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Chaotic   /keɪˈɑtɪk/   Listen
Chaotic

adjective
1.
Lacking a visible order or organization.  Synonym: helter-skelter.
2.
Completely unordered and unpredictable and confusing.  Synonym: disorderly.
3.
Of or relating to a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.



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"Chaotic" Quotes from Famous Books



... an ideal place for an ambush, but the old warrior did not hesitate. The Woongas had followed a moose trail, with which they were apparently well acquainted, and in this traveling was easy. But Rod gave an involuntary shudder as he gazed ahead into the chaotic tangle through which it led. At any moment he expected to hear the sharp crack of a rifle and to see Mukoki tumble forward upon his face. Or there might be a fusillade of shots and he himself might feel the burning sting that comes with rifle death. At the distance ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... cayn't talk; I'm that thusty I'm a-spitt'n' cotton!—No, seh! White man ain't eveh goin' to lif hisseff up by holdin' niggeh down, an' that's the pyo chaotic truth; now, ain't it?" ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable

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

... in itself during times when judicial murders were common, would have excited nothing more than passing interest had not the national sentiment been so aroused by the chaotic conditions. As it was it served to focus attention on the general maladministration over which Yuan Shih-kai ruled as provisional President. "What is my crime?" had shrieked the unhappy revolutionist as he had been shot and then bayonetted to death. That ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... with a riot of thought that was almost chaotic. There was only one thing that stood out clearly, definitely, in his mind. It was the Nemesis of the thing that had happened. It was Nemesis ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... a saturated solution, a point of crystallization had formed, round which the whole chaotic and fluctuating mass united, producing a crystal of wonderful forms. Thus, when the phenomenon of the polarisation of attention had taken place, all that was disorderly and fluctuating in the consciousness of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

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

... began to feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly, and the bare chaotic look of the half-erected 'stands.' Was it in the Green Park, or in Kensington Gardens, or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... silently crumpled, and suddenly one cruiser right in the line of the flight was brought to a sudden halt as all its molecules were reversed. The ships behind it, unable to stop so suddenly, piled up on it in chaotic wreckage! A vast halo of shining gas spread out fifty thousand miles about, blinding further the other ships, the radiance about them making it impossible to see ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... ten years has shown the excellence of the former institution. Now, instead of a tournament, we have a mob; instead of a noble exhibition, we have a tumultuous bazaar; instead of a choice selection we have a chaotic mass. What is the result? A great artist is swamped. Decamps' "Turkish Cafe," "Children at a Fountain," "Joseph," and "The Torture," would have redounded far more to his credit if the four pictures had been exhibited in the great Salon with the ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac

... without sign or warning of their proximity, till, standing on the edge of a precipitous escarpment, he sees yawning below a chasm sunk several hundred feet into the earth. In its bed may be loose boulders piled in chaotic confusion, as if cast there by the hands of Titans; also trunks of trees in a fossilised state such as those observed by Darwin on the eastern declivity of the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... the sense, such a century will needs reject as an amorphous heap of rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms, and Ship-money will be the theme of much constitutional eloquence, striving to be fervid;—which will glitter, if not as fire does, then as ice does: and the irreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... elections in 1979 and independence (as Zimbabwe) in 1980. Robert MUGABE, the nation's first prime minister, has been the country's only ruler (as president since 1987) and has dominated the country's political system since independence. His chaotic land redistribution campaign begun in 2000 caused an exodus of white farmers, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread shortages of basic commodities. Ignoring international condemnation, MUGABE rigged the 2002 presidential ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... sitting was chaotic. The secretary's notes consist of unrelated words and often childish verses. On going over the notes the next day, when the stenographic record had been copied on a typewriter, Sperry and I found that one word recurred frequently. The word was "curtain." Of the extraordinary event that followed ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... invectives—as they ought to be given—with the impetuous rush and wild fury of the avalanche; and yet they were felt to come out of agony as well as out of passion. The pathos of those tremendous passages is in their chaotic disproportion; in their lawlessness and lack of government; in the evident helplessness of the poor old man who hurls them forth from a breaking heart and a distracted mind. He loves, and he loathes himself for loving: every fibre of his nature ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... in preparing a new bridge, and throwing it across the stream, which in this place had nothing formidable in its character. The road now struck into the heart of a mountain region, where woods, precipices, and ravines were mingled together in a sort of chaotic confusion, with here and there a green and sheltered valley, glittering like an island of verdure amidst the wild breakers of a troubled ocean! The bold peaks of the Andes, rising far above the clouds, were enveloped in snow, which, descending ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... cannon, the bursting of shell and the flash of the rifle. In the darkness it seemed as if the hand of Deity had let loose its hold upon the world, its attraction was gone, and, amid thunder and lightning and tempest, the chaotic masses of earth and sky were commingling ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman

