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Chaotic   Listen
adjective
Chaotic  adj.  Resembling chaos; confused.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Chaotic" Quotes from Famous Books



... yielded his place to those behind, saying that he didn't matter. And he had wasted more precious time buying bananas, though he knew that the Pembrokes were not partial to fruit. Amid much tardy and chaotic hospitality the meal got under way. All the spoons and forks were anyhow, for Mrs. Aberdeen's virtues were not practical. The fish seemed never to have been alive, the meat had no kick, and the cork of the college claret slid ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... 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 does that religion ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... chaotic elements had collected together in the family of the Franks for one sun-gleam to dissipate. Even the married pair did not clearly understand ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... the Quarterly finds to be an "ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken, much less written.... We never," concludes the reviewer, "in so few lines saw so many clear marks of the vulgar impatience of a low man, conscious and ashamed of his wretched vanity, and labouring, with coarse flippancy, to scramble ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... borrowed from the Platonists, or taken from some other source. Some have thought that he also holds matter to be eternal. But when he speaks of God's almighty hand as having "created the world out of formless matter" (chap. 11:17), he may have reference simply to the chaotic ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... regiments were, as was not unusual in those days, very much in arrears as regards their pay. For months they had received none, and were, perhaps naturally, in an angry and sullen mood. The finances of the State were in a chaotic condition, the treasury at low ebb, and credit had receded to a vanishing point. After staving off the day of reckoning as long as possible, the welcome news reached the Herati troops that they were to receive their pay in full next morning, September 3rd, at the ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband

... reduced the apparently chaotic diversity of stellar spectra to order was Secchi, who showed that they might all be grouped according to four types. Within the last thirty years, however, so many modifications of the various types have been found that it has become necessary to subdivide Secchi's types, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... structure for the support of the mass of imagery that the taste of the age demanded, it showed itself superior to the rival prose fashions. Euphues is a model of form beside the tedious prolixity of the Arcadia, or the chaotic effusions of Nash. The weariness, which the modern reader feels for the romance of Lyly, is due rather to the excessive quantity of its metaphor, which was the fault of the age, than to ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... itself firmly in Foma's mind, and growing clearer, larger and more vivid with each time it arose before him, rousing in his breast something chaotic, one great indefinite feeling into which fell, like streams into a river, fear and revolt and compassion and wrath and many another thing. All this boiled up within his breast into strained desire, which was thrusting it asunder into a desire whose power was choking him, and his eyes ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... than a month after the inauguration of President Lincoln there seemed to be a kind of interregnum, during which the confusion of ideas in the Border States as to their rights and duties as members of the "old" Union, as it began to be called, became positively chaotic. Virginia, still professing neutrality, prepared to seize the arsenal at Harper's Ferry and the navy-yard at Norfolk; she would prevent the passage of the United States' forces "with a serried phalanx of her gallant sons," two regiments of whom stood, looking on while a file of marines took ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved horribly in the Gaelic O'Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all the horse-men and fish-women that man's unnatural fancy has begotten. A voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: "Keep out of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid the evil garden where died the man with two heads." ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... supplied, but still the most considerable one in the vicinity of Rio Janeiro. We then returned to the high road, and in half an hour reached a little elevated plain, whence the eye ranged over a valley of the most remarkable description, one portion of it being in a state of wild chaotic confusion, and the other resembling a blooming garden. In the former were strewed masses of broken granite, from which, in some places, larger blocks reared their heads, like so many Collossi; while in others large fragments of rocks lay towering one above the other; in the second ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... into the very heart of Broadway. I have had enough of the peace of the country. I want the crack, and crash, and rattle, and grind of wheels, the confused cries, the snatches of talk and laughter, the tread of crowds, the sound of bells, and clocks, and chimes. I long for all the chaotic, unintelligible noise of the streets. How suggestive it is! Yet it never explains itself. It only gives one a full sense of life. Love may need just the same stimulus. I wish grandmother would come home. I should ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr

... the bitter infusion of personal feeling in the first scene, and its occasional charm to the march of some of the lines, especially those describing the Bourbon's advance on Rome; but the effect of the magical element is killed by previous parallels, while the story is chaotic and absurd. The Deformed Transformed bears somewhat the same relation to Manfred as Heaven and Earth—an occasionally graphic dream of the world before the Deluge, written October, 1821, and issued about the same time as Moore's ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... Chaotic political and industrial conditions are, of course, occasionally inevitable in modern society—torn as it is by the very bitter struggle going on constantly between capital and labor. When this struggle breaks into war, as it often does, we are bound to suffer ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... then surely we, or our progenitors, in counting ships, and the assumptive floatative mechanisms of anterior and past ages; or as the Assyrians [under-estimating the force of the correlative elements] declared a bridging, or a going over [not of seas merely, but of those chaotic gaps of the mind] are all wrong enough indeed,) ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various

... confronted by the Irish Land Trust, and we see both combinations eager and ready to renew the unending conflict. I do not believe there is an Irishman, whatever his political feeling, creed or position, who does not yearn to see a true settlement of the present chaotic, disastrous and ruinous struggle. In the best interests, therefore, of Ireland and my countrymen I beg most earnestly to invite the Duke of Abercorn, Mr John Redmond, M.P., Lord Barrymore, Colonel Saunderson, M.P., the Lord ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... is dingy and bright; it has hawkers' barrows and chaotic shop windows. It has the curiosity-stimulating, cosmopolite air of all dockside areas, but to the Englishman accustomed to the picturesque bedragglement of East End costumes, it is almost dismayingly well-dressed. Its young men have the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... tired with sights, our minds were chaotic with strange ideas and tongues, but yet we felt how misunderstood that beautiful county is, how well worthy of careful study, and what a delightful new field it opens up to the traveller who, though he believes he "knows all Europe," yet has omitted Suomi, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... the 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

... Before the great rejoicing was over, before the bill could be acted on by the Senate, the Government was defeated and the Parliament was dissolved. Italy soon, like other European countries, was threatened with revolution. Ministers rose and fell; politics was in a chaotic state. This situation has continued to a considerable degree and women are still without ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... 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

... chaotic night in which he was drifting, David experienced neither pain nor very much of the sense of life. And yet, without seeing or feeling, he seemed to be living. All was dead within him but that last consciousness, which is almost the spirit; he ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... to take 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 speaking soothingly, firmly, prevailed; and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... opposition from them, but the subtle and varied attack of natural forces they have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor the natural organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether too chaotic and diffused for positive defence. And the question of the prolonged existence of this comparatively new social phenomenon, either in its present or some modified form, turns, therefore, entirely on the quasi-natural laws of the social body. If they favour it, it will survive; when they do not, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... conditions, then, are not chaotic or lacking in a well-defined purpose, even though they are unsettled. Anything that disturbs the seeming placidity of the surface always strikes alarm to the undeveloped mind. Particularly in those phases of our modern ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... of course," she went on. "I remember, even now, the view from the house-top that night. In a sense, it was finer than this; everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one simply felt that underneath all those mysterious places was some great being, toiling and struggling—Life itself, groaning through space with human cogwheels. Up here one sees too much. Oh, my dear Leonard," she continued, "to think that you, too, should ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... God exacts the shedding of blood as the penalty. So much for the past. The only hope of the future lay in an immediate return to the system which God himself had established, and in the restoration of that spiritual power which had presided over the reconstruction of Europe in darker and more chaotic times than even these. Though, perhaps, he nowhere expresses himself on this point in a distinct formula, De Maistre was firmly impressed with the idea of historic unity and continuity. He looked upon the history of the West in its integrity, and was ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... outline are the features of this chaotic, superb novel, which, in spite of its faults of technique, remains to this day the truest and the most beautiful product of ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... Nonentity: he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor, sceptical encyclopedias. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt, every way articulate character, is in itself perhaps small compared with our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of 'dumb prophet struggling to speak,' we have a portentious mixture of the Quack! Hume's notion of the Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... himself on the side of the country in that struggle. And when a town like Moscow loses a third of its working population in a year, it is impossible not to see that, so far, the struggle is going in favor of that huge chaotic, unconscious but immensely powerful countryside. There is even a danger that the town may become divided against itself. Just as scarcity of food leads to food speculation, so the shortage of labor is making possible a sort of speculation in labor. The urgent ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... existence. They must suppose a creator then; and that he possessed power and wisdom to a great degree. As he intended the earth for the habitation of animals and vegetables, is it reasonable to suppose, he made two jobs of his creation, that he first made a chaotic lump and set it into rotatory motion, and then waited the millions of ages necessary to form itself? That when it had done this, he stepped in a second time, to create the animals and plants which ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... doctrine of divine influence, or I could not thus grossly insult it I answer... that which Harrington ridiculed, as the context would have shown Mr. Newman, if he had had the patience to read on, and the calmness to judge, is the chaotic view of inspiration, formally held by Mr. Parker, who is expressly referred to, "Eclipse," p. 81." In ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... interest, and one which we cannot refrain from putting to ourselves, is—whether we see in the rings of Saturn a finished structure, destined to play a permanent part in the economy of the system; or whether they represent merely a stage in the process of development out of the chaotic state in which it is impossible to doubt that the materials of all planets were originally merged. M. Otto Struve attempted to give a definite answer ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... industrial community is not naturally prone to political unrest. But they bear the chief burden of taxation; they constantly feel in their business and daily lives the effects of chaotic local legislation and of incompetent and unsympathetic administration; they have many grievances, but they believe all these could gradually be removed if they had only a fair share of political ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... 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

... again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful. The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy, therefore ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston

... infinite power of sight, and placed at the unknown centre round which gravitates the universe, would have seen myriads of atoms filling all space during the chaotic epoch of creation. But by degrees, as centuries went on, a change took place; a law of gravitation manifested itself which the wandering atoms obeyed; these atoms, combined chemically according to their ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne

... ascent of the mountainous chain, a wearisome and painful toil. Two hours past noon he reached the summit of the first ridge, and looked over a wild and chaotic waste full of precipices and ravines, and dark unfathomable gorges. The surrounding hills were ploughed in all directions by the courses of dried-up cataracts, and here and there a few savage goats browsed on an occasional ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... the almost chaotic excitement caused in Charmian by the music, and by her secret infatuation, concrete knowledge seemed to detach itself and to arise. As, when she had looked at the island in the Algerian Garden, she had felt ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... 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 ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... packet of food and Na-che with the camera tripod, while Enoch insisted on toting the camera and the coil of rope. The sun was hot on the plateau and the way very rough. They climbed constantly over ragged boulders, and chaotic rock heaps, or rounded deep fissures that cut the plateau like spider webs. Muscular and in good form as was the trio, frequent rests were necessary. They had one mishap. Na-che, lagging behind, slipped into a fissure. Enoch and ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... post—nearer forty than thirty—but highly recommended. Reduced my chaotic papers to order in twenty-four hours, charmed my wife and her sisters, drafted a speech which won me quite a little ovation in the House, suggested several notable improvements in the "Importation of Mad Dogs Bill," with which I was to be entrusted next session—and was found lying ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... English woman of the better classes: an inborn composure, a calm orderliness of the emotions. Mrs. Wrandall was conscious of a sense of surprise, of a wonder that increased as her thoughts resolved themselves into something less chaotic than they were at the time of contact with this ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... a chance to escape from the room, went out. John was pumping water over a jug to cool it before he filled it. The sight of the man who was her husband had a curious effect on Elizabeth; everything in her, mentally and physically, became chaotic, her ears buzzed, her temples throbbed, and there was an inner shrinking which could scarcely be controlled. John had seen her and waited for her to come out to ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... of the little room seemed suddenly to congeal. The silence was intense. Adhemar himself remained thunderstruck in his chair, his tongue dry, his thoughts chaotic, unable to form a reply to the child's virulent attack. For the sake of breaking up this general paralysis, Maurice Renaud finally suggested that they should vote upon the decision to be given to his ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt

... of the earth's surface carry in their stratification indelible records harmonizing with this scriptural arrangement of the evolution of the earth from its chaotic misty past to ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... 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 ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... were to be entirely Stella's, whereas it had been arranged that she and Amy should share in the management. So, leaving Vava with Eva to clear away, she followed Amy to her room, which did indeed look chaotic. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin

... placed Lee in the saddle order slowly emerged from chaotic conditions and the first rays of light began to illumine ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... somewhat firmer ground than in the first two essays. The field for mere conjecture is less: we are supported more continuously by explicit documents. Yet the subject is a very difficult one owing to the scattered and chaotic nature of the sources, and even where we get away from fragments and reconstructions and reach definite treatises with or without authors' names, I cannot pretend to feel anything like the same clearness about the true meaning of ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... year before. As Danton had said in the debates on the Revolutionary Tribunal: "This tribunal will take the place of that supreme tribunal, the vengeance of the people; let us be terrible so {194} as to dispense the people from being terrible." Judicial, organized terror was to replace popular, chaotic terror. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... the chorus, to converse with the public in a general way, but also to point the finger at certain individual spectators, was essential to this species of poetry. As Tragedy delights in harmonious unity, Comedy flourishes in a chaotic exuberance; it seeks out the most motley contrasts, and the unceasing play of cross purposes. It works up, therefore, the most singular, unheard-of, and even impossible incidents, with allusions to the well-known ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... 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 ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... faults, most of the books and essays in which this subject has been handled, have been in some degree beneficial, and a few of them highly so; and that, without their influence, our language must have been much more chaotic and indeterminable than it now is. But a late writer says, and, with respect to some of our verbal terminations, says wisely: "It is my sincere conviction that fewer irregularities would have crept into ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... Zimbabwe) in 1980. Robert MUGABE, the nation's first prime minister, has been the country's only ruler (as president since 1987) and has dominated the country's political system since independence. His chaotic land redistribution campaign, which began in 2000, caused an exodus of white farmers, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread shortages of basic commodities. Ignoring international condemnation, MUGABE rigged the 2002 presidential election to ensure his reelection. ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... 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 ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... The Church of God has pondered, and labored, and prayed over this subject, and will continue to do so until the millennium. And the disbeliever in Revelation has also turned his mind to the consideration of this black mass of ignorance and misery, which welters upon the globe like a chaotic ocean; these teeming millions of barbarians and savages who render the aspect of the world so sad and so dark. The Church, we need not say, have accepted the Biblical theory, and have traced the lost condition ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... J. Campbell, the eminent English clergyman, in his recent work entitled, "The New Theology," says, speaking of the popular evangelical views: "But they are even more chaotic on the subject of death and whatever follows death. It does not seem to be generally recognized that Christian thought has never been really clear concerning the Resurrection, especially in relation to future judgment. One view has ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... is infallible and can bring about order in the chaotic social conditions, knows the curative effect of law to the minutest detail. The question how things might be improved is met with this reply: "All criminals should be caught in a net like fish ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... stumps, and decayed trunks of trees, 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 ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... Providence for that career which she rendered so illustrious through her talents and her sufferings. At this early period there were struggling in her bosom those very emotions which soon after agitated every mind in France, and which overthrew in chaotic ruin both the altar and the throne. The dissolute lives of many of the Catholic clergy, and their indolence and luxury, began to alarm her faith. The unceasing denunciations of her father gave additional impulse to every ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... dazed by his chance discovery, he made no comment on the child's continual chatter, but let her exuberance and delight have full play while he tried to adjust himself to a realization that made all thought but a chaotic mixture of hope and doubt, of turbulent fear and determined purpose, and of one thing only was he sure. Three years of his life had been wasted. Another hour should not be lost were it in his ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher

... There, too, the maintenance of that doctrine falls most heavily upon the United States. It is therefore essential that the countries within that sphere shall be removed from the jeopardy involved by heavy foreign debt and chaotic national finances and from the ever-present danger of international complications due to disorder at home. Hence the United States has been glad to encourage and support American bankers who were willing to lend a ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... a crack as of the thunder that follows close upon the bolt,—a rending and crashing as of a forest snapped through all its stems, torn, twisted, splintered, dragged with all its ragged boughs into one chaotic ruin. The ground trembled under them as in an earthquake; the old mansion shuddered so that all its windows chattered in their casements; the great chimney shook off its heavy cap-stones, which came down on the roof with resounding ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... course. He never had believed, since he had thought out the subject in early manhood, that God would continue existence if He did not make it a blessing. But to others who, like many before him, had intelligently accepted of a sterner theology, and who had been struggling through years of chaotic doubts and fancies for footing on which to rest, he saw that these assurances gave real strength and support. An hour had passed amidst these manifestations—the interest of the believers continued to be unflagging, but Francis felt a little tired of it. He had lost no dear friend by death. The ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... most of them belong to the whole Indian race. Undoubtedly there was a distinct and definite effort of legislation; but Iroquois legislation invented nothing. Like all sound legislation, it built of materials already prepared. It organized the chaotic past, and gave concrete forms to Indian nature itself. The people have dwindled and decayed; but, banded by its ties of clan and kin, the league, in feeble miniature, still subsists, and the degenerate Iroquois looks back with a mournful pride to ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... 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 personages except Max and Thekla, whom he had invented for the purpose ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... this volume on grammar, has chosen for an example a passage from an Eloge on Peter Corneille, pronounced before the French academy by Racine, on the reception of Thomas Corneille, who succeeded to Peter. It is in the French style of academical panegyric, a representation of the chaotic state in which Corneille found the French theatre, and of the light and order which he diffused through the dramatic world by his creative genius. A subject less interesting, or more unintelligible to a child, could scarcely have been selected. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... for a few years after leaving the cradle he had exhibited a certain immatureness, but as soon as he put on knickerbockers and began to go about a little he outgrew all that. He avoided altogether the chaotic period which usually lies between the years of ten and fourteen. At ten he was a thoughtful and sober-minded young man, at fourteen almost an ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... wish you to 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 ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... for formal reconstruction came to communities impoverished, forlorn, and chaotic, almost beyond imagination. Property, industry, social order, had been torn up by the plowshare of war. The prolongation of resistance until defeat was complete and overwhelming had ended all power and all ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... of each blaze, And grandeur, then, of all, entrance thy gaze. Thou thinkest, why not thus all life below? Perceiving, then that all the breezes blow Upward and onward, in the skyey maze, Thou wouldst go back and start with them, to raise A new creation from chaotic throe. ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle

... in a muddle now; not that it was ever in very good order. Russians in general are broad in their ideas, Avdotya Romanovna, broad like their land and exceedingly disposed to the fantastic, the chaotic. But it's a misfortune to be broad without a special genius. Do you remember what a lot of talk we had together on this subject, sitting in the evenings on the terrace after supper? Why, you used to reproach me with breadth! Who knows, perhaps ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... of our midsummer drive through, the Pyrenees. We realize it almost suddenly, and with regret. We seek to absorb and enjoy every minute as we drive down the long hills and on through the Vale of Campan in the evening light toward Bigorre. It is a chaotic, delightful array of memories that our minds are whirling over and over in their busy hoppers,—incidents and scenes, grains of legend, kernels of history, gleanings of quick, nearer life,—all the intermingled associations now sown for us ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... existence; but if we regard it rather as a candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert mass, and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty, will ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... to set aside this problem. It seems not unlikely that we are entering on a new phase of the poverty question. The upper strata of low-skilled labour are learning to organize. If they succeed in forming and maintaining strong Unions, that is to say, in lifting themselves from the chaotic struggle of an earlier industrial epoch, so as to get fairly on the road of modern industrial progress, the condition of those left behind will press the illogicality of our present national economy upon us with a dramatic force which will be more ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... 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 ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... 23: The original barrack captains were chosen, as an informant of mine writes, "in a hurry, when things were chaotic." Dissatisfaction was felt with their action, or inaction, and a "Camp Committee" was formed of newly elected representatives of the different barracks, which was, as it were, to supervise the captains (overseers). The arrangement was scarcely likely to work, and ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton

... first-class children parents must be in good physical condition and be controlled mentally. Chaotic parents can not have orderly children. The young people learn quickly from their elders and they usually take after one of the parents. They intuitively learn what they can do and what they can not do and how to get their way while we consider them ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... reconciliation of races. One thing that must be done is to take this chaotic mass of dissimilar, discordant, suspicious, antipathetic racial elements and blend them into unity and brotherhood. The first Christians had a task of this nature on their hands; they had to bring together in one fellowship Jews and Gentiles. But that was a pastime compared with the herculean labor ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... 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 the absent-minded acquiescence he had displayed ever since my stroke had put his wits asleep. ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... Corps had broken at the first shock of the attack; entire regiments had thrown down their arms, which were lying in regular lines on the ground, as if for inspection; suppers just prepared had been abandoned; tents, baggage, wagons, cannons, half-slaughtered oxen, covered the foreground in chaotic confusion, while in the background a host of many thousand Yankees were discerned scampering for their lives as fast as their limbs could carry them, closely followed by our men, who were taking prisoners by the hundreds, and scarcely firing ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... as critics of the story will insist on pulling it into little pieces, selecting one detail here, another there, for study and elucidation, so long will the ensemble result be chaotic and unsatisfactory. We shall continue to have a number of monographs, more or less scholarly in treatment—one dealing with the Grail as a Food-providing talisman, and that alone; another with the Grail as ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... proper to the passive-minded, to those who give way to a "drifting" tendency, and habitually suffer their whole interests to be absorbed by the strongest sensation or emotion that presents itself. Such minds are generally chaotic and unorganized, as is revealed in the rambling, involved, interminably parenthetical and digressive character of their conversation. But when, as with Mother Juliana, we find unity and coherence, we may infer ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... are not the same in quality or scope as they were to start with. Even the simplest stimuli of taste and of sound are different to the adult from what they are to the child. What for the adult is a printed page full of significance is for the baby a blur, or at most chaotic black marks ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... examine the Bible Genesis a little further in this direction. It is said in the second verse of the first chapter that "the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," that is, upon the face of the abyss—the chaotic mass at creation—the earth "without form ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... the tragedy of Peter III. He dies, as Catharine said, unpitied: a fool, echo her friends, who perished in his folly. But history is precise and simple; truth complex and difficult. Was there no light, no touch of nobility at all in that strange chaotic temperament? No reverence in the boy who would kneel to the picture of the great Frederick? No generosity in the Czar who sacrificed victory to a sentiment; who abolished the hateful "secret chancery," torture, monopolies, and refused a statue of gold offered by St. Petersburg, "desiring rather ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... equally strong and just language of an able writer, "replete with auspicious evidences of the efficacy of intellect, combined with firmness, activity, and integrity, in restoring to wholesome and honourable order a chaotic jumble of anomalies—of humiliations and dangers—of fears, hatred, and confusion thrice ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... for three years at the East, Mr. Smyth accepted a call to the pastoral charge of a church in Michigan. It was a village of a few hundred people, in a new and wild region. Society was in a chaotic condition, and there were but few who had either the ability or the disposition to do much for the young pastor's support or encouragement. The locality was unhealthy, and Mr. Smyth suffered severely from prevalent ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... art in its proper sense no more than do "futuristic" pictures and other modern monstrosities of a like nature. The only exact means whereby a poet may transmit his ideas to others is language, a thing both definite and intellectual. Granting that vague, chaotic, dissonant lines are the best form in which the tender suitor of the Muses may record his spiritual impressions for his own benefit and comprehension, it by no means follows that such lines are at all fitted to ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... open air that I began to feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly and the bare chaotic look of the half-erected "stands." Was it in the Green Park or in Kensington Gardens or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading article that went on repeating itself in my fagged mind: ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm

... Pickering of Massachusetts and Roger Griswold of Connecticut broached to 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 him with their ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... her healthy, orderly mind, the chaotic environment with its petty cares and dirty tittle-tattle, in which we lived, was very painful. I could see that, and I, too, could not sleep at night. My brain whirled and I could hardly choke back my tears. I tossed about, not ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... deaf and unconscious of all else but the tempest that raged within me, a wild confusion of doubt and fearful speculation with a passionate rebellion against circumstance, and a growing despair. Gradually these chaotic thoughts took form, marshalling themselves against each other, so that it seemed as two voices ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... with beauty, into which men and women may go to rest from the clamour of the day's confusions; I do not see why men should not make great shrines and pictures expressing their sense of divine things, and why they should not combine in such enterprises rather than work to fill heterogeneous and chaotic art galleries. A wave of religious revival and religious clarification, such as I foresee, will most certainly bring with it a great revival of art, religious art, music, songs, and writings of all sorts, drama, the making of shrines, praying places, temples and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... naming varieties is still somewhat chaotic. Possibly we should adopt the general pattern of the American Pomological Society. Their example of setting up an approved list of varieties for planting on a regional basis is worthy of consideration. Even though ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various

... nothing better than this chance to bloat himself into a some-day colossus. But now the thing stuck in his gorge. He understood the implied obligation. Payment for his service to Aline Harley was to be given, and the ledger balanced. Well, why not? Had he not spent the night in a chaotic agony of renunciation? But to renounce voluntarily was one thing, to be bought ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... deeper water, was a lurid cloud, incessantly torn in shreds of lightning, then fusing together again, once more to be rent. As yet this lurid cloud was neither stationary nor slowly adrift, like the first-mentioned one; but, instinct with chaotic vitality, shifted hither and thither, foaming with fire, like a valiant water-spout careering off ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... furnished some attempts at utopian construction, but the modern world of politics has presented and does present still more of them with the ridiculous and chaotic mess of laws and codes which surround every man from his birth to his death, and even before he is born and after he is dead, in an inextricable network of codes, laws, decrees and regulations which stifle him like the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... of it. Even if it had been otherwise, it is doubtful if Thorpe would have cared in the least. He was lost in a rushing train of thought. His brain had cleared under the stimulating potions of raw whiskey, and, just as before his chaotic state had made him unable to grasp things fully, now it was equally chaotic in an opposite direction. His brain was running riot with a clearness and rapidity that showed only too plainly the nervous tension under which he was laboring. He was piecing ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... decades of work in Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of the war until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen's Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking system and co-operation. Then followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building of complete school systems in the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the public schools. There ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... was laid aside. Fifty thousand Christian ministers, stunned and crazed by insane passion, standing before the altars of God, hurled into the broken hearts before them the wildest cries of vengeance—cries incoherent, chaotic, unreasoning, blind in ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... to 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 up and down ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... people of 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 ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... other men's opinions: he is not shaped on any model: he bows to no authority: he yields only to his own wayward peculiarities. He is wild, irregular, singular, extreme. He is no formalist, not he! All is crude and chaotic, self-opinionated, vain. He wants proportion, keeping, system, standard rules. He is not teres et rotundus. Mr. Southey walks with his chin erect through the streets of London, and with an umbrella sticking out under his arm, in the finest weather. He has not sacrificed to the Graces, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... an architect as lightly as you would select a cravat. To him you are intrusting the task of putting your chaotic and half-expressed thoughts and desires into a set of plans that will guide and control masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and painters in their work. As your professional adviser, it will be his ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... finally made Mrs. Grubb's acquaintance; but in the somewhat hurried interviews she had with that lady at first, she never seemed able to establish the kind of relation she desired. The very atmosphere of her house was chaotic, and its equally chaotic mistress showed no sign of seeking advice ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... So quickly did it all happen that I was entangled in the sail and drawn under. When I fought my way to the surface, suffocating, my lungs almost bursting, I could see nothing of the oars. They must have been swept away by the chaotic currents. I saw Demetrios Contos looking back from his boat, and heard the vindictive and mocking tones of his voice as he shouted exultantly. He held steadily on his course, leaving me ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London

... were in flames, but she dared not provoke that dreaded tongue further. She forced herself to smile as she turned to Anne, standing abashed during this discussion of herself, and longing to be alone with her chaotic thoughts. "Confess, dear Miss Percy, that you did not talk about yourself, but about that most fascinating of all subjects to man, himself. I believe you have the true instinct of the coquette, in spite of your great lack of experience, and that ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... was the dark and chaotic realm of the giants, which lay in the uttermost part of ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner

... a brick stove; next, a bedroom; the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress, which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again, opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room, now in chaotic disorder. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the fullness of the Divine life bubbles over into the bordering void. Hereupon the dead matter, by commixture with the living principle, which it wanted, first of all receives animation. But, at the same time, also, the divine, the living, becomes corrupted by mingling with the chaotic mass. Existence now multiplies itself. There arises a subordinate, defective life; there is ground for a new world; a creation starts into being, beyond the confines of the world of emanation. But on the other hand, since the chaotic principle of matter has acquired vitality, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... the north and north-west frontiers of India lie the Himalayas, the greatest disturbance of the earth's surface that the convulsions of chaotic periods have produced. Nearly four hundred miles in breadth and more than sixteen hundred in length, this mountainous region divides the great plains of the south from those of Central Asia, and parts as a channel separates opposing ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill

... hypothesis (carried out forty years later by Laplace in ignorance of Kant's work) of the mechanical origin of the universe and of the motion of the planets. It presupposes merely the two forces of matter, attraction and repulsion, and its primitive chaotic condition, a world-mist with elements of different density. It is noticeable that Kant acknowledges the failure of the mechanical theory at two points: it is brought to a halt at the origin of the organic world and at the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... life, all in a grand mix-chaotic tangle. Lawrence was talking for the joy of his thought to the woman who ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades

... Church in Canada is emerging from its first chaotic state. The visit of Mgr. Septeski to Canada, the appointment of the Very Reverend N. Budka as Bishop of all the Ruthenians in Canada, marked a turning-point in their history. Authority is, in the Church of God, ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... along a corridor, Jandron and the girl and two of the men coming with them. Kent's thoughts were still chaotic as he walked between Krell and Liggett. What was this girl doing amid the men of the Martian Queen? What had her eyes ...
— The Sargasso of Space • Edmond Hamilton

... 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 ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... shown us," they replied; and with this answer, with his organization yet uneffected, his plans more than ever chaotic, the Maccabee began another day. Shrewd and resourceful as he believed himself to be, he beheld plan after plan reveal its inefficiency. Forced by some act of the city to abandon one idea, the next that followed found a new intractability. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... half so deceitful inside as the words seemed to her issuing from her lips. It was such a relief to be assured Godfrey had not seen Tom, that she felt as if she could forego the sight of Tom for evermore. Her better feelings rushed back, her old confidence and reverence; and, in the altogether nebulo-chaotic condition of her mind, she felt as if, in his turn, Godfrey had ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... be too chaotic! Fancy all the Ghettos of the world amalgamating. Everybody would want to be ambassador at Paris, as the old ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... being and led them to final victory over the Turk in 1912, only to set them tearing one another to pieces again in 1913. In the present catastrophe the curse of the Balkans has descended upon the whole of Europe, and laid bare unsuspected depths of chaotic hatred; yet Balkan antagonisms still remain more ineradicable than ours. The cure for nationality is forgetfulness, but Balkan nationalism is rooted altogether in the past. The Balkan peoples have suffered one shattering experience in common—the Turk, and ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... revolutionary thinking lurk dimly among the oppressed minorities during intervals of disaster. The Jansenists were loyal and patient; but their famous jurist Domat was a philosopher, and is remembered as the writer who restored the supremacy of reason in the chaotic jurisprudence of the time. He had learnt from St. Thomas, a great name in the school he belonged to, that legislation ought to be for the people and by the people, that the cashiering of bad kings ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... the German propaganda. With 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 ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... occasionally almost negligent fashion Mr. Brumley had been living up to his impassioned resolve to be an unselfish lover of Lady Harman. He had been rather at loose ends intellectually, deprived of his old assumptions and habitual attitudes and rather chaotic in the matter of his new convictions. He had given most of his productive hours to the writing of a novel which was to be an entire departure from the Euphemia tradition. The more he got on with this, the more clearly he realized that it was essentially ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... are given in the Bibliography. The present edition is therefore the first to reproduce the authoritative text unimpaired. The original spelling has been retained, though capitalization has been modernized, and the use of italics for personal names has not been preserved. But the chaotic punctuation has been throughout revised, though, except to remove ambiguity, I have not interfered with one distinctive feature, an exceptionally frequent use of brackets. In a few cases of doubtful interpretation, the old punctuation has been ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... to wither his son with continued dignity and calm. The vagaries of Irish temper ordained otherwise. Kenny glanced at the fragments of a statuette conspicuously rearranged on a Louis XV table almost submerged in the chaotic disorder of the studio, and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... native priest, Senor Pascual Reyes, has arrived here from Cebu, and says that in Leyte General Lucban is committing many abuses and that Colonel Mojica is only a mere figurehead. In Cebu, he says, things are also in a chaotic condition, because the military chief, Magsilum [Maxilom,—TR.], and the people ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... immaculate and rude; Beside it stands the sculptor, lost in dreams. With vague, chaotic forms his vision teems. Fair shapes pursue him, only to elude And mock his eager fancy. Lines of grace And heavenly beauty vanish, and, behold! Out through the Parian luster, pure and cold, Glares the wild horror of a ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... here. It was not until I was out in the open air that I began to feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly, and the bare chaotic look of the half-erected 'stands.' Was it in the Green Park, or in Kensington Gardens, or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading article ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... get a clear idea of the state of your own mind," I said, "for to me it really seems as chaotic as ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... infinite labour the Teuton mind has grappled with the chaotic welter produced by the European war. But, besides the skilful handling of great financial and kindred problems, its assiduity in watching for and readiness to seize opportunities for dealing with ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... foam at the mouth, but she displayed all the symptoms of advanced literary hysteria. Now there is this to be said for the sea—it may not furnish one with universal judgments about women but it does provide the solitude and austere discipline which enable a man to coordinate his hitherto chaotic ideas about them. And women, if they only knew how they appear to the imagination of men on the rolling waters, would undoubtedly modify their own conceptions of life, and possibly profit by the change. Imogene, however, had no such moment of ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... discover the principles of the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map of a labyrinth and making a map ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... discords of sound, if reproduced on a music roll, would present a chaotic jumble ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... 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 ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... shops she had noticed on her way, and soon accomplished her errand. This necessity for action put her right with herself, and gave her the courage she needed. With a word to the fainting old miser, she descended to the chaotic kitchen, where she rejoiced the heart of the small slavey by the sight of the cold beef and bread she had brought for her. Then she set to work to cook the chops she had purchased. This done, to the amazement ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... head—metaphorically, of course, and not Carlistically. He sat, tiller in hand, gazing aghast at the great wall of rock with the rugged debris of fallen masses at the bottom, upon which in a very few minutes the boat would rush with a sharp crash, and then, mistily and in a chaotic manner, he realised that there would be a miniature wreck, similar on a small scale to those of which he had so often ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... same style as A Star, or in the same style as that astounding lyric which begins abruptly "Some people hang pictures up." These metres and manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His curious complicated puns are ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... the Jasper B. Cleggett and Captain Abernethy found to be in a chaotic state. Casks, barrels, empty bottles by the hundred, ruins of benches, tables, chairs, old nondescript pieces of planking, broken crates and boxes, were flung together there in moldering confusion. It was ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... state of mental disease, resulting in disordered, unbalanced and chaotic thought, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... Slipperton had warned me that I should, in a chaotic condition inside. Everything movable seemed to have been moved—without any definite intention, so far as I could see, but just for the sake of upsetting the decent order of the household. I found a frying-pan, for instance, ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford

... mind the dinner—the turtle, venison, and turbot—and the popping of the corks from the throats of the champagne bottles. I was conscious, too, that I had made a speech; but, beyond this point, all the events of the night were lost in chaotic confusion. One thing, however, was certain—I was a bona fide Lord Mayor—and being aware of the arduous duties I had to perform, I resolved to enter upon them at once. Accordingly I arose, and as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various

... held the degree of Doctor from the University of Melbourne; a doctor of music. Jaime, suppressing his astonishment at this news from a distant world, told of himself, of his family, of his native land, of the curiosities of the island, of the cavern of Arta, tragically grand, chaotic as an ante-chamber of the inferno; of the Dragon's caves with their forests of stalactites, glistening like an ice palace, of its thousand placid lakes, from the deep crystal depths of which it seemed as ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... 1871, we began the purchase of some of the more important of the refinery interests of Cleveland. The conditions were so chaotic and uncertain that most of the refiners were very desirous to get out of the business. We invariably offered those who wanted to sell the option of taking cash or stock in the company. We very much preferred to have them take the stock, because a dollar ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller

... haranguing his listener in a loud, eager voice. Of course she knew—every one knew—that all the best men and all the coming forces were now outside the Academy. Millais, Leighton, Watts—spent talents, extinct volcanoes!—Tadema a marvellous mechanic, without ideas!—the landscape men, chaotic,—no standard anywhere, no style. On the other hand, Burne-Jones and the Grosvenor Gallery group—ideas without drawing, without knowledge, feet and hands absurd, muscles anyhow. While as for Whistler and ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... alert. How many Burgs of wood and stone they built in different parts, what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man counted; their life, read in Dryasdust's newest chaotic Books (which are of endless length, among other ill qualities) is like a dim nightmare of unintelligible marching and fighting: one feels as if the mere amount of galloping they had would have carried the Order ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... many things. Not the least was the difference in their ages. Christophe was on the way to full consciousness and mastery of himself. Emmanuel was still in process of formation and more chaotic than Christophe had ever been. The originality of his face came from the contradictory elements that were at grips in him; a mighty stoicism, struggling to tame a nature consumed by atavistic desires,—(he was the son of a drunkard and a prostitute);—a frantic imagination ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... medievalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... the first hours of the night, but seldom all night; and even should one have the capacity to do so, his companions in durance would wake him with a shout or a song or a curse or the kicking of a door. A noisy and chaotic medley frequently continued without interruption for hours at a time. Noise, unearthly noise, was the poetic license allowed the occupants of these cells. I spent several days and nights in one or another ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... that this ever-flowing current of events is something entirely outside one's own choice or volition is to stand helpless—if not hopeless—before the spectacle of life. It is out of this aimless and chaotic state that resort is had to the seeking of all kinds of divination, omens, prophecies, and foreshadowings, with the result of more and more completely separating the individual from his legitimate activities and endeavor, and leading him to substitute for spiritual realities a mere false and ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... profound expectation, and one might continue to choose his place of worship Sabbath after Sabbath without offence. This was Bartley's custom, and it had worked to his favor rather than his disadvantage: for in the rather chaotic liberality into which religious sentiment had fallen in Equity, it was tacitly conceded that the editor of a paper devoted to the interests of the whole town ought not to ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells



Words linked to "Chaotic" :   chaos, disorganised, helter-skelter, chaotic attractor, disorderly, physics



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