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Chaos   /kˈeɪɑs/   Listen
Chaos

noun
1.
A state of extreme confusion and disorder.  Synonyms: bedlam, pandemonium, topsy-turvydom, topsy-turvyness.
2.
The formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos.
3.
(Greek mythology) the most ancient of gods; the personification of the infinity of space preceding creation of the universe.
4.
(physics) a dynamical system that is extremely sensitive to its initial conditions.






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"Chaos" Quotes from Famous Books



... our liberty, touching it from side to side. Mr. Lincoln, on the 1st of January, 1863, struck it on the cheek, and the faithless and unbelieving among us expected to see the fabric of our institutions dissolve into chaos because their idol had fallen. He struck it again; Congress and the States repeated the blow, and its unsightly carcass lies rotting in our streets. The sun shines in the heavens brighter than before. Let us remove the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... First born of Chaos, who so far didst come, From the old negro's darksome womb! Which when it saw the lovely child, The melancholly mass put on kind ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... fiercely; the heat was intense, although still early in the day. When they turned their heads toward the mountains which they had passed, they were struck with astonishment at the grandeur of the scene: rocks and cliffs in wild chaos, barren ridges and towering peaks, worn by time into castellated fortresses and other strange shapes, calling to their fancy the ruins of a former world. With the exception of a pool of water, near to ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... suddenly at one spot like this. Imagine what would happen if this had occurred in a city, in a crowded street. Hundreds would have been stricken blind, then hundreds would have been suffocated. Vehicles would have run amok, and the result would have been an indescribable chaos of the maimed, mangled and distraught. A flash like this green ray (which blinded Miss McLeod and her dog, deluded the General, and nearly suffocated us) at the mouth of a harbour, say, the entrance to a great port—Liverpool, London, or Glasgow—would be responsible for untold loss of life. ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux

... people is not necessarily a society. They may meet and disperse with no other bond of union than a fine house and lavish hospitality can give. It may be an assembly without unity, flavor, or influence. In the social chaos that followed the Revolution, this truth found a practical illustration. The old circles were scattered. The old distinctions were virtually destroyed, so far as edicts can destroy that which lies in the essence ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... knowledge in it Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men Most journalists would have been literary men if they could Motley Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Nearly nothing as chaos could be Neatness that brings despair Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it Never paid in anything but hopes of paying Never saw a man more ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... buildings proved to be farther away than was expected, and a halt was made at night at the first of the outlying piles of tree overgrown stones, while it was the middle of the next day before their goal was reached. A regular halt was made at a very chaos of stones, some being evidently artificially built up after the fashion of walls huge in size, but so overwhelmed, as it were, by a wave of ancient verdure, and dragged down by the wonderfully abundant ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn

... to infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of "chaos and old night" and Abelard and his opponent, St. Bernard, rode high on the mounting force in its swift ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard

... the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who is quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother, has a greater advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We must have chaos within" said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton

... to rummage through a little condensed chaos of handkerchiefs, gloves, powder-puff, powdery dollar bills, powdery coins, loose bits of paper, samples, thread, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... convenient shell hole, where the old walls had stood long ago, where Vauban's star-shaped bastions were, and the general conformation of what had been present-day Ypres; but I saw only a dusty chaos of shattered arch and tower and walls, with huge, unsightly mounds of rubble and brick—a rubbish dump in very truth. Therefore I turned to the quiet-voiced Major and asked him of his experiences, whereupon he talked to me most interestingly and very learnedly ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol

... mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty effort, let us advance on Chaos ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... shuddered; the wild excitement of secret love had departed. She knew she was beloved, she had given her promise, yet she was not happy; and could she then expect to be when irrevocably his own? Her brain reeled beneath the bewildering chaos of her thoughts; but she followed up her resolution, and implored him as she had intended. Lord Alphingham heard with a dark ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar

... a "big, blooming, buzzing confusion," according to James, but gradually, cosmos emerges from chaos. The senses, clouded at first, become clear and active. Adjustment and voluntary control of the larger muscles are secured. The art of walking is mastered, and the great feat of learning a language practically unaided, is well under way. The awakening ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... to reduce industry to such a state of chaos that it becomes absolutely unprofitable to the employers, and thus it will be easier for the shop committees to take over the "control of industry" by Soviets from which all "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionaries" shall be excluded. Meanwhile, when ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee

... and volcanic class, including trachyte, basalt, and tuffs and agglomerates associated with streams of lava, have made this a land of supernatural horrors. I had no idea of the spectacle which was awaiting us in the peninsula of Snfell, where these ruins of a fiery nature have formed a frightful chaos. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... This face I had never seen before. It was the face of the spirit visitant, chaste with wisdom, lighted by a splendour of power and calm. Perhaps it was the calm that smote me most of all. It was as the calm of one who had crossed chaos to bless poor sea-worn men with the word that all was well. It was not the face of the fighter. To my thrilled imagination it was the face of one who dwelt beyond all strivings of the elements and broody dissensions of ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... Chaos followed. Indoors and out of doors they raged without check. Even Beale gave the thing up. He knocked Charlie into a flower bed and then disappeared in the ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse

... arm, he held it suspended, and paused—"Robert! this is a queer world, and men are made of the queerest dregs that Chaos churned up in her ferment. I might swear sounding oaths—oaths that would make the poachers think there was a bittern booming in Bilberry Moss—that, in the case you put, death only should have parted me from Mary. But I have lived in the world fifty-five years; I have been forced ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... to mythology (Hesiod's Theog., 123), one of the first things created, the daughter of Chaos, and mother of Aether (sky) and Hemera (day); also of Deceit, Strife, Old Age, and ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... beyond the seas, and such avalanches of coin and currency had fluttered and jingled confusedly down before him, that he was now as one who has been whirling round and round for a time, and, stopping all at once, finds his surroundings still whirling and all objects a dancing chaos. However, little by little the Sellers family cooled down and crystalized into shape, and the poor room lost its glitter and resumed its poverty. Then the youth found his voice and begged Sellers ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... which I lost my noble and good Dittmar. I am a prey to a thousand different and confused feelings; but I have only two passions left in me which remain upright and like two pillars of brass support this whole chaos—the thought of God and ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... Colonel fondly pictured his nephew wandering distractedly through a long suite of padded cells—but, alas! the bird had flown. Such things were always expedited with such felicitous despatch in those parts of the earth inhabited by civilized men, but here where everybody was equally mad, where chaos reigned, and nobody either recognized or respected beings of a superior order, what could be done to check the headlong career of his nephew who with twenty millions ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... foundation of being is distinguishable quality; were there no set of differing characteristics, one or more of which an existing thing might appropriate, existence would be altogether impossible. The realm of essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental possibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the light of attention on one of its constituent ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... their future destiny. Not that I am an Utopian projector in these things. I am resolved never to breed up a son of mine to any of the learned professions. I know the value of independence; and since I cannot give my sons an independent fortune, I shall give them an independent line of life. What a chaos of hurry, chance, and changes is this world, when one sits soberly down to reflect on it! To a father, who himself knows the world, the thought that he shall have sons to usher into it, must fill him with dread; but if he have daughters, the prospect in a thoughtful ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... rushing terror burst the awful cry, GOD AND THE TEMPLE! As the avalanche slides Down Alpine slopes, precipitous, cold and dark, Unpitying and unwrathful, grinds and crushes The mountain violets and the valley weeds, And drags behind a trail of chaos and death; So burst we on that field, and through and through The gay battalia brave with saffron silks, Crushed and abolished every grace and gleam, And dragged where'er we rode a sinuous track Of chaos and ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay

... the illusion of a dream, hearken to us, who are immortal beings, ethereal, ever young and occupied with eternal thoughts, for we shall teach you about all celestial matters; you shall know thoroughly what is the nature of the birds, what the origin of the gods, of the rivers, of Erebus, and Chaos; thanks to us, even Prodicus(3) will envy ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes

... and the firm hand brought order out of chaos, and the British were astonished to see the effectiveness of the rough and ready troops that opposed them. The city of Boston was besieged so firmly that the British at last decided to evacuate the town, sailing ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards

... fallen, and communism had from that moment become impossible, property must be respected as the one institution which could put a curb on his avarice, and preserve a society of fallen men from chaos and general rapine. ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien

... spot a sac d'eau, one of those reservoirs of water which form among the glaciers on the summits of the rocks, had broken, and, descending like a water-spout, it had swept before it every vestige of cultivation, covering wide breadths of the meadows with a debris that resembled chaos. A frightful barrenness, and the most smiling fertility, were in absolute contact: patches of green, that had been accidentally favored by some lucky formation of the ground, sometimes appearing like oases of the desert, in the very centre of a sterility that would put the labor and the art of ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... for the railway north of Bloemfontein. The charge of it had been given to an officer who, unknown to the staff, was at the time in hospital and unable to take over his command; detachments were moved promiscuously by orders which came now from Pretoria and now from Bloemfontein; and in the chaos De Wet wriggled in between ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... Vast Chaos, of eld, was God's dominion, 'Twas His beloved child, His own first born; And He was aged ere the thought of morn Shook the sheer steeps of dim Oblivion. Then all the works of darkness being done Through countless aeons hopelessly ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... ethics and right conduct and duty playing a devil's dance in the victim's soul, that can change the practised customs of a man's life and send cherished opinions, accepted beliefs, and approved dogmas spinning into chaos before its fiery onslaught—love did not thus overpower Martin Grimbal. His old-fashioned mind was no armour against it, and in that the passion proved true; religion appeared similarly powerless to influence him; yet now his extreme humility, his natural sense of ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... England man, as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, but all of us Americans,—that was the vision and message of Washington; and that insight and that law, coming to petty, prejudiced, jealous, and disordered states, put an end to chaos and brought peace, prosperity, strength, largeness of life, and an ever broadening horizon. Let no man think of himself any longer in the first place as an American, as an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a German, a Russian, but all men in the first place ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... possessed of power and capable of taking broad views of things, the rule of reason may be set up. A deliberate attempt may be made to recognize many wills, harmonize discords. Order may be brought out of chaos, and the limits of the realm within the borders of which order reigns ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... into the valley of the Marne where division after division of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... end of a mighty struggle, he had philosophically accepted this hopeless passion which Fate had thrust upon him. Yet he whose world was a chaos ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer

... embodied: "And the earth was waste ['without form,' in the Authorised Version] and void." Most people seem to think that this phraseology intends to imply that the matter out of which the world was to be formed was a veritable "chaos," devoid of law and order. If this interpretation is correct, the nebular hypothesis can have nothing to say to it. The scientific thinker cannot admit the absence of law and order; anywhere or anywhen, in nature. Sometimes ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... This was a large, a disastrous loss, but traceable, to no inconsiderable extent, doubtless, to the loose business methods of the reformer and his partner. The Liberator at the beginning of its fourth year was struggling in a deep hole of financial helplessness and chaos. Would it ever get out alive, or "SHALL THE LIBERATOR DIE?" burst in a cry of anguish, almost despair, from its editor, so weak in thought of self, so ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... went to work and got order out of chaos in a short while. She piled the papers and magazines neatly on a shelf; emptied the teapot of its former drawing of leaves; washed and rinsed it; filled the kettle with fresh water; and replenished the alcohol lamp from a bottle of wood alcohol she ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed

... falling down over a wide area. Several fell close to where the lads were crouched against the rock, but none touched them. For a full half-minute the fragments continued to fall, then the boys stood up and looked round. It was too dark to see more than that the yard was a chaos; the long lines of waggons, the huts and buildings, had all disappeared; loud shouts could be heard from the other side of the bridge, but nearer to them everything was silent. There was no doubt that the ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty

... all were staring at Mr. Pyecroft, as though in each a whirling chaos were striving to shape itself into speech. But before they could become articulate, that sober young gentleman had stepped from out of their midst and, his back to them, was discreetly engrossing himself in the examination ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott

... wild chaos of storm and whirlwind which madly raged over the benighted earth before 'light was,' rushed to the dark caverns where the fettered earthquake lay, when order was demanded by the Father of Lights, we can not tell; but surely it is a pleasing thought for the mind engulfed in the unfathomed ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... give some account of the stages in the process from original chaos to present arrangements. The division into cold mist and warm ether first broke the spell of confusion. With increasing cold, the former gave rise to water, earth and stones. The seeds of life which continued floating ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Government now chose to wring money out of Cheyte Sing. It had formerly been convenient to treat him as a sovereign prince; it was now convenient to treat him as a subject. Dexterity inferior to that of Hastings could easily find, in the general chaos of laws and customs, arguments for either course. Hastings wanted a great supply. It was known that Cheyte Sing had a large revenue, and it was suspected that he had accumulated a treasure. Nor was he a favourite at Calcutta. He had, when the Governor-General was in great difficulties, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... all the methods of resuscitation usually resorted to in cases of apoplexy. A relaxation of every fibre of his being seemed to give him over to death, to prepare his body for the rigidity of the corpse; and that in the most dismal place on earth, chaos lighted by a dark lantern, where all the debris of plays that had been performed, gilded furniture, hangings with gorgeous fringe, carriages, strong boxes, card-tables, discarded flights of stairs and ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... pleasure-place of an opulent family; for there was the ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however, continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man's window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... something more than a magnetism for which she was not responsible and to which she had seemed singularly indifferent. It was quite evident that he was watching charm in action. She was sparkling and exerting herself, talking brilliantly and illuminatingly upon the chaos still known as Europe, and it was patent that her knowledge was not derived from newspapers or drawing-room gossip. Her personal acquaintance of public men had evidently been extensive before the war, and she had as manifestly continued to see those in and out of office in Vienna and Buda ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... pounds in my pocket, I think I could dare anything. Three thousand pounds! One year of splendour and happiness, and then—the rest is chaos! ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... working hypothesis as to how the conditions that need redemption were brought about. I state the case thus, therefore: That human society, even humanity itself, is now in a state of flux that at any moment may change into a chaos comparable only with that which came with the fall of classical civilization and from which five centuries were necessary for the process of recovery. Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... pealing voice the unnumbered tribes That toil and groan and bleed, hungry and blind— These, hush'd awhile with patient eye serene, Shall watch the mad careering of the storm; Then o'er the wild and wavy chaos rush 245 And tame the outrageous mass, with plastic might Moulding Confusion to such perfect forms, As erst were wont,—bright visions of the day!— To float before them, when, the summer noon, Beneath some arched romantic rock reclined 250 They felt the sea-breeze ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... but by dreams and hopes, and by the love of the marvellous—that early source of idealism—strayed into a variety of fabulous and legendary mazes. Hence arose all the strange and grotesque myths about heathen gods and Christian saints which occupy the shadowy borders between chaos and history. The stories which were current in this country in early times spoke of miracles worked by the Virgin, represented St. Christopher as a giant twenty-four feet high, and related how "Seynt Pateryk" banished the "wormes" from Ireland; ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... sent a challenge, which he met with outward firmness. Meanwhile he was inwardly haunted by a phrase he had once heard a woman apply to the mental capacities of her best friend. "Her mind?—her mind, my dear, is a shallow chaos!" The words made a neat label, he scoffingly thought, for his own present sensations. For he could not persuade himself that there was much profundity in his feelings towards Miss Sewell, whatever reckless possibilities life might seem to hold ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the early Greek thinkers affords the readiest illustration of his meaning in conceiving all philosophy under the form of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought. Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form which was at first simply a material element, the most equable and colourless and universal which could be found. ...
— Sophist • Plato

... things I see with wonder, but no fear. Were all the elements to be confounded, And shuffled all into their former chaos; Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me, And all mankind roaring within those fires, I could not fear, or feel the least remorse. To the last instant I would dare thy power. Here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn. Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... Soter, or of Savior. Thus Nature works mysteriously with man; And from the Eternal One, as from a centre, All things proceed, in fire, air, earth, and water, And all are subject to one law, which, broken Even in a single point, is broken in all; Demons rush in, and chaos comes again. By this will I compel the stubborn spirits, That guard the treasures, hid in caverns deep On Gerizim, by Uzzi the High-Priest, The ark and holy vessels, to reveal Their secret unto me, and to restore These precious things to the Samaritans. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out the great elements. The chaotic ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... are two little streams running down from the dark chaos of rock, that look to me different from the rest of the mountain. You ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn

... had the exact words of the 'Popol Vuh,' we should probably find no more history there than we find in the Quiche MS. as it now stands. Now and then, it is true, one imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again. It may be difficult to confess that with all the traditions of the early migrations of Cecrops and Danaus into Greece, with the Homeric poems of the Trojan war, and the genealogies of the ancient ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... to wait in the station for ten days—an eternity. I lived in a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into the accountant's office. It was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put together that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... practical architect; without technical education, but gifted with supreme genius, bringing the imperious instincts of a sublime creative amateur into every task appointed him. We need not wonder if a man of his calibre left the powerful impress of his personality upon an art in chaos, luring lesser craftsmen into the Barocco mannerism, while he provoked reaction in the stronger, who felt more scientifically what was needed to secure firm standing-ground. Bernini and the superb fountain ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... the purser's clerks and assistants, had provisions and articles innumerable to stow away; the gunner, boatswain, and carpenter, their respective stores to look to; indeed, in every department order had to commence its reign, where chaos had hitherto seemed to prevail, operations not to be performed without their due allowance of shouting and swearing. On deck all went smoothly, and under the pleasantest of auspices the two ships ran through the Needles, and ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... semi-blindness amid a chaos. Then as he began to recover his consciousness, he found himself standing by a pillar some distance from where he had been sitting: he saw a place where tables and chairs were all upside down, legs in the air, amid debris of glass and breakage: he saw the cafe almost empty, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... Aunt Jane, taking off her spectacles. "What a man! He is ugly enough to frighten the neighboring crows. His face looks as if it had fallen together out of chaos, and the features had come where it had pleased Fate. There is a look of industrious nothingness about him, such as busy dogs have. I know the whole family. They used to bake ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... An indescribable chaos of fragments, blocks, debris, detritus of all kinds half choked the river below; and the swift current, suddenly blocked, now foamed and chafed with lathering fury through ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... was determined not to obey him, for again and again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked. But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions. It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind one ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... ledge, struck water, felt himself whirled around in the icy, rushing current, rolled over, tumbled through rapids, blinded, deafened, choked, swept helplessly in a vast green wall of water toward something that thundered in his brain an instant, then dashed it into roaring chaos. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... was an egg according to the conceptions of many of the ancients; and few ideas were more widely spread, or can be traced further back, than the one that the whole visible creation emerged from the original Chaos or Darkness in the ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons

... left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... This chapter and the events connected with the tendency which it reports will be cited as showing this need. Some of the schemes will spring from motives that are hostile to China. Some will be benevolently conceived in a desire to save China from herself and shorten her period of chaos and confusion. But the hope of the world's peace, as well as of China's freedom, lies in adhering to a policy of Hands Off. Give China a chance. Give her time. The danger lies in being in a hurry, in impatience, possibly in the desire of America to ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey

... day of Paofi chaos had begun. Communication was interrupted between Lower and Upper Egypt; commerce had ceased; on the Nile moved only boats on guard, the roads were occupied by troops marching toward those cities which ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... true scheme of them, but when measured only by the gratification which they procure, they become jumbled together and return to their aboriginal chaos. Socrates apologizes for the length of his speech, which was necessary to the explanation of the subject, and begs Polus not unnecessarily ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... sweetest sugar plums, sweets to the sweet—such as the revellers of the Carnival reserve as tributes to especial loveliness. Hilda pressed her hand across her brow; she let her eyelids fall, and, lifting them again, looked through the grotesque and gorgeous show, the chaos of mad jollity, in quest of some object by which she might assure herself that the whole ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... chiefs of the ancient regime, built a new city at "Tampu-tocco." Here they kept alive the memory of the Amautas and lived in such a relatively civilized manner as to draw to them, little by little, those who wished to be safe from the prevailing chaos and disorder and the tyranny of the independent chiefs or "robber barons." In their new capital, they elected ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... around you. Amongst these threatening apparitions, there are some which fade away and reenter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no longer with the horrors of this present chaos; but there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and alive, to say: 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we, we do ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... the dismal scene. And now, in this burning tomb, this subterranean volcano, seek the king's guards with their blue coats laced with silver. Seek the officers, brilliant in gold, seek for the arms upon which they depended for their defense. One single man has made of all of those things a chaos more confused, more shapeless, more terrible than the chaos which existed before the creation of the world. There remained nothing of the three compartments—nothing by which God could have recognized His ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... uncultivated lands which they did not regard as being any more the property of the Indians than of their own hunters. With the best intentions, it was wholly impossible for any government to evolve order out of such a chaos without resort to the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... purchaser who suffers from the want of thought bestowed on the materials, the sloppy manipulation, the careless compounding; sins of omission and commission that cause him, on finding his picture becoming chaos, to join the detractors of modern pigments. In classifying colours therefore, those also should be classified who use them:—into artists, whose love for art would render it more lasting than themselves; and into painters, whose motto is ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... emerged from this chaos, they saw before them another gulf, encircled by a wall of blood-red granite. And these red rocks were reflected in the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... us, at the return of light. The Atlantic resembled a chaos of waters, the portions of the rolling sheet that were not white with foam, looking green and angry. The clouds hid the sun, and the gale seemed to be fast coming to its height. At ten, we drove past an American, with nothing standing but his foremast. Like ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper

... just in time. It burst over the same rocks with greater violence than its predecessor, but the boat had gained the shelter of the next ledge, and lay floating securely in the deep, quiet pool within, while the men rested on their oars, and watched the chaos of the ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne

... congratulate it; if it suffers, it cries aloud to high heaven to avenge its wrongs: it comports itself as if it and it alone were the only sensitive things in existence.—That is curious. That it wrongs may have been wrought by itself; that is fate may have been determined in the reign of Chaos and Old Night, or ere even cosmic nebulae were born, it does not dream: if Jill is indifferent or Jack morose,—either is enough to cause Jack or Jill to curse God and die. Is there some archetypal and arcanal secret ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain

... to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... of the bombarding molecules of gases and liquids is the same in our bodies as out; that turmoil of the particles goes on forever; it is, in itself, blind, fateful, purposeless; but life furnishes, or is, an organizing principle that brings order and purpose out of this chaos. It does not annul any of the mechanical or chemical principles, but under its tutelage or inspiration they produce a host of new substances, and a world of new and beautiful ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... easy to transmute wretched humanity into gold. But who is going to call order out of this horrid chaos? No one, I am thinking, for no one seems to dare attempt in any thorough way to solve the question of housing the very poor, and that question lies at the root ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... garrison. On the afternoon of the 13th Haughton was cut down by a treacherous native officer of the artillery, who then rushed out of the gate, followed by all the gunners and most of the Mahommedans of the garrison. In the midst of the chaos of disorganisation, Dr Grant amputated Haughton's hand, dressed his other wounds, and then spiked all the guns. When it was dark, the garrison moved out, Pottinger leading the advance, Dr Grant the main body, and Ensign Rose ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes

... apparently, nine-tenths of the decks, the remaining tenth encumbered by spars, cordage, tangled rigging, chains, cables and the like, all helter-skeltered together in such a haze of entanglements that my heart misgave me as I looked on it. Surely order would not issue from this chaos in four days' time with only three men to ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... transcendental theology.... Let the most absolute science, let the highest reason, become once more the patrimony of the leaders of the people; let the sacerdotal art and the royal art take the double sceptre of antique initiations, and the social world will once more issue from its chaos. Burn the holy images no longer; demolish the temples no more; temples and images are necessary for men; but drive the hirelings from the house of prayer; let the blind be no longer leaders of the blind, reconstruct the hierarchy of intelligence and holiness, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... very agreeable, Lady Constance took up a book which was at hand, and said, 'Do you know this?' And Tancred, opening a volume which he had never seen, and then turning to its titlepage, found it was 'The Revelations of Chaos,' a startling work just published, and of which a rumour ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... relieving him from those burthens in 1781. The arguments and facts adduced on the one occasion, as well as the conclusion, are a flat contradiction to those exhibited on the other."] which entirely takes away our respect even for success, when issuing out of such a chaos of self-contradiction and shuffling. It cannot be denied, however, that such a system of exposure—submitted, as it was in this case, to a still further scrutiny, under the bold, denuding hands of a Burke and a Sheridan—was a test to which the councils of few rulers could with ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... with every hour. The perfect organization which has been effected within the past day or two has gradually resolved all the chaos and confusion into a semblance ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... The change from the chaos of the storm-cloud to the almost perfect calm of the upper ether was so great that it was almost stunning. For a minute none of the five spoke ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood

... with most pleasure heard, Were noble strains, by Mopas sung, the bard Who to his harp in lofty verse began, And through the secret maze of nature ran. He the great spirit sung, that all things fill'd, That the tumultuous waves of chaos still'd: Whose nod dispos'd the jarring seeds to peace, And made the wars of hostile atoms cease. All beings we in fruitful nature find, Proceeded from the great eternal mind; Streams of his unexhausted spring of power, And cherish'd with his influence, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... held and allowed no forgetting; Ravenel always held they were violet, and Josef, who saw her every day for years, spoke them gray; but Dermott McDermott was firm as to their being blue until the day she visited him about the railroad business, when he afterward described them "as black as chaos," adding a word or two about her deil's temper as well. The truth was that the color of them changed with her emotions, but the wistfulness of them remained ever the same. Dermott, in some lines he wrote of her ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane

... It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Get education, get a good education. Fight your way to the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... to see the human face divine multiplying around me; and, in thus cultivating what is in the rudest state of nature, I shall taste one of the greatest of all pleasures, that of creation, and see order and beauty gradually rise from chaos. ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... shows that he had not in the least grasped its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic constantly selects the wrong ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... anything in such a chaos?" he exclaimed. "I can't see my way through it, and when I try to get information from the people here, they seem to have an understanding among themselves to leave me under a wrong impression, or even to make my uncertainties still greater! Ah! Mademoiselle Reine, you were right! I do not ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... went upon his new course unheeded for a time, for a tragic happening to Cynthia and a calamity to the community threw the little doctor and many others into chaos. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock

... bridge into more mud. At this southern end there was a chaos of hoarse directions and commands. Darkness was coming upon the earth, and regiments were being hurried up the slippery bank. As Billie floundered in the black mud, amid the swearing, sliding crowd, ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... no bringing order out of such a chaos, Jurgis soon discovered; and he fell in with the spirit of the thing—there was no reason why he should wear himself out with shouting. If hides and guts were slashed and rendered useless there was no way of tracing it to any one; and if a man lay off ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... her as a wedding present. Emmeline was now seventeen and passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could be safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood. Beyond that period lay chaos, the wrenching asunder of Francesca from the sheltering habitation that had grown to be her soul. It is true that in imagination she had built herself a bridge across the chasm, a bridge of a single span. The bridge in question was her ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... the place and strictness of my liberty, I am so transported that I could not follow that study wherein I took great delight and chief pleasure, and to spend my time idly would but add more discontentments to my troubled breast, and being in this chaos of discontentments, fantasies must arise, which will bring forth the fruits of an idle brain, for e malis minimum. It is far better to give some account of time, though to little purpose, than none at all. To which end I gathered a handful of essays, and few ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... that once more the Few were throttled and trampled by the Many, then the fabled "Ragnarok" of the Sagas described only approximately the doom of the devastated South. In the financial and social chaos that followed the invasion by "loyal" hordes, rushing under "sealed orders" on the mission of "Reconstruction," and eminently successful in "reconstructing" their individual fortunes, an anomaly presented itself for the consideration of political ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... travelling force which mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof is multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your half-lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius. What do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... active for that, his nerves were tingling again. The bright, gay life about him did not exist for him. That afternoon he lived in the past. He marshalled for review contending thoughts, that had for many years fought for supremacy. Out of the chaos of conflict no order had yet come. He was getting old ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson

... yet fully realized the fact with which he had just been acquainted in terms of such sweeping passion. The old man's brain was none too clear in the mornings now. And the suddenness of the announcement had shocked his faculties into a state of chaos. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... Tellus by the Romans, the personification of the earth, described as the first being that sprang fiom Chaos, and gave birth to ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... came to myself, to an undefinable sense of the tremendous pressure of nothingness. Darkness! it was not that; yet it was as little light. It was as if we lay in a dim, luminous chaos, ourselves an integral part of its self-containment. I did not stir; but I spoke: and my strange voice broke the enchantment. Surely never before or since was speech ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... the shop—when his eye fell upon the till. Plaskwith had left it open, and the gleam of the coin struck his gaze—that deadly smile of the arch tempter. Intellect, reason, conscience—all, in that instant, were confusion and chaos. He cast a hurried glance round the solitary and darkening room—plunged his hand into the drawer, clutched he knew not what—silver or gold, as it came uppermost—and burst into a loud and bitter laugh. The laugh itself startled him—it did not sound like his own. His ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... good or bad, But chaos for a soul to trust, — God counts it for a soul gone mad, And if God be God, ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... which his transcendent genius was unable to effect. It is this fundamental error that destroys the effect, even of his finest pieces; it is this, combined with the unapproachable nature of the presence which it reveals, that has rendered the Transfiguration itself a chaos of genius rather than a model of ideal beauty; nor will it, we hope, be deemed a presumptuous excess, if we venture to express our sentiments in regard to this great author, since it is from his own works alone that we have derived the means ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... external evidence, according to our calendar of the Muses, he is the first-born of the Poets that yet survive the wasteful ravages of hoary Time. He sings not, indeed, of Chaos and Eternal Night. But as one inspired by a heaven-born Muse, he echoes the chorus of the Angelic Song, when on the utterance of the first fiat the Morning Stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... with me, and for that very reason you will stay, if you are my friend! No more! Farewell, Antonio, till we meet again, perhaps to-morrow, in spite of a chaos of business. Happy fellow that you are! In the twinkling of an eye you will be revelling in colors again, while the yoke, the iron yoke, weighs ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Slovaks joined the closely related Czechs to form Czechoslovakia. Following the chaos of World War II, Czechoslovakia became a Communist nation within Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe. Soviet influence collapsed in 1989 and Czechoslovakia once more became free. The Slovaks and the Czechs agreed to separate peacefully on 1 January 1993. Slovakia was invited to join NATO and the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... believe it! I don't believe it!" Jack broke out. "You'll find a flaw in his art, if you find a moral chaos in him. It must be ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... through a strange experience. It gave her a dreadful shock to know that such things were reported of her hero, her champion. They could not be true, else Chaos was come again. But when no exultant denial of them arrived from the pen of his mother, although she wrote as she had promised, then she understood by degrees that the youth had erred from the path, and had denied the Lord that bought him. She brooded and fancied and ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... from them, the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the wind together—they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to the other, and ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim

... the only truth, and is there ever only one truth about the concrete facts of reality? Does truth in this sense not simply mean a certain order into which we bring our experience in the service of certain purposes of thought? We may approach the chaos of life experience with different purposes, and led by any one of them we may reach that consistent unity of ideas for the limited outlook which we call truth. The chemist has a right to consider everything in the world as chemical substances, and the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... initiated disturbances in order to reduce Russia to chaos. They printed masses of paper money to finance their schemes; the notes, of which I possess specimens, can be easily ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... liars, for he comes from the West! He is the scum of mankind, for he is from the East! The people rage and rend each other, and the frenzy grows apace with the hour, till honor and justice, truth and manliness, are lost together in the furious chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... concluded, Ambrosio retired to his Cell. The pleasures which He had just tasted for the first time were still impressed upon his mind. His brain was bewildered, and presented a confused Chaos of remorse, voluptuousness, inquietude, and fear. He looked back with regret to that peace of soul, that security of virtue, which till then had been his portion. He had indulged in excesses whose very idea but four and twenty hours before He had recoiled at with horror. He shuddered at reflecting ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... it, and are disappointed when we find that it revolves around the sun instead of the sun revolving around it. What a fuss we make about this little bit of a world, its existence only a short time between two spasms, the paroxysm by which it was hurled from chaos into order, and the paroxysm ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... Herodian and Sadducean palaces had seemed so fair from the north were great blackened shells of walls and leaning pillars, partly buried in ruin and rubbish. Far and wide the streets were littered with debris and charred fragments of burned timbers. At another place on the breast of Zion was a chaos of rock where a mansion had been literally pulled down. Somewhere near Akra pale columns of pungent, wind-blown smoke still rose from a colossal heap of fused matter that the Ephesian could not identify. About it were neglected houses; ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... upon, and which in independent action is bound to rush into a variety of differences according to the bent of the individual mind. However, to answer thus merely opens up a multitude of questions, and launches one into a sea of chaos, across which he will have to sail without chart or compass. Accordingly, I usually answer that these various utterances of individuals and provincial bodies are not infallible; that the only utterance absolutely binding on the conscience of the Catholic is that of a general council ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... that tense. The doings and actions of last year are as uninteresting and vague to me as the blank gulf of the future, the tabula rasa that may never be anything else. I remember a confused hotch-potch of unconnected events, a "chaos without form, and void"; but nothing salient or striking rises from the dead level of "flat, stale, and unprofitable" generality. When we are looking at a landscape we think ourselves pleased; but it is only when it comes back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can disentangle the main ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Wordsworth, to Byron, to Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, even to this year in which literature still lives and engenders; and the brain, if not too giddy indeed, stands as Satan stood on the brink of Chaos...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... mind, like fallow ground, is the soil for every weed to grow in; in it vice strengthens, the seed of every vanity flourishes unmolested and luxuriant; discontent, malignity, ill humour, spread far and wide, and the mind becomes a chaos which it is beyond human power to call into order and beauty. This therefore my good friends laboured to expel from their infant establishment. They taught them that it was the duty of every person to be of service ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott

... point from which he started. Such an experience had Flossy, when by reason of her loitering propensities she became detached from her party, and tried to find her own way to the stand. A whole hour of wandering, then a turn into perfect chaos. She had no more idea where she was than if she had been in the by-ways of London. Clearly she must inquire the way. She looked about her. It was queer to be lost in the woods, and yet be surrounded ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy

... through the hedge they were faced by a lane running in the general northwest direction. It provided better footing, and it led away from the chaos at Cynthiana. With Croxton on their hands it was the best they could hope for, and without more than an exchange of glances they turned into it, the wounded ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton

... quickness, which belong to the most destructive of physical forces. When, in any community, ideas are harmonious, they have an organizing power wholly independent of their soundness or of their ultimate stability; but when discordant and conflicting, they produce disorganization, ruin, and chaos. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world; what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile, lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our infancy, what lessons we might learn to ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... far away. In his own ears it sounded strange and unusual. All at once the world seemed to be a vast vacuum in which his brain strove for air, and all his senses were numbed and overpowered. Distempered and vague, his soul seemed spinning in an aching chaos. It was being overpowered by vast elements, and life and being were atrophied in a deadly smother. The awful forces behind visible being hung him in the middle space between consciousness and dissolution. He heard David's voice, at first ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of this time, and by dint of great efforts, it became possible to ascertain the sum total of the information given by Papa Ravinet, Daniel, and Henrietta. The truth began to show itself in the midst of this chaos; and the plot of Sarah Brandon and her accomplices appeared in all its hideous outlines. A plan of striking simplicity, the success of which seemed to have hung upon a hair. If the old dealer, instead of going down by the backstairs, had taken the front staircase, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... no longer affected any doubt about the authenticity of the discovery. All his friends complimented him upon it, the majority to see how he would receive their congratulations. It was a chaos rather than a mixture, of vanity the most outrageous, modesty the most affected, and joy the most immoderate ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... known times, there have been powers of darkness set over against the powers of light; and the conflict between them has suggested with exceptional vividness the conflict between good and evil. The opening verses of the Bible, with their chaos and darkness, and the sublime command—"Let there be light"—are in line with a vast body of primitive myth and speculation which represents the good God as the Creator of light, or as light itself over against the dark. The mysticism of the prologue to St. John's Gospel both represented ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer



Words linked to "Chaos" :   chaotic, dynamical system, natural philosophy, balagan, physical phenomenon, physics, Greek mythology, Greek deity, confusion



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