"Calculable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Brienne. Napoleon soon found that there is a gulf measurable by no calculable distance between existence as the dominating force of a family and life as a new boy at a boarding- school. He found his position reversed, and he began for the first time in his life to appreciate the virtues of his brother ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... his English poets he read them. And here was a whole new world. For in his occupation with the Encyclopaedists he had cared little for poetry. The reaction against his Methodist fit had lasted long, had developed a certain contempt for sentiment, a certain love for all sharp, dry, calculable things, and for the tone of irony in particular. But in such a nature such a phase was sure to pass, and it was passing. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson—now he was making acquaintance piecemeal with them all, as the precious volumes turned ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... demonstrate, balance, audit, overhaul, take stock; affix numbers to, page. amount to, add up to, come to. Adj. numeral, numerical; arithmetical, analytic, algebraic, statistical, numerable, computable, calculable; commensurable, commensurate; incommensurable, incommensurate, innumerable, unfathomable, infinite. Adv. quantitatively; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... lessons and preparations, had no place in this new world. Even the masters' lessons, coming in from outside and making a kind of framework of appointments over the otherwise fortuitously occupied days, were, she soon found, not always securely calculable. Herr Kapellmeister Bossenberger would be heard booming and intoning in the hall unexpectedly at all hours. He could be heard all over the house. Miriam had never seen him, but she noticed that great haste was always made to get a pupil to the saal and that he taught impatiently. ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering, brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank [sic] and woke, I thought all was over: the end come and passed by. Trembling fearfully—as consciousness returned—ready ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and the air of cold churches. There was also the impression—was it too fantastic?—of words carried over a medium, an invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to one's idea. But the comparison was irritating, and after a time she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... become the arena of mere personal partialities it is confessedly difficult to predict the future, on the wider field of the world's great interests, the well-known uniformity of human passions and interests render their results calculable to the sagacious statesman. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the fact that so far as loss of life was concerned it was not so great as had been feared, though no exact estimates were yet calculable. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... story might be told of Yale or any other college. Considered as what are called popular institutions—that is, institutions from which everybody can or does derive some calculable, palpable benefit—the universities of this and every other country are useless, and there ought on this theory to be a prodigious "outcry" against them, and they ought, on the principle of equality, if allowed to exist at all, to be allowed to exist only on condition that they will give ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... facts. Add this fact to that and you reach a certain conclusion. Subtract this truth from another and you have a definite result. Multiply this fact by another and have a precise product. See how many times this occurrence happens in that space of time and you have reached a calculable dividend. In thought-processes you perform every known problem of arithmetic and algebra. That is why mathematics are such excellent mental gymnastics. But by the same token, thinking is work. Thinking takes ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... in some material, a carver in wood, or a manager of commercial affairs, or a governor and administrator of men, and yet so order his life that his work and his material are his object: not his gain in the end—not his appreciable and calculable gain at least—nor his immediate ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... disconcerting—given, that is, for the critical, or at least the intelligent, eye, the great style of the facade and its high place in its class. The phenomenon that had since occurred, whether originally to have been pronounced calculable or not, had not, naturally, been the miracle of a night, but had taken place so gradually, quietly, easily, that from this vantage of wide, wooded Fawns, with its eighty rooms, as they said, with its spreading park, with its acres and ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... prosaic, regular, sound, calculable, literal, real, sensible, sure, calculated, ordinary, reasonable, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... her, they also rendered the length of her stay in the school almost calculable. Little by little the girl saw the forces developing which she knew must effect her dismissal; little by little, as Madam Elwin's manner toward her became less gracious, and her schoolmates made fewer efforts to conceal from her the fact that she was not one of them, Carmen prepared ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... does nothing to foster. Nor does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its sensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that events have other aspects—the psychic and the moral, for instance—no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation would indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable elements of nature her substance, as ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of ignorance and pre-occupation. He has to arrest a wandering attention, and to clear away the misconceptions which cling around verbal symbols. Words are not llke iron and wood, coal and water, invariable in their properties, calculable in their effects. They are mutable in their powers, deriving force and subtle variations of force from very trifling changes of position; colouring and coloured by the words which precede and succeed; significant or insignificant from the powers of ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... is the guardian to do when the guarded refuse to bear their share of the burden; refuse, indeed, to manifest any calculable interest, except in the way of occasional opposition? Such is the case in Charleston, South Carolina, where every man aspires to do just as his remotest recognizable ancestor did, and the best citizens would all live in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... of an antagonistic nature—the deadly, sickening, physical loathing that in rare instances affects certain human beings toward others of their species, and toward certain animals—then there are no calculable bounds to the ferocity of such a blind instinct, no possibility of mitigating, by considerations of reflection or feeling, an inherent, integral element of a morbid organization. And Shakespeare, in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a deeper mechanical order. Men's thoughts, like the weather, are not so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, the man guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them revolving about their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and the principle of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes. Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Gyp taint, however faded and feeble. The trouble appears to have been that while I on the one hand exorcised the baleful association, I succeeded in rousing on nobody's part a sense of any other association whatever, or of my having cast myself into any conceivable or calculable form. My private inspiration had been in the Gyp plan (artfully dissimulated, for dear life, and applied with the very subtlest consistency, but none the less kept in secret view); yet I was to fail to make out in the event that the book succeeded ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... and listened. The workmen's calculations were based (like too many of the masters') on false premises. They reckoned on their fellow-men as if they possessed the calculable powers of machines, no more, no less; no allowance for human passions getting the better of reason, as in the case of Boucher and the rioters; and believing that the representations of their injuries would have the same effect on strangers ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Americans northward are perfectly furious on the subject; and Motley the historian (a very sensible man, strongly English in his sympathies) assured me the other day that he thought the harm done very serious indeed, and the dangerous nature of the daily widening breach scarcely calculable. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... on taking a larger or smaller portion, the exact quantity to be used will be either some round number of grams, such as 50 or 100, easily calculable into percentage; or it will be that known as the "Assay Ton" (see page 13) or some simple multiple or fraction of it, which is easily calculable into ounces. The reports, too, are at least as often made as ounces in the short ton of 2000 lbs., as on the more orthodox ton of 2240 lbs. Now ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... that you can speak the truth truly!) if anything like the Sphinxineness of Browning, you discover in me; take me as far back as 'The Seraphim' volume and answer! As for Browning, the fault is certainly great, and the disadvantage scarcely calculable, it is so great. He cuts his language into bits, and one has to join them together, as young children do their dissected maps, in order to make any meaning at all, and to study hard before one can do it. Not that I grudge the study or the time. The depth and power of the significance ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... in such a state of debility as would confine him to his bed. But such debility could be produced by only starvation, unsuitable food, or chronic poisoning. Of these alternatives, poisoning is much more exact, more calculable in its effect and more under control. The probabilities, then, were in favour of ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... canal, in that it would threaten the tidal lock, the dam at Gamboa, and the excavation through Culebra cut. Very little is known regarding earthquake motions, and there are very few seismic elements which are really calculable in conformity to a mathematical theory of probability. It is a subject which has not received the attention in this country of which it is deserving, but enough of seismic motion is known to warrant the conclusion that the Senate committee of 1902 was, in all human probability, ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... activity, ceaseless change, a thousand new forms are what I crave." As soon as life enters matter, matter meets with a change of heart. It is lifted to another plane, the supermechanical plane; it behaves in a new way; its movements from being calculable become incalculable. A straight line has direction, that is mechanics; what direction has the circle? That is life, a change of direction every instant. An aeroplane is built entirely on mechanical principles, but ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... fond of all Roman sights and sensations, and to breathe the Roman atmosphere began to seem a needful condition of being. He could not have defined and explained the nature of his great love, nor have made up the sum of it by the addition of his calculable pleasures. It was a large, vague, idle, half-profitless emotion, of which perhaps the most pertinent thing that may be said is that it enforced a sort of oppressive reconciliation to the present, the actual, the sensuous—to life on the terms that there offered themselves. It was ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... consequences involved in his acceptance of the definition. For if the actual existence of wealth be dependent on the power of its possessor, it follows that the sum of wealth held by the nation, instead of being constant, or calculable, varies hourly, nay, momentarily, with the number and character of its holders! and that in changing hands, it changes in quantity. And farther, since the worth of the currency is proportioned to the sum of material wealth which it represents, if the sum of the wealth changes, the worth of the currency ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... out. He has his place, his office, and his destiny; he is no enigma but as an individual; "in the mass," as the author emphatically remarks, "he is a mathematical problem." His conduct is uniform and consistent; the result of known and ascertainable causes—causes calculable and predicable in their consequences, as the statistics of crime ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... and starts. They have no constancy—they are too weak to be constant even in evil; their minds are all impressions; their actions are all the issue of immediate promptings. Swayed by the fleeting impulses of the hour, they have only one persistent, calculable motive on which reliance can always be placed—that motive is vanity; you are always sure of them there. It is from vanity they are good—from vanity they are evil; their devotion and their desertion ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... calculable matters. It will have to be considered and decided in each place how far the Company can go without running any risks of failure. And the Company itself will confer freely with Finance Ministers on the various points at issue. Ministers ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... primaries, {9} and the motions of all on their axes, are IN ONE DIRECTION—namely, from west to east. Had all these matters been left to accident, the chances against the uniformity which we find would have been, though calculable, inconceivably great. Laplace states them at four millions of millions to one. It is thus powerfully impressed on us, that the uniformity of the motions, as well as their general adjustment to one plane, must have been a consequence ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... find wood enough?' I asked her. I could have sent her to the devil, for two hundred and forty thousand francs a year are no equivalent for liberty, nor a fair price for my physical and moral worth and my prospects. But she is the sole heiress of a gouty old fellow, some London brewer, who within a calculable time will leave her a fortune equal at least to what the sweet creature has already. Added to these advantages, she has a red nose, the eyes of a dead goat, a waist that makes one fear lest she should break into three pieces if she falls ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasselled ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the argument, with the artificial systems on which the chemist, physicist, and astronomer operate. But in astronomy, physics, and chemistry the proposition has a perfectly definite meaning: it signifies that certain aspects of the present, important for science, are calculable as functions of the immediate past. Nothing of the sort in the domain of life. Here calculation touches, at most, certain phenomena of organic destruction. Organic creation, on the contrary, the evolutionary phenomena which properly constitute life, we cannot in any way subject to ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... and that the accumulated effect of past action holds the stars in their courses, and that if we knew what all the past was we should be able to foretell the future, because it would be mathematically calculable—what of it? That does not prove your case, man! Can't you see that in free will another element enters—the spiritual, if you please, that is not amenable to atomic action past or present?" Amos smiled ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the greatest precision, might be thrown upon the tenant; in short, he could hardly ask any rent too high for his machine which a responsible person would give; dilapidation would be so visible, and so calculable in such instances, that any secondary lease, or subletting, would be rather an increase of security than a source of alarm. Any evil from such a practice would be improbable measurable, and remediable. In land, on the contrary, the object is not to get ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... thinks—which we have not quite abandoned since Descartes named the pineal gland as the seat of the soul. Then there is the false idea that all causality is mechanistic and that there is nothing in the universe which is not mathematically calculable. There is the confusion of representations and of things. There is the false notion that we may argue that if two wholes are bound together there must be an equivalent relation of the parts. Bergson points out in this connexion that the absence or the presence of a screw can stop a machine or keep ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... circumstances would be, that there was some fault in the microscope. But even if this conclusion were rejected, we presume Mr. Mill would allow that, under the supposed circumstances, the exact magnitude of the minimum of extension would be calculable. We have only to measure the minimum visibile, and know what is the magnifying power of our microscope, to determine the exact dimensions. Suppose, then, that we assign to it some definite magnitude—say the ten billionth part of an inch,—should we then conclude that ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... impossibility of the achievement set before him, he quietly puts it aside, and thinks no more about it. But seen as the crowning effort of many lives of steady improvement, as the triumph of the God within us over the lower nature, it comes within calculable distance, and we recall the words of Porphyry, how the man who achieves "the paradigmatic virtues is the Father of the Gods,"[63] and that in the Mysteries these ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... is an annual incident of which I fancy only California could be capable. Of course the calculable quality of the weather helps in this possibility. But the art-spirit, born and bred in the Californian, is the driving force. Every year the Bohemian Club produces in its summer annex—a beautiful grove of redwoods ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... did not fear: he could make a sort of calculation of the votes for the Liberal thumping on the old drum of Reform; but the number for him who appealed to feelings and quickened the romantic sentiments of the common people now huddled within our electoral penfold, was not calculable. Tory and Radical have an eye for one another, which overlooks the Liberal at all times except when he is, as they imagine, playing the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and as Miss Austen's, is really the result of generally working forces, as well as of individual genius, would lead to the same conclusion. But the expectation would show his inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact that Art, unlike Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws whatsoever. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the absence of all momentum—elsewhere so scientifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our day—and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness, the felicities of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together, the last of calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James |
