosmic rays to warm it, and drive the individual power units that way, or we can have a main electrical power unit and warm them all electrically. Now, which one would ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... once a nebulous mass; that it gradually condensed, that it broke up into that wonderful group of harmoniously rolling balls we call planets and satellites, and that then each of these underwent its appointed metamorphosis, until at last our own share of the cosmic vapour passed into that condition in which we first meet with definite records of its state, and in which it has since, ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... nation recognizes its own needs and aspirations. Democracy wells up from the very pit of things. Its value is its foundation in actuality, its concordance with the slow unending process of man's evolution from the animal he was. Democracy, for one with any comic and cosmic animal sense, is the only natural form of government, because alone it recognizes States as organisms, with spontaneous growth, and a free will of their own. Democracy is final; other forms of government are but steps on the way to it. It is the big thing, because ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... already given brilliant examples, he set up these terms of discourse, like the Pythagorean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities, existing before all things, revealed in all things, giving the cosmic artificer his models and the creature his goal. By some inexplicable necessity the creation had taken place. The ideas had multiplied themselves in a flux of innumerable images which could be recognised by their ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... it's man's destiny to build live machines and then bow out of the cosmic picture. Except the ticklers need us, dammit, just ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... day touching the use of extreme convictions is a sort of notion that extreme convictions specially upon cosmic matters, have been responsible in the past for the thing which is called bigotry. But a very small amount of direct experience will dissipate this view. In real life the people who are most bigoted are the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual, electrolytic — who knew what? — defying science, if not denying known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... America, I never could detect its use in the cosmic economy, unless it was flung down there in the southern hemisphere purely as ballast, to ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... all things, is himself no sooner created by the conscience,—in other words, no sooner have we lifted God from the idea of the social me to the idea of the cosmic me,—than immediately our reflection begins to demolish him under the pretext of perfecting him. To perfect the idea of God, to purify the theological dogma, was the second hallucination of ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... to expression is cosmic and eternal. But even in the homeliness and familiarity of our life from day to day the need of expression is there, whether we are entirely aware of it or not; and we are seeking the realization and fulfillment of ourselves through the utterance of what we are. A few find ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... There came another cosmic cry from the chaos below them, more terrifying than anything yet had been. Two Forks was throwing in the reserves. The enemy was breaking! Doctor Barnes knew what this meant. The break was widening. He stood looking down. And then he heard ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... the will of God laid down as a rule of conduct for the Universe; and when we feel disinterested love, we should know that we partake the feeling of the Infinite God. Then, when we reverence the mighty cosmic force, it will not be a blind Fate in an Atheistic or Pantheistic world, but the Infinite God, that we shall confront and feel and know. Then we shall be mindful of the mind of God, conscious of God's conscience, sensible of His sentiments, and our own existence ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... that the first man was born from an egg, the Orphic hymns speak of the "First-Begotten One" as "egg-born," and the Greeks fabled that their Sun-God Dionysos sprang from the cosmic egg. ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... music steals from underground, And to the spirit's ear there comes the sound, The whisper vague, and rustle delicate, Of myriad atoms stirring in their trance That for the lifted hand of Order wait, Taking their stations in the cosmic dance, Mate ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... question, and of it we are admonished, as it seems to me, still louder by our growing intellectual instincts—those instincts, let us remember, which do but represent whatever has been congruous and uniform in repeated experience. Art is a much greater and more cosmic thing than the mere expression of man's thoughts or opinions on any one subject, of man's attitude towards his neighbour or towards his country, much as all this concerns us. Art is the expression of man's life, of his mode of being, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... west and sets in the east, making one day of Mars equal three of its months. This moon changes every two hours, passing all phases in a single martial night; is anomalous in the solar system, and tends to subvert that theory of cosmic evolution wherein a rotating gaseous sun cast off concentric rings, afterward becoming planets. Astronomers were not satisfied with the telescope; true, they beheld the phenomena of the solar system; planets ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... travelled over immense spaces; for she thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. The colour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Sahara throbbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep, vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had not risen high enough yet to deserve or desire ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... entirely dissent. I can understand that such Dead Ancestors can be looked upon as Protectors, or as Benefactors, but I see no ground for supposing that they have ever been regarded as Creators, yet it is precisely as vehicle for the most lofty teaching as to the Cosmic relations existing between God and Man, that these Vegetation cults were employed. The more closely one studies pre-Christian Theology, the more strongly one is impressed with the deeply, and daringly, spiritual character of its speculations, and the more doubtful ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... its wild original flavor. He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... understanding of others, there was a certain trait in the character of Paul Mario not infrequently found in men of genius. From vanity he was delightfully free, nor had adulation spoiled him; but his interest in the world was strangely abstract, and his outlook almost cosmic. He dreamed of building a ladder of stars for all earth-bound humanity, and thought not in units, but in multitudes. Picturesque distress excited his emotions keenly, and sometimes formed ineffaceable memories, but memories oddly impersonal, ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... feet opened the enormous sea, at the bottom of a steep valley which fell down into a bay; and the sea under their feet blazed at them almost as lustrous and almost as empty as the sky. The sunrise opened above them like some cosmic explosion, shining and shattering and yet silent; as if the world were blown to pieces without a sound. Round the rays of the victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused and conquered colours—brown and blue and ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... that Heine's mind did indeed, as he claimed, reflect or rather refract the All. Only not sublimely blurred as in Spinoza's, but specifically colored and infinitely interrelated, so that he might pass from the sublime to the ridiculous with an equal sense of its value in the cosmic scheme. It was the Jewish artist's proclamation of the Unity, the humorist's ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... time in the world. For many of the assertions I have quoted in the preceding paragraph there was no kind of proof; many of them also, such as the settling of the heavy and the rise of the light, imply very poor cosmic ideas. It is not until he deals with those branches, such as comparative anatomy and natural history, of which he had a personal and practical knowledge, that he begins to write well. Of his physiological conclusions, some are singularly felicitous; ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... forward to! The age-long life of the South stands for much in modern France, correcting the cruder blood which has poured in these last fifteen hundred years. As one blends wine of very old stock with newer brands, so has France been blended and mellowed. A strange cosmic feeling one had, on the top of the great building in that town older than Rome itself, of the continuity of human life and the futility of human conceit. The provincial vanity of modern States looked pitiful in the clear air above that vast ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the other. "At any rate in an autocratic country there is a visible, tangible repository of power to whom you can apply. If the repository is in the humour you will get whatever you want done, in the way of justice or injustice. Now in a free country justice is absorbed into the great cosmic forces, and it is apt to be an expensive incantation that wakes the lost elementary spirit. In Russia justice shines by contrast with the surrounding corruption, but there is no mistake about it when you get it. In America it is taken for granted ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... counter he held at arm's length, waited until it settled down to a steady ticking slower than a clock—due only to cosmic rays and indicating nothing dangerous—and then began to comb her body with the instrument. First her head and shoulders, then out along her arms and back along their under side. There was something oddly voluptuous about her movements, although her ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... this cosmic dust continuously, but the earth now never parts with a particle of its mass. The consequence is inevitable; the mass of the earth must be growing, and though the change may be a small one, yet to those who have studied ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... danger. It would take many days to build up a dose of gamma that could hurt them. But gamma was not the only radiation. They were in space, fully exposed to equally dangerous cosmic radiation. ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... that no obvious organic damage had been incurred by exposure outside of the Earth's protective atmosphere. Biopsy of even selected brain tissues seemed to show that microscopic cellular changes due to prolonged weightlessness or primary cosmic-ray bombardment, which had been suggested by some authorities, were unimportant. Somewhat reluctantly, it was decided to repeat the experiment ...
— Egocentric Orbit • John Cory
... concealed miscarriage. In this case it is not merely the man who is threatened or killed, it is the whole country, it is the sky itself which suffers. By a curious association of ideas a physiological fact causes cosmic troubles!" As for the disastrous effect which a miscarriage may have on the whole country I will quote the words of a medicine-man and rain-maker of the Ba-Pedi tribe: "When a woman has had a miscarriage, when she ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... to the doer, come back as thine own exhalations Into thy bosom return, weepings of mountain and vale; Man with the cosmic fortunes and starry vicissitudes tangled, Chained to the wheel of the world, blind with the dust of its speed, Even as thou, O giant, whom trailed in the wake of her conquests Night's sweet despot draws, bound ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... for the comprehension of the definition which has been given. Living matter is subject to the laws which govern matter, and like matter of any other sort it is composed of atoms and molecules. There is no force inherent in living matter, no vital force independent of and differing from the cosmic forces; the energy which living matter gives off is counterbalanced by the energy which it receives. It undergoes constant change, and there is constant interchange with the environment. The molecules which compose it are constantly undergoing ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... some description or remembrance; hardly one word is close to the original, though here and there some outline or shadow of a real passage is traceable. What fractional elements, capable of gaining some vestige of meaning when laid together in their cosmic order, I could pick from the circumambient immensity not cosmic, are here for the reader's behoof. Let him skip, if, like myself, he is weary; for the substance of the story is elsewhere given. Or perhaps he has the curiosity to know the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... about England in the nineteenth century is this—that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads; they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright, great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... to glance a little farther and seek its reflection in the public eye. It was not indeed of his special task that he thought in this connection. He was but one of the great army of weavers at work among the threads of that cosmic woof; and what he sought was the general impression their labour ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everything away. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the first barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... of suns have brought forth, shall be the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... philosophies of the Orient and the Occident compared; their chief difference; The mistaken idea of death. Cosmic Consciousness not common in the Orient. Why? What the earnest disciple strives for. The Real and the unreal. Buddha's agonized yearnings; why he was moved by them with such irresistible power; the ultimate victory. The identity of The Absolute; The Oriental ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... air of the born unpacker—swift and firm, yet withal tender. Scarce had her arms been laden but their loads were lying lightly between shelves or tightly in drawers. To calculate, catch, distribute, seemed in her but a single process. She was one of those who are born to make chaos cosmic. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing in that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... mist at this height above the Charles. The night was still, and the moon westering. The light had a glimmering, metallic essence, as from a cosmic mirror in the firmament. Long shadows of trees and shrubbery lay across the grass. Clear in the moonlit foreground stood an elm, the pride of Tory Hill—springing as a single shaft for twice the measure of a man—springing ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... guessed instantly that Dick was in that balloon, and her grievances would have been multiplied. The vast grievance of the Federation scheme weighed on her to the extremity of her power to bear. She was not a politician; she had no general ideas; she did not see the cosmic movement in large curves. She was incapable of perceiving the absurdity involved in perpetuating municipal divisions which the growth of the district had rendered artificial, vexatious, and harmful. She saw nothing but Bursley, and in Bursley ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... of this total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy. Examples are scarcely needed to show that, whatever else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist, a Cartesian or a Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist. Let me, however, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a still more limited kind of geological division, founded upon the special character of local deposits. These I would call geological Formations, indicating concrete local deposits, having no cosmic character, but circumscribed within comparatively narrow areas, as distinguished from the other terms, Ages, Epochs, Periods, which have a more universal meaning, and are, as it were, cosmopolitan in their application. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... noted in their estimates of the dynastic or historical period. But there is no need to assume that Berossus' huge total of a hundred and twenty "sars" (432,000 years) is entirely a product of Neo- Babylonian speculation; the total 432,000 is explained as representing ten months of a cosmic year, each month consisting of twelve "sars", i.e. 12 x 3600 43,200 years. The Sumerians themselves had no difficulty in picturing two of their dynastic rulers as each reigning for two "ners" (1,200 years), and it would not be unlikely that "sars" were ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... we are able to bring this conception into the realm of actual consciousness—when we are able not only to intellectually accept this fact, but to even go still further and feel and be conscious of this Universal Life on all sides, then are we well on the road to attaining the Cosmic Consciousness. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... water-power. The Country is one huge Block of Sandstone, so many square miles of that material; ribbed, channelled, torn and quarried, in this manner, by the ever-busy elements, for a million of Ages past! Chiefly by the Elbe himself, since he got to be a River, and became cosmic and personal; ceasing to be a mere watery chaos of Lakes and Deluges hereabouts. For the Sandstone was of various degrees of hardness; tenacious as marble some parts of it, soft almost as sand other parts. And the primordial diluviums and world-old torrents, great and small, rushing down from ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... slowly was reddening and stiffening into something closely akin to a blinding rage. "Mr. Opdyke, believe me: your poor, broken body is only the outer guise of your erring mind. Dismiss your error; throw yourself unresistingly into the vast and placid pool of the Cosmic Ego, and you will arise from your bed of pain, a ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... religion begins in cosmic emotion. It is the recognition of an essential relationship between the human soul and the great whole of things of which it is the outcome and expression. The mysterious universe is always calling, and, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... suggestion is this: Is it likely that Nature has placed the Fijians exactly in the same meridian with Greenwich, which in some measure may be called the meridian of civilization, for nothing?—is it likely that all the solar and cosmic influences which must result from this fact have really left the Fijian in that state of hyper-brutality which you think is proved by his menage? Is it, we ask, fairly to be supposed? We ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... much of the three cosmic laws. Our earth, by a form of self-love called molecular attraction, ceases to be scattered dust, and takes on the shape of a rich and beautiful planet. But self-loved, our earth is also sun-loved, and drawn by invisible bands it is swept forward out of winter ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is always associated with one idea, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... landlords demanded, which was about every three months. There were three girls in the family—Mary, Everina and Eliza—all above the average in intelligence. Whether there is any such thing in Nature as justice for the individual is a question, but cosmic justice is beyond cavil. The stupidity of a parent is often a very precious factor in the evolution of his children. He teaches them by antithesis. So if a man can not be useful and strong, all is not lost: ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... changes, births and demolition of Stars, are the sensations of Mars. These Reports are read aloud in the Halls of Announcement and Recreation. But astounding beyond belief, they photograph the surfaces of these distant bodies, and report in moving pictures the disturbances of the cosmic universe. No wonder that the whole Mind, as it were, of Mars is concentrated on the fabulous results of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... now like to substitute the word powers for "forces.") possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... to the organic creation; for not only do we behold the entire vast spectacle thrilled through and through by one Life, but we are also enabled to discern something of the august Purpose which progressively realises itself in all the phases of the cosmic process. That the God revealed by the universe must transcend the universe in order to be in any real sense its Creator, is self-evident; but that it is His own Energy which pervades it, a present Power operating ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... time, actuated by its noble thought, trained as we know More to have been in the severest school of Spenser, and thus habituated to the heavenly harmonies of that perfect poet, could hardly fail to produce such. But his muse is a chaotic not a cosmic one. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... queer it is! Every move I'm making, Cosmic gravity's Center I am shaking; Oh, how droll to feel (As I now am feeling), Even as I reel, All the ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... all this, Agassiz turned his glance upon the glaciers, and the "local phenomenon" became at once a cosmic one. So far a happy divination; but he seems to have believed quite to the last that, not only the temperate zones, but whole intertropical continents—at least the American—had been sheeted with ice. The narrative in the first volume will give the general reader a vivid but ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... there bigger things to talk about Than a window in Greenwich Village And hyacinths sprouting Like little puce poems out of a sick soul? Some cosmic hearsay— As to whom—it can't be Mars! put the moon—that way.... Or what winds do to canyons Under the tall stars... Or even How that old roue, Neptune, Cranes over his bald-head moons At the twinkling ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... skies, and not in that only other place where they say it can be found, in the eyes of some daughter of Eve. Would any Circe or Calypso—and if so, what one?—ever check this pale-haired scientist's nocturnal sailings into the interminable spaces overhead, and hurl all his mighty calculations on cosmic force and stellar fire into Limbo? Oh, the pity of it, if ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... the monarchy was thrice interrupted by democratic governments, and that there were four periods. This is the Indian tradition. But the whole was conceived as one history, doubtless with a prehistoric ideal beginning, like our Manus and Tuiskon. Therefore, no cosmic periods (Brahmanical imposture), but four generations of Aryan ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... as optimism is for the more fortunate mortals who enjoy the mens sana in corpore sano." [5] However, there are some pessimists for whom indigestion can plead no excuse, [6] but for whose intellectual perversity some other cosmic influence must be sought "behind the veil, behind the veil,"—to borrow Mr. Laing's favourite line from his favourite poem. These are not only "social swells, would-be superior persons and orthodox theologians, but even a man of light and learning like ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... sharply aware of Their presence, of Their urgency, of Their long patience. Awareness! Once man had got over his greedy delight in occupying more and more of the universe simply because he could, to protect himself against the cosmic loneliness that must follow, he too would be searching ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... church has aureoled and sainted the men and women who have fought the Cosmic Urge. To do nothing and to be nothing was regarded ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... belonging as they did to that wealthy middle class which has made France what she is. His indifference to the doings of the old friends of his family saddened them; and they were unable to understand his airy and persistent trifling. It seemed to them a discord in the cosmic tune. ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... it withdrew, sob by sob, into whatever great bosom had birthed it, until it whimpered deadly whispers of wrath and as equally seductive whispers of delight, striving still to be heard, to convey some cosmic secret, some understanding of infinite import and value. It dwindled to a ghost of sound that had lost its menace and promise, and became a thing that pulsed on in the sick man's consciousness for minutes after it had ceased. When he could hear ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... not round ... it was far too tiny a bit of cosmic debris to have sufficient gravity to crush down rocks and round off ragged corners. It was roughly oblong in shape, and one side was sheer smooth rock surface. The other side was rough, bristling with jutting rock. More than anything ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... there? They argue out with toil intense A 'cosmic' poet's esoteric sense, Of which a world, unwitting, Recks nothing. Yet how terribly they'd trounce Parliament's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... cycle of Osiris, and this objection is a valid one; but in this place we are only concerned to shew that R[a], the Sun-god, was evolved from the primeval abyss of water by the agency of the god Khepera, who brought this result about by pronouncing his own name. The great cosmic gods, such as Ptah and Khnemu, of whom mention will be made later, are the offspring of another set of religious views, and the cosmogony in which these play the leading parts is entirely different. We ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... unsheath your glasses and tie them, telescope-fashion, to a window-ledge or railing. Seat yourself in an easy position and focus on the moon. Shut out all earthly scenes from your mind and imagine yourself wandering amid those arid wastes. What a scene of cosmic desolation! What vast deserts, and gaping craters of barren rock! The cold, steel-white planet seems of all ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... 1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed through—all those weird and terrifying experiences—should have been encompassed within so short a span as three brief months. Rather might I have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its changes and evolutions for that which I have seen with my own eyes in this brief interval of time—things that no other mortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... guarded secret, of course," he was told. "I merely possess a slight comprehension of it. I know that it is an adaptation of that discovery of Professor Singe, two years ago—cosmic attraction. Eventually, perhaps, it will permit interplanetary travel. This use of it is simply the beginning. But it is to America's everlasting glory that a ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... instance, there is an immense difference. Goethe's egoism was creative; Montaigne's receptive. Goethe's was many-sided; driven forward by a tremendous demonic urge toward the satisfaction of a curiosity which was cosmic and universal. Montaigne's was in a certain sense narrow, limited, cautious, earth-bound. It had nothing of the large poetic sweep, nothing of the vast mystical horizons and huge imaginative vistas of the great German. But on the other hand, it was closer ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... activity of the World-eject; and hence, not only have we no right to predict a future eclipse with certainty, but we have not so much as the right to affirm that even a past eclipse must have taken place of necessity. For we have no right to affirm that at any one period of cosmic history the action of the World-eject must have been what it was, or could not have been other than it was. Our knowledge of the obverse aspect of this action (in the course of physical causation) is, as I have said, purely empirical; and this is merely another way of saying ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... is in no respect a graceful or romantic figure such as Leonardo was. He reminds us rather, by the weird and cosmic nature of his speculations and inventions, of some one of the beings created by the Norse mythologists: a nineteenth century gnome, rough, shaggy, uncouth, wholly absorbed in his search among the secrets of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... unyielding, closely tracking the first, indispensable to it, opposite, (as the sexes are opposite,) and whose existence, confronting and ever modifying the other, often clashing, paradoxical, yet neither of highest avail without the other, plainly supplies to these grand cosmic politics of ours, and to the launch'd-forth mortal dangers of republicanism, to-day or any day, the counterpart and offset whereby Nature restrains the deadly original relentlessness of all her first-class laws. This second principle is individuality, the pride and centripetal isolation of a human ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... lover's ambition. Because of her the 'giant has shriveled to a dwarf'. She has 'blown away the mountains', that he had 'rolled up' to the sunny heights of glory. In another poem, 'Mystery of Reminiscence', we hear of a cosmic golden age in which Laura, one with her poet, was a part of the Godhead. One and yet two, they swept through space in unimaginable ecstasy. Somehow,—the point is not made very clear,—there came a great cataclysm and separated them. Now ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... The actors in this cosmic masque or pageant of the planets are the Sun, the Moon and the Earth with her four Elements; for stage there is the limitless background of Time and Space, and the audience may be conceived as being represented by Immanent Nature. Creation ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... the earth with effulgent glory, and each little star began to wonder who I was, to the loftiest turret of his quite commodious castle this dwarf would climb, and muse upon sciology and the cosmic forces. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... grinned. "I had a couple of clues that you and Alice didn't," he said. "I knew there was a very sick woman involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They've had a lot of trouble with it, I believe—some say its spores come from outside the world with the cosmic dust—and now it seems to have been carried to Atla-Hi. Let's hope they've found the answer this time. Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... many people will temporarily suffer, and a few people will be annihilated. But things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why, therefore, should we deceive ourselves? I quite expect to suffer myself. I shall not, however, complain of the cosmic movement. The auctorial report (which, by the way, is full of common sense) envisages immense changes in the book market. I agree. And I am sure that these changes will come about in the teeth of violent opposition from ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... coercive intelligence such as the Biblical God is conceived to be. Whatever is, is one. And it is, in the special Spinozistic sense, supremely perfect because absolutely real. There is, considered in its totality, no lack or defect in Nature. There can be, therefore, no cosmic purposes, for such purposes would imply that Nature is yet unfinished, or unperfected, that is, not completely real. Something that cannot possibly be true of ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... was the material universe in miniature. It held the potentialities of mind, life, and phenomena. In every aggregation of atoms, there were the four planes, each in touch through the Cosmic Mind, its manasa, with other atoms in the universe, with every other globe of whatever kind. "As above, so below," was the secret Key-word. The unity of all the material universe in its prakriti, ether, prana and manasa, was the corner stone ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... by right supreme, With frosted locks adrift, and eyes a-dream, With quick short footfalls, and an arm a-swing, As to some cosmic rhythm heard to ring From Putney to Parnassus, a brief bard. (In stature, not in song!) Though passion-scarred, Porphyrogenitus at least he looks; Haughty as one who rivalry scarce brooks; Unreminiscent now of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions, reaching back and back, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the financial heavens happened—it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... actually been referred to the fall of meteoric matter upon his surface; and whether the sun is thus supported or not, it is perfectly certain that he might be thus supported. Whether, moreover, the whilom molten condition of our planet was, as supposed by eminent men, due to the collision of cosmic masses or not, it is perfectly certain that the molten condition might ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... that he would have published it in any case. A man who regarded himself as of no more significance than a chance deposit on the surface of the world might indeed write down an intimate record of his soul's doings as an exercise in cosmic irony; but the idea of publishing it could hardly have lived for a moment in the lambent flame of his own sardonic humor. He could be perverse, but perversity could not well go the length of perpetrating so pointless a joke as ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... under the viewports, were wooden boxes full of red geraniums, and ivy wound tenuous green fronds over the gleaming hull that had withstood the bombardment of pinpoint meteors and turned away the deadly power of naked cosmic rays. ...
— Homesick • Lyn Venable
... Professor Tiele, 'the story of Cronos has precisely the opposite meaning.' The New Zealand myth is one of dawn, the Greek myth is one of sunset. The mutilated part of poor Ouranos is le phallus du ciel, le soleil, which falls into 'the Cosmic ocean,' and then, of course, all is dark. Professor Tiele may be right here; I am indifferent. All that I wanted to explain was the savage complexion of the myth, and Professor Tiele says that I have explained that, and (xii. 264) ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... other families of the world. The name of the emotion would then be properly "Cosmism," and would signify the resolution of such a people to sacrifice its own special interests to those of Mankind. Cosmism hitherto has indeed generally asserted itself only in the desire of the Cosmic nation that all others should adopt its theological opinions, and permit it to adopt their personal property; but Patriotism has truly existed, and even as a dominant feeling, in the minds of many persons who have been greatly influential on the fates of their races, and that ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... theories require it to treat the ultimate particles into which it resolves matter, and which are so small that they are no longer divisible, as if they were solid bodies with weight and form, with centre and circumference, colliding with one another like billiard-balls, or like cosmic bodies in the depths of space, striking one another squarely, and, for aught I know, each going through another, or else grazing one another and glancing off. To particles of matter so small that they can no longer be divided or made smaller, the impossible feat of each going ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... never entered into my actions. I am careless of personal fame. Look at me, boy! As I stand before you I am Homer, I am Shakespeare ... I am every cosmic manifestation in art. Men have doubted in each incarnation my individual existence. Historians have more to tell of the meanest Athenian scribbler or Elizabethan poetaster than of me. The radiance of my work obscured my very self. I care not. I have a mission. I am a servant ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... a span of awkward silence. "Well," said he, with a wan smile, "we're facing, not a political, but a very unimportant party situation. Don't suppose I haven't a sense of proportion. I have. What for me is the end of the world is the unruffled continuance of the cosmic scheme for the rest of mankind. But there are relative things to consider. You have to consider the party. I'm sort of fly-blown. Am I any use? Let us talk straight. Am ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke |
