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More "Fickleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and not only announces that Chrysa is dead, but tells the equally grateful news that Octavia, Nero's wife, has been condemned to die. Nero himself now appears upon the scene, and a duet follows in which Poppoea reproaches him for his fickleness and he seeks to console her with flattery. At its close the death of Octavia is announced, and Poppoea is appeased by the prospect of sharing the throne. Meanwhile Chrysa has fallen into the custody of Agrippina, Nero's mother, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... life, with a better code of morals. Even political groups have their reactions, in which, notwithstanding the great room for improvement, they stand for morality and justice. The relations of man to man are becoming better understood every day. His fickleness and selfishness are more readily observed in recent than in former times, and as a result the evils of the present are magnified, because they are better understood; in reality, social conditions are improving, and the fact that social conditions are understood and evils clearly observed promises ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... smile he got at the sly twist he gave her hair as he passed her desk on his way to the spelling class. As for Miss Lucy, who saw herself displaced, she wrote to Philemon Ward, and told him of her jilting, and railed at the fickleness and ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... beauty. Hollyhock Ambition. Hydrangea Vain glory. Ice Plant Your looks freeze me. Ivy Friendship. Iris, German Flame. Iris, Common Garden A message for thee. Jonquil Affection returned. Jessamine, White Amiability. Jessamine, Yellow Gracefulness. Larkspur Fickleness. Lantana Rigor. Laurel Words though sweet may deceive. Lavender Mistrust. Lemon Blossom Discretion. Lady Slipper Capricious beauty. Lily of the Valley Return of happiness. Lilac, White Youth. " Blue First emotions of love. Lily, Water Eloquence. May Flower Welcome. Marigold Sacred ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... While all this was occurring, the struggle in Peru had continued to show the fickleness of the fortunes of war. Rondeau had been appointed General-in-Chief of the Army of Peru; he, however, had proved himself a General of slow movements, and suffered several defeats. He also fell out with Guemes, and a battle ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... my shallows and miseries and set me afloat on my full sea. You will only come second in my affections to Mrs. Murray, to whom I shall simply never be able to repay all her kindness and goodness, so if you want to hurt me, Margaret, accuse me again of fickleness and ingratitude." ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... doesn't come; the sea, always the sea without a moment's weakness; in brief, not the stuff of which friends are made! When the knight appears and kills her monster, he loses his halo for Andromede, who cherishes her monstrous guardian. Perseus, a prig disgusted by the fickleness of the Young Person, flees, and the death of the monster brings to life a lovely youth—put under the spell of malignant powers—who promptly weds his ward. In Lohengrin, Son of Parsifal, the whole machinery of the Wagner ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of merchants possessing the monopoly of the European trade,) although the members of this body could have no concern in the transaction." Capt. K. is decidedly of opinion, that nothing but resolute conduct will overcome the fickleness and knavery of the Chinese. He pays a high compliment to our countrymen, especially Mr Drummond, president of the factory, who interfered in his behalf when at Whampoa, and with effect, when they could easily have thwarted his plan, and embroiled his government with that of China. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... them information respecting the frontiers, and arrange about the marching of his troops. His constant word to them was forward! forward! For the precious time for action was slipping away, and he feared their Indian allies, so important to their security while on the march, might, with their usual fickleness, lose patience, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... the stable cat, and the grooms holding a voluble conversation with her, or among the cows at the bottom of the paddock, or feeding the pigs and fowls in the poultry yard. Generally she was attended by Fritz, a beautiful collie, who had, with the fickleness of his nature, transferred his affection from his master to her, and though uncertain in temper towards most, was never anything but amiable ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre
... we as brave men been defeated By brave men, we might have consoled ourselves With common thoughts of Fortune's fickleness: But that a sorry farce should be our ruin!— Did our earnest toilsome struggle merit No graver ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the difference between love and friendship? And when the development of her understanding disclosed the true nature of this intercourse to her, her affections were already engaged to her friend, and all she feared was lest other attractions and fickleness might make him ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... determine,—and did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with Parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his fortitude, to steady their fickleness by his constancy, to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom, to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious,—to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to others that he is unable to bear with equanimity not only his own poverty but also the wealth of others. So also a man who has not been well deceived by his mistress thinks of nothing but the fickleness of women, their faithlessness, and their other oft-proclaimed failing—all of which he forgets as soon as he is taken into favor by his mistress again. He, therefore, who desires to govern his emotions and appetites from a love of liberty alone will strive as much as he can to know virtues and ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the fickleness of untried youth! Henry seemed to promise his country freedom and he gave it tyranny. Francis promised his people glory—that is, honor and splendor. In the end he brought them shame and suffering. Charles V of Germany, youngest of this mighty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... only a few incidents are recorded. One abbot of the monastery, Niphon, was promoted in 1397 to the bishopric of Old Patras, and another named Theophanes was made bishop of the important See of Heraclea. An instance of the fickleness of fortune was brought home to the monks of the establishment by the disgrace of the logothetes Gabalas and his confinement in one of their cells, under the following circumstances:—In the struggle between John Cantacuzene and Apocaucus for ascendancy at the ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... but even my Lord of Chester—my fair father's great enemy—interceded with the Lord King in his behalf. We heard that my Lord of Chester spoke very plainly to him, and told him not only that he would find it easier to draw a crowd together than to get rid of it again, but also that his fickleness would ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... such full assurance of being able to bring Dora forward as a witness in his defense that Florence, for the first time, feels a strong doubt thrown upon the belief she has formed of his being a monster of fickleness. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... had "a propensity for the [fair] sex." After two or three flirtations, he engaged himself, without the knowledge of his mother or guardian, to Nellie Calvert, a match to which no objection could be made, except that, owing to his "youth and fickleness," "he may either change and therefore injure the young lady; or that it may precipitate him into a marriage before, I am certain, he has ever bestowed a serious thought of the consequences; by which means his education is interrupted." To avoid this danger, Washington ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... She was forever having a "crush" on some girl or other, getting suddenly over it, and seeking another affinity with bewildering fickleness. Eva Larry had been proclaimed her dearest friend for a longer term than most ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... woman to whom he had once sung a song of another passion. It is very hard to answer a woman in such circumstances, because her womanhood gives her so strong a ground of vantage! Lady Laura might venture to throw in his teeth the fickleness of his heart, but he could not in reply tell her that to change a love was better than to marry without love,—that to be capable of such a change showed no such inferiority of nature as did the capacity for such a marriage. She could hit him with her argument; ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... cried, in affected surprise. "You were not wont, in past days, to consider my presence an insult, and I could never have believed fickleness a part of your nature. You are now of age, and have a right to listen to my defense, and my suit for ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... soon it would be over; and how the action of one short night would give to all their nights and days to come sovereign sway and royalty! Then she threw contempt on his change of purpose, and accused him of fickleness and cowardice; and declared that she had given suck, and knew how tender it was to love the babe that milked her, but she would, while it was smiling in her face, have plucked it from her breast, and dashed its brains out, if she had so sworn to do it, as he had sworn to perform that murder. ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of others needlessly one offends the divine will, which desires that all be happy as far as it is possible. I will say as much of the fourth section, where there is mention of the source of wrong elections, which are error or ignorance, negligence, fickleness in changing too readily, stubbornness in not changing in time, and bad habits; finally there is the importunity of the appetites, which often drive us inopportunely towards external things. The fifth section is designed to reconcile evil elections or sins with the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... his master's enemies with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no more just then than such complaints are now. Then, as now, he got his deserts; and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sell himself to this ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... directness, and determination in the Duke of Wellington. Next came an evening paper, of high character for Conservative honesty and ability, which (having all along justified the past policy of vigilant neutrality) could not be supposed to acknowledge any fickleness in ministers: the time for moderation and indulgence, according to this journal, had now passed away: the season had arrived for law to display its terrors. Not in the Government, but in the conspirators had occurred the change: and so far—to the extent, namely, of taxing these conspirators with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... people followed her, weeping and bewailing the fickleness of fortune. Griselda did not turn to them, nor speak, nor weep. She quietly went ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... With the fickleness of October weather (which is often as freakish as that of April), the golden afternoon had turned cloudy and raw before the girls returned home. By nightfall it was raining, and a rising, gusty wind had ruffled ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... which deform and degrade the human type. On these diverse points, religious faith could scarcely show its effect; but he also declared himself to be irritable and violent—he confessed to a dangerous fickleness—still, he would readily have slandered himself in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Without annoyance in this earthly state! For, haply, thou dost feed some rankling wound, Or on thy youth pale poverty doth wait, Till years, on heavy wing, have rolled away; Or where thou most didst hope firm faith to see, Thou meetest fickleness estranged and cold; Or if some true and tender heart there be, On which, through every change, thy soul might trust, Death comes with his fell dart, and smites ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... changed with a suddenness that we are apt to think American, but which occurs more frequently in this hemisphere, or rather in this part of it, than in our own. The peculiarity of the American climate is its exaggeration rather than its fickleness; its passages from extreme heat to extreme cold, more than the frequency of its lesser transitions. One never thinks of an umbrella in America, with a cloudless sky; whereas, during the spring months in particular, there is no security against rain an hour at a time, near the western coast of Europe, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... for a short time Lannes, reduced to his own troops, found himself in a difficult position. He was, moreover, ill from a fall from his horse, but succeeded in winning the battle, and drove before him, one after another, all the divisions of the enemy's army. With the cruel and heedless fickleness of revolutionary governments, the Junta of Aranjuez hurriedly cashiered Generals Blake and Castanos. The Marquis of Romana's soldiers having distinguished themselves at Espinosa, he was appointed general of the united armies. Already, in spite of the consternation which reigned in ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... but have failed signally, nor can they succeed while they seek a mechanical solution to what is really a manifestation of life. Could they see the hosts of sylphs winging their way hither and thither, they would know who and what is responsible for the fickleness of the wind; could they watch a storm at sea from the etheric view-point they would perceive that the saying "the war of the elements" is not an empty phrase, for the heaving sea is truly then a battlefield of sylphs and undines and the ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... are that he would instantly fall foul of and try to mar his own handiwork; and he quarrels with his own creatures as soon as he has written them into a little vogue—and a prison. I do not think this is vanity or fickleness so much as a pugnacious disposition, that must have an antagonistic power to contend with, and only finds itself at ease in systematic opposition. If it were not for this, the high towers and rotten places of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... everything to mine. It was the worship of the devotee to his protecting saint. It was the faith that made me rise above misfortune and mishap, and led me onward; and in this way I could have borne anything, everything, rather than the imputation of fickleness. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... when they were retiring to rest, and Caroline and Rosamond were in their mother's room, Rosamond, unable longer to keep her prudent silence, gave vent to her indignation against Count Altenberg in general reflections upon the fickleness of man. Even men of the best understanding were, she said, but children of a larger growth—pleased with change—preferring always the newest to the fairest, or the best. Caroline did not ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... and riding out alone before the people, he cried out, "I am your leader"; and himself promised to grant them all they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to be seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... and invincible force that lies at the end of every existence. Doubtless, from one point of view, unhappiness must always remain the portion of man, and the fatal abyss be ever open before him, vowed as he is to death, to the fickleness of matter, to old age and disease. If we fix our eyes only upon the end of a life, the happiest and most triumphant existence must of necessity contain its elements of misery and fatality. But let us not make a wrong ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... have entire confidence in these charms, which are supplied by Moslem priests; but their confidence is based upon the supposed magic of the writing, irrespective of its religious meaning.[46:1] The failure of a charm to perform a cure is attributed to the ingratitude and fickleness of the spirits.[46:2] In Algeria it is not an uncommon experience of physicians who have prescribed for native patients, to meet such an one some days after, with the prescription either suspended from his neck, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... success or oratorical display! Farewell to the distempered longings for office! Farewell to the dismal, blood-red phantom of martial renown! Fame and glory may then continue, as in times past, the reflection of public opinion; but of an opinion sure and steadfast, without change or fickleness, enlightened by those two sons of Christian truth,—love to God and love to man. From the serene illumination of these duties all the forms of selfishness shall retreat like evil spirits at the dawn of day. Then shall the happiness of the poor and lowly and the education of the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the destruction of men, O bull among men. Indeed, every one of these wait for opportunity in respect of men, like a hunter expectant of opportunities in respect of deer. Assertion of one's own superiority, desire of enjoying others' wives, humiliating others from excess of pride, wrathfulness, fickleness, and refusing to maintain those worthy of being maintained, these six acts of wickedness are always practised by sinful men defying all dangers here and hereafter. He that regards the gratification of lust to be one of life's aims, he that is exceedingly proud, he that grieves ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... gradually did he make the four or five paces between him and safety. The window was gained, and all were saved. The multitude in the street absolutely danced with triumph, and huzzaed, and yelled till you would have fancied their very throats would crack; and then, with all the fickleness of interest characteristic of a large body of people, pressed and stumbled, and cursed and swore, in the hurry to get out of Dunham Street, and back to the immediate scene of the fire, the mighty diapason of whose roaring flames formed an awful accompaniment to ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his fortitude—to steady their fickleness by his constancy—to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom—to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people he resolved to make them great and glorious; to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, the tutelary angel ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... take pleasure in mortifying me. Do you deem me capable of such fickleness? Suppose for a moment, you are not what the world calls beautiful, you could not, by removing your mask, also strip yourself of the attractions of your conversation—of that voice that thrills through my heart—of that grace exhibited in your every movement! With such ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... habit is subjected to our examination, if it appear in any respect prejudicial to the person possessed of it, or such as incapacitates him for business and action, it is instantly blamed, and ranked among his faults and imperfections. Indolence, negligence, want of order and method, obstinacy, fickleness, rashness, credulity; these qualities were never esteemed by any one indifferent to a character; much less, extolled as accomplishments or virtues. The prejudice, resulting from them, immediately strikes our eye, and gives us the sentiment of ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... the Adelantado. In truth, all might have come, for massacre, slow or swift, was certain if we stayed in Veragua. I read that the Adelantado, who was never accused of cowardice or fickleness, was himself determined. The settlement below the golden mines of golden Veragua ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... with him since. I saw the meeting of Octavia and Cleopatra;(192) the Newcastle was all haughtiness and coldness. Mr. Pelham, who foresaw the storm, had prudently prepared himself for the breach by all kind of invectives against the house of Leveson. The ground of all, besides Newcastle's natural fickleness and jealousy, is, that the Bedford and Sandwich have got the Duke. A crash @as been expected, but people now seem to think that they will rub on a little longer, though all the world seems indifferent whether they will or not. Mankind is so sick of all the late follies and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... passion played around his heart with the hitting radiance of a wintry sunbeam flashing against an icicle, which may brighten it for a moment, but cannot melt it. Neither of these was precisely the ease, though such fickleness of disposition might also have some influence ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... is too much. I deserved distrust by my wretched folly and fickleness last year, but I did not know what you were to me then—my most precious one! Can you not trust me! Do you not know how I ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the motionless form of the woman whose love and confidence he had gained and who had been to him such a faithful wife in spite of his fickleness, he wept, and vowed; but what are tears and vows when the will has been weakened by self-indulgence? He looked about him helplessly. What was he to do? What could he do without her? He was almost a stranger to his children, and had no idea how to care for them. She had always carried the burden, ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... that Kinraid was married, her heart had still more strongly turned to Philip; she thought that he had judged rightly in what he had given as the excuse for his double dealing; she was even more indignant at Kinraid's fickleness than she had any reason to be; and she began to learn the value of such enduring love as Philip's had been—lasting ever since the days when she first began to fancy what a man's love for a woman should be, when she had first shrunk from the tone of tenderness ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... to fade And dwindle; yes, the heavens are opening now. Perhaps up there, this night, some lonely soul Gazes at earth, watches our dawning moon, And wonders, as we wonder." In that dark We knelt together . . . Very strange to see The vanity and fickleness of princes. Before his enemies had provoked the wrath Of Rome against him, he had given the name Of Medicean stars to those four moons In honour of Prince Cosmo. This aroused The court of France to seek a lasting place Upon the map of heaven. A letter came Beseeching him to find another star ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... knitting-needles clicked viciously; then she told Lois that this was the rubber, and she had better see to the tray. The young girl must have heard every word they said, though she had not lifted her bright eyes from her book, but she did not seem disturbed by the charge of fickleness on the part of Mr. Forsythe. He had not confided to her his reasons for not going abroad; all she knew was that the summer was the merriest one she had ever spent. "I feel so young," little Lois said; and indeed she had caught a certain careless gayety ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... life I form such wishes. You may see by this that I preserve still that sincere friendship which has united our hearts from our tenderest years:—recognize at least, my dear Sister, that you did me a sensible wrong when you suspected me of fickleness towards you, and believed false reports of my listening to tale-bearers; me, who love only you, and whom neither absence nor lying rumors could change in respect of you. At least don't again believe such things on my score, and never mistrust me till you ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... physical types are reasserting themselves. The folk of a Celtic type, whether pre-Celtic, Celtic, or Norse, have all spoken a Celtic language and exhibit the same old Celtic characteristics—vanity, loquacity, excitability, fickleness, imagination, love of the romantic, fidelity, attachment to family ties, sentimental love of their country, religiosity passing over easily to superstition, and a comparatively high degree of sexual morality. Some of these traits were already noted ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... wanting, and soon the whole of Europe— thanks to the indefatigable manner in which the Norwegians cultivated the European Press—resounded with accusations against the Swedish government, and the entire Swedish nation of unreasonableness, fickleness etc. etc.; it was important now to make good cause for the plans then already existing in Norway, plans which had probably been ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... himself with conjectures about the cause of this unexpected change, he received such intelligence from England, as, when joined with what he himself had perceived by her manner of writing, left him little or no room to doubt of her fickleness and inconstancy. Nevertheless, as he knew by experience that informations of that kind are not to be entirely relied upon, he resolved to be more certainly apprised: and, for that end, departed immediately for London, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... irrevocable that even itself may not change or modify it. To rescind a recent vote is, no doubt, as Sir Robert Peel said, a step not wholly free from objection. It should be an exceptional act, as one which, if often repeated, would give an appearance of capricious fickleness and instability to the opinions of Parliament, calculated to impair that respect for it which the whole state and nation are deeply concerned in upholding; but to refuse, under any circumstances, to confess a change of judgment, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... which faded in one generation and became totally forgotten in another. What jealousies, what petty bickerings, what extravagances! With fancy and desire unchecked, what ingenious tricks they used to keep themselves in the public mind,—tricks begot of fickleness and fickleness begetting. And yet, it was a curious phase: their influence was generally found when history untangled for posterity some Gordian knot. In old times they had sung the Marseillaise and danced the carmagnole and indirectly plied the guillotine. And ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... It was a weighty matter with her. A belief in a successful rival might give Mr. —— pain,—might cause him to doubt her truth and affection,—might induce him to forget her, or cast her off in bitter indignation at her supposed fickleness. I could see in her face her alarm at these suppositions. Yes, it was a great temptation to do a very dishonorable action. A word from me would have ended the trial; for it is only in solitude that we are thus assailed. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... fickleness, Marseilles, whose name during the Terror had been, as one may say, the symbol of the most advanced opinions, had become almost entirely Royalist in 1815. Nevertheless, its inhabitants saw without a murmur the tricolour flag after a year's ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not slight it. Remember you make the world noble; and, if you have an absorbing desire to work in some other way, watch every little loop-hole of opportunity, and see if you cannot make it large enough to jump through to a wider field. Let us all avoid fickleness, however,—the doing a little of this and of that: it is poor economy. To grow up to a work, to master it, we must first be slaves to it. Girls, everywhere, make progress slowly,—grow in efficiency, and do ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... drop off;[323] or rather like the foster-child of Hypsipyle, "sitting in the meadow and plucking flower after flower, snatching at each prize with gladsome heart, insatiable in its childish delight,"[324] so in the case of each of us, owing to our love of novelty and fickleness, the recent flower ever attracts, and makes us inconstant, frequently laying the foundations of many friendships and intimacies that come to nothing, neglecting in love of what we eagerly pursue what we have already possession of. To begin therefore with the domestic ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... indication with him of suppressed and violent emotion. Then he turned his head and regarded me with a slight smile. "Not altogether. You forget that the most faithless men have been the most faithful when they have found the one woman. Curiosity and fickleness are merely parts of a ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... thickens would be to use too coarse a word; it becomes slightly tinged with incident, inasmuch as Euphues falls in love with Lucilla, the destined bride of Philautus. She reciprocates his passion, and the double fickleness of mistress and friend forms an excellent opportunity, which Lyly does not fail to seize, for infinite moralizings in euphuistic strains. Philautus is naturally indignant at the turn affairs have taken, and ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... hospitality at the "Blue Mass" mine should afterward have little part in his active life seemed not inconsistent with his habits. At present the mine was his only mistress, claiming his entire time, exasperating him with fickleness, but still requiring that supreme devotion of which his nature was capable. It is possible that Miss Carmen saw this too, and so set about with feminine tact, if not to supplement, at least to make her rival less pertinacious and absorbing. Apart from this object, ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... this,—How far are they affected by the original axiomatic truths? Truths are like the winds. Near the earth's surface winds blow in variable directions, and the weathercock becomes the type of fickleness. So there is a class of little truths, dependent upon ever-variable relations, with which it is the function of cunning, shrewdness, tact, to deal, and numbers of men seldom or never lift their heads above this weathercock region. Yet the upper air, alike of the spiritual and the physical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... was hated, and it was not the multitude so much as the rulers that hated him. Many of those now shrieking 'Crucify Him!' had shouted 'Hosanna!' a day or two before till they were hoarse. The populace was guilty of fickleness, blindness, rashness, too easy credence of the crafty calumnies of the rulers. But a far deeper stain rests on these rulers who had resisted the light, and were now animated by the basest self-interest in the garb of keen regard for the honour of God. There were very different degrees of guilt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... in Vincoli, Rome. At the beginning of Michelangelo's connection with Julius II., he made plans for a magnificent monumental tomb for this pope, to be ornamented with more than forty statues and to be of great size (34-1/2 x 23 feet). The fickleness of the Pope caused a continual series of disappointments in the progress of the work, which was finally abandoned for the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. After the death of the Pope, his executors were even less zealous for the completion of the tomb. A succession of contracts were made and broken, ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... decided as you please, as long as you are quiet and gentlemanly in your words. Let me say one thing more," she added, very gravely. "If you enter on this affair, and then, in any kind of weakness or fickleness, give it up, I shall despise you, and so will all in this city who know about it. Count the cost. I'm too true a Southerner to look at you again if you trifle with a Southern girl. Your father will ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... little more than one half the sum! The same friend subscribes for a large paper of the present work, of which there are only eighteen copies printed: and of which my hard-hearted printer and myself seize each upon a copy. Will the same friend display equal fickleness in regard to THIS volume? If he does, he must smart acutely for it: nor will 15l. 15s. redeem it! It is justly observed, in the first edition of this work, that, 'analogous to large paper, are TALL copies: that is, copies of the work published on the ordinary size ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... accepted this information, and then made his farewells. Edna's good wishes were couched in a spirit of frigid magnanimity. She had too much self-respect to let him perceive that she resented his fickleness. ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... know what that inquiry means, Michael. You think that I am always so much taken up with new people that I forget my old friends; but you are wrong.' And then she added, a little reproachfully: 'That you of all people should accuse me of fickleness!' ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... as the gradual slowness, of that victory, are well set forth by the future history of the Apostle. We know how his fickleness passed away, and how his vehement character was calmed and consolidated into resolved persistency, and how his love of distinction and self-confidence were turned in a new direction, obeyed a divine impulse, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the happiness of a tranquil family life. The next day, I told them that I had changed my mind, and should not go away, but should establish myself in Berlin. Of course, I received a torrent of gibes on my fickleness; for they did not understand my feelings in respect to the responsibility that I feared to ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... such thing as Fear, And no such word as Reason; And Faith was like a pointed spear, And Fickleness was treason; And hearts were soft, though blows were hard; But when the fight was over, A brimming goblet cheered the board, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... "If I can bring this off, I'll be a fracas buff celebrity. I don't have any illusions about the fickleness of the Telly fans, but for a day or two I'll be on top. If at the same time I had your all out support, pulling what strings ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... servants, as the King and his ministers were now considered to be. Louis and the National Assembly yielded to the menace, the court returned to Paris, politics grew hotter and more bitter, the fickleness of the mob became a stronger influence. Soon the Jacobin Club began to wield the mightiest single influence, and as it did so it grew ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... demi-monde is probable from this fact; as also from the poet's strong assertion that he had never been guilty of an intrigue with a married woman. The class to which she belonged were mostly Greeks or Easterns, beautiful and accomplished, often poetesses, and mingling with these seductive qualities the fickleness and greed natural to their position, of which Ovid somewhat unreasonably complains. To her are dedicated the great majority of the Amores, his earliest extant work. These elegant but lascivious poems, some of which perhaps were the same which he recited to ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... early character was plasticity and fickleness. I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and estate." The honest writer refused to partake of a splendid entertainment with which Gilbert Glossin, Esquire, now of Ellangowan, treated the rest of the company, and returned home in huge bitterness of spirit, which he vented in complaints against the fickleness and caprice of these Indian nabobs, who never knew what they would be at for ten days together. Fortune generously determined to take the blame upon herself, and cut off even this ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... together the details of so delicate a scrutiny by a thread of fiction. The outward body of it matters little. The essential point is to remember that such things were not caused, as they try to persuade us, by human fickleness, by the inconstancy of our fallen nature, by the chance persuasions of desire. There was needed the deadly pressure of an age of iron, of cruel needs: it was needful that Hell itself should seem a shelter, an asylum, by contrast ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... five pounds on purpose that he might be enabled to spend that very Sunday with some officers of the Suffolk volunteers at Ipswich. And hearing this, he would walk out among those rich heaps, at the back of his farmyard, uttering deep curses against the falsehood of men and the fickleness of women. ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... tried every new colour; and often, as is well known, failed.... My fickleness in the mode of colouring arose from an eager desire ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... of the fact of their fickleness, I would buy a dozen or two of the auratum lilies, for even if they last but for a single year, they are so splendid that we can almost afford to treat them as a fleeting spectacle. As the speciosum lilies (I wish some one would give them a more gracious ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... aggrieved than now did the dejected Corporal. His master had not yet even acquainted him with the cause of the countermarch; and, in his own heart, he believed it nothing but the wanton levity and unpardonable fickleness "common to all them ere boys afore they have seen the world." He certainly considered himself a singularly ill-used and injured man, and drawing himself up to his full height, as if it were a matter with which Heaven should be acquainted at the ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... condemned, and which he should have known that he wanted the peculiar ability to bring to a successful and honorable conclusion, he might never have been President, but his fame would have been of a higher order. History might have overlooked the act of political fickleness in his earlier career, which was so warmly resented by many of his contemporaries. Abandonment of party is too common and often too justifiable to be accounted as necessarily a crime; and it can rarely be said with positiveness, whatever the probabilities, ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... One-third of Jim Polk may be human, but the other two-thirds is politician. He will flatter that lady into confidences. She is well nigh distracted at best, these days, what with the fickleness of her husband and the yet harder abandonment by her old admirer Pakenham; so Polk will cajole her into disclosures, never fear. In return, when the time comes, he will send an army of occupation into her country! And all the while, on the one side and the other, ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... Glover was obliged to remain contented, though extremely anxious for the postponed explanation. It could not be levity or fickleness of character which induced his daughter to act with so much apparent inconsistency towards the man of his choice, and whom she had so lately unequivocally owned to be also the man of her own. What external force there could exist, of a kind powerful enough to change the resolutions she had so decidedly ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the fire having been lighted, every one withdrew except the king and queen. She then said to him: "You know how faithless you have been to me, and with this handsome body you will be a much greater attraction to other women. I know the fickleness of your disposition. Can you expect that I will confer on you this beauty for the sake ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... of March in the great, southward-reaching bight of the Tennessee River is the pattern and form of fickleness climatic. Normally it is the time of starting sap and swelling buds and steaming leaf beds odorous of spring; the month when the migratory crows wing their flight northward, and Nature, lightest of winter sleepers in the azurine ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... pointed out above as likely to ensue from a desultory and intermittent mode of dealing with Malay piracy have revealed themselves even sooner and in a more formidable manner than I had anticipated. The weak and covetous sultan of Borneo has, with more than the usual fickleness of Asiatics, already forgotten the lessons we gave him and the engagements he solemnly and voluntarily contracted with us. Mr. Brooke's faithful friends, Muda Hassim and the Pangeran Budrudeen, with numbers of their families ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... in their amiability and fickleness closely resemble the Parisians, passed in a moment from an apparently deep-seated hatred of Napoleon, to the most unbounded confidence. The still bleeding wounds of Wagram were forgotten; every one thought ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... de Besenval appears mightily surprised at the Queen's sudden coolness, and refers it to the fickleness of her disposition. I can explain the reason for the change by repeating what her Majesty said to me at the time; and I will not alter one of her expressions. Speaking of the strange presumption of men, and the reserve with which women ought always to treat ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... for such unionising suggestions. They had gone out of fashion for sixty years to come. Reaction had set in. Public sentiment, frequently reproached for its fickleness, but in reality protective in its vacillation, demanded a change. Federalism had lost prestige. Its leaders were at enmity. Washington, its unconscious mainstay, ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... it soon; she is so young. She will soon get over that gay frippard's fickleness. To-morrow I will start upon my little errand cheerfully. After that she will come round; they ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... the man whom he had selected for her husband. They were married: but she deceived herself; as soon as the ceremony was over, the courage which had supported her gave way, her former feelings returned stronger than ever, and she hated herself for her fickleness. Her heart whispered that it was impossible that one possessing every great and every amiable quality, as did her lover, could ever have proved faithless, or would have abandoned one who loved him so dearly. As she sat in the garden and wept, a slight noise ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... doubtless they receive their reward; but if we would derive the advantages to Character that result from a wise Companionship, we must select our friends without undue regard to the opinions of the world, and impelled by a desire for moral or intellectual advancement. Falsehood and fickleness in friendship result from its being built upon merely selfish or circumstantial foundations. When built upon mutual respect and affection, it contains no element of decay or change; and they who trust to any other foundation ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... tribunal has the right to summon him?—And they dare to condemn him!—Does the king condemn him, or the duke? And the Regent withdraws herself! Orange hesitates, and all his friends!—Is this the world, of whose fickleness and treachery I have heard so much, and as yet experienced nothing? Is this the world?—Who could be so base as to hear malice against one so dear? Could villainy itself be audacious enough to overwhelm with sudden destruction the object of a nation's homage? Yet so it ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... and reputation, because 'an aery [i.e. nest] of children, little eyases [i.e. young hawks],' dominated the theatrical world, and monopolised public applause. 'These are now the fashion,' the dramatist lamented, {214b} and he made the topic the text of a reflection on the fickleness of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... just than his deliberate moral opinions; as if his characters had taken the matter into their own hands, against his will. Or is it art, and art of the subtlest order, which in Kjartan Olafsson, the glorious hero, still leaves something of lightness, of fickleness, as compared both with the intensity of the passion of Gudrun and the dogged resolution of Bolli? There is another Saga in which a hero of the likeness of Kjartan is contrasted with a dark, malevolent, not ignoble figure,—the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... that God might be accused of fickleness. Before, when he was about to punish man, he assigned as a reason for his purpose the fact that the imagination of man's heart is evil; here, when he is about to give unto man the gracious promise that he will not thereafter show ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... the plain is in vegetables, for the use of Paris; though there is occasionally a vineyard, or a field of grain. The weather has become settled and autumnal, and is equally without the chilling moisture of the winter, or the fickleness of the spring. The kind-hearted peasants see me pass among them without distrust, and my salutations are answered with cheerfulness and civility. Even at this trifling distance from the capital, I miss the brusque ferocity that is so apt to characterise the deportment of its lower ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... phenomenon of panic, sympathetic hope and despair, is exhibited by every stock-exchange, and is not peculiar to political life. And when political opinion is not manufactured solely in the reverberating furnace of a city, fickleness ceases to characterise democracy; and, in fact, is not found in Switzerland, or the United States, nor in France so far as politics, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... to her—"My child, remember the country is not the town—the meadow is not a ball-room; you know well that we have promised you to the soldier, Marcel, who loves you, and expects you to be his wife. You must conquer this fickleness of mind. A girl who tries to attract ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... there had been a strong and indeed unreasonable feeling against Hastings. At the close of the trial there was a feeling equally strong and equally unreasonable in his favour. One cause of the change was, no doubt, what is commonly called the fickleness of the multitude, but what seems to us to be merely the general law of human nature. Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... minutes ago, there was a consultation going on with Harry as to what she should wear. I don't think it will last more than half an hour; and then she was coming to try to persuade you to keep her fickleness ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... unhappiness into which Oswald was plunged was increased by the fact that his letters to Corinne received no replies. Had her love ceased when his presence was removed? His friends told him of the fickleness of Italian women, and he began to believe that she had deserted him. The truth was that Corinne was not in Italy to receive his letters. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... last, after long years of delusion and endurance, the scales drop from the eyes of the wife, and revenge or despair drives her into a hostile position towards her lord and master, she is an inhuman criminal, and the hue and cry against the fickleness of women and the falsity of their nature is endless. Oh, the injustice of society and the injustice of cruel man. Is there no relief for helpless women that are bound by the ties of marriage to men who are ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... more brightness in her eyes, and more animation in her countenance than on the previous days; but still the crowd passed on unnoticed. Even the learned brahmins, who stood immovable in rows on each side of her throne, became impatient: they talked about the fickleness of the sex, the impossibility of inducing them to make up their minds; they whispered wise saws and sayings from Ferdistan and others, about the caprice of women, and the instability of their natures, and the more their legs ached from such ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... peristyles, did not in his eyes deserve the term "human." Hence he gave no answer whatever to the applause, or the kisses sent from lips here and there to him. He was relating to Marcus the case of Pedanius, reviling meanwhile the fickleness of that rabble which, next morning after the terrible butchery, applauded Nero on his way to the temple of Jupiter Stator. But he gave command to halt before the book-shop of Avirnus, and, descending from the litter, purchased an ornamented ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... aching sadly to-day, owing to the excitement of her brother's visit and the harsh words which passed between him and his sisters, he telling them, jokingly at first, that he was tired of getting married, and half resolved to give it up; while they, in return, had abused him for fickleness, taunted him with their poverty, and sharply reproached him for his unwillingness to lighten their burden, by taking a rich wife when he ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... brilliant piece of work in STRIFE is Galsworthy's portrayal of the mob, its fickleness, and lack of backbone. One moment they applaud old Thomas, who speaks of the power of God and religion and admonishes the men against rebellion; the next instant they are carried away by a walking delegate, who pleads the cause of the union,—the union that always stands for compromise, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... been subject to their influence know that there is nothing more uncertain than the winds. Their fickleness has passed into a proverb; but their inconstancy, as well as their power, from the fanning air to the destructive tornado, are to be traced to causes that are sufficiently clear, though hid in their nature from the calculations of our forethought. The tempest of the night was ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... guess what it is I have omitted,[1] so as to wish to hand down that same to posterity; since each man has a turn of thinking of his own, and a tone peculiar to himself. It was not, therefore, {any} fickleness, but assured grounds, that set me upon writing {again}. Wherefore, Particulo,[2] as you are amused by Fables (which I will style "Aesopian," not "those of Aesop;" for whereas he published but few, I have brought out a great many, employing the old ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... disposed to comply with my invitation, I desired that he would go over to Fort Providence, and remain near the Indians whom he had engaged for our service. I feared lest they should become impatient at our unexpected delay, and, with the usual fickleness of the Indian character, remove from the establishment before we could arrive. It had been my intention to go to them myself, could the articles, with which they expected to be presented on my arrival, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... with more readiness and effect than others, will ordinarily prosecute and finish their course with proportionably higher reputation. Indeed, to the want of a thorough initiation into the rudiments of learning may be traced much of that indolence and fickleness and easy yielding to temptation, by which the mind, untaught in the labor of successful occupation, and discouraged by the failure of its imprudent efforts, is presently paralyzed, and lost to every honorable and useful purpose. If then it may be provided that early instruction shall be ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... time of stress when Minna began to suffer from the fickleness of some one nearer to her than fortune. Wagner began to cast meaning glances over the garden wall. As Mr. Henderson says: "He was as inconstant as the wind, a rover, and a faithless husband. His misdoings amounted to more ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... for the Baesle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more serious—for Mozart a very serious—affair, was his infatuation with Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... analysed their composition. He was apt to be the more moody and irritable because his resentments clothed themselves spontaneously in the language of some nobler emotion. If his friends are cold, he bewails the fickleness of humanity; if they are successful, it is not envy that prompts his irritation, but the rarity of the correspondence between merit and reward. Such a man is more faithful to his dead than to his living friends. The dead cannot change; they always come back to his memory in their old colours; ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... line more than any other. "The people in their wisdom"—this is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it was in the beginning, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... perceived the symptoms of a new scene of difficulty. The sailors now began to contemplate the dangers and uncertain issue of a voyage, the nature and length of which were left entirely open to conjecture. Besides the fickleness and timidity natural to men unaccustomed to the discipline of a seafaring life, several circumstances contributed to inspire an obstinate and mutinous disposition; which required the most consummate art as well as fortitude ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... themselves the hatred felt against disagreeable or doubtful regulations, and if they did not do this quite in unison with her mood, they had to fear her blame and displeasure. She was not free from the fickleness of her family: but on the other hand she displayed also the amiable attention of a female ruler: as when once during a speech she was making in a learned language to the learned men of Oxford, on seeing the Lord Treasurer standing ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... your lead and line, shoulder your birch canoe, as the old sea-kings used, and thrid the deep forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water again, when you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is that fickleness? What else can you do? Must you launch your bark on the unquiet stream, against whose pebbly bottom the keel continually grates and rasps your nerves—simply that your reputation suffer no detriment? Fickleness? There is no fickleness about ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... similar performance with Stephen Smith the year before. Elfride had not; but she had begun to take for her maxim the undoubted truth that the necessity of continuing faithful to Stephen, without suspicion, dictated a fickle behaviour almost as imperatively as fickleness itself; a fact, however, which would give a startling advantage to the latter quality should it ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... might have a job for him; but now Hiram was not looking for a job. He had given himself heartily to the project of making the old Atterson farm pay; nor was he the sort of fellow to show fickleness in ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... a beautiful thought," put in Mr. Whitechoker. "It is, I presume, an allegory to contrast faithful devotion and constancy with unfaithfulness and fickleness. Such thoughts occur only to the wholly gifted. It is only to the poetic temperament that the conception of such a thought can come coupled with the ability to voice it in fitting terms. There is a grandeur about the lines the Idiot has quoted ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... once, and we fell (figuratively speaking) upon each other's neck. Her shop was empty, the whole quarter had trooped off to the review. After mingling our tears (again figuratively) over the fickleness of the capital, I inquired if she ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... instigation of Gobel, who was, in reward, appointed bishop of Paris, and whose nephew, Rengger, shortly afterward became a member of the revolutionary government in Berne. In Geneva, during the preceding year, the French faction had gained the upper hand. The fickleness of the war kept the rest of the patriots in a state of suspense, but, on the seizure of the left bank of the Rhine by the French, the movements in Switzerland assumed a more serious character. The abbot, Beda, of St. Gall, 1795, pacified his subjects by ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... separation between the President and his party. Edwin D. Morgan so understood it, and although he had heretofore sustained the President, he now stood with the Radicals. Raymond also knew the gravity of the situation. But Raymond, who often wavered and sometimes exhibited an astonishing fickleness,[1054] saw only one side to the question, and on April 9 when the House, by a vote of 122 to 41, overrode the veto, he was one of only seven Unionists ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... we believe such an accusation. Trace a man's career from his cradle to his grave and mark how Fortune has treated him. You will find that when he is once dead she can for the most part be vindicated from the charge of any but very superficial fickleness. Her blindness is the merest fable; she can espy her favourites long before they are born. We are as days and have had our parents for our yesterdays, but through all the fair weather of a clear parental sky the eye of Fortune can discern the coming storm, and she laughs as she places her favourites ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... though the work was done by the British. "Had they destroyed it, we were most certainly all lost; however, we joined the main body." Colonel Smith now had his force together, and had done all that could be done, yet for two hours more he, by futile marchings and countermarchings, "discovered great Fickleness[68] and Inconstancy of Mind." The delay was serious; he had earlier sent to Gage for reinforcements, and he ought now to have considered that every minute was bringing more Americans to the line of his retreat. When, about ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... fairest face, after the first heyday of his youth was past, as worth the pain its owner's caprices could inflict. For, as seen under that phase, woman was apt to be both mercenary and capricious; and if the poet suffered, as he did, from the fickleness of more than one mistress, the probability is—and this he was too honest not to feel—that they had ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... as readily as would any five-year-old child, this invitation to go motoring. And it banished the memory of Lady's fickleness. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... the people, which made them nearly always welcome a fresh master with enthusiasm, soon led them from love and obedience to hatred, and finally to revolt. Merodach-baladan trusted to the Kalda to help him to maintain his position, and their rude barbarity, even if it protected him against the fickleness of his more civilised subjects, increased the discontent at Kutha, Sippar, and Borsippa. He removed the statues of the gods from these towns, imprisoned the most turbulent citizens, confiscated their goods, and distributed them among his own followers; the other cities took no part in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... be a subject of bitter mortification to one in whose bosom pride still rested. She would not have thus tormented herself with turning and twisting Mary's information into such ideas, had she not felt assured that he had penetrated her weakness, and despised her. Fickleness was no part of St. Eval's character, of that she was convinced; but it was natural he should cease to love, when he had ceased to esteem, and in the society and charms of Louisa Manvers endeavour to ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... taking such a hold over Marie Antoinette that they begin to furnish some topics for her letters to her mother, one of which shows that she had already formed that opinion of French fickleness which she had afterward too abundant cause to maintain. "I do hope," she says, "that the good intelligence between our two nations will last. One good thing in this country is, that if ill-natured feelings are ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Anugita, and you will find that Arjuna after the great battle, forgetting the teaching that was given him on Kurukshetra, asked his Teacher to repeat that teaching once again. And Shri Krishna, rebuking him for the fickleness of his mind and stating that He was much displeased that such knowledge should by fickleness have been forgotten, uttered these remarkable words: "It is not possible for me to state it in full in that way. I discoursed ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... in this state in Isauria, and while the king of Persia was involved in wars upon his frontier, repulsing from his borders a set of ferocious tribes which, being full of fickleness, were continually either attacking him in a hostile manner, or, as often happens, aiding him when he turned his arms against us, a certain noble, by name Nohodares, having been appointed to invade Mesopotamia, whenever occasion might serve, was anxiously exploring our territories with a view to ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... make quite as much sensation as Eyebright had expected, and she had a little sore feeling at her heart, as if the others cared less about losing her than she should have cared had she been in their place. This idea cost her some private tears; she comforted herself by a poem which she called "Fickleness," and which began: ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... sense-experience could reach her mind. She had seen tragedies of animal life, lonely death-struggles, horrible flights and more horrible captures, she had seen joyous wooings, love-pinings, partings, and bereavements. She had seen maternal fickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of mated bliss and its—renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad beautiful autumns, the riotous ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... extinguished the hope which the young Prince might have entertained of one day becoming Stadtholder. But God laughs at the presumption of man, who wants to raise and prostrate the powers on earth without consulting the King above; and the fickleness and caprice of the Dutch combined with the terror inspired by Louis XIV., in repealing the Perpetual Edict, and re-establishing the office of Stadtholder in favour of William of Orange, for whom the hand of Providence had traced out ulterior destinies on the hidden ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... themselves unto them, might they but have the colour of an invitation to do it under. Yea, so far as I could gather, the town had been surrendered up to them before now, had it not been for the opposition of old Incredulity, and the fickleness of the thoughts of my Lord Will-be-will. Diabolus also began to rave, wherefore Mansoul, as to yielding, was not yet all of one mind, therefore, they still lay ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the danger of delay from calms in the tropical latitudes, through which we should have to pass—from storms off Cape Horn, renowned among mariners for the fickleness of its wind—other obstacles might be encountered, and the voyage protracted far beyond the period ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... that fickleness which seems in some way communicable from wicked cities to virtuous villages, East Patten suddenly ceased to exhibit unusual interest in the pair of warriors, for a new excitement had convulsed the village mind to its ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... sailed from St. Fiorenzo on this destination; but fell in, off Cape del Mele, with the enemy's fleet, who immediately gave his squadron chase. The chase lasted four-and-twenty hours; and, owing to the fickleness of the wind, the British ships were sometimes hard pressed; but the want of skill on the part of the French gave Nelson many advantages. Nelson bent his way back to St. Fiorenzo, where the fleet, which was ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... have been expected to welcome the Romans. One of these, Abgarus, prince of Osrhoene, or the tract east of the Euphrates about the city of Edessa, had been received into the Roman alliance by Pompey, but, with the fickleness common among Orientals, he now readily changed sides, and undertook to play a double part for the advantage of the Parthians. Another, Alchaudonius, an Arab sheikh of these parts, had made his submission to Rome even earlier; but having become convinced that Parthia was the stronger power of the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... his temple at Dodona been caught? I answered all these questions, and he proceeded:—'Tell me, Menippus, what are men's feelings towards me?' 'What should they be, Lord, but those of absolute reverence, as to the King of all Gods?' 'Now, now, chaffing as usual,' he said; 'I know their fickleness very well, for all your dissimulation. There was a time when I was their prophet, ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... Bannerworth is not now the person she was when first I knew her and loved her. Such being the case, and she having altered, not I, she cannot accuse me of fickleness. ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... Which for the length of forty years I held, If in my sixtieth year my good old name Can purchase for me a revenge so full. Start not at what I say, sir generals! My real motives—they concern not you. And you yourselves, I trust, could not expect That this your game had crooked my judgment—or That fickleness, quick blood, or such like cause, Has driven the old man from the track of honor, Which he so long had trodden. Come, my friends! I'm not thereto determined with less firmness, Because I know and have looked steadily At that on which I ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... you—all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... of both, Gerard replied that the king had already approved the treaty, that it was now engrossed on parchment, and that a new arrangement would entail "inconvenience and considerable delay." But finally, not without showing some irritation at the fickleness of the commissioners, he was brought to agree that Congress might ratify the treaty either with or without these articles, as it should see fit. This business cost Franklin, as an annoying incident, an encounter with Mr. Izard, and a ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... of this incident as a glimpse of glory before His sufferings. Alas! it was but a glimpse. What a picture of the fickleness and treachery of the heart!—That excited populace who are now shouting their hosannahs, are ere long to be raising the cry, "Crucify Him, crucify Him!" Four days hence we shall find the palm branches lying withered on the Bethany road, and the blazing torches ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... description of her, of Lyesse, of Delight, and of the God of Love himself, with his bow-bearer Sweet-Glances, who carries in each hand five arrows—in the right Beauty, Simpleness, Frankness, Companionship, Fair-Seeming; in the left Pride, Villainy,[145] Shame, Despair, and "New-Thought"—i.e., Fickleness. Other personages—sometimes with the same names, sometimes with different—follow in the train; Cupid watches the Lover that he may take shot at him, and the tale is interrupted by an episode giving the story of Narcissus. Meanwhile ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... for a considerable space. "I must set this matter right," thought honest George, "as she loves him still—I must set his mind right about the other woman." And with this charitable thought, the good fellow began to tell more at large what Bows had said to him regarding Miss Bolton's behavior and fickleness, and he described how the girl was no better than a little light-minded flirt; and, perhaps, he exaggerated the good humor and contentedness which he had himself, as he thought, witnessed in her behavior in the scene with ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the design and its frustration were almost simultaneous. Her brain was still in a hideous tumult. Weakened by suffering, the shock of Helena's fickleness and injustice, the sudden perception that her sacrifice had been useless, if not absurd, had disturbed her mental balance for a few seconds, and left her at the mercy of passions hitherto in-existent to her consciousness. Her love for her old friend, ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... trifles turn the great events in the life of man! If I had received a cool letter from my intended wife; if I had only heard a rumour of any thing from which fickleness in her might have been inferred; if I had found in her any, even the smallest, abatement of affection; if she had but let go any one of the hundred strings by which she held my heart: if any of these, never would ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... they came to the main land, rarely brought their captives: they were in danger of losing them. Their fickleness or revenge, was sometimes fatal: in 1824, a party, engaged in an expedition to entice the girls of a tribe, took with them one who had a half-caste infant, and sent her on shore as a decoy. She returned, bringing promises from her countrywomen to appear the following day; but at that time the blacks ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... begin then," said Miss Mills. "Oh, don't talk to me about it, children. May you never understand what I am suffering! Oh, the fickleness of some people! The promises that are made only to be broken! You trust a person, and you are ever so happy; and then you find that you have made a great, big ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... of all his entreaties to George, all his attempted bribery, his broken-hearted sorrow when he failed, he seemed to be now content. Indeed, he had made no opposition to the match. When Caroline had freely spoken to him about it, he made some little snappish remark as to the fickleness of women; but he at the same time signified ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... gratitude. Yet avoiding all allusion to the past, guarding himself scrupulously from confidential converse, and observing a frigid politeness to Mademoiselle Marie, there remained doubt in his mind that, the fickleness of the fair sex aiding him, the young mother of the girl would renounce her chimerical project. His error was great: and it may be here remarked that a hard and scornful scepticism may in this world engender as many false ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the mountaineers. His petition had no effect, and three missionaries of great merit and learning were sent. By dint of great hardships, and, by living in the same manner as the Indians, they succeeded in baptizing many; but when they learned the fickleness of the Indian nature, and that it was as easy for them to become baptized as it was to take to the mountains to continue their former mode of life, the missionaries proceeded more cautiously in giving them the benefit of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... one they have left, regardless of the fact that no two careers have the same gage, that every man builds his own road upon which another man's engine can not run either with speed or safety. This fickleness, this disposition to shift about from one occupation to another, seems to be peculiar to American life, so much so that, when a young man meets a friend whom he has not seen for some time, the commonest question to ask is, "What are you ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Scriptures, which you can do with a very small amount of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae. If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... sighs: Near him his work-mate mended broken vows With dangerous gold, or strung soft rhymes together Upon a lady's tress.... And one there was alone, Who with wet downcast eyelids threw aside The remnants of a broken heart, and looked Into my face and bid me 'ware of love, Of fickleness, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... occupied with disagreeable reflections. Perhaps both the girls at last understood him, and had been comparing notes, to his infinite disadvantage. His fickleness and the dilemma he was in may have become a jest between them. What could he do? Resentment, except against himself, was impossible. If Amy understood him, in what other way could she meet any approach to sentiment on his part than by a laughing scorn? ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the noblest impulses, he was equally capable of the basest actions. Extremely accessible to praise, he indiscriminately entertained every form of flattery; but his fickleness was such that no courtier could cajole him long. Among his favorite women was the beautiful Princess Tongoo Soopia, sister to the unfortunate Sultan Mahmoud, ex-rajah of Pahang. Falling fiercely in love with her on her presentation at his court, he procured ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... others; and it is rarely, except in a few dark and morose and gloomy natures, which are exceptions to the rule and standard of human nature, that man learns to be distrustful and suspicious of his kind, even after experience of fickleness and falsehood may have in some sort justified suspicions, until ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... easy the deed was; how soon it would be over; and how the action of one short night would give to all their nights and days to come sovereign sway and royalty! Then she threw contempt on his change of purpose, and accused him of fickleness and cowardice; and declared that she had given suck, and knew how tender it was to love the babe that milked her; but she would, while it was smiling in her face, have plucked it from her breast, and dashed its brains out, if she had so sworn to do it, as he had sworn to perform ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... incident as a glimpse of glory before His sufferings. Alas! it was but a glimpse. What a picture of the fickleness and treachery of the heart!—That excited populace who are now shouting their hosannahs, are ere long to be raising the cry, "Crucify Him, crucify Him!" Four days hence we shall find the palm branches lying withered on the Bethany road, and the blazing torches of an assassin-band ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... you touch a more difficult subject, but here, too, time and skill have wrought wonderful changes. In our histories we read of the time when the weather was chiefly noted for its fickleness, and when some parts of our globe were mere desert wastes, where rain was unknown and no life could exist. And in the inhabited portions one section would often be deluged with too much rain while another would have none, both conditions leading to a failure in agriculture and much consequent ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... has no direct historical reference. He calls it "An Old Story," because in all ages men have experienced this unjust reversal of public approval. The poem is merely an imaginative, dramatic representation of the fickleness of popular favor. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... have admired your sister Sarah," said Christopher; "she was so delightfully feminine. And as for the red-headed swain, I have no patience with him. His fickleness was intolerable." ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... rank were invited, the females of whom are charged with being fond of showing themselves, and are usually to be seen in the front of plantations. Hitherto they had despised the fickleness of fashion, and had never modernized their dress enough to seem thinly clad even in the winter, and now they could not reconcile themselves to such a change, which, in fact, did them honour, though a few ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... Hydrangea Vain glory. Ice Plant Your looks freeze me. Ivy Friendship. Iris, German Flame. Iris, Common Garden A message for thee. Jonquil Affection returned. Jessamine, White Amiability. Jessamine, Yellow Gracefulness. Larkspur Fickleness. Lantana Rigor. Laurel Words though sweet may deceive. Lavender Mistrust. Lemon Blossom Discretion. Lady Slipper Capricious beauty. Lily of the Valley Return of happiness. Lilac, White Youth. " Blue First emotions of love. Lily, ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... the most pitiful experience of all, child," she replied. "She married. Shortly after you were born, she died, fortunately spared all knowledge of your father's faithless fickleness. Adnah, he, too, married again! You, Adnah, was too young to protect yourself from a stepmother, but we came to your rescue. Your great uncle, Peter, had just died and left us this fine estate, and here we are, trying to shield you from the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... suffered, and all might have gone well. Gradually the idea gained upon him, that it was not impossible to repair the past. His conduct had been unpardonable, no doubt; yet, perhaps it might be forgiven. But even if Elinor could forget his inexcusable fickleness, would her friends ever consent to risk her future peace with one who had so recklessly trifled with her already? Mr. Wyllys had been deeply indignant at his conduct; his whole manner had changed, there had been a cold ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... that every Man is full of Complaints, and constantly uttering Sentences against the Fickleness of Fortune, when People generally bring upon themselves all the Calamities they fall into, and are constantly heaping up Matter for their own Sorrow and Disappointment. That which produces the greatest Part of the [Delusions ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... they might be as much as they pleased in each other's company without being particular; but as soon as her eyes gave him some encouragement, he entertained no other thoughts than how to please her, without considering her fickleness, or the obstacles he ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... almost finished when the Ministers sent to tell him[243] that they would willingly receive him, but not as Ambassador from Sweden, because that kingdom was of a different persuasion. "I am surprised (he writes to his brother) at the fickleness of people, who invite the Lutherans to partake with them, and say they cannot receive me in quality of Ambassador from Sweden, on account of their differing in opinion from that kingdom." To go to sermon as a ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... preparing to devour you; and the wind is only one shade more respectable—nay, perchance the worse of the two; for the waters, in the self-justifying, neighbour-condemning spirit, apparently inherent in human nature—and for which Father Adam be thanked—may very possibly lay the blame of their fickleness upon it, and bring a host of witnesses into court to testify to their general good behaviour—their calmness, and amenity, and inoffensiveness, till exposed to the evil influence of AEolus's unruly troop—the most wholesale agitators going, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... suite overlooked the barred den of lions from which, the prince thought, there could be no escape, his puzzlement was only increased. Though he searched about the room for some clue to the whereabouts of its former occupants he did not discover the niche behind the hangings. With the fickleness of insanity he quickly tired of the search, and, turning to the soldiers who had accompanied him from the floor below, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Kinraid was married, her heart had still more strongly turned to Philip; she thought that he had judged rightly in what he had given as the excuse for his double dealing; she was even more indignant at Kinraid's fickleness than she had any reason to be; and she began to learn the value of such enduring love as Philip's had been—lasting ever since the days when she first began to fancy what a man's love for a woman should be, when she had first shrunk from the tone of tenderness he put into his especial term ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... animation in her countenance than on the previous days; but still the crowd passed on unnoticed. Even the learned brahmins, who stood immovable in rows on each side of her throne, became impatient: they talked about the fickleness of the sex, the impossibility of inducing them to make up their minds; they whispered wise saws and sayings from Ferdistan and others, about the caprice of women, and the instability of their natures, and ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... JIMMY. The fickleness of women is notorious. It is exceeded only by their mendacity. But Angels have up to this time stood in good repute. Your conduct, sir, is scandalous. I am ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... difficulties, nor, because little progress may be made in our own time, abandon the enterprise as hopeless, and charge upon the obstinacy and bigotry of the nations the failure occasioned by our own fickleness in not pursuing steadily the only line of conduct on which any hope of success can be reasonably founded. We should make the same allowances for the Hindus as for other nations and consider how slow the progress of improvement has been ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... but leaves open to both, at any future period, an opportunity of retiring from the position of courtship taken up on the one side, and of receiving addresses on the other, without laying either party open to the accusation of fickleness or jilting. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... semi-dependent position, and might have been expected to welcome the Romans. One of these, Abgarus, prince of Osrhoene, or the tract east of the Euphrates about the city of Edessa, had been received into the Roman alliance by Pompey, but, with the fickleness common among Orientals, he now readily changed sides, and undertook to play a double part for the advantage of the Parthians. Another, Alchaudonius, an Arab sheikh of these parts, had made his submission to Rome even earlier