"Totality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ARE subtle enough to put off the scent a woman who has but half a nose." Mrs. Brookenham as she spoke appeared to attest by the pretty star-gazing way she thrust it into the air her own possession of the totality of such a feature. "I don't know yet quite what I think, but one wakes up to such ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... of this rather startling conclusion rests by no means exclusively upon the finding of pithecanthropus and the other fossils, nor indeed upon any paleontological evidence whatever. These, of course, furnish data of a very tangible and convincing kind; but the evidence in its totality includes also a host of data from the realms of embryology and comparative anatomy—data which, as already suggested, enabled Professor Haeckel to predicate the existence of pithecanthropus long in advance of his actual discovery. Whether the more remote ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... to the ancestors of the house; the various corporations into which families were grouped, the local divisions for the purpose of taxation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual unity from the worship of a common god; and finally the all-embracing totality of the state itself was explained and justified to all its members by the cult of the special protecting deity to whom its origin and prosperous continuance were due. The sailor who saw, on turning the point of Sunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the Acropolis, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... though it presented no threat, through Holding the Correct Thought, praying daily for its miraculous disappearance, preferably at a simultaneous moment, to reorganizing the spiritual concepts of the human totality. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakspeare goes on creating, and evolving B. out of A., and C. out of B., and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... order to set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it beside the great—that it may annihilate both, because in the presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal, only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality, the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... with regard to the origination of nature in some Power, of which man's mind is a faint and humble representation. The insects of the garden, supposing them to be invested with reasoning power, and aware how artificial are their own works, might of course very reasonably conclude that, being in its totality an artificial object, the garden was the work of some maker or artificer. And so also must we conclude, when we attain a knowledge of the artificiality which is at the basis of nature, that nature is wholly the production of a Being resembling, but ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... crop and now down in the breres: Now in the tree-top, now down in the briars. "Crop and root," top and bottom, is used to express the perfection or totality of anything. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Paul speaks of a Gnosis or higher knowledge, which can be taught with safety only to the "perfect" or "fully initiated";[110] and he by no means rejects such expressions as the Pleroma (the totality of the Divine attributes), which were technical terms of speculative theism. St. John, too, in his prologue and other places, brings the Gospel into relation with current speculation, and interprets it in philosophical language. The movement known as Gnosticism, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... preserve the unities. To keep the proportion of things and give place to others without losing one's own position was the secret of success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order to properly act our parts; the conception of totality must never be lost in that of the individual. This Laotse illustrates by his favourite metaphor of the Vacuum. He claimed that only in vacuum lay the truly essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and the walls, not in the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... book is as dull as it is indecent. The 'drollery' is of the following kind. Johnson is represented as saying:—'Without dubiety you misapprehend this dazzling scintillation of conceit in totality, and had you had that constant recurrence to my oraculous dictionary which was incumbent upon you from the vehemence of my monitory ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... inexplicable, undeserved, and unexpected. It follows, therefore, that the poet can only place on the stage (this phrase I use merely as an abbreviation: it would be more correct to say, "cause us to assist at some adventure whereof we know personally neither the actors nor the totality of the circumstances") faults, crimes, and acts of injustice committed by persons of defective consciousness, as also disasters befalling feeble beings unable to control their desires—innocent creatures, it may be, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of the girl as primarily a human being, his associate on even terms in this great game that they were playing together, this tremendous problem they were laboring to solve—the vastest and most vital problem that ever yet had confronted the human race, now represented in its totality by these ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... and each his own sufficient justification, each a sacred book comprising its own unique secret, a master-piece of the divine tragedian, a universe self-moved and self-contained, a centre of infinity, a mirror of totality, in a word, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... which describes mental states, as physical science describes the behaviour of matter in motion. Both are abstract sciences. Physical science treats nature as the totality of things conceived of as independent of any subject; psychology treats inner experience as independent of any object. Both are outside any idea of value, though it is needless to say that the votaries of both sciences trespass habitually, and often unconsciously. Both are dualisms with one ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... At the beginning of totality the line from the west side was much the longer, but as the eclipse progressed it shortened notably, while the line from the east side, shorter by about one-third at the beginning of the eclipse, grew ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... vehicles of vitality, it develops a group of symptoms which is exceedingly similar to our abdominal typhus that seems to have become stationary among us for the last twenty years. This similarity, in its totality, results from the following symptoms contained ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... our inquiry, was an idea which Christianity took over from Greek and Roman thinkers. In the later period of Greek history, which began with the conquests of Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception of the whole inhabited world as a unity and totality, the idea of the whole human race as one. We may conveniently call it the ecumenical idea—the principle of the ecumene or inhabited world, as opposed to the principle of the polis or city. Promoted by the vast extension of the geographical limits of the Greek world resulting from Alexander's ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... of words and phrase, specially of such words as are most general and intervene in every inquiry, it seemeth to me that the true and fruitful use (leaving vain subtleties and speculations) of the inquiry of majority, minority, priority, posteriority, identity, diversity, possibility, act, totality, parts, existence, privation, and the like, are but wise cautions against ambiguities of speech. So, again, the distribution of things into certain tribes, which we call categories or predicaments, are but cautions against the confusion of ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... next afternoon with Rachel. A silence of familiarity had fallen upon them. There was a totality in silence. Walking through the streets beside her, Dorn mused, "Undoubtedly the thing is over. It begins even to bore a bit." He noted curiously that he was unconscious of the streets. No tracing their pictures with phrases. They were streets, and that was an end ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... every life has, in its sphere, a totality or wholeness of the animating powers of the other spheres; having only, as its own characteristic, a predominance of some one power. Thus Jupiter comprises, within himself, the other twelve powers, which stand thus: The ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the hard organs which in their connection and totality constitute the skeleton of an animal (see Plate XXIII). They are of various forms, three of which—the long, the flat, and the small—are recognized in the extremities. These are more or less regular in their form, but present upon their surfaces ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... being identical for an idealistic philosophy) and comprises both the external and the internal world. Now the Dharma-kaya is emphatically not a phenomenon but it may be regarded as the substratum or totality of phenomena or as that which gives phenomena whatever reality they possess and the double use of the word dharma rendered such divagations of meaning easier.[96] Hindus have a tendency to identify being and knowledge. According to the Vedanta ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... without seeming to penetrate below the surface-need of any one task. Out of the present his mind was always escaping to a mystic fourth dimension which he did not understand. But a week before, he had felt himself absorbed in the component parts of his enterprise, the totality of which arched far over his head, shutting out the sky. Now he was outside of it. He had, without his volition, abandoned the creator's standpoint of the god at the heart of his work. It seemed as important, as great to him, but somehow it had taken on a strange solidarity, as though he had left ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... timidity of our public opinion," he said, "is our disease; or, shall I say, the absence of private opinion. Good nature is plentiful, but we want justice with heart of steel to fight down the proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and to stand for the private verdict against popular clamor is the office of the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... reduced the dangers of life and limb, made the tenure of existence less precarious, and rendered a general relapse of society impossible. There can never again be an intellectual holocaust, such as the burning of the Alexandrian library. Civilizations may wax and wane, but the totality of knowledge cannot decrease. With the possible exception of a few trade secrets, arts and sciences may be discarded, but they can never be lost. And these things must remain true until the end of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... you are Atheist and Anti-Christ. He is the sans-culotte of the Spiritual Revolution, and will not hear of your accepting this point and rejecting that;—down your throat with them all, one and indivisible, at the point of the pike; No Liberty, Totality, Fraternity, or Death! ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... language and logic to which we are compelled to conform, and to which our ideas naturally adapt themselves; and we can no more get rid of them than we can cease to be ourselves. The absolute and infinite, whether explained as self-existence, or as the totality of human thought, or as the Divine nature, if known to us at all, cannot escape from the ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... flow may be a natural part or our present limitations. And if we once grasp the idea that past and future may be actually existing, we can recognize that they may have a controlling influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the 'higher plane' or totality of things after which, as it seems to me, we are impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or determinism, and the action of living beings consciously directed to a definite and ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... and cyclones, as well as explosions, casting up jets to the height of 200,000 miles. In the early days of spectroscopy these protuberances could only be seen at a time of a total solar ellipse, and astronomers made long journeys to distant parts of the earth to be in line of totality. Now all is changed. Images of the sun are thrown into the observatory by an ingenious instrument run by clockwork, and called a heliostat. This is set on the sun at such an angle as to throw the solar image into the objective ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... family should remember, that the human race is, as to time and nature, but as one totality; for, since every man and woman had two parents, each parent two parents, and so on in geometrical progression, hence every individual, high or low, must necessarily be descended from every individual of the whole population as it existed but a few hundred years before, whether ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... yourself to the pantheism with which philosophy is reproached; that is, the whole is understood as equivalent to all individual things. But there is also the genus, which is equally the universal, yet is wholly different from this totality in which the universal is but the collection of individual things, and the basis, the content, is constituted by these things themselves. To say that there has ever been a religion which has taught this pantheism is to say ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal ill-will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King's person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the system. And it has been a precious privilege for me to ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... characteristic molluscan fauna, but that the different subdivisions often present a widely different series of species; so that although a certain number of species are common to two or more of the great divisions, the totality of the species that have lived upon the earth must be very much more than twelve times—perhaps even thirty or forty times—the number now living. In like manner, although the species of fossil mammals now recognised ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... not a quality wholly simple. On the contrary, it is a composite of many others all of which take part in the molding of that totality which bears ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... is elementary that such understanding must also apply to oneself. Understanding of self must come before understanding of others. Total understanding is not necessary—indeed, utter totality is very likely impossible to any human mind. But the greater the understanding, the freer the mind, and, at a point which might be called the "critical point," certain abilities inherent in the individual human mind become controllable. A change, ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... material for history, but a certain and not very short interval must be permitted to elapse during which men's brains and feelings may return to normal conditions, and permit the various incidents which have exalted or depressed them to be seen in their totality, as well as in their true relative importance. There are thus at least two distinct operations essential to that accuracy of judgment to which alone finality can be attributed,—first, the diligent and close study of detail, by which knowledge ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... force and matter in combination. These, in their grosser form, make the material world; in their finer, more subjective form, they make the psychical world, the world of sense-impressions and mind-images. And through this totality of the phenomenal, the soul gains experience, and is prepared for liberation. In other words, the whole outer world exists for the purposes of the soul, and finds in this its ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... matter, and is therefore One, and is its own essence. But other things are not simply their own essences, for each thing has its being from the things of which it is composed, that is, from its parts. It is This and That, i.e. it is the totality of its parts in conjunction; it is not This or That taken apart. Earthly man, for instance, since he consists of soul and body, is soul and body, not soul or body, separately; therefore he is not his own essence. That on the other ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend in its inmost a thing so essentially French as the Comedie; it is a fact that Frenchmen of all sorts and sizes have accepted the Comedie in its totality; and that is reason good enough for any commonplace Englishman who is lacking in the vanity of ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... objective synthesis based upon them, has emancipated us from many illusions, but it has, as it were, taken the inspiration out of our lives. It has made knowledge a thing for specialists who have lost the sense of totality, the sense of the value of their particular studies in relation to the whole; and it has made action feeble and wayward by depriving men of the conviction that there is any great central aim to be achieved ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... rendered me on this occasion particularly sensitive to the impression, but it seemed to me that I saw him as I had never seen him before—saw him inside and out, in the intense sea-light, in his personal, his moral totality. It was a quick, vivid revelation; if it only lasted a moment it had a simplifying, certifying effect. He was intrinsically a pleasing apparition, with his handsome young face and a certain absence of compromise in his personal ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... one; so that, when one does not view things from a single standpoint only, one recognizes in the end the utility of every human being. Those who believe in God should say to themselves that if their God does not strike the wicked dead, it is because he sees his work in its totality, and that he cannot descend to the individual. Labor ends to begin anew; the living, as a whole, continue, in spite of everything, admirable in their courage and their industry; and love of ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... the biogenetic law, and on the basis of the evidence we have obtained, we now turn to the interesting task of determining the series of man's animal ancestors. Phylogeny us a whole is an inductive science. From the totality of the biological processes in the life of plants, animals, and man we have gathered a confident inductive idea that the whole organic population of our planet has been moulded on a harmonious law of evolution. All the interesting phenomena ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call {FidoNet}. 2. Fanciful term for a {cyberspace} expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see {network, the}). 3. The totality of present-day computer networks. ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... assemblages of British ships of war constituted the totality of naval effort imposed upon Great Britain by "the fourteen sail of vessels of all descriptions"[216] which composed the United States navy. It would not in the least have been necessary had these been ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... being dogmatic, but gradually assumed an historical character. The principle of this mode of classification is to select and group together those facts which relate to the same species of actions; each of these groups becomes the subject-matter of a special branch of history. The totality of facts thus comes to be arranged in compartments which may be constructed a priori by the study of the totality of human activities; these correspond to the set of general questions of which we have spoken in the ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... works in their sum and totality, and the world-decree is that he is an artist, and an admirable one. He plays upon his instrument with all power and grace. But he is no mere virtuoso. There is something in him beyond the executant. Of Malibran, Alfred de Musset says, most beautifully, ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving "black-fellows" are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... to love, seeing that the love of any thing is the offspring of this knowledge, the love being the more fervent in proportion as the knowledge is more certain. And this certainty is born of a complete knowledge of all the parts, which, when combined, compose the totality of the thing which ought to be loved. Of what use then is he who abridges the details of those matters of which he professes to give thorough information, while he leaves behind the chief part of ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... censor Gaius Flaminius, and was then repeated and more stringently enforced fifty years later (585) by the censor Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the father of the two authors of the Roman revolution. This reform of the centuries, which perhaps in its totality proceeded likewise from Flaminius, was the first important constitutional change which the new opposition wrung from the nobility, the first victory of the democracy proper. The pith of it consists ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen |
