"Geometrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... carpet, they remained stationary. "You mean more to me than anything I have ever known. I used to wonder how I could ever think more of anyone than I thought of Woodbridge and the Star and the different boys in college, but that was nothing compared to this." Nancy was tracing a series of geometrical patterns upon the magic carpet with a bit of stick. "I wish I could do something to show you how much I care now." Still Nancy said nothing. "And, oh, Nancy, what you could do for me! With you to help me, I think I could do anything. But ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... orderly and symmetrical deductions from each other. But the good debater is he who faces the negative aspects of the question, who meets sudden objections, has an answer for any momentary summons of doubt or difficulty, dissipates seeming inconsistencies, and reconciles the geometrical smoothness of a priori abstractions with the coarse angularities of practical experience. The great work of Ricardo is of necessity, and almost in every page, polemic; whilst very often the particular objections or difficulties to which it replies are not indicated at all—being spread through ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... every child in Spaceland who has touched the threshold of Geometrical Studies, that, if I can bring my eye so that its glance may bisect an angle (A) of the approaching stranger, my view will lie as it were evenly between the two sides that are next to me (viz. CA and AB), so that I shall contemplate the ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... choir from the west, the pavement between the stalls is of tesselated Roman mosaic, in an effective geometrical pattern of squares, and oblongs of red, green and white marbles. The first bay of the chancel is also in Roman mosaic, but of more elaborate design, the central portion being a framework of interlacing cream bands, forming diamond shaped panels alternating with circles, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... the lectures were almost easy for me—for instance, those on mathematics. I have always been able to perceive with ease and pleasure relations of geometrical figures and of planes; so that it seemed inexplicable to me that every farmer should not be equally capable of understanding them. This I had said before to my brother, who tried to give me an explanation; but I did not yet grasp it. I had expected I ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... their attention by pretending to show them a geometrical problem and seizes the opportunity to steal something for supper. The young men who gathered together in the palaestra, or gymnastic school, were wont there to offer sacrifices to the gods before beginning the exercises. The offerings ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... was pregnant with another; invention followed invention almost in geometrical progression; the secrets of nature were disclosed; and power, being wielded only by men intent on good, disease and crime were soon reduced to almost imperceptible proportions. Wisdom and joy ruled where before folly and misery prevailed, and ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... mathematics dream of discussing these questions with his class before proceeding to the proof of his propositions? It is generally admitted that, if such questions are to be answered at all, it is not with the aid of geometrical reasonings that they will ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and draw a pen line with some steadiness (the geometrical exercises for this purpose being properly school, not University work), you shall have a series of studies from the plants which are of chief importance in the history of art; first from their real forms, and then from the conventional and heraldic ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... into her hands one of the Speranza Colt's. She took her bottom-lip between her teeth, shut her left eye, vaulted out the revolver like an old shot to the level of her intense right eye, and sent a ball through the geometrical centre of the boss. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Works are divided into Three Parts: The First Treats of Building; The Second is Gnomonical, and treats at large of Astronomical and Geometrical Affairs. The Third gives Rules and Examples for making Machines or Engines serviceable, either in War or Building. The First Part is treated of in the Eight first Books: The Second in the Ninth: ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... instrumentality of real timber and real hemp, should absolutely rely on the propositions which he finds in treatises on Dynamics, and should make no allowance for the imperfection of his materials, his whole apparatus of beams, wheels, and ropes would soon come down in ruin, and, with all his geometrical skill, he would be found a far inferior builder to those painted barbarians who, though they never heard of the parallelogram of forces, managed to pile up Stonehenge. What the engineer is to the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... scientific truth itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be contemplated. The mere delineation of the dimensions and colours of external objects is not poetry, no more than a geometrical ground-plan of St. Peter's or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive poetry consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as they appear, not as they are; and it paints them not in their bare and natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... hotel as a peculiarly American point of departure, and also because it is the hub of Washington,—the centre of an eccentric, having the White House at the end of its shorter, and the Capitol at the end of its longer radius,—moral, so they say, as well as geometrical. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... arithmetical or mathematical proportions, such as we employ in chemistry and natural philosophy, such as the Pythagoreans and even Aristotle make use of in Ethics and Politics, e.g. his distinction between arithmetical and geometrical proportion in the Ethics (Book V), or between numerical and proportional equality in ...
— The Republic • Plato
... come upon errands for her mother connected with a timorous refurbishment; and as she did these, in and out of the department stores, she had an insistent consciousness of the Sheridan Building. From the street, anywhere, it was almost always in sight, like some monstrous geometrical shadow, murk-colored and rising limitlessly into the swimming heights of the smoke-mist. It was gaunt and grimy and repellent; it had nothing but strength and size—but in that consciousness of Mary's the great structure may have partaken of beauty. Sheridan had made some ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... such a spider, nor even paid attention to any geometrical species; though one large black and yellow variety is, or used to be, common enough in our fields at the North. Neither had I ever heard of such a method of obtaining silk. But though my first specimen was not preserved, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... with common practice among architects. After pointing out the importance of studying design in the solid, that is, constantly keeping in mind that the forms which are to be designed have three dimensions, and that a geometrical projection, such as a plan or elevation, only partially represents its appearance, he advocates the more general use of perspective drawing in designing. By this is not meant the making of pretty sketches after the design is all determined, to mislead impressionable clients, but ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... aliquot part; prime number, prime, relative prime, prime factor, prime pair; reciprocal; totient^. binary number, octal number, hexadecimal number [Comp.]. permutation, combination, variation; election. ratio, proportion, comparison &c 464; progression; arithmetical progression, geometrical progression, harmonical progression^; percentage, permilage. figurate numbers^, pyramidal numbers, polygonal numbers. power, root, exponent, index, logarithm, antilogarithm; modulus, base. differential, integral, fluxion^, fluent. Adj. numeral, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... all his courage, reached blindly out in the direction indicated, and as he did so, he realized that annihilation was imminent. Demonstrating a swift geometrical figure in the air, he felt himself hurling through space, coming to an abrupt and awful pause when he struck the earth. Perceiving with a thrill of surprise that he was still alive, he cautiously opened his eyes. To his further amazement he found that he had landed on his feet, unhurt, ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... represents the original mansion, or, we should rather say, city of mansions, with its monastic chapel, and geometrical gardens, laid out in the trim style of our forefathers. The suite of state apartments in the principal front was very splendid, and previously to their being dismantled by Sir William Chambers, they exhibited ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... tend to increase. Every being which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... loveth, as if nothing could have happened more happily. You would say there was in that place Plato's academy; but I do his house an injury in comparing it to Plato's academy, where there were only disputations of numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes of moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school or university of Christian religion; for, though there is none therein but readeth and studyeth the liberal sciences, their special care is piety ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... let the blue flood of the Columbia through. The interest crept back to her face. Between them and those guardian peaks a steel bridge, fine as a spider web, was etched on the river, then a first orchard broke the areas of sage, the rows of young trees radiating from a small, new dwelling, like a geometrical pattern. Finally she said: "I would like to know a little more about Mrs. Barbour. Did you ever see her again, ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... free and vast and noble, I did not feel in the least awe-struck, or humbled by its size and grandeur. I have not often felt thus when looking on architecture, but have felt, at all events, at first, intense exultation at the beauty of it; that, and a certain kind of satisfaction in looking on the geometrical tracery of the windows, on the sweeping of the huge arches, were, I think, my ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... of the eighteenth century. Their sole expedient is material force, and as material force diminishes in the same degree as the spread of pauperism and the insight of the proletariat increase, English perplexity necessarily grows in geometrical proportion. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... on the bridge, between the wheel-house and the rail, where I was safe against rolling off. And then the shadows about me got deeper and blacker, and a horrible sense of oppression came over me, and I seemed to be falling endlessly while myriads of black specks arranged themselves in curious geometrical figures before my eyes—and then the black specks and everything else vanished suddenly, and my consciousness left me with what seemed to me a great crash ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... theory was Thomas Young, a name, perhaps, unfamiliar to many of you, but which ought to be familiar to you all. Permit me, therefore, by a kind of geometrical construction which I once ventured to employ in London, to give you a notion of the magnitude of this man. Let Newton stand erect in his age, and Young in his. Draw a straight line from Newton to Young, tangent to the heads of both. This line ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... head full of Roman castrametation and geometrical problems, a prince, scarce emerged from boyhood, presents himself on that stage where grizzled Mansfelds, drunken Hohenlos, and truculent Verdugos have been so long enacting, that artless military ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dressed in those geometrical undulations without which no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened. Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for her father and mother at her own studio, ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... distinction, and in the course of it, to the surprise of the examiners, showed that he could repeat Euclid verbatim,—not by the exercise of the memory, which in Ericsson is not remarkably retentive, but from his perfect mastery of geometrical science. There is no doubt that it is this thorough knowledge of geometry to which he is indebted for his clear conceptions on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and had left no instructions about me. So for two hours I sat in the waiting-room, balancing my cap on my knee, and trying to work up the spots on the dingy wall-paper into geometrical figures. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... and the soft, ceaseless jar of the throbbing engines, half a dream hovered above his head, and touched him with a gentle, insistent caress. If you had passed by him this afternoon, and had been anything of a mathematician who could straighten out geometrical angles, you would have come close to his height had you stopped at five feet nine. Indeed, had you clipped off the heels of his low shoes, you would have been exact. But all your nice calculations would not ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... to the starting point. Other poets still adhere to form, though the pattern must be elaborate enough to hide its scheme from the casual reader, and sufficiently elastic to provide space for sentiment and pathos. In his sixty-eighth poem Catullus employs what might be called a geometrical pattern, in fact a pyramid of unequal steps. He mounts to the central theme by a series of verses and descends on the other side by a corresponding series. In the sixty-fourth poem, however, the epyllion which the author of the Ciris clearly had in mind, Catullus ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... seems to have undergone every figure, size and shape of geometrical invention: It has passed through every form in the whole zodiac of Euclid. The large square buckle is the ton of the present day. The ladies also, have adopted the reigning taste: It is difficult to discover their beautiful little feet, covered ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... cosy. A cake of barley bread was on the table, and a little black teapot stood there also. There was no furniture but a low wooden bed, one chair, a settle, and a broad shelf. On the shelf was a slate scrabbled all over with geometrical figures, and one of these figures was a parabola with two tangents drawn touching. This puzzled me much. I sat down to warm my hands and my half-frozen face, and when I ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... I can follow, excites in me a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher half of your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat, your theory about humanitarianism and all that? They are but the geometrical figures of thought in your mind; and I have no wish to disturb your "philosophic proposition." The point is, I love that in you more than I love the lover. And the passion with which you cling to it as something apart from our ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... to use compasses and ruler, because all the instructions they gave me in geometry were forthwith put into practice; and I occupied myself greatly with paste-board-work. I did not stop at geometrical figures, little boxes, and such things, but invented pretty pleasure-houses adorned with pilasters, steps, and flat roofs. However, but little of this ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... author of several of the geometrical theorems and demonstrations now included in the Elements of Euclid. The celebrated fifth proposition of the first book, so famous among all the modern nations of Europe as the great stumbling block in the way of beginners ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... law that beauty is variety. Monotony, though magnificent, will become irksome, but variety is an unceasing delight. Versailles, with its formal avenues of shorn foliage, and its geometrical lawns and terraces, may please you more at first sight than an English park, because the mind feels a sort of pride in being able to grasp such vast ideas at a glance. But you will find, upon a second or third visit, that the unnatural arrangement of the French pleasure ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... they found a market on the continent and in England; and the numerous cultivated patches along the mountain sides presented a very pretty appearance from the anchorage—laid out as they were with seemingly geometrical precision. The hardy little horses could be hired very cheaply, and the justly extolled natural beauties of the island in the vicinity of Funchal were fully explored. The greater portion of it is quite ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... difficult. Why a man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will. Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great undiscoverable indefinable Thought.... He was cold, He was efficient. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... situation was full of humour. Bedard was an excellent mathematician, and was in the habit of whiling away the hours of his imprisonment by solving mathematical problems. When the guard came to turn him out, he was in the midst of a geometrical problem. 'At least,' he begged, 'let me finish my problem.' The request was granted; an hour later the problem was solved, and Bedard was thrust ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... different. In his first work Professor Smyth describes the coffer as showing no "symptoms" whatever of grooves, or catchpins or other fastenings or a lid. "More modern accounts," he re-observes, "have been further precise in describing the smooth and geometrical finish of the upper part of the coffer's sides, without any of those grooves, dovetails, or steady-pin-holes which have been found elsewhere in true polished sarcophagi, where the firm fastening of the lid is one of the most essential features of the whole ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... of a difficulty or problem in the geometrical environment which calls for solution, or adjustment—the relation of the angle a to the angles b and c ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the pleasant thought aside, he opened the roll, and with exceeding tenderness of touch brought forth a sheet of vellum dry to brittleness, and yellow as a faded sycamore leaf. There were lines upon it as of a geometrical drawing, and an inscription in strange characters. He bent over the chart, if such it may be called, eagerly, and read it through; then, with a satisfied expression, he folded it back into the cover, rebuckled the straps, and placed ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... if he likes despise my plate, I never pretended it was a work of art." And in a later letter he speaks "of the armillary spheres drawn by our common friend Albert Duerer." He was one of those who helped Duerer in his mathematical and geometrical studies; and he, like Pirkheimer, dedicated books to him. Although the mathematics of those times are hardly considered seriously nowadays, they then ranked with verse-making as a polite accomplishment, and had all the charm of novelty. Duerer, no doubt, had some gift that way, as he seems to ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... back to bygone times, while I, not wishing to interrupt her, had taken the poker in my hand and with it was tracing geometrical figures in the peat-ash on the hearthstone. So absorbed was I in my circles and pentagons that I did not notice that Grannie had stopped short in her story, and was taking a lively interest in what I was doing. It was with no little surprise, therefore, that I ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... Strasbourg, were at work upon a machine which, if perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature. The writers before, few as they were, had been almost as numerous as the readers; hereafter the readers were to increase in a geometrical proportion, and each great writer should address millions. Movable types, first of wood and then of metal, were made, the latter as early as 1441. Schoeffer, Guttenberg, and Faust brought them to such perfection that books were soon printed and issued in large numbers. But so slowly did the art ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... is that of Multiplication. Animals and plants multiply; they do not simply increase, they increase in a geometrical ratio. Anyone who has worked out one of these geometrical ratios knows how wondrously they mount up. There is an old familiar story of the blacksmith who asked the price at which the stranger would sell the horse he was shoeing. The owner of the horse replied that, if the blacksmith would give him ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... in geometrical ratio. They are like living beings, each one of which may become parent of a dozen others—some good and some ne'er-do-weels; but they differ from animals and vegetables inasmuch as they not only increase in a geometrical ratio, but the period of their gestation decreases in geometrical ratio ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... itself AGAINST the suggestions of the shape to which it is applied, as the ornaments of baskets, pottery, and all rounded objects; and (2) all distortion, disintegration, degradation of pattern- motives, often so marked as all but to destroy their meaning, is in the direction of geometrical symmetry. The early art of all civilized nations shows the same characteristic. Now it might be said that, as there exists an instinctive tendency to imitate visual forms by motor impulses, the impulses suggested by the symmetrical ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... neat geometrical pattern of little scars, perpendicular on the forehead, horizontal on the cheeks and in concentric circles on the chest (done with loving care and a knife, in his infancy, by his papa) said only "Ptwack" as he ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... the scene spread out beneath us. Seen from a balloon the streets of a rambling town resolve themselves into beautifully defined curves, straight lines, and various other highly respectable geometrical shapes. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... thrill with life. This is only the D of the alphabet of power. And glancing up to the other suns, one hundred, five hundred, twelve hundred times as large, double, triple, septuple, multiple suns, we shall find power enough to go through the whole alphabet in geometrical ratio; and then in the clustered suns, galaxies, and nebulae, power enough still unrepresented by single letters to require all combinations of the alphabet of power. What is the significance of this single element of power? The answer of science to-day is "correlation," the constant evolution of ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... boys had his own room, and there collected his own treasures and trophies, arranged to suit his convenience and taste. Frank's was full of books, maps, machinery, chemical messes, and geometrical drawings, which adorned the walls like intricate cobwebs. A big chair, where he read and studied with his heels higher than his head, a basket of apples for refreshment at all hours of the day or night, and an immense inkstand, ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... her, for the most decided feature in the character of Anne of Austria was an invincible obstinacy in her calculations, to which she would fain have subjected all events and all passions with a geometrical exactitude. There is no doubt that to this positive and immovable mind we must attribute all the misfortunes of her regency. The sombre reply of Cinq-Mars; his arrest; his trial—all had been concealed from the Princesse Marie, whose first fault, it is ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... have to lament that our mountain barometers were broken at an early stage of the expedition; the height however of some principal points had been previously obtained, and is marked on the chart; these in two instances were verified by geometrical measurement, and the difference was found to be too trilling to be noticed. The conveyance of such delicate instruments is always attended with great risk, and in our case peculiarly so, our means being only those of ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... caution against delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, ii. 170. his observations on the resemblance between a democracy and a tyranny, iii. 397. his distinction between tragedy and comedy, vii. 153. his natural philosophy alone unworthy of him, vii. 252. his system entirely followed by ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... truths are those the contrary of which is impossible; accidental truths, those of which the contrary is impossible only under certain conditions. Now, revelation could not contradict necessary truths; but it may appear to contradict those which are accidental. Geometrical truths are necessary; and therefore revelation could not oppose them; but as accidental truths refer to the changes of natural things, it follows that these may be apparently contradicted by revelation; ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... been developed along divergent lines. The intellect has merely a practical function. It is related to the needs of action.[24] It is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.[25] It deals with solids and geometrical figures, and its instrument is logic. But according to Bergson it has an inherent incapacity to deal with life.[26] When we contrast the rigidity and superficiality of intellect with the fluidity, sympathy and intimacy of intuition, we see at once wherein {119} lies ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... by other mosquitoes they serve to transmit the disease through the "intermediate host" to still others. Thus the epidemic extends, at first slowly from house to house, then more rapidly, as by geometrical progression. ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... the most incurious observer, is struck with astonishment on inspecting the interior of a bee-hive. He beholds a city in miniature. He sees this city divided into regular streets; and these streets composed of houses constructed on the most exact geometrical principles and the most symmetrical plan; some serving as store-houses for food, others for the habitations of the citizens, and a few, much more extensive than the rest, destined for the palace of ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... facts, in connection with the various ways in which various minds function, is the fact that when in these days we seek to visualize, in some pictorial manner, our ultimate view of life, the images which are called up are geometrical or chemical rather than anthropomorphic. It is probable that even the most rational and logical among us as soon as he begins to philosophize at all is compelled by the necessity of things to form in the mind some vague pictorial representation answering to ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... into a flat surface of varicoloured figures. Woods are irregular blocks of dark green, like daubs of ink spilled on a table; fields are geometrical designs of different shades of green and brown, forming in composite an ultra-cubist painting; roads are thin white lines, each with its distinctive windings and crossings—from which you determine your location. The higher you are the ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... capitals, previously a combination of geometrical figures, which may have been architecturally great and imposing, but was always more or less formal and rigid, disappeared; the new masters, whose names have been forgotten, looked round them and drew inspiration from nature. The forest trees of Central Europe ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... tells us that he "had much zeal for whatever interested" him, and he was interested in many and very diverse topics. He could work hard, and liked a complex subject better than an easy one. The "clear geometrical proofs" of Euclid delighted him. His interest in practical chemistry, carried out in an extemporised laboratory, in which he was permitted to assist by his elder brother, kept him late at work, and earned him the nickname of "gas" among his schoolfellows. And there could have ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... green and yellow. The ceiling is made up of little squares, painted in bright colors, with gilded edges, and ornamented with gilt knobs. On the cement floor are mattings, sheepskins, and leathern cushions with geometrical patterns on them. There is a tiny Moorish table in the middle; and at it a huge saddle, with saddle cloths of various colors, showing that the room is used by foreigners accustomed to chairs. Anyone sitting at the table in this seat would have the chief entrance, a large horseshoe ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... the popular historian would have us believe one spent his entire life in chopping down acorn trees and the other splitting them up into rails. Washington could not tell a story. Lincoln always could. [Laughter.] And Lincoln's stories always possessed the true geometrical requisites, they were never too long, and never too broad. [Laughter.] He never forgot a point. A sentinel pacing near the watchfire while Lincoln was once telling some stories quietly remarked that "He had a mighty powerful memory, but an ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... have my throat cut With diamonds? or to be smothered With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls? I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits; and 'tis found They go on such strange geometrical hinges, You may open them both ways: any way, for heaven-sake, So I were out of your whispering. Tell my brothers That I perceive death, now I am well awake, Best gift is they can give or I can take. I would fain put off my last woman's-fault, I 'd ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... up a stick, and drew in the sand the geometrical problem of which he had spoken. It is one of the simplest. No sooner had he done so than the ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... pantheistic, and, sometimes, purely material, in the condensed shape of allegorical symbols, India, nevertheless, has known how to express all these teachings more or less successfully. She has immortalized them in her ugly, four-headed idols, in the geometrical, complicated forms of her temples, and even in the entangled lines and spots on the foreheads of ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... from his own ground, he followed me about a mile up the hill I had now to climb, but without venturing very near. At length I thought I had had enough of his company, so at the next bend in the road I came to a stand beside a heap of stones that a cantonnier had neatly piled up in geometrical pattern. There I waited, and the animal came on gaily, little expecting to find himself suddenly at close quarters with me. Just as he turned the corner he raised a howl that said he was both surprised and shocked. Skipping with great agility, he avoided the next stone, and the expression ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... monumental, gradient way, whose curve is gradually described. At that distance you were still unable to see the pilgrims themselves, and you beheld simply those well-disciplined travelling lights tracing geometrical lines amidst the darkness. Under the deep blue heavens, even the buildings at first remained vague, forming but blacker patches against the sky. Little by little, however, as the number of candles increased, the principal architectural lines—the tapering ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... fog not only in general, but in detail. In every branch, from the most solid to the most sentimental, she was victorious. For machinery a million of gamins beat a million of Cockneys in the proportion of seven to six; in the economical and chemical arts, four to one; in the geographical and geometrical, eight to three; and in the fine arts, Waterloo was reversed to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... the middle ages. The eternal advance toward omniscience goes on, but is like that of the infinite approach of the asymptote, which never reaches the hyperbolic curve. The onward march of science is in a geometrical ratio, so that in time, the intellectual progress of a day in the future, must exceed that of a century in the past. Knowledge is enthroned as a king, and grand truths and new ideas are his ministers. Science ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... then thought that, by imagining the existence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter, and another between Venus and Mercury, he might be able to attain his object; but he found that this assumption afforded him no assistance. Kepler then imagined that as there were five regular geometrical solids, and five planets, the distances of the latter were regulated by the size of the solids described round one another. The discovery afterwards of two additional planets testified to the absurdity of this speculation. A description of these extraordinary researches was published, in ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... is not here to be understood in its literal sense. Surveying a place, according to my idea, is taking a geometrical plan of it, in which every place is to have its true situation, which cannot be done in a work of ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... might divert the attention of the blind man. Thus," added he, with extreme volubility, "I would have told him my opinion on the isothermal and orthogonal superficies, causing him to observe that the equations of partial differences, of which the geometrical explanation is summed up in two orthogonal superficies, cannot generally be integral on account of their complication. I should have proved to him that the united superficies are all necessarily isothermal, ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Proportion.—Definite proportion of elements (Chemistry), symmetrical arrangement of parts (Crystallography), numerical and geometrical relation of the forms and movements of the heavenly bodies (Spherical Astronomy), all of which are capable of exact ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... attributed to Socrates, have been made of old to give a definition of justice. The earliest description I have found is that of the early Pythagoreans, who, in accordance with their practise of symbolizing the virtues by geometrical figures, designated justice by the square, and the just man by the cube. Plato seems to have had a theory of justice when he wrote in the "Gorgias," "Nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the stronger than the weaker, ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... studied mathematics in Paris according to the analytical method, instead of the geometrical, which was at that ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... repeated designs in mouldings and wainscotings (for example, the alternation of egg and dart), the series of windows in a wall, or of the columns of a Greek temple, or of the black and white keys of a piano. Still more complex is the balanced arrangement of straight lines and curves in a geometrical design, as in certain Oriental rugs or the Gothic rose windows. And probably the most complex spatial rhythms are those of the facades of great buildings like the Gothic cathedrals or St. Mark's of Venice, where only the trained eye perceives ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... and Surreptitious Treasurer. Two months ago I was the only member. One month ago there were two. To-day we number four Emperors of the Abnormal Proboscis in good standing—doubles every four weeks, see? That's geometrical progression—you know how that piles up. In a year and a half every man in California will have a wart on his Nose. Powerful Order! ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... turn of the argument, to prevent the vessel of the state from being hurried forward with the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr. Malthus forward with the geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his hands, and holds them out to his affrighted contemporaries as the only means of salvation. "For" (so argued the author of the Essay) "let the principles of Mr. Godwin's Enquiry and of other similar works be carried literally and completely ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... behind his chair, hanging in the dimmer light, was a colored print portraying a blue sea, spread with rank upon rank of accurately measured waves, each with its tiny cap of foam, stretching without diminution to the horizon, upon which was perched a full-rigged ship, a geometrical triumph; and from this vessel came by small-boat to the strand a company of accurately moulded, accurately featured, accurately tailored fellows, pulling with perfect accuracy in every respect. ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... the spots in our picture are geometrical figures, nevertheless geometry can obviously say nothing at all about their actual form and position. The network, however, is purely geometrical; all its properties can be given a priori. Laws like the principle of sufficient ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... to take pleasure in the natural sprouts of my own wit—without troubling whether the same idea has occurred to others. Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to have discovered even the simplest of his geometrical demonstrations, shall I be crestfallen when some one draws attention to the book? These natural sprouts are, after all, the best products of our life; it is a mere accident that they may have no value in the world's ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... marvellous sky, a sort of limpid sapphire, set in the battlements of El-Azhar and fringed by those audacious slender towers. We are in the religious East of olden days and we feel how the mystery of this magnificent court—whose architectural ornament consists merely in geometrical designs repeated to infinity, and does not commence till quite high up on the battlements, where the minarets point into the eternal blue—must cast its spell upon the imagination of the young priests who are ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... used as are the blocks in our kindergarten simply to make geometrical figures, but rather to illustrate such facts of history as will have a moral influence, or be an intellectual ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... eastward, the other westward from the said cross-aisle, and running parallel therewith. The floor of the whole is paved with marble, but under the cupola and within the rail of the altar with fine porphyry, polished and laid in several geometrical figures. ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... him, and according to that which is held in Astrology and in Philosophy since those movements were seen, there are nine moveable Heavens; the site of which is evident and determined, according to an Art which is termed Perspective, Arithmetical and Geometrical, by which and by other sensible experiences it is visibly and reasonably seen, as in the eclipses of the Sun it appears sensibly, that the Moon is below the Sun; and as by the testimony of Aristotle, who saw with his own eyes, according to what he says in the second ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... lighted it and flipped the match into the campfire. He smoked it down to the last inch, staring into the fire and saying nothing the while. When the cigarette stub followed the match, he leaned back upon one elbow and began tracing a geometrical figure in the sand with ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... side of the Lady Chapel contains a central window of three lights and geometrical tracery, with a lancet window on the right and left. The mouldings of these side windows are not exactly alike, that on the right (of the spectator) being extremely plain, while the other is supported by slender shafts, terminating ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... being awarded to Rajput nobles of loyalty and valour. The result was yet another style of painting—comparable in certain ways to that of Bundi and Udaipur yet markedly original in its total effect. In place of tightly geometrical compositions, Malwa artists preferred a more fluid grouping, their straining luxuriant trees blending with swaying creepers to create a soft meandering rhythm and only the human figures, with their sharply cut veils and taut intense faces, expressing ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... halls of Mycenae, was followed, at an interval, by the age represented in the relics found in the older tombs outside the Dipylon gate of Athens, an age beginning, probably, about 900-850 B.C. The culture of this "Dipylon age," a time of geometrical ornaments on vases, and of human figures drawn in geometrical forms, lines, and triangles, was quite unlike that of the Achaean age in many ways, for example, in mode of burial and in the use of iron for weapons. Mr. H. R. Hall, in his learned ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Now, however, the geometrical and mathematical difficulties of calculation, which before had been tedious and oppressive, threatened to become overwhelming; and it is with a rising sense of despondency that Kepler sees his six years' unremitting labour leading deeper ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... were an importation from Flanders, like the gloriettes. Not by the remotest suggestion could a clipped yew in the form of a peacock or a giraffe be called French. Le Notre eliminated the menagerie and the aviary, but kept certain geometrical forms, particularly with respect to hedges, where niches were frequently trimmed out for the placing of statues, columns ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... but stood in silence in the centre of the road, drawing a geometrical design in the dust with the ferrule of his stick. It was his habit when ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... in good taste. Here hundreds of tourists pass a portion of "the season," as in a "loop-hole of retreat." In the front of the inn, however, the stream of life glides fast; and a little past it, the road crosses the Mole by Burford Bridge, and winds with geometrical accuracy through the whole of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... thrust it beneath his chest, but as he used his hand with less effect owing to the inflammation, he did not immediately despatch himself, and having some difficulty in dying he fell from the bed and made a noise by overturning a little abacus of the geometrical kind that stood by, which his attendants perceiving called out and his son and his friends immediately ran in. Seeing him smeared with blood and the greater part of his bowels protruding, though he was still alive and his eyes were open, they were all dreadfully alarmed, and the physician going ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... thou? Come in from the gate and ease this poor man of his burden.' So the cateress entered, followed by the portress and the porter, and went on before them to a spacious saloon, elegantly built and handsomely decorated with all manner of colours and carvings and geometrical figures, with balconies and galleries and cupboards and benches and closets with curtains drawn before them. In the midst was a great basin of water, from which rose a fountain, and at the upper end stood a couch of juniper wood, inlaid with precious stones and surmounted by a canopy of red ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... passages is the vast and elemental picture of the Wind driving over the Russian plain; a passage familiarised to satiety by numerous more or less clever imitations. Petersburg is a "political" novel. It is intended to symbolise the Nihilism, the geometrical irreality of Petersburg and Petersburg bureaucracy. The cold spirit of system of the Revolutionary Terrorists is presented as the natural and legitimate ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... these different orders are not to be understood precisely as the geometrical figures indicate them. A general who would expect to arrange his line of battle as regularly as upon paper or on a drill-ground would be greatly mistaken, and would be likely to suffer defeat. This is particularly true as battles are now fought. In the time of Louis XIV. or of Frederick, ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... barren stretch of sand, the philosopher was very sad at first. He observed on the sand the remains of certain geometrical drawings, and instantly exclaimed: "There is help near. Here I see signs of ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane |