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

... Nancy, wild with merriment, as they swayed amid the uproar. For the first time she understood how perilous such a crowd might be. A band of roisterers, linked arm in arm, were trying to break up the orderly march of thousands into a chaotic fight. The point for which Crewe made was unattainable; just in front of him a woman began shrieking hysterically; another fainted, and dropped ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... Mynheer Stroom, with all the gravity of a vice-chancellor in his countenance, and without the slightest idea that he was in any way ridiculous. The whole presented, perhaps, one of the most strange and chaotic ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat

... from such a catastrophe; but this is not given, and consequently destruction takes its course. Petty accidents destroy life and happiness; a moment annihilates the most toilsome work. Often, also, we discover a chaotic medley, a sudden overthrow of all potency, a seeming indifference towards all human weal and woe, a blind groping in the dark; we discover gloomy possibilities constantly sweeping as dark clouds over man and occasionally descending as a crashing tempest."[24] Hundreds of ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... calmly, pointing to Elbow Rock: "Look there, Brian. See how the river is broken into bits. See how its smoothly flowing, onward sweep is suddenly changed to wild, chaotic turmoil; how it rages and fumes and frets and smashes itself against the rocks. But it goes on just the same. Life cannot be always calm and smoothly flowing like the peaceful Bend. But life can always go on. Life must always go on. And you will find, my dear boy, that a little way below Elbow ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright

... her; and yet I could think of no reasonable objection to make. The lady had promised that he should not be in the way, and the most I could say, even to myself, was that the arrangement did not appear attractive to me. Of course, with no reason but a chaotic distaste, I would not recede from my agreement, and deprive this worthy lady of the opportunity of supporting herself and her husband; and the two departed, to return on the following day prepared to labor ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton

... instincts were not in reality changed; they had only ebbed for the moment. No sooner did Congress meet in its second session in January, 1790, and undertake the task of reorganizing the chaotic finances of the country, than political unanimity vanished, and new sectional and class antagonisms came rapidly to the front in which could be traced the return of the old-time colonial habits. The central figure was no longer Madison, but Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, who aspired ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

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

... Brazilian government was actually challenged by slave rebels. It was during the chaotic days of 1630-1654, when the Dutch were in occupation of Pernambuco, and the Brazilians were at war with them, that hundreds of slaves fled to the interior, where they established an independent state, consisting of a cluster of fortified villages. Establishing a rude form of administration ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... on the surface, but in a chaotic, almost idiotic inward condition: "I've sat here for days, wishing all the while that I might really know you. Would you care to let ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers

... stubbornness, indolence have thus far made futile all efforts towards more progressive methods in handling food stuffs, particularly in the weighing of them and in selling them by their weight. Present market methods are very chaotic, and are kept purposely so to the detriment of ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... summation of the omoiomere into totals of the same name, was the work of Mind or Reason; panta chremata en omou . eita nous elthon auta diekosmese. This peculiar thing, called Mind (nous), was no less illimitable than the chaotic mass, but, unlike the Intelligence of Heraclitus (q.v.), it stood pure and independent (mounos ef eoutou), a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations and everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and power, is especially seen ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... well-known fact, while its influence was proving much stronger than at first anticipated, and I cheerfully admitted the same to the stockholders assembled. The Eastern mind, living under established conditions, could hardly realize the chaotic state of affairs in the West, with its vicious morals, and any attempt to levy tribute in the form of blackmail was repudiated by the stockholders in assembly. Major Hunter understood my position and delicately suggested ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams

... but in the more remote Tusayan the chimney seems to be still in the experimental stage. Numbers of awkward constructions, varying from the ordinary cooking pit to the more elaborate hooded structures, testify to the chaotic condition of the chimney-building art in ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

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

... perish entirely, the stage through which it has caused certain fragments of matter to pass would remain, notwithstanding all ulterior transformations, an indelible principle and an immortal cause. The formidable, provisional vegetations of the primary epoch, the chaotic and immature monsters of the secondary grounds—Plesiosaurus, Ichthyosaurus, Pterodactyl—these might also regard themselves as vain and ephemeral attempts, ridiculous experiments of a still puerile nature, and conceive that they would leave no mark upon a more harmonious globe. And yet ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... his savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a clear determinate man's-energy working in the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an element of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... slip away with her collection of peacocks' feathers, and descended in haste to the kitchen, where for some time the various orders she issued caused much domestic perturbation, and fully expressed the chaotic condition of her own mind. The maid, Nancy Pyrle, was hustled off to 'wait on Miss Vancourt upstairs, and don't be clumsy with your 'ands, whatever you do!'—Primmins, the butler, was sent to remove the tea-things from the morning-room,—at which command he turned round somewhat indignantly, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... may, among its brain-phantasms, have something of reality and sanity inarticulately stirring it withal. It may have a real ordinance of Heaven to accomplish on those terms:—and IF so, it will sometimes, in the most chaotic circuitous ways, through endless hazards, at a hundred or a hundred thousand times the natural expense, ultimately get it done! This was the case of the poor English ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... hastily went up to the unknown lord's room to discover, if she could, some clue to this mysterious business. Like some learned men who give themselves infinite pains to complicate the clear and simple laws of nature, she had already invented a chaotic romance to account for the meeting of these three persons under her humble roof. She hunted through the chest, examined everything, but could find nothing extraordinary. She saw nothing on the table but a writing-case and some sheets of parchment; ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac

... midst of foreign armies, and of new combinations disturbing the established balance of Italian Powers, the lesser potentates were exposed to destruction; and there were forces about sufficient, under capable guidance, to remodel the chaotic centre of Italy, where no strong government had ever been constituted. Caesar Borgia recognised the opportunity as soon as the French were at Milan; the Pope was growing old and was clay in his terrible hands. His sister just then became Duchess of Ferrara, on the border ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... Spirits is a deep forest which stretches back and back in a dense and chaotic tangle of strangled sapling and parasitic weed to the edge of the Pigmy forest. No man—white or brown or black—has explored the depth of the Forbidden Forest, for here the wild beasts have their lairs and rear their young; and here are mosquito in dense clouds. Moreover, ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... aid, and just in time caught the arm of a native about to slash him with a huge knife. With the two gripped hands high in the air struggling for mastery, the adversaries became separated a bit from the rest of the chaotic mass of friend and foe, swaying out to one side of the plaza, and under the walls of a convent. Bansemer was facing it; and just at the moment that he felt his strength giving way and could see a grin of triumph on the fiendish face, there carne a flash and a report, and his ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... over all the weltering waters of this lower world, the peaceful seeking dove, his meek hope, that shall come back again from its flight with some palm-branch broken from the trees of Paradise between its bill. And he that has no such present has a future dark, chaotic, a heaving, destructive ocean; and over it there goes for ever—black-pinioned, winging its solitary and hopeless flight—the raven of his anxious thoughts, which finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... into Biblical fanaticism; but the old leaven of revolt against the church, and against all compulsion—keenly sharpened by their experiences, in the recent Peasant's War—was as hot as ever among them. They had no great or high philosophy, but were in all respects chaotic, contradictory, and stormy. Unable to rise to the cultivated and philanthropic feelings which accompanied the skepticism of their remote founders, they based their denial of moral accountability—as narrow and vulgar minds naturally do—on ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... For two endless, chaotic days, I saw nothing of either of them, Alice or Sir John. I became more and more agitated, the nurse more and more taciturn. She would only say that they had gone away for a ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker

... is an historical expression of the successive Ages of the World's growth. The Central Fountain symbolizes the nebulous world with its innate human passions. Out of a chaotic condition came Water (the Basin) and Land (the Fountain) and Light (the Sun supported by Helios, and the Electroliers). The Braziers and Cauldrons symbolize Fire. The floor of the Court is covered with verdure, ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James

... Gifted— He whose soul is heaven-ward lifted. Till it drinketh inspiration At the fountain of the skies; He, within whose fond embraces Start to life the marble graces; Or, with God-like power presiding, With the potent pencil gliding, O'er the void chaotic canvas Bids the fair creations rise! And the quickened mass obeying Heaves its mountains; From its fountains Sends the gentle streams a-straying Through the vales, like Love's first feelings Stealing o'er a maiden's heart; The Creator— ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... would come back to it to rest after having completed his spell to the fore, breaking trail with the snowshoes for the dogs. Such work was far from exhilarating also, they must expect places where for miles at a time they must toil over chaotic ice-jams, where they would be fortunate if they made two miles an hour. And there would be the inevitable bad jams, short ones, it was true, but so bad that a mile an hour would require terrific effort. Kama and Daylight did not talk. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

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

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

... rivaled Ditton in his researches after the longitude (for which the mischief-loving Swift discharged on their heads a most savory stanza), has distinguished himself by a very admirable theory respecting the earth. He conjectures that it was originally a chaotic comet, which, being selected for the abode of man, was removed from its eccentric orbit; and whirled round the sun in its present regular motion; by which change of direction, order succeeded to confusion in the arrangement ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... enfeebled and discredited as a principle of public relations, furnished no bond whatever which was stable enough to countervail the alliances of religion. In a condition, therefore, of public law which was little less than chaotic, those views of a state system to which the Roman jurisconsults were supposed to have given their sanction alone remained standing. The shape, the symmetry, and the prominence which they assumed in the hands of Grotius are known ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... this chaotic situation came exactly the result that was intended—the press got off our backs. Captain James's answers about the possibility of the radar targets' being caused by temperature inversions had been construed by the press to mean that this was the Air Force's answer, even ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

