"Orbit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sought within the extremes. If we adopt the magnificent argument of Dr. Croll, which seems to me still to hold its ground against all adverse criticism,[5] and regard the Glacial epoch as coincident with the last period of high eccentricity of the earth's orbit, we obtain a result that is moderate and probable. That astronomical period began about 240,000 years ago and came to an end about 80,000 years ago. During this period the eccentricity was seldom less than .04, and at one time rose to .0569. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... gravitation," says one whose life was the holy echo of his words, "in the moral as in the physical world. When love to God is habitually in the ascendant, or occupying the place of will, it gathers round it all the other desires of the soul as satellites, and whirls them along with it in its orbit round the center of attraction." (Hewitson's Life.) Till the heart, then, be changed, the believer can not have "this testimony that he pleases God." The world, self, sin—these be the gods of the unregenerate ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... "Easy to make; you spray a thin metallic coat on a plastic backing. They're in orbit around us, each with a small geegee unit to control drift and keep it aimed directly at the sun. The focused radiation charges heavy-duty accumulators, which we then collect and use for our power source ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... make the same power felt on the remote shores of the Indies. Lying along the distant Pacific, the principle of attraction which held Peru to the parent country was so feeble, that this colony might, at any time, with a less impulse than that now given to it, fly from its political orbit. It seemed as if the fairest of its jewels was about to fall from ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts and were trying ...
— The Repairman • Harry Harrison
... eastbound train to find that out," she cried gayly. "I'm here to tell you I care a lot more than any number of pins. Oh, I've learned a lot in the last six months, Bill. I had to hurt myself, and you, too. I had to get a jolt to jar me out of my self-centered little orbit. I got it, and it did me good. And it's funny. I came back here because I thought I ought to, because it was our home, but rather dreading it. And I've been quite contented and happy—only hungry, oh, so ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... swung out of Birdie's orbit and made friends for herself. For her it was a night of delirium, and her pulses hammered in rhythm to the throbbing music. In one day life had caught her up out of an abyss of gloom and swung her to a dizzy pinnacle of delight, where she poised in exquisite ecstasy, fearing ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... this Law of Unity as the basis of our Thought we shall be surprised to find how far it will carry us. Each part is a complete whole in itself. Each inconceivably minute particle revolves round the centre of the atom in its own orbit. On its own scale it is complete in itself, and by co-operation with thousands of others forms the atom. The atom again is a complete whole, but it must combine with other atoms to form a molecule, and so on. But if the atom be imperfect as an atom, how ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... dinner-plates, and the nutation of the glasses, do not promote the music of the spheres. But, Mr. PUNCH and gentlemen, although not one of the heavenly bodies, indeed altogether terrestrial, one feels, naturally, rounder in his orbit, and a little more likely to see stars, after such a dinner as this, than before. Do I not, indeed, see around me now, all the stars of the intellectual firmament? Are not SIRIUS and ARCTURUS here, in their glory, as well as ORION and the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... on my face, Stayed suddenly where in its orbit shone The lamp of all things beautiful; then on, Following more heedfully, did softly trace Each arch and prominence and hollow place That shall revealed be when all else is gone— Warmth, colour, roundness—to oblivion, And nothing ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... awful voice: So did We talk, gazing with God's own eyes Into Life's deeps—ah, how they throbbed with stars! And were we not ourselves like pulsing suns Who, once an aeon met within the void, So fiery close, forget how far away Each orbit sweeps, and dream a little space Of fiery wedding. So our hearts made answering Lightnings all that afternoon through purple mists Of riddled speech; and when at last the sun, Our sentinel, made sign ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... than our example, lodged in Him, and available for us, by our simple faith in Him. In love that seeks to copy, lies the only power that will cast out self, that 'anarch old,' from his usurped seat in our hearts, and will throne Jesus Christ there. It needs a mighty lever to heave a planet from its orbit, and to set it circling round another sun; and there is nothing that will deliver any man, in any rank of life, from the dominion of self, except submission to the dominion of Him who, because He died to serve, deserves, and has won, the supreme right ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... gaze followed his narrow orbit of vision he soon saw his firearm, which had slipped from him in his ride over the precipice and fallen near where he lay ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... at its pristine beauty! What better consolation can a man ask, for not having gotten to land at the apogee point of his orbit?" ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... marvellous knowledge which youth are to acquire, and of which we are ignorant?' Men say that the sun, moon, and stars are planets or wanderers; but this is the reverse of the fact. Each of them moves in one orbit only, which is circular, and not in many; nor is the swiftest of them the slowest, as appears to human eyes. What an insult should we offer to Olympian runners if we were to put the first last and the last first! And if that is a ridiculous error in speaking of men, how ...
— Laws • Plato
... was cloudy. Jupiter reported nothing new except that Neptune had deviated from its course and tended to pursue an erratic and puzzling new orbit. ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... seemed to be withdrawn. The young folks who loved him were free to see him as often as he would come. They were going to Baden: would he come too? Baden was on the road to Switzerland, he might journey to Strasbourg, Basle, and so on. Clive was glad enough to go with his cousins, and travel in the orbit of such a lovely girl as Ethel Newcome. J. J. performed the second part always when Clive was present: and so they all travelled to Coblentz, Mayence, and Frankfort together, making the journey which everybody knows, and sketching the mountains and castles we all of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... beauty of our system of government consists, and its safety and durability must consist, in avoiding mutual collisions and encroachments and in the regular separate action of all, while each is revolving in its own distinct orbit. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Eve in the indestructible paradise, when he kept her single with himself, like a star in its orbit.' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... "I rode all night — Love served me as a guide — To seek the home of beauteous Flordespine; And there arrived, before in ocean's tide The western sun had hid his orbit sheen. A happy man was he who fastest hied To tell my coming to the youthful queen; Expecting from that lady, for his pain, Favour and goodly guerdon ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the sun, and moon, and all the stars move; but that those things which are moved by natural impulse are either borne downward by their weight, or upward by their lightness; neither of which things could be the case with the stars, because they move in a regular circle and orbit. Nor can it be said that there is some superior force which causes the stars to be moved in a manner contrary to nature. For what superior force can there be? It follows, therefore, that their motion must be voluntary. And whoever is convinced of ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... We only know motion by the jolts. The revolution of the earth and its rush along its orbit are unfelt by us. We are constantly startled to feel how long ago such and such a thing took place. The mother sees her little girl at her knee, and in a few days, as it seems, finds her a woman. How immense is our life in the prospect, how awfully it collapses in the retrospect! ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... call the tide. The sun, still farther off, has a similar influence; and when the sun and moon act in the same direction, we have the spring tides. The planets, those apparently little wandering points in the heaven, yet affect, by their attraction, the motion of our earth in her orbit, quickening it when she is approaching them, retarding it when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... ceiling &c (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c (angel) 244 [Obs.]; batophobia^. satellite, spy-in-the-sky. V. be high &c adj.; tower, soar, command; hover, hover over, fly over; orbit, be in orbit; cap, culminate; overhang, hang over, impend, beetle, bestride, ride, mount; perch, surmount; cover &c 223; overtop &c (be superior) 33; stand on tiptoe. become high &c adj.; grow higher, grow taller; upgrow^; rise ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... acme of completeness, and it tends to all symmetry and finish. It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing perfectly the impelling and restraining forces; by a felicitous adjustment of the centripetal and centrifugal, ensuring to human nature its proper orbit. It is the golden girdle wherewith every institution like this should bind her garments of strength ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... placed five satellites in orbit, which have gathered information of scientific importance never before available. Our latest satellite illustrates our steady advance in rocketry and foreshadows new developments ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... ourselves instead of working for others, meetings such as our own, bringing together so large a number of the first Oriental scholars of Europe, seem to me a most excellent safeguard. They draw us out of our shell, away from our common routine, away from that small orbit of thought in which each of us moves day after day, and make us realize more fully, that there are other stars moving all around us in our little universe, that we all belong to one celestial system, or to one terrestrial commonwealth, and ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... the eclipses of 1062 B.C. and 762 B.C.; and has thereby been enabled, in the last few years, to correct the lunar tables of Hansen, and to find a more accurate value for the secular acceleration of the moon's longitude and the node of her orbit than any that could be obtained from modern observations made with ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... "newness" of the Porcii might have necessitated generations of vigorous leaders to make them a power in the land. Scipionic traditions were now represented by Aemilianus, and the glow of the luminary was reflected in paler lights, who received their lustre from moving in that charmed orbit. One of these, the indefatigable henchman Laelius, had risen to the rank of consul, and stimulated by the vigorous theorisings of his hellenised environment, he contemplated for a moment the formation of a plan which should deal with some of the worst evils of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Vavasor being, however, naturally jealous of the judgment of young men, pledged herself to nothing, and made inquiries for herself. Learning thereby at length, after much resultless questioning—for her world but just touched in its course the orbit of that of the Raymounts—that there was rather a distinguished-looking girl in the family, and having her own ideas for the nephew whose interests she had, for the sake of the impending title made her own, she ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... accurate or numerous enough to found any definitive conclusion upon. Nevertheless, M. Homann's preliminary result of fifteen miles a second as the speed with which our system travels in its vast orbit inspires confidence both from the trustworthiness of the determinations (Mr. Seabroke's) serving as its basis and from its intrinsic probability. Accepting it provisionally, we find the parallax of Alcyone about 0.02', implying a distance of 954,000,000,000,000 miles and a light journey ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... of its motion in an orbit round the sun, our earth is comparable with a railway carriage travelling with a velocity of about 30 kilometres per second. If the principle of relativity were not valid we should therefore expect that the direction of ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... oysters on the half-shell, he would have given the unusual meal a most animated consideration, although he might have utterly withheld any subsequent approbation. As a general thing, he revolved in an orbit where one might always be able to find him, were the proper calculations made. But if any one drew a tangent for him, and its direction seemed suitable and interesting, he was perfectly willing ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... the laws of Kepler say? They lay down a relation between the areas described by the heliocentric radius-vector of a planet and the time employed in describing them, a relation between the longer axis of the orbit and the time taken up by the course. And what was the principle discovered by Galileo? A law which connected the space traversed by a falling body with the time occupied by the fall. Furthermore, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... which embraces and binds together individuals and generations in an established tradition and mission, a moral law which suppresses the instinct to lead a life confined to a brief cycle of pleasure in order, instead, to replace it within the orbit of duty in a superior conception of life, free from the limits of time and space a life in which the individual by self-abnegation and by the sacrifice of his particular interests, even by death, realises the entirely spiritual ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... chapters I have sketched in outline the way in which England, partly by historical accident, but partly also by false philosophy, was drawn into the orbit of Germany, the centre of whose circle was already at Berlin. I need not recapitulate the causes at all fully here. Luther was hardly a heresiarch for England, though a hobby for Henry VIII. But the negative Germanism of the Reformation, its drag towards the north, its quarantine ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... rollicking old fraud life was! Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood! An ass, indeed, if ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... sea could she but launch the huge, unwieldy craft. Unfastening the rope that had moored it to the tree, Jane pushed frantically upon the bow of the heavy canoe, but for all the results that were apparent she might as well have been attempting to shove the earth out of its orbit. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a century appears so highly gifted with that wonderful quality for which we have no better name than Humor. His humor is the conciliation that takes place between love and knowledge. The two tendencies create the bold and graceful orbit on which his well-balanced books revolve. With one alone, his impetuosity would hasten to quench itself in the molten centre; and with the other alone, he would fly cynically beyond the reach of heat. This reconciling humor sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fitted his cosmos with a fair degree of ease. He was at home with them now, and natural; and—when not absorbed with study—talked freely in a slow magnetic way that compelled listeners. The early reticence had given place to the full sway of an enthusiast, and everyone within his orbit felt the influence ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... correct. I don't think it is a new one. From what I have seen of it so far, I have every reason to believe that it is Gambert's comet, which was discovered in 1826, and became visible to the naked eye in the autumn of 1833. It then crossed the orbit of the earth one month after the earth had passed the point of intersection. After that, some force divided it, and in '46 and '52 it reappeared as twin comets constantly separating. Now it would seem ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... onward by slow, cautious, and firm steps—but still movement, and that onward. The world, neither physically, intellectually, nor morally, was made to stand still. As in her daily revolutions on her own axis as well as her annual orbit round the sun, she never returns precisely to the same point in space which she has ever before occupied, it would seem to be the lesson which the Great Author of all Being would most deeply impress upon mind as ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... or so months following the opening of the space age, as signaled by the launching of Sputnik I in October 1957, the United States put 21 satellites into orbit out of 42 attempts. Two out of five deep-space probes were successful. The degree of success for all major launchings ran better than 50 percent. The American effort has been based on a broad scope of inquiry and includes long-range communications, ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... nearer to the Milky Way than seemed admissible to their predecessors; so that the constellation Lyra may now be said to have a stronger claim than Hercules to include it; and the necessity has almost disappeared for attributing to the solar orbit a high inclination to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... and all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or grey hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better—I daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... own great mechanic, Saxton, solved the problem. This has induced Arago, of France, to propose to test the rival theories of light, by similar means—to measure thus a velocity, to detect which has heretofore required a motion over the line of the diameter of the earth's orbit. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... fair who drew me through the ford Followed with Statius and myself the wheel Which made its orbit with the ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... spectacle still for the contemplation of the mind which has understood their wondrous mechanism. We admire them; but if the stars failed to attract our admiration, no one of them on that account would cease to trace its orbit. There is another heaven, a heaven of loving stars and free, the sight of which is one day to fill us with rapture, and the realization of which is to be the work of our love and of our will. Before we contemplate it we must make it; this is our high and awful ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... victorious:—need any man be happier? No man can be supremely happy long; and this General's strategic felicity and his domestic were fatally cut down almost together. The Cause of Liberty, too, now at the top of its orbit, was—But let us stick by ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... two foci are coincident and identical that her orbit becomes the perfect circle and her home ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... of the skull bones, called the orbit, where it is held in position by suitable tissues and turned in different directions by a special set of muscles. A cup-shaped receptacle is provided within the orbit, by layers of fat, and a smooth surface is supplied by a double membrane that lies between the fat and the eyeball. In front the eyeballs are provided with movable coverings, called the eyelids. These are composed of dense layers of connective tissue, covered on the outside by ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... look farther, came back after having made a pretty thorough inspection all over the civilized world, and camped outside of the home of a girl in our class until she admitted that he looked better to her than any of the rising young business men who had bisected her orbit in the last ten years. They're to be married this spring and I'm going back to the wedding. Incidentally I'm going to help pay for three more silver cups. We give a silver cup to each class baby and each frat baby, and I've been looking around this past year for a place ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... decree! Formed to connect, to blend, to associate, and to cooperate; bearing the same course, with kindred energies and harmonious sympathy, each perfect in its own lovely sphere, each moving in its wider or more contracted orbit, with different, but concentering, powers, guided by the same influence of reason, and endeavoring at the same blessed end—the happiness of the individual, the harmony of the species, and the glory of the Creator. In the Vices, on the other hand, it is the discord that ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... (falsely so called) tried experiments on the Satellites of Jupiter. He found that he could delay the eclipse 16 minutes by going to the other side of the earths orbit; in fact he found he could make the eclipse happen when he liked by simply shifting his position. Finding that credit was given him for determining the velocity of light by this means he repeated it so often that the calendar began to get seriously wrong ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... she should never forget Hugo's face as he turned on Pilzer, while his voice of protest struck a singing chord in her jangling nerves. It was the voice of civilization, of one who could think out of the orbit of a whirlpool of passionate barbarism. She could see that he was about to spring and her prayer went with his leap. She gloried in the impact that felled the great brute with the liver patch on his cheek, which was like a ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... al-Ghayb," somewhat like the "Himalayan Brothers" of modern superstition. See Herklots (Qanoon-e-Islam) for a long and careful description of these "Mardan-i-Ghayb" (Pers.), a "class of people mounted on clouds," invisible, but moving in a circular orbit round the world, and suggesting the Hindu "Lokapalas." They should not be in front of the traveller nor on his right, but either behind or on his left hand. Hence tables, memorial couplets and hemistichs are required to ascertain the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... theory that a stream or group of innumerable bodies, comparatively small, but of various dimensions, is sweeping around the solar focus in an orbit, which periodically cuts the orbit of the earth, thus explaining the actual cause of shooting stars, aerolites, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... unless you are frightfully rich. Then follows this lucid and soul-stirring sentence: "5. We will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own orbit." What a jolly song it would be—so hearty, and with such a simple swing in it! I can imagine the Futurists round the fire in a tavern trolling out in chorus some ballad with that incomparable refrain; shouting over their swaying flagons ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 0".75, corresponding to a distance of 0.27 siriometers ( 4.26 light years). This distance is obtained from the annual parallax with great accuracy, and the result is moreover confirmed in another way (from the study of the orbit of the companion of [alpha] Centauri). In the year 1916 INNES discovered at the observatory of Johannesburg in the Transvaal a star of the 10th magnitude, which seems to follow [alpha] Centauri in its path in the heavens, and which, in any case, lies at the same ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... that the matter of the solar system was once wholly gaseous, and extended as a roughly globular or lenticular mass beyond the orbit of Neptune. Sir Robert Ball stated in a lecture here that even when the solar nebula had shrunk to the size of the earth's orbit it must have been (I think he said) hundreds of times rarer than the residual gas in one of Crookes's high vacuum tubes. Yet, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... pikestaff, maypole, flagstaff; top mast, topgallant mast. ceiling &c. (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c. (angel) 244[obs3]; batophobia[obs3]. satellite, spy-in-the-sky. V. be high &c. adj.; tower, soar, command; hover, hover over, fly over;orbit, be in orbit; cap, culminate; overhang, hang over, impend, beetle, bestride, ride, mount; perch, surmount; cover &c. 223; overtop &c. (be superior) 33; stand on tiptoe. become high &c. adj.; grow higher, grow ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... centre of the orbit of the sun, nor the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements and united with them; and if any one were to stand on the moon when the moon and the sun are beneath us, our earth, with its element of water, ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... around, and return to base did not come until their second hop had brought them into the Mars orbit. Then it came from space police in charge of shipping traffic ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... that the sun does not move in exactly the same course as the stars, and yet not in one which is opposed to them, but by revolving in an inclined and oblique orbit performs an easy and excellent circuit through them all, by which means everything is kept in its place, and its elements combined in the most admirable manner. So too in political matters, the man who takes too high a tone, and opposes the popular will in all cases, must be thought harsh ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... land, anywhere on the world's surface. Instead, they were flying upward toward, and were being drawn one by one into the bowels of, huge Arpalonian space-freighters. When each such vessel was filled to capacity, it flew upward and set itself into a more-or-less-circular orbit ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... 5) that the tangent to the orbit makes with the sun at a given point, and the angle [delta] of the track upon such tangent, as well as the velocity v of the comet, we can deduce therefrom the velocity V of the solar waves by the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... fifteen should have opportunity—indeed the opportunity should be thrust upon her—of attending a continuation school, where the special aim should be to counteract the narrowing tendency of work which revolves about so small an orbit. Ideals of home life are either lacking or distorted in the minds of many working girls, and when such girls become wives and mothers they strive for the wrong things or they fall back without striving at all, taking merely what comes. They fail ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... comparison between them and the known relations is felt at once to be absurd. The question discussed, being the most ultimate of all possible questions, must eventually contain in itself all that is to man unknown and unknowable; the whole orbit of human knowledge is here insufficient to obtain a parallax whereby to institute the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... end of the pond, the boat gently headed around, and silently we glided back into the clasp of that strange orbit. Slight sounds were heard as before, but nothing that indicated the presence of the game we were waiting for; and we reached the point of departure as innocent of venison ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Hart. The news broadcast announcer was in the midst of a long dissertation regarding the discovery only this morning that there were certain apparent discrepancies in the movements of the tides and unwonted perturbations of the moon's orbit. There flashed on the screen a view of the great observatory at Mount Wilson, and Professor Laughlin of that institution stepped into the foreground of the scene to take up the discussion so mechanically ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... though seldom shining there, should have drawn some satellites to her orbit. You see, dearest, I can catch the note of Court flattery. Nay, I will press no questions. My girl shall choose her own partner; provided the man is honest and a loyal servant of the King. Her old father shall set no stumbling-block ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... already moved in an orbit around her, and whose parents had, according to a familiar phrase, an even more circumscribed course around her little finger—for Bessie Hall to rail at fate was deliciously ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... as I need hardly inform the sober reader, revolves round the sun at a mean distance of [character: Venus sigil] vermillion miles. More than that, as has been proved by the recent observations of Puits of Paris, its orbit is steadily but surely advancing sunward. That is to say, it is rapidly becoming too hot for clothes to be worn at all; and this, to the Wenuses, was so alarming a prospect that the immediate problem of life ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... how come you're loafing now? Seems to me you'd be busy as a Martian dustdigger today, of all days. Who's setting up the landing orbit, if ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... luminous, benignant. And I seeking to chain this wandering comet into the harmonies of heaven! Better task than that of astrologers, and astronomers to boot! Who among them can "loosen the band of Orion"? But who amongst us may not be permitted by God to have sway over the action and orbit of the human soul? ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... may, too, be hundreds of millions of dark bodies, extinct constellations far larger than our own sun. Any one of these could approach our solar system and annihilate it with its impact for, in passing the orbit of the earth on their way around the sun, they attain a regular velocity of 26-1/2 miles per second. If one of these dark comets should overtake the earth and strike it, the velocity of impact would be about eight miles per second; but if it should meet the earth ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... her accustomed place, which she could no more get away from than a planet could leave its orbit. But her attention was wandering, as it rarely did, and she was silently casting uneasy glances at the judge and his nephew who sat on the other side of the room, talking to each other in a loud, excited tone. The widow Broadnax, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... sunshine! The pleasant greeny light cast by awnings into her bedroom. What devil dance was in her blood? What prickly rash lay under her being? Her mother at that ordered scrubbing of the window sill! Her eyes swung the smaller orbit of the room. The rumpled bed. That discarded collar on the dresser, the two stretched buttonholes like two tiny mouths. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... means of locomotion was not in the least the outcome of snobbishness or pride; they had come from a race of people accustomed to move in a small orbit in their own particular way, an exclusive people, breeders and lovers of horses, a people to whom locomotion had always meant pride in the means and the method; to take a seat in a stuffy railway ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... at it as a man looks at a flickering fireplace and thinks of other things. He thought of the sun, 52 trillion miles away, a pinpoint of light lost in the dazzle of the Milky Way—the Earth a speck of dust in orbit just as this planet was to ...
— The Quantum Jump • Robert Wicks
... days; real business, when one's orbit was confined to a few hundred yards of cratered surface, claimed the nights. A peculiar degree of darkness characterised these closing days of November, and with rain and mud put an end to active operations. Wiring, the chief labour of which was carrying the coils ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... relations of binary and triple systems of stars, the theories for the explanation of the extraordinary, not to say fantastic, shapes discerned in some of the nebulous systems—whirls and spirals radiating through spaces as vast as the orbit of Neptune;[A] the glimpses at systems beyond that to which our sun belongs;—these are all splendid results, which may fairly be attributed to the school of Herschell, and will for ever insure no secondary place to that name ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... previous life had been leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link. This was the LAST link—merely the last one, and no bigger than the others; but as we gaze back at it through the inflating mists of our imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of Neptune. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is all as admirably felt as expressed, and to those acquainted with and accustomed to love the works of the painter, it leaves nothing to be asked for; but we must again remind Lord Lindsay, that he has throughout left the artistical orbit of Giotto undefined, and the offense of his manner unremoved, as far as regards the uninitiated spectator. We question whether from all that he has written, the untraveled reader could form any distinct idea of the painter's peculiar merits or methods, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... happened before, Quarles's manner of shutting me up annoyed me, but when you have to deal with an eccentric it is no use expecting him to travel in an ordinary orbit. ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... hermitage in a more tranquil mood, though it seemed mathematically inconceivable that I could pass. I looked once or twice apprehensively into the sky; the Lord of Day appeared to be securely anchored in his customary orbit! ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... our life. The iceberg of the northern seas is less than its unseen foundations; the lava stream is less than the molten sea whence it issues; the apple falling to the ground, and the moon circling in her orbit, are less than the great invisible force which controls their movements and the movements of all the things that do appear. The crime is not so great as its motive, nor yet as its results; the beneficent deed is not so great as the beneficence of which it is but a fruit; yet we cannot ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... machines to cultivate the earth, to make our clothes, to build our houses, to multiply our means of offense and defense, to make weak children do the work of Titans, to measure our time with the accuracy of the orbit of the planets, to use the sun itself in perpetuating our likenesses to distant generations, to cause a needle to guide the mariner with assurance on the darkest night, to propel a heavy ship against the wind and tide without oars or sails, to make ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... had to be regulated, and, unlike the great world, our world had to be steered in its journey through space. Also, there were cosmic disturbances to be encountered and baffled, such as do not afflict the big earth in its frictionless orbit through the windless void. And we never knew, from moment to moment, what was going to happen next. There were spice and variety enough and to spare. Thus, at four in the morning, I relieve Hermann ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... their stock of emotions between Bridge, Dress, and Other Women's Husbands. And when Julian Adderley, as an author in embryo, found himself seated at luncheon with this particular set of persons, all of whom were more or less well known in the small orbit wherein they moved, he felt considerably enlivened and exhilarated. Life was worth living, he said to himself, when one might study at leisure the little tell-tale lines of vice and animalism on the exquisite features of Lady ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... yellow sun of the Moruan system swam into sight in the viewscreen. Far below, the tiny eighth planet glistened like a snowball in the reflection of the sun, with only occasional rents in the cloud blanket revealing the ragged surface below. The doctors watched as the ship went into descending orbit, skimming the outer atmosphere and settling into ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... a strange little shock, it came to her that they were going, as a mass, nowhere except from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn; that they were exactly like the crowd of sea gulls, each individual rotating in its own little orbit, and that the wonderful coloured and spangled crust called Civilization was nothing more than the excretion of individual ambitions, desires ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... very special interest to the student of Cooper's character. He had now lived for so long a time a life remote from the real clash of conflicting views that he had finally reached that satisfied state of opinion which thinks the little circle in which it moves is the proper orbit for the revolution of thought of the whole race. As he advanced in years he narrowed instead of broadening. The intensity of his faith coupled with his energy of expression makes this fact very conspicuous; and in "The Crater" the reader is alternately attracted ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... essentially help'd, though often harm'd, by them. It has been and is carried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopp'd than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv'd, the fervid, the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of Nature. What proof do we want, then, from a book? If the man who observes the myriad stars, and considers that they and their innumerable satellites move in their serene dignity through the heavens, each swinging clear of the other's orbit—if, I say, the man who sees this cannot realise the Creator's attributes without the help of the book of Job, then his view of things is beyond my understanding. Nor is it only in the large things that we see the ever present solicitude of some ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... at play. In spite of his attempt to imitate the Governor's jauntiness Archie felt again, as so often since he left Bailey Harbor, the unreality of the events through which he had been projected with his singular companion, who had drawn him so far out of his orbit that it was hard to believe that he would ever slip into it again. Their affairs had never presented so many problems as now, when the Governor was predicting and planning the end with so much assurance. In the few seconds that Ruth deliberated ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Bulgars. With the arrival of the Magyars, in the ninth century, a wall was raised between the Serbs and central and western Europe on land. Croatia and Slavonia (between the Save and the Drave) were gradually drawn into the orbit of the Hungarian state, and in 1102, on the death of its own ruler, Croatia was absorbed by Hungary and has formed part of that country ever since. Hungary, aiming at an outlet on the Adriatic, at the same time subjected ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... not as yet dried a single blade of the heavily dewed grass, whereon the shadows of the yellow and red vans were projected far away, those thrown by the felloe of each wheel being elongated in shape to the orbit of a comet. All the gipsies and showmen who had remained on the ground lay snug within their carts and tents or wrapped in horse-cloths under them, and were silent and still as death, with the exception of an occasional snore that revealed their presence. But the Seven ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... know not why—why seek to know? Is not All life a problem? and the tiniest pulse Beats with a throb which the remotest star Feels in its orbit? Why ask me? Rather say Whence these vague yearnings, whither swells this heart, Like some wild floweret leaping at the dawn? 'Tis not for me, 'tis not for thee to tell, But Time shall be our teacher, and his voice Shall ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... before its front beam[1] had bent the chariot round. Then to the wheels the ladies returned, and the griffon moved his blessed burden, in such wise however that no feather of him shook. The beautiful lady who had drawn me at the ford, and Statius and I were following the wheel which made its orbit with the smaller arc. So walking through the lofty wood, empty through fault of her who trusted to the serpent, an angelic song set the time to our steps. Perhaps an arrow loosed from the bow had in three flights reached such a distance as ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... perhaps not like ourselves, yet having affinities with ourselves, and correlating ourselves to some family of men or gods of which we are all lost children. We shall then know our universal function and find our universal orbit. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham |
