"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of humour in the manner in which the pride of Alcibiades, and of the Greeks generally, is supposed to be taken down by the Spartan and Persian queens; and the dialogue has considerable dialectical merit. But we have a difficulty in supposing that the same writer, who has given so profound and complex a notion of the characters both of Alcibiades and Socrates in the Symposium, should have treated them in so thin and superficial a manner in the Alcibiades, or that he would have ascribed to the ironical Socrates the rather unmeaning boast that ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... case. He had seen Jake Hibbard, that carrion crow of the law, loafing about the corridors, and the sight had made him shiver. He had next heard that Jim's case would be quickly called,—probably on the next day,—news producing a complex emotion, the elements of which he could not distinguish. Furthermore, a remark or so which he overheard indicated that the out-of-town men were inclined to take a harsh view of the matter. And reflecting on all these things, he paddled home through ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... grace in the individual is the divine gift of faith, hope and charity implanted in every soul. These every man must guard and cherish for they are the way of advancement in character. But society is man in association with men, in a sense a new and complex personality, and the same qualities are as necessary here as in the individual. Society, like man, may be said to possess body, soul and spirit, and it must function vitally along all these lines if it is to maintain a normal and wholesome existence. Somewhere there must be ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... rickety stairs, its labyrinth of passages and its Babel of tongues. Above him, however, the plaster bust of Justinian, out of those blank, sightless eyes, continued the contemplation of the garden as though turning from the complex jurisprudence of the ancients and moderns to the simple existence of butterflies ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... Australia, Canada and a multitude of smaller states and countries. Not the least remarkable of the events which ensued in the succeeding early weeks of the great War was the extraordinary way in which this vast and complex Empire found itself as a unit in fighting force, a unit in sentiment, a unit in co-operative action. Irish sedition, whether "loyal or disloyal," Protestant or Catholic, largely vanished like the shadow of an evil dream; Indian talk of civil war and trouble disappeared; South ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... which the State requires of each particular type of Higher School. It is surely manifest that the service which the modern industrial State looks for from its members is not the same in kind and is much more complex in its nature than that which was required during the mediaeval period, and that if this service is to be efficiently supplied, then there is need for Higher Schools varied in ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... complex signification always tend to slough off a part of their meaning*; and, especially, words that denote a state or property, together with its mode of growth or of manifestation, are prone to drop the latter, even though it may have given them ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... almost a departure from natural laws. But the form alone does not produce the full effect, which is only experienced when you see the creature in motion. The true horror of the centipede, perhaps, must be due to the monstrosity of its movement,— multiple and complex, as of a chain of pursuing and inter- devouring lives: there is something about it that makes you recoil, as from a sudden corrupt swarming-out. It is confusing, —a series of contractings and lengthenings ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... talked. When he had progressed sufficiently to round out the theory of Christianity, she had grasped a new standard. The contrast between the old and the new made itself instantly felt. On one hand was the simple and logical; on the other the complex and dogmatic. The Christian was able to measure proportionately how much should be laid upon her mind for study at once and while she still waited, he rose from ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... read. Complexity of motive is all very well,—very human and very Italian; but the difficulty is that in this case it is not properly subordinated to a luminous dramatic idea. When a man's motives become so complex and contradictory that one does not know how to take him, he ceases to be available for the higher purposes of tragedy. That 'Fiesco' produces this bewildering effect is due to the fact that the inner logic of the piece had not been fully and consistently thought out ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... who, one is safe in saying, care for little else in the world than the rhythm of their lines and the cadence of their phrase, the love of the sea, to which some men and nations confess so readily, is a complex sentiment wherein pride enters for much, necessity for not a little, and the love of ships—the untiring servants of our hopes and our self-esteem—for the best and most genuine part. For the hundreds ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... unaffected, simple, artless, outspoken, undesigning, ingenuous, unreserved, direct; frugal, homely; unvaried, unfigured; mere, absolute, unmistakable. Antonyms: ambiguous, equivocal, indistinct, indecipherable, elaborate, luxurious, cryptic, abstruse, ornate, enigmatic, vague, inexplicable, obscure, complex, intricate, embellished. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... southerners differs from that of the northerners in that it does not mingle the different elements and forms in literature, and remains lucid in its outbreaks. In our most complex natures you never encounter the entanglement of directions, relations, and figures that characterizes a Carlyle, a Browning, or a Poe. For this reason the man of the north always finds fault with the man of the south for his lack of ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... perform certain mental operations on the symbols of number or of quantity, and, by proceeding step by step from more simple to more complex operations, we are enabled to express the same thing in many different forms. The equivalence of these different forms, though a necessary consequence of self-evident axioms, is not always, to our minds, ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... first place as a Presbyterian minister. He was a man of good appearance, of intelligence and address, and of rather more polish than the average man. He was an orator, a dreamer, and a visionary; a strange, complex character. He was not a fighting man, and belonged anywhere in the world rather than on the frontier of the bloody Southwest. His health was not good, and he resolved to journey to New Mexico. He and his young bride started overland, with a good team and conveyance, and ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... these new facilities did greatly help the steam engine in its invasion of the field of common life, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. It was, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented series of causes, that set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, and in another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisive factor. One peculiar condition of its production in England seems to have supplied ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... mournful eclipse?—Yes, it would come right—come right—Katherine told herself, thereby making one of those magnificent acts of faith which go so far to produce just that which they prophesy. God could not have created so complex and beautiful a creature, and permitted it so to suffer, save to the fulfilment of some clear purpose which would very surely be made manifest at last. God Almighty should be justified of His strange handiwork; and she of her love before the whole of the story was told.—And, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... manufacturers of other trade goods. In the American plantation districts it immensely stimulated the production of the staple crops. On the other hand it kept the planters constantly in debt for their dearly bought labor, and it left a permanent and increasingly complex problem of racial adjustments. In Africa, it largely transformed the primitive scheme of life, and for the worse. It created new and often unwholesome wants; it destroyed old industries and it corrupted ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... were a mere "epiphenomenon," having no "use" to the organism, it would soon perish (if it ever appeared) according to the law which says that all useless functions perish. But we know that, as a matter of fact, consciousness has grown more and more complex, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... poem could be classed; and in many, even of the most striking and most characteristic, this condition does not exist. In one group, for instance, the prevailing mood is either too slightly indicated, or too fugitive, or too complex, or even too fantastic, to be designated by any term but "poetic." Others, again, such as songs and legends, depict human emotion in too simple or too general a form, to be thought of as anything but "popular;" and a third group may ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... inside, he began to realize the magnitude of his problem. This was not a tiny independent orbit-ship with a few corridors and compartments. This was a huge ship, a vast complex of corridors and compartments and holds. There was probably a crew of a thousand men on this ship ... and there was no sign where Greg and Johnny ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... Samuel W. Johnson of Yale College. New and revised edition. A treatise on the chemical composition, structure and life of the plant. This book is a guide to the knowledge of agricultural plants, their composition, their structure and modes of development and growth; of the complex organization of plants, and the use of the parts; the germination of seeds, and the food of plants obtained both from the air and the soil. The book is indispensable to all real students of agriculture. With numerous illustrations and tables of ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... action, counteraction, elective affinities, explosive developments, to work out healing for a sick moribund System of Society! Probably the strangest Body of Men, if we consider well, that ever met together on our Planet on such an errand. So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst-up from its infinite depths; and these men, its rulers and healers, without life-rule for themselves,—other life-rule than a Gospel according to Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... address, Quebec, will always find me. The only special point I would ask correspondents to remember is that even the best recommendations must be adapted to the peculiarities of the Labrador problem, which is new, strange, immense, and full of complex human factors. ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... and usages were formerly more general all over England than they are at present, being become by time, necessity, or avarice, complex, confined, and altered. They are commonly insisted upon by the reapers as customary things, and a part of their due for the toils of the harvest, and complied with by their masters perhaps more through regards of interest than inclination; for should they ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The complex character of the Chinese is shown in various ways. Side by side with the reverence of ancestors the law recognizes the right of the parent to sell his offspring into slavery and among the poor this is not an uncommon practice, though in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... emotion, strikes the mind as being salient, beautiful, strange, wonderful, and the mind desires to record it, to depict it, to isolate it, to emphasize it. The process becomes gradually, as the life of the world continues, more and more complex. It seemed enough at first just to record; but then there follows the desire to contrast, to heighten effects, to construct elaborate backgrounds; then the process grows still more refined, and it becomes essential to lay out materials in due proportion, and to clear away all that is otiose or ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... motion by so many different springs, and acted one upon the other from such a variety of strange principles and impulses—that though it was a simple machine, it had all the honour and advantages of a complex one,—and a number of as odd movements within it, as ever were beheld in the ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... insufficiencies of existing laws can be remedied by further legislation, it should be done. The fact must be recognized, however, that all Federal legislation on this subject may fall short of its purpose because of inherent obstacles, and also because of the complex character of our governmental system, which, while making the Federal authority supreme within its sphere, has carefully limited that sphere by metes and bounds which cannot be transgressed. The ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... after a series of laboratory experiments on animals inoculated with the syphilis germ (spirochaeta pallida), that a complex compound, with arsenic as its base, had the desired effect of destroying the parasite, in a dose not poisonous to the animal. This compound, first designated as "606," representing its number among his many laboratory experiments, he later named "salvarsan." With the assistance of his clinical ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... yellowtail, and a few great sea-bass were always waiting for us—for our discarded bait or fish of some kind. But when I threw in a live remora, how these hungry fish did dart away! Life in the ocean is strange, complex, ferocious, and wonderful. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... These gentlemen, who rule our government and ruin our people, comprise what Mr. Matthew Arnold recently termed the "remnant" which should be permitted to run things to suit themselves, the people, the great mass, being incapable of taking care of themselves and the complex machinery of government. Of course, Mr. Arnold, who is necessarily very British in his ideas of government, intended that the "remnant" he had in his "mind's eye," should comprise men of the most exalted character and intelligence, the very ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... occurs to us on examining the Landa alphabet is the complex and ornate character of the letters. Instead of the two or three strokes with which we indicate a sign for a sound, we have here rude pictures of objects. And we find that these are themselves simplifications of older forms of a still more complex character. Take, for ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... emphasize the facts that no one conceives a story in all its details in a moment of inspiration, and that there is a way of proceeding that passes in logical gradations from the simplest to the most complex phases ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... in inexpensive cynicism say that women are complex and difficult to understand. This may be true of an ambitious and hard woman, but nothing can be more simple and direct than a ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... in the head, The feet, the hands, instead of cleaving still To one sole seat, to one fixed haunt, the breast, If not that fixed places be assigned For each thing's birth, where each, when 'tis create, Is able to endure, and that our frames Have such complex adjustments that no shift In order of our members may appear? To that degree effect succeeds to cause, Nor is the flame once wont to be create In flowing streams, nor cold ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... true of human beings. By his own efforts a solitary man cannot, even after he has been nursed to maturity, maintain himself in a decent manner. Certainly he is unable successfully to resist his foes. But with the aid of his fellows man can develop a highly complex and tolerably stable civilization, all the excellences of which he can enjoy at the comparatively small risk of becoming a victim of its dangers. Social organization is the natural expression of man's ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... was one of those so-called seasoned casks, who are seldom or never completely disabled by drink, although thoroughly enslaved, and he was now quite competent to steer the Fairy in safety through the mazes of that complex dance which the deep-sea trawlers usually perform on the arrival of ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... To her flashed a memory of this man, her other-time employer—keen and smooth-shaven, alert, well-dressed, self-centered, dominant, the master of a hundred complex problems, the directing mind of engineering ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... ignorance, there came to the Bishopric, four years vacant, a true man whose name on the page of Manx Church history is like a star on a dark night, when only one is shining—Bishop Thomas Wilson. He was a strange and complex creature, half angel, only half man, the serenest of saints, and yet almost the bitterest of tyrants. Let me ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... in the separation from the younger George. You begin to wish some great joy to come to her: it does not come unalloyed; you know that Dobbin had bad quarters of an hour with this lady, and had to disguise a little of his tenderness for his own daughter. Yes, Emmy is more complex than she seems, and perhaps it needed three ladies to contribute the various elements of her person and her character. One of them, the jealous one, lent a touch to Helen Pendennis, to Laura, to Lady Castlewood. Probably this may be the reason why some persons ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... had nevertheless finished its trial stages and acquired full development as connecting agent for all the other arms, whom it supplied with information. Serving at first for strategic reconnaissance, and then almost exclusively for regulating artillery fire, the aerial forces now performed complex and efficient service for every branch of the army. By means of aerial photography they furnished exact knowledge of the ground and of the enemy's defenses, thus preceding the execution of military operations. They regulated artillery fire, followed the program laid down for the destruction of ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... speech is limited, so the notes of their music are few, but expressive gestures and modulations of the voice supplement both. With advancing civilization the emotions of which the human heart are capable become more complex and demand larger means of expression. Some belief in the healing, helpful, uplifting power of music has always prevailed. It remains for independent, practical, modern man to present the art to the world as ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... Broccoli, but it is a strong-land plant, and a well-tilled clay should yield first-class crops. But there are so many kinds coming into use at various seasons, that the cultivation may be regarded as a somewhat complex subject. We will therefore premise that the best must be made of the soil at command, whatever it may be. The Cornish growers owe their success in great part to their climate, which carries their crops through the winter unhurt; but they grow ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... the section of the well, which I have drawn as accurately as possible (not an easy thing to do when one is standing upon a rope ladder), will give an idea of the form of this strange pocket formed in the limestone of the mountain through the most complex dislocations and erosions. Two lateral pockets attracted my attention because of the enormous quantity of clay and bones that obstructed them. The first, to the left, was about 15 feet from the orifice. When we had entirely emptied it, we found that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... build up for France (1) Production; (2) Shipping; (3) Colonies and Markets,—in a word, sea power. The study of such a work is simpler and easier when thus done by one man, sketched out by a kind of logical process, than when slowly wrought by conflicting interests in a more complex government. In the few years of Colbert's administration is seen the whole theory of sea power put into practice in the systematic, centralizing French way; while the illustration of the same theory in English and Dutch history is spread over generations. Such growth, however, was forced, and ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... extricate itself and trade from the complex difficulties of the situation, Admiralty had at its back what an eighteenth century Beresford would doubtless have regarded as the finest talent of the service. Neither the unemployed admiral nor the half-pay captain had at that time, in his enforced retirement at Bath or ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Time's fair stream far back,—oh far, The great wise teacher must be sought! The Kurus had not yet in war With the Pandava brethren fought. In peace, at Dronacharjya's feet, Magic and archery they learned, A complex science, which we meet No more, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... the Democratic side was McQuade, on the Republican side was ex-Senator Henderson. These men were bosses of no ordinary type. The first was from the mass, the second from the class; and both were millionaires. The political arena was a pastime for these two men; it was a huge complex game of chess in which recently the senator had been worsted. The public paid, as it invariably does, to watch this game on the checkerboard of wards. The senator had been unfortunate in his candidates. He had ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... just dealt, arises from the erroneous assertion of the allness of God; but as the whole subject of the reality of evil will come up for treatment at a later stage, we need not now enter into its discussion. At one aspect, and one only, of this vast and complex theme we may, however, be permitted to glance for a moment before we pass on. If God dwells in us, it is frequently asked, whence comes what Paul so pathetically calls "the law of sin which is in our members"—whence come the wrongful desires and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... laudator temporis acti in her description of the present as compared with the past social life of the colonies, though I am quite prepared to agree with her remark, that 'in proportion as the conditions of life become more complex, they should be met by more ingenuity, more culture, and a deeper sense of duty;' and that 'the suddenness of our accumulation of wealth has scarcely prepared our little community for some necessary modifications of our social arrangements.' ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... wealth and the enjoyment of luxury. To him, as to other single-minded men in every age and race, from Diogenes to the brothers of Saint Francis, from the Montanists to the Shakers, the love of possessions has appeared a snare, and the burdens of a complex society a source of needless peril and temptation. Furthermore, it was the rule of his life to share the fruits of his skill and success with his less fortunate brothers. Thus he kept his spirit free from the clog of pride, cupidity, or envy, and carried ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... 'to furnish the cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food. The higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but it is just this that is most precious and significant—all of which shows His unrolling purpose. It is the last that alone explains all that went before, and it is the coming that will alone explain ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... So complex has life become in these later days that the very beds we lie on and the meals we eat are controlled by patents. Every garment and piece of furniture now pays a “royalty” to some inventor, from the hats ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... youth, maturity and old age pass, complex experiences come to the soul thus functioning here. Other souls functioning through physical bodies are encountered and various relationships are established. Out of the complexity of social, business, religious and political activities the soul gets a large ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... speculations. This is everywhere dominated by reason and order;[424] it bears the impress of the divine Logos, and that in a double sense. On the one hand it appears as the copy of a higher, eternal world, for if we imagine transient and changeable matter removed, it is a wonderful complex of spiritual forces; on the other it presents itself as the finite product of a rational will. Moreover, the matter which lies at its basis is nothing bad, but an indifferent substance created by God,[425] though indeed perishable. In its constitution the world is in every respect a ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... by putting on, in addition to their long gown, a European hat and shoes, which, if anything, looks worse still. The ladies have not yet adopted the European style which, perhaps, they have sense enough to see, is far more complex and inconvenient than their own. Of this much I am certain that no mysterious production of Worth would be more becoming, or suit them better than their ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... orchids, the mechanism of our milkweed blossom is perhaps the most complex and remarkable, and illustrates as perfectly as any of the orchid examples given in Darwin's noble work the absolute divine intention of the dependence of a plant species upon the visits ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... disclosed teeth as white as milk, was enhanced by the fact that every line, every tint spoke of flawless health and a mind attuned to the simple, gracious things of life rather than those which are complex ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... an uncertain mood to see either Sir Douglas or Sir William left with a sense of stalwart conviction. Both had the gift of simplifying any situation, however complex. When a certain general became unstrung during the retreat from Mons, Sir Douglas seemed to consider that his first duty was to assist this man to recover composure, and he slipped his arm through the general's and walked ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Immediately the stuffed figure began to shout, "Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help! Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help! Murder!" at intervals of two seconds. The editor wrote something on another slip of paper, and the mechanical figure went through a most complex series of movements. First it seized a pair of paint brushes and began to paint all the white objects in the room black and all the black objects white. Then it went through the motions of playing, for a few minutes, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... power given to us is in such niggardly measure for our needs; that, in order to carry out perfectly the work of the organs most peculiarly our own, the regular action of the brain must be suspended. Not so. He who fits the shoulder to the burden; who, in planning the complex organism, not only made possible greatly increased size and strength whenever they should be needed, but even took thought also to provide for the return of the blood through capillary and vein from the artery which has been severed by the surgeon's knife, is not so forgetful of ends and ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... the lamb to the lion, as that no distinctions should take place between the members of the same society. The burdens of the State are distributed through the whole community, with as much impartiality as the complex nature of taxation will admit; every man sustains a part in proportion to his strength; no order is exempted from the payment of taxes. Nor is any order of men exclusively entitled to the enjoyment ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Jack, aloud, "but I have put my foot into it. Look here, kind friends, I never was meant for a parlour, and I always make mistakes when I stray into one. My place is in a hospital ward or at the bedside of those who have been given up to die. The complex social arena is not where I shine to my best advantage. There are too many rings to keep track of at once, and my mind ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... would have spent his last penny to add to her happiness or comfort. I make no attempt to explain. I only know that such men do exist, and that Hasluck was one of them. One avoids difficulties by dismissing them as a product of our curiously complex civilisation—a convenient phrase; let us hope the recording angel may be ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... otherwise," I pleaded; "but life is very complex nowadays on both sides of the Atlantic. Much that I have told Edith I have also revealed to the passport clerk at Washington and the keeper of birth records in New York. Something too I confided to the assistant-book-keeper ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... only account I can give myself of the evolution of the fable it is all under the head thus named that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the right complications as having started. It was naturally of the essence that the young woman should be herself complex; that was rudimentary—or was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had originally dawned. It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights, contending, conflicting lights, and of as many different colours, if possible, as the rockets, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... at the corner; the mother, singing her angel-donation to sleep; Clancy, thundering forth something concerning his broken heart, whilst tailing up the stringing cattle; the canary in its cage; the magpie on the fence—are each setting in motion the complex machinery of music, and with about equal scientific knowledge of what they are doing. To the philosophic mind, however, they are not playing or singing; they are producing and controlling sound-vibrations, arbitrarily varied in duration and quality; a series of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Queen's grief for a faithful human creature— for thirty-four years devoted to her—ever at her call—looking up to her, yet watching over her; a friend, whose humble good sense and canny bits of counsel must often, in the simpler, yet not simple, affairs of her complex life, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... endless variety of plant-forms and consider the highly complex and still little known processes in the interior of cells, and if we remember that the whole of this branch of investigation came into existence only a few decades ago, we are able to grasp the fact that a satisfactory ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... by the word in which his fate would be quietly reflected; by the fiery young eye in the brilliancy of which the complex became simple, the dark bright; by the wicked old man to whom the whole world, as seen from his mire, had become ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... what is known as a broach. Thus a wide hole or groove is formed in which powder is inserted, either by ramming it directly in the hole, or by puling it in a canister, shaped somewhat like the Lewis hole trench. A complex Lewis hole is the combination of 3 drill holes, while a compound Lewis hole contains 4 holes. Lewising is confined almost entirely to granite. In some cases a series of Lewis holes is put in along the bench at distances of 10 and 25 ft. apart, or even greater, each Lewis hole being situated equidistant ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... committee was appointed. It consisted' (it is still Brother Doumer who speaks) "of directors and high functionaries of all the ministerial departments." It went to work. It heard "a great number of witnesses." It also showed conclusively "how complex was the question, and how urgent the necessity ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... parts, dancing and wrestling. Of dancing one kind imitates musical recitation and aims at stateliness and freedom; another kind is concerned with the training of the body, and produces health, agility, and beauty. There is no military use in the complex systems of wrestling which pass under the names of Antaeus and Cercyon, or in the tricks of boxing, which are attributed to Amycus and Epeius; but good wrestling and the habit of extricating the neck, hands, and sides, should be ...
— Laws • Plato
... So his nerves tingled, his pulses beat, his veins glowed, his heart throbbed; and all the new, sweet, young sensations of a boy wildly reveling in the success of his first great venture, all the vague, strange, deep, complex emotions of a man who has become conscious of what he is giving to the world—these shook Casey by storm, and life had no more to give. He knew that, whatever he was, whatever this incomprehensible driving ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... back to nature, and that one alone was helpless. Now with what I saw came what I heard. I heard the clatter of harness, the jingle of a bell, the low of a cow, the trampling of the mules. And I smelt with rapture, with delight, the complex odours of the farm that sat so solitary in the world; but above all the chill moving odour of the great plain itself. This, or these, made a strange, primitive pleasure that I had known in Australia, in Texas, even in a farm upon the edge of a wild Westmorland ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... matter, it is time to agitate for a radical change in the whole administration of the Indian service. We believe that this should be disconnected entirely from the Department of the Interior, and be made a separate department. This whole Indian question is so important and so complex that it ought not to be simply an annex to a department which has under its control land, patents, etc. It should stand by itself; there should no longer be a divided responsibility, which is always productive of evil. We are finding the necessity in our cities of making responsibility ...
— American Missionary, Vol. 45, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of students. Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the quick. In the matter of writing for more voices than one we have retrograded considerably since the days of Bach. We have, to be sure, built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been invented, or rather re-discovered—for in Bach all were latent—but, confound it, children! these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait for me. Music is, first of all, motion, after that emotion. I like movement, rhythmical variety, polyphonic ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... down he went—not head or feet first, or sideways, or any way, but every way by turns, and no way long. Indeed, he spun and, as it were, spurted down that mighty face of ice. Each instant intensified the velocity; each whirl increased the complex nature of the force. The ledge half-way down, from which the affrighted gulls fled shrieking, did not even check the descent, but with bursting violence shunted the victim out into space, through which he hurled till re-met by the terrific ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... This time I'll act honestly and explain to you. Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a very beautiful, complex and delicate covering of the body. It consists of six layers, and contains arteries, capillaries, lymphatics, nerves, sweat glands, sebaceous glands, pigment, etc. So you see that the care of the skin involves much. One writer ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... at her as if stunned. Arguments of that sort were a bit above the reasoning of the simple masculine animal, who seemed to belong to that race which comprehends little of the complex emotions, and looks on love as the one inevitable passion of life, and on marriage as its logical result and ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... point in a room, encourages so many possibilities for comfort and effect that it behooves us to forget traditional customs which were established during the gaslight period. The introduction of gaslight through tubes was a rather complex problem, and the carrying of the pipes into the room through a main chandelier was the most advisable constructive form. But we have no need for such cumbersome fixtures in ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... laughed it off. Hundreds of sexual offenders passed through my hands, and in the closest study of their points of view I was unable to find that in more than rare cases had the risk of syphilis any real power to control the expression of their desires. Sexual morality is a complex affair, in which the habit of self-control in many other activities of life plays an important part. The man or woman who best deserves to be called clean and honorable and sexually blameless has not become so through a ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... to horizontal surfaces by radiation, some scientists think. "That the sleep movements of leaves are in some manner of high importance to the plants which exhibit them," says Darwin, "few will dispute who have observed how complex they sometimes are." ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... railways is the work of the human mind proceeding from the simple to the complex by the spontaneous efforts of the parties interested, and it is thus that all the great enterprises of our age have been undertaken. It is quite true, indeed, that we pay too much to the managers of these enterprises; ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... satisfactory conclusion was an orthodox belief of celestial mechanics until 1853, when Professor Adams of Neptunian fame, with whom complex analyses were a pastime, reviewed Laplace's calculation, and discovered an error which, when corrected, left about half the moon's acceleration unaccounted for. This was a momentous discrepancy, which at first no one could explain. But presently Professor Helmholtz, the great German physicist, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Les Maitres Sonneurs, in which Etienne Despardieu, or Tiennet, the rustic narrator, tells, in the successive veillees of a month, the romance of his youth. It is a work of a very different type to the rural tales that had preceded it, and should be regarded apart from them. It is longer, more complex in form and sentiment, more of an ideal composition. Les Maitres Sonneurs, is a delightful pastoral, woodland fantasy, standing by itself among romances much as stands a kindred work of imagination, "As You Like It," among plays, yet thoroughly ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the human aggregate,—how insignificant his part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... even more complex; his jealous torments reach a climax, and those same two questions torture his fevered brain more and more: 'If I repay Katerina Ivanovna, where can I find the means to go off with Grushenka?' If he behaved wildly, drank, and made disturbances in the taverns in the course ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his thrifty promotions. The schemes, it must be said, had never come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They were always the schemes of little people, very complex in organization, needing a wheel here, a cog there, finally breaking down from the lack of capital. Then some "big people" collected the fragments to cast them into the pot once more. Dr. Leonard added ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... leave behind him unfought the squadrons of Shovel and Killigrew, and so far as commanding a line of invasion passage was concerned Tourville was himself as well contained as Torrington. The conditions of naval defence against invasion are in fact so complex compared with those of general naval defence that they must be treated later as a ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... heard the shout of the reinforced seamen as they started from the water's edge to give chase, they hesitated no longer. Turning round, they also fled. It is, however, due to Larry O'Hale to say that he shook his fist at the enemy, and uttered a complex howl of defiance before ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... has my heart been made to sink as I have gone through the South and into the homes of people, and found women who could converse intelligently on Grecian history, who had studied geometry, could analyse the most complex sentences, and yet could not analyse the poorly cooked and still more poorly served corn bread and fat meat that they and their families were eating three times a day! It is little trouble to find girls who can locate Pekin or the Desert of Sahara on an artificial globe, but seldom ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... we might do some other man's work, occupy his social or political station. But such an interchange is not easy. The world is complex, and its adjustments have come from long years of experience. Each man does well to perform the tasks for which nature and training have fitted him. And instead of feeling envy toward other people, we should rejoice that all labor, however diverse, is to one ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... to," I utterly deny as a fact. That they ought to be so, sounds well enough; but this proposition is of the same nugatory nature with some of the former. The regulations for the colony trade ought not to be more nor fewer, nor more nor less complex, than the occasion requires. And, as that trade is in a great measure a system of art and restriction, they can neither be few nor simple. It is true, that the very principle may be destroyed, by multiplying to excess the means of securing it. Never did a minister depart more from ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... soon as even a minute excess of H^{} or OH^{-} ions are present. Some, as will be seen, react sharply in the presence of H^{} ions, and others with OH^{-} ions. These substances employed as indicators are usually organic compounds of complex structure and are closely allied to the dyestuffs ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... moment the number of details that are crowded into this picture, and then notice how few are the strokes required to put them there. For this rapid painting of a crowded canvas Morris is second to none among English poets. This power to put a whole landscape or a complex personality into a few lines is the direct outcome of his study of Old Norse literature. Icelandic poetry is characterized by this quality. One has but to compare the account of the end of the world as it is found in the last strophes of Voeluspa, or in ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... without a reason. The springs of action were arrested and the machine instantly ran down. But a man is not a clock, which can be stopped and reveal no sign of the thing that stopped it. Life is a far more complex matter than a watch-spring, and if we knew more we might not be faced with so many worthless post-mortem reports. But Sir Howard Fellowes is not often beaten. I repeat, however, I do not associate the two ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... is now, the government has not found itself and it falls back on complex rules or machines for getting out of seeing ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... with, this representative religious consciousness was by no means simple. Professor James Harvey Robinson tells us that the modern mind is really a complex, that it contains and continues the whole of our inheritances and can be understood only through the analysis of all the contributive elements which have combined to make it what it is and that the inherited elements in it far outweigh more recent contributions. ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... interesting remarks on the metrical features of this complex ode. On the 10th line of Antistrophe 1a (line 86 of the ode)—Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk—which exceeds by one foot the 10th lines of the two corresponding divisions, Strophe 1 and Antistrophe ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the result of what we call the protective mechanism of fear. Back of most of these cases lies fear. Not cowardice, but perhaps we might say the limit of endurance. Fear is a complex, of course. Dislike, in a small way, has the same reaction. We are apt to forget the names of persons we dislike. But if you have ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the vision of the end through any enterprise, who would always put the curb of expediency on emotional impulses, who would invariably judge a theory not by its underlying principle, but by its practical application. A charming face, too, complex and imaginative, a face which made the rugged and open countenance of the Governor appear primitive and undeveloped. Corinna admired Benham; she respected him; she liked—was it even possible, she asked herself, that she loved him? Yet here again she was conscious of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... as the months rolled by that she "weren't no meddlesome busybody, a-trying to run things," she was only too glad to ask her advice in many instances, and Peggy's toilet this evening was one of them. Poor old Harrison had begun to find the intricacies of a young girl's toilet a trifle too complex for her, and had gone to Mrs. Harold for advice. The manner in which it was given removed any lingering vestige of doubt remaining in Harrison's soul, and tonight Peggy was a vision of girlish loveliness in a soft pink crepe meteor made with a baby waist, the round neck frilled with the ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Locomotives are not copied from the hare, nor are ships copied from the fish. To the first we have put wheels which are not legs; to the second we have put screws which are not fins. And they do not do so badly. Besides, what is this mechanical movement in the flight of birds, whose action is so complex? Has not Doctor Marcy suspected that the feathers open during the return of the wings so as to let the air through them? And is not that rather a difficult operation for ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... thing, and a thing of fundamental importance, which the revolutionists against petty artificialities always fail to appreciate, and that is the necessity and the value of convention. I cannot in a paragraph deal effectively with this most difficult and complex question. I can only point the reader to analogous phenomena in the arts. All the arts are a conventionalization, an ordering of nature. Even in a garden you put the plants in rows, and you subordinate the well-being of one to the general well-being. The sole difference ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... required most time and trouble to 'bring up' so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... many compensations in our freedom from the things that make your social life of to-day a complex problem," she replied. "In the first place I never had to worry much over Adam. When he was not out getting the raw material for our daily meals he was most generally at home, for the very excellent reason that there was no other place to go. We hadn't any Clubs ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... which is described in the vernacular by the term sakit hati—sickness of liver—that organ, and not the heart, being regarded as the centre of sensibility. The states of feeling which are described by this phrase are numerous, complex, and differ widely in degree, but they all imply some measure of anger, excitement, and mental irritation. A Malay loses something he values; he has a bad night in the gambling houses; some of his property is wantonly damaged; he has a quarrel with one whom ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the epea pteroenta, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey," "whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"—the gift of conferring good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as they were at ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... beams. If, in all cases, it be taken at the middle of the depth of the concrete beam, and if variation of intensity of stress in the concrete be taken as uniform from this neutral axis up, the formula for the resisting moment of a reinforced concrete beam becomes extremely simple and no more complex than that for a rectangular ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... complex condition of the veins which join the external jugular at this part of the course of the subclavian artery is now and then to be found overlying that vessel. If the hemorrhage consequent upon the opening of these veins, or that of the external jugular, be so profuse as to impede the ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... necessary here to observe that the discipline to which the nation had been subjected up to the age of the great Shinto writers, seems to have had a curious evolutional history of its own. In primitive times it had been much less uniform, less complex, less minutely organized, though not less implacable; and it had continued to develop and elaborate more and more with the growth and consolidation of society, until, under the Tokugawa Shogunate the possible maximum of regulation was reached. In ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... is still more obscured by the complex nature of the consciousness of right and wrong. A quite different consciousness of right and wrong develops in individuals, whether persons or peoples, and this consciousness finds its expression in most varied forms, and lives in the heart of the people by the side of, and frequently ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... told he is mistaken. To say he is self-deceived is neither to compliment him nor Christianity. He builds in all sincerity who raises his altar to the UNKNOWN God. He does not know God. With all his marvellous and complex correspondences, he is still one correspondence short. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... pair were soon involved in the crowd of people struggling toward the hostess across Mrs. Denton Frostwinch's handsome drawing-room. Mrs. Frostwinch belonged, beyond the possibility of any cavilling doubt, to the most exclusive circle of fashionable Boston society. Boston society is a complex and enigmatical thing, full of anomalies, bounded by wavering and uncertain lines, governed by no fixed standards, whether of wealth, birth, or culture, but at times apparently leaning a little toward each of these three great ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... if you will kindly bring your work to me, I shall do my best to enlighten you in regard to the complex duty of entering ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... vessels resembling the half of a hollow sphere, and eating with incredible velocity a quantity of tiny round coloured objects—closely related, as I subsequently had occasion to ascertain, to the Bellaria angelica,—which they raised to their mouths with astonishing and unerring aim in the complex Handling-Machines, or Tenticklers, which form part of their ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... the frog and the fish. The frog is a more complex animal and, so to speak, more difficult to create, and it lays fewer eggs. Since there are fewer eggs they must be more carefully fertilized; that is, the fertilizing material must be sure to come in contact with all of them. Consequently at the moment when the eggs are finding their way ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... at a distance, and it must not be confused with molecular physics, which has, on the other hand, undergone very serious checks. The molecular physics greatly in favour some fifty years ago leads to such complex representations and to solutions often so undetermined, that the most courageous are wearied with upholding it and it has fallen into some discredit. It rested on the fundamental principles of mechanics applied to molecular actions; and that was, no doubt, an extension ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... that Rand had made three days before in a public gathering. It had included a noteworthy display of minute information of western conditions, extending to the physical features of the country and to every degree of its complex population. One sentence among many had caught Cary's attention, had perplexed him, and had remained in his memory to be considered afterwards, closely and thoughtfully. There was one ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... dip, the so-called beds in the metamorphic schists, but I strongly suspect that they would not be found to extend with the same character, very far in the line either of their dip or strike. Hence I am led to believe, that most of the so-called beds are of the nature of complex folia, and have not been separately deposited. Of course, this view cannot be extended to THICK masses included in the metamorphic series, which are of totally different composition from the adjoining schists, and which are far extended, as is sometimes the case with quartz and marble; ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... gave serious trouble to the constabulary at Skibbareen, and so eventually caught the eye of a subordinate agent of Von Bork, who recommended me as a likely man, you will realize that the matter was complex. Since then I have been honoured by his confidence, which has not prevented most of his plans going subtly wrong and five of his best agents being in prison. I watched them, Watson, and I picked them as they ripened. Well, sir, I hope that you are ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is often as rickety as a two-legged stool. No, I won't laugh at you. There's not a braver man in the service than you. If you feel as you say, there's some cause for it; and yet so complex is our organism that both cause and effect may not be worthy of very grave consideration, as I ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... just studied what life without God would be for the individual. Let us now direct our attention to those collections of human beings which form societies. We shall not speak here of the relations of civil with ecclesiastical authorities,—a complex question, the solution of which must vary with times, places, and circumstances. Let us only remark that the distinction between the temporal and spiritual order of things is one of the foundations of modern civilization. This distinction ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland's works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... principle. The system is so complex, naturally, that we have not yet learned the actual method of working the process. We must do a great deal of mathematical and ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... that the Melmotte connection could ever really affect him, for she felt sure that she would never accept his offer,—but that he might think that he would be so affected. Of course he resented the feeling which she thus attributed to him. But, in truth, he was much too simple-minded for any such complex idea. 'Felix,' he continued, 'has already descended so far that I cannot pretend to be anxious as to what houses he may frequent. But I should be sorry to think that you should often ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Plateau Italian artillery destroyed the Austrians' complex system of defenses at several points. Italian infantry, attacking during a violent storm in the direction of Monte Zebio and Monte Forno, carried the pass of Agnello, and captured nearly the whole of Monte Ortigara, 6,924 feet high, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... from time to time criticism and reformation. So does the church. You look at the characters of the really great lawyers! And there is another thing. In dealing with the cases of our complex life, there is no accomplishment, no learning in science, art, or literature, that the successful practitioner will not find it very advantageous to possess. And a lawyer will never be eminent ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to the brawlers in Hyde Park. The life of civilized beings is a very complex thing. It isn't filled by good intentions nor even by the cardinal virtues. The function of the older societies is to hand on the best things the world has won, so that those who come after, instead of having to go back to barbarism, may start from where the best of their day left ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... for morality. Many suppose that, when God made man, He implanted conscience as an automatic moral mechanism, a kind of inner mind, to act in his absence; but conscience is not a single faculty. It includes many faculties, and is complex in nature. It has an intellectual element, and this is distinctly fallible and capable of education. Witness the Indians, believing it to be right to kill aged persons. Witness savages of old, sacrificing their children to appease the gods. Just as there has been an evolution in tools, in laws ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Pharamond, or of any other heroic novel, would be a desperate task. The great number of personages introduced in pairs, the intrigues of each couple forming a separate thread wound into the complex web of the plot, is alone enough to make any following of the story a great difficulty. On the fly-leaf of a copy of Cleopatra which lies before me, some dear lady of the seventeenth century has very conscientiously written ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse |