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

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

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

... and ravines, surrounded them on every side, and so concealed the softer features of the country that it was scarcely possible to believe in the reality of the verdant region out of which they had just passed. In another hour this chaotic scenery was left behind; the highest ridge of the mountains was crossed, and the travellers began to descend the green slopes on the other side of the island. These slopes terminated in a beach of white sand, while beyond lay the ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne

... clever. The brightest wit must say some dull things, and a comic journal can hardly help letting some dreary attempts at mirth slip into its columns. We could point out paragraphs in this serial which are most chaotic and unmeaning, and some, indeed, which fall below its own excellent standard of refinement; but we do not remember ever to have met in its pages a double-entendre or a foulness of speech. We must advise its conductor (who, we may say ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

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

... was awake to the finger-tips, her veins apulse with the flow of rushing rivers of life. Her chaotic thoughts centered about two men. One had followed crooked trails for his own profit. There was something in him hard and unyielding as flint. He would go to his chosen end, whatever that might be, over and through any obstacles that might rise. But to-night, on her behalf, he had thrown ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... here, as so often, our best source of knowledge. At Timgad (p. 109), a town laid out in Roman fashion with a rigid 'chess-board' of streets was subsequently enlarged on irregular and almost chaotic lines. At Gigthi, in the south-east of Tunis, the streets around the Forum, itself rectangular enough, do not run parallel or at right angles to it or to one another.[89] At Thibilis, on the border of Tunis and Algeria, the streets, so far ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield

... theology; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible. The pagan moralists lack life and color, and even the noble stoic, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... York for the previous five or six months, the same spirit still in sovereign mastery over him, and, "though regulated, none the less powerful." He says that he is not so restless nor his mind so chaotic, but that he still has a pain at heart which he declares to be almost unbearable, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... and stern, the maestro's face, in which Andrea had been trying to read the ideas he was uttering in inspired tones, though the chaotic flood of notes afforded no clue to them, had by degrees glowed with fire and assumed an impassioned force that infected Marianna and the cook. Marianna, too, deeply affected by certain passages in which she recognized a picture of her own position, could not conceal ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... was playing one of those rather feeble descriptive pieces which begin with soft, peaceful music with the suggestion of the life of a farmyard, and the sound of church bells, swing into the approach of armed men with shrill bugle calls, become chaotic with the rush of fearful women and children, and the commencement of heavy artillery, and wind up with the broad triumphant strains of a national anthem. It happened, naturally enough, that the particular national anthem chosen by the energetic and patriotic ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... sufferings magnified him into a man of importance, and she enjoyed the reflected glory of being his keeper. People came from remote villages to listen to him, and it was held a privilege among the humbler sort to view the ruin of Michael Tregenza and hark to the chaotic ravings of ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. Reason for the Church's ready acceptance of the conclusions of comparative philology Beginnings of a scientific theory of language Hottinger Leibnitz The collections of Catharine the Great, of Hervas, and of Adelung Chaotic period in philology between Leibnitz and the beginning of the study of Sanskrit Illustration from the successive editions ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... were still. For a moment he sat leaning against the desk, his hands trembling. He wasn't sure just when the last straw had been added, but he was sure that he had had enough. The restrictions, red tape, security measures of these government laboratories seemed to close in on his mind in boiling, chaotic waves of frustration. What was the good of his work, all this great installation, all the gleaming expensive equipment in the lab around him? He was alone. None of them seemed to share his problem, the unctuous, ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon

... very natural optical illusion, we are struck by the confined space before us, but the eye, after a time, piercing through the thick atmosphere of a thousand vapours which are most inodorous, the extent becomes visible by details which escape in the first chaotic glimpse. It is the moment of creation, all is bright, the fog disappears, becomes peopled, is animated, forms appear, they move, they are agitated, they are no illusory shadows; but, on the contrary, essentially material, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various

... in its four phases and have seen clearly that it operates not in a blind, chaotic manner, but according to law. Certain conditions are required and when they are met memory is good. After providing proper conditions for memory, then, trust your memory. An attitude of confidence is very necessary. If, when you are memorizing, you continually tremble for ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson

... diving-dress," with all its accompaniments of double-extra pumps, pipes, powers, and purchases, and descend to a depth of antiquity that would suffice to collapse a whale, we should find nothing but idiotic speculation in the midst of chaotic darkness. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne

... making foot-tours through the Odenwald, the Spessart, and the Schwartzwald. But I was not satisfied with what I had seen of the North. There was still a wild region, far beyond any explorations I had yet made, which constantly loomed up in my imagination—the chaotic land of frost and fire, where dwelt in ancient times the mighty Thor, the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... situation will clear itself, parties will become defined. No doubt Enghien's victory will add to the power and importance of Conde, who is already dangerously strong; then matters will become interesting. At present the situation is somewhat chaotic, and politics will not be openly and generally discussed, simply because no one knows what ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty

... reader in some perplexity by these cursory and desultory remarks on German literature, I have succeeded in giving them a conception of that chaotic condition in which my poor brain found itself, when, in the conflict of two epochs so important for the literary fatherland, so much that was new crowded in upon me before I could come to terms with the old, so much that was old yet made me feel its right over me, when I believed I had already ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds of Acts, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing an infinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made the customs costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry they stimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, reduced and simplified these duties; but 443 Acts still ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... love of his, was in truth no vision—was a stern, palpable reality, very difficult to get rid of, and one which he often thought to himself would very probably swallow up that other love, and drive his sweet dream far away into utter darkness and dim chaotic space. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... setting. Such a sunset! The whole world, the three great spaces of sea and land and sky, were incarnadined with the glory of it. The ocean floor was a blinding red radiance, the hills were amethyst, the sky one gigantic opal, and they two seemed poised in the midst of all the chaotic glory of a primitive world. It was New Year's Day; the earth was new, the year was new, and their love was new and strong. Everything was before them. There was no longer any past, no longer any present. Regrets and memories had no place in their new world. It was Hope, Hope, Hope, that ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... trail men to write autobiographic sketches. He used to refer to Volume II as the "second edition"; just the same, he was not ignorant, and he had a passion for the history of his people. The chronicles, though chaotic in arrangement, comprise basic source material. An index to the one-volume edition of The Trail Drivers of Texas is printed as an appendix to The Chisholm Trail and Other Routes, by T. U. Taylor, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... mad, but his madness would have seemed less chaotic and incomprehensible, and a thread of sense would have been discovered even in his excesses and in the ravings of his unsettled mind, if it had been understood that many of his most famous freaks were moved and inspired by this Egyptian idea and tendency. In the ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero

... character, to be put in close collision with bustling egotism, ignorance of usages, an absence of training, and downright vulgarity of thought and practices. Although necessity soon brings these chaotic elements into something like order, the first week commonly passes in reconnoitring, cool civilities, and cautious concessions, to yield at length to the never-dying charities; unless, indeed, the latter may happen to be kept in abeyance by a downright quarrel, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... This somber reverie of earth and sky has a sacredness of its own, but it fills the spectator with a vague and stupefying ennui. Light brings life: darkness may bring thought, but a dull daylight, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states of nature are ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared colors, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the sea. The source of all attractiveness is to be found in character, in sharpness of outline, in individualization. All that is confused and indistinct, without form, or sex, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... from the chains with which the Roman guard had bound him. The Lord came to him, not in darkness, but in light. He brought the light with him. He never works in darkness. Even when he was about to fashion the world, the first thing he did was to throw a flood of light all over its wide, chaotic surface. But the light which he caused to shine in the prison did not wake Peter up, although it must have shone in his eyes. So he smote him on the side, and ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... of indigested theology, with here and there a prominent point developed out of due proportion, from the circumstance that I had thought upon it for myself; and while entangled, if I may so speak, amid the recesses and under cover of the general chaotic mass, there harboured no inconsiderable amount of superstition, there rested over it the clouds of a dreary scepticism. I have sometimes, in looking back on the doubts and questionings of this period, thought, and perhaps even spoken of myself as an infidel. But ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... the chaotic mass on the ground. The boy Billie felt a heavy boot strike his head. He made a furious effort and disentangled himself from Jimmie. He ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane

... informed me that there existed a great deal of confusion regarding the accounts of some of the disbursing officers in his department, whose management of its fiscal affairs under his predecessor, General John C. Fremont, had been very loose; and as the chaotic condition of things could be relieved only by auditing these accounts, he therefore had determined to create a board of officers for the purpose, and intended to make me president of it. The various transactions in question covered a wide field, for the department embraced the States of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... the subject in early manhood, that God would continue existence if He did not make it a blessing. But to others who, like many before him, had intelligently accepted of a sterner theology, and who had been struggling through years of chaotic doubts and fancies for footing on which to rest, he saw that these assurances gave real strength and support. An hour had passed amidst these manifestations—the interest of the believers continued to be unflagging, but Francis felt a little tired of it. He had lost no dear friend by ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... reputation as the most deadly fighter known to the mahouts, was exulting in strength. It was his joy-song. It came from straight ahead. Mitha Baba answered with a rollicking squeal. But the wild herd voices were savage—chaotic. Now Nut Kut's challenge came back—looming. The situation was ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

