"Chaotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... write down any more. After she had gone I felt delightfully puffed up for a while. But when I came up to my room this evening, and knelt down to pray, everything looked dark and chaotic. God seemed far away, and I took no pleasure in speaking to Him. I felt sure that I had done something or felt something wrong, and asked Him to show me what it was. There then flashed into my mind the remembrance of ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... details. Outwardly or inwardly, there is no History, or almost none, to be had of this Reinsberg Period; the extensive records of it consisting, as usual, mainly of chaotic nugatory matter, opaque to the mind of readers. There is copious correspondence of the Crown-Prince, with at least dates to it for most part: but this, which should be the main resource, proves likewise a poor ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... brotherhood and peace amongst the earthly children of a Heavenly Father, whose attribute was love—this story, possessed a certain homely beauty and sentimental glamour which won the allegiance of many golden-hearted and sweet-souled men and women. These lovely natures assimilated from the chaotic welter of beauty and ashes called the Christian religion all that was pure, and rejected all that was foul. It was the light of such sovereign souls as Joan of Arc and Francis of Assisi that saved Christianity from darkness and the pit; and how much ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... lying beside the quay in full sight of the travellers, lurched giddily at her moorings. The fourth occupant of our compartment, a sallow man with yellow whiskers, turned green with apprehension. Not so Placidia. From amongst her chaotic hand-baggage she extracted walnuts and mandarin oranges, and began eating with an appetite that was a direct challenge to the Channel. Bravery or foolhardiness could ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... lower. It seemed to me as we stood in that empty garage that an invisible hand was drawing a net closer and closer about Isobel and my ideas became increasingly chaotic, for the purpose of it all eluded me, try how I would to conceive of a scheme by which any one could profit which necessitated the imprisonment, or worse, ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... epigram of a French art critic a hundred years before— Il cherche toujours a faire mieux qu'il ne fait. {22} He lavished on it far more pains than on "Eothen": the proof sheets were a black sea of erasures, intercalations, blots; the original chaotic manuscript pages had to be disentangled by a calligraphic Taunton bookseller before they could be sent to press. This fastidiousness in part gained its purpose; won temporary success; gave to his style ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... canst thou grasp the whole?— Nay, comprehend one attribute of God, The Maker, Sovereign, Him who at a nod Can hurl all worlds to wreck, and with a breath Can wake a Universe from night and death, And clothe in Beauty's robes of richest bloom Ten thousand worlds snatched from chaotic gloom? ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... garment of long ago,—in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of easterly storm. He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from the house. There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives of persons who lack real force of character,—moments of test, in which courage would most assert itself,—but where these individuals, if left to themselves, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as he was sinking into the dulness of despair, there came, like the fist gleam of light in chaotic darkness, the memory of Mildred Carr. Truly she had spoken prophetically. His idol had been utterly cast down and crushed to powder by a hand stronger than his own. He would go to her in his suffering; perhaps she could find ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... the measure of the situation and plan what she would do, the noise of the music suddenly ceased, and she heard a voice, though low in tone, give some sort of command. Then there was a cry, and what seemed the chaotic noise of a struggle followed; then a voice a little louder speaking, a voice of someone she remembered, though she could not place it. Something vital was happening outside, something punctuated by sharp, angry exclamations; afterwards a voice ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for producing sonorous shocks following each other rapidly at regular intervals. Musical sounds are distinguished from mere noises by their regularity. If we shake a number of nails in a tin box, we get only a series of superimposed and chaotic sensations. On the other hand, if we strike a tuning-fork, the air is agitated a certain number of times a second, with a pleasant result which we call ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... regulation which will strike, not at the symptoms of the evil, but at its roots. The existing concentration of wealth and financial power in the hands of a few irresponsible men is the inevitable outcome of the chaotic individualism of our political and economic organization, while at the same time it is inimical to democracy, because it tends to erect political abuses and social inequalities into a system. The inference which follows may be disagreeable, but it is not to be escaped. In becoming ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... This chaotic little world of the dawning life is not our world, the world of common thought, the world in which we all live and move in maturer years; nor can we go back to it on the wings of memory. We seem to ourselves to have ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... he was destined to receive from her. The others, if there were others, all went astray in the chaotic confusion attendant on active service. The poor quartermaster, when the ship was so lucky as to take a mail aboard, grew accustomed to be told that there was nothing for him. He lost heart and stopped writing himself. ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... one substance of Adam's soul; a view that logically implies an ultimate attenuating diffusion, ridiculously absurd. Secondly, it is held that "the eating of the forbidden fruit corrupted all the vital fluids of Eve; and this corruption carried vicious and chaotic consequences into her ova, in which lay the souls of all her posterity, with infinitely little bodies, already existing."6 This form is as incredible as the other; for it equally implies a limitless distribution of souls from a limited deposit. As Whewell says, "This successive inclusion of germs ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Infinite; showing how the infinite is contained in the finite, the absolute in the relative, not spatially or by continuation, but by exact correspondency, as the soul is contained in the body. He always steers clear of the shoals of atheism, and of the dim and chaotic abysses of pantheism. He is often obscure, but has the power to be concise and luminous. His style is vigorous, though we object to the meaning he attaches to two words very dear to the human heart: for religion is not ritualism, nor is morality made of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb. On the one side is a disciplined, fortified Gibraltar, held by the gentry; then comes a singularly barren and unstable neutral zone; and on the other side is the vast chaotic mass. In Under Town, I notice, a gentleman is always gen'leman, a workman or tramp is man, but the fringers, the inhabitants of the neutral zone, are called persons. For example: "That man what used to work for the council is driving about the gen'leman ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... merciless logic and incisive phrase he showed how the Bolsheviki were using the formula, "the self-determination of nationalities," as the basis of a propaganda to bring about the dismemberment of Russia and its reduction to a chaotic medley of small, helpless states. To Lenine's statements about the readiness of the German working class to rebel, Kerensky made retort that Lenine should have remained in Germany while on his way to Russia and preached ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... in a saturated solution, a point of crystallization had formed, round which the whole chaotic and fluctuating mass united, producing a crystal of wonderful forms. Thus, when the phenomenon of the polarisation of attention had taken place, all that was disorderly and fluctuating in the consciousness ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... consulted, and will adopt methods which cannot be regarded as philosophical. Therefore, it is a matter of pressing importance that all people who can think at all should use their own minds, and should do their best to widen and strengthen the influence of the ablest thinkers. The chaotic condition of the average mind is our reason for trying to strengthen the influence, always too feeble, of the genuine thinkers. Much that passes itself off for thought is simply old prejudice in a new dress. Tradition has always this, indeed, to say for itself: ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... highest peak in the range of the soapstone hills. The gorge in which our party of thirty-two had entered ran within fifty feet to the left of us. But, for at least one hundred yards, the channel or bed of this gorge was entirely filled up with the chaotic ruins of more than a million tons of earth and stone that had been artificially tumbled within it. The means by which the vast mass had been precipitated were not more simple than evident, for sure traces ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... stones, and damp and broken crags, In wild chaotic heap, Were lying at the barren base Of the ferny hillside steep; Between those fragments hollows lay, Upfilled with fruitful ground, Where many a modest floweret grew, To scent the wind-breaths round; As fertile patches bloom within A dried and worldly ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... all right, but Hodge isn't even a piece of a man!" he growled, as he made his way home, his thoughts in a chaotic state. "I shall have to punch his head for him. Merry wouldn't have beat me shooting if I had taken my own gun along! I reckon I was a fool for going into the thing. Hodge isn't any too good to slip that shell in on Merry! And if he didn't do it, who did? And I'd like ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... profoundly independent from how we conduct the business of defense. It is this environment of innovative upheaval that any useful foundation for strategic and operational thought must address. Rapid Dominance capitalizes on, and may even require, this rapid and chaotic development of technology. ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... definite choice of a subject whereon to employ his intellect was at one and the same time a proof of how far his development had progressed and a warning of what lay before him. However chaotic the material in which he proposed to work, however inadequate his powers, it was yet a truth that, could he execute anything at all, it would be something of the kind thus vaguely contemplated. His intellect was combative, and no subject excited it to such ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... knowledge of and a delight in the variety of things is the end of all science and poetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations. They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the order of beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in pursuit of a generalisation—the perfect generalisation of the universe. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough to call ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... common summit for all. One is bewildered in the attempt to describe such scenery. There is no central figure, no prevailing character, no sharp contrasts, which may serve as a guide whereby to reach the imagination of the reader. All is confused, disordered, chaotic. One begins to understand the old Norse myth of these stones being thrown by the devil in a vain attempt to prevent the Lord from finishing the world. Grand as they are, singly, you are so puzzled by their numbers and by the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... head sadly and started to walk slowly across the sunlit grass. Mortimer watched her, his brain in a whirl of chaotic thoughts. She ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... nations. Feudalism, already enfeebled and discredited as a principle of public relations, furnished no bond whatever which was stable enough to countervail the alliances of religion. In a condition, therefore, of public law which was little less than chaotic, those views of a state system to which the Roman jurisconsults were supposed to have given their sanction alone remained standing. The shape, the symmetry, and the prominence which they assumed in the hands of Grotius are known to every ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... their New England friends the possibility of a withdrawal from the Union and the formation of a Northern Confederacy. As the confederacy shaped itself in Pickering's imagination, it would of necessity include New York; and the chaotic conditions in New York politics at this time invited intrigue. When, therefore, a group of Burr's friends in the Legislature named him as their candidate for Governor, Pickering and Griswold seized the moment to approach ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... topics. Whenever I and Seraphina began to get too absorbed in sentimental dreams and vague aspirations, the Lady Adelheid, though now hardly young enough to be so naive and droll as she once was, yet intervened with all sorts of merry and somewhat chaotic nonsense. From several hints she let fall, I soon discovered that the Baroness really had something preying upon her mind, even as I thought I had read in her eyes the very first moment I saw her; and I clearly discerned the hostile influence of the apparition ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... No heads have appeared as yet. One hundred yards! Now we are under the rise, the horses feel the hill—a few seconds and we shall know who has won the race. "Steady, men, steady!" Up goes the squadron leader's arm. "Halt! Dismount!" A chaotic second as the frenzied line reins in. "'Number Threes.' Where are the 'Number Threes'?"—"Way for the pom-pom." The straining team crashes through the line. The dismounted troopers follow their officers up the slope. A moment of suspense—and a long-drawn breath. ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... mouths shut. From the ceiling downward hung the thick, stale cloud of smoke from many strong pipes and the rancid poison of air discharged from many lungs had become a stench in the nostrils. Occasional figures walked with an unsteady lurch, while through the whole chaotic pandemonium others slept heavily in their ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... survey your mansion, and tell me what kind of a man it indicates. If it does not proclaim (in your case) the President of the Patagonia Junction, a man shrewd, and hard, and solid, without taste or liberal cultivation, it is a painted deceiver. If it tries to insinuate by this chaotic profusion of rich and rare objects, that you are a cultivated, accomplished, tasteful, and generous man, it is a bad lie, because a transparent one. Why, my dear old Pot., the moment your servant opens the front door, a man of sense perceives the whole thing. You and Mrs. Potiphar ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... this young ice "rafts," so forming double thicknesses of a toffee-like consistency. Again the opposing edges of heavy floes rear up in slow and almost silent conflict, till high "hedgerows" are formed round each part of the puzzle. At the junction of several floes chaotic areas of piled-up blocks and masses of ice are formed. Sometimes 5-ft. to 6-ft. piles of evenly shaped blocks of ice are seen so neatly laid that it seems impossible for them to be Nature's work. Again, a winding canyon ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... well as the channel bends it is difficult indeed to avoid disaster. Still, Dick remained perfectly cool and self-possessed; the certainty and success with which he had piloted the canoe through that unknown half-mile of chaotic leaping and rushing water had given him more confidence in himself than all the rest of his experience put together, and he felt that unless something quite unexpected and out of the common happened, there was no reason why they should not accomplish the remainder of the run in safety. ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the conjurer's art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective UTOPIAN. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... of life, the ordering of the home, its habits, intercourse, purposes, care for the needs of children, and their sound development, must stand in the foreground. But at present, in most cases, children of tender years, as well as those who are older, are sacrificed to the chaotic condition of the home. They learn self-will without possessing real freedom, they live under a discipline which is spasmodic ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... whirring engines and Nolan's pleasant eyes were harmoniously mingled. And when at last she started up into active consciousness again, and rushed pellmell to bed, mindful of her responsibility as a business girl, sleep came very slowly. And when it came at last, it was a chaotic jumble of excited ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... know, dear reader, that the gigantic reflector of Lord Rosse, and the exquisite fifteen- inch refractors of the modern observatories, eliminate from the chaotic rubbish-heap of the surface of old Thornbush much smaller objects than such a circle as I have named. If you have read Mr. Locke's amusing Moon Hoax as often as I have, you have those details fresh in your memory. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... her seemed never to have wavered. He had respected, perhaps partly imagined her feelings, and in spite of these now a sense of gratitude to him stole over her, mitigating the intensity of their bitterness. Mr. Tiernan alone seemed stable in a chaotic world. He was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a digest of the whole mass of Roman law literature, compiled and annotated at the command of Justinian, under the supervision of the great lawyer Tribonian, who, with his helpers, reduced the chaotic mass to a logical system containing the essence of Roman law. The first part of the Codex Constitutionem, prepared in less than a year, was published in April, 529. The second part, the Digest or Pandects, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... creation of the world, the formation of man, and the destruction of the world by a deluge. They suppose the existence originally of two worlds, an upper and lower. The upper completed and filled with an intelligent order of beings, the lower unformed and chaotic, whose surface was covered with water, in which huge monsters careered, uncontrolled and wild. From the upper there descended to the lower a creating spirit, in the form of a beautiful woman. She alighted on the back of a huge tortoise, gave birth ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... of a chaotic huddle, order was formed, and to the men left horseless, mounts were given behind other men. Captain De Lancey assigned a beast to myself and my prisoner. The big rebel clambered up behind me, with ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... government at Washington, it may well be believed that he found matters in a condition decidedly chaotic. His task was many sided, a greater task than that of Washington as he had justly said. First, of the fifteen slave states seven had seceded. It was his purpose to hold the remaining eight, or as many of them as possible. Of this number, Delaware and Maryland could ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... golden halo that grew more and more concentrated till it burst into gloom as one gigantic sunflower, which, suddenly changing into the full moon just rising above the top of a neighboring roof, put an end to his chaotic dreams. ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... upon America as a nation would be absurd, for nation, properly speaking, it is not; but to consider it in its present chaotic state, is well worth the labour. It would not only exhibit to the living a somewhat new picture of the human mind, but, as a curious page in the Philosophy of History, it would hereafter serve as a subject of review for the ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... very distasteful. He recollected the smell of the place, and the memory brought with it a sense of nausea. He thought of Lala Huang, and his ideas became grotesque and chaotic. Yet the solution of the mystery lay at last within his grasp, and to the zest of the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... about sunset up our spacious bay and view for the first time the eccentric sky-line of lower New York, he would rub his eyes and wonder if they were not playing him a trick, for distance and twilight lend the chaotic masses around the Battery a certain wild grace suggestive of Titan strongholds or prehistoric abodes of Wotan, rather than the business part of a practical ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and horseplay which is sometimes more ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Fouche, with a sigh. "I have disclosed myself, or rather I have been outwitted. You are in all things a hero and a master, in cunning as much as in bravery and discretion. I bow before you as before a genius whom God Himself has sent upon the earth, to bring the chaotic world into order again; I bow before you as before my lord and master; and instead of opposing you, I will henceforth be content with being your instrument, provided that you will ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... unaided fails"; but the difficulty is that if enhanced powers were attained by the whole population of the world without any common basis for their use, their promiscuous exercise could only result in chaotic confusion and the destruction of the entire race. To introduce the creative power of the Individual and at the same time avoid converting it into a devastating flood is the great problem of the transition ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... usual chaotic turmoil and it was impossible to get a taxi, so we had to walk. But the general did not seem at all averse to the exercise. It seemed to me he rather enjoyed returning the salutes with the greatest punctilio and flourish. On our way we came to one of the capital's most famous taverns ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... was it for us that we did so. We had just backed a few hundred yards astern, and given the order to go ahead full steam, when the Russian's magazine exploded. Our charge had somehow fired it. Instantly there was a crashing roar as if heaven and earth had met in chaotic conflict. The air was darkened with bursting clouds of blackest smoke, in the midst of which beams, guns, pistons, boilers, armour-plates, human limbs and heads were seen hurling about like the debris of a wrecked universe. Much of this came down upon our iron deck. ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... all around and about me. My head reeled, the wine, the excitement, my long previous illness, all pressed upon me; and as my temples throbbed loudly and painfully, a chaotic rush of discordant, ill-connected ideas flitted across my mind. There seemed some stir and confusion in the room, but why or wherefore I could not think, nor could I recall my scattered senses, till Sir George Dashwood's voice roused me ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Often the traveller comes upon them without sign or warning of their proximity, till, standing on the edge of a precipitous escarpment, he sees yawning below a chasm sunk several hundred feet into the earth. In its bed may be loose boulders piled in chaotic confusion, as if cast there by the hands of Titans; also trunks of trees in a fossilised state such as those observed by Darwin on the eastern ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... upon Toby where they innocently sought him, in the front ranks, even scanning the carriages, seeking him in all positions which she conceived as highest in honour, and she would have missed him altogether, had not there reached her, out of chaotic clamours, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... in talking over this matter with a couple of seniors, they told me I was supposed to claim this invasion was mor'ly and legally all right. Well—" Here, by some chance, the recollection of a word of Dora's flickered into his chaotic mind, and he had a brighter moment. "My opponent said she proved all war is wrong—or something like that, anyhow. She said she proved it was wrong to fight, no matter what. Well, if she wasn't a girl, anybody that wanted to get her into ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... childish imagination. When at last, as a young man, I used to listen to the Zillmann Orchestra in the Grosser Garten almost every afternoon, one may imagine the rapturous thrill with which I drew in all the chaotic variety of sound that I heard as the orchestra tuned up: the long drawn A of the oboe, which seemed like a call from the dead to rouse the other instruments, never failed to raise all my nerves to a feverish ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... moral philosophy is to unite the disjoined element, to end the divorce between reason and experience, and to escape from the alternative of dealing with empty but symmetrical formulae or concrete and chaotic facts. No hint can be given here as to the direction in which a final solution must be sought. Whatever the true method, Wordsworth's mode of conceiving the problem shows how powerfully he grasped the questions at issue. If his doctrines are not systematically ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... easy to say as yet what will one day be evolved from this necessarily somewhat chaotic period. What will be the fundamental ideas on which the societies that are to succeed our own will be built up? We do not at present know. Still it is already clear that on whatever lines the societies of the ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... followed by the polyglot curses of Barlasch, who was now endeavouring to find his bayonet amidst his chaotic possessions. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... to preside over the courts, but also as a consequence of the steady determination of the majority of French Canadians to ignore laws to which they had naturally an insuperable objection. In fact, the condition of things became practically chaotic. It might have been much worse had not General Murray, at first, and Sir Guy Carleton, at a later time, endeavoured, so far as lay in their power, to mitigate the hardships to which the people were subject ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... such sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards—I think I see him now—along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... union's income on intricate betterment schemes, and wealthy in tradition—there a rise in wages meant an increase in welfare. But in the United States, with a heterogeneous labor class, bereft of their social norms by the violence of their uprooting from the old world, dropped into an unprepared and chaotic American life, with its insidious prestige—here a rise in wages could and does often mean added ostentation, social climbing, superficial polishing, new vice. This social perversion in the consuming of the ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... pattern, and there seems to be a prospect that we shall outlive the Gothic cottage. Even the Anglo-Italian bracketed villa has seen its palmiest days apparently, and exhausted most of its variations. We are in an extremely chaotic state just now; but there seems to be an inclination towards more rational ways, at least in the plans and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to speak, on the eve of a battle, when the army faces the enemy. It seems that genuine staff duties are something altogether unknown to the military senility of the army. McDowell received this corps in the most chaotic state. Almost with his own hands he organized, or rather put together, the artillery. Brigades are scarcely formed; the commanders of brigades do not know their commands, and the soldiers do not know their generals—and still ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... grew up the typical Corsican temperament, moody and exacting, but withal keen, brave, and constant, which looked on the world as a fencing-school for the glorification of the family and the clan[2]. Of this type Napoleon was to be the supreme exemplar; and the fates granted him as an arena a chaotic ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... travelling through the narrow valley of the Bogatschitza brought us to the bank of the Drina, where, leaving the up-heaved monuments of a chaotic world, we bade adieu to the Tremendous, and ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... patched with disheveled bluff, split by rifts and yawning chasms. And ever they rose higher and higher as the distance gained, and, though summer was not yet at its height, it was gaunt-looking, torn, chaotic, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... in any respect resemble that of the Arctic regions, as James Ross very soon discovered. It consisted of huge blocks, with regular and vertical walls, whilst the ice-fields, less compact than those of the north, move about in chaotic confusion, looking, to quote Wilkes' imaginative simile, like a heaving land, as they alternately break away from each other ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... in brief are now in an extremely chaotic state and it is impossible at present to determine whether rickets is a true avitaminose or a consequence of deficiency in a series of factors. It is however certain that the disease in its subacute forms is extremely wide-spread among infants and that ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... spiritual vision of the Patriarchs. At the same time He was the special God of the Israelitish nation, the only nation that avouched Him with a full and undivided heart, the nation chosen by God Himself to carry out, alone, His sublime plans.[9] In his wanderings, Israel became acquainted with the chaotic religious systems of other nations. Seeing to what they paid the tribute of divine adoration, he could not but be dominated by the consciousness that he alone from of old had been the exponent of the religious idea in its purity. The resolution must have ripened within him to continue for all ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... Nevertheless, such a mental partition is an indispensable first step. The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents at every instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose each chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic antecedent a multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic consequent a multitude of distinct consequents. This, supposing it done, will not of itself tell us on which of the antecedents each consequent is invariably attendant. To determine that point, we must endeavor to effect a separation ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... back to their sources, he finds more rational accounts of the Creation and the order of nature, and sees striking points of resemblance to the Mosaic record. The story of Genesis represents the "Beginning" as formless, chaotic, and dark. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The heavens and the earth were separated. Light appeared long before the sun and moon were visible, and the day and night were clearly defined. Creation proceeded in a certain order from ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... is in her a celestial beauty,—which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal. She is a goddess, but one not yet dis-imprisoned; one still half-imprisoned,—the articulate, lovely still encased in the inarticulate, chaotic. How true! And does she not propound her riddles to us? Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the meaning of this Day? What thou canst do Today; wisely attempt to do?" Nature, Universe, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... contradictions, some tending to drift away in good, others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was less and more than human—capable of falling below the scale of the tiger, or of rising above that of man. Such chaotic souls exist. There was something inscrutable in that face. Its secret reached the abstract. You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is the calculation, and the after-taste which is the zero. In his impassibility, which was perhaps only on the surface, were imprinted ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... read, but her mind was in such a chaotic state that words had no meaning for her, and she finally grew so nervous that she could do nothing but pace ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Halleck sent for me, and when I reported he informed me that there existed a great deal of confusion regarding the accounts of some of the disbursing officers in his department, whose management of its fiscal affairs under his predecessor, General John C. Fremont, had been very loose; and as the chaotic condition of things could be relieved only by auditing these accounts, he therefore had determined to create a board of officers for the purpose, and intended to make me president of it. The various transactions in question ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... to imagine what the inside of a young enthusiast's head must be like when he makes his first conscious step toward artistic expression. The chaotic jumbles of half-formed ideas, whirling about in its recesses, produce kaleidoscopic effects, which to him look like the most lovely pictures. If he could only learn to put them down! let him but acquire the technical department of his art, and what easier than to realize those most marvelous ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... setting. Such a sunset! The whole world, the three great spaces of sea and land and sky, were incarnadined with the glory of it. The ocean floor was a blinding red radiance, the hills were amethyst, the sky one gigantic opal, and they two seemed poised in the midst of all the chaotic glory of a primitive world. It was New Year's Day; the earth was new, the year was new, and their love was new and strong. Everything was before them. There was no longer any past, no longer any present. Regrets and memories had no place in their new world. It was Hope, Hope, Hope, that sang to ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... observe in all this is the perfect freedom with which these so-called gods or Devas are handled, and particularly the ease and naturalness with which now the one, now the other emerges as supreme out of this chaotic theogony. This is the peculiar character of the ancient Vedic religion, totally different both from the Polytheism and from the Monotheism as we see it in the Greek and the Jewish religions; and if the Veda had taught us nothing else but this ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... this came about is not altogether uniformly explained. In the Polynesian creation story[5] three things are significant—a monistic idea of a god existing before creation;[6] a progressive order of creation out of the limitless and chaotic from lower to higher forms, actuated by desire, which is represented by the duality of sex generation in a long line of ancestry through specific pairs of forms from the inanimate world—rocks and earth, plants of land and sea forms—to the animate—fish, ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... home! She had spurned her one chance to be scientifically taught the woefully needed lessons of right living-on her way to the home which had become more and more chaotic with the passing of the years and ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... dispose and concentrate. To quicken his imagination Schiller commenced reading again upon the history of the period and soon perceived that what he already knew would be quite inadequate; that it would be necessary to go over the whole ground anew and more thoroughly. He found the material dry, chaotic and abstract; in short, lacking in nearly all the poetic elements which he would have thought indispensable a few years before. He could not treat it in his earlier manner. He had no love for any of his ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... double projection apparatus which secures complete correspondence of the two pictures so that in every instance the left and the right view are overlapping on the screen. This would give, of course, a chaotic, blurring image. But if the apparatus which projects the left side view has a green glass in front of the lens and the one which projects the right side view a red glass, and every person in the audience ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... ever a morbid attraction for a certain class of mind. There is always a small coterie of highly intellectual men and women eager to give welcome to whatever is eccentric, obscure, or chaotic. Worshipers at the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with a sense of tolerant superiority when they say: "Of course this is not the kind of thing you would like." Sometimes these impressionable souls almost seem to make a sort of reputation for ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... front. None seemed to heed the remarkable procession that wended its way to the cable office. Here Coleman resolutely took precedence. He knew that there was no good in expecting intelligence out of the chaotic clerks, but he managed to get upon ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... silently thinking over what Elsie had been saying, in a muddly, confused sort of way. Robbie, and granny's letter, and Elsie's beating, lairds and ladies, and something secret and mysterious that Elsie knew, were mingled hazily in his mind, in such chaotic fashion that he had nothing to say, not knowing how to put his ideas into the ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... months of the year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summer time, towering up there stern and grim, with its snow jokuls and roaring geysers, and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battlefield of frost and fire." The interior comprises lava and sand tracts, and ice-fields, but outside these are river valleys and lake districts affording pasturage, and arable land capable of producing root crops. The climate is changeable, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... regard the object of our science not as a magnified billiard-ball, but as a living being—as Mother-Earth. Not as hard, unimpressionable, dull, and inert, but as live, supple, sensitive, and active—active with an intensity of activity past all conceivability. Yet with no chaotic activity, but with activity having coherence and direction, and that direction ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... placed Lee in the saddle order slowly emerged from chaotic conditions and the first rays of light began to illumine the fortunes ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... would inevitably run into the small hours, Joan went over to the piano and, with what was a quite unconscious touch of irony, played one of Heller's inimitable "Sleepless Nights," with the soft pedal down. The large imposing room, a chaotic mixture of French and Italian furniture with Flemish tapestries and Persian rugs, which accurately typified the ubiquitous mind of the hostess, was discreetly lighted. The numerous screened windows were open and the soft warm air came ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... suffrage the end of all that home life and education which are the best nursery for a nation's virtue. I can see in all these attempts to invade the relations between man and wife, to establish differences, to declare those to be two whom God hath declared to be one, elements of chaotic disorder, elements of destruction to all those things which are, after all, our best reliance for a good and a pure and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Not that that reasonable prose structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence. Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... took the place of woodland and ravine, and indicated his approach to civilization. Then a church- steeple came in sight, and he knew that he had reached home. In a few moments he was clattering down the single narrow street that lost itself in a chaotic ruin of races, ditches, and tailings at the foot of the hill, and dismounted before the gilded windows of the Magnolia saloon. Passing through the long bar-room, he pushed open a green- baize door, entered a dark passage, opened another door with a passkey, and found himself ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... cloud transformed itself into the walls of the bateau cabin did the chaotic darkness of the sands fully possess him again. In that darkness he heard a voice. It was not the voice of Golden-Hair, or of Bateese, or of Jeanne Marie-Anne. It was close to his ears. And in that darkness that smothered him there was something terrible about it as it droned slowly the words—"HAS-ANY-ONE-SEEN-BLACK-ROGER-AUDEMARD?" ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... little thing that had been wandering over those sun-flooded hills, with neither food nor drink nor sight of friendly face, for so many hours, and the agony of the thought seemed more than she could endure. Sharp, lightning-like pains cracked through her brain, and a dizzy, chaotic whirl filled her head. She put her hands to her forehead and stopped short on the hillside, the fear flying through her mind that she might be going mad. Mead saw her and came quickly to her side, alarmed by her white, tense face and the wild look of agony ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... still in a tumult as he ran down the line of cabins. From every doorway men were now stumbling, half-dressed, half-asleep. Behind them, in many cabins, alarmed, agitated women appeared. Farther on there were lanterns and a chaotic mass of moving objects. Above the increasing clamour rose the horrible, uncanny wail of a woman. Percival's blood cooled, his brain cleared. Men shouted questions as he passed, and obeyed his ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... psychologist. He had never acquired the habit of turning himself inside-out and gloating over the horrid spectacle. All his life he had been a simple soul with simple motives and a simple though possibly selfish standard to measure them. But now his soul was knocked into a chaotic state of complexity, and his poor little standards were no manner of use. He saw himself as in a glass darkly, mystified ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... bills of lading. Bertie Lawrence, who was sent to Mudros in June when things were growing desperate, was here yesterday and has made a report on the present business situation which, though less chaotic, is still serious. There are not launches enough to enable people to get about. There are not lighters enough to work the daily transhipment of 300 tons. But the worst trouble lies in the bills of lading. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... rebuke Lady Jim had come to give her while she was undressing. No doubt she deserved it. She had been unmaidenly, and all for love of this light-hearted vagabond who did not care the turn of a hand for her. All day her thoughts had been in chaotic ferment. At times she lashed herself with the whip of her own scorn because she cared for a self-confessed thief, for a man who lived outside the law and was not ashamed of it. Again it was the knowledge of her unwanted love that flayed her, or of the injustice to her betrothed in so passionate ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... persecutions and tortures, by intolerance and injustice. She felt for, but not with, the heretics in their errors. "She typifies her age in all that is good and noble, in artistic aspirations, in literary ideals, in pure politics—in short,—in humanity; in her is not found the chaotic vagueness which so often breaks out in license and licentiousness, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Moreover, thanks to Bong's timely alarm, every one had got out of the way in good season. All fear of earthquake being removed, the crowd flocked back eagerly to stare down into the wrecked tunnel, which formed now a sort of gaping, chaotic ditch, with sides at some points precipitous and at others brokenly sloping. The throng was noisy with excited interest and with relief at having escaped so cleanly. The break had run just beneath one corner of the keepers' cottage, tearing away a portion of the foundation and wrenching the structure ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... change from the ancient form of imperialism to the newer forms of European government. It arose out of the ruins of the Roman system as an essential form of social order. It appears to be the only system fitted to bring order out of the chaotic conditions of society, but by the very nature of affairs it could not long continue as an established system. It is rather surprising, indeed, that it became so universal, for every territory in Europe was subjected to its control in a ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... great! Poor Tom had tried. Byrne ran to the bed and attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering the body. It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable like a tombstone. The rage of vengeance made him desist; his head buzzed with chaotic thoughts of extermination, he turned round the room as if he could find neither his weapons nor the way out; and all the time he stammered ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... modern science in the West has led to the danger of losing sight of the fundamental fact that there can be but one truth, one science which includes all the branches of knowledge. How chaotic appear the happenings in Nature? Is nature a Cosmos! in which the human mind is some day to realise the uniform march of sequence, order and law? India through her habit of mind is peculiarly fitted to realise the idea of ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... freeing of trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds of Acts, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing an infinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made the customs costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry they stimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by Adam Smith, whose Wealth of ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... range of his sympathies and activities narrowed, the ends of the room had gradually fallen into dusty neglect, till at length only the small space about the chair and table was left clear and available. The rest was impeded by books, instruments of science, and endless chaotic rubbish; while spiders had handed down their ever-broadening estates from father to child, through innumerable Araneidaean generations. A gray uniformity had thus come to overspread everything; and ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... &c. which is so solemnly made to precede an incantation, apparently not meant to be ridiculous, after which, a huge egg is somehow miraculously produced upon the stage, put me in mind of the very old mythologists, who thus desired to represent the chaotic state of things, when Night, Ocean, and Tartarus disputed in perpetual confusion; till Love and Music separated the ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... braggart more boastful, the cruel more merciless, the untruthful more false, the carnal more degraded. 'In vino veritas' expresses, even, indeed, to physiological accuracy, the true condition. The reason, the emotions, the instincts, are all in a state of carnival, and in chaotic feebleness. ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it has placed itself under the severe conditions of a chronological order reaching from the first nisus of chaotic matter to the consummated production of a fair and goodly, a furnished ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... boulders shaken down from the cliffs above, you cross the threshold of the great valley as into some vast house or hall carved out of the mountains, and at once feel the spell of the brooding calm and sheltered seclusion that pervades it. You pass suddenly from the tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tranquil, the restful, which seems enhanced by the power and grandeur that encompass them about. You can hardly be prepared for the hush that suddenly falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and sylvan character of much that surrounds you; ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... present time, but in the more remote Tusayan the chimney seems to be still in the experimental stage. Numbers of awkward constructions, varying from the ordinary cooking pit to the more elaborate hooded structures, testify to the chaotic condition of the chimney-building ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... tribe, a branch of the Tinneh of British America, have a legend that "the earth existed first in a chaotic state, with only one human inhabitant, a woman, who dwelt in a cave and lived on berries." She met one day a mysterious animal, like a dog, who transformed himself into a handsome young man, and they became the parents of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly |
