"Luminosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... calculated to lead a spirited and brave people through such a trying crisis as the American Revolution. His star was not dark and bright by turns—did not reveal itself in uncertain and fitful glimmerings—but shone with a full and steady luminosity across the troubled night of a nation's beginning. Under these broad and beneficent rays the Ship of State was guided, through a sea of chaos, to safe anchorage. The voyage across those seven eventful years was one that tried men's souls. Often, appalling dangers threatened. ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... falling, just before dawn of the 11th, of an extraordinarily brilliant meteor that flamed with a curious red and green light as it entered the earth's atmosphere. This meteor did not burn itself out, but fell, still retaining its luminosity, from a point near ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... always been a difficult question what caused the extraordinary luminosity of Aristarchus. No end of hypothesis had been invented to account for it. Now I was to assist in settling ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... suggests—to those who dream of landscape—the country of a dream. The serried pines, and the lighted fields, and the golden ricks of the farms are dyed with the sun as one might paint with a colour. Bright as it is, the glow is rather the dye of sunlight than its luminosity. For by a kind of paradox the luminous landscape is that which is full of shadows—the landscape before you when you turn and face the sun. Not only every reed and rush of the salt marshes, every uncertain aspen-leaf ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... translated, their chief attraction lies, I think, in what they reveal to us of the human nature of their authors. Tanabata-tsum['e] still represents for us the Japanese wife, worshipfully loving;—Hikoboshi appears to us with none of the luminosity of the god, but as the young Japanese husband of the sixth or seventh century, before Chinese ethical convention had begun to exercise its restraint upon life and literature. Also these poems interest us by their expression ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... or mode. The notion of d@rs'yatva (objectivity) carries with it also the notion of ja@datva (materiality) or its nature as non-consciousness (ajnanatva) and non-selfness (anatmatva) which consists in the want of self-luminosity of objects of consciousness. The relation of consciousness (jnana) to its objects cannot be regarded as real but as mere illusory impositions, for as we shall see later, it is not possible to determine the relation between knowledge and its forms. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... of Gothic architecture in the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth. Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out — an inert residuum — with movement of pure inertia. From the car window one seemed to float past undulations of nomad life — herders deserted by their leaders and herds — wandering waves ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... mark for which warrant cannot be found in Rubens, Sarto, Guido Reni, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raffael, Michelangelo, or Trajan's Column. For further information consult "The Discourses" of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A., whose recipes are made palatable by a quality infrequent in his dishes, luminosity. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... aluminum pole, in the form of a disk, at each end, both coated with a paint of phosphorescent yttria. As the rarefaction approaches about 0.5 millimeter the surface of the negative pole, A, becomes faintly phosphorescent. On continuing the exhaustion this luminosity rapidly diminishes, not only in intensity but in extent, contracting more and more from the edge of the disk, until ultimately it is visible only as a bright spot in the center. This fact does not prop a recent theory, that as the exhaustion gets higher the discharge ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... a jewel, thanks to the lustre of her eyes in artificial light. Whether from humidity or some quality of their substance, I do not know, but they reflected the rays as I have rarely seen eyes do; and in their luminosity her whole face seemed to have part, so that her presence had an effect of warm brilliancy that lured and dazzled you. To see her emerge from the darkness of the Faringfield coach, or from her sedan-chair, into ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... projected above the thickest part of its case, on the upper side. Their ends were joined by a little ring, three inches across. The tiny metal ring glowed with purple luminosity. A purple haze seemed to cling about it, as to the huge ring Dan had seen on the towers above the peak. And suspended inside this ring was a tiny metal needle, shimmering with ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... conducted by Mr. James Gilchrist, manager, down into the workings in the ell seam at a depth of 118 fathoms. Here at the pit bottom, in the roads and at the face, twenty-one Swan lamps were burning, giving forth a brilliant, steady flame, the luminosity of which, while sufficient to supply the desired light, had none of the disagreeable intensity associated with most systems of electric lighting. Besides the pear-shaped Swan lamp, in which the glowing or incandescence is carried on in vacuo, there is an outer lantern, the invention of Mr. David ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... of our northern middle latitudes, in summer, where the Milky Way breaks up into vast sheets of nebulous luminosity, lying over and between the constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius, there is a remarkable assemblage of "coal-sacks,'' though none is of great size. One of them, near a conspicuous star-cluster in Scorpio, M80, is interesting ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... cold do not affect its radioactivity in the least. It gives off but little light, its luminosity being largely due to the stimulation of the impurities in the radium by the powerful but invisible ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... and some very intense physiological reactions. Its salts are luminous in the dark, but this luminosity, at first very bright, gradually diminishes as the salts get older. We have here to do with a secondary reaction correlative to the production of the emanation, after which radium undergoes the transformations which will be studied ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... did it retain its brilliancy. The slightest movement in the water caused a flash of light. Jerry and I agreed that we had never seen anything more beautiful. The doctor told us that this phosphorescence or luminosity of the ocean is caused by a minute animal, scarcely perceptible to the naked eye, though sufficient to tinge the water of a brown or reddish colour. Other marine substances are, however, luminous. While we were waiting to step into the boat, the bay having returned to its original darkness, on ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... the network of boughs above them, flinging the ghost of a net about their feet; for they were mounting again to the faint luminosity of the naked night. Flambeau felt truth all round him as an atmosphere, but not as an idea. He answered with bewildered brain: "Well, what's the matter with the sword? Officers generally have ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... establish actual communication with her. Thus, a few days ago, a German geometrician proposed to send a scientific expedition to the steppes of Siberia. There, on those vast plains, they were to describe enormous geometric figures, drawn in characters of reflecting luminosity, among which was the proposition regarding the 'square of the hypothenuse,' commonly called the 'Ass's Bridge' by the French. 'Every intelligent being,' said the geometrician, 'must understand the scientific meaning of that figure. The Selenites, ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... had an extraordinary quality that I seemed to notice in all the faces around me—a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the sight of the world. When he brightened to answer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a weight were on the mind of the whole world—a preoccupation that I shared without understanding. ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... our hut, the elements without seemed desirous of celebrating the occasion with equal emphasis and greater decorum. The eastern sky was massed with swaying auroral light, the most vivid and beautiful display that I had ever seen—fold on fold the arches and curtains of vibrating luminosity rose and spread across the sky, to slowly fade and yet again ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... among the half-crown magazines for his essays and then through various scientific quarterlies for his research papers. The ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant theorizing, is apt to be rather sawdusty in texture, and Ann Veronica was delighted to find the same easy and confident luminosity that distinguished his work for the general reader. She returned to these latter, and at the back of her mind, as she looked them over again, was a very distinct resolve to quote them after the manner of Miss Garvice at ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the large tropical firefly which has the seat of its luminosity on the upper surface of the thorax, nothing definite appears to be known; but it has been said that this instinct is altogether nocturnal. The Pyrophorus is only found in the sub-tropical portion of the Argentine country, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... The palpable difference of luminosity between the sun and the planets, which, as they are all made of the very same materials, and by the same process, according to this theory, ought to be equally self-luminous, is in itself a self-evident refutation of the nebular hypothesis, or of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the process of ventilation had been permitted to proceed for nearly a week, the air in the subterranean passages was found to be fresh enough to be breathed without much difficulty, and to allow of the torches burning in it with scarcely diminished luminosity, and the search for the treasure chamber was resumed. And now it was discovered that the labyrinth of passages and chambers extended far beyond the area covered by the superstructure, many of the chambers ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsis, and Ulysses restoring Chryseis to her father, are typical imaginary classic compositions and variations on the artist's favourite theme—the effects of sunlight on an atmosphere of varying luminosity and on the limpid, rippling waves of the sea. We now come to the grand monarque of the arts at Paris during the century, Charles Lebrun (1619-1690), founder of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture that finally eclipsed the old Painters' Guild which, from the thirteenth century, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... associated with fungi that are of greater interest than those which relate to luminosity. The fact that fungi under some conditions are luminous has long been known, since schoolboys in our juvenile days were in the habit of secreting fragments of rotten wood penetrated by mycelium, in order to ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... though in this part of the city, there was neither gas nor electricity, and surely on such a night as this, neither moon nor stars dared show their faces in such a grayness of sky; but a sort of all-diffused luminosity was in the air, as though the sea of atmosphere was charged ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore |