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

... his dignified, generous, and every-way honorable deportment in private life is known fully, I believe, only to a few friends. I have often said, looking at him as a manager of great London theatres, "This Man, presiding over the unstablest, most chaotic province of English things, is the one public man among us who has dared to take his stand on what he understood to be the truth, and expect victory from that: he puts to shame our Bishops and Archbishops." It is ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... knowledge that we believe we have of things only the knowledge which we take of the laws of our mind by applying it to things? This is what is most probable. We perceive the things by moulds, so to speak, which are in ourselves and which give them their shapes and they would be shapeless and chaotic were it otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish the matter and the form of our knowledge: the matter of the knowledge is the things themselves. The form of our knowledge is ourselves: "Our experimental knowledge is a compound of what we receive from impressions and of ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

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

... proportioned and ornamental base for the cliffs. In this work of beauty, every boulder is prepared and measured and put in its place more thoughtfully than are the stones of temples. If for a moment you are inclined to regard these taluses as mere draggled, chaotic dumps, climb to the top of one of them, and run down without any haggling, puttering hesitation, boldly jumping from boulder to boulder with even speed. You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of these magnificent ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... extent at a period beyond ours in the drama (soon to be radically changed in almost every possible characteristic) of the Restoration. The field of survey is vast, and despite the abundant labour which has been bestowed upon it during the nineteenth century, it is still in a somewhat chaotic condition. The remarkable collection of old plays which we owe to Mr. A. H. Bullen shows, by sample only and with no pretence of being exhaustive, the amount of absolutely unknown matter which still exists. The collection and editing of texts has proceeded on the most widely different ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... weapon. The sound of more shots, of men dodging their way to safety, of a sharp cry followed by groans, had trodden so swiftly on the heels of the range-rider's action that when he turned a moment later he saw in the semi-darkness a smoke-filled room in the confusion of chaotic movement. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine

... before Borrow landed at Lisbon that Maria had become undisputed queen. Spain, to which Borrow speedily betook himself, was even in a worse state. She was in the throes of a six years' war. Queen Isabel II., a child of three, reigned over a chaotic country with her mother Dona Christina as regent; her uncle Don Carlos was a formidable claimant to the throne and had the support of the absolutist and clerical parties. Borrow's political sympathies were always in the direction of absolutism; but ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... her, forming, waiting for decision to make it a real and fixed thing. She had told Lassiter that she felt helpless and lost in the fateful tangle of their lives; and now she feared that she was approaching the same chaotic condition of mind in regard to her religion. It appalled her to find that she questioned phases of that religion. Absolute faith had been her serenity. Though leaving her faith unshaken, her serenity had been disturbed, and now it was broken by open war between her and ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

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

... in a tumult as he ran down the line of cabins. From every doorway men were now stumbling, half-dressed, half-asleep. Behind them, in many cabins, alarmed, agitated women appeared. Farther on there were lanterns and a chaotic mass of moving objects. Above the increasing clamour rose the horrible, uncanny wail of a woman. Percival's blood cooled, his brain cleared. Men shouted questions as he passed, and obeyed his ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... dear reader, that the gigantic reflector of Lord Rosse, and the exquisite fifteen- inch refractors of the modern observatories, eliminate from the chaotic rubbish-heap of the surface of old Thornbush much smaller objects than such a circle as I have named. If you have read Mr. Locke's amusing Moon Hoax as often as I have, you have those details fresh ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... where electric lights hanging from the balconies mingled with rich yellow lamplight and ruddy firelight streaming from the kitchen. All the luggage was piled anyhow, in a chaotic heap surging with suit-cases, boiling with dressing-bags; while near by, like Marius and a friend or two at the ruins of Carthage, stood the Duchess, Lady Vale-Avon, Carmona, Dick, and the Cherub. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... independent effort of thought to interpret nature, and attain the fundamental grounds of human knowledge—to find an arche—a first principle, which, being assumed, should furnish a rational explanation of all existence. If philosophy reach the conclusion that the arche was water, or air, or fire, or a chaotic mixture of all the elements or atoms, extended and self-moved, or monads, or to pan, or uncreated mind, and that conclusion harmonized with the ancient standards of religious faith—well; if not, philosophy ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... the entire city passed into the control of the Bolsheviki but not without severe fighting in which more than three thousand people were slain. On the collapse of the Kerensky government conditions throughout Russia became chaotic. Ukraine declared its independence, and Finland also severed its connection with Russia. General Kaledines declared against the Bolsheviki, and organized an army to save the country. Siberia, Bessarabia, Lithuania, the Caucasus and ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... slow thinking man, although quick in action. He pieced all these things together. The pieces did not seem to fit just then—the construction was decidedly chaotic in its architecture. But later on the corner-stone of knowledge propped up the edifice, and everything slipped ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... areas of towering rock or surmounting them when they were not too high, and always working southward. Tom, who was not unaccustomed to woods and mountains, thought he had never before traversed such a chaotic wilderness. He would have given a good deal for a watch and for some means of knowing how much actual distance they were covering. It ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... found everything we did not want—costumes, odds and ends of all sorts, which belonged to all other periods than Louis XV. The contents of the trunks were in a very chaotic state; each article which once had formed one of a complete costume was without its better half; the unprincipled things had meandered off and got ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... de la Feuillie ("the booths"), otherwise Li Jus Adam, or Adam's play, is more ambitious and more complicated, but also more chaotic. It is, as has been said, an early sketch of a comedy of manners; but upon this is grafted in the most curious way a fairy interlude, or rather after-piece. Adam himself opens the piece and informs his friends with much coolness that he has tried ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... that primitive men were originally assembled in chaotic hordes, and that organized society was developed out of the chaotic mass by the segregation of groups and the differentiation of functions within each group. Now the American aborigines collectively represent a wide range in development, extending ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee

... zinc, and molybdenum) that are largely unexploited. For the mid-term, Armenia's economic prospects seem particularly bleak because of ethnic strife and the unusually high dependence on outside areas, themselves in a chaotic state of transformation. The dramatic drop in output in 1992 is attributable largely to the cumulative impact of the blockade; of particular importance was the shutting off in the summer of 1992 of rail and road links ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... shining rays of sunlight. Their eyes closed in langour, their full- blooded bodies ached with a delicious sensation. Their hearts seemed to grow benumbed, the numbness spreading through their blood to their limbs; it deprived them of strength, and their thoughts became chaotic. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak

... define the work of each, or else hire them with the understanding that neither shall ever say, "This is not my work." It is sometimes quite impossible to define what is the exact duty of each servant. Our house-keeping in this country is so chaotic, and our frequent changes of house and fortune cause it to partake so much of the nature of a provisional government, that every woman must be a Louis Napoleon, and ready for a ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... elsewhere. Here is a people's playground in which all manner of amusements are thrown together, from the balhaus, where nothing but expensive champagne is sold, to the scenic railway, on which one may ride for fifty heller. This park presents a bizarre and chaotic mingling of outdoor concerts, variety theatres, bierkabaretts, moving picture halls, promenades and sideshow attractions of the Atlantic City type. The Kaisergarten is the rendezvous of the bourgeoisie, the heaven of hoi polloi—rotund merchants with walrus moustachios, dapper young clerks ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... 'stonied will Halted in circles, dizzied in the swing Of mazy nothingness.—His mind could bring Not to subjection, grip or hold the theme Whose wide horizon melted like a dream To thinnest edges. Infinite behind The piling centuries were trodden blind In gulfs chaotic—so He could not see When He was not ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... active in the railroad problem, conditions were fairly demoralized. Attempts to enforce the anti-pooling clause had led railroads to purchase competing lines, and when the United States Supreme Court pronounced this illegal, the situation became chaotic. The evils of overcapitalization also became an issue of the times. The Interstate Commerce Commission had become almost moribund, and there was a general sentiment that the trouble arose from the fact that the commission had no power to fix rates and that the solution of the railroad ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... and powerful figures and shapeless columns loomed in chaotic confusion, hewn out of the virgin rock, and seemed to date back to an immemorial antiquity. Here a palace with low portals extended its ponderous expanse; it was ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France

... thing that had been wandering over those sun-flooded hills, with neither food nor drink nor sight of friendly face, for so many hours, and the agony of the thought seemed more than she could endure. Sharp, lightning-like pains cracked through her brain, and a dizzy, chaotic whirl filled her head. She put her hands to her forehead and stopped short on the hillside, the fear flying through her mind that she might be going mad. Mead saw her and came quickly to her side, alarmed by her white, tense face and the ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... And now his faith was gone, destroyed by her own hands; destroyed cruelly, treacherously, in the dark; in the very moment of success. In the utter wreck of his affections and of all his feelings, in the chaotic disorder of his thoughts, above the confused sensation of physical pain that wrapped him up in a sting as of a whiplash curling round him from his shoulders down to his feet, only one idea remained clear and definite—not to forgive her; only one vivid desire—to forget her. And this must be made ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad

... conception and the workmanship the more striking it grows in originality and daring. Mullgardt has succeeded in putting into architecture the spirit that inspired Langdon Smith's poem 'Evolution,' beginning 'When you were a tadpole and I was a fish.' In the chaotic feeling that the court gives there is a subtle suggestiveness. The whole evolution of man is intimated here from the time when he lived among the seaweed and the fish and the lobsters and the turtles and the crabs. Even the ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... the unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds—the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... had been informed A of the chaotic state of affairs, and arrived at Glencoe early the next morning. The burghers were called together, and the President, leaning out of the window of his railway carriage, asked them to join him in singing a psalm. He then offered up a ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar

... feared in the day-time; but marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of her mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus she proceeded mile after mile, ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about midnight looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade which was all that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side she was born. Having already traversed about five miles on the upland, she had now some ten or eleven in the lowland before her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... the transfigured scene it did not seem exactly like a bonfire or any ritual illumination. It was too chaotic, and too close to the houses of the town. All one side of a cottage was painted pink with the giant brush of flame; the next side, by contrast, was painted as black as tar. Along the front of this ran a blackening ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

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

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

... nobility of Germany, and only partially by that of England. The habits of refined society are very much the same everywhere. The man or woman of real culture recognizes certain forms as necessary, that social intercourse may be ordered instead of being arbitrary and chaotic; but these forms must not be allowed to limit the free, expansive contact of mind with mind and character with character, which is the charm and blessing of society. Those who meet within the same walls meet upon an equal footing, and all accidental distinctions cease for the time. I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

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

... feeling of despair, I wended my way through the chaotic anterior hall in search of the hole through which I had so miraculously entered. It seemed as if life's sole aim had suddenly been stricken from the range of my vision. I could not understand why nature should be so cruel as to give me but one momentary glimpse of that angelic mortal and then thrust ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

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

... revise his dictum in the subsequent experiences of the afternoon. Indeed the afternoon and the next day were steadily consistent in confirming what a very good dictum it had been. The scenery was the traditional scenery of England, and all the people seemed quicker, more irresponsible, more chaotic, than any one could have anticipated, and entirely inexplicable by any recognised ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... from the summit of the highest peak in the range of the soapstone hills. The gorge in which our party of thirty-two had entered ran within fifty feet to the left of us. But, for at least one hundred yards, the channel or bed of this gorge was entirely filled up with the chaotic ruins of more than a million tons of earth and stone that had been artificially tumbled within it. The means by which the vast mass had been precipitated were not more simple than evident, for sure ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... below, and around me, are mountains piled on mountains in chaotic confusion. Some are bald and bleak; others exhibit traces of vegetation in the dark needles of the pine and cedar, whose stunted forms half-grow, half-hang from the cliffs. Here, a cone-shaped peak soars up till it is lost in snow and clouds. There, a ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... mind of any unbiased observer who follows the question fairly along the lines of electro-chemical biology, but that the general emotional disturbances incident upon the war conditions of the world, combined with the chaotic dietetic position with its anxieties and privations under strenuous and unwonted physical demands, do undoubtedly afford a sound and reasonable explanation of the cataclysmal outbreak which has recently fallen ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... had been sitting in a state of semi-stupor all the evening,—his chaotic mind utterly confused and bewildered by the events which had taken place;—but now, on being called, his usual audacious and irrepressible spirit came to his ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... Kruger would have said it. I hope you will still hold to your intention of visiting the Cape, and I can only say I will do all I can to assist you in seeing those parts with which I am connected. I am afraid Matabeleland will be in too chaotic a state to share in your visit, but between the diamonds and the gold there is a good extent to travel over. I am doubtful about your getting Kruger's speech before you publish, but it will be the first thing I will attend to on my arrival at the Cape. Kindly ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... their specific and proper natures, without the compromise which is involved in all attempts to extend some one until it shall embrace them all. If such a universe seems inconceivably desultory and chaotic, one may always remind one's self by directly consulting experience that it is not only found immediately and unreflectively, but returned to and lived in after every ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... antithesis of truth, but a higher species of truth—the actuality as seen by the selecting, combining, and harmonizing imagination. In themselves, he would have said, the facts of a man's life are meaningless, chaotic, discordant: it is the poet's office to put them into the crucible of his spirit and give them forth as a significant and harmonious whole. The "poetry" of Goethe's autobiography—by far the best of autobiographies in the German language—must not be taken to imply concealment, perversion, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... with very little sense of responsibility for what is set forth. Many of these novels are merely the blind outbursts of a nature impatient of restraint and the conventionalities of society, and are as chaotic as the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

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

... sailed for America on a three-months' vacation, a very inopportune time, as the Y work was in a chaotic state and his more than two hundred subalternate ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt



Words linked to "Chaotic" :   helter-skelter, disorganised, wild, chaos, disorganized, physics



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