"Opacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Verona. The finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that, however pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of the great chain, they become of the color and opacity of clay before they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thrown down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along the eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... will help us here. We have certain qualities in common with inanimate matter, such as weight, opacity, resilience. It is clear that these are not human. We have other qualities in common with all forms of life; cellular construction, for instance, the reproduction of cells and the need of nutrition. These again are not human. We have others, many others, common ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Transparency and opacity constitute another contrast of colouring, the former of which belongs to shade and blackness, the latter to light and whiteness. Even contrast has its contrast, for gradations or intermedia are opposed to contrasts or extremes; and, upon the right management of contrasts and gradations ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... from this, and other causes, it arises that when the naked light from fifty cells is looked at the blur of light upon the retina is sufficient to destroy the definition of the retinal image of the carbons. A long list of indictments might indeed be brought against the eye—its opacity, its want of symmetry, its lack of achromatism, its partial blindness. All these taken together caused Helmholt to say that, if any optician sent him an instrument so defective, he would be justified in sending it back with the severest censure. ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... beautiful example of this structure, in a specimen of obsidian from Mexico, which is shaded and zoned, like the finest agate, with numerous, straight, parallel layers, more or less opaque and white, or almost perfectly glassy; the degree of opacity and glassiness depending on the number of microscopically minute, flattened air-cells; in this case, it is scarcely possible to doubt but that the mass, to which the fragment belonged, must have been subjected to some, probably prolonged, action, causing the ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... tiny lamps fell in all sorts of odd forms, as the rays crossed each other, or the opacity of our bodies threw great shadows. I could not for my life get away from the feeling that there was someone else amongst us. I suppose it was the recollection, so powerfully brought home to me by the grim surroundings, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... circle, he avoids its use in the latter sense and speaks always of the semi-diameter, not of the radius. His speculations as to the ether, his suggestive views of the structure of crystalline bodies, and his explanation of opacity, slight as they are, will possibly surprise the reader by their seeming modernness. And none can read his investigation of the phenomena found in Iceland spar without marvelling at his ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... which he began to lose in his second, and from which his successors strayed ever farther as the generations succeeded each other. The fullness and richness of coloring of the glass leaves really nothing to be desired. It is as brilliant, as jewel-like, and at the same time as free from opacity and heaviness, as the best ancient glass; and it is mainly in these respects that it so far excels the productions of other makers of painted glass. The landscape is treated with a pellucid delicacy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... wished to traverse alone, without even the Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty to follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter and lighter. Too light even, for a blue phosphorescence, coming from the eastern horizon, begins to filter through the opacity of the colonnades on the right, outlines the monstrous shafts, and details them by vague glimmerings on their edges. The full moon is risen, alas! and my hours ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... night. The visitor was in the mood for high stakes. Monsieur Robin lost and won without the quiver of an eyelash or a change of hue in the dull opacity of his complexion. Henry Denvil lost and won with the veins growing knotted and prominent in forehead and temple, and his color deepening from red to crimson. Madame Robin, cool and quiet, crocheted little threads of silk ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... human limbs or drapery: it gives the form, but not the stuff. It is the exact reverse with marble. Granulated like a living fibre, yet susceptible of a delicate polish, it can imitate the actual substance of human flesh, with its alternations of opacity and luminousness; it can reproduce, beneath the varied strokes of the chisel, the grain, running now one way, now another, which is given to the porous skin by the close-packed bone and muscle below. Moreover, it is so docile, so soft, yet so resistant, that the iron ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... more, puts in to hinder our passage. The Moone (saith he) is not altogether opacous, because 'tis still of the same nature with the Heavens, which are incapable of totall opacity: and his reason is, because perspicuity is an inseparable accident of those purer bodies, and this hee thinkes must necessarily bee granted, for hee stops there, and proves no further; but to this I shall deferre an answere, till hee hath made ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... "Art Journal" says of Sir Frederic's Actaea: "The artist has made some attempt to paint flesh in its freshness and transparency, and indeed the more he renounces the opacity of the German school, and the more he can realize the brilliance of the old Venetian ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... powerful figure towered like a giant's. His abundant red hair, waving thickly from his bulging forehead, redeemed by its single note of colour the rigidity of his features. His eyes—small, keen, deeply set beneath heavy brows—flashed from a dull opacity to an alert animation. But in the first and last view of his face it was the mouth that marked the man; the straight, thin lips would close or unclose at their own will, not at another's—the line of the mouth, like ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... characteristics. Think of the ochres, for instance, as mainly opaque, and as yellows tending to the reddish. With any blue they make gray greens because of the latter quality, and they make gray oranges with red because of the dulness of their opacity and body. For richer greens think of the lighter chromes and cadmium yellows or citrons; and for the richer oranges, the deeper cadmiums and chromes. With reds, work the same way, scarlet or orange vermilions ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst |
