"Cog" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made them," we say. Did we? It is not we who make them. It is they who make us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels—in a process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth, that brachycephalism is a Mendelian ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... with the detached parts. Without that power the worker is a mechanical drudge, whose work has no quality save that of dogged fidelity to the task. Now, this power of keeping the whole before the mind while dealing with the parts, of seeing the completed machine while shaping a pin or a cog, of getting the complete effect of the argument while elaborating a minor point, resides in the imagination. It is the light which must shine upon all toil that has in it intelligence, prevision, and freshness; and its glow is as essential in ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... pone's hot— Dey is a time in life when nature Seems to slip a cog an' go, Jes' a-rattling down creation, Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a pickaninny's top, An' you feel jes' lak a racah, Dat is trainin' fu' to trot— When yo' mammy says de blessin' An' ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... he applied his own shoulder to a huge cog-wheel, with the alacrity, if not the power, of ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... first trial at extracting the fibre failed on account of our having no proper machine to bruise the stems. We extemporized a two-roller mill; but as it had no cog-gearing to cause both rollers to turn together, the only one on which the handle or crank was fixed turned, with, the result of grinding the stems to pulp instead of simply ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... chirp. Church-giebe-house, grave. Claes, clothes. Claithing, clothing. Clamb, climbed. Claught, catch up. Clinkin, smartly. Clinkumbell, the bell-ringer. Clymmynge, noisy. Cockernony, woman's hair gathered up with a band. Cofte, bought. Cog, basin. Cood, cud. Coost, cast. Corbie, raven. Core, company. Cotter, tenant of a cottage. Coulier, ploughshare. Cour, stoop. Couth, couthy, sociable, affable. Crack, chat, instant. Craig, rock. Cranreuch, hoar-frost. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... abandoned for some years and was rapidly going to decay. The frames had been torn from the windows, and both the floor of the building and the ground in its vicinity were strewn with fragments of expensive machinery, broken cog-wheels, shafts, etc. This building is shown in Pl. XLV, and may serve as an illustration of the contrast between Tusayan masonry and modern stonemason's work carried out with the same material. The comparison, however, is not entirely fair, as applied to the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... villages everywhere contained millions of dollars' worth of machinery, manufacturing goods of untold value. Not an ounce of energy, not a second of time, seemed to be lost in the Empire. Every German was a busy cog fitted precisely ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... click and rattle of the cog-wheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... a lame man working a bicycle by a lever— well, after that principle. There would be a steel rod with cog- wheels, and one man could work the lever as the lame cyclist does without the labour of rowing." Venning waited nervously ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... true teeth, like ours, to chew with. You know a good many very different things are called teeth—those on a rake, for example, or a comb, or a cog-wheel. A Duck's teeth are horny like the skin that covers its whole beak, and act like strainers. When a Duck dabbles in the water, as you have all seen tame ones do, the water that gets into its mouth runs out at the sides between the teeth, but whatever food ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... welcome is touching, yet nought o' the faun— A warmth is express'd in the shake o' his han'; His cog and his bed, or ought in his biel, The lonely will share frae kind ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... re-cog-nize me," she persisted, throwing a bitter emphasis on the middle of the word. "He didn't ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... hard upon that imp Stringstriker. If Klaus were only a clever fellow, and knew how to say a private word or so to his godfather, he would soon make it all right with him again. Dwarfs must be managed. Bless you, I have one in my own mill. Every ninth night he hammers away on the twenty-first cog of the third wheel; and as soon as he begins, three honey cells must be put upon the millstone for him, if I don't wish the mill to stand still immediately, and all the grain to breed worms. It is nothing but Dwarf's roguery, and so I say let Klaus go quietly his way. I'll wager ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Prince had been devoting much of his attention to the problems of commerce and industry. He had a taste for machinery of every kind, and his sharp eye had more than once detected, with the precision of an expert, a missing cog-wheel in some vast and complicated engine. A visit to Liverpool, where he opened the Albert Dock, impressed upon his mind the immensity of modern industrial forces, though in a letter to Victoria describing his experiences, he was careful to retain his customary lightness of touch. "As I ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... attends the fulfillment of any of his native or acquired reactions. Society has been variously pictured as a force holding the individual in check, as an organism of which he is a part, as a machine of which he is a cog. Society consists rather as the collective name for the cooeperative and associated activities of human beings who find such activity, by nature and by habit, interesting for its ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... But Professor Eddinger, a cog in the wheels of a great educational machine, glanced at the watch on his wrist. Again his thin shoulders were stooped, his voice tired. "My classes," he said. "I ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... degrees that she was scarce aware of it, Stella took her place as a cog in her brother's logging machine, a unit in the human mechanism which he operated skilfully and relentlessly at top speed to achieve his desired end—one million feet of timber in boomsticks by September ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... entire construction. There are three short bridges of iron, and the precautions in the way of cross sections of masonry are very elaborate. The average ascent per mile is 1,320 feet, and the total ascent is nearly 8,000 feet. In the center of the track, between the heavy steel rails, are two cog rails, of great strength. These are provided to insure absolute safety for travelers, one being for general use and the other ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... recruit, and the young lieutenant harries the petty officer, and so it goes up to the highest,—a well-planned system on the part of the superior to bring the inferior to a high point of material efficiency. The propelling spirit is devotion to the Fatherland: each believes himself a cog in the machine chosen of God to achieve His purposes on earth. The world hears of the Kaiser's "Ich und Gott," of his mailed fist beating down his enemies, but those who have lived in Germany know that exactly the same spirit reigns in every class. The strong in chastizing his ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill. And send that other fellow—Hopkins, you said?—along with him. By the way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his hand. "You've a new ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... wound up and set going by some outside mechanician, and regard ourselves as cogs on the wheels, watching all the other wheels go round and through the maze of machinery catching sight of the mechanician standing by and watching his handiwork. A cog on the wheel as it revolved would be rigidly confined in its operations: it would have no choice as to what means it should employ to carry out its end. Yet even plants have the power of choice, as we have seen, and use different ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... played occasionally for them. Doc had a Rip Van Winkle look. His hair hung down his back, and his clothes were threadbare and green with age. His shoes were tied to his feet with wire, and stockings he had none. Doc had studied in a Medical College until the eve of his graduation. Then he slipped a cog and went down, down, down, until he landed at Halloran's dive. For twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest inhabitants of that dive told me that ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... a cog in our plans—making a false start, having somebody get on to us! Why, man, there may be jail for ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... song that from pride to pride and joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make, from the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is, after all the praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and cog and wheel—is it not more than these to him standing before it there? It is the face of matter—who does not know it?—answering the face of the man, whispering to him out of the ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... brought him a cog of brose. Sim stared at it and sickened: he was too far gone for food. Young Harden passed, and looked curiously at him. "Here's a man that has na spared himsel'," he said. "A drop o' French cordial is the thing for you, Sim." And out ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... such a day in spring as this, as Job came whistling down the trail, gun in hand, looking for deer-tracks, that he thought he heard the report of a gun up in the second tunnel. He had often been there before; had climbed the trail and the cog railroad, played around and over the deserted buildings, and gone swimming off the iron bridge where the torrent was deepest. Once he and Dolph Swartz, a neighbor boy, had slept all night in the tool-house ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... its force this machine, being man-made, like all machines, and thus without a soul, gets out of order, loosens a cog or bolt perhaps, throwing the mechanism "out of gear," as it is called. When this happens, the engine resting on its bed-plate still keeps its foundation, but some lesser part, the loom or lathe or driving-wheel, which is another way of saying ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... heartfelt wish to put my shoulder to the great wheel of good. What could I say? Every prayer seemed based on the idea that God was a magnified man—that He needed asking and praising and thanking. Should the cog of the wheel creak praise to the Engineer? Let it rather cog harder, and creak less. Yet I did, I confess, try to put the agitation of my soul into words. I meant it for a prayer; but when I considered ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... second quarter dim their hopes. The Blues had not yet found themselves. There was a cog missing somewhere in the machinery. Technically, their playing was not open to much adverse criticism. Their passing was accurate and their tackling fair, but they were too mechanical and automatic. They needed something ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... stepped aside, but the world never waits; I was a cog discarded from the mechanism of society—" He was so pleased with the metaphor ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... offered' did he? Well, whenever Ben Stark 'kindly' offers anything, I'm in on the play. He's had his eye on you for the last three months, and he wants you, but he slipped a cog when he gave me the oars. You needn't be afraid, though, I'm going to do the square thing by you. We'll stop in at the Mission and be married, and then we'll see whether we want to go to St. Michael's or not, though personally I'm for going back ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... exclaimed, "Cog's 'ounds, what am I about?" He instantly rang the bell, and a footman attended. "John, desire that wench ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the rest of the day wasn't fascinatin'. No; I'd had about all of Barnes I could stand. A few more of his cheerin' observations, and I'd want to jam his head into his typewriter and then tread on the keys. Nor I wasn't goin' to be fed on any more cog-wheel statistics ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... a whip, snip, high cum diddledy, The cog-wheels of life have need of much oiling; Smack, crack—this is our jubilee; Huzza, my lads! we'll keep the ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of the flood, as thou viewest the perils ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... merry night we get the corn in, O sweetly, then, thou reams the horn in! Or reekin on a New-year mornin In cog or bicker, An' just a wee drap sp'ritual ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... sacred to Vulcan? The answer readily suggests itself: substantials before dessert—Mulciber before the Muses. Let us get the film of coal-smoke, the dissonance of clanking iron and the unloveliness of cog-wheels from off our senses before offering them to the beautiful, pure and simple. We come from the domain of finished products, complete to the last polish, silently self-asserting and wooing the almighty dollar with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... troops, seemingly endless columns of infantry on foot, all moving with us, along parallel roads, toward the firing-line. And most of these troops and supply columns belonged to my own division, one small cog ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... monk too good to rob, or cog, or plot. No fool so gross to bolt Scotch collops hot. From Donjon tops no Oroonoko rolls. Logwood, not Lotos, floods Oporto's bowls. Troops of old tosspots oft, to sot, consort. Box tops, not bottoms, schoolboys flog for sport. No cool monsoons blow soft ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... would seem to lack a Vice? Ere his words be half spoken, I am with him in a trice Here, there, and everywhere, as the cat is with the mice: True Vetus Iniquitas. Lack'st thou cards, friend, or dice? I will teach thee to cheat, child, to cog, lie, and swagger, And ever and anon to be ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... when you know that you have made winning certain! The outcome of it all is that, in the unequal battle between the men who back and the men who lay, the latter must win; they will win, even if they have to cog the dice on a pinch; and, moreover, they will not be found out officially, even though their "secret" is as open as if it were written across the sky. A strange, hard, pitiless crew are these same bookmakers. Personally, strange to say, they are, in private life, among ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... of us from the direction of the Cathedral's clock tower there came a slow wheezing as of the expansion of decrepit lungs, a creaking and jarring of springs and cog-wheels that grew rapidly louder till it culminated abruptly in a single sonorous stroke. At once Captain McKittrick laid his hand to the halyards of the flagstaff, a bundle of bunting rose in the air, shapeless and without definite color. ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... plumb alarmed about myse'f," observed the Old Cattleman, as we drew together for our usual talk. "I've been sort o' cog'tatin' tharof, an' I begins to allow I'm a mighty sight too garrulous that a-way. This yere conversation habit is shore growin' on me, an', if I don't watch out, I'm goin' to be a bigger talker than ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... there weren't from one to three of the men grouped adoringly around her, and Francis wasn't chaperoning her silently in the background, she felt that the work was a small price to pay for the pleasantness of the rest of her life there. Always before she had been a cog in the machinery, wherever she had been. At Cousin Anna's she was a little girl, loved and dominated. With Lucille she was free, but Lucille, in compensation, helped herself to the ungrudgingly given foreground. But here she was lady and mistress, and pet besides. In short, the punishment ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... dash, nerve, vim and initiative essential to a successful flier. He is moulded as a cog. He is part of a system—out of that he must not move. It has wrecked his initiative, and the sneer of the greatest German in history, Frederick the Great, ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... play, Except to pass an hour away: And well he might; for, to his cost, By want of skill, he always lost; He heard there was a club of cheats, Who had contrived a thousand feats; Could change the stock, or cog a die, And thus deceive the sharpest eye: Nor wonder how his fortune sunk, His brothers fleece him when he's drunk. I own the moral not exact, Besides, the tale is false, in fact; And so absurd, that could ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... question of time when vice should get its clutches upon her, as a cog-wheel seizes whoever comes too near the machine. After whirling her around through a short life of shame and degradation, it would, with mechanical punctuality, have cast her off into some corner, there to drag out to ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... 'it'll just be the ruin of you an' the death of me if you keep on makin' a picter of yourself like that lonely Indian a-sittin' on a pinnacle in the jographys, watchin' the inroads of civilization, with a locomotive an' a cog-wheel in front, an' the buffalo an' the grisly a-disappearin' in the distance. Now it'll be much better for all of us,' says I, 'if you'll git down from your peak, and try to make up your mind that the world ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... He sourly realized that he was only a cog in the big machine; that for a moment he had threatened to develop a rough edge and start a squeak, but the big file had been used on him. It had been used on many another of the State House cogs, as he well knew. Responsibility as to his party! Safety and sanity in regard to financial interests! ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... training-table, the shower-rooms after scrimmage, on Bannister Field during practice; as yet, no one had dared to give it form, by voicing his thought, but though no youth dared admit it, something was wrong, there was a defective cog in the machinery of that marvelous machine, the Gold and ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... matter very greatly, as shall be seen. Here, again, was an instance of an humble individual becoming a cog in the wheel of world politics. Within less than a month Schmidt was vituperated by half the chancelleries of Europe. A newspaper war raged over him. He became the object of an Emperor's Jovian wrath. "What's ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... and said: "Just the same I am glad to know you. My name seems to have got away from me for the time being. My mind's slipped a cog, as you might say. What do they call ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... feels that he has been defrauded of something he might have won with the better side of his nature, which will never be called out now. They will go on prospering; there is no further reason why he should bend a wire, slip a cog, or delay the hurrying wheels. Since Grandon has achieved all, then let them make money, money for which he ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... seven huge gates, which are raised or dropped into their places by beautiful machinery. To each gate is attached an immense screw, which stands perpendicularly, twenty feet long and ten inches in diameter. At its upper end, it passes through a matrix-worm in the centre of a large cog-wheel, lying horizontally The whole is set in motion by the slightest turning of a handle; and here I saw the application of the Turpin Wheel I spoke of before—no engine or complication, but a wheel fifteen feet in diameter, fixed horizontally, submerged in the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... Hindoo widow on a burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at worse times, sliding off ...
— Options • O. Henry
... city life, of industry and commerce, of war, of education and public health followed one after another as the individual human became more and more a cog in a vast social mechanism. This regimentation dulled imagination at the same time that it deified greed, with "gimme, gimme;" "more, ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... to come down on Perk with the western breeze—his motor was keeping up more or less of a furore, which told Perk that shrewd though these up-to-date contraband runners might be, at least they had slipped a cog by failing to keep up with the inventions of the times, for undoubtedly this pilot had no silencer aboard his craft to effectually muffle ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... middle life, are not equal to the tremendous demand upon the vital energies of beginning life over again after some disastrous visitation of Nature, or a panic, or an ill-advised personal venture has wrecked their own business or that of the concern in which they were a highly paid cog. In the mining States men are dependent upon the world's demand for their principal product. Farmers and stock-raisers are often cruelly visited, strikes or hard times paralyze mills and factories; and in times of panic and dry-rot the dealers in luxuries, including booksellers—to say nothing ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... "You'll tell me next that they can make shoes by machinery—cut out and peg and sew and fix the treads and all? No, damn it, that can only be done by human hands directed by human intelligence. Shoemaking is work for men only. Perhaps I myself might be replaced by a machine—by a few cog-wheels that go round and round! Bah! A machine is dead, I know that, and it can't think or adapt itself to circumstances; you may have to shape the boot in a particular way for a special foot, on account of tender toes, or—here ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... or corked or caulked joint, Fig. 265, is made by cutting out only parts of the notch on the lower piece, leaving a "cog" uncut. From the upper piece a notch is cut only wide enough to receive the cog. A cogged joint is stronger than a notched because the upper beam is not weakened at its point of support. It ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... beginning to move slowly up and down, like the strong right arm of some automaton giant. Greater and lesser cog-wheels caught up the motive power, revolving slowly and majestically, and with steady, regular rotation, or whirling round so fast you could hardly see that they stirred at all. Of a sudden a soul had been put into that wonderful creature of man's making, that inert mass of wood ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... with their task, I was much amused with the brisk way in which they trundled the huge hogs-heads along, running them up to the pier-head, slinging them to the chains of the crane, and then lowering them down into the launch. There was much creaking of cog-wheels and cheerful, "Yo-heave-hoing!" from the men in the boat below, as they stowed them away in the bottom of the craft as easily as if they were only so many tiny little kegs, the darkeys joining in the ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Secretaire, Monsieur Richard, the Cook, and the plantons. The first I have described sufficiently, since he was an obedient and negative—albeit peculiarly responsible—cog in the machine of decomposition. Of Monsieur Richard, whose portrait is included in the account of my first day at La Ferte, I wish to say that he had a very comfortable room of his own filled ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... of November in our rigid northern clime, and in the spring they will have the same luxuriant foliage as the tropical hat-rack. Vines may be left in the room during the winter until the furnace slips a cog and then you can pull them down and feed them to the family horses. In changing your plants from the living rooms or elsewhere to the cellar in the fall, take great care to avoid injury to the pot. I have experienced some very ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the woods, the sugar-making, the apple-gathering—all had a holiday character. But the hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and cleaning the cow stables, had little of this character. I have never been a cog in the wheel of any great concern. I have never had to sink or lose my individuality. I have been under no exacting master or tyrant.... I have never been a slave to any bad habit, as smoking, drinking, over-feeding. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... and cantie wi' mair, Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, Wi' a cog o' gude swats, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... worst school in Cincinnati" Oyler has risen, first in its own esteem, and then in the esteem of the city, until it is looked upon everywhere as a factor in the life of the west end, and an invaluable cog in the educational machinery of the city. Its tone has changed, too. Mr. Roberts, who came, a total stranger, to assist in the work while Mr. Voorhes was sick, says, "I have never heard a word of discourtesy or a bit of rudeness since ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... Machinery Hall, each one being twenty-eight by fifteen feet in size, with figures larger than life. The design represents the wheelwright and boiler-making trades. Reclining nude figures, of colossal size, bend toward the keystone of the arch, each holding a tool of a machinist. Interlaced cog-wheels form the background. ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... swerved to right or left around the hills, the pursuing smoke trail rose above the intervening hill-shoulders near and threatening. With the parts of a great machine whirling in unison and nicely timed to escape destruction, a small accident to a single cog may ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... them to be gentlemen of good houses, well descended and allied, hire apparel at brokers, some scavenger or prick-louse tailors to attend upon them for the time, swear they have great possessions, [5178]bribe, lie, cog, and foist how dearly they love, how bravely they will maintain her, like any lady, countess, duchess, or queen; they shall have gowns, tiers, jewels, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple: Scrambling, outfacing, fashion-monging boys, That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander, Go anticly, and show outward hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dangerous words, How they might hurt their enemies if they durst; And this is all. 223 SHAKS.: Much Ado, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... asked. "Oh, no; they know what they've got to do and they do it. But let a cog slip and you can have all the trouble you want. I gad, you can't temporize with a negro. He's either your ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... I was done with my recital he sat with his eyes wide open, seeming to wonder whether my reason had slipped a cog. ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... on the edge of the bed and took his hand. She sat in silence with a great pain in her heart. Over beyond the window sill the glow was dying, and the gathering pall was rising and coming nearer. Like a blanket the relentless world the cog-world of personal interests, regulations, and restrictions—was coming, gathering up its wastage into its ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... venerable men who preached. They were good men, sometimes great scholars, but the ears they addressed were not always willing. A somewhat machine-like sermoniser who, it was irreverently declared, ran as if wound up but sometimes slipped a cog, had been known to pray "that the intemperate might become temperate, the intolerant tolerant, the industrious dustrious." Longfellow always came with his beautiful wife, the heroine of Hyperion, whose tragic fate a few years later shocked the world. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... double-bladed knife containing several implements, including a corkscrew and an attachment for extracting stones from horses' feet, a piece of string, a watch spring, twenty or thirty shot, a button, a magnet, a cog-wheel, a pencil, a match-box, a case of foreign stamps all stuck together with salt water, a whistle, a halfpenny with a hole in it, and a soaked and swollen cigar which the Captain ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... corporation," to designate our great combinations of capital in industry and commerce. Why was that phrase used so widely? The answer is illuminating: we took it for granted that an individual employer would treat his artisans to some extent as human beings and not merely as cog-wheels in a productive machine; but we also took it for granted that an impersonal corporation, where no individual was dominantly responsible, would regard its artisans merely as pieces of machinery, with no ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... more than twenty years since he had last seen Orde, his schoolmate, and their paths in the world had divided early. The one had quitted college to become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government; the other more blessed with goods, had been whirled into a similar position in the English scheme. Three successive elections had not affected Pagett's position with a loyal constituency, and he had grown insensibly to regard himself ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... She is but weak, and he is the stronger. I'll upon him. Miller, thou art my neighbour, and therein charity holds my hands; but methinks you, having a water-gap of your own, you may do as other millers do, grind your grist at home, knock your cogs into your own mill; you shall not cog ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... of the cylinder is a cog-wheel and a metal spring is attached to the board, by means of which the wheel is prevented from turning ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... box with vehemence on the table, the dice as yet not appearing from under the box. The 'Dribble' was, when with an air of easy but ingenious motion, the caster poured, as it were, the dice on the board—when, if he happened to be an old practitioner, he might suddenly cog with his fore-finger one of the cubes. The 'Long Gallery' was when the dice were flung or hurled the whole length of the board. Sometimes the dice were thrown off the table, near a confederate, who, in picking them up, changed one of the fair for a false die with two sixes. This ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... lang, an' snaws were deep, An' threaten'd labour back to keep, I gied thy cog a wee-bit heap Aboon the timmer; I ken'd my Maggie wad na sleep For that, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the carelessness of the operator the brake of the great drum slipped, and on being applied again with reckless force, broke, and the car was off, bringing destruction to half a dozen men at the bottom of the shaft. Quick as a flash of light, Kalman sprang to the racing cog wheels, threw in a heavy coat that happened to be lying near, and then, as the machinery slowed, thrust in a handspike and checked the descent of the runaway car. It took less than two seconds to see, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... men Who still believed in Heaven and Hell, Nor hoped to find a spell, In some fine flourish of a pen, To make a better man Than long-considering Nature will or can, 280 Secure against his own mistakes, Content with what life gives or takes, And acting still on some fore-ordered plan, A cog of iron in an iron wheel, Too nicely poised to think or feel, Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal. They wasted not their brain in schemes Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere, As if he must be other than he seems Because ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... had I sunk lower in my own conceit. Till this hour I had been, as it were, the hinge on which my share of the world turned, and now I was no more than a wheel in the carriage of a couleuvrine, an unconsidered cog in the machine of war. I was to be lost in a multitude, every one as good as myself, or better; and when I had thought of taking service, I had not foreseen the manner of it and the nature of the soldier's trade. My head, that I had carried high, somewhat drooped, as I saluted, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... through fields and lines of villas and terraces and then slums and mean streets, and it took me pretty nearly two hours. All the while my restlessness was growing worse. I felt that great things, tremendous things, were happening or about to happen, and I, who was the cog-wheel of the whole business, was out of it. Royer would be landing at Dover, Sir Walter would be making plans with the few people in England who were in the secret, and somewhere in the darkness the Black Stone would be working. I felt the sense of ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... an employee; I don't want to be just your son-in-law, waiting for your shoes. I want to be your partner—to be more than a cog in the machine. And those freighters I've chartered—why, I could never have chartered them without your help. Who was I? Would I have had any credit or standing with those big Eastern shipping firms? Not much! I ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... There were the petty tradesmen who in former years had prospered through George Henry's patronage, whose large bills had been paid with unquestioning promptness until came the slip of his cog in the money-distributing machine. They had not hesitated a moment. As the peccaries of Mexico and Central America pursue blindly their prey, so these small yelpers, Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, of the trade world, had bitten at his heels persistently from the beginning ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... mind. As he let himself slowly down to his heels there was a sardonic grin on his brown face. In outguessing Tighe he had slipped one little mental cog, after all, and the chances were that he would pay high for his error. A man had been lying in the mesquite close to the creek watching him all the time. He knew it because he had caught the flash of light on the rifle barrel ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... midst, I could lay my hand on the roof-tree. A heath-bed occupied one of the corners; a few grey embers were smouldering in the middle of the floor; a pot lay beside them, ready for use, half-filled with cockles and razor-fish, the spoils of the morning ebb; and a cog of milk occupied a small shelf that projected from the gable above. Such were the contents of the shieling. Its only inmate, a lively little old man, sat outside, at once tending a few cows grouped on the moor, and employed in stripping with a pocket-knife, long slender filaments from ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... more different to me than you can have any idea of. Then I was a cog in a machine; now I am ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... a tip from a Roughneck, Go slow now and don't crowd your hand Or some day you may find that the orphan Has quit creeping and learned how to stand. Don't make us the goat for the theories Advanced by some government cog, And don't use this land as a station For trying things out ...
— Rhymes of a Roughneck • Pat O'Cotter
... the simplest designs produced by it. The machines are too expensive to be obtained by anyone but a government or a great banknote company and there are very few men who thoroughly understand operating them. A turn of a screw or a variation of a single cog will change the result entirely. Finally the work of the lathe is often reversed, so that the line which is cut by the graver and should print in color prints white, and vice versa. It would not be possible to imitate ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... she would be doing at any hour of the seven days of the week. Everything she influenced seemed to recur as regularly as the motions of the great ruthless-looking engines that Gillian had seen at work at Belfast; the only loose cog being apparently her sister Adeline, who quietly took her own way, seldom came downstairs before eleven o'clock, went out and came in, made visits or received them, wrote letters, read and worked at her own sweet will. Only two undertakings seemed to belong to her—-a ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... German drive seems to have slipped a cog somewhere," Bart remarked to his comrades, a few days later, as they were resting after a hard morning's work at organizing the position that their ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... wrote, "and misled by accepted doctrines, the acute framers of the Federal Constitution, even after the keenest attention, did not perceive the Prime Minister to be the principal executive of the British Constitution, and the sovereign a cog in the mechanism;" and he seems to think that if this had been understood the executive power ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... vitality, the charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education and development and meant to attract toward successful family life rather than ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the Promised Land presents itself as a tremendous enterprise in transportation, unparalleled in the modern world. What transportation? It is a complex of all human enterprises which we shall fit Into each other like cog-wheels. And in the very first stages of the enterprise we shall find employment for the ambitious younger masses of our people: all the engineers, architects, technologists, chemists, doctors, and lawyers, those who have emerged in the last thirty years from the ghetto and who have been ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... considered and at last stolidly accepted. He became an official with the weight of the Federal authority behind him. He became an investigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving at his beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless in its ramifications. He was the agent of a vast and centralized authority, an authority against which there could be no opposition. But he had to school himself to the knowledge that he was a cog, and nothing more. And two things were expected ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... waters little shoals of fish spluttered, raising tiny tempests. Languid jelly-fish floated near, tremulously waving a thousand legs. A row of porpoises trundled along like a procession of cog-wheels. The sky became greyed save where over the land ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... since the morning, the King had been watching and waiting. An hour yet, two hours, it might be three, it mattered not; it was only a question of time. Wheel and pinion, cog and lever, were working in harmony, the great engine of destruction was in motion, and soon would have run its course. In the center of the immense horizon, beneath the deep vault of sunlit sky, the bounds of the battlefield ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... National Coffee Roasters Association Home coffee mill, employing an improved set screw operating on a cog-and ratchet principle, was introduced to ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... had mended and he asked Meg to turn the crank and Bobby to feed in the ears of corn. They were never allowed to touch the sheller unless some older person was around, for little fingers could get easily nipped in the cog wheels. So they were rather proud to be especially asked to help Jud make ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Brookside Farm • Mabel C. Hawley
... arraignment of the mayor and the judge on the hay-market question that has made every decent organization in the city look to you to begin the fight for a clean-up reorganization. They have all rallied to your support. Show your colors, boy, and, God willing, we will smash this machine to the last cog and get on a ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... quoth Ishie blandly, "he who would play poker with dishonest men should never put all cards on table too soon. Or in other words, Confusion is the better part of valor. The garbage made them think that the Cow had sprung a cog somewhere, without ever guessing ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... with the old. "The pleasure," he said, "was in the teaching, in making the thought clear, in tempting the boys to find out what they knew all the time; and the oftener I taught a subject the better I liked it; it was like a big cog-wheel, with a number of little cog-wheels turning with it. But the men who were always wanting to change their subjects were the men who thought of their own intellectual interest first, and very little ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not guided solely in his inference by marks of adaptation and utility; he would recognize design in half a watch, in a mere fragment of a watch, just as surely as in a whole time-keeper . . . Two cog-wheels, grasping each other, will be thought conclusive evidence of design, quite independently of any use attaching to them. And the inference, indeed, is perfectly correct; only it is an inference, not from a mark of design, properly so called, but from a mark of human ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... arrived. The Baroness, was a very stout woman, about fifty, with a double chin, a considerable moustache, a low broad forehead, and bright, round, black eyes, very far apart. When introduced to Lady George, she declared that she had great honour in accepting the re-cog-nition. She had a stout roll of paper in her hand, and was dressed in a black stuff gown, with a cloth jacket buttoned up to neck, which hardly gave to her copious bust that appearance of manly firmness which ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... exclamations, the Live Children were dragged towards the blue workshops, where each of the little inventors set his machine going. It was a great blue whirl of disks and pulleys and straps and fly-wheels and driving-wheels and cog-wheels and all kinds of wheels, which sent every sort of machine skimming over the ground or shooting up to the ceiling. Other Blue Children unfolded maps and plans, or opened great big books, or uncovered azure statues, ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... Fillmore Street, San Francisco, which is alleged to have a gradient of 34 per cent., with twenty-three persons on board. As 25 per cent. is regarded as the maximum safe gradient for an Abt rack railway, since the cog-wheel is liable to climb out of the rack on any steeper grade, it will be seen that the strain upon the credulity of the hearer of this story is almost as great as that upon the car ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... a more generous, soft-hearted, kindly people. Germany, the land of the Christmas tree and folk songs, and hearthsides and gay childish laughter, turned into a relentless fighting machine! But each individual is a cog firmly fixed in the machine, which will go ever on as long as the ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... memories of those two lads in future days. But while they seemed to be holding the fort, so to speak, Giraffe knew only too well that they were up against two desperate characters, and that if they slipped just one cog, it might have a different ending than the one they wished ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... traversed in every thirty-five days—the time required by that swift boat to achieve two round trips. We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate he did, and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a vacancy. He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence; and I did mine with the reserve and moderation of a subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house that is perched forty feet above ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... accept. I knew I was caught deep in the meshes of Prussian discipline, every one had his orders and blindly carried them out, from the garrulous Major on the frontier to this preposterous Exzellenz, this Imperial aide-de-camp of Potsdam. I was already a tiny cog in a great machine. I should have to revolve ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... men in the compartment, soldiers and workers, each a cog in the big machine, each bound upon some important errand. Each had news to tell—tales of the fighting, or of the progress of preparation. For more than a year now America had been getting ready, and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... unless transported over seas. She has a peculiar genius for organization, not only in elaborating minute detail, but in the grasp of a coherent whole. She knows the art of giving a brain to a machine, of transmitting power to the uttermost cog-wheel, and at the same time of concentrating responsibility in a supreme centre. She has a small navy, but very effective for its purpose, built, trained, and manned on methodical principles, for defined ends, and backed by an inexhaustible reserve of men from her maritime conscription. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... had returned to her accounts, the accounts which were the cog-wheels that kept running the smooth course of the Etchingham estates. She seemed to wish to indicate that I counted for not very much in the scheme of things ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... were, indeed, nearly concerned in the fracas which their laziness occasioned, being no other than the faithful Mr. Fairservice, with his friend Mr. Hammorgaw, and another person, whom I afterwards found to be the town-crier, who were sitting over a cog of ale, as they called it (at my expense, as my bill afterwards informed me), in order to devise the terms and style of a proclamation to be made through the streets the next day, in order that "the unfortunate ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... The English fleet consisted of only 260 ships fit for warfare. The French, whose fleet amounted to no less than 400 sail, lay securely, as they thought, in the harbour of Sluys. Edward embarked on board the cog Thomas, commanded by Richard Fyall, and attended by several noblemen. A cog was a craft larger than those usually designated ships—the cog John, which is spoken of, had a crew of eighty-two men, and probably she carried besides a considerable number of knights and soldiers. Many ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... travelling, but nothing "irreparable," and you have Mandane. For the rest, with the rare and slight exceptions mentioned, they flit like shadows ticketed with more or less beautiful names. Even Philidaspes, the most prominent male character after the hero by far, is, whether he be "in cog" as that personage or "out of cog" as Prince and King of Assyria, merely a petulant hero—a sort of cheap Achilles, with no idiosyncrasy at all. It is the fault, and in a way the very great fault, of all the kind: and there is nothing more to do ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... The cog railroad running nearly to the top has been badly damaged a number of times in recent years and the occupants of the meteorological observatory on or near the summit have ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... right. I saw also that in a very little while I should abruptly find the plains. A low hill some five miles ahead of me was the last roll of the mountains, and just above me stood the last high crest, a precipitous peak of bare rock, up which there ran a cog-railway to some hotel or other. I passed through an old town under the now rising heat; I passed a cemetery in the Italian manner, with marble figures like common living men. The road turned to the left, and I was fairly on the shoulder ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... monotony. Here is an important item in the problems of our times. Side by side with growth of the cities and their excitement is the growing monotony of most labor. The factory, with its specialized production, reduces the worker to a cog in the machinery. In some factories, in the name of efficiency, the windows are whitewashed so that the outside world is shut out and talking is prohibited; the worker passes his day performing his unvaried task from morning to night. Under such circumstances there arises either a burning ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... acumination^; spinosity^. point, spike, spine, spicule [Biol.], spiculum^; needle, hypodermic needle, tack, nail, pin; prick, prickle; spur, rowel, barb; spit, cusp; horn, antler; snag; tag thorn, bristle; Adam's needle^, bear grass [U.S.], tine, yucca. nib, tooth, tusk; spoke, cog, ratchet. crag, crest, arete [Fr.], cone peak, sugar loaf, pike, aiguille^; spire, pyramid, steeple. beard, chevaux de frise [Fr.], porcupine, hedgehog, brier, bramble, thistle; comb; awn, beggar's lice, bur, burr, catchweed^, cleavers, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... thunder into showers of gold, Whose silent courtship wins securer joys, Taints by degrees, and ruins without noise. While parliaments, no more those sacred things Which make and rule the destiny of kings. Like loaded dice by ministers are thrown, And each new set of sharpers cog their own. Hence the rich oil that from the Treasury steals Drips smooth o'er all the Constitution's wheels, Giving the old machine such pliant play[6] That Court and Commons jog one joltless way, While Wisdom trembles for the crazy car, So gilt, so rotten, carrying fools so far; And the duped ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... times in life when Nature Seems to slip a cog an' go Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a picaninny's top, An' you' cup o' joy is brimmin' 'Twel it seems about to slop. An' you feel jes' lak a racah Dat is trainin' fu' to ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... step; some of it with the enemy on the run. Take it all together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward. Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a certificate of character. In ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... his tent, and fed him, and wined him, and fleeced him while he was drunk." He took a goblet of claret from the lackey who brought his salver, emptied it, and went on, hoarse with passion. "To the marrow of your bones you are false, all of you! You do not cog your dice, perhaps, but you bubble your friends with finesses, and are as much sharpers at heart as the lowest tat-mongers in Alsatia. You empty our purses, and cozen our women with twanging guitars and jingling rhymes, and laugh at us because we are honest and trust you. Seducers, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... corner of the room; for the tarboosh was the sign of official servitude, and Dicky was never the perfect official. Initiative was his strong point, independence his life; he loathed the machine of system in so far as he could not command it; he revolted at being a cog in the wheel. Ismail had discovered this, and Dicky had been made a kind of confidential secretary who seldom wrote a line. By his influence with Ismail he had even more power at last than the Chief Eunuch or the valet-de-chambre, before whom the highest officials ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... particularly interested. His expression was that of one disappointed. It suddenly flashed across Ralph, he could scarcely have told why, that the young inventor had indeed been "inventing" something, that something had slipped a cog, and that he was responsible for the catastrophe of the moment. Now Archie looked about him in a stealthy, baffled way, as though he was anxious to sneak away ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... I want your opinion on is this: Wouldn't it be perfectly fair for A to—well, slip a cog ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of hidden jubilation in her voice worried Sarah. She had not known Patricia for all of her eleven years for nothing. "Honey, what you cog'tating?" she coaxed; as she brought Patricia a generous slice of fresh ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... in writing. At once there was a cog gone from the answering wheel to match. Billy shortened his letters; the answers were shortened. Then he quit writing, and his Thursday letter ceased to come. He had thought the matter all over, and ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... it does no work, it exercises no influence or control, it is nothing. How then can it be the vehicle and instrument of my conscious soul? It cannot. Then is my soul homeless? Or is it to be identified with the activity and fortunes of a single atomic constituent of my body, a single cog in the animal clockwork? If so, how irrational! For the soul does not experience itself as the soul of one minute part, but as the soul of ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... this, when one stops to remember that this army of three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater army and hardly know it was there—why, then, the brain refuses to wrestle with a computation so gigantic. The imagination ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... told myself she would be marryin' one of the boys most likely; I kep' that in mind steady, as you may say. I thought I was so used to the idee that it wouldn't jar me much of any when it come to the fact. But it did; yes siree, it did, sure enough. 'Peared as if a cog slipped somehow, and my whole works was jolted ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... earth is but an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not be missed in the ratchet wheel which fits into the grand machinery ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing |
