|
|
|
More "Unstable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unprofitable railroad in the entire 9000 miles under operation. In recent years large soft coal deposits have been discovered and developed on many of the branch lines, and today the coal tonnage of the Southern Railway is exceeding the relatively unstable lumber tonnage of two or three ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... and all sorts of marital woes. But, the situation once mastered, by the most loving and accurate of scientific methods of procedure, a happy married life is certain to result. Otherwise, the "married state" will always be in a condition of "unstable equilibrium." So let every bride and bridegroom begin, from the first, to try to establish the greatly to be desired accomplishment. If anything further on this point should be desired, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... government in her always troublesome colony—a land which had first claimed consideration as the gateway to Cathay, and presently appeared to be nothing better than a "thousand leagues of snow and ice." This decline from the equator of enthusiasm to the north pole of neglect indicated the unstable fortunes of the colony. National spirit was left to fill up the ranks of her army when danger threatened the frontiers; and to the simple habitant, who had no interest to keep alive the memory of France, Quebec and Louisbourg ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... to show that a majority of men will not submit to a minority, no matter how many non-combatants are joined with that minority. To give women a position of apparent power, without its reality, would be to make our Government forever unstable. ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... father said, "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel;" and of Dan, "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... suspended girder types are as economical and free from uncertainty as to the stresses. In long-span bridges the cantilever system permits erection by building out, which is economical and sometimes necessary. It is, however, unstable unless rigidly fixed at the piers. In the Forth bridge stability is obtained partly by the great excess of dead over live load, partly by the great width of the river piers. The majority of bridges not of great ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... or in seeking out retired nooks beneath the cliffs, where there was no sound in her ears but that of the waves. She would sit for hours with no companion save her thoughts, which were unconsciously led from phase to phase by the moving lights and shadows upon the sea, and the soft beauty of unstable clouds. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... its seeming freedom is but slavery to passion, and this, too, the poet proclaims in Manru's confession that faithfulness is impossible to one to whom each new beauty offers irresistible allurement, and whose heart must remain unstable ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... obscurity, sudden fallings back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most stirred ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... gathering strength for its devastating career. The water vapor has risen higher and higher. Dense cumulus clouds have formed, the upper surfaces of which have caught all the sun's heat, intensifying the unstable equilibrium of the air. The powers of the tempest have grown steadily in all evil majesty of destructiveness. Day by day, then hour by hour, then minute by minute, the awful force has been generated, as steam is generated by fierce furnace fires ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the fact remains that humour is one of the most delicate, the most evasive, and the most unstable of human qualities. I am myself inclined to hold that sheer outrageous ribaldry, especially if graced with an undertone of philosophic irony, is the only kind of humour which is really permanent. To give permanence to any human quality in literature, there must be an appeal ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... stay at rest. This will not do. A ring composed of materials almost infinitely rigid might possibly, under such circumstances, be for a moment at rest; but it could not remain permanently at rest any more than can a needle balanced vertically on its point. In each case the equilibrium is unstable. If the slightest cause of disturbance arise, the equilibrium is destroyed, and the ring would inevitably fall in upon the planet. Such causes of derangement are incessantly present, so that unstable equilibrium cannot be an ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... a succession of bewildering images he beheld the irruption into Judaea of the headlong and indignant prophets, hurling imprecations against the crimes of the kings and the atrocities of that unstable race perpetually tempted by the voluptuous worships of Asia, always rebelling and complaining, and ready to break the iron bit with which ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... one wavers and cannot make up his mind. Now he will do this and now he will do that, uncertain and unstable, putting his hand to the plough and removing it again, my Californian at home would call him "wivel-minded." "Wivelly" means undecided, wavering, not to be depended on. It sounds like it. If the labourer gets his clothes soaked, he says they are "sobbled." The sound of ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Jefferson's influence became uppermost, and Madison swung over to the extreme of the state rights view, and drew the resolutions of the Virginia legislature declaring the Alien and Sedition laws "utterly null and void and of no effect," so that he has also been called the "Father of Nullification." However unstable his opinions may have been, there is no questioning his patriotism or the purity ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... The unstable and perishable nature of stock and credit, however, renders them unfit to be trusted to as the principal funds of that sure, steady, and permanent revenue, which can alone give security and dignity to government. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... leaving only some 2,000,000 actual agricultural wage-earners, or employable agricultural laborers. Five-eighths of these were under twenty-five years of age, and of the white regular workers only one-tenth were over thirty-five years of age. This shows how unstable is the foundation of our agricultural prosperity, the chief asset of plenty and contentment of our country. Mr. Get-Rich-Quick has moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the cities, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... were the love. Lord, I would have me love thee from the deeps— Of troubled thought, of pain, of weariness. Through seething wastes below, billows above, My soul should rise in eager, hungering leaps; Through thorny thicks, through sands unstable press— Out of my dream to him who slumbers ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... identical with the case among the most obscure of mankind, viz.: That a degenerated nerve condition has been inherited which renders the sufferer specially susceptible to this and allied neuroses, such as epilepsy, idiocy and suicide. The inheritance of an unstable nervous system makes the individual easily affected by what I must call 'alcoholic surroundings.' In other words, the provocation to drink which would have no influence upon an ordinary, stable nervous organization, is sufficient to turn the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... flowers, fragrant, but quickly languishing. The rough German musician was a simple person, unstable, fickle, ready to be amused at any new plaything. Leonora admitted to Rafael that she could have lived to old age submissively at Keller's side, pampering his whims and selfish caprices. But one day Keller deserted her, as she had deserted others, to take up ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... doubt is because she cannot bear to be unstable, and to desert the work to which she was almost pledged; but she says she is ashamed to perceive how much the sacrifice would cost her. She adds, that decide as she may, he concurs with her in devoting everything to the restoration of ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... proceed to Rome was granted by the consul. In the mean time a truce was asked, a request to which assent was readily expressed by Sylla and the majority; the few, who advocated harsher measures, were men inexperienced in human affairs, which, unstable and fluctuating, are ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... behavior to the standards of society and will be incapable of giving proper parental care to children. So a considerable percentage of our petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, and dependent are found to be feeble-minded. They are unstable, suggestible, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... conscription of old treaties. But the Allies give her no credit for this. The French, since the war began, have recovered all their old 'blague.' They talk incessantly of what they have done, and despise everyone else. But look how unstable they are politically! They change their ministries, as often as some men change their mistresses. The Pope, too, is an enemy of Italy and a friend of Austria. He aims at the restoration of his temporal power. ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... something ludicrous as well as pathetic in this cry. It did more for him than the most eloquent pleading could have done. Man, in a crowd, is an unstable being. At any moment he will veer right round and run in an opposite direction. The idea that the condemned man had a Susan who would mourn over his untimely end, touched a cord in the hearts of many among the crowd. The ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... whether any land was near. Oliver Farwell was clinging on next to me. The other men had secured themselves round the mast, others to the top. No one spoke; indeed it seemed to all of us that our last moments had arrived. Every instant we expected to be hurled off from our unstable resting-place, as the seas dashed with redoubled fury against the wreck. We could hear the vessel breaking up below us, and we all well knew that in a short time the mast itself must go for want ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Patagonia lived, there must have been there a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... which institution he found a great number of degenerative psychoses. In a recent work on the subject of psychogenesis he upholds his former views, and believes he has been able to separate his cases into three distinct groups. The first group comprises certain unstable individuals who show a tendency to the development of simple paranoid psychoses. It concerns patients of a very labile make-up with increased affective reactions, with marked tendencies to impulsions and antisocial acts. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Nations, its rulers entered upon a course of policy in accordance with the wants and demands of the age, and that policy is still adhered to, though meantime the general aspect of affairs is sadly changed, and Sardinia herself has experienced the sorest reverses. The weak, unstable King whose ambition first conspired to throw her into the current of the movement for the liberation of Italy, has died defeated and broken-hearted, but his wiser son and heir has taken his stand deliberately and firmly on the liberal side, and cannot be driven from ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... children, mankind." They afterwards led men into the second cavern, then into the third, and finally into the fourth, whence they made their way, guided by the two children, to the world of earth, which, having been covered with water, was damp and unstable and filled with huge monsters and beasts of prey. The two children continued to lead men "Eastward, toward the Home of the Sun-Father," and by their magic power, acting under the directions of their creator, the Sun-Father, they caused the surface of the earth to harden ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... tightly together, so tightly that she reduces the feathers on the fan she is holding to their last gasp. Because she is now disappointed in him; because he has proved himself, perhaps, unstable, deceptive to the heart's core, is she to vilify, him? A thousand times no! That would be, indeed, to be ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... despatches came from Clinton, who had received later news, and who was always trying to humor this spoiled child. He told him to keep all his men in Virginia, where he would take command himself as soon as the hot season was over. The "solid operations" were to begin. Very unstable they proved, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... erected was crude and unstable, and fell rapidly into decay. Scarcely a dozen years had passed, when it became necessary to build a new one. This was constructed of adobe and roofed with tile. It was completed in 1802, but although well built, it was totally destroyed by an earthquake, as we ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... also feels strongly in regard to foreign financial interests seeking to control those unstable governments through concessions and otherwise. This, too, he is determined to discourage as far as it is possible ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... by night, attended by three slaves, with a promise that if he should receive a reward for it, he would engage to betray Arpi to them. Fabius having laid the matter before a council, some were of opinion that "he ought to be scourged and put to death as a deserter, as a man of unstable mind, and a common enemy to both sides; who, after the defeat at Cannae, had gone over to Hannibal and drawn Arpi into revolt, as if it were right that a man's fidelity should vary according to the fluctuations of fortune; and who now, when the Roman cause, contrary to his hopes and wishes, was ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... and ran and slept and woke And ran in beauty when each morning broke, Love yet was boylike, fervid and unstable, Teased with romance, ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... lose balance, but the professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself, knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did know — what the idiot could hardly do — that his normal condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was unstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream, inconsequence; the simultaneous action of different thought-centres without central control. His artificial balance was acquired habit. He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back, crossing ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... in the water and difficult to capsize. This is true of model boats just as much as it is true of large boats. The model boat builder must keep the weight of his boat as near the bottom as possible. For instance, if a heavy cabin were built on a frail little hull, the boat would be very unstable ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... policy, though adventurous and unstable, was somewhat more successful. His only principle was to grasp whatever opportunity seemed to offer. Thus at one time he seriously proposed to have himself elected pope. His marriage with Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, added to the estates of his house ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... breeding, is possible only when plants are bred pure, and it is the experience of grape-breeders that in pure breeding this fruit loses in vigor and productiveness and that the variations are exceedingly slight and unstable. Many pure-bred grapes have been raised on the grounds of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station under the eyes of the writer, of which very few have surpassed the parent or have shown promise for the ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... that the cheeks of each separately, and of all when brought together, will be bathed in tears, because of those ills which are alone the occasion of my never-ending misery. Do not, I beseech you, refuse me these tears, reflecting that your estate is unstable as well as mine, and that, should it ever come to resemble mine (the which may God forfend!), the tears that others shed for you will be pleasing to you in return. And that the time may pass more rapidly in speaking than in, weeping, I will do my best to fulfil my promise briefly, ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... heard that, Sir Galahad went to Sir Percival and Sir Bors and kissed them and commended them to God, saying, "Salute for me Sir Lancelot, my father, and bid him remember this unstable world." ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... The gods abetted, Cato lik'd the other.[591] Both differ'd much. Pompey was struck in years, 130 And by long rest forgot to manage arms, And, being popular, sought by liberal gifts To gain the light unstable commons' love, And joy'd to hear his theatre's applause: He lived secure, boasting his former deeds, And thought his name sufficient to uphold him: Like to a tall oak in a fruitful field, Bearing old spoils and conquerors' monuments, Who, though his root be weak, and ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... mention of Cicero as the greatest of authorities with regard to this subject, because he was himself the greatest of letter writers. The epistle was the shape in which his versatile and beautiful mind most gracefully ran and moulded itself. His fluctuating and unstable character no less than his vanity and love of distinction, seemed to minister occasion to those varied forms of diction and expression in which the genius of animated letter writing may be said to delight. Read his 'Familiar Letters,' if not in Latin, yet ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... functional activity. Moreover, it is necessary to endeavour to secure the free development of these centres and their unimpeded functional activity, because otherwise the development of the higher centres is hindered, and the whole nervous system rendered unstable ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... that I found Luscinda at the grating that was the witness of our loves. She recognised me at once, and I her, but not as she ought to have recognised me, or I her. But who is there in the world that can boast of having fathomed or understood the wavering mind and unstable nature of a woman? Of a truth no one. To proceed: as soon as Luscinda saw me she said, 'Cardenio, I am in my bridal dress, and the treacherous Don Fernando and my covetous father are waiting for me in the hall with the other witnesses, who shall be the witnesses of my death before ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... adolescents should be unstable is what we ought to expect from the general instability of the organism due to the rapidity of growth and the remarkable developmental changes that are crowded into these few years. Rapidity of growth and increase of ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... to advance. And if ever they met, the encounter was so weakened by the hands of the men, the rearing of the horses, the swinging of heads, that it was a face to face stop. Some blows were exchanged with the sword or the lance, but the equilibrium was too unstable, mutual support too uncertain for real sword play. Man felt himself too isolated. The moral pressure was too strong. Although not deadly, the combat lasted but a second, precisely because man felt himself, saw himself, alone and surrounded. The first ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... to shift, with the shifting calendar, from summer through spring to winter, and so backward through autumn to summer. The rites of the husbandman were stable because they rested on direct observation of nature: the rites of the priest were unstable because they were based on a false calculation. Yet many of the priestly festivals may have been nothing but the old rural festivals disguised in the course of ages by the pomp of sacerdotalism and severed, by the error of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... along a corridor and opened a door. Then he set his unstable candle down on a toilet-table and asked at what hour they were to be called in ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Captain Tremain, pausing, "I am not so sure about that. You see, their Government is so very unstable. The country itself is rich enough in mineral wealth, if that is what you mean." All the while Howard stood there with his mouth agape, and I felt like ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... by, they all walked so gracefully, Balancing their bodies on lithe unstable hips, As if music moved them that swelled in their bosoms And ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... brother, go thy ways, you have neither left your country nor your kindred; you have given what you had to your parents, and disappointed the poor; you do not deserve to be received into the company of those who make profession of holy poverty. You commenced by the flesh, which is an unstable foundation for a spiritual edifice." This carnal and animal man returned to his parents, resumed his property, and rather than give it to the poor, he gave up the good purpose ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... carry them far. We all know that they have a marked genius: great gifts of their own. In a civilization of super-ants or bees, there would have been no problem of the hungry unemployed, no poverty, no unstable government, no riots, no strikes for short hours, no derision of eugenics, no thieves, perhaps ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... side begin high up; higher yet, the more melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is deserted, the superstructure—pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical timber—speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity. We must have passed from six to eight of these now houseless platforms. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disposition brought to Goethe's noble soul heavy sorrows, transitory relations, many disappointments, and a solitary old age. It becomes doubly momentous for a king, before whom others rarely stand with assurance and on equal terms; for his most sincere friends may yet turn into admiring flatterers, unstable in their bearing, now constrained under the moral spell of his majesty, now, under the conviction of their ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... an old maid; and when I was a young one I had, I dare say, more than was good for me. If I were still young, perhaps I should not make this confession; but so many women are fond of government, I suppose, because they are not fit for it. To be unstable and capricious, I really think, is but too characteristic of our sex; and there is, perhaps, no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behavior as woman. I have soberly and uniformly maintained ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... am here to say. The time is come to give up the shifts and unstable expedients that we needed, or thought we needed, in our early beginnings. Let us pull down all these scaffoldings and stages that have helped us to build, and let us see whether our fabric will stand upon its base, erect, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... collection of our own selves from time to time, no great purpose is carried out, and no great work can be done; and that it is the bustle and hurry of our modern life which causes shallow thought, unstable purpose, and wasted energy, in too many who would be better and wiser, stronger and happier, if they would devote more time to silence and meditation; if they would commune with their own heart in their ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... unfortunate man, and learning that I had taken the field in the counties further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement to the west of them tempted them to move ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious and essentially unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish for a time great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads, empires, literatures, and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In India even more than about the Mediterranean all this is spectacular. There the peasant ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, received their supplementary daily meals of specially fit and specially prepared food, could not be suddenly dropped by the American workers. There could be no confidence that the still unstable and struggling governments would be able to carry it on successfully. But with the abolition of the blockade and the incoming of the year's harvest, and with the growing possibility of adequate financial help through government and bank loans, the various new ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... dub as criminal. Consistent and portentous selfishness, combined with dullness of imagination is probably just as transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons of unstable mind." ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new; that self-interest, well understood, will produce social concord; that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits; that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is, not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... then, direct contemporary testimony, that, at the period of Shakespeare's entrance upon London life, it was a common practice for those lawyers whom want of success or an unstable disposition impelled to a change in their avocation to devote themselves to writing or translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... not whether I can escape you, but whether you can escape me. Since you have lost your boat and your rifle and we're in such a treacherous and unstable element as water, I occupy the superior position. The young may indeed over-estimate their powers, but in swimming at least I'm a competent critic. For instance, you're holding your shoulders too high, and you kick too much. You're splashing water, a useless ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... difficulty in recognizing her cherished First-Reader Class. Isidore Belchatosky's face was so wreathed in smiles and foreign matter as to be beyond identification; Nathan Spiderwitz had placed all his trust in a solitary suspender and two unstable buttons; Eva Kidansky had entirely freed herself from restraining hooks and eyes; Isidore Applebaum had discarded shoe-laces; and Abie Ashnewsky had bartered his only necktie for ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... was a good swimmer, and was not afraid of the water, the current was so swift, and her own footing so unstable, it was doubtful if Ruth Fielding could save both the miller and herself from ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... mortal mother who gave birth to an immortal son; or, contrarily, he is like Achilles in regard to Thetis. What a contrast there is between what is fleeting and what is permanent! The short span of a man's life, his necessitous, afflicted, unstable existence, will seldom allow of his seeing even the beginning of his immortal child's brilliant career; nor will the father himself be taken for that which he really is. It may be said, indeed, that a man whose fame comes after him is the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... stroke was therefore suddenly levelled against the Council in full session. On the 5th of September, the Seigneur de Heze, a young gentleman of a bold, but unstable character, then entertaining close but secret relations with the Prince of Orange, appeared before the doors of the palace. He was attended by about five hundred troops, under the immediate command of the Seigneur de Glimes, bailiff of Walloon Brabant. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... but I possess it in abundance, and it does not feed me, nor make music for me, nor fan me when the sun is hot, nor cause me to sleep when I am weary; therefore when my slaves have told me how merchants go out and brave the perilous wind and sea, and live in the unstable ships, and run risks from shipwreck and pirates, and when, having asked them why they have done this, they have answered, 'For gold,' I have found it hard to believe them; and when they have told me how men have lied, and robbed, and deceived; how they have murdered ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... despise, that can not satisfy my heart? If my piety is founded upon this feeling, then there are in it two great defects: the first, that it is not based upon a pure love of God, full of humility and charity, but on pride; and the second, that this piety, because it is thus without foundation, is unstable and inefficacious. For who can be certain that the soul will not forget the love of its Creator, when it does not love him infinitely, but only because there is no other being whom it deems worthy of endowing ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... was irrevocably dedicated to youth and the beauty of youth, which is like no other beauty. The wildness of her which did not die, which probably would never die, was capable of trampling over Sir Seymour's fidelity to get to unstable, selfish and careless youth, was capable of casting away his fidelity for the infidelity of youth. As she met her host's grave eyes, she sentenced him in her heart to eternal watching at her gate. She could not, she never would be able to, let him into the secret room ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Rousseau still maintains his influence, and boasts his imitators. Rousseau was the worse man of the two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer. But his reputation is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and the danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away. In Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive; their uses cease with the evils they denounce. But Rousseau sought to construct as well as to destroy; and though nothing could well be more absurd than his ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... corroborate. Dr. Clouston's observation, and assert that children fed largely on flesh foods have capricious appetites, suffer more commonly from indigestion in its various forms, possess an unstable nervous system, and have less resisting power ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... after a great deal of ineffectual wriggling and struggling—which occasioned serious inconvenience and anxiety to the human supports who were with the utmost difficulty maintaining a state of very unstable equilibrium beneath his feet—his patience completely failed him, and, in a fit of childish anger and spite, he sent a series of truly blood- curdling yells echoing into the interior of the pilot-house. These cries were of course distinctly heard ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... leaders who had attempted in vain to overcome by skill and patriotism the thousand difficulties placed in their way by successive unstable, insincere Ministers of War, General Vincente occupied an honoured place. This mild-mannered tactician enjoyed the enviable reputation of being alike unconquerable and incorruptible. His smiling presence ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... give any idea to one who has not seen it what a snow slide really is; how it sweeps away every vestige of trees, grass, and roots, and leaves a surface of shirting, unstable earth ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... from which I write to-day. I spent all those years in the service of the Empire (and even of Russia) from no uncertain temper and from no imaginary quarrel. It is so common or so necessary for men and women to misjudge each other that I believe you thought me wayward, or at least unstable. If you did so you did me a wrong. Those two good seasons when we met again, and this last of but a month ago, were not accidents or fitful recoveries. They were all I possessed in my life and all that will perish with me when ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Second Epistle of Peter, is favourable to the supposition that the Apostle of the Gentiles was now dead; as, had he been still living to correct such misinterpretations, it would scarcely have been said that in all his epistles were things "hard to be understood" which "the unlearned and unstable" wrested "unto their own destruction." [159:4] It would seem, too, that Peter here alludes particularly to the Epistle to the Hebrews—a letter, as we have seen, addressed to Jewish Christians, and written after Paul's liberation from his first Roman imprisonment. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... South, to which Grant was prompted both by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,—just or unjust, benignant or cruel,—would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large would not ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... said Louis, "that your friend the Chevalier is placed under arrest at once, and as much for his attempt upon your life as for the unstable quality of his political opinions, the law shall deal with him—conclusively." He sighed. "It always pains me to proceed to extremes against a man of his stamp. To deprive a fool of his head seems a work ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... with a dialectic demonstration of what is best for us—to do only what is in reason best for us—we must simply cease to live, though we do continue to breathe. Even in physics, of what use are logical demonstrations, when the premises are only a foundation more unstable than ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... from the Reverend Dr. Price and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? For this plain reason—because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... a low monotone, as if pursuing aloud a train of thought that had its beginning in the silent contemplation of the unstable nature of earthly greatness—"yes. He has been rich and strong, and now he lives on alms: old, feeble, blind, and without companions, but for his daughter. The Rajah Patalolo gives him rice, and the pale woman—his daughter—cooks it for him, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... forenoon when the sergeant had been sent for to come to headquarters. Half an hour later he had started, the letter tightly wrapped in a bit of rubber blanket before he had placed it inside his jacket, for he had already had enough experience with the native boats to know how unstable they would be in the current ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... of the brain-cells for adrenalin which was manifested in our experiments we may strongly suspect that the Nissl substance is a volatile, extremely unstable combination of certain elements of the brain-cells and adrenalin, because the adrenals alone do not take the Nissl stain and the brain deprived of adrenalin also does not take Nissl stain. The consumption of the Nissl substance in the brain-cells is lessened ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... offer to James the Second, which, had it been acted on, Mr. Laing acknowledges, might have produced another change! What then had become of our "glorious Revolution," which from its earliest step, throughout the reign of William, was still vacillating amidst the unstable opinions and contending interests of so many ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... they were ready to violate it without scruple when they saw their way to securing a predominant position among their neighbours; and although the ideal of Panhellenic unity had been put before Greece by Gorgias and Isocrates, its realization did not go further than the formation of leagues of an unstable character, each subject, as a rule, to the more or less tyrannical domination ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... is beginning to contain speculations on using the principle of the missile engine to save unstable intermediate products of the chemical processes. The high heats achieved in the rocket engine can, perhaps, be utilized to produce desired products that would be lost by slow cooling. But the high rate of cooling accomplished by expanding gases through ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... the talents of the best thinkers and the most eloquent writers and speakers that the world ever saw. But in the present case a system declared to be far better, and which certainly is much newer, (to restless and unstable minds no small recommendation,) was held out to the admiration of the good people of England. In that case it was surely proper for those who had far other thoughts of the French Constitution to scrutinize that plan which has been recommended to our imitation by active and zealous factions at ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... remarked that Byron's popularity made it difficult for him to indulge sentiments of envy. But without referring to the unstable character of popularity, was not his own attacked by the jealousy of those who wished to pull him down from the pedestal of fame, to which they hoped themselves to rise? Did he not think, some years before his death, that his popularity was wavering, and that ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... light-spot shivering and spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain another picture ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... desperately set to check their descent, to be steadied and encouraged by the booming voice, deep as a bell, of the man nearest them. Sometimes in dangerous spots where shale slides threatened to prove unstable, his lean, grim face and blue-gray eyes appeared apprehensive, and he braced his great shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating, straining animal. After one of these perilous tracts he stopped beside the burros, pushed the stained white Stetson to the back of ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Nor the deep wounds of victours raging blade, Nor ruthlesse spoyle of souldiers blood-desiring, The which so oft thee, Rome, their conquest made, Ne stroke on stroke of fortune variable, Ne rust of age hating continuance, Nor wrath of gods, nor spight of men unstable, Nor thou oppos'd against thine owne puissance, Nor th'horrible uprore of windes high blowing, Nor swelling streames of that god snakie-paced* Which hath so often with his overflowing Thee drenched, have thy pride so much abaced, But that this nothing, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... candour with which they greeted me, and although by long usage I am reasonably unconcerned at the proximity of any of our own recognised genii, it is not to be denied that my organs of ferocity grew small and unstable at the revelations. ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... heard him thus argue, adroitly stole an arrow out of his own quiver, and addressed him as he had frequently heard him address others. And there was just enough truth mixed with the sophistry of his argument to carry conviction to the mind of one as unstable as Ashton; for he did feel all unnerved. He had broken off suddenly from a long-continued drunken spree, and was beginning to have premonitions of something which he dreaded only second to death. He had already twice suffered ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... snapped at him, poor Jurgen thought of that very real dissension and severance which in the oncoming years was to arise between them; and of how she would die without his knowing of her death for two whole months; and of how his life thereafter would be changed, somehow, and the world would become an unstable place in which you could no longer put cordial faith. And he foreknew all the remorse he was to shrug away, after the squandering of so much pride and love. But these things were not yet: and besides, these ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... not exactly tubercular, he remarked, but he 'feared tuberculosis'—excuse the long words; the phrase was his, not mine; I repeat verbatim. He vetoed her exposing herself to a winter in London in her present unstable condition. Davos? Well, no. Not Davos: with deliberative thumb and finger on close-shaven chin. He judged her too delicate for such drastic remedies. Those high mountain stations suited best the robust invalid, who had dropped ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability. If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure and function—of what is called the traditional with what is called the ideal—that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps make even the crown of the French Empire unstable. He did not deny that Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy and Italy. Might not circumstances turn out ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... clutched the tap root a foot higher and tried his weight upon it. It held like a rope. He pulled himself a foot higher from the waters. Once more, and then he found that he had command of his legs and could dig his feet into the unstable clay. Then, inch by inch, scarce daring to hope, he pulled himself up, up until he was free of the flood and between him and the ground above only a scant yard remained. Below him the rushing torrents roared, as though angry at ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... disposition was at that period restless and unstable, free from the passionate caprices of his ill-fated father, and attuned by the fond efforts of the Swiss democrat Laharpe, to the loftiest aspirations of the France of 1789. Yet the son of Paul I. could hardly free himself from the instincts ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... you, Withers," replied Shefford, with his hand on the trader's shoulder. "You are right to caution me. I seem to be wild—thirsting for adventure—chasing a gleam. In these unstable days I can't answer for my heart. But I can for my honor. These unfortunate women are as safe with me as—as they are with ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... them to remain wholly or partially unemployed, until they have "adjusted" themselves to the new economic conditions. (2) Miscalculation and temporary over-production, to which machine industries with a wide unstable market are particularly prone, bring about periodic deep depressions of "trade," temporarily throwing out of work large bodies of skilled and unskilled labour. (3) Economies of machine-production in the staple industries drive an increasing ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the length, depth and breadth of his perception of true, just, safe financial principles and his unconquerable loyalty to them. At a time when the enemies of an honest, stable currency are seeking to destroy it and to set up in its place a debased, unstable, dishonest currency, the country would accept this exponent of sound, wise finance and a reliable, steadfast currency with extraordinary satisfaction."—Philadelphia "Ledger and Transcript," ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... who had been at her feet it was said that but one was so fortunate as to engage her fancy. To President Miraflores, the brilliant but unstable ruler of Anchuria, she yielded the key to her resolute heart. How, then, do we find her (as the Coralians would have told you) the wife of Frank Goodwin, and happily living a life ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... and unstable minds of men! How quickly our intentions fluctuate! All thoughts we lightly change, but mostly when These from some lover's quarrel take their date. But now, so wroth I saw that Saracen With woman, so outrageous in his hate, I weened not only he would ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... looking at her with those odd, unstable eyes of his that ever barred the way to his inner being. "It depends a little on the condition of your heart—that. When it comes to this in an obstacle race, there are three courses open to you. Either ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... that the real habit of our characteristic walk, gesture, or speech resides in the brain, rather than in the muscles which it controls. So delicate is the organization of the brain structure and so unstable its molecules, that even the perfume of the flower, which assails the nose of a child, the song of a bird, which strikes his ear, or the fleeting dream, which lingers but for a second in his sleep, has so modified his ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... only about one-tenth now become completely insane,[1] and this percentage might be greatly diminished by general sanitary improvements. Our alienists now claim that, by checking the reproduction of the obviously unstable, and careful hygienic treatment and training of the predisposed two per cent, insanity is almost as ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... didn't want me to come, why in the world didn't you have the courage to say so at the start? I must say I don't admire people whose tempers—and manners—are so unstable. I'm sorry I forced my presence upon you, and I promise you it won't occur again." She hesitated, and then fired a parting shot which certainly was spiteful in the extreme. "There's one good thing about it," she smiled, tartly, "I shall have something ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... deceive us and nowhere more than in our ideas about the physical body. It is an unstable mass of matter, in constant motion, with great gulfs of space between its atoms. Emerson was very far ahead of his time and it took science a half century to catch up with him and learn that he had recorded a fact ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... create incurable confusion again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable polity of Europe heeled over like a ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... in a small way, and while Joe turned banker and recklessly loaned the attractive but unstable Johnny Nelson a hundred dollars to help him to his feet, Sylvane and Merrifield bought a few horses and a few head of cattle, took on shares a hundred and fifty more, belonging to an old reprobate of a ranchman named Wadsworth and a partner of his named ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... be said for even so stringent a policy as this. An unstable home, with a worthless father an intermittent member of the household, is as bad an environment as children can have—its very fluctuations making for nervous instability and a wrong point of view later on. There is ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... seek to use this principle for the purpose of reaching a permanent settlement. When with the assistance of the South he effected the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he honestly thought that he was replacing an arbitrary and unstable territorial division of the country into slave and free states, by a settlement which would be stable, because it was the logical product of the American democratic idea. The interpretation of democracy which dictated the proposed ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... hereditary dominions of the House of Austria, Hungary and Transylvania were the most unstable, and the most difficult to retain. The impossibility of holding these two countries against the neighbouring and overwhelming power of the Turks, had already driven Ferdinand to the inglorious expedient ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... but a special development of the instinct of workmanship, a variant, relatively late and ephemeral in spite of its great absolute antiquity. The emulative predatory impulse—or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well be called—is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory emulation, and therefore the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... he argues, in which all are free but in which the means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or withhold ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... course, two kinds of equilibrium—stable and unstable—according as the social and political system is in a healthy or unhealthy state. If a body is in stable equilibrium, and any slight motion takes place, the body will return immediately to its former position; but if in unstable, it will decline further and further away from its original position, and be entirely upset. So a healthy and sound conservative equilibrium is not disturbed by outside forces, and the State will resume its former position of stability and rest ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... little affect daily conduct; I reply that it is no part of my business to inquire whether this or that makes for my pet theories or against them; my concern is to inquire whether or no it is borne out by facts, and I find the opinion that protoplasm is the one living substance unstable, inasmuch as it is an attempt to make a halt where no halt can be made. This is enough; but, furthermore, the fact that the protoplasmic parts of the body are MORE living than the non- protoplasmic—which I cannot deny, without denying that it is any longer ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... speaks hastily and heedlessly, for the earth can show itself as unstable as the air, and our solid footing become as insecure as the deck of a ship laboring in a storm at sea. The powers of the atmosphere, great as they are and mighty for destruction as they may become, are at times surpassed by those which abide ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Democratic Republic of the Congo is a source and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; much of this trafficking occurs within the country's unstable eastern provinces and is perpetrated by armed groups outside government control tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - Democratic Republic of the Congo is on the Tier 2 Watch List for its failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat trafficking in persons in 2007; while ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... reality is temporarily abandoned. In so far as sleep is psychologically determined, it is a regressive phenomenon. It is interesting that the most frequent euphemism or metaphor for death is sleep. Sleep is a normal regression. It does not always give the unstable individual sufficient relaxation from the demands of adaptation and so pathological regressions take place, one of which we believe stupor to be. It is important to note that objectively the resemblance between sleep and stupor is striking. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... astrology; and here I stand, all London roaring by at the street's end, as impotent as any baby. I have a prodigious contempt for my maternal uncle; but without him, it is idle to deny it, I should simply resolve into my elements like an unstable mixture. I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some one thing to the bottom—were it only literature. And yet, sir, the man of the world is a great feature of this age; he is possessed of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the dynamic relations of life in the face of its evident advance upon the Earth. The law of the unconstrained cell is growth on an ever increasing scale; and although we assume the organic configuration, whether somatic or reproductive, to be essentially unstable, so that continual inflow of energy is required merely to keep it in existence, this does not vitiate the fact that, when free of all external constraint, growth gains on waste. Indeed, even in the case of old age, the ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... He realized the significance of what his visitor was saying. Ever Since Zoe had gone, Jean Jacques had been for ever on the move, for ever making hay on which the sun did not shine. Jean Jacques' face these days was lined and changeful. It looked unstable and tired—as though disturbing forces were working up to the surface out of control. The brown eyes, too, were far more restless than they had ever been since the Antoine was wrecked, and their owner returned with Carmen to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... characters have the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music: for example, neither the Valhalla nor the spear themes could, without the most ludicrous incongruity, be used for the forest bird or the unstable, delusive Loki; but for all that the musical characterization must be regarded as independent of the specific themes, since the entire elimination of the thematic system from the score would ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... soi-disant superiors; and I assert that, if our people have no consciousness of their great destiny, nor sense of their true power and mission,—if, while twenty-four millions of Italians are at the present day grouped around, I will not say the conception of unity, but the mere unstable fact of union, the great soul of Italy still lies prostrate in the tomb dug for her three centuries ago by the Papacy and the Empire,—the cause is to be found in the immorality and corruption ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Utrecht called them British subjects. What the word "subjects" meant, they themselves hardly knew. The English told them that it meant children; the French that it meant dogs and slaves. Events had tamed the fierce confederates; and now, though, like all savages, unstable as children, they leaned in their soberer moments to a position of neutrality between their European neighbors, watching with jealous eyes against the encroachments of both. The French would gladly have enlisted them ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... because of the more watery character of woman's blood and great extent of subcortical centers in woman in comparison with cerebrum, the physical equilibrium of woman is more unstable than of man. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... thrust by the praise of the people, and the tale that no ending hath, And the love and the heart of the godlike, and the heavenward-leading path, For the rose and the stem of the lily, and the smooth-lipped youngling's kiss, And the eyes' desire that passeth, and the frail unstable bliss? Now shalt thou tell King Sigmund, that I deem it the crown of my life To dwell in the house of his fathers amidst all peace and strife, And to bear the sons of his body: and indeed full well I know That fair from the loins of Sigmund shall such a stem outgrow That all folk of the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... think, more wise,— Some doubloons from the window threw, And render'd thus the count untrue. The padlock'd room permitted Its owner, when he quitted, To leave his money on the table. One day, bethought this monkey wise To make the whole a sacrifice To Neptune on his throne unstable. I could not well award the prize Between the monkey's and the miser's pleasure Derived from that devoted treasure. One day, then, left alone, That animal, to mischief prone, Coin after coin detach'd, A gold jacobus snatch'd, Or Portuguese doubloon, Or silver ducatoon, Or noble, of the ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... cried Stanhope, pale with the sudden white-hot passion of the unstable. "This is your ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Chances of Peace will be a reckoning of forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic nation in an unstable equilibrium ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... that point, and she was no oarswoman; but the poor little old lady, thus suddenly roused from the strange hallucinations (as she called them) which were the most marked feature of her complaint, and finding herself afloat upon the unstable deep, instantly supposed that her last hour was come. She sprang up, too terrified to scream, with a look of deadly horror in her face, and then sank again all in a heap in the bottom of the boat. Olly ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... breeding was practised in prehistoric times is out of the question. The men of those days were one and all what we are ourselves—nature's mongrels, now broken up into varieties by casual isolation, and now by no less casual intermixture recompounded in a host of relatively unstable forms. Whatever progress, therefore, may have occurred in this respect has been unconscious. Man cannot take the credit for it, except in so far as it is indirectly due to that increase and spread of the race which have been promoted by his achievements ...
— Progress and History • Various
... striking blue and purple wild flowers we have," says John Burroughs, "are of European origin. These colors, except with the fall asters and gentians, seem rather unstable in our flora." This theory is certainly borne out in the case of the RAMPION, EUROPEAN, or CREEPING BELLFLOWER (C. rapunculoides), now detected in the act of escaping from gardens from New Brunswick to Ontario, Southern New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and making ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... things, charity, fasting, and truth, and have been great murderers. But sinful as Sir Lancelot was, since he went into the quest he never slew man, nor shall, till he come into Camelot again. For he has taken upon him to forsake sin. And were he not so unstable, he should be the next to achieve it, after Galahad his son. Yet shall he die an holy man, and in earthly sinful ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... an evil manner; but there is honour in yielding to the good, or in an honourable manner. Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting. The ...
— Symposium • Plato
... is a work of time. The majority of the people are unstable, thriftless improvident and ignorant. Slavery left its blight of impotency and profligacy upon them. They come and go as did their fathers a hundred years ago. Their tools and utensils are the ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... knowledge of judicial astrology; and here I stand, all London roaring by at the street's end, as impotent as any baby. I have a prodigious contempt for my maternal uncle; but without him, it is idle to deny it, I should simply resolve into my elements like an unstable mixture. I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some one thing to the bottom—were it only literature. And yet, sir, the man of the world is a great feature of this age; he is possessed of an extraordinary mass and variety of knowledge; he is everywhere at home; he ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... the conscious mind is much feebler, and consequently the impressions received realise themselves with greater power. These impressions are the material from which the child's growing life is constructed, and if we supply faulty material the resultant structure will be unstable. Yet the most attentive and well-meaning mothers are engaged daily in sowing the seeds of weakness in their children's minds. The little ones are constantly told they will take cold, will be sick, will fall down, or will suffer ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... T. Vernon Wollaston's book, On the Variation of Species, and they must be considered as indications of very widespread though little noticed phenomena. He speaks of the curious little carabideous beetles of the genus Notiophilus as being "extremely unstable both in their sculpture and hue;" of the common Calathus mollis as having "the hind wings at one time ample, at another rudimentary, and at a third nearly obsolete;" and of the same irregularity as to the wings being characteristic ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... City bubbles and bladders, at all events,' Mr. Fenellan said. 'But if we let our journals go on making use of them, in the shape of sham hawks overhead, we shall pay for their one good day of the game with our loss of the covey. An unstable London's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been acted on, Mr. Laing acknowledges, might have produced another change! What then had become of our "glorious Revolution," which from its earliest step, throughout the reign of William, was still vacillating amidst the unstable opinions and contending interests of so ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... future of this fine race is shrouded in uncertainty. Mormonism is strong in some districts, and competes with the tohunga (medicine man and priest) in drawing away many of the unstable from Christian influence. The bright hopes of Marsden and of Selwyn have not yet been realised, but many saintly souls have been gathered in, and a faithful remnant still survives to ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... up the last bead and looked at the unstable baubles in her pink left palm. She tilted her hand so that they rolled back and forth. "Could a kitten look at a king?" she asked with ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed only a not too well ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... moral sense. The leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a whole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individual worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no one is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and improves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at the inception of the human Charter, take the place of ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... of ambition may crumble," he said. "Since I am speaking frankly of one thing, Captain Prescott, I may speak likewise of another. Have you ever thought how unstable may prove this Southern Confederacy for which we are ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... competing activities, one is variable, since it depends on the constantly changing nature of the objects which come into relation with us; the other, on the contrary, is a constant, since it expresses the contribution of our nerve substance, and, though this last is of very unstable composition, it necessarily varies much less than the series of excitants. We consequently see faintly that these two elements differ sufficiently in character for us to be able to suppose that ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... these feats of tight-rope balance, they stood upright and graceful, quite unconscious of themselves, their bodies accustomed by long habit to nice and instant obedience to the almost unconscious impulses of the brain. Only their eyes, intent, preoccupied, blazed out by sheer will-power the unstable path their owners should follow. Once at the forefront of the drive, the men began vigorously to urge the logs forward. This they accomplished almost entirely by main strength, for the sluggish current gave them little aid. Under the pressure ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... scheme prevails among the majority, the greater part, with the Athenians, spending their time only to hear and see something new, gadding about to change their ways, going in the ways of Egypt and Assyria, to drink the waters of Shichor and the river, unstable souls, like so many light combustibles wrapt up by the eddies of a whirlwind, tossed hither and thither till utterly dissipated.—The doctrine of original sin[14] is by several denied, others are pulling ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... with its own movement, or had become heaped into slushy hummocks of pumice-like sponginess and the consistency of broken glass. And everywhere around me I could discern the chilly, gaping smile of blue crevices which caught at my feet, and rendered the tread of my boot-soles unstable. And ever, as we marched, could the voices of Boev and the old soldier be heard speaking in antiphony, like two pipes being fluted by one and the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... without habitual collection and re- collection of our own selves from time to time, no great purpose is carried out, and no great work can be done; and that it is the bustle and hurry of our modern life which causes shallow thought, unstable purpose, and wasted energy, in too many who would be better and wiser, stronger and happier, if they would devote more time to silence and meditation; if they would commune with their own heart in their chamber, and be still. ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... government almost wholly to Dunstan, his primate, and spent his time in gayety, pleasure, and ease. He was unstable, profligate, and vicious. He once broke into a convent and carried off a beautiful nun, named Editha. For this violation of the sanctuary, Dunstan commanded him not to wear his crown for seven years, which was ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... present, which rather militates against the advantage Laplace had in mind! Finally, however, it was shown by M. Liouville, in 1845, that the position of a perennial full moon, such as Laplace dreamed of, would be unstable—that is to say, the body in question could not for long remain undisturbed in the situation suggested (see Fig. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... men of modern days. This "mad" idea has long since been fulfilled; for what is a ship but a wooden house made to float upon the sea, and sail with its inmates hither and thither, at the will of the guiding spirit, over a trackless unstable ocean for months together? It is a self-sustaining movable hotel upon the sea. It is an oasis in the desert of waters, so skilfully contrived as to be capable of advancing against wind and tide, and of outliving the wildest storms—the bitterest fury of winds and waves. It is the residence ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... together and gathered a great basket of wild oranges, green, but sweet and juicy; and they picked plantains from around the hut, and coconuts from their trees, and breadfruit and mangoes; and they carried them down to the cove. They loaded the unstable canoe with them, and Red and the native boy who had brought them the news of the ship paddled along outside ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... far. Eighteen pitched battles fought I in the Saracen land, and in every one was a victor—never, at home or abroad, have I known shame and defeat. Doth the wind always blow from one point?—and is Fate less unstable than the wind?" ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been found, in the course of the present investigation, to present a fundamental dichotomy into units of two beats. Only one, that characterized by secondary accentuation, has no such discriminable quality of phases. Of this form two things are to be noted: first, that it is unstable and tends constantly to revert to that with initial stress, with consequent appearance of secondary accentuation; and second, that as a permanent form it presents the relations of a triple rhythm with a grace ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is deserted, the superstructure—pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical timber—speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity. We must have passed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indicated a greater solidity of character than the young man had given her credit for. He had not realised that a love developed by natural and slow degrees, without a shadow of opposition, could be deeper and more enduring than the spasmodic passion that springs up amidst the unstable surroundings of the world, ill nourished by an uncertain alternation of hope and fear, and prone to consume itself in the heat of its own expression. The one is about as different from the other as the slowly moving glacier of the Alps ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... thing that so large a proportion of British secondary schoolmasters and mistresses are unmarried. The normal condition of a healthy adult is marriage, and for all those who are not defective upon this side (and that means an incapacity to understand many things) celibacy is a state of unstable equilibrium and too often a quite unwholesome condition. Wherever there are celibate teachers I am inclined to suspect a fussiness, an unreasonable watchfulness, a disposition to pry, an exaggeration of what are called "Dangers," a painful idealization of "Purity." It is a part ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... not appear marvellous, that the learned advocates of Rowley should not have regarded the ground on which they stood as somewhat unstable, when they found Chatterton readily avow that he wrote the first part of the "Battle of Hastings," and discovered the second, as composed three hundred years before, by Thomas Rowley? This was indeed an unparalleled coincidence. A boy writes the commencement of a narrative poem, and then finds in ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most stirred and ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... you one needless burden; He will not exact more than He knows your strength will bear; He will ask no Peter to come to Him on the water, unless He impart at the same time strength and support on the unstable wave; He will not demand of you the endurance of providences, and trials, and temptations you are unable to cope with; He will not ask you to draw water if the well is too deep, or withdraw the stone if too heavy. But neither, at the same time, will He admit as an impossibility ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... was obviously a capacity for labor, and co-operative labor at that, which could carry them far. We all know that they have a marked genius: great gifts of their own. In a civilization of super-ants or bees, there would have been no problem of the hungry unemployed, no poverty, no unstable government, no riots, no strikes for short hours, no derision of eugenics, no thieves, perhaps ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... are all the more interesting for the literary historian. All writers are conditioned by their environment, but some concern themselves with the essentials, others with the accidents, of that internally constant, but externally unstable, phenomenon, known as humanity. Waller and Lyly were of the latter class. Like jewels suitable to one costume only, they remained in favour just as long as the fashion that created them lasted. Waller was probably inferior ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... was now extremely precarious and difficult to manage, during the unstable sway of a government so weak as Maximilian's. But he having succeeded his father on the imperial throne in 1493, and his son Philip having been proclaimed the following year duke and count of the various provinces ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... ridiculed in public libels, and reviled in private conversation. Instances were every where repeated of his fraud, warice, and extortion; his insolence, cruelty, ambition, and misconduct; even his courage was called in question; and this consummate general was represented as the lowest of mankind. So unstable is the popularity of every character that fluctuates between two opposite ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... understood the full force of the attraction between them. The real energy and deliberation, the unswerving purpose in her magnetized the weakness at the roots of his ardent, impulsive, but unstable character. Moreover, in spite of the superlative passion which he had aroused in her, she lacked the animal magnetism which was his in abundance. Her oneness was a magnet for his gregariousness and concentrated it upon herself. That ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... saw at the sons of Fitjung, Now they carry beggars' staffs; Wealth is Like the twinkling of an eye, The most unstable ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... forest, from a stone to a cluster of stars whose light takes 4000 years to reach us. It is only a question of time when our own sun shall set in impotence and rise again no more. All things are passing away, everything is unstable, change is at the heart of all. How solemn, how true the words, whose melancholy haunts the more the memory dwells on them: "this world passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will endureth ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... he had received a violent blow. Curious physical changes were taking place in him. His legs, which only that morning he had looked upon as eminently muscular, he now discovered to be composed of some curiously unstable jelly. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... so anomalous that we were almost ready to doubt our own measurements, when a simple test was suggested. A weather vane, with two planes attached to the pointer at an angle of 80 degrees with each other, was made. According to our table, such a vane would be in unstable equilibrium when pointing directly into the wind, for if by chance the wind should happen to strike one plane at 39 degrees and the other at 41 degrees, the plane with the smaller angle would have the greater ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... now nothing to be gained in reviewing that unhappy affair," continued the other. "Your mother's family are headlong, impulsive, fiery, unstable, emotional. There was a last shameful and degrading scene. I offered her a separation; but she was unwisely ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... obeyed. It wasn't the first time she'd been rebuked for her unstable temperament. She was meek and abashed; yet it is not uninteresting to know one possesses an unstable temperament which must be looked after lest it prove dangerous. The picnic was as dull as she had feared it would be. She usually ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... toward a sense of personality. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows stronger and stronger in his dealings with persons—an uncertainty aroused by the moods, emotions, changes of expression, and shades of treatment of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of quite unstable experiences. This period we may, for brevity of expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the "projective" stage in the growth ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... an orator and a Solomon. He was a farmer, middle-aged, and somewhat short, whose shaven lips were drawn so over-soberly as to express a complete self-conviction of his own profundity, while his unstable averted glance warned that his alliances were not to be depended on where he was likely to be a material loser. A particularly "fluent" man, accomplished in gestures such as form an ingredient in all French conversation, he was in Zotique's Sunday afternoons a ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... in each molecule, 298 atoms of carbon, 49 of nitrogen, 2 of sulphur, 228 of hydrogen, and 92 of oxygen—in all, 669 atoms; or, more strictly speaking, equivalents. And these two substances are so unstable as to decompose at quite ordinary temperatures; as that to which the outside of a joint of roast meat is exposed. Thus it is manifest that the present chemical heterogeneity of the Earth's surface has arisen by degrees, as the decrease of heat has permitted; and that it has shown ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... projection were, of course, the figments of some unstable dreamer's imagination. But they showed the instability of the usual lackland wanderers. And what could such men do that a solid, responsible man like ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish to anybody else. Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders, she is incurably inconsistent; what she says ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... soundless, the Populace and Municipals stop him as a fugitive, are not unlike massacring him as a traitor; the National Assembly, consulted on the matter, gives him free egress as a nullity. Such an unstable 'drift-mould of Accident' is the substance of this lower world, for them that dwell in houses of clay; so, especially in hot regions and times, do the proudest palaces we build of it take wings, and become Sahara sand-palaces, spinning ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... on your side, forbear To greet with too impressed an air A certain youth with chestnut hair,— A youth unstable; Albeit none more skilled can guide The frail canoe on Thamis tide, Or, trimmer-footed, lighter glide Through "Guards" ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... Federalist, "are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... her severely. Soon after committing this act he surrendered himself to the police. He also showed striking evidences of a psychopathic personality with a strong suggestion of epilepsy, but with intact intelligence. He was given to periods of depression and was unstable mentally. He was easily suggestible and his general conduct was not only controlled by environmental influences, but also by his mood. Suicidal ideas and jealousy played a very important role in his mental life; especially they were marked when he began to keep company ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... areas mentioned above, the precipitation is much less than 30 inches per year and its effect as an agent of erosion is of greatest significance, although in restricted areas there may be short periods when the soil is made unstable by ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... without either rule or reason before a Consonant or two, with e after, as ace, acre, able, unstable, father, with A long, and solace, massacre, constable, gather, ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... did yet her blunted horns renew, Nor yet was earth suspended in the sky, Nor, poised, did on her own foundations lie, Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown; But earth, and air, and water were in one. Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable, And water's dark abyss unnavigable. No certain form on any was impressed; All were confused, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... soaring and gliding machines, the Wrights became master pilots and conquerors of the air. Their success had in it no element of luck; it was earned, as an acrobat earns his skill. So confident did they become that to the end their machines were all machines of an unstable equilibrium, dependent for their safety on the skill and quickness of the pilot. Their triumph was a triumph of mind and character. Other men had more than their advantages, and failed, where these men succeeded. Great things have sometimes ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... not violate with modern polish the ingenuous and noble roughness of these truly Constitutional materials. Above all things, I was resolved not to be guilty of tampering, the odious vice of restless and unstable minds. I put my foot in the tracks of our forefathers, where I can neither wander nor stumble. Determining to fix articles of peace, I was resolved not to be wise beyond what was written; I was resolved to use nothing else than the form of sound words, to let others ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... the star, That led him on from crown to crown, Has sunk; and nations from afar Gazed as it faded and went down. High is his couch;—the ocean flood, Far, far below, by storms is curled; As round him heaved, while high he stood, A stormy and unstable world. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... he, "did I ever entertain so wild a hope? This wood-nymph, with her robust yet graceful figure, her clear-headedness, her energy and will-power, could she ever have loved a being so weak and unstable as myself? No, indeed; she needs a lover full of life and vigor; a huntsman, with a strong arm, able to protect her. What figure should I cut by the side of so hearty ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... All this was said, as we shall see that much else was said by Emerson, by way of reaction and protest against instability of soul in the people around him. 'Here or nowhere,' said Goethe inversely to unstable Europeans yearning vaguely westwards, 'here or nowhere is thine America.' To the use of travel for its own ends, Emerson was of course as much alive as other people. 'There is in every constitution a certain solstice when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... must mount again, or we shall not be home by dinner-time.' And they returned to where Pansy stood tethered. 'Instead of entrusting my weight to a young man's unstable palm,' she continued gaily, 'I prefer a surer "upping-stock" (as the villagers call it), in the form of a gate. There—now I am ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... developing reason evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods was a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal evolution ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... master, Art has been pursuing the Chimaera, attempting to reconcile two opposites—the most slavish fidelity to nature and the most absolute independence of her, an independence so absolute that the work of art may claim to be a creation. This is the persistent problem offered by the unstable character of the point of view at which it is approached; the whole mystery of art. The subject, as presented in nature, cannot keep the place which art with its transforming instinct would assign it; and therefore a single formula can never ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... fatalism. There are at least several subsidiary considerations which it is well to advance. The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. The deficiency of classical patterns—at a time which still firmly believed, for the most part, that all good work in literature had been so done by the ancients that it could at best be emulated—should count for something: the scanty respect in which ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... with a stronger Latin element), would also be capable of dealing with these barbaric "Administered Territories"? A day may come when Tripoli, Nigeria, the French and the Belgian Congo will be all under one supreme control. We may be laying the foundations of such a system to-day unawares. The unstable and fluctuating conferences of the Allies to-day, their repeated experiences of the disadvantages of evanescent and discontinuous co-ordinations, may press them almost unconsciously toward this building up of ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... already mentioned: because whereas in other cases clay has been found beneath the sand, and the foundation wells have been sunk into it, no bottom has been discovered to the sand which constitutes the bed of the Jumna; and the wells in question are required to stand firm in this most unstable of ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... recasting the arrangement of the tea-festivity that was to celebrate the event, discovering in each new disposition of the insufficient cups and unstable teapot a fresh satisfaction to gloat over, and imputing feelings in sympathy with her own to her offspring Gweng. It was fortunate for Gweng that her mamma understood her so thoroughly, as otherwise her fixed expression of a maximum of joy at all things in Heaven ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... flashed in the sunlight. With a soft crashing sound some tree would let fall its priceless burden in a dazzling rain of diamonds. Crash! and the silver roof of the barn slid down into the yard, collapsing in a flood of opals. The whole world seemed unreal and unstable, toppling to pieces and vanishing in ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... stain to stand for two weeks before use; keep in a dark place or in an amber glass bottle. Owing to the unstable character of the methyl green, this stain ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... and is, both dangerous and unstable. Not only is it sensitive to flame or spark, but it absorbs moisture from the air. In other words, it was no easy matter to "keep your powder dry." During the middle 1700's, Spaniards on a Florida river outpost kept powder ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... yield thy share, I think, it is far better for thee to live upon alms in the kingdom of the Andhakas and the Vrishnis than obtain sovereignty by war. Since this mortal existence is for only a short period, and greatly liable to blame, subject to constant suffering, and unstable, and since it is never comparable to a good name, therefore, O Pandava, never perpetrate a sin. It is the desires, O ruler of men, which adhere to mortal men and are an obstruction to a virtuous ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to say of a woman. Doctor McKenzie wondered if it could be said of his own daughter. Set side by side with Drusilla, Jean seemed a childish creature, unstable, swayed by the emotion of the moment. Yet her fire matched Drusilla's, ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... definition of "life" encouraged Professor Bastian to try his hand at it, with this definitional result: "Life," he says, "is an unstable collocation of Matter (with a big M), capable of growing by selection and interstitial appropriation of new matter (what new matter?) which then assumes similar qualities, of continually varying in composition in response to variations ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... was shown by her sudden blushes, and by her somewhat awkward movements, nor was it her ingenious questions which had assailed and conquered George d'Harderme's heart. He had a peculiar temper, and any appearance of a yoke frightened him and put him to flight immediately, and his unstable heart was ready to yield to any temptation, and he was incapable of any lasting attachment, while a succession of women had left no more traces on it than on the seashore, which is constantly ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... eyes were brown, and had that velvety texture of the iris which one sometimes sees among the women of the New Forest, and sometimes among the girls of the district round Bordeaux. His whole appearance was feminine, and the unstable glance that he flashed from side to side spoke of vanity. He said to his companion, "Who is the prim virgin with the ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... San Francisco, the Hobarts sailed for Australia. They urged Grace to accompany them, but she declined, saying, with a smile, that she believed for the present she preferred the solid earth to the unstable sea. She saw her friends aboard the steamer; then returning to the hotel, sent for the manager, Major H.; explained that she expected her husband by the first steamer from Australia; that he did not expect ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... step would be certain destruction. The difficulties of the ascent appear to have impressed the old historian of Cornwall, Norden, so vividly that he tries in his "Survey," to frighten all his readers from attempting it; warning "unstable man," if he will try to mount the cliff, that "while he respecteth his footinge he indaungers his head; and looking to save the head, indaungers the footinge, accordinge to the old proverbe: Incidit in Scyllam qui vult vitare ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... words without knowledge? The apostle speaks of some that did more than darken counsel; for they wrested the counsel of God; 2 Pet. iii. 16. In Paul's epistles, saith he, "are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction." Some things in the Scriptures are hard to be known, and they are made harder by such unlearned teachers as utter their own notions ...
— An Exhortation to Peace and Unity • Attributed (incorrectly) to John Bunyan
... lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? For this plain reason—because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... ignore. The leg is the best part of the figure, inasmuch as it has the finest lines and therewith those slender, diminishing forms which, coming at the base of the human structure, show it to be a thing of life by its unstable equilibrium. A lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium; the body, springing, poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, never stands without implying and expressing life. It is the leg that first suggested the phantasy of flight. We imagine wings to the figure that is erect upon the ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... better than anyone, had not yet succeeded, in spite of all its popularity, in penetrating the souls of men. To a large extent, the masses seemed to be still stolid and indifferent. Even among the clergy, many were so unstable, so obscure, and so incompetent, that they failed to make any progress with their congregations. There were even some among them who were ready, according to circumstances, to adopt either the old or the new Church usages. In some places the ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... through changeless ages thus and thus. But, as it is truly said: 'Milk by repeated agitation turns to butter,' and for many years it has been this one's ceaseless study of the Arts whereby she might avert that which she helped to bring about in her unstable youth." ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... the centre and its speed consequently increases. The rate of radiation of energy will increase rapidly with the speed of the electron. When the speed of the electron becomes very nearly equal to the velocity of light, according to Lodge, the system is unstable. It has been shown that the apparent mass of an electron increases very rapidly as the speed of light is approached, and is theoretically infinite at the speed of light. There will be at this stage a sudden ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... first few shots the boys found the difficulty which Jesse had prophesied, for shooting from an unstable platform is always difficult. They had the added advantage, however, of being able to tell where their bullets were falling. As they were all firing close together, and were using rifles of the same caliber, it was difficult to tell who really was the lucky marksman, but, while the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... was the same person. We may speak of one person as being well integrated, meaning that he is always himself, his various tendencies being so cooerdinated as to work reasonably well together; whereas of another we speak as poorly integrated, unstable, an uncertain quantity. Integration is achieved partly by selection from among conflicting impulses, partly by cooerdination, partly by judicious treatment of those impulses that are denied; as was partly explained ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Prelatists, it acted for a time as one man, and drew to itself a multitude of those mean and timid politicians who naturally gravitate towards the stronger party. The friends of the government were few and disunited. Hamilton brought but half a heart to the discharge of his duties. He had always been unstable; and he was now discontented. He held indeed the highest place to which a subject could aspire. But he imagined that he had only the show of power while others enjoyed the substance, and was not sorry to see those of whom he was jealous thwarted ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and bred under its branches. When the soil became rank because of continuous residence and insects of diabolical activity pestered its occupants, the camp would shift to another site; but there existed proofs that the bin-gum-tree localised the thoughts of those aimless, unstable wanderers to whom a few bushes stuck in the sand as a screen from prevailing winds represent the home of the hour and all that the word signifies and embodies. Many a one was laid to rest beneath its spreading branches, for it ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of time, of the most varied and unsuitable order. They were generally received and treated with hospitality, and this may have been one reason why all kinds of adventurers were ready to join them. Their unstable mode of life easily explains their frequenting the society of other vagabonds, who traversed the country as jugglers, treasure-diggers, quacks, or sorcerers, and that their clerical dignity did not prevent their occasionally adopting these professions themselves. The Chronicle of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... men from prostrate camels piled the stores to windward round, And within the barrier herded, on the hot, unstable ground. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... the sand, so unstable, had moved beneath the pressure of an unusual tide. The course of the channel had changed, and when the horse, treading confidently, had approached the edge, it stepped straight into deep water and, losing its balance, being also impeded by the cart, dragged with it the vehicle, ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... portentous selfishness, combined with dullness of imagination is probably just as transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons of unstable mind." ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Phonny. In order to see Beechnut while he asked this question, Phonny had to twist his head round in a very unusual position, and look out under his arm. It was obvious that in doing this he was in imminent danger of falling, so unstable was the equilibrium in which he was poised ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... assassinated; again, they were impaled." In what, then, must we seek for the cause of the futility of these efforts? All those who know the savages will understand it; it is in the fickle character of these children of the woods, a character more unstable and volatile than that of infants. God alone knows what restless anxiety the conversions which they succeeded in bringing about caused to the missionaries and the pious Bishop of Petraea. Yet every day Mgr. de Laval ardently prayed, not only for the flock confided to his care but ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... complex molecular aggregate, and ask what new property, beyond the province of ordinary chemistry and physics, is to be expected of a compound which contains millions or billions of atoms attached to each other in no rigid, stable, frigid manner, but by loose unstable links, enabling them constantly to re-arrange themselves and to be the theatre of perpetual change, aggregating and reaggregating in various ways and manifesting ceaseless activities. Such unstable aggregates of matter may, like the water of a pond or a heap of organic refuse, serve ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... licence and not liberty to hasten the advent of that murderous political power prophetically depicted with the statue standing upon feet of clay and iron: supreme authority vested in the world's proletariat in unstable and uncohesive union with militarism, Satan himself the actual lawless animator.[14] As to the scope for outlets in the East, it is more restricted to industries and commerce, but those enterprises, however brilliantly promising, are fraught with the risks ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... steady dissipation of energy, it follows that an exothermic substance is stable, for it tends to remain as it is unless heat is supplied to it, or work is done upon it; whereas, according to its degree of endothermicity, an endothermic substance is more or less unstable, for it is always ready to emit heat, or to do work, as soon as an opportunity is given to it to decompose. The theoretical and practical results of this circumstance will be elaborated in Chapter VI., when the endothermic nature of acetylene ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... William Knox, long Under-Secretary for the Colonies, declared that Americans could not settle the western territory "for ages," and that the region must be given up to barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as unstable as the Scythians and Tartars. But the shortsightedness of these distant critics can be forgiven when one recalls that Franklin himself, while conjuring up a splendid vision of the western valleys teeming with a thriving population, supposed ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... for geese. To these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new; that self-interest, well understood, will produce social concord; that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits; that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in our power. Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before; ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... the prototype of the unstable, foolish ruler. He sacrificed his wife Vashti to his friend Haman-Memucan, and later on again his friend Haman to his wife Esther. (49) Folly possessed him, too, when he arranged extravagant festivities for guests from afar, before he had won, by means of kindly treatment, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Turks are so well acquainted with its beauties, that all their pleasure-seats are built on its banks, where they have, at the same time, the most beautiful prospects in Europe and Asia; there are near one another some hundreds of magnificent palaces. Human grandeur being here yet more unstable than any where else, 'tis common for the heirs of a great three-tailed bassa, not to be rich enough to keep in repair the house he built; thus, in a few years, they all fall to ruin. I was yesterday to see that of the late grand Vizier, who was killed ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... arrangement of the knee-joint, it is rendered little liable to wear, and all lateral or rotary motion is avoided. It is hardly necessary to remark that any such motion is undesirable in an artificial leg, as it renders its support unstable." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of Waterfalls, on account of the vast number of small but exquisitely beautiful falls seen there.' A narrow lane with high hedges leads round the shoulder of the hill to the steep little valley, where the Tavy jostles against obstructive boulders, and a high, narrow, unstable-looking bridge of tarred timber (sometimes called a 'clam' bridge) crosses the stream. Climbing up on the farther side, the road soon reaches the village of Mary Tavy. In reference to these villages a very old joke is told of a Judge unacquainted ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... well be asked now, even if for the first time, why has Jay Gould been plucked out as a special object of opprobrium? What curious, erratic, unstable judgment is this that selects this one man as the scapegoat of commercial society, while deferentially allowing his business contemporaries the fullest measure of ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... and foggy. The heart of the town, with its noises, was left behind. Reflected from the high vapours, its distant lights were manifest in quivering, cone-shaped streamers, in questionable blushes of unnamed colours, in unstable, ghostly waves of far, electric flashes. Now that the darkness was become more friendly, the wall against which the street splintered developed a stone coping topped with an armature of spikes. Beyond it loomed what appeared to be the acute angles of mountain peaks, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... love my brother, and it is because I do not love him, and because I do have affection and comradeship for him, that I do not turn away when he commits even a lurid act. Love, you will remember, takes its rise in the emotions, and is unstable and wanton and capricious. But affection takes its rise in the intellect, is based upon judgment of the brain. Love is unyielding tyranny; affection is compromise. Love never compromises, no more than does the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of men were relieved of all need, hardship, and adversity, if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance . . . that they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly. A ship without ballast is unstable, and will not go straight." Therefore let us make our ship of life go straight with its ballast of miseries and hardships, over which we ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... but that of the waves. She would sit for hours with no companion save her thoughts, which were unconsciously led from phase to phase by the moving lights and shadows upon the sea, and the soft beauty of unstable clouds. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... is so complex and unstable that one feels it is presumptuous to try to define it. It is a city so highly-strung, so ingrained with fickleness, and so changeable in its tastes, that a book that truly describes it at the moment it is written is no longer accurate by the time it is published. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least touch upsets, and fell to crying. It took her some time to get down the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them. At last it ventured out,—showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the billow, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Roy, "which passeth from the mountains to the ocean, kisseth every meadow on its way, yet tarries not in any place, so Fortune visits the sons of men; she is unstable as the wind; who shall hold her? Let not adversity tear off ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... under the action of the sun when exposed to it. Comparatively solid in the morning, it would crack to pieces and slide down the mountain side before night. A sixty-foot cut had already been made into the precipitous mountain side, and the result was an unstable road-bed, hardly four feet in width, which threatened to go ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... a dubious way. "Don't borrow unnecessary alarm about that, Mr. Ware," he said, with studied smoothness of modulated tones. "These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of the idea that they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable character. It has grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well, and they pursue it with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual diversions open to us here, and they make the most of this one. It amuses them, and it ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... the document and bowing, "this is a noble reward; but everything in the world is unstable, and the man who happened to fall into disgrace with your majesty might ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... imagination, his consciousness of inrushes from the unplumbed deeps within, and his inclination to solitude and meditation are well in evidence at an early age, and we have no difficulty at all in seeing that his psychological equilibrium was unstable, and that he was capable of sudden shifts of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... stately by, they all walked so gracefully, Balancing their bodies on lithe unstable hips, As if music moved them that swelled in their bosoms And was pizzicatti ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... city of the beautiful, Home of all art, all elegance, all grace; Whose orators and poets sway the soul As the winds move the sea's unstable face; O wonderous city, nurse and home of mind, This is my oracle to you this day— No generous growth from starved roots will you find, But fruitless blossoms weakening ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... opinion, based upon general observation, is that it is not, and that when light acts upon a compound color the unstable color fades, while the stable color remains behind. A woaded color, for example, is only fast in respect of the vat indigo which it contains, and yet how frequent is the custom to unite with the indigo such dyes as barwood, orchil, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... existence of any such genuine, warm and living feeling for any of Mr. Asquith's Ministry, perhaps Ireland is not to blame. There was no intense grip of any fact in the Government's attitude, and on one cardinal point they were unstable as water. Sir Edward Carson, in opposing the introduction of the Bill, had used the words: "What argument is there that you can raise for giving Home Rule to Ireland that you do not equally raise for giving Home Rule to that Protestant minority in the north-east province?" Redmond, ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility. Then he turned ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth: so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws and roads and set government we see to-day. So the spring storms of the Renaissance settled, I say, into that steady summer of stable form which has now for three hundred years dominated ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... that any one of us can say what these bounds are, for every day of our experience is extending them in both the inner and outer worlds; and we never can be very sure whether the things which rise upon the distant horizon of our nocturnal visions are less unstable and uncertain than those that exist under our noses. True it is, at any rate, that the legend was narrated to me in a meagre form by a lady, sufficiently ancient to be supposed to be a lover ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... in the air, and became a globe, a globe of brown. But it changed, and disappeared. Morey recognized the signal. "He will now make the artificial matter into all the elements, and many nonexistent elements, unstable, atomic figures." There followed a long ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... unbearable for many Iraqis. Robberies, kidnappings, and murder are commonplace in much of the country. Organized criminal rackets thrive, particularly in unstable areas like Anbar province. Some criminal gangs cooperate with, finance, or purport to be part of the Sunni insurgency or a Shiite militia in order to gain legitimacy. As one knowledgeable American official put it, "If there were foreign forces in New Jersey, Tony ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... these sensitive salts of silver is that, being very unstable, i. e., ready to undergo a molecular change, the undulations produced in the ether, which pervades all space, and the potential action or moving power of light is sufficient to disturb their normal chemical ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... recognized that Bonbright and herself were embarked on one of these unstable, experimental craft. She saw, as he did not, that it was unseaworthy and must founder at the first touch of storm. She pinned no false hopes to it; recognized it as a makeshift, welcome to her only as a reprieve—and that ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... address on the bill, and proof plenty that he had been disloyal, not only to her but to the children, who had been obliged to scrimp along while he helped maintain another woman. Humiliated beyond measure by her disaster, unable to endure her past memories of happiness and faith, with an unstable world rocking before her, through the revelation that a quiet, contented, loving man could be completely false, she found no adequate reason for living and became a helpless prey to her troubled mind. "A temporary unfaithfulness, a yielding to sudden temptation" she could understand, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... amethyst? This coast-line alone—the sheer effrontery of its mineral charm—might affect some natures to such an extent as to dislocate their stability. Northern minds seem to become fluid here, impressionable, unstable, unbalanced—what you please. THere is something in the brightness of this spot which decomposes their old particles and arranges them into fresh and unexpected patterns. That is what people mean when they say that they 'diswcover' themselves ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Toulouse, where the battle was fought, was one heap of dead bodies, and continued to be mentioned in the Arab chronicles under the name of Martyrs' Causeway. But the Arabs of Spain were then in that unstable social condition and in that heyday of impulsive youthfulness as a people, when men are more apt to be excited and attracted by the prospect of bold adventures than discouraged by reverses. El-Samah, on crossing the Pyrenees to go plundering and conquering in the country of the Frandj, had ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a period of expansion and confidence; much money was seeking investment and "Industrials" were the fashion. Prices were rising all round. There remained little more for my uncle to do therefore, in his climb to the high unstable crest of Financial Greatness but, as he said, to "grasp the cosmic oyster, George, while it gaped," which, being translated, meant for him to buy respectable businesses confidently and courageously at the vendor's estimate, add thirty or forty thousand to the price and sell them again. His sole difficulty ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... all, inflation holds the threat of another depression, just as we had a depression after the unstable boom following the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... very much, and are indeed unstable from their very nature, constantly becoming formed and again decomposed, the primitive mythologies of all people are in like manner very various, indefinite, and subject to ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... Christianlike to strive cheerfully to conform to actual circumstances; and, after remedying all that we can control, patiently to submit to what is beyond our power. If domestics are found to be incompetent, unstable, and unconformed to their station, it is Perfect Wisdom which appoints these trials, to teach us patience, fortitude, and self-control; and, if the discipline is met, in a proper spirit, it will prove a blessing, rather than ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... say fanaticism, a quality rarely apart from the purest religious sentiment. Still continue our conversations on Timbuctoo. Most of the old respectable merchants have been to Timbuctoo. One of them, Haj Mansour, resided there fourteen years, carrying on a prosperous trade. But so perverse and unstable are human affairs, that, on returning home after so long an exile, with thirty camels laden with the riches of the interior, and with much fine gold, and whilst within a few days of Touat, the banditti of The Desert fell upon ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... all plain sailing. The air is an unstable medium at best, and quite without warning, at an acute angle, he entered an aerial tide which he recognized as the gulf stream of wind that poured through the drafty-mouthed Golden Gate. His right wing caught it first—a ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... there are Paul Bourget; Andre Couvreur, who in La Graine deals with the problem of human selection; Brieux, who in Les Avaries, attacks the social tragedies of venereal disease. The book of Vacher de Lapouge on social selection is full of interesting ideas, although too much influenced by the unstable hypothesis of Gobineau. To make distinct zoological species of dolichocephalics and brachycephalics, as Vacher de Lapouge attempts, is a grave error in zoology. Charles Albert: L'Amour Libre, and Queyrat: La Demoralization de l'idee sexuelle, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... rough breeches, coat, and cap, was a staggering apparition. The beauty of the surprised face did not appeal to Kathryn, but she was not for one instant deceived as to the sex of the person on the threshold, and her none-too-pure mind made a wild and dangerous leap to a most unstable point of disadvantage. ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... July Campeggio embarked at Corneto,[603] and proceeded by slow stages through France towards England. Henry congratulated himself that his hopes were on the eve of fulfilment. But, unfortunately for him, the basis, on which they were built, was as unstable as water. The decision of his case still depended upon Clement, and Clement wavered with every fluctuation in the success or the failure of (p. 216) the Spanish arms in Italy. Campeggio had scarcely ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the power of Rome, which had long been unstable, utterly fell to the ground for want of capable support. Such were the fortunes of Belisarius in the Gothic war. After this, despairing of success, he begged the Emperor to allow him to leave Italy with all speed. When he heard that his prayer had been granted, he joyfully retired, bidding ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... wont to have, sure I am that the cheeks of each separately, and of all when brought together, will be bathed in tears, because of those ills which are alone the occasion of my never-ending misery. Do not, I beseech you, refuse me these tears, reflecting that your estate is unstable as well as mine, and that, should it ever come to resemble mine (the which may God forfend!), the tears that others shed for you will be pleasing to you in return. And that the time may pass more rapidly in ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... together, will make amends for the want of individual value: or she prides herself upon the curious subtilty and the successful elaboration with which she can detect their lurking affinities. If she can win you over to her purpose, and impart to you her feelings, she cares not how unstable or transitory may be her influence, knowing that it will not be out of her power to resume it upon an apt occasion. But the Imagination is conscious of an indestructible dominion;—the Soul may fall away from it, not being able ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... continental countries generally, the number of political groups is legion. Many are too small and unstable to be entitled properly to the designation of parties; and, in truth, of even the larger ones none has ever become so formidable numerically as to acquire a majority in the popular chamber. For the enactment of measures the Government is obliged to rely always ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... and later others who had gone out in their company.[3] Most men were suspicious of these circumstances, but since they did not know the mind of Tiberius and further took into consideration the latter's caprice and the unstable condition of affairs, they were divided in sentiment. Privately they kept a sharp eye on their own safety, but publicly they paid court to him, among other reasons because Tiberius had joined to [him][4] as priests both Sejanus and his son. Moreover, they had given him the proconsular ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... after, was dethroned by Beornulf. The reign of this usurper, who was not of the royal family, was short and unfortunate: he was defeated by the West Saxons, and killed by his own subjects, the East Angles [q]. Ludican, his successor, underwent the same fate [r]; and Wiglaff, who mounted this unstable throne, and found every thing in the utmost confusion, could not withstand the fortune of Egbert, who united all the Saxon kingdoms into one great monarchy. [FN [o] Ingulph. p. 6. [p] Ibid. p. 7. Brompton, p. 776 [q] Ingulph. p. 7. [r] Ann. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... in a lesser degree, true of our more immediate subject. It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly things had any worldly success. The politics are a nightmare; the kings are unstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we are really never on solid ground except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not only always unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are all castles in the air; it is only the churches that are built ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... it remains an ideal to which we should wish to approach as nearly as possible, and which, in some distant age, we hope may be reached completely. Syndicalism shares many of the defects of Anarchism, and, like it, would prove unstable, since the need of a central government would make itself ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... France and Great Britain are giving to ports held by them a degree of artificial strength uncalled for by their present importance. They look to the near future. Among the islands and on the mainland there are many positions of great importance, held now by weak or unstable states. Is the United States willing to see them sold to a powerful rival? But what right will she invoke against the transfer? She can allege but one,—that of her reasonable policy ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... from one method of work to another, from marble to bronze, and from bronze to clay, did this not by reason of laziness or because he was, as many are, capricious, unstable, and discontented with his art, but because he felt himself drawn by nature to new things and by necessity to an exercise according to his taste, both less fatiguing and more profitable. Wherefore the world and the arts of design ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... Princess of Wales. But that strong-minded woman, Caroline Dorothea Wilhelmina, steadily looked away from the mayor's consort. She would not do what Queen Anne had not thought worth the doing; and Lady Humphreys, we are sorry to say, stood upon her unstable rights, and displayed a considerable amount of bad temper and worse behaviour. She wore a train of black velvet, then considered one of the privileges of City royalty, and being wronged of one, she resolved to make the best of that which she possessed—bawling, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... reward of 1000 marks followed this deed of bravery. Some of the insurgents were afterwards executed as traitors; but the majority even of the ringleaders escaped unpunished, for Henry's seat upon the throne was so unstable, that it was deemed better to win the people by a manifestation of clemency, rather than to provoke them by an exhibition ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... closer to the ground, he feels even if he cannot express the doubt of the disinterestedness of the land-scheme promoter, of the wisdom of his father. He knows better than his elders the uncertainties of salaried men, young men with a way to make in the unstable conditions of to-day. ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... composed of "every particular man." The sovereign power was unlimited, and was not to be questioned. Whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was the form of government was unimportant, though Hobbes preferred monarchy, because popular assemblies were unstable and apt to need dictators. Civil laws were the standard of right and wrong, and obedience to autocracy was better than the resistance which led to civil war or anarchy—the very things that induced men to establish sovereignty. Only when the safety of the state was ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... and celestial was Leonardo, the son of Ser Piero da Vinci; and in learning and in the rudiments of letters he would have made great proficience, if he had not been so variable and unstable, for he set himself to learn many things, and then, after having begun them, abandoned them. Thus, in arithmetic, during the few months that he studied it, he made so much progress, that, by continually suggesting doubts and difficulties to the master who was teaching him, he would very often ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... take mind, in the eyes of learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently irregular and wayward character. How different the manifestations in different beings! how unstable in all!—at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive! It seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is only in appearance. When we give up the individual, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM, With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. THEN I had religion, THEN ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... between the Shakespeares and the other Arden families seems to have been unstable. Aunt Joan's husband, Edmund Lambert, of Barton-on-the-Heath, and their son John, through rather sharp practice for cousinly customs, became owners of Asbies. There is a hazy suspicion even about the bona fides of the Edkins. Agnes had settled rather far off at the home of ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... her husband; "not a knave, but a singular example of a man whose feelings and susceptibilities never deepen into affection—unstable as water—tossed hither and thither for want of fixed principles, and suffering intensely in his better moods from the knowledge of the weakness he has not the courage to overcome. I was not inclined to let him spare himself, and did not contradict his opinion that he was a 'fool,' but told ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... sentiment, so happily disguised; Pope, in the chair of wisdom, tells much that every man knows, and much that he did not know himself; and gives us comfort in the position, that though man's a fool, yet God is wise; that human advantages are unstable; that our true honour is, not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own, and that happiness is always in our power." The reader, when he meets all this in its new array, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
