"Disproportion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the same matter for astonishment as in Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... in the heyday of life, but I shall not be the one to say it. The race must yet revert in its decrepitude, as I have in mine, to the climates of the South. Since I have been in Italy I have realised what used to occur to me dimly at home—the cruel disproportion between the end gained and the means expended in reclaiming the savage North. Half the human endeavour, half the human suffering, would have made the whole South Protestant and the whole East Christian, and our civilisation would now be there. No, I shall never go back to New England. ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... the man, better constituted to endure fatigue and privation, preserves his vigour almost to the last unimpaired. Nothing is more common here than to see an old man of eighty and odd surrounded by little children who are his flesh and bone. In spite of this disproportion between man and woman, the union, contracted almost in childhood, is only dissolved by death. The Princess de Belgiojoso tells us that she has seen hideous, decrepit, and infirm women tenderly cared for and adored by handsome old men, straight as the mountain ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... You can scarcely be disfranchised if you have never been enfranchised; and I have regarded the enfranchisement of the people on the roll as more important for the time being than adding new names to the rolls. This would only tend to increase the disproportion between the representative and the represented. But I rejoiced when the Women's Suffrage Bill was carried, for I believe that women have thought more and accepted the responsibilities of voting to a greater extent than was ever expected ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... itself, though of a dingy brown wood-color, was neat and inviting. It may have been forty feet square on the ground, and was only a story and a half high, but a projecting roof, and a front dormer-window, relieved it from the appearance of disproportion. Its gable ends were surmounted by two enormous brick chimneys, carried up on the outside, in the fashion of the South, and its high, broad windows were ornamented with Venetian blinds. Its front door opened directly into the "living-room," and at ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... narrow—how spectral did its slender lines appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it in. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has been proved to exist at Waterloo. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... appear. When first the Atoms to the Congress came, And by their Concourse form'd the mighty Frame, What did the Liquid to th' Assembly call To give their Aid to form the ponderous Ball? First, tell us, why did any come? next, why In such a disproportion to the Dry! Why were the Moist in Number so outdone, That to a Thousand Dry, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... was much perplexed hereat, for should I attempt her, and be slighted, she would never care for me afterwards; but again, I considered that if I should attempt and fail, she would never speak of it; or would any believe I durst be so audacious as to propound such a question, the disproportion of years and fortune being so great betwixt us: however, all her talk was of husbands, and in my presence saying one day after dinner, she respected not wealth, but desired an honest man; I made answer, I thought I could fit her with ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... the field on which mankind have reaped their principal honours. But in modern Europe, republics of a similar extent are like shrubs, under the shade of a taller wood, choaked by the neighbourhood of more powerful states. In their case, a certain disproportion of force frustrates, in a great measure, the advantage of separation. They are like the trader in Poland, who is the more despicable, and the less secure, that he is neither ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... conquers all—a callous accomplice in the fate of the poor man. In a week to a fortnight unemployment would take all comfort from a home that represented the scraping and saving of many years—so crying was the disproportion. Here was enough to stamp a lasting comprehension upon the minds of all, and enough to challenge agitation. All but persons of feeble mind could see now what ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... repose Of spirits angelical. Blessed be God, The measure of his judgments is not fix'd By man's erroneous standard. He discerns No such inordinate difference and vast Betwixt the sinner and the saint, to doom Such disproportion'd fates. Compared with him, No man on earth is holy call'd: they best Stand in his sight approved, who at his feet Their little crowns of virtue cast, and yield To him of his own ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... for the rear, making his way onward by nearly impassable roads and coming before the outposts of the supplementary Russian army with only eight thousand men. With apparently utter indifference to the vast disproportion in numbers, the Swedish firebrand rushed forward, the Russians, not dreaming of such mad temerity, being sure that he had his ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... contraction; you would have pronounced the face not only beautiful, but sweet and womanly. Take that bandage suddenly away and the change would have startled you, and startled you the more because you could detect no sufficient defect or disproportion in the lower part of the countenance to explain it. It was as if the mouth was the key to the whole: the key nothing without the text, the text uncomprehended without ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thing, we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of magnitude and multitude. Since we have realized the unspeakable insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness of star-sown space, we have come to feel such a disproportion between the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience, that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may be. "What is it all," we say, "but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?" ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... political party, and consequently rendering obsolete all the arts of persuasion and deliberation, and reducing parliamentary discussion to a struggle between obstruction on the one side and closure on the other. The disproportion, moreover, between the majority in the House and that in the country, which it is supposed to represent, deprives the decisions of the House of much of their moral authority. The rigid partisanship, and the essentially unrepresentative character ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... into spasms by that drug, and all the organs of his body dependent on that system, are the collocation. Now any one who thinks only of the speech, or the drug, in these cases, may express astonishment at the disproportion of cause ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the German forces are massed against the British lines, and that in some parts of the centre and the east, owing to the nature of the ground, they are but thinly strung along the French front, which accounts partly for the disproportion in the number of kilometres covered by each Ally. But, also, we had to make our Army; the French, God be thanked, had theirs ready, and gloriously have they stood the brunt, as the defenders of civilisation, till we could ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the figures of a million and a half Germans to half a million French, British, and Belgians, or of fifty corps to twelve and a half, will probably be corrected when the German statistics are known. If it is further true that at the actual points of fighting the disproportion was five to one, we need no further illustration of the ills which inadequate co-ordination imposes on an Alliance, and inadequate staff-work and intelligence on any fighting force. The Allied tactics were probably not so clumsy nor the German ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... esteem and affection; but although the heart of the uncle was set upon this marriage, which was much wished for by the nephew also, and I was greatly desirous to promote the satisfaction of both, the great disproportion of age, and the extreme repugnancy of the young lady, made me join with the mother in postponing the ceremony, and the affair was at length broken off. The colonel has since married Mademoiselle Dillan, his relation, beautiful, and amiable as my heart could wish, and who has made him ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... the English monarch was much more extensive within his kingdom, and the disproportion much greater between him and the most powerful of his vassals. His demesnes and revenue were large, compared to the greatness of his state: he was accustomed to levy arbitrary exactions on his subjects; his ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... that been forced upon your attention?- Sometimes in the discharge of my professional duties, I have observed that there was an utter disproportion between the clothing and the food of these knitters. I am no judge as to the value or quality of the goods, but many of them are clothed in a very gaudy, showy manner, and in a way quite inconsistent with their position in life. I have reason to know at the same time that their food is utterly ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... two days she would delay a week, and after a week things would be adjusted to submission forever. "I'll go," she vowed to the night, "or I'll die!" She made plans and estimated means and resources. These and her general preparations had perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold watch, a very good gold watch that had been her mother's, a pearl necklace that was also pretty good, some unpretending rings, some silver bangles and a few other such inferior trinkets, three pounds thirteen shillings unspent ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... had reached such proportions that it was thought that "the great number of negroes which of late have been imported into this Collony may endanger the safety thereof." The immigration of white servants was therefore encouraged by a special law.[10] Increase of immigration reduced this disproportion, but Negroes continued to be imported in such numbers as to afford considerable revenue from a moderate duty on them. About the time when the Assiento was signed, the slave-trade so increased that, scarcely a year after the consummation of that momentous ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... fell like a thunder-clap on Joan and her husband. The Hungarian army consisted of 10,000 horse and more than 7000 infantry, and Aversa had only 500 soldiers under Giacomo Pignatelli. In spite of the immense disproportion of the numbers, the Neapolitan general vigorously repelled the attack; and the King of Hungary, fighting in the front, was wounded in his foot by an arrow. Then Louis, seeing that it would be difficult to take the place by storm, determined to starve them out. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... remarkable effect of such extensive wastes, that they impose an idea of solitude even upon those who travel through them in considerable numbers; so much is the imagination affected by the disproportion between the desert around and the party who are traversing it. Thus the members of a caravan of a thousand souls may feel, in the deserts of Africa or Arabia, a sense of loneliness unknown to the individual traveller, whose solitary course is through ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... (Monatsschrift fuer Geburtshuelfe, 1889, Bk. ix, pp. 221 et seq.) has collected over one hundred and fifty cases of injury to women in coitus inflicted by the penis. The causes were brutality, drunkenness of one or both parties, unusual position in coitus, disproportion of the organs, pathological conditions of the woman's organs (Cf. R.W. Taylor, Practical Treatise on Sexual Disorders, Ch. XXXV). Blumreich also discusses the injuries produced by violent coitus (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sum must be raised on the security of Irish property, and expended upon labour, during the continuance of the distress occasioned by the failure of the potato crop, the expenditure of this sum upon unproductive works will increase the disproportion already existing between labour and capital in the country; which disproportion they look on as the main cause of the want of employment for the people, and of the miserable wages they are sustained by. Reproductive work, they continue, is the only work on which the labour of the population ought ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... least ten males for one female, maintains a great disproportion between the sexes. This is the greatest evil ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... goodness of God they tread upon much less firm earth. How can one see any proof of that goodness in the senseless and intolerable sufferings of man—his helplessness, the brief and troubled span of his life, the inexplicable disproportion between his deserts and his rewards, the tragedy of his soaring aspiration, the worse tragedy of his dumb questioning? Granting the existence of God, a house dedicated to Him naturally follows. He is ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... American in these fine qualities. This was at Mr. Lecky's. He is Irish, you know. Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's. Lord Roberts is Irish; and Sir William Butler; and Kitchener, I think; and a disproportion of the other prominent Generals are of Irish and Scotch breed-keeping up the traditions of Wellington, and Sir Colin Campbell of the Mutiny. You will have noticed that in S. A. as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish and the Scotch that are placed in the fore-front ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... disproportion between the losses of the two armies is not surprising, when we remember the armour of the Greek spearmen, and the impossibility of heavy slaughter being inflicted by sword or lance on troops so armed, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... its movements must be slow in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals, (especially in great and arduous cases like this,) if we did not look, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 150,000,000 pounds, and Ireland of but 36,000,000 pounds, there are in Ireland 75,000 agricultural proletarians more than in the neighbouring island. {272a} How great the competition for land in Ireland must be is evident from this extraordinary disproportion, especially when one reflects that the labourers in Great Britain are living in the utmost distress. The consequence of this competition is that it is impossible for the tenants to live much better than the labourers, by reason of the high rents paid. The Irish people is thus held in crushing poverty, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... that the expenses incurred in the prosecution of the ambitious enterprises and vainglorious pursuits of a monarchy are not a proper standard by which to judge of those which might be necessary in a republic, it ought, on the other hand, to be remarked that there should be as great a disproportion between the profusion and extravagance of a wealthy kingdom in its domestic administration, and the frugality and economy which in that particular become the modest simplicity of republican government. If ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... and this was the origin of the sound wafted to General Lee's ears as he came in sight of Thoroughfare. It was certainly calculated to excite his nerves if they were capable of being excited. Jackson was evidently engaged, and the disproportion between his forces and those of General Pope rendered such an engagement extremely critical. Lee accordingly pressed forward, reached the Gap, and the advance force suddenly halted: the Gap was defended. The Federal force posted here, at the eastern opening of the Gap, was small, and ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... gun. Counting all the French dead we came across killed by artillery, they figured up about three hundred —a ridiculously small number; in fact, not much more than one dead man for each Krupp gun on that part of the line. Although the number of dead was in utter disproportion to the terrific six-hour cannonade, yet small as it was the torn and mangled bodies made such a horrible sight that we turned back toward Bazeilles without having gone further ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... The dark locks were rolled back in pompadour fashion over a high cushion, the plait turned up in a queue, fastened at the nape of the neck by an enormous outstanding bow; the cheeks were fuller in outline, and the disproportion between nose and mouth less marked. She was by no means pretty, yet there was a charm about the quaint little face which made the onlooker smile involuntarily and feel a sudden ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you might own one a year without thinking how it was done; but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness. The weaver and the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same elements. Twice a year, in the time ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... is based (1) on the disproportion between nature and grace and (2) on the absolute necessity of grace for ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... back over this chapter, it will be strange if some are not impressed, and unfavorably impressed, with a disproportion in the names cited as representative, which are taken chiefly from some two or three sects. This may justly be referred in part, no doubt, to the author's point of view and to the "personal equation"; but it is more largely due to the fact ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... be a long time after the first establishment of such colonies, before it can become profitable to feed cattle upon the produce of cultivated land. The same causes, therefore, the want of manure, and the disproportion between the stock employed in cultivation and the land which it is destined to cultivate, are likely to introduce there a system of husbandry, not unlike that which still continues to take place in so many parts of Scotland. Mr Kalm, the Swedish traveller, when he gives an account ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... with a fate too great, a history too various, for its slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human lot. A disproportion—all in favour of man—between man and his destiny is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the trouble of a 'vain capacity,' so well ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... and residing in, the society of men, in whom the will of God is supreme, is to change the heavy lump of dough into light, nutritious bread. There are three or four points suggested by the parable which I could touch upon; and the first of them is that significant disproportion between the apparent magnitude of the dead mass that is to be leavened, and the tiny piece of active energy which is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... reliability in certain materials or processes used in decoration, or the rules of treatment which will modify a low and dark room and make it seem light and airy, or "bring down" too high a ceiling and widen narrow walls so as to apparently correct disproportion? These things are the results of laws which she has never studied—laws of compensation and relation, which belong exclusively to the world of colour, and unfortunately they are not so well formulated that they can be committed to memory like rules of grammar; yet all good colour-practice ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... everybody else might not share his interest. But I shall not use that argument; it is quite possible for an artist of Strauss's worth to keep us entertained. What grates upon me more is the way in which he speaks of himself. The disproportion between his subject and the means he has of expressing it is too strong. Above all, I do not like this display of the inner and secret self. There is a want of reticence in this Sinfonia Domestica. The fireside, the sitting-room, and the bedchamber, are open to all-comers. Is this the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... mass of fluttering dresses and wide-rimmed straw hats that drew down toward the "Rose Standish," and gracefully thronged the pier, and prettily hesitated about, and finally came aboard with laughter and little false cries of terror, attended through all by the New England disproportion of that sex which is so foolish when it is silly. It was a large picnic party which had been spending the day upon the beach, as each of the ladies showed in her face, where, if the roses upon her cheeks were somewhat ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... longer life, are inclined to treat the notions of those whose conduct they superintend with superciliousness and contempt, for want of considering that the future and the past have different appearances; that the disproportion will always be great between expectation and enjoyment, between new possession and satiety; that the truth of many maxims of age gives too little pleasure to be allowed till it is felt; and that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... friends who had sworn to be comrades for life. There are explanations and justifications. George Sand discovers that there are certain inconveniences connected with intimacies in which there is such disproportion of age and of social position. Finally there are the following desperate letters, written in fits of irritation: "My dear friend, go to Jules and look after him. He is broken-hearted, and you can do nothing for him in that respect. It is no use trying. I do not ask you to come ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... prodigious market-buildings, which occupied one whole side of the immense oblong. This market-place haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen it, were it but once, while waiting to change trains; it was so unexpected, so magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it, the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent witness to the might and opulence of old, ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... veracity:—Eastern nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with two;—Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and exalting themselves into ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... accounted for by the melancholy of the landscape, that immense gloomy plain which stretches from Nanterre to Saint Cloud, broken only by a few clumps of trees or the smoke of factory chimneys. Possibly also by the disproportion that existed between the humble little straggling village which you expected to find and the grandiose establishment, this country mansion in the style of Louis XIII, an agglomeration of mortar looking pink through the branches of its leafless ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... prevents putrefaction, it renders the skin moist and flexible for many days. While the bird is drying, take it out and replace it in its position once every day. Then, if you see that any part begins to shrink into disproportion, you can easily ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... in the present day been taken up into the social sciences from natural science, and adopted. But originally it descended from social science to natural. Darwin's law is, as he himself said, only Malthus' law generalised and extended to the animal world: a growing disproportion between the supply of food and the number of the living is the fatal order whence arises the necessity of universal struggle, a struggle which, to the great advantage of the species, allows only the best equipped individuals to survive. Nature is regarded ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... suffrage all but universal have neither equalised wealth nor abrogated greed and iniquity; and though there be some dreamers in our midst to-day who look for wonderful transformations of society to follow on possible reforms, there is not even in these dreamy schemes the same amazing disproportion of means to be employed and end to be attained ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... when wool-growing and the manufacture of woollen goods developed into important industries. Relatively to the population there was more "meat" of oxen and sheep in this country than on the continent of Europe, and this disproportion has been maintained. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... it might be said, that, knowing his pride, and become hopeless of subduing him, except by means of himself, these monarchs and their people only humbled themselves before him, in order to aggravate the disproportion of his elevation, and by so doing, to dazzle his moral vision. In their assemblies, their attitude, their words, even the tone of their voice, attested his ascendancy over them. All were assembled there for his sake alone! ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... inconvenience to the traffic and commerce of the country. From the fact that nearly 2,000 miles of Railway are already made or sanctioned on the narrow gauge, while not more than 300 are sanctioned on the wide gauge, a disproportion which will be still more largely increased by the new Railways now in contemplation, an inference might be drawn in favour of confining the gauge which is in such a decided minority within the narrowest possible ...
— Report of the Railway Department of the Board of Trade on the • Samuel Laing
... Churra, is seen to be very abrupt, but nothing can be seen beyond the elevated plateau of this part towards the south. To the east and west the view has the usual appearance—grassy valleys and hills—with a great disproportion ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... note that Whitman's Washington physician said he had one of the most thoroughly natural physical systems he had ever known,—the freest, probably, from extremes or any disproportion; which answers to the perfect sanity which all his friends must have felt with regard ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... agonizing aspirings after a something, clearly perceived to exist, but to be here unattainable—that all these things point to another life, the only true life of the soul? There is such a manifest disproportion between all objects of earthly attainment and the capacities of the spirit, that, unless man is immortal, he is vastly more to be pitied than the meanest reptile that crawls upon the earth. So I thought as I was walking this morning and saw a frog ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... four thousand five hundred men, had routed the army of Holkar and the Rajah of Berar—amounting in all to over fifty thousand, of whom ten thousand five hundred were disciplined troops, commanded by Frenchmen. The news excited the utmost enthusiasm among the troops, as the disproportion of numbers was far greater than it had been at the ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... from their combustion being complete; and the disproportion between the flame and heat shows you that these are by ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... equally alert and vigilant. None of these whalemen ever exceed the age of forty: they look on those who are past that period not to be possessed of all that vigour and agility which so adventurous a business requires. Indeed if you attentively consider the immense disproportion between the object assailed and the assailants; if you think on the diminutive size, and weakness of their frail vehicle; if you recollect the treachery of the element on which this scene is transacted; the sudden and unforeseen accidents of winds, etc., ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... the bones too is remarkable, although this is characteristic of all the catodon whales, especially as regards the bones of the anterior narial passages, the left of which is very much larger than the right. This is also the case in the large sperm whale, but in Euphysetes the disproportion is still greater. In a notice on a New Zealand species (E. Pottsii), by Dr. Julius Haast, he gives the difference as fifteen times the size of the right aperture; the mouth is also peculiar from its ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... capacious bosom while making tracks from her enemies; nor is she much "on the fight," not being so liberally furnished with jaw as the fierce and much larger bull—for this is the only species of whale in which there exists a great disproportion between the sexes in point of size. Such difference as may obtain between the MYSTICETA is slightly in favour of the female. I never heard of a cow-cachalot yielding more than fifty barrels of oil; but I have both heard of, and seen, bulls carrying one hundred and fifty. One individual ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... enough?—No; they are not: because it is only the Balance which can keep you on the right path; strength without the beauty sense,—yes, even fortitude, strength of will,—turns at the touch of quickening time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion, brutality; ay, it is not strength:—the saving quality of strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it: only the Balance is true strength. The empires that were founded upon uncompassion, through they swept the world ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... been read in their respective times and circles with great avidity, and produced a correspondent effect. THE PORT FOLIO alone raised, long ago, a spirit in the country which malicious Dulness itself will never be able to lay. Yet the disproportion in number of those miscellanies which have succeeded in America, to those which enrich the republic of letters in England, is astonishing, considering the comparative population of the two countries. London boasts of several periodical publications founded on the DRAMA alone; and though the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... both, that distance of place and time can make no alteration in my friendship. It grew from esteem for your characters, and understandings, and tempers; and became affection from your good-natured attentions 'to me, where there is so vast a disproportion in our ages. Indeed, that complaisance spoiled me; but I have weaned myself of my own self-love, and you shall hear no more ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... an excessive ambition of originality, can alone account for the disproportion which seems to exist between this author's taste and his genius; or for the devotion with which he has sacrificed so many precious gifts at the shrine of those paltry idols which he has set up for himself among his lakes and his mountains. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Nueva Valencia occupies a considerable extent of ground, but its population scarcely amounts to six or seven thousand souls. The streets are very broad, the market place, (plaza mayor,) is of vast dimensions; and, the houses being low, the disproportion between the population of the town, and the space that it occupies, is still greater than at Caracas. Many of the whites, (especially the poorest,) forsake their houses, and live the greater part of the year in their little plantations ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... gone! Hours of remorse and indecision lay before him! And with a heavy sense of disproportion he smiled, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... made the collection the finest academic library in England, not excepting the excellent library of 380 volumes then at Peterhouse. It had a character of its own. The usual overwhelming mass of Bibles, of church books, of the Fathers and the Schoolmen does not depress us with its disproportion. The collection was strong in astronomy and medicine: Ptolemy, Albumazar, Rhazes, Serapion, Avicenna, Haly Abenragel, Zaael, and others were all represented. Besides these, there was a fine selection of the classics—Plato, Aristotle, including the Politica and Ethica, Aeschines' ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... pleasure. The enterprise of others is baffled by the extravagance of their family; for few men can make as much in a year as an extravagant woman can carry on her back in one winter. Some are ambitious of fashionable society, and will gratify their vanity at any expense. This disproportion between means and expense soon brings on a crisis. The victim is straitened for money; without it he must abandon his rank; for fashionable society remorselessly rejects all butterflies which have lost their brilliant colors. Which shall he choose, honesty ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... was the first effective moralist who realized what a monstrous disproportion existed between the fortune of the rich and of the poor.[15] If we read the chapter "Des Biens de Fortune" we may be astonished at his courage, and we may see in him a direct precursor of the revolution which took a little more than a hundred ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... comfort, and probably a very considerable addition to real happiness. In the case of rich men this is not the case, and of colossal fortunes only a very small fraction can be truly said to minister to the personal enjoyment of the owner. The disproportion in the world between pleasure and cost is indeed almost ludicrous. The two or three shillings that gave us our first Shakespeare would go but a small way towards providing one of the perhaps untasted dishes on the dessert table. The choicest masterpieces of the ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of one sort or another—too often successful—had been made upon the lives of persons who had incurred the hostility of powerful labour organizations. This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric. But nowhere, in my judgement, is the prospect so dark as it is in the ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... follow that there must be precisely four. And therefore I hope you will proceed to acquaint us with your other and more considerable Objections against Themistius's Opinion, especially since there is so great a Disproportion in Bulke betwixt the Earth, Water and Air, on the one part, and those little parcells of resembling substances, that the fire separates from Concretes on the other part, that I can scarce think that you are serious, when to ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... to Cheshire's calculations, she has provided each of their antennae with thirty-seven thousand eight hundred olfactory cavities, while the worker has only five thousand in both. There we have an instance of the almost universal disproportion that exists between the gifts she rains upon love and her niggardly doles to labour; between the favours she accords to what shall, in an ecstasy, create new life, and the indifference wherewith she regards what will patiently have to maintain itself by toil. Whoever would seek faithfully ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... witnessed on the high seas, as it has been remarkable for the reverse on land. The French have not been wanting in excellent sailors—gallant seamen, too; but the results of their exploits afloat have ever borne a singular disproportion to the means employed—a few occasional exceptions just going to prove that the causes have been of a character as peculiar, as these results have, in nearly all ages, been uniform. I have heard the want of success in maritime exploits, among the French, attributed to a ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... entirely, or cause it to develop in a saccharine medium deprived of free oxygen, it will multiply just as if air were present, although with less activity, and under these circumstances its fermentative character will be most marked; under these circumstances, moreover, we shall find the greatest disproportion, all other conditions being the same, between the weight of yeast formed and the weight of sugar decomposed. Lastly, if free oxygen occurs in varying quantities, the ferment-power of the yeast may pass through all the degrees comprehended between the two extreme limits of which ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... that there are a few hoboes who have taken to boys because women are so scarce "on the road." For every woman in hoboland there are a hundred men. That this disproportion has something to do with the popularity of boys is made clear by the following case: In a gaol, where I was confined for a month during my life in vagabondage, I got acquainted with a tramp who had the reputation of being a "sod" (sodomist). One day a woman ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... memory, subjugated a still mightier empire, and abased a still prouder name. Such odds had never been heard of in war. The people whom Frederic ruled were not five millions. The population of the countries which were leagued against him amounted to a hundred millions. The disproportion in wealth was at least equally great. Small communities, actuated by strong sentiments of patriotism or loyalty, have sometimes made head against great monarchies weakened by factions and discontents. But small as was Frederic's kingdom, it probably contained a greater ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... influence on the priesthood; but this was not all. The caste increased in numbers by the process of natural reproduction much more rapidly than the offices to be filled, so that the supply of priests and deacons soon far exceeded the demand; and the disproportion between supply and demand became every year greater and greater. In this way was formed an ever-increasing clerical Proletariat, which—as is always the case with a Proletariat of any kind—gravitated towards the towns. In vain the Government issued ukazes prohibiting the priests ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... to himself. 'Have I ever been sane? Probably not. The disproportion between my motives and other men's is too great to be normal. Well, at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still be doing penance in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... corsets and tight lacing do not necessarily go hand in hand. Distortion and feebleness are not beauty. A proper proportion should exist between the size of the waist and the breadth of the shoulders and hips, and if the waist is diminished below this proportion, it suggests disproportion and invalidism rather than ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... parts was obtained, and upon singing into the external artificial ear the piece of hay was thrown into vibration, and tracings were obtained upon a plane surface of smoked glass passed rapidly underneath. While engaged in these experiments I was struck with the remarkable disproportion in weight between the membrane and the bones that were vibrated by it. It occurred to me that if a membrane as thin as tissue paper could control the vibration of bones that were, compared to it, of immense size and weight, why should not a larger and thicker membrane be able to vibrate a ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... opened; the Dutch traders were scrupulously honest in their dealings and purchased by weight, establishing it as an invariable table of avoirdupois, that the hand of a Dutchman weighed one pound, and his foot two pounds. It is true, the simple Indians were often puzzled by the great disproportion between bulk and weight, for let them place a bundle of furs, never so large, in one scale, and a Dutchman put his hand or foot in the other, the bundle was sure to kick the beam;—never was a package of furs known to weigh more than two pounds in ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms:—waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity—her disproportion—her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... keep well. Good health on the whole is a kind of by-product. We suffer as distinctly from spiritual and mental maladjustments as from physical. We suffer also from the sense of inadequacy, the sense, that is, of a burdening disproportion between our own powers and the challenge of life. New Thought has addressed itself increasingly to such states and problems as this. Here it ceases to be a cult or a method of healing and has become a most considerable influence and here also it in general takes the direction ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... degrees (their seats being adapted to this course of proceeding and being bent down at their backs). They mistake their carriage and its horizontal lines for a proper measure of the normal plain, and therefore all the objects outside which really are in a horizontal position must show a disproportion of twenty to twenty-five degrees declivity, in regard to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... every one is at liberty to find this tendency pleasing or disagreeable, but none can doubt its historical necessity. From this point of view the very defectiveness of the Roman poetry, which cannot be denied, may be explained and so may in some degree be justified. It is no doubt pervaded by a disproportion between the trivial and often bungled contents and the comparatively finished form; but the real significance of this poetry lay precisely in its formal features, especially those of language and metre. It was not seemly ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the delegates from Alsace-Lorraine at Berlin is characteristic. William II, eternally pre-occupied with stage-effects, has on this occasion accentuated the disproportion between the framework and the results obtained. He insisted upon it that the proceedings should be as imposing as the refusal of the delegates' request was to be humiliating. All the pomp and circumstance of State was displayed for the occasion, with the result of ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... representation! Is not this enormous? Have gentlemen considered this? Have they looked at it? Are they willing to look it in the face, and then say they embrace it? I trust, Sir, the people will look at it and consider it. And now let me add, that this disproportion can never be diminished; it must remain for ever. How are you going to diminish it? Why, here is Texas, with a hundred and forty-nine thousand people, with one State. Suppose that population should flow into Texas, where will ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... humming-bird is one drachm, that of the condor not less than four stone. Now, if we reduce four stone into drachms we shall find the condor is 14,336 times as heavy as the humming-bird. What an amazing disproportion of weight! Yet by the same mechanical use of its wings the condor can overcome the specific gravity of its body with as much ease as the little humming-bird. But this is not all. We are informed that this enormous bird possesses a power in ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... once establish that those bye-laws which afford protection to the well-governing of the merchant service in general, are not sufficient to maintain the necessary discipline on board of the East India ships. The greater the disproportion between the unit who commands and the numbers who obey, the greater the chance of mutiny. Sedition is the progeny of assembly. Even where grievances may be real, if there is no contact and no discussion, there will be no insubordination; but ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident to poverty, overcrowding, and bad ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... has been taken is a very wise one. I have been informed what is really in the cases. Were I going by myself with a sergeant and twelve men, I should say that to put the money in ammunition-cases was not only absolutely useless but dangerous, the disproportion between the force and the value of the ammunition would be so great that it would attract attention at once, but as you are with us it is more likely to pass without observation. You are an officer on the staff of the English general. You have your own two orderlies, and, as ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... first lesson taught here, the divinely appointed disproportion between means and end, and its purpose. Many an Israelite would look across to the long lines of black tents, and think, 'We are too few for our task'; but to God's eye they were too many, and the first necessity was to weed them out. The numbers must be so reduced that the victory shall be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... food, his physic and his bane. In due proportions where these atoms lie, A certain form their equal aids supply; And while unchanged the efficient causes reign, Age following age the certain form maintain. But where crude atoms disproportion'd rise, And cast their sickening vapors round the skies, Unlike that harmony of human frame, That moulded first and reproduce the same, The tribes ill form'd, attempering to the clime, Still vary downward with the years of time; ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... disagreement; discord, discordance; dissonance, dissidence, discrepancy; unconformity &c 83; incongruity, incongruence^; discongruity^, mesalliance; jarring &c v.; dissension &c 713; conflict &c (opposition) 708; bickering, clashing, misunderstanding, wrangle. disparity, mismatch, disproportion; dissimilitude, inequality; disproportionateness &c adj.^; variance, divergence, repugnance. unfitness &c adj.; inaptitude, impropriety; inapplicability &c adj.; inconsistency, inconcinnity^; irrelevancy &c (irrelation) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... difficult to lose the feeling of disproportion between the size of the Dutch churches and that of the villages and congregations. The villages are so small, the churches so vast. It is as though the churches were built to compensate for the absence of hills. From any one spire in Holland one must be able to ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... that the danger of "disproportion" was found. For the complex vision with the whole weight of all its aspects behind it receives the colour and the form of only one of them. We can see the result of this from the tenacity—implying the presence of emotion ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Victory. His head was crowned with a laurel wreath; his mantle, falling from one shoulder, left his breast bare and covered the lower part of his person with its ample folds of pure gold enamelled with flowers. The whole height of the statue with the pedestal was about fifty feet; by its very disproportion to the size of the temple it was made to appear still larger than it really was. This statue was reckoned one of the wonders of the world. In it the Greeks seemed to behold Zeus face to face. To see it was a cure for all earthly woes, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... inseparable from the desire to escape from it; every idea of pleasure from the desire to enjoy it. All desire implies a want, and all wants are painful; hence our wretchedness consists in the disproportion between our desires and our powers. A conscious being whose powers were equal to his desires would ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Caernarvonshire side. A thick bank of earth had there to be cut through, and a solid mass of masonry built in its place, the rock being situated at a greater distance from the main pier; involving a greater length of suspending chain, and a disproportion in the catenary or chord line on that side of the bridge. The excavation and masonry thereby rendered necessary proved a work of vast labour, and its execution occupied a considerable time; but by the beginning of the year ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... intensity. Among incongruities that may excite anything but a laugh, Mr. Bain instances—"A decrepit man under a heavy burden, five loaves and two fishes among a multitude, and all unfitness and gross disproportion; an instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege, and all discordant things; a wolf in sheep's clothing, a breach of bargain, and falsehood in general; the multitude taking the law in their own hands, and everything of the nature of ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... under oath the monstrosities of the existing system were fully revealed, as well as the wretched character of the "health officers,'' "inspectors,'' and the whole army of underlings, and I exhibited statistics carefully ascertained and tabulated, showing the absurd disproportion of various classes of officials to each other, their appointment being made, not to preserve the public health, but to carry the ward caucuses and elections. During this exposure Boole, the head of the whole system, stood not far from me on the floor, his ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... affection and confidence, and to establish that equality of benefits and burdens which constitutes the true basis of our strength and union? Will the militia of the nation, which must furnish our soldiers and seamen, increase as slaves increase? Will the actual disproportion in the military service of the nation be thereby diminished?—a disproportion that will be, as it has been, readily borne, as between the original States, because it arises out of their compact of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... service, not of sorrow and defeat. It is surely better to ride a fine steed well under control, than find our safety only because we mount a hack. I have heard young men complain bitterly about the disproportion between their bodily passions and their will-power. They overlook two things—first, that will can be acquired, that an act of will means more will; and, secondly, that passion in itself can be, and is intended ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... reliable sources the enemy at this period numbered 40,000 men, all trained soldiers of the former regular army, besides undisciplined armed hordes of fanatics and rabble of the city and surrounding country—a formidable disproportion to our scanty force when it is recollected that they were protected by strong fortifications mounting upwards of fifty guns, with an unlimited supply of artillery and munitions of war, and that with their vast numbers they had ample opportunities of harassing ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... he saith, [5745]Diligenter consideranti raro facies absoluta, et quae vitio caret, seldom shall you find an absolute face without fault, as I have often observed; not in the face alone is this defect or disproportion to be found; but in all the other parts, of body and mind; she is fair, indeed, but foolish; pretty, comely, and decent, of a majestical presence, but peradventure, imperious, dishonest, acerba, iniqua, self-willed: ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 2. Touching his laws, this I say further, they are both unreasonable, intricate, and intolerable. Unreasonable, as was hinted before; for that the punishment is not proportioned to the offence: there is great difference and disproportion between the life and an apple; yet the one must go for the other by the law of your Shaddai. But it is also intricate, in that he saith, first, you may eat of all; and yet after forbids the eating of one. And then, in the last place, it must needs be intolerable, forasmuch as that fruit which you ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... France, who thought nothing so small, not even a lark or a minnow, but he might vindicate his prowess by its capture. For such a great, healthy man, his hair flourishing like Samson's, his arteries running buckets of red blood, to boast of these infinitesimal exploits, produced a feeling of disproportion in the world, as when a steam-hammer is set to cracking nuts. The other was a quiet, subdued person, blond and lymphatic and sad, with something the look of a Dane: 'Tristes tetes de Danois!' as Gaston Lafenestre used ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of these periodical repentances? At the first temptation I forgot my remorse and good resolutions. I am weak and mean-spirited, and you are not firm enough to govern my vacillating nature. While my intentions are good, my actions are villainous. The disproportion between my extravagant desires, and the means of gratifying them, is too great for me to endure any longer. Who knows to what fearful lengths my unfortunate disposition may lead me? However, I will take my fate in my own hands!" he finally said with ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... time I perceived, in examining the fruits of the labour of so many days and nights, the vast disproportion between the magnitude of the subject and my untrained powers. One passage seemed faulty, another so overstrained and inadequate, that I flung it angrily back among the rest. At the same time I thought that the verses I had addressed to various beauties and the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... more thoroughly brow-beaten the states, and having soundly lectured Buckhurst—as a requital for his successful efforts to bring about a more wholesome condition of affairs—she gave the envoy a parting stab, with this postscript;—"There is small disproportion," she said "twist a fool who useth not wit because he hath it not, and him that useth it not when it should avail him." Leicester, too, was very violent in his attacks upon Buckhurst. The envoy had succeeded in reconciling Hohenlo with the brothers Norris, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Man's disproportion.—[This is where our innate knowledge leads us. If it be not true, there is no truth in man; and if it be true, he finds therein great cause for humiliation, being compelled to abase himself in one ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... distance and difference there was between suffering, dying Christ, and wretched men living in sin. None can say but he is infinitely better, even while in pain, nor(176) the highest prince in pleasure, so much disproportion there is between sin and pain; so much is the one worse than the other. Do not think then that Christ died to purchase an indulgence for you to live in sin. Truly that were to take away the lesser evil, that the greater may remain; that were to deliver from one misery, that we may be ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... like a Beggar in a rich Wardrobe. He found the pure native English too cold and poor to second the Heat and Abundance of his Imagination: and therefore was forc'd to dress it up in the Robes, he saw provided for it: rich in themselves, but ill-shaped; cut out to an air of Magnificence, but disproportion'd and cumbersome. To the Costliness of Ornament, he added all the Graces and Decorum of it. It may be said, this did not require, or discover a Knowledge of the Latin. To the first, I think, it did not; to the second, it is so far from discovering it, that, I think, it discovers the contrary. ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... after being struck with the justice of these observations, one still retains a sort of intellectual uneasiness, a certain suspicion of the disproportion between the explanation and the phenomena it seeks to explain? How does it happen, that, under the influence of such an impression, many suffer themselves to be seduced into an admission of diabolical or miraculous agency? It happens, because Dr. Calmeil, faithful to the countersign of all learned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... influence is in reality hardly observable in such a case. In the moment of real action, the notions of the actual strength of the enemy are generally so uncertain, the estimate of our own commonly so incorrect, that the party superior in numbers either does not admit the disproportion, or is very far from admitting the full truth, owing to which, he evades almost entirely the moral disadvantages which would spring from it. It is only hereafter in history that the truth, long suppressed through ignorance, vanity, or a wise discretion, makes its appearance, and then it certainly ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... bankruptcies—a tea-totaller, with Pope's Essay on Man for his consolation, in a bark hut. This "melancholy Jaques" lamented the state of depravity to which the colony was reduced, and assured me that there were shepherdesses in the bush! This startling fact should not be startling, but for the disproportion of sexes, and the squatting system which checks the spread of families. If pastoralisation were not one thing, and colonisation another, the occupation of tending sheep should be as fit and proper for women as for men. The pastoral life, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... construction work, the gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge, the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work of clearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and I marveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilled in this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capable of active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if given intelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually and educationally equipped to plan and direct ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... rise in the world was not of that meteor-like rapidity which the admirers of his extemporaneous eloquence had expected for a preacher whose voice demanded so wide a sphere, he had yet enough of growing prosperity to enable him to increase his expenditure in continued disproportion to his income. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... disproportion between the ages of the master and the pupil; in my eyes she was quite an old person, in her eyes, being her intellectual equal, I was likewise her equal in age. In the natural order of things she felt more personal ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... such tendency in some other mission fields. Possibly it may yet be manifested here. This, however, does not now seem probable. The native members of Tai-hoey, almost from the first, have outnumbered the foreign. The disproportion now is as three or four to one, and must continue to increase. It would seem, therefore, that there will now be no occasion for jealousy of the missionaries' influence to grow up on the part of ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... no district would embrace portions of two or more states. Since 1871 there has been no redistricting of the Empire, and the populations comprising the various constituencies have become grossly unequal. Berlin, with more than two million people, is still entitled to but six seats; and the disproportion in other great cities and densely inhabited regions is almost as flagrant.[328] There has long been demand for a redistribution of seats; but, by reason of the proneness of urban constituencies to return to the Reichstag socialists or other radicals, the Government has never ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Sparta the number of citizens was still less. At the time of the formulation of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus (about 850 B.C.) there were but 9000 Spartan families in the midst of 250,000 subject people. This disproportion increased rather than diminished ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... head of it, where there is a vast extent of boggy land; this is also the case in the next bay to the westward, Anderson Bay, which receives the waters of the Forestier River.** The only good soil seen was on the large Piper River, so that the disproportion of land fit for cultivation on this part of the northern shore of Tasmania, with that which is not, is very great. Behind the coast the eye wanders over interminable woody ranges of various heights, thrown together in irregular groups, called ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... these gems, it may be added, were such as the verses deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency, the disproportion which is the essence of parody combined with the accuracy which is the sine qua non ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... and incoherent. In consequence of the daily vicissitudes of his fortune, he is well aware that he is affected for better or for worse by agencies which fall outside the more familiar routine operations of society and nature. So great is the disproportion between the calculable and the incalculable elements of his life that he is like a man crouching in the dark, expecting a blow from any quarter. The agencies whose working can be discounted in advance form his secular world; but this world is narrow and meagre, and is overshadowed ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... characteristics—his voice and his hair—as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the "casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar—while the walls ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... shame of the one, whilst the intemperate vanity of the other justly provokes ridicule and indignation. I have always observed in the understandings of women who have been too much cultivated, some disproportion between the different faculties of their minds. One power of the mind undoubtedly may be cultivated at the expense of the rest; as we see that one muscle or limb may acquire excessive strength, and an unnatural size, at the expense of the health of the whole body: I ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... say, a true 'map of th world', such as was traced by the bold hand of the elder Herschel. If, notwithstanding the smallness of our planet, the most considerable space and the most attentive consideration be here afforded to that which exclusively concerns it, this arises solely from the disproportion in the extent of our knowledge of that which is accessible and of that which is closed to our observation. This subordination of the celestial to the terrestrial portion is met with in the great work of Bernard Varenius,* which appeared in the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Washington shortly afterward, and was boasting that the elevation of Mr. Jefferson was brought about solely by the management of Tammany Hall. Mr. Jefferson was a philosopher, and soon after caught a very large fly, calling the attention of Mr. Davis to the remarkable fact of the great disproportion in size of one portion of the insect to its body. Mr. Davis took the hint, and left the President, in doubt as to whether Mr. Jefferson intended the comparison to apply to New York or to him (Davis) ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... "N'etes-vous donc pas ridicules, mes Peres? Qu'on satisfait au precepte d'ouir la messe en entendant quatre quarts de messe a la fois de differents pretres!" When [68] you have the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'y porte davantage qu'une disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attend et ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... must be made. Fitzjames was still doomed to be an illustration of the curious disproportion which may exist between a man's intrinsic power and his fitness for professional success. Still, as at college, he was distanced in the race by men greatly his inferiors in general force of mind, but better provided with the talent for bringing their gifts to market. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... necessary outside provisioning to such a sum. Still, quintupling it even, the hotel, at the spa a mile away, will charge you the same twenty sous for a cup of coffee, and considerably more for the lightest meal. The disproportion is ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... the world blame us if you are left happy at the last? We are daily banishing from our law-books the statutes that disproportion punishment to crime. Daily we preach the doctrine that we demoralize wherever we strain justice into cruelty. It is time that we should apply to the Social Code the Wisdom we recognize in Legislation! It is time that we should ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... danger and escape are exciting to the imagination, from the disproportion between the interests of an individual and the interests of a whole nation which for the moment happen to be concurrent. The death or the escape of Caesar, at one moment, rather than another, would ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... been a beauty in her day, but as she passed middle age the family failing seized upon her, and she grew huge and unwieldy, the disproportion of her enormous figure to her small feet giving her an awkward, ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... v. Now this being the great design of God, of which all other things done in time are but the footsteps and low representations, the great question is, how this shall be brought about, because of the great distance and huge disproportion of the parties, He "being the brightness of the Father's glory," and we being wholly eclipsed and darkened since our fall;—He higher than the heaven of heavens, and we fallen as low as hell into a dungeon of darkness and misery, led away by sin and Satan, lying ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... knew that tens of thousands died so, and had died so ever since the days of Phenicians and Gauls and Goths. But it revolted him. The few gorged, the many famished—strange disproportion! unkind ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... that the position of Ireland under the Act of Union would become steadily worse. We have probably not yet reached the bottom of the hill. Ireland is so poor that each new Act for the relief of poverty increases the disproportion between the expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland. There is no way out of that vicious circle. If England were to increase Irish taxation she would simply increase the poverty which she has to relieve. During the last fifty years, in fact, the British Government has had to give back in some ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... polyandry of the Tibetans is in direct contrast with the polygamy of the Moslems, and is far more strictly maintained. It is favored by the circumstance that, contrary to what usually obtains in old countries, the males in this region considerably outnumber the females; yet, while that disproportion exists throughout the provinces, polyandry is confined to the Tibetans. Their wretched lands, verging on the line of perpetual snow, devoid of fuel, and in many places unable to ripen grain, keep them poor; and they assign as a justification for the practice the necessity of repressing population ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... etc. But it is his Tales of the Hall which discover him in silk Stockings; the subjects, the Scenery, the Actors, of a more Comedy kind: with, I say, Paragraphs, and Pages, of fine Moliere style—only too often defaced by carelessness, disproportion, and 'longueurs' intolerable. I shall leave my Edition of Tales of the Hall, made legible by the help of Scissors and Gum, with a word or two of Prose to bridge over pages of stupid Verse. I don't wish to try and supersede the Original, but, by the Abstract, to get People to read the whole, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... She was a sloop of some ninety or one hundred tons, with a tall mast, that, to the timid eye of a landsman, seemed fitter for a vessel of twice her size, and when her enormous mainsail was raised and usual sail set, she looked more like one of those birds whose wings bear such a disproportion to the body, that in the contemplation we forget to what they are attached, than like a safe and sea-worthy craft. But the shipwright who laid her keel and shaped her ribs, knew what he was about, and the Calypso was as staunch and stiff as she was handsome. Her cabin extended full one-half the length ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... singular disproportion between the expansive force of its political, scientific, and commercial life and that of its literary life. While the work of the Dutch in every other field extends beyond the frontier of the land, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... survived. Even so, Maiwand was one of the gravest disasters ever sustained by our Indian army. It cost Burrows' force nearly half its numbers; 934 officers and men were killed and 175 wounded. The strange disproportion between these totals may serve as a measure of the ferocity of Afghans in the hour of victory. Of the non-combatants 790 fell under the knives of the ghazis. The remnant struggled towards Candahar, whence, on the 28th, General Primrose despatched a column to the aid of the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of all the child angels by what will seem to you the undue size of their abdomen. You will notice this even in the works of painters who, like Raphael, most idealise their subjects, while in those of others who, like Rubens, interpret nature more literally, the apparent disproportion becomes grotesque; or, in the coarser hands of Jordaens, ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... accurately and firmly fitted to each other, so as not to admit of being moved. If the beak of a retort is to be luted to the neck of a recipient, they ought to fit pretty accurately; otherwise we must fix them, by introducing short pieces of soft wood or of cork. If the disproportion between the two be very considerable, we must employ a cork which fits the neck of the recipient, having a circular hole of proper dimensions to admit the beak of the retort. The same precaution is necessary ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... great struggle on that continent, the thirteen colonies had reached a population of nearly a million and a quarter of souls, exclusive of the negroes in the South, while the total number of the people in Canada and Louisiana did not exceed eighty thousand. In wealth and comfort there was the same disproportion between the French and English colonies. In fact at the time of the last {226} war, Canadian commerce was entirely paralysed, farms neglected, and the towns barely able to live. In 1757 food was so scarce in Quebec and Montreal that the soldiers and ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader's consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some disproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it is not because they are giants, but because they are hunchbacks or cripples. Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do not think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... and the debt which a fellow-servant owed to him, there is no assignable proportion: so vast is the difference that we cannot form a definite conception of the relation. This is precisely what we should expect in order to show the disproportion, or want of all proportion, between sins against God and sins against a neighbour. In this parable, on the other hand, the debt in both cases is due to the master, and not in either due by one servant to another. We accordingly do not expect, and do ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... discord, hostility, schism, battle, controversy, disproportion, incongruity, separation, conflict, difference, dissension, inconsistency, variance, contention, disagreement, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald |
