"Mutability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lament not Fortune's mutability, And seize her fickle favours ere they flee; If others never mourned departed bliss, How should a turn of Fortune come ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... collecting the ashes of these two compositions, the tendency of which is so different, (for such is the complexion of the moment, that I would not have even the servant suspect I had been burning a quantity of papers,) I could not but moralize on the mutability of popular opinion. Mr. Burke's Gallic adversaries are now most of them proscribed and anathematized more than himself. Perhaps another year may see his bust erected on the piedestal which now supports that of Brutus ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... a firm hold upon the mind of Darwin, in an instant, one day while on board the "Beagle." From that very hour the thought of the mutability of species was the one ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... sealed book. When looking upon the scene which has been consecrated by the presence and labours, the joys and sorrows, of such a man, how interesting are our reflections, marred as they may be by mournful impressions of "the mutability of human affairs." We feel a romantic regret that the genius of Johnson could not bestow an imperishability upon the spot; and preserve it from the casualties and decay of fire, and storm, and time. Here the unfortunate Savage has held ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... this great structure be erected than under those of that Aristotelian Realism, which was at bottom a dialectic between the Platonic Realism and Nominalism; and which was represented as capable of uniting immanence and transcendence, history and miracle, the immutability of God and mutability, Idealism and Realism, reason ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... nearer to us than the head, and gives us trouble, whereas the latter knows how to set matters to rights, the affairs of the heart had always appeared to me as the most important. I was never weary of reflecting upon the transient nature of attachments, the mutability of human character, moral sensuality, and all the heights and depths, the combination of which in our nature may be considered as the riddle of human life. Here, too, I sought to get rid of that which troubled me, in a song, an epigram, in some kind of rhyme; which, since ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... EXTRACTS FROM UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT: Humility Oppressed Upward Strivings Truthfulness Love's Influence Value of Adversity Misguiding Appearances Virgin Purity Man's Destiny Love's Incongruities Retribution Love's Mutability A Mother's Advice Sunrise in the Country Faith in Love Unrequited Affection The Poet's Troubles Echoes from the City Love's Wiles Hazard in Love A Mother's Love "The Shadow of the Cross" Curates and Colliers: on reading in a ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... takes what is true of a term secundum quid, treats it as true of the same term simpliciter, and then, of course, applies it to the term secundum aliud. A {281} good example of this is found in the first triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever is by the same act is not, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been written has its roots in an ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... that his proper day had been stormy or unsympathetic or the people had had some crops to get in or something else to do, and so the saint had had his festa shifted; or it may have been because some greater festival had fallen on S. Somebody's day owing to the mutability of Easter or for some other reason. I had been wishing I could have been at Castellinaria for the first anniversary of Ricuzzu's birth, I ought to have wished to be there for the festa of S. Enrico, but I ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... contrary, she registered them every one with the accuracy of a trained observer. And as surely as the cumulative evidence of all she saw began to point with ever greater precision in the direction of her sister's fickleness and mutability, the more her health improved, and the more cheerful she became. It is remarkable how the state of being overanxious spoils a creature's humour and mars the brightest sally. A week previously Cleopatra could say nothing, however bright, that did not fall flat, even ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... wonder, always, everywhere— Not that vast mutability which is event, The pits and pinnacles of change, But man's desire and valiance that range All circumstance, and come ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... on the energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs, and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events. Such a spirit, too, rests upon itself; it is not confined to partial views or to one particular object. And if at last all should be lost, it has saved ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... first to proclaim the doctrine of the perpetual fluxion of the universe (to reon, to gignomenon—Unrest and Development), the endless changes of matter, and the mutability and perishability of all individual things. This restless, changing flow of things, which never are, but always are becoming, he pronounced to be ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... as possible to the extraordinary happenings of that Saturday afternoon, which as much as any other event in this entire history, portrays the mutability of the feminine mind. I had gone out to the cabin to see that everything was in order, and Jerry was to follow later, while a few of the men fished up stream, Marcia and some of her guests driving in motors to the upper gate, cutting across to the cabin through the woods. Christopher ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... in my inner ear, that neither is that creature coeternal unto Thyself, whose happiness Thou only art, and which with a most persevering purity, drawing its nourishment from Thee, doth in no place and at no time put forth its natural mutability; and, Thyself being ever present with it, unto Whom with its whole affection it keeps itself, having neither future to expect, nor conveying into the past what it remembereth, is neither altered by any change, nor distracted into any times. O blessed creature, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... this secular fluctuation of the constellation figures is not without keen interest for the meditative observer. It is another reminder of the swift mutability of terrestial affairs. To the passing glance, which is all that we can bestow upon these figures, they appear so immutable that they have been called into service to form the most lasting records of ancient thought and imagination that we possess. In the forms of the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the privileged class had gone to the wall. In this era of unrestrained ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... that he drank off the cup of suffering to the very extremity of what his peculiar nature allowed. And in no life of so short a duration, have there ever been crowded equal extremities of gorgeous prosperity and abject infamy. It may be added, as another striking illustration of the rapid mutability and revolutionary excesses which belonged to what has been properly called the Roman stratocracy then disposing of the world, that within no very great succession of weeks that same victorious ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... her of the proud creature she had known, raging terribly through the obsequious ranks of clerks, and carrying desolation to the Hutches and the many-headed editorial department. She looked, and was filled with reflections on the mutability of human affairs. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... not making the king's soldiery purchase the advantage they have obtained at a dearer rate. It is not, Gentlemen, it is not to respect the dispensations of Providence, nor to provide any decent retreat in the mutability of human affairs. It leaves no medium between insolent victory and infamous defeat. It tends to alienate our minds further and further from our natural regards, and to make an eternal rent and schism in the British nation. Those who do not wish for such a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with our scientific readers. I think some few passages savour of the dogmatism of the pulpit, rather than of the philosophy of the Professor's Chair; and some of the wit strikes me as only worthy of — in the 'Quarterly.' Nevertheless, it is a grand piece of argument against mutability of species, and I read it with fear and trembling, but was well pleased to find that I had not overlooked any of the arguments, though I had put them to myself as feebly as milk and water. Have you read 'Cosmos' yet? The English translation is wretched, and the semi-metaphysico-politico ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... a humid flux, or catarrh, by the mutability of air, falls from your head into an arm or shoulder, or any other part; take you a ducat, or your chequin of gold, and apply to the place affected: see what good effect it can work. No, no, 'tis this blessed unguento, this ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... below), leads deism toward dissolution. Among those who defended revealed Christianity against the deistical attacks we may mention the names of Conybeare (1732) and Joseph Butler (1736). The former argues from the imperfection and mutability of our reason to like characteristics in natural religion. Butler (cf. p. 206) does not admit that natural and revealed religion are mutually exclusive. Christian revelation lends a higher authority to natural religion, in which she finds ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... they wondered; they complained. And where are they now? All dead and gone. Wilt thou also be like one of them? Or rather leaving to men of the world (whose life both in regard of themselves, and them that they converse with, is nothing but mere mutability; or men of as fickle minds, as fickle bodies; ever changing and soon changed themselves) let it be thine only care and study, how to make a right use of all such accidents. For there is good use to be made of them, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts,—her influence and her glory will still survive,—fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... for the wicked of every class- -the most part destined to perpetual labour or to the gallows. And in one century to come, what living being will be found in these cells? Oh, mighty Time! unceasing mutability of things! Can he who rightly views your power have reason for regret or despair when Fortune withdraws her smile, when he is made captive, or the scaffold presents itself to his eye? yesterday I thought myself one of the happiest of men; to-day every pleasure, the least flower that strewed ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... ascribed to Hushang, one of the earliest kings of Persia, are the following remarkable words: "The passions of men may, by long acquaintance, be thoroughly known; but the passions of women are inscrutable; therefore they ought to be separated from men, lest the mutability of their tempers should ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... had so recently appeared in royal splendor surrounded by an army, his generous heart was touched by sympathy. He said everything to comfort him that became a courteous and Christian knight, observing that the same mutability of things which had suddenly brought him low might as rapidly restore him to prosperity, since in this world nothing is stable, and sorrow, like ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... here also that the Pope has now fixed his abode. We cannot take one step in Rome without bringing the present near to the past, and different periods of the past near to each other. But we learn to reconcile ourselves to the events of our own time, in beholding the eternal mutability of the history of man; and we feel ashamed of letting our own lot disturb us in the presence of so many ages, which have all overthrown the work of ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... barrels, the horse-dealer padding the foot of a lame horse, men selling inferior skins for good fur, and other cheats with false weights, short measure, and light money, prove that the vices of the modern age are not novelties. Other allegorical pictures and verses describe the mutability of fortune, where a wheel, guided by a gigantic hand outstretched from the sky, is adorned with three asses, wearing of course the cap ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... been a mighty gain to such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser's "Fairy Queen," above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many a dark eschatological superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism, which was even then tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to give him altogether a freer and more loving ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... argument. Mr Easy had admitted that she was right, and if like all men he would do wrong, why, what could a poor woman do? With a lady of such a quiet disposition, it is easy to imagine that the domestic felicity of Mr Easy was not easily disturbed. But, as people have observed before, there is a mutability in human affairs. It was at the finale of the eleventh year of their marriage that Mrs Easy at first complained that she could not enjoy her breakfast. Mrs Easy had her own suspicions, everybody else considered it past ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... save where the reflection of the sky gave it the appearance of a shield of blued steel. No gaping tourists loitered, eyeing with their glasses, or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient river god. All tended to harmonize with the natural grandeur of the scene. I gazed long. I saw how here mutability and unchangeableness were united. I surveyed the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like toppling ambition, o'erleaping themselves, they fall on t'other side, expanding into foam ere they reach ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... the beginning, an exemplification of the power that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man's life. With regard to myself, this came almost by inheritance. My father was one of those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of wit and imagination, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... of Princes," from which this is an extract, was printed in folio in 1558. Its complete title is, "The Tragedies gathered by Jhon Bochas of all such Princes as fell from theyr Estates throughe the Mutability of Fortune since the creation of Adam until his time; wherin may be seen what vices bring menne to destruccion, wyth notable warninges howe the like may be avoyded. Translated into English by John Lidgate, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... and the mourner of Dr. West, coldly. "I admit it was discreet of thee in old times to have thy sentimental passages there with caballeros who, like the guests of the hidalgo that kept a skeleton at his feast, were reminded of the mutability of their hopes by Koorotora's bones and the legend. But with the explosion of this idea of a primal curse, like Eve's, on the property," added the Dona Maria, with a slight bitterness, "thou mayest have thy citas—elsewhere. Thou canst scarcely keep ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... necessarily, for the time at least, superior to the afflicted person,) and indulged his love of talking. He inflicted on the poor penitenta harangue of pitiless length, stuffed full of the usual topics of the mutability of human affairs—the eminent advantages of patience under affliction— the folly of grieving for what hath no remedy—the necessity of taking more care for the future, and some gentle rebukes on account of the past, which acid he threw in to assist in subduing the patient's obstinacy, as Hannibal ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... 1813 Dr. W. C. Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the Royal Society in London that contains a passage that might have come from the pages of Darwin. In the anonymous and famous volume called "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the vital hint, the first step, his discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let him take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood,—fortune, mutability, death,—just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, albeit by ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... play. A withholding from the scene will naturally arouse disturbing wishes; but to be present lulls; for then we live, we are in our element. And who could expect, what sane person can desire, perpetual good luck? Fortune, the goddess, and young Love, too, are divine in their mutability: and Fortune would resemble a humdrum housewife, Love a droning husband, if constancy were practised by them. Observe the staggering and plunging of the blindfold wretch seeking to be persuaded of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as she paced the Square. The sight of the half-stripped tree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thought of skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. They seemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability of all things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to live and exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creeping changes and the insidious passing away of youth and all it meant to her! "I hate autumn, most awfully," she had ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Francisco de Ubeda in this matter, and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that, if my quill display no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From the jargon, therefore, of the Highland gillies, I pass to the character of their Chief. It is an important examination, and ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... the evidence we have in favor of the fixedness of species is, of course, evidence not only against Darwinism, but against evolution in all its forms. It would seem idle to discuss the question of the mutability of species, until satisfied what species is. This, unhappily, is a question which it is exceedingly difficult to answer. Not only do the definitions given by scientific men differ almost indefinitely, but there is endless diversity ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Thanks to the surprising mutability of temper which was the most striking characteristic of his nature, M. Wilkie was already consoled for ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... noticed in such works as Lorenzo's Ambra. The subject, however, is treated in a more subtly allegorical manner than by Ovid's direct imitators, and this mode of presentment likewise characterizes Spenser's tale of Molanna in the fragment on Mutability.[106] Browne returned to a more crudely metamorphical tradition in the loves of Walla and Tavy, while a similarly mythological Naturanschauung may be ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Nearly all the large European galleries contain specimens of his work and in the majority of cases the pictures are queried. That fatal (?) which, since curators are more erudite and conscientious, is appearing more frequently than in former years, sets one to musing over the mutability of pictorial fortunes. Also, it awakens suspicions as to the genuineness of paint. Restorations, another fatal word, is usually a euphemism for overpainting. Between varnish and retouching it is difficult to tell where the old master leaves off and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... to the forest of Arden. Being come thither, they were glad they had so good a harbor: but fortune, who is like the chameleon, variable with every object, and constant in nothing but inconstancy, thought to make them mirrors of her mutability, and therefore still crossed them thus contrarily. Thinking still to pass on by the by-ways to get to Lyons, they chanced on a path that led into the thick of the forest, where they wandered five or six days without meat, that ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... mutable by a power in itself, thus also in some manner every creature is mutable. For every creature has a twofold power, active and passive; and I call that power passive which enables anything to attain its perfection either in being, or in attaining to its end. Now if the mutability of a thing be considered according to its power for being, in that way all creatures are not mutable, but those only in which what is potential in them is consistent with non-being. Hence, in the inferior ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... return the money they had been at such pains to collect. Even Mrs. Fraser was disappointed in the minister's action, for she had been in hopes that Annie would be the organist, and she sighed long and deeply over the mutability of the young minister. Such sudden changes of opinion, she declared, denoted an unstable character, and she feared he would not have a good influence over the wild and unsettled young ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... author in verse and prose, original and translated, and is certainly to be reckoned among the predecessors of Shakespeare in dramatic composition. His earliest work, as far as can be now ascertained, was "The Mirror of Mutability," 1579, when he was in his 26th year: he dedicates it to the Earl of Oxford, and perhaps then belonged to the company of players of that nobleman, to which he had again attached himself on his return from Italy.[150] The Council Registers ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... blessed fountain, 1 John iv. 9, 10; Rom. iii. 24, 25. God hath been framing this righteousness from all eternity, and even this world seems to be made for this end. All God's dispensation with Adam, his making a covenant of works with him, his mutability and liableness to fall, and so governing all things in his holy providence that he should fall from his own righteousness, and involve all his posterity in the same condemnation with himself,—all this seems to be in respect of God's intention and purpose, even ordained for this end, that the ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... is not very strange; for my uncle is king of Denmark;] This is a reflection on the mutability of fortune, and the variableness of ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... under the yellow birches the lady's slipper he had transplanted, year after year, and that finally took root and showed a fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy, wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to the left ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... this inconstancy and mutability of mind enough to deter any one by its own deformity? We are to demonstrate, as was said of every perturbation, that there are no such feelings which do not consist entirely of opinion and judgment, and are not owing to ourselves. ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... and naked, other times hot and flowery: nay, I cannot tell how, but even the lowest of those celestial bodies, that mother of months, and empress of seas and moisture, as if she were a mirror of our constant mutability, appeareth (by her too great nearness {21} unto us) to participate of our changes, never seeing us twice with that same face: now looking black, then pale and wan, sometimes again in the perfection and fulness of her beauty shining over us. Death ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... what Spain was at no remote period of time, but in her instance we have an example showing us that states are no more exempt than individuals from the mutability of fate. So was it with Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Rome, though in their case we look far back into the vista of history to recall the change, whereas in the instance of Spain we are contemporary witnesses. From a first-class power, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... angels' trumpets—on the emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and the combined effect of so many of them in this quiet ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... achievements in art most distinctive of the present age—the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance—proclaim the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed, the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, "I shall ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... they are an early manifestation of the mental bias which leads to pantheism, metempsychosis, and the feeling that all things and persons are transitory and partial aspects of the one reality. But evidently the mutability of the Vedic gods is also due to their nature: they are bundles of epithets and functions without much personal or local centre. And these epithets and functions are to a large extent, the same. All the gods are bright and swift and helpful: all love sacrifices and bestow wealth, sons and cows. A ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... lay to heart the deceptiveness and mutability of all the external species of matter, at the same time considering that we have no reason to deem it capable of change in its ultimate and imperceptible particles; if, also, we reflect, that whatever is not palpable in itself is yet indicated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... John Brown's monument at Balmoral; and the date of the yearly departure for Scotland was fixed by that fact. Inevitably it was around the central circumstance of death—death, the final witness to human mutability—that these commemorative cravings clustered most thickly. Might not even death itself be humbled, if one could recall enough—if one asserted, with a sufficiently passionate and reiterated emphasis, the eternity of love? Accordingly, every ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... this mutability, this power to detach herself from her environment and view it with the stoical indifference of a spectator that caused Wilton with its harsh New England standards, to characterize Celestina as "easy ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... oppressive. This conviction, indeed, strikes us in a very peculiar manner as we read, that no more genial nature ever penetrated that dismal and incredible East, to avouch the eternal freshness of man against the decay of nature and the mutability of institutions. An actually weird effect is produced by the sight of this plump and rosy Christian pervading the graves of dead empires, and thinking democracy amidst the listening ghosts of the Pharaohs. Did these ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... not, the life of our spirits is not at the mercy of changing events. We look back on a lifetime of changing scenes through which we have passed, and forward to a similar succession, and this mutability is sad to many of us, and in some aspects sad to all, so powerless we are to fix and arrest any of our blessings. Which we shall keep we know not; we only know that, as certainly as buds and blossoms of spring drop, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... nature, and men who live by the life of the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, empirical, parts of a vast nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural, psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on" incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is "heavenly," a creation ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... dinner. He had said as well that there were all sorts of things they ought to have; yet governess and pupil, it had to be admitted, were still divided between discussing the places where any sort of thing would look best if any sort of thing should ever come and acknowledging that mutability in the child's career which was naturally unfavourable to accumulation. She stayed long enough only to miss things, not half long enough to deserve them. The way Sir Claude looked about the schoolroom had made her feel ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... changeableness, n. mutability, variability, inconstancy, instability, vacillation, convertibility, transmutability, mobility, impermanence; volatility, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... know them no longer. "This, this," their solemn voices preach to us, "is the changeableness of earth, and the emptiness of its pursuits!" They urge us to seek the noblest end, the unfailing treasure. They bid us to find our hope and our rest, our only constant joy in Him, who alone, amid this mutability and ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... countless ages, during which whole continents have been submerged, whole seas become dry land, again and again. Even now the heavens and the earth are being shaken by researches into the antiquity of the human race, and into the origin and the mutability of species, which, issue in what results they may, will shake for us, meanwhile, theories which are venerable with the authority of nearly eighteen hundred years, and of almost every great Doctor since ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... here expressly stated that the theory of the mutability of species is Mr. Darwin's own; this, nevertheless, is the inference which the great majority of his readers were likely to draw, and did draw, from ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... boys. You've got nothing to change into," said Betty, pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in gardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, which stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger. She gripped Archer's hand. On she ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... dark for a working theory of the Evolution of life, and it is remarkable that they clearly perceived from the outset that the point to which observation should be directed was not the past but the present mutability of species, and further, that this mutability was simply the variation of individuals on ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... hand of age, as the tale of other times passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain—'Roll on, ye dark brown year, ye bring no joy in your wing to Ossian!'" "The poet Gray, too," says Wilson, "frequently ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... the colour of sticklebacks, and other small fishes, was influenced by the colour of the earthenware, or other vessels in which they were confined, as well as modified by the quantity of light to which they were exposed; and Mr Shaw has very recently informed us, regarding this mutability of the outer aspect of fishes, that if the head alone is placed upon a particular colour, (whether lighter or darker,) the whole body will immediately assume a corresponding shade, quite independent of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... same; in this sense the immutability of the universe is much more easy of comprehension, much more demonstrable than that of an other being to whom, they would attribute all the effects, all the mutations which take place. Nature is not more to be accused of mutability, on account of the succession of its forms, than the eternal Being is by the theologians, by the diversity of his decrees. Here we shall be able to perceive that, supposing the laws by which nature acts to be immutable, it does ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... to feel the luxury of the sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, "inhale great draughts of space," wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... not buffet any set of beings with more industry, and withal less effect, than Actors. There may be something in the habitual mutability of their feelings that evades the blow; they live, in a great measure, out of this dull sphere, "which men call earth;" they assume the dress, the tone, the gait of emperors, kings, nobles; the world slides, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... in the English House of Lords, the evils which would thence arise to the public would inflict a greater wound upon his heart than any loss he might himself sustain by such irregular proceedings. He flourished much on generosity and forgiveness of mutual injuries, and hinted at the mutability of human affairs, always favourite topics with the weaker party in politics. He pathetically lamented, and gently censured, the haste which had been used in depriving him of his situation of Lord Keeper, which his experience ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... differently interpreted! Does the difference imply that the early observer had no objective facts before him, and that modern astronomy has advanced to a freedom which enables it to frame hypotheses at its sovereign will? Such a conclusion is just possible as we meditate on the mutability of many scientific concepts! Still, the conclusion would be regarded as somewhat violent. But if it is allowed that in the latter case, the basis of objective fact gives continuity to the development of astronomic ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... that is properly perceived by the visive faculty amounts to no more than colours, with their variations and different proportions of light and shade. But the perpetual mutability and fleetingness of those immediate objects of sight render them incapable of being managed after the manner of geometrical figures; nor is it in any degree useful that they should. It is true there are divers of them perceived at once, and more of some and less of others: but accurately to ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... out by the radical friar who wrote the Song of Lewes. Even to the partisan of Earl Simon, Edward was "a valiant lion, quick to attack the strongest, and fearing the onslaught of none. But if a lion in pride and fierceness, he was a panther in inconstancy and mutability, changing his word and promise, cloaking himself by pleasant speech. When he is in a strait he promises whatever you wish, but as soon as he has escaped he forgets his promise. The treachery or falsehood, whereby he is advanced, he calls prudence; the way whereby he arrives ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... one may in the literature which was open to Dante, one finds evidence of his universal reading. We take up such a book as Otto of Freising's Annals (to which, with his Acts of Frederick I., we shall have to refer again), and find the good bishop moralising thus on the mutability of human affairs, with especial reference to the break-up of the Empire in the ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... of that metaphor? Stable being, as it seems to me, is the first thought in it, for there is nothing that is more absolutely the type of unchangeableness and steadfast continuance. The great cliffs rise up, and the river glides at their base—it is a type of mutability, and of the fleeting generations of men, who are as the drops and ripples in its course—it eddies round the foot of the rocks to which the old man looks up, and sees the same dints and streaks and fissures ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... been called his "intellectual universality," the elements which compose it cannot be reduced to unity and harmony. It would be difficult to co-ordinate them into a higher synthesis, for that universality is at the same time diversity and mutability. Goethe is essentially changeable and elusive. In his works we find combined the antipodes of human thought. There is little in common between the poet of Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther on the one hand and the poet of Tasso ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... pantheism but monotheism, and not rebellion but submission, were to be the animating creed and motive of the protagonist. In the first of the two Scenes he addresses in succession the great heavenly lights, but in their mutability he finds no stay or solace for mind and heart, and he turns to the creator of them all. "Uplift thee, loving heart, to the creating One! Be thou my Lord, my God! Thou, all-loving One, Thou who didst ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... those convolutions of trail and argument in which he had expended the finest flowers of his contradictory faculties, the stanch immobility of his obstinacy, his unswerving singleness of purpose in seeing only one side of a question, this afternoon, a few short hours since! The mutability of the affairs of the most immutable of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Juan mused on mutability, Or on his mistress—terms synonymous— No sound except the echo of his sigh Or step ran sadly through that antique house; When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh, A supernatural agent—or a mouse, Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the people realised that the trance of Time had paralysed his daughter Mutability as well. Every operation depending on her silent processes was arrested. The unborn could not come to life. The sick could not die. The human frame could not waste. Every one in the enjoyment of health and strength felt assured of the perpetual possession ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... rare or beautiful. It was nature with her simplest ornaments, and family life in the most unpretending tranquillity. But nothing was wanting. I had space, verdure, affection, conversation, liberty, and employment,—the necessity of occupation, that spur and bridle which human indolence and mutability so often require. I was perfectly content. When the soul is calm, the heart full, and the mind active, situations the most opposite to those we have been accustomed to possess their charms, which speedily ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... God before the altar prayers in their behalf, he also ascended the pulpit to speak of life and death in all their sublime relations. "There was nothing touching," says Talfourd, "in the instability of fortune, in the fragility of loveliness, in the mutability of mortal friendship, or the decay of systems, nor in the fall of States and empires, which he did not present, to give humiliating ideas of worldly grandeur. Nor was there anything heroic in sacrifice, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... blinking gradually back to a state of composure, glad to be appeased on any terms; for mutability is but another name for the sex, and it is the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the hoof-marks of the hunters. About noon he found himself dull, melancholy, and disconsolate, before the sign of the "Pig and Whistle," on the Westerham road, where, after wetting his own whistle with a pint of half-and-half, he again journeyed onward, ruminating on the uncertainty and mutability of all earthly affairs, the comparative merits of stag-, fox-, and hare-hunting, and the necessity of getting rid of the day somehow ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... creative act; the second as much as, if not more than, the first. According to the first theory the creative power has been distributed over a series of acts, according to the second theory it has been concentrated in one primal creation. The second is the theory of the mutability of species, or, in general, of evolution, but not necessarily of ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... alluded to, with whom I deeply sympathize, who are only deterred from more active exertion by their reluctance to give dissatisfaction to those whom they respect. The sorrow which I feel, under the consideration that, in parting with many of you, we never probably shall meet again in mutability, is softened by the persuasion, that the difficulties by which you are surrounded are lessening, and that some who are now opposing you, will, ere long, join you in efforts, which shall remove from the minds, both of abolitionists and ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... usually so weak, that it is absolutely necessary for them to know Sorrow and Pain to be in their right Senses. Prosperous People (for Happy there are none) are hurried away with a fond Sense of their present Condition, and thoughtless of the Mutability of Fortune: Fortune is a Term which we must use in such Discourses as these, for what is wrought by the unseen Hand of the Disposer of all Things. But methinks the Disposition of a Mind which is truly great, is that which makes Misfortunes and Sorrows little when they befall ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... and ending it all. Her faith had been his constant marvel. Every hour, every moment, she knew only the immanence of her God; whereas he, obedient to the undulating Rincon character-curve, expressed the mutability of his faith in hourly alternations of optimism and black despair. After periods of exalted hope, stimulated by the girl's sublime confidence, there would come the inevitable backward rush of all the chilling ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to sit in his cell and meditate on the mutability of human events," answered Mr. Buxton, and this time ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... have an income now of $50,000 a year or an income of $1000. A bank is secure according to its capital stock, and not to be judged by the deposits for a day or a week. A man is rich according to his sterling qualities, and not according to the mutability of circumstances, which may leave with him a large amount of resources to-day and withdraw them to-morrow. If a man is worth nothing but money he is poor indeed. If a man have upright character he is rich. Property may come and go, he is independent of the markets. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... and providence, they would not declare themselves fools as now they do, and he should have no cause of laughter; but (quoth he) they swell in this life as if they were immortal, and demigods, for want of understanding. It were enough to make them wise, if they would but consider the mutability of this world, and how it wheels about, nothing being firm and sure. He that is now above, tomorrow is beneath; he that sate on this side today, tomorrow is hurled on the other: and not considering these matters, they fall into many inconveniences and troubles, coveting ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... [end of page iii] remains of ancient greatness, presenting a melancholy contrast with the poverty, indolence, and ignorance, of the present race of inhabitants, and an irresistible proof of the mutability of ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... there, suh. De po' lamb fell—No, suh"—the old woman's racial mutability swept her into a sudden flare of indignation —"old Cindy ain't gwineter lie for dat debble. He done it, suh. May de Lawd wither de hand what—dar now! Cindy promise her sweet lamb she ain't gwine tell. Miss Amy got ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Fourth. The mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members, however qualified they may be, points out, in the strongest manner, the necessity of some stable institution in the government. Every new election in the States ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... of the foregoing letter is published in the "Life and Letters," II., page 29. It is interesting as giving his views on the mutability of species. Thus he wrote: "With respect to books on this subject, I do not know any systematical ones, except Lamarck's, which is veritable rubbish; but there are plenty, as Lyell, Pritchard, etc., on the view of the immutability." ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Lamarckiana, obtained at the end of a few generations a certain number of new species. The theory he deduces from his experiments is of the highest interest. Species pass through alternate periods of stability and transformation. When the period of "mutability" occurs, unexpected forms spring forth in a great number of different directions.[28]—We will not attempt to take sides between this hypothesis and that of insensible variations. Indeed, perhaps ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Normandy. It was then that he agreed to an accommodation, and in the terms of peace, which he dictated in the midst of victory to his sons, his subjects, and his enemies, there was seen on one hand the tenderness of a father, and on the other the moderation of a wise man, not insensible of the mutability of fortune. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... more did the mutability of public feeling and opinion as usual become apparent. No sooner had fame spread abroad the report of Flanagan's two-fold crime, and his imprisonment, than those very people who had only a day or two before inferred ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... by all that's unlucky," exclaimed I; and downstairs I ran, with one arm in, and one out of my jacket, leaving Thomas to conclude his speculations on the mutability of human affairs ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... the evidence of age, of him who creeps and totters on his way, who has told his threescore years and ten, and on the threshold of eternity has found the vanity of all things. Oh, look at him, and learn how hard it is, even at the door of death, to FEEL the mutability and nothingness of earth! Palsied he is, yet to the Exchange he daily hies, and his dull eye glistens on the mart—his ear is greedy for the sounds that come too tardily—his quick and treble voice is loud amongst the loudest. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... and great nobles, whose mutability of faith had so happily corresponded with every ecclesiastical vicissitude of the last three reigns, political and personal considerations may well be supposed to have held the first place; and though the old religion might still ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... her affection and her disinterested zeal for his welfare in that tone of hypocrisy which was too congenial to her disposition; at other times she breaks forth into vehement invective against the weakness and mutability of his counsels, and offers him excellent instructions in the art of reigning; but clouded by her usual uncouth and obscure phraseology and rendered offensive by their harsh and dictatorial style. When she regards herself as personally injured by any part of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... he was preceded by music, and colours flying, every one turned out to see him. Amongst the rest was a captive king in chains, who was employed blowing the bellows to our armourer, whilst he was forging bolts and fetters for our prisoners and convicts. Here the sunshine of prosperity, and the mutability of human greatness, were ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... but a hint of the mutability of created things. Marble, sea-shells, the chalk-cliffs of Dover, the limestone fossils which preserve for us animal forms of species long since extinct, the coral formations that are stretching out in dangerous reefs in so many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... all my Worldly Goods, and add my earnest hope that this may suffice to support both him and his Descendants in Godliness and Contentment, knowing how greatly these excell the Wealth of this World and the Lusts of the Flesh. But, knowing also the mutability of earthly things, I do hereby command and enjoin that, if at any time He or his Descendants be in stress and tribulation of poverty, the Head of our Family of Trenoweth shall strictly and faithfully obey these my Latest Directions. He shall take ship and go ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... you do can make you mine, For enterprise with equal charity In duty as in love elect will shine, The constant slave of mutability. Nor can your words for all their honey breath Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme, And though my ear deliver them from death One day or two, it is so little time. Nor does your beauty in its excellence Excel ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... believed, and how some men delight in lies which they either feign of their own heads or most greedily swallow from the mouths of others. In Egypt I heard it reported how Chilo had renounced all friendship and correspondence with Solon, because he maintained the mutability of laws. A ridiculous fiction, quoth I, for then he and we must have renounced Lycurgus, who changed the laws and indeed the whole ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... something about him," though what it was she couldn't really say. Only from the first she had had that feeling in her heart—"He will not be permanent." The joy she had in his youth and mystery was drenched with the pathos of mutability. Mrs. Downey rebelled against mutability's decree. "Perhaps," she said, "we ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the very framework of human life giving way daily before their eyes, men grew apt to give up the game. The very instability of all things, once established as a law, brought a sort of rest and permanence with it; "there is nothing strictly immutable," they might have said, "but mutability." Thus the law of change became a permanent thread in mortal affairs, and, with the knowledge that all the old round would be gone over again by others, grew the sense that in the acceptance of this law of nature there was involved a conquest of nature, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... hastily. So far as I know I stand alone in taking it. Neither Dr. Darwin nor Flourens, nor Isidore Geoffroy, nor Mr. Charles Darwin see any subrisive humour in Buffon's pages; but it must be remembered that Flourens was a strong opponent of mutability, and probably paid but little heed to what Buffon said on this question; Isidore Geoffroy is not a safe guide, as will appear presently; Mr. Charles Darwin seems to have adopted the one half of Isidore Geoffroy's conclusions ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Juan mused on Mutability, Or on his Mistress—terms synonymous— No sound except the echo of his sigh Or step ran sadly through that antique house; When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh, A supernatural agent—or a mouse, Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... a fallida vna Magestad: ayer dead majesty, but yestreen temida Deidad, oy breve a reverenced deity, now a mere monton de tierra. heap of earth. Little gains he, and much he errs, who, Poco alcanca, y mucho hierra cautious, does not note the quien prevenido, no advierte mutability of his lot; for lo inconstante de su suerte; Fate does not exempt the pues no reserva la Parca al successor of a monarch from Sucessor de un Monarca del the tribute of death." [5] ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... Pandora, the mischief-maker among the Utopian shepherds. In Act v. she receives her commission to conform the moon to her own mutability: ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... escaping captivity at the hands of Alexander only to perish by those of the satrap Bessus. All antecedent historical parallels—the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Croesus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition—sank into trifles compared with the overthrow of this towering Persian colossus. The orator AEschines exprest the genuine sentiment of a Grecian spectator when he exclaimed (in a speech delivered at Athens shortly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new light, are poured from the outward world. The conscious love which achieves this vision may, indeed must, fluctuate—"As long as thou livest thou art subject to mutability; yea, though thou wilt not!" But the will which that love has enkindled can hold attention in the right direction. It can refuse to relapse to unreal and egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in darkness, and in the suffering which such darkness brings to the awakened ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... open to every impression of sensuous delight. When he wrote the "Shepherd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or thought of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability," ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... waxen Icarian wing, we seek to ascend to that skiey elevation whence only can the understretching regions of an impassive mutability be satisfactorily contemplated; and if, in our heterogeneous ambition, aspirant above self-capacity, we approach too near the flammiferous Titan, and so become pinionless, and reduced again to an earthly prostration, what marvel is it, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... who the Lady was who had thus changed me; that, by her manifest excellence, they might gain some perception of her virtue; and that, by the comprehension of her most exalted virtue, they might be able to see that all stability of mind could be in that mutability: and, therefore, they should not judge me light and unstable. I then began to praise this Lady, and if not in the most suitable manner, at least as well as I could at first; and I began to say: "Love, reasoning of my Lady in my mind." This Song chiefly has three parts. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... to understand that he now found the advertisement Solon had formerly given him true to his cost, which was, "That men, however fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy, till they had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives, by reason of the uncertainty and mutability of human things, which upon very light and trivial occasions are subject to be totally chang'd into ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... and Jerry, to show the mutability of human affairs and the evanescent nature of reputation, we have been to the British Museum and no less than five circulating libraries in quest of the book, and "Life in London," alas, is not to be found at any one of them. We can only, therefore, speak ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by the fickle-headed tailors, who covet to have several tricks in cutting, thereby to draw fond customers to more expense of money. For my part, I can tell better how to inveigh against this enormity than describe any certainty of our attire; sithence such is our mutability that to-day there is none to the Spanish guise, to-morrow the French toys are most fine and delectable, ere long no such apparel as that which is after the high Almaine fashion, by-and-by the Turkish manner is generally best ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... surface betrayed the agitation beneath. She had no nervous likes or dislikes, no changeful humors, few unequal moods. She did not sparkle and then die out. The fire was always kindled on the hearth, the lamp serenely burning. Some women charm by their mutability; she attracted by her uniformity. But in her uniformity there was no monotony. Like the continuous murmur of a brook, it gladdened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... unexpected knowledge of the lives, the achievements, and the histories of far-off, long-buried, hidden and lost peoples, communities, and even distinct personalities, were carefully planned and exactly executed by those who, already perceiving the mutability of all human life, and all its affairs, who—in a word—realizing that "the fashion of this world passeth away," sought to immortalize and perpetuate forever an absolute history of their own, and kindred ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... abiding, unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress, and therefore mutability, of our existence. Perhaps the most painful of all the forms in which change confronts us is in the increased infirmities and diminished graces which after long absence we observe in those we love; the failure of power and vitality in the outward ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... world is developed in time, or change, the perfection of the faculty that places men in relation with the world will necessarily be the greatest possible mutability and extensiveness. Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action (autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under manifold aspects, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... his whole nature when he sat at her side; with some justice he attributed his new indifference to the extraordinary alteration in her appearance, whereby she seemed now so much older than himself, and he forthwith moralised upon the mutability of human affairs, with all the mental fluency of a very young man whose affairs are still extremely mutable. He fell to musing on the accident in the park, wondering how he would have acted in Mr. Juxon's place, wondering especially what object could have led the wretched tramp to attack ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... been taken at Vienna to deprive the Duke of Parma of the administration of his states, and to put in a regency, of which Ward is to be the head. The elevation of Ward affords not only a singular instance of the mutability of human affairs, but of the tendency of the Anglo-Saxon race, when transplanted to foreign countries, to emerge to eminence, and surpass others by the homely but rare qualities of common-sense and unfaltering energy. Ward was a Yorkshire ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... well-earned popularity and the failure of his ambitious expectations. His life is sad as well as proud, like that of so many other great men who at one time led, and at another time opposed, popular sentiments. Their names stand out on every page of history, examples of the mutability of fortune,—alike joyous and saddened men, reaping both glory and shame; and sometimes glory for what is evil, and shame for what ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... oak-panelled parlour, cake and currant wine were set forth, and after courtesies and compliments exchanged, Aunt Eliza, greatly condescending, talked the fashions with Mrs Larkin; while the farmer and I, perspiring with the unusual effort, exchanged remarks on the mutability of the weather and the steady fall in the price of corn. (Who would have thought, to hear us, that only two short days ago we had confronted each other on either side of a hedge,—I triumphant, provocative, derisive; he flushed, wroth, cracking his whip, and volleying forth profanity? ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... Great Lover Heaven Doubts There's Wisdom in Women He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence) One Day Waikiki Hauntings Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research) Clouds Mutability ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... it been with Spain. Unlike all other nations in all other respects, she could not allow herself to resemble them even in the matter of making sacrifices to Mutability. Had Juan Ponce de Leon been so unlucky as to find the Fountain of Youth, and had he been so unwise as to reserve its waters for his own private washing and drinking, and so have lived from the age of American discovery to the age of American secession, he would, as a Spaniard, have been forced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... at page 480, it cannot surely be said that the most eminent naturalists have rejected the view of the mutability of species? You do not mean to ignore G. St. Hilaire and Lamarck. As to the latter, you may say, that in regard to animals you substitute natural selection for volition to a certain considerable extent, but in his theory of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... county, as distinguished from the city, has no claim to particular consideration. That a man was in gaol for sedition and impiety, would, I believe, have been, within memory, a sufficient reason why he should not come out of gaol a legislator. This reason, notwithstanding the mutability of fashion, happens still to operate on the house of commons. Their notions, however strange, may be justified by a common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... another side. It may be taken that our laws against blasphemy have moved a good deal since Lord Coleridge's famous summing-up concerning the essential mutability of the Common Law about blasphemy which he gave in Regina v. Ramsey and Foote; if the restriction were removed what power would prevent the atheists from producing distinctly anti-Christian plays which might very well cause ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... declined to do such an act, whereupon he dismissed me from his presence for ever. This occurred on the morning of the day of the fire. I thought he might perhaps relent after such an evidence of the mutability of human affairs. I even ventured to remind him that Tooley Street was not made of asbestos, and that an occasional fire occurred there! But this made him worse than ever; so I went the length of saying that I would, at all ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... marked by more dignity than was to be expected from so weak a man. He is said to have even opened a school to teach boys to read, and to have instructed the public singers in reciting poetry. His career, at least, was an impressive commentary on the mutability of fortune, to which the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... when once hurled from the throne of his creation, the conqueror of kingdoms could not descend to compare one petty island with another? “At Elba he found the horizon, the sky, the air, the waves of his childhood; and the history of his island-state, would be to him a constant lesson of the mutability of human things.”[3] ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester |
