"Visibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... proper motion of the stars, and demonstrated that their change of position on the celestial vault was real, and not caused by a displacement of the ecliptic. He attempted to ascertain the apparent diameter of Sirius, and made observations with regard to the visibility of the stars. The Cassini family produced several generations of eminent astronomers, whose discoveries and investigations were of much value in advancing ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... uplands to the north-east, like the crushing of a cart over a gravelly road, came the rattle of musketry fire. Then, as the visibility increased, war-ships manoeuvred into position, and fired slowly and deliberately at unknown inland targets. Occasionally the troop-ship shook from the shattering crash of the Queen Elizabeth's guns. Reflecting was not one ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... volition. 'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go unto the Father.' Thus the earthly life is, as it were, islanded in a sea of glory, and that which stretches away beyond the last moment of visibility, is like that which stretched away beyond the first moment of corporeity; the eternal union with the eternal Father. But such an entrance on and departure from earth, and such a career on earth, can only end in that coming again ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was closer now, and the sky was growing dark. Rick estimated that they had no more than ten minutes before the storm would hit. He had to look up at a sharp angle to see the storm front. Visibility was down to zero directly under it. Whitecaps and a roiling sea told him there was plenty of wind in the squall. He doubted that the houseboat could head into it successfully. The wind would catch the high cabin sides and force the houseboat onto ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... indifference. In an angel, for instance, beauty is the condition of his mere form; but the angel has also an intellectual and moral or spiritual nature, which is essentially paramount: the former being but the condition, so to speak, of his visibility, the latter, his very life,—an Essence next to ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... seasonal August winds blow from the west, carrying sand and dust across the country, which can obscure visibility ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... being of complex structure thousands of primary constituents must go to make up a single id; these I call DETERMINANTS, and I mean by this name very small individual particles, far below the limits of microscopic visibility, vital units which feed, grow, and multiply by division. These determinants control the parts of the developing embryo,—in what manner need not here concern us. The determinants differ among themselves, those of a muscle are differently constituted ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... toward her a soiled palm. With hands encased in oversight gloves she fumbles at the catch of a hand bag. Having wrested the hand bag open, she paws about among its myriad and mysterious contents. A card of buttons, a sheaf of samples, a handkerchief, a powder puff for inducing low visibility of the human nose, a small parcel of something, a nail file, and other minor articles are disclosed before she disinters her purse from the bottom of her hand bag. Another struggle with the clasp of the purse ensues; finally, ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... were then reckoned, not from the astronomical conjunction with the sun, which nobody sees except at an eclipse, but from the day of first visibility of the new moon. In fine climates this would be the day or two days after conjunction; and the fourteenth day from that of first visibility inclusive, would very often be the day of full moon. The following is then the proper correction of the precept ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the elbows, and fell down behind on either side. The hair was dressed wide, with ringlets at the cheeks; and the fair vision held a fan in one hand, while the Duke led her by the other. When she had ascended the steps, and came walking up the terrace, the lowness of her dress in the bosom, the visibility of her trim ankles, and the flourishing massiness of the rest of her apparel, produced the effect, not of a woman over-dressed, but of a dress displaying a woman; and she came on, breathing rosy perfection, like ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... the Santa Fe cases were almost identical, so far as the visibility of Venus was concerned. In the Santa Fe case, which had very little publicity, Project "Saucer" dropped the Venus explanation as a practically impossible answer. But in Case 33, it had tried desperately to make Venus loom up as a huge gleaming ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... when proceeding from the southward. The cause is understood by the above figure. At such a time, after dark, the auroral shafts will also be seen over the storm to the northward, but will be invisible to those beneath. There is this to be observed, however, that the visibility of the ethereal current (or the aurora) is more frequent when the passage of the vortex is not attended with any great commotion, its free passage being perhaps obstructed by too dry an atmosphere; hence it becomes more visible. But it ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... factor in war, and its influence appears to have increased in modern times. Mists and fogs militate against observation by aircraft, and poor visibility interferes with the work of artillery. Roads are broken up by the weight of modern traffic, and in a shelled area the craters become impassable after a few days rain, making the supply of food, stores and ammunition a serious problem. ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... revolutionary development in mid-century. They were low-hulled, armored, steam vessels, with one or two revolving turrets. Although most cannonballs bounced from the armor, lack of speed made the "cheese box on a raft" vulnerable, and poor visibility through the turret slots was a serious handicap ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... he found Miss Painter seated in a redundant purple armchair with the incongruous air of a horseman bestriding a heavy mount. Madame de Chantelle sat opposite, still a little wan and disordered under her elaborate hair, and clasping the handkerchief whose visibility symbolized her distress. On the young man's entrance she sighed out a plaintive welcome, to which she immediately appended: "Mr. Darrow, I can't help feeling that at heart you're ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... doubling of the canals once having been doubted, it was an easy step to the casting of doubt on the reality of the canals themselves. The idea, indeed, was put forward that the human eye, in dealing with detail so very close to the limit of visibility, may unconsciously treat as an actual line several point-like markings which merely happen to lie in a line. In order to test this theory, experiments were carried out in 1902 by Mr. E.W. Maunder of Greenwich Observatory, and Mr. J.E. Evans of the Royal Hospital School ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... occupied. Here, like pale ghosts upon the wall paper, are outlined the pictures of the departed tenant; here are the nails of the invisible curtains, this dent in the wall is all that is sensible of a vanished piano. I could fancy all these things creeping back to visibility as the light grew dim. Someone was irritable in the house, perhaps, and a haunting fragrance of departed quarrels is to be found in the loose door-handles, and the broken bell-pull. Then the blind in the bedroom has a broken string. He was a beer-drinker, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... before. "We attracted your attention," said Ayrault, "in the way you said we might, because we longed so to see you." "Yes," added Bearwarden and Cortlandt, "we felt we MUST see you again." "I am always at your service," replied the spirit, "and will answer your questions. With regard to my visibility and invisibility"—he continued, with a smile, "for I will not wait for you to ask the explanation of what is in your minds—it is very simple. A man's soul can never die; a manifestation of the soul is the spirit; this has entity, consciousness, and will, and these ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... newly connected Zed-ray flashed on, I could hear the load of it in the deepened, throaty hum from the power house. Its dirty brown beam sprayed out over the plain; then swung to the sky, caught something, hung motionless, narrowed into great intensity. The powerful Zed-ray, capturing the visibility of dense solids only.[24] ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... of the body that dwells within them. And, that being so, it being certain that 'whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,' and that no deed, be it ever so small, be it ever so evanescent, be it ever so entirely confined within our own inward nature, and never travelling out into visibility in what men call actions—that every one of such produces an eternal, though it may be an all but imperceptible effect, upon ourselves; oh, surely there can be nothing more ridiculous than that a man should refrain from forecasting the issue of his conduct, and saying ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... searchlight on an airship with me, and, in consequence, it can't be very heavy. Of course there are stationary searchlights, such lights as are in lighthouses, that could beat mine all to pieces for candle power, and for long distance visibility. But they ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... appeared a scout cruiser, her funnels vomiting volumes of dense smoke that flattened down oilily upon the sea in her wake. Her stern guns spat viciously at some craft of low visibility which followed her. ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... appointments, and delighting to execute His commandments, then the sacrifice is begun. But, inasmuch as the body is the organ of the man's activity, the sacrifice of the will and of self must needs come out into visibility and actuality in the aggregate of deeds, of which the body is the organ and instrument. But there must first of all be the surrender of my inmost self, and only then, and as the token and outcome of that, will any external acts, however religious they may seem to be, come into the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the power he has to the utmost. In laboriously erecting his edifice of reasoning he also studiously regards the intellects and the passions of ordinary men; strives to bring his mind into cordial relations with theirs; employs every faculty he possesses to give reality, to give even visibility, to his thoughts; and though he never made a speech which rivals that of Burke on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, in respect to grasp of understanding, astounding wealth of imagination and depth of moral passion, he always ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Griffin. "But consider, visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... want or think! Nay, desire itself is but God—Good—Love, knocking at the door of your consciousness. It is impossible for you to desire anything that is not already your own! It only remains for you to bring the invisible into visibility—to take of the everlasting substance what ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... Scarcely was it in plain sight ere it was upon us, racing across the Jordan, over the city, and up the slopes of the Wahsatch, eclipsing all the landscapes in its course—the bending trees, the dust streamers, and the wild onrush of everything movable giving it an appreciable visibility that ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... ghosts, and monster spirits, that did presume A body's priv'lege to assume, Vanish again invisibly, And bodies gain again their visibility. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... moment Ransome appeared quite close to me, stepping out of the darkness into visibility suddenly, as if just created with his composed ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... falling rain, told the watchers that the great brutes were treating themselves to the luxury of a shower-bath. The elephants were well out from the shore, standing apparently knee-deep in the water; hence their visibility; but the reeds were too tall to permit of animals being seen if they happened to be drinking at the extreme edge of the water. The hunters had made what Mildmay characteristically designated "a bad landfall." What they desired was, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... wonders. It has substituted things for names, experiment for hypothesis, first principles for arbitrary rules. It has simplified processes, stripped knowledge of its abstraction and thrown it into visibility, made practical results rather than mystery the standard by which to measure the value of attainment, and facts rather than conjecture ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the general assumption that light as such is visible. In order to realize that light is itself an invisible agent, we need only consider a few self-evident facts - for instance, that for visibility to arise light must always encounter some material resistance in space. This is, in fact, an encounter between light, typifying levity, and the density of the material world, typifying gravity. Accordingly, wherever visible colours appear we have always ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... higher than the imperishable Pradhana, which itself is higher than all its effects. The reasons for this decision are as follows:—Colour and so on reside in the gross forms of non-intelligent matter, viz. the elements, earth, and so on. When, therefore, visibility and so on are expressly negatived, such negation suggests a non-sentient thing cognate to earth, &c., but of a subtle kind, and such a thing is no other than the Pradhana. And as something higher than this Pradhana there are known the collective souls only, under whose ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... was falling rapidly and with it the dust that obscured the landscape. That the storm was over he was convinced, but he chafed at the inactivity the low visibility put upon him, nor did conditions better materially before night fell, so that he was forced to await the new day at the very spot at which the tempest had deposited him. Without his sleeping silks and furs he spent a far from comfortable night, and it was with feelings of ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... would have performed a work precisely the reverse of her own labours. Under these circumstances she has deemed it better that her flowers should blush unseen, than that they should melt away in a halo of visibility. ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... might any moment vanish and release their huge bodies into primal sounds; that the stones in the road, the peaked hills, the very earth herself might alter in shape before his eyes: on the other hand, that the viewless forces of life and death might leap into visibility and form with the calling of their names; that himself, and Skale, and Mrs. Mawle, and that pale fairy girl-figure were all enmeshed in the same scheme with plants, insects, animals and planets; and that God's voice ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... larger experience. To say nothing of the valuable correction afforded by the polar winter and the polar summer, we have learned by a more comprehensive experience to replace the law that day follows night by the wider generalisation that the visibility of objects is invariably coincident upon the presence of some luminous body and not upon a previous state of darkness. But between cases of what we call mere succession and what is commonly called causal sequence the difference lies merely ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... saw his shadow projected in the road before him. "The moon is rising," he said to himself. Then he remembered that it was about the time of the new moon, and if that tricksy orb was in one of its stages of visibility it had set long before. He stopped and faced about, seeking the source of the rapidly broadening light. As he did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road in front of him as before. The light still came from behind him. That was surprising; ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... flash of imagination, I pictured the thing adrift in the Chapel, moving here and there, as though of its own volition; for whatever Force wielded it, was certainly beyond visibility. I turned my head stiffly over to the left, glancing frightenedly behind me, and flashing the light to help my eyes. In the same instant I was struck a tremendous blow over the left breast, and hurled backward from ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... architecture is half so painful as the apparent want of sufficient support when the weight above is visibly passive: for all buildings are not passive; some seem to rise by their own strength, or float by their own buoyancy; a dome requires no visibility of support, one fancies it supported by the air. But passive architecture without help for its passiveness is unendurable. In a lately built house, No. 86, in Oxford Street, three huge stone pillars in the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... a convenient sandy space among the rocks at the fifty-foot level. He reached it and turned to count noses. All were present. Visibility was good enough. He set his camera and took a position cross-legged on the sand. Barby and Scotty took similar ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... daughter on the verandah, glancing now and then down the valley. It was very still and peaceful, and trails of white mist crept about the pines, while, though the paling light still lingered high up upon the snow, a crescent moon was growing into visibility against the steely blueness behind the eastern shoulder of a hill. Deringham, however, was listening for the thud of hoofs, and wondering if the mounted man sent down to the settlement would bring ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... beggar, mendicant choose, elect smell, odor same, identical sink, submerge name, nominate dip, immerse follow, pursue room, apartment follow, succeed see, perceive teach, instruct see, inspect teach, inculcate sight, visibility teacher, pedagogue sight, vision tiresome, tedious sight, spectacle empty, vacant glasses, spectacles ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... lover, a great lover, somewhat after the manner of Dante. For him, as for Dante, in the impassioned glow of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are blent and fused together. While, in that fire and heat, what is spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material, on the other hand, will lose its earthiness and impurity. It is of the amorous temper, therefore, you must think in connexion with Plato's youth—of this, amid all the strength of the genius in which it is so large a constituent,—indulging, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... place in question. Essentially this form must be composed of the matter of the mental plane, but in very many cases it would draw round itself matter of the astral plane also, and so would approach much nearer to visibility. There are, in fact, many instances in which it has been seen by the person thought of—most probably by means of the unconscious influence emanating from the original thinker. None of the consciousness of the thinker would, ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... enable an observer to use the X-rays in the delineation or inspection of objects through opaque substances. He said within himself: "Why not pass the X-rays through the object to be inspected and then convert them into visibility, as if by fluorescence." ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... last Lady Harman entered the box—the strangest place it seemed for her—he tried to emerge from the jostling crowd about him into visibility, to catch her eye, to give her the support of his devoted presence. Twice at least she glanced in his direction but gave no sign of seeing him. He was surprised that she could look without fear or ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Siddons, his eyes cold and piercing. "Lieutenant Siddons, you seem to be a most excellent map flyer. You find your way here alone, and you tour this part of France with admirable ease. To-morrow morning, if the visibility is good, you will take off at dawn, cross the line above Bouresches, push on toward Bonnes and as far inland as the railroad crossing on the ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... their St. Edmund's dead Body in this manner? Yes, brother;—and yet, on the whole, who knows how to reverence the Body of a Man? It is the most reverend phenomenon under this Sun. For the Highest God dwells visible in that mystic unfathomable Visibility, which calls itself "I" on the Earth. 'Bending before men,' says Novalis, 'is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human Body.' And the Body of one Dead;—a temple where the Hero-soul once was and now is not: Oh, all mystery, all ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... for the five days that he lingered, the young violinist monopolized nearly her entire time of visibility. Often Graham strayed into the music room, and, quite neglected by the pair, sat for moody half-hours listening to their "work." They were oblivious of his presence, either flushed and absorbed with ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... — N. visibility, perceptibility; conspicuousness, distinctness &c adj.; conspicuity^, conspicuousness; appearance &c 448; bassetting^; exposure; manifestation &c 525; ocular proof, ocular evidence, ocular demonstration; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... stoic could have desired. Our work consisted of reversing portions of the original German support trench to form a fire trench facing the other way. Owing to the distance to the then German line (1,000 to 1,500 yards) and the low visibility, we were able to work openly and practically unmolested. Our only casualties were the result of an unlucky shell which fell on the morning of October 5th, amongst a party of Signallers, killing L.-Sergt. C. E. Harrison, Signalling Sergeant, and three men, whilst another ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... during the drafting of the Covenant lay in the clause proclaiming the equality of religions, which Mr. Wilson was bent on having passed at all costs, if not in one form, then in another. This is one example of the occasional visibility of the religious thread which ran through a good deal of his personal work at the Conference. For it is a fact—not yet realized even by the delegates themselves—that distinctly religious motives inspired much that was done by the Conference on what ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... other hand, was barely perceptible, and odds were freely taken as to the measurement of her waist. She was a person who, when she was out—and she was always out—produced everywhere a sense of having been seen often, the sense indeed of a kind of abuse of visibility, so that it would have been, in the usual places rather vulgar to wonder at her. Strangers only did that; but they, to the amusement of the familiar, did it very much: it was an inevitable way of betraying an alien habit. Like her husband she carried clothes, ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... her deceptive look of fragility everywhere drooping with regret, was patent. What she said, thought, felt, was magnificently reflected, given visibility, by her fluid being. "But you haven't come over here to talk to me about that," she said directly; "you want me to give ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Brigadier commanding 172nd Infantry Brigade visited the Battalion and expressed his appreciation of the wiring done at Salmon Trench. Visibility was very good in the evening, and several parties ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... with an oval white finger, the farthest edge of which reached a hundred and fifty yards. Over the "western" lake—and its inky ripples sparkled somehow ominously. Over the jungle's confusion—and trees, great bushes, spiky vines and creeper-growths leaped into momentary visibility, and then were again swallowed up in the tide of night. Here a cutlas-beaked bird, spotlighted for an instant, froze into surprised immobility with the pasty, bloated worm it had seized twisting and dangling from its mouth, to flap squawking away as the ray glided on: there the ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... whine, followed promptly by the familiar growling thunder of infra-bass, had again become audible. At the same moment a long pencil-like beam of green light glowed into visibility, extending from the tip of the cone to a point high within the enclosure just back of them. As they halted abruptly and watched, they saw the interlacing meshes of the green flame-net materialize suddenly at the end ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... it had what may be styled shoulders on each side, that passed twenty cubits further. Its first gate was seventy cubits high, and twenty-five cubits broad; but this gate had no doors; for it represented the universal visibility of heaven, and that it cannot be excluded from any place. Its front was covered with gold all over, and through it the first part of the house, that was more inward, did all of it appear; which, as it was very ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... seen was from the observer's basket of the kite-balloon let up from S.S. "Manica" in June, 1915. We were spotting for the guns of H.M.S. "Lord Nelson" bombarding Chanak. The sky and sea were a marvellous blue and visibility excellent, the peninsula, where steady firing was going on all the time, lay below us, the Straits, with their ships and boats, the Asiatic shore gradually disappearing in a golden haze, the Gulf ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... does not imitate nature, for what is nature, but that vast confusion of perceptions and representations that were referred to above? Yet in a sense art does imitate nature; it uses nature to produce values of a kind peculiar to itself. Those values are true visibility. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... that dapper antique, Mr. Ridgely. Noble's straw hat might have brightened under the treatment of lemon juice or other restorative; his scarf was folded to hide a spot that worked steadily toward a complete visibility, and some recent efforts upon his trousers with a tepid iron, in his bedchamber at home, counteracted but feebly that tendency of cloth to sculpture itself in hummocks upon repeated ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... for a time, then suddenly sank to silence and stillness. A frost fell with a keen icy chill. Mists gathered, and the day did not break,—it seemed as if it might never dawn again; only a pallid visibility came gradually upon clouds that had enshrouded all the world. The earth and the sky were alike indistinguishable; the mountains were as valleys, the valleys as plains. One might scarcely make shift to see a hand ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... precaution must be taken not to attract the attention of the enemy to batteries moving forward into action. Nothing to be taken up in daylight, except in the event of very bad visibility." ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... it got through—we did not know. But our power was weaker now. The wall of one of the rooms sprang a leak, and the men were hours repairing it. I did not say so, but never once did I feel that our signals were read on Earth. Those cursed clouds! The Earth almost everywhere seemed to have poor visibility. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings |
