"Chaos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was now on deck again, in pretty fair condition, but he was beginning to be despondent. After such an awful storm, and in all that chaos of waves, what chance was there of finding a little brig such as ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... by air but that proved impossible. All civil flights were canceled so that the fields could accommodate the armadas of military aircraft that swarmed into the area. We couldn't even get a wireless message out because of the spreading chaos. We had to proceed out of the city on foot and by then affairs were beginning to take an ugly turn. Food supplies were becoming exhausted and as long as the military refused to budge nothing could be brought in, even their own supplies. Once out of the city we took to the river. ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... which Arthur with most pleasure heard, Were noble strains, by Mopas sung, the bard Who to his harp in lofty verse began, And through the secret maze of nature ran. He the great spirit sung, that all things fill'd, That the tumultuous waves of chaos still'd: Whose nod dispos'd the jarring seeds to peace, And made the wars of hostile atoms cease. All beings we in fruitful nature find, Proceeded from the great eternal mind; Streams of his unexhausted spring of power, And cherish'd with his influence, endure. He spread the pure cerulean fields ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... subsistence of the matter, and the other in disposing the beauty of the form. This being supposed, it is to be observed that for anything which appeareth in the history of the creation, the confused mass and matter of heaven and earth was made in a moment, and the order and disposition of that chaos or mass was the work of six days; such a note of difference it pleased God to put upon the works of power, and the works of wisdom; wherewith concurreth, that in the former it is not set down that God said, "Let there be heaven and earth," as ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... witches—so fearfully hath error gone abroad," lamented young Mather, keen to be heard then, as he always was. "Brethren, toleration would make a kingdom of chaos, a Sodom, a Gomorrah, ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... swayed a scepter more mighty than that of the Caesars. But sixteen months had now elapsed since Napoleon landed at Frejus. In that time he had attained the throne of France. He had caused order and prosperity to emerge from the chaos of revolution. By his magnanimity he had disarmed Russia, by his armies had humbled Austria, and had compelled continental Europe to accept an honorable peace. He merited the gratitude of his countrymen, and he received it in overflowing ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... keeping her in sight until she entered the house. Then he turned and walked like a madman through the hissing rain—walked he knew not whither—his being a mere erratic chaos, a symbol of Nature's prime impulse ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... discourse Joel Rae sat terrified, with a bloodless face, cowering as he had made others to cower six weeks before. The words seemed to carry his own preaching to its rightful conclusion; but now how changed was his world!—a whirling, sickening chaos of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... profoundly, and come in a thousand times to exalt my faith amid trials, and sooth my griefs, and calm my solicitudes, when anguish has pierced me, and storms have raged. The text finds a thousand illustrations. The world was called from chaos, and warring elements, and confused and conflicting principles have not yet been restrained from their fury, or soothed to perfect peace. There are wars among the waters of nature; there are wars among the waters ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty effort, let us advance on Chaos and ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... impotence of the warfare of the small against the great capitalists that, during this convulsive period, the existing magnates increased their wealth and power on every hand, and their ranks were increased by the accession of new members. From the chaos of middle-class industrial institutions, one trust after another sprang full-armed, until presently there was a whole array of them. The trust system had proved itself immensely superior in every respect to the competitive, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... diversity in comment and in attempt at elucidation than has this marvelous instance of control over the forces of nature. Science ventures no explanation. The Lord of earth, air, and sea spoke and was obeyed. He it was who, amidst the black chaos of creation's earliest stages, had commanded with immediate effect—Let there be light; Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters; Let the dry land appear—and, as He had decreed, so it was. The dominion of the Creator over the created ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... events, but in accordance with the succession of ideas. The economic phases or categories are now contemporary, now inverted, in their manifestation; hence the extreme difficulty always felt by the economists in systematizing their ideas; hence the chaos of their works, even those most to be commended in every other respect, such as Adam Smith's, Ricardo's, and J. B. Say's. But economic theories none the less have their logical succession and their series in the mind: it is this order which we flatter ourselves that we have discovered, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... can be said to be your case, then remember, that just what the Saviour's healing word was to that child, sick and possessed, as He met it on His way from the Hill of Transfiguration, and breathed over it the spirit of the higher life, reducing the chaos of the soul to harmony, and bringing reason out of madness, and freedom out of demoniac possession, these holy seasons of time-honoured observance may be to your soul, if you use them reverently, and as God's appointed means for your growth in ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... the bitterness with which he entered his studio that morning. In all this chaos, what of his work? Could he ever have peace of mind for it again? Those people last night had talked of 'inspiration of passion, of experience.' In pleading with her he had used the words himself. She—poor soul!—had but repeated them, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... less imperfect. It is a barbarous practice, to express, like the greater part of the nations of Europe, the most simple and distinct sounds by many vowels, or many united consonants, while they might be indicated by letters equally simple. What a chaos is exhibited by the vocabularies written according to English, German, French, or Spanish notations! A new essay, which the illustrious author of the travels in Egypt, M. Volney, is about to publish on the analysis of sounds found in different nations, and on the notation of those ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of uncomplaining discomfort, outwardly if not inwardly resigned. Of a naturally systematic habit of thought, Connie's carelessness had been for him one of those petty annoyances of daily life to meet which he had always felt that philosophy had been especially designed; but to-night the chaos struck him so forcibly that he found himself vaguely questioning if it were possible for a human creature to sleep in such a spot? Picking up several gowns from the middle of the floor, he returned them to the wardrobe, and set himself to clearing the bed of an array ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... an attempt has been made to show how, during what was from the design standpoint perhaps the most critical period, order gradually became evident out of chaos, ill-considered ideas dropped out through failure to make good, and, though there was still plenty of room for improvement in details, the bulk of the aeroplanes showed a general similarity in form and conception. There was still a great deal ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... "In the midst of chaos," observed Tregarthen, laughing; "and she looks as placidly indifferent to the noise around her as if it were only the murmuring of a summer breeze, although there are two boys yelling at her very ear ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... a pencil sketch done on cheap, unruled tablet paper, but her mind dissolved into a chaos of interrogation marks and exclamation points—with the latter predominating more and more the ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... content with making an example—but he knew they would not. The blood hunger of a mob is easy to whet and hard to hold. McNamara would resist, as would Voorhees and the district-attorney, then there would be bloodshed, riot, chaos. The soldiers would be called out and martial law declared, the streets would become skirmish-grounds. The Vigilantes would rout them without question, for every citizen of the North would rally to their aid, and such men could not be stopped. The Judge would go down with the rest of the ring, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... Creil. It was time to go. We were not soldiers. Lying on the floor of a railway carriage I tried to sleep, pillowed involuntarily on someone's boot. I never knew to whom that foot belonged, for the compartment was chaos, like the world. The carriage light was feeble, and the faces I saw above me drooped under the glim, wilted and dingy. The eyes of the dishevelled were shut, and this traveller, counting the pulse of the wheels ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... American present requested that he be permitted to attempt an improvement on the toast given by his countryman, which request was granted. He then toasted the United States in this fashion: 'Here's to the United States, bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the east by infinite chaos, on the south by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the day of judgment.' This indeed is extravagant language, but that fellow possessed the American spirit which recognizes no limit to the ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Talleyrand, now appeared. Whereas the preceding legislative bodies had considered the subject carefully, but without taking action, the Convention now acted. The nation, though, was so engrossed by the internal chaos and foreign aggression that there was neither time nor funds to carry ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... arrived, Who carried off from Dis the mighty spoil Of the highest circle, then through all its bounds Such trembling seiz'd the deep concave and foul, I thought the universe was thrill'd with love, Whereby, there are who deem, the world hath oft Been into chaos turn'd: and in that point, Here, and elsewhere, that old rock toppled down. But fix thine eyes beneath: the river of blood Approaches, in the which all those are steep'd, Who have by violence injur'd." O blind lust! O foolish ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... cavalry had struck down and shredded the wayside vines and bushes to bury them under a cloud of following dust, and the short, plunging double-quick of infantry had trodden out this hideous ruin into one dusty level chaos. Along that rudely widened highway useless muskets, torn accoutrements, knapsacks, caps, and articles of clothing were scattered, with here and there the larger wrecks of broken-down wagons, roughly thrown aside into the ditch to make way ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... almost, four thousand square miles of fertile Volhyman soil, and recaptured the fortified town of Lutsk. He had the advantage of a most efficient artillery preparation, which blew the Austrian entanglements, trenches and earthworks into such a chaos that the bewildered occupants surrendered in thousands when the Russian ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... state of chaos had to be discovered, and on November 4, 1900, the Joint Committee of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society passed a resolution, which left Scott practically with a free hand to push on the work in every department, under a given estimate of expenditure in each. To safeguard the ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... rising sun advancing in the east to illuminate the wondrous scene. The whole atmosphere by degrees kindled up, and showed dimly and faintly the boundless prospect around. Both sea and land looked dark and confused, as if only emerging from their original chaos; and light and darkness seemed still undivided, till the morning by degrees advancing, completed the separation. The stars are extinguished, and the shades disappear. The forests, which but now seemed black and bottomless gulfs, from whence no ray was reflected ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... Out of the chaos of ejaculations and interrogation the reason for our expulsion at last was made clear. The little German hotel had not been remunerative. Our host and hostess were too hospitable and too polite to state the true reason for this state of affairs. Perhaps rents were too high. Perhaps, thought I, Frau ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... while she emerged from the chaos of attempted reflection and listened to what he was saying. He spoke very quietly, very distinctly, not sparing himself, laying bare every deception ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... played while Isolda impatiently awaits Tristan is turned into the whirling accompaniment to impassioned and incoherent exclamations as they first embrace; then to the seething mass of tone is added (l), and gradually out of chaos and confusion emerges one clean-cut melody after another. The daylight-theme which begins the introduction is Protean in the shapes it assumes, and the emotions, now hot passion, now the gentlest tenderness, it is made to express. The ferment settles down, and we ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... world fell from them, the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the wind together—they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to the other, and ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Set Free (Macmillan) Mr. H. G. Wells has seen a vision—the vision of a world plunged into blazing and crumbling chaos by the ultimate logical issues of military violence. Defence, becoming always less and less effective against attack, which is always more and more a matter of the laboratory, finally succumbs before Holsten's discovery ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... stage where he can maintain at once the two propositions, "Pound is merely a scholar" and "Pound is merely a yellow journalist," or the other two propositions, "Pound is merely a technician" and "Pound is merely a prophet of chaos," then there is very little hope. But there are readers of poetry who have not yet reached this hypertrophy of the logical faculty; their attention might be arrested, not by an outburst of praise, ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... one of quiet and peace to indescribable chaos. The startled and terrified buck uttered cries of agony. His fellows broke and leaped off in all directions. The elephant raised his trunk, and, trumpeting loudly, lumbered off through the wood, crushing down small trees and trampling bushes ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was awaited came when the fire was at its height. It came with a roar, tossing the licking flames into a wild chaos of protest. They were swept apart, and a great detonation boomed across to expectant ears. A pillar of smoke and flame shot up to the heavens. Then a deluge of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... with the gloom. Now, also, the cloud began to roll away from the mountain, while, as it heavily withdrew, one object after another started out of its impenetrable obscurity into sight with precisely the effect of a new creation before the indistinctness of the old chaos had been completely swallowed up. As the process went on they saw the gleaming of water close at their feet, and found themselves on the very border of a mountain-lake, deep, bright, clear and calmly beautiful, spreading from brim to brim of a basin that had been scooped out ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... perimeter of one's acquaintances. Already the difficulties of avoiding a collision in a crowd are enough to tax the sagacity of even a well-educated Square; but if no one could calculate the Regularity of a single figure in the company, all would be chaos and confusion, and the slightest panic would cause serious injuries, or—if there happened to be any Women or Soldiers present—perhaps considerable ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... the solitude, making night hideous—but in vain: the axle-tree has given way; the vehicle has overset, and marchionesses, chamber-maids, bandboxes, and philosophers are weltering in inextricable chaos. The carriage was in the stage next Nangis, about half-way to that town, when the hind axle-tree broke, and it tumbled on the road to M. de Voltaire's side. Madame du Chatelet and her maid fell above him, with all their ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... human figure, the new cast of features ... presented to the ruling classes of that time the type of human being most likely to win the day in the combat of human forces... Who had the power to break through this new standard of vision and, out of the chaos of things, to select shapes more definitely expressive of reality than those fixed by men of genius? No one had such power. People had perforce to see things in that way and in no other, and to see only the shapes depicted, to love only the ideals presented...." [Footnote: The ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... "this planet is poorly constructed. It is so irregular and has such a ridiculous shape! Everything here seems to be in chaos: you see these little rivulets, none of which run in a straight line, these pools of water that are neither round, nor square, nor oval, nor regular by any measure; all these little pointy specks scattered across the earth that grate on my feet? (This was in reference to ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... chaos in the theatrical business. They decided that its only economic hope was in a centralization of booking interests, and they acted immediately on this decision. Within a few weeks they had organized all the theaters ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... would leave the house, but she must see him yet once, alone, before he went! Once more he must hang his shriveled pinions in the presence of the seraph whose radiance had scorched him! And still the most hideous thought of all would keep lifting its vague ugly head out of chaos—the thought that, lovely as she was, ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... cannot comprehend the idea of social organisation without a minute machinery of management and interference. Society in England, where people may speak and do pretty much what they like, go here and go there without leave asked, and set up any business anywhere as suits their fancy—is anarchy, a chaos, according to French notions. Sir Francis inclines to the belief that a system of government interference and regulation, as in France, is an advantage, because it protects society against some gross abuses—such as the indiscriminate sale of medicines, want of sanitary ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... very well, though some of them began to cry; and hearing a fearful row in the kitchen I dashed off there, followed by the Doctor. The interior was a chaos of pots and kettles, in the centre of which sat the cook, Eleanor, holding on by the floor. Every now and then she would give a scream which took all the breath out of her; so she had to stop and fetch breath before she could give another. The ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... better one according to his caprice. The manifoldness of the proposed tests for special functions, is therefore enormous to-day. What is needed now is surely much more that order be brought into this chaos of propositions, and that definite norms and standards be secured for certain chief examinations, than that the number of variations simply ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... place we will build two refuges for the use of the pilgrims who cross the two mountains. Go thou, as the tenth one in this band; then wilt thou conjure the demons. Thou shalt bind the statue with a blessed stole, and its ruins will mingle with the chaos of the mountains. Thus shalt thou destroy the power of evil to ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... are not often the same—but no matter how she looks you feel all the time just love, love, love—so I have not named her yet. You remember when Orpheus took his lyre and sang after Cheiron had finished his song—it was of Chaos and the making of the world, and how all things had sprung from Love—who could not live alone in the Abyss. So I ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... this precise moment there was nobody completely sane in the house. Setting apart Therese and Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy of Dona Rita had gone to pieces. Everything was gone except her strong sense of life with all its implied menaces. The woman was a mere chaos of sensations and vitality. I, too, suffered most from inability to get hold of some fundamental thought. The one on which I could best build some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything. I whispered this ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... fractional. In the life natural, wherein we are swayed but by our own native impulses and desires, subservient only to the great silent law of Virtue (which has pervaded the universe since it swung out of chaos), a man is of worth from what he is in himself,—Newton was as worthy before the apple fell from the tree as when all Europe applauded the discoverer of the Principle of Gravity. But in the life artificial we are only ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... saeculis duo reperti sint, qui idem imaginati sint (Erastus de Lamiis), scarce two of two thousand that concur in the same symptoms. The tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms. There is in all melancholy similitudo dissimilis, like men's faces, a disagreeing likeness still; and as in a river we swim in the same place, though not in the same numerical water; as the same ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... order; they must trace it "from the end of Louis XIV. to the year VIII," and their object must be to show how superior the new architecture is to the old one.[2340] "The constant disturbance of the finances must be noted, the chaos of the provincial assemblies,... the pretensions of the parliaments, the lack of energy and order in the administration, that parti-colored France with no unity of laws or of administration, being rather ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... trachyte, basalt, and tuffs and agglomerates associated with streams of lava, have made this a land of supernatural horrors. I had no idea of the spectacle which was awaiting us in the peninsula of Snfell, where these ruins of a fiery nature have formed a frightful chaos. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... regular and proportioned beauty, like the pheasant of India, but a gaudy and glaring system of unconnected parts, like Esop's daw with borrowed feathers. Anarchy and darkness will be the original appearance. But light shall spring out of the noon of night; harmony and order shall succeed the chaos. The present patchwork of three different forms of government shall be changed into one simple and godlike system of despotism. Thus, when London was burned, a more commodious and healthful city sprung as it ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... creative influence of the Eternal Spirit, were the heavens and the earth finished in the space of six days—so admirably finished—an unformed chaos changed into a system of perfect order and beauty—that the adorable Architect himself pronounced it very good, and all the sons of God shouted for ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... sketch he would 'terrify himself' and vanquish the specter of Atheism! Oh, sir! the dear God stretches his arm about each and all of us! 'When the sorrow-laden lays himself, with a galled back, into the earth, to sleep till a fairer morning,' it is not true that 'he awakens in a stormy chaos, in an everlasting midnight!' It is not true! He goes home to his loved dead, and spends a blissful eternity in the kingdom of Jehovah, where death is no more, 'where the wicked cease from troubling, and ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... fulfilled when laws are voted clause by clause in a miscellaneous assembly. The incongruity of such a mode of legislating would strike all minds, were it not that our laws are already, as to form and construction, such a chaos, that the confusion and contradiction seem incapable of being made greater by any addition to the mass. Yet even now, the utter unfitness of our legislative machinery for its purpose is making itself practically felt every year more and more. The mere time necessarily occupied in getting ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... the crumbs, as it were, of a half-extinguished heaven swept down upon the earth. Occasional constellations of bright stars, tracing mysterious figures, vainly endeavoured to show forth distinctly, but they were submerged, blotted out by the general chaos which suggested the dust of some old planet that had crumbled there, losing its splendour and reduced to mere phosphorescent sand. And how immense was the blackness thus sprinkled with light, how huge the mass ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it was such a scene as you seldom see, and never want to. Nastiness beyond account, and chaos run loose in the midst of the nastiness. There were not a great many of the negroes; but by way of making what there were understand that they were free, Vaughan had had their hand-cuffs and ankle-cuffs knocked off, and, for convenience' sake, was putting ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... innumerable, in the dull grey mist that for these wretches replace the sun; beneath these pitiless fatalities; beneath this bewildering maze of vaults, some of granite, the others of hatred; at the deepest depths of horror; in the midst of asphyxiation; at the bottom of the chaos of all possible blacknesses; under the frightful thickness of a deluge composed of expectorations, there where all is extinct, where all is dead, something moves and shines. What is it? ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... theorists, who know nothing of the Hindoo as he really shews himself to us in daily and hourly contact with him, will ever persuade me that native, as opposed to English rule, would be productive of aught but burning oppression and shameless venality, or would end in anything but anarchy and chaos. ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... merely grief-stricken that such chaos should have sprung into being under his hand where there should be only order and efficiency. Now there surged into his heart a flaming, scorching rage. The whiteness left his face, and it went a dull, burning red. ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... God in respect of the whole creation, and that miracles are neither afterthoughts, nor irregularities, nor contradictions, but at once free and according to law. Miracles are not abnormal, unless Free-Will is a reduction of Kosmos to Chaos, and ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... stood before the banks of complex, yet beautifully familiar levers, the sheer exquisite complexity of it overcame him. To compute the movements of thousands of stars, all moving at different speeds in different directions in the vast swirling directionless chaos of the Universe—and yet to be sure that every separate movement would come out to within a quarter of a mile! It was something that no finite brain—man or Lhari—could ever accomplish, yet their limited ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... dim, vanished. He was lying on the grass in a London park, and Mavis' confession rang through the buzzing of his ears, through the chaos of his mind. It seemed that the whole of his small imagined world had gone to pieces, and the immensity of the real world had been left to him in exchange—crushing him with an idea of its unexplored vastness, of its many countries, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... actuality of which hath not its origin in God: Chaos spirituale:- [Greek text which cannot ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... but the uncompromising moral attitude and denunciation of the Hebrew seer? What is there but the same stormy phrase, tumultuous almost to chaos? Carlyle is our own era's type of the Hebraic temperament. Behind him follows Ruskin, a Carlyle tempered by the spirit of Hellenic art without the balance of Hellenic calm. In what Ruskin has to say on how we live and think, his sentences are one ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... part in Wyatt's rebellion) are discussed. There is no contest of day and darkness, of Truth and Error. The characters are in that perplexed condition about creeds which was their actual state after the political and social and religious chaos produced by Henry VIII. Gardiner is a Catholic, but not an Ultramontane; Lord William Howard is a Catholic, but not a fanatic; we find a truculent Anabaptist, or Socialist, and a citizen whose pride is his moderation. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... exaggerations of the claims of sex," breaking away violently from the older obsessing preoccupation with their position as women, but only to take up new evasions—fresh miserable attempts at escape. What began as a war of ideals became before long a chaos. It has had the effect not at all of minimizing the power of sex, but just as far as the deeper needs and instincts have been denied, has there been a deliberate turning on the part of the young to the ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... half-stifled moan that came from the feather bed was a voice of collapse and chaos, to which ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... o'erhead, but played Its crooked fires in constant flashes still, Just in our rear, as though it had arrayed Its heavy batteries at Fairlight Mill, So that it lit the town, and grandly made The rugged features of the Castle Hill Leap, like a birth, from chaos into light, And then relapse ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... will follow him to the Chartres Cathedral (particularly if you have been there already), and will stand facing the great East Window, where in stained glass of the ancient jewelled sort, woman, as Mother of God, is enthroned above all, he will tell you how, out of the chaos of warring religious orders, the priestly schools of Abelard, St. Francis of Assisi and others, there emerged the ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... disaster, but he was certainly making it endurable. However greatly he might be deserving of censure, from the standpoint of the sterner morality, he made amends. If he brought the whole world crashing in chaos about one's ears, at least he helped one ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... put the departing guest's luggage into the waiting vehicle. Then he turned his back and let the chance escape. The issue was fairly defined. To become a fugitive now was to plead guilty as charged—to open the door to chaos. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... I had been led to expect to fall in with this sea of ancient ice before I had got thus far, but it is not to be found. The sea indeed is partly blocked with ordinary ice, but there is nothing to be seen of this vast collection of mighty blocks, some of them thirty feet high—this wild chaos of ice which so effectually stopped some of ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... instinct in the case of animals takes in man the looser form of aptitude, talent, and genius. {84} Granted that certain ideas are not innate, yet the fact of their taking form so easily and certainly from out of the chaos of his sensations, is due not to his own labour, but to that of the brain substance of the thousands of thousands of generations from whom he is descended. Theories concerning the development of individual consciousness ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... interpreted, the fact is what we have described; absolute confusion, the "anarch old" of Milton, is the one deity whose sceptre is there paramount; and yet there it was, in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built his throne. That he must have looked with trepidation and perplexity upon his wild empire and its "dark foundations," may be supposed. The tenure was uncertain to him as regarded its duration; to us it is equally uncertain, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... hours I was comfortably settled in a town which is sometimes described as a chaos, especially for a stranger. But in London everything is easy to him who has money and is not afraid of spending it. I was delighted to be able to escape so soon from a house where I was welcomed so ill, though I had a right to the best reception; but I was still more pleased ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... at no time had any one deliberately spoken, or anything been accidentally disclosed. The truth had come to light by the force of its irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse. She looked back with melancholy derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well policed suburb to dark places one need never ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... through the chaos of his surging thoughts. He must call in Ruth Frazer and explain to her that he had not done what the papers said he did. Somehow he felt he owed her explanation, her ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... rent. For some years it is hardly too much to say that the law of the League, with its purely revolutionary propaganda, supplanted the law of the land and reduced large areas to a condition of chaos, the decrees of the "village ruffians," who ruled the situation, being enforced by ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... Your scheme is but a sign of the mad age we live in. Since the thirteenth century, when the anarchic element sprang full-grown into the history of humanity, that history has been chaos. And this republic is ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... time the little government was in chaos. The newspapers, by government order, were suppressed. The cable station voluntarily refused to send press dispatches to the outside world. Don, Jane and I, through Mr. Dorrance's prominence, had all the reports; but to the public it was only known by whispered, garbled ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... they were better!" Society was uprooted from its foundations. Strange characters were thrown up. The scum had come to the top, and bore itself bravely in the sunshine. The whole social fabric seemed warped and wrenched from its base; and in the midst of this chaos of starving women, feverish men, spies, extortioners, blockade-runners,—over the "doomed city," day and night, rolled the thunder of the cannon, telling that Grant and Lee were still holding ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... accompanied it we could have beleeved nothing else from such a confusion but that all the elements were at Strife, which of them should doe most towards the reduction of the creation into a Second Chaos. It was wonderful to consider the contrary effects of that Storme, for it blew some shipps from their Anchors and carryed them safe over shelves of Sand where a wherry could Difficultly passe, and yet knockt out the bottome of ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... control over delinquent servants? Was the collection of the revenue left without any check? Was the tyranny of a double government, like our double cabinet, tolerated with a view of seeing the concerns of the company become an absolute chaos of disorder, and of giving to government a handle for seizing the territorial revenue? I know that this was the original scheme of administration, and I violently suspect that it never has been relinquished. If the ministry have ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Army of the Proletaire fell back and back still further, out into the wrecked and trampled Park, and all through the city, where shattered buildings, many of them ablaze, and broken trees, dead bodies, smashed ordnance and chaos absolute told something of the story of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Bridge to other chambers, and afterwards to the house in Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes the copy got hidden away, and it was not until numerous applications for it had been made that it was at length ferreted forth from the chaos of some similar volumes huddled together in a corner of the studio. Full of remorse for having so long abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti then took up afresh the cause of the neglected poem, and enlisted Mr. Swinburne's interest so warmly as to prevail with him to use his influence ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... bewildering, intricate, and the whole land was divided in opinion as to the proper courses. Finally, all the Confederate officers, saving perhaps Jefferson Davis alone, and some who refused to accept, received again their political rights at the hands of the magnanimous North. Slowly chaos became cosmos. ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... valuable, if for nothing else, as a means for exercising the memory. A child who has thoroughly mastered a good catechism has his intellectual store-house already reduced to some order and system. His mind is not the chaos that we so often find in those children who are gathered into ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... and semi-blindness amid a chaos. Then as he began to recover his consciousness, he found himself standing by a pillar some distance from where he had been sitting: he saw a place where tables and chairs were all upside down, legs in the air, amid debris of glass and breakage: he saw the cafe almost empty, nearly everybody ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... pushed forward into a socialism which destroys individual liberty of action, or to a state of anarchy in which the weak would have no protection. I do not imagine that the leaders who preach socialism, who live by agitation and not by labor, really desire to overturn the social order and bring chaos. If social chaos came, their occupation would be gone, for if all men were reduced to a level, they would be compelled to scratch about with the rest for a living. They live by agitation, and they are confident that government will ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to know anything about God, or to make any use of the knowledge if he had it? Then his whole interior world is in the condition of confusion, which must necessarily exist where no spirit of order has yet begun to move upon the chaos in which are, indeed, the elements of being, but all disordered and neutralising one another. Has he advanced a step further, and realised that there is a ruling and an ordering power, but beyond this is ignorant of its nature? Then the unknown stands to him for the terrific, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... caused by ceaseless worry, can explain why Philippo Beroaldi the Younger departed this life five years after undergoing the labour of preparing for the press at the order of Leo X. the MS. found in the Westphalian Convent, containing the first six books of the Annals. When we consider the chaos in which that dismal MS. presented itself to the eyes of the unfortunate Professor in the University of Rome, we can readily conceive how he must have consulted, as he told us he did, "the learned, the judicious and the subtle" about the correction of errors of the knottiest nature ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... are upon the whole creatures of habit. However, it is certain that all those odd scratches and marks which on a close examination are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures, and which even to experienced painters appear rather the effect of accident than design; this chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse acknowledging the full effect ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... under the name of the Republic—a condition of things in which, at first, there will be no possibility of communicating with the people, infuriated with crime. In case a Government should evolve itself out of this chaos, I conscientiously hold that the "united word" of the great Powers, such as I have indicated in the preceding pages, should be made known, without any modification, to the new holders of power. Your Majesty's gracious friendship will certainly not take amiss this addition to my letter, though it ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... already confessed we do not feel sure that we rightly apprehend. What we do clearly see is that to have cosmic emotion or cosmic anything you must have a cosmos. You must be assured that the universe is a cosmos and not a chaos. And what assurance of this can materialism or any non theological system give? Law is a theological term, it implies a lawgiver or a governing intelligence of some kind. Science can tell us nothing but facts, single or accumulated as experience, which would not make a law though ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... why in thy foolish heart Should one seed grow so well, That naught but chaos there should reign, 'Mid poison plants ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... 1918 the Slovaks joined the closely related Czechs to form Czechoslovakia. Following the chaos of World War II, Czechoslovakia became a communist nation within Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe. Soviet influence collapsed in 1989 and Czechoslovakia once more became free. The Slovaks and the Czechs agreed ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... ETERNITY: It is the day when all the sons of God Wait in the roofless senate-house, whose floor Is Chaos, and the immovable abyss Frozen by His steadfast ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... a pleasant place. The table was covered with a chaos of supper. Everything sweet and rare, and hot and cold, solid and liquid, was there. It was the very apotheosis of gilt gingerbread. There was a universal rush and struggle. The charge of the guards at Waterloo was nothing to it. Jellies, custard, oyster-soup, ice-cream, wine and water, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... Jupiter seem more disgusting than when as just now in a translation of the 'Batrachia' I read that Jupiter had given to frogs an amphibious nature, making the awful, ancient, first-born secrets of Chaos to be his, and thus forcing into contrast ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... into a forest. All this appear'd accomplish'd in the space Between the morning and the evening star: So, in his third day's work, Jehovah spake, And Earth, an infant, naked as she came Out of the womb of chaos, straight put on Her beautiful attire, and deck'd her robe Of verdure with ten thousand glorious flowers, Exhaling incense; crown'd her mountain-heads With cedars, train'd her vines around their girdles, And pour'd spontaneous harvests at their feet. Nor were those woods without inhabitants Besides ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... Their appearance in the midst of that turbulent band was a sedative which soon allayed the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of social chaos arose the inchoate form ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... She can annihilate that black past in the light of Carol's smile; but when he is absent, and night is on the earth and in her heart, then the spectre rises, points his deadly finger at her quivering soul, and she realises the hideous dropping off of the veil. Her mind is a chaos of ruins. She calls to Carol in vain; only the shrill cry of some night bird through the air, and the beating of her pulses, answer ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... new difficulties,—by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and presumptuous curiosity which enquires whether we are to consider him co-ordinate with the Veiled Being, and in that case probably hostile, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... even the priest wrote, we wonder, as Thwaites says, that anything whatever has been preserved in writing. The "Relations" were written by the fathers, he reminds us, [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations," 1:39, 40.] in Indian camps, the aboriginal insects buzzing or crawling about them, in the midst of a chaos of distractions, immersed in scenes of squalor and degradation, overcome by fatigue and improper sustenance, suffering from wounds and disease, and maltreated by their hosts who were often their jailers. What they wrote under these circumstances is simple and direct. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... with bolder wing, Escap't the Stygian Pool, though long detain'd In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne With other notes then to th' Orphean Lyre I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night, Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to reascend, Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe, And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou Revisit'st not these eyes, that rowle in vain To ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... et Marion. There the very form of the pastourelle was in a manner dramatic—it wanted little adjustment to be quite so; and though the coda of the rustic merry-making is rather artless, it is conceivably admissible. Here we are not far out of Chaos as far as dramatic arrangement goes. Adam's announced desertion of his wife and intended journey to Paris lead to nothing: the episodes or scenes of the doctor and the monk are connected with nothing; the fool or madman and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... a Parcel of illiterate, ignorant Bigots, cry'd a Grecian: 'Tis plain, you know nothing of the Chaos, and that the World, as it now stands, is owing wholly to Matter and Form. The Greek ran on for a considerable Time; but was at last interrupted by a Celt, who having drank deep, during the whole Time of this Debate, thought himself ten Times wiser than any of his Antagonists; ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... in great magazines are proving, on the authority of the Japanese themselves, that the American moving picture is re-making Japan. Another, who has studied the signs of the times, asserts that the only way to bring order out of chaos in Russia is by ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... African Republic had been in existence as an independent State for twelve years when it reached that condition of insolvency which appeared to invite, or at least justify, annexation, as the only alternative to complete ruin and chaos. And there are very few, even among the most uncompromising supporters of the Boers, who seriously attempt to show that the Transvaal had any prospect of prolonging its existence as an independent State for ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... end, escape from this chaos of differing ears only if one accedes to the opinion of old Quantz, the flute teacher of Frederick the Great, who, after an exhaustive argument for and against, comes to the conclusion that in theory nothing can be definitely decided concerning ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... accustomed to such language, nor is my daughter, although my son and the twins probably know enough definitions to make them angry. This is an impasse, Mr. Cornell, and it behooves all of us to be extremely polite to one another. For one wrong move and you'll fire; this will mean complete chaos for all of us. One wrong word from you and someone of us will take offense, which will be equally fatal. Now, let's all stand quietly and ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... suits, yeomanry uniforms, and the like; a medley of old account books, photographs, worthless volumes, and broken ornaments: all the refuse that our too complex life piles about us was represented in the chaos of the room. Roger pulled and pushed as cautiously as he could, but making, inevitably, some noise in the process. At last! He caught sight of some belongings of his own and was soon joyfully detaching the old ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... features of the corpse. My limbs grew stiff with horror; thoughts of strange import crowded on my mind; I knew not how to shape them into any definite form, but stood trembling and appalled before the dark chaos whence they sprung. Scarcely knowing what I said, still I remember the first inquiry that burst from my lips—"Knowest thou that ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... General Halleck was pushing his preparations most vigorously, and surely he brought order out of chaos in St. Louis with commendable energy. I remember, one night, sitting in his room, on the second floor of the Planters' House, with him and General Cullum, his chief of staff, talking of things generally, and the subject then was of the much-talked-of "advance," as soon ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... startling than the desiccation of the landscape forced itself upon them. The town was still there, but where were the inhabitants? Four months ago they had left the straggling street thronged with busy citizens—groups at every corner, and a chaos of merchandise and traders in the open plaza or square beside the Presbyterian church. Now all was changed. Only a few wayfarers lifted their heads lazily as the coach rattled by, crossing the deserted square littered ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... task fell to my lot, in the reduction to order of the chaos existing at Junction Station. This place had been an important rest camp on the enemy's line of communications. That the Germans thought they had come to stay was manifested by the style in which the station and other buildings had been erected, as well as by the plans which ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... They filled the room; table, chairs and sofa were loaded with them; they lay in stacks upon the floor; and, in some cases, were piled, two or three tiers deep, into the shelves against the walls. To anybody else the library would have been a chaos; but he could lay his hand at once upon any book he wished for. It was in this room, thus crammed with books, that he used to entertain the little parties he invited to sup with him. The repast was always frugal; the conversation, on his part, such as might have gone into print. ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... imperial authority in the provinces; and bold men, taking advantage of the moment of weakness, start up in various places, asserting independence, and seeking to obtain for themselves kingdoms out of the chaos which they see around them. The more remote provinces are especially liable to be thus affected, and often revolt successfully on such an occasion. It appears that the circumstances under which Darius obtained the throne were more than usually provocative of the spirit ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... in making his first call upon the Hardys. He had discussed the matter with Irene over the telephone. "We are hardly in order yet," she had explained. "We are in a chaos of house-furnishing, but you will be welcome. And there may be boxes to lift, and carpets to lay, and heavy things to ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... warmth, arises a stem, leaves, and a flower; in a word, they perceive the apparition of a plant springing from its ashes. As soon as the warmth ceases, all the spectacle vanishes, the matter deranges itself and falls to the bottom of the vessel, to form there a new chaos. The return of heat resuscitates this vegetable phoenix, hidden in its ashes. And as the presence of warmth gives it life, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... shed Its central light on Harvard's holy head, And learning's ensigns ever float unfurled Here in the focus of the new-born world The speaker stops, and, trampling down the pause, Roars through the hall the thunder of applause, One stormy gust of long-suspended Ahs! One whirlwind chaos of insane hurrahs! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... her phraseology can find no comparison save in the inconceivable chaos of her teachings. She goes so far as to imply that the supreme effort of a woman's spirit should suffice to bring about conception. Jesus Christ having been conceived of the Holy Ghost, she suggests that man should follow ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... government appeared as much of an impossibility as it had appeared to Hegel. The attempt to establish it would, in his opinion, have led to nothing less than chaos. The German parties, as he viewed them, represented, not the State, not the nation, but an infinite variety of private and class interests—the interests of landholders, traders, manufacturers, laborers, politicians, priests, and so on; each ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents his God very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, had done. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribe with a god of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like a nigger clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet's mythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedral it builds. A myth is worth ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... without reference to a whole, so neither can a whole be imagined without fitness of parts. To give this fitness, then, is the ultimate task and test of genius: it is, in fact, calling form and life out of what before was but a chaos of materials, and making them the subject and exponents of the will. As the master-principle, also, it is the disposer, regulator, and modifier of shape, line, and quantity, adding, diminishing, changing, shaping, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... Viviers, founded by Cassiodorus in 531, the Benedictine rule required of every monk that a fixed portion of each day be spent in the scriptorium. There the more skilled scribes were entrusted with the copying of precious documents rescued from the chaos of the preceding century, while monks not yet sufficiently expert for this high duty were ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... here much of his uncertain conduct was owing to the unfulfilled promises of what he himself called his "realm of kings," and a sovereign can only justly be estimated by his domestic policy. The contrast of the empire before his time with the subsequent Germany is that of chaos with order. Since the death of Friedrich II. the Imperial title had been a mockery, making the prince who chanced to bear it a mere mark for the spite of his rivals; there was no centre of justice, no appeal; everybody might make war ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... its more general growth from the training bestowed in the tillage of childhood, shot a pang to his heart. For a minute, the mind of this creature equally of civilization and of barbarism, was a sort of chaos as to feeling, not knowing what to think of its own act; and then the obstinacy and pride of one of his habits, interposed to assert their usual ascendency. He struck the butt of his rifle on the bottom of the scow, with a ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... merrily enough till they had nearly reached the chaos of tumbled-together rocks, when, in spite of the bright sunshine and blue sky overhead, the wildness of the place once more impressed them unpleasantly, and, instead of the cheery conversation and banter in which they had indulged, they became quiet, only speaking ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... state in which I found myself, when the recollection of what I had done flowed back upon my mind, I was incapable of any resolution. All was chaos and uncertainty within me. My thoughts were too full of horror to be susceptible of activity. I felt deserted of my intellectual powers, palsied in mind, and compelled to sit in speechless expectation of the misery to which I was destined. To my own conception I was like a man, who, though ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... 15th of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... has never been done in crowds, but in closets; and when it works out from thence, it is not upon crowds, but upon individuals. A crowd is not a divine thing. It is not a body. Its atoms are not members one of another. A crowd is a chaos over which the Spirit of God has yet to move, ere each retires to his place to begin his harmonious work, and unite with all the rest in the organized chorus of the human creation. The crowd must be dispersed that the ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... yes, and I believe he required the county, too. He made one little concession in favor of New York: you could say "New York City," and stop there; but if you left off the "city," you must add "N. Y." to your "New York." Why, it threw the business of the whole country into chaos and brought commerce almost to a stand-still. Now think of that! When that man goes to—to—well, wherever he is going to—we shan't want the microscopic details of his address. I guess ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... defence without; no effective public force, but a foreign force, which entered a naked country at will, and disposed of everything at pleasure. Here was a state of things which seemed to invite, and might, perhaps, justify bold enterprise and desperate experiment. But in what manner was this chaos brought into order? The means were as striking to the imagination, as satisfactory to the reason, and soothing to the moral sentiments. In contemplating that change, humanity has everything to rejoice and to glory in, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... was going out by the wrong door, through the hall, but luckily did no more than turn the handle; or she never could have escaped bouncing in upon the lovers' interview, and thereby occasioning a chaos of confusion. For, be it whispered, the step-dame was not a little jealous of her ready-made daughter's beauty, persisted in calling her a child, and treated her any thing but kindly and sisterly, as her full-formed woman's ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of Luther and the generations after him have had this particular teaching of Luther before them four hundred years. What effect has it had on human progress in every field of secular activity in Protestant lands? Has it created that chaos and confusion which Catholics claim it must inevitably lead to? Quite the contrary has happened. And now let the patrons of the theory of human free will measure their own success as recorded by history ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... their language: those who were from their youth accustomed to admire Shakespeare and Milton, became acquainted for the first time with a race of poets, who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe, and investigate the realms of Chaos and Old Night; and of dramatists, who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its boundless ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... sinister passions. For Conrad is on one side an implacable realist.... Unforgetable are his delineations of sudden little rivers never charted and their shallow, turbid waters, the sombre flux of immemorial forests under the crescent cone of night, and undergrowth overlapping the banks, the tragic chaos of rising storms, hordes of clouds sailing low on the horizon, the silhouettes of lazy, majestic mountains, the lugubrious magic of the tropical night, the mysterious drums of the natives, and the darkness that one can feel, taste, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... a candle to light her down the stairs, but after she had gone he did not return to the office. Instead, he went slowly up to his own room, glancing first into Crailey's—the doors of neither were often locked—to behold a chaos of disorder and unfinished packing. In his own chamber it only remained for him to close the lids of a few big boxes, and to pack a small trunk which he meant to take with him to the camp of the State troops, and he would be ready for departure. He set about ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... swearing allegiance to Maud. This Arnold, who had followed his great cousin in supporting King Stephen's cause, had received for his service broad lands, both farm and forest, in Hertfordshire, bordering upon the hereditary estates of the Wardes; and in the turmoil and chaos of the long civil war, his word, at first without Raymond's knowledge, had more than once saved the latter's little castle from siege and probable destruction. Warde, in his loyalty to the rightful sovereign, had, indeed, rather ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... of arms, and the tramp of mailed feet resounded through Haddon Hall, and the doom-like din reached Dorothy's room in the tones of a clanging knell. There seemed to be a frightful rhythm in the chaos of sounds which repeated over and over again the words: "John will die, John will die," though the full import of her act and its results did nor for a little time entirely penetrate her consciousness. She remembered the queen's words, "You may ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... Congress of Vienna bequeathed to posterity may be seen at a glance by looking at a political map of Europe in 1815. The entire centre of the Continent from Ostend to Palermo, and from Koenigsberg to Constantinople, was left a political chaos. And it is not too much to say that the history of Europe from 1814 to 1914 is the history of the settlement of this vast area. The only State whose frontiers have not altered during this period is Switzerland, and even that country seized ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... only to be told, hesitatingly, "Ye-es, you have got the right answer, but that isn't the way my teacher does bank discount. Don't you know how to do it as she does?" Or, with a young Latin "beginner" in the house, have we not tried to bring order out of chaos with respect to the "Bellum Gallicum" by translating, "All Gaul is divided into three parts," to be at once interrupted by, "Our teacher translates that, 'Gaul is, as a whole, divided into three parts.'" If ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... sufferings and the destruction of life which it involved, was yet no senseless duel between two jealous nations, but one of the most fruitful in results of all modern wars, rescuing whole provinces from Ottoman dominion, and leaving behind it in place of a chaos of outworn barbarism at least the elements for a future of national ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... down the steep and winding path, my heart chanting a psalm to the mountains. Mountains like cathedrals, with carved, graceful spires; mountains like frozen waves left by some great sea when the world was chaos; mountains like leaning towers of Pisa; mountains like sentinel Titans; mountains silver-grey; mountains dark-red. The "Pain de Sucre" was strangest of all in form, perhaps, and Joseph distressed me much by remarking ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... shadow, holds how many myriad grass-blades? Here they are all matted together, long, and dragging each other down. Part them, and beneath them are still more, overhung and hidden. The fibres are intertangled, woven in an endless basket-work and chaos of green and dried threads. A blamable profusion this; a fifth as many would be enough; altogether a wilful waste here. As for these insects that spring out of it as I press the grass, a hundredth part of them would suffice. The American crab tree is a snowy mount in ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... remedied only under Elizabeth. The first experiment was made as early as 1526; but it was the financial embarrassments of Henry's last years which brought about a debasement that was almost catastrophic. From 1543 to 1551 matters went from bad to worse till the currency was in a state of chaos: and the silver coin issued in the last year contained only one-seventh of the pure metal that went to that of ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes |
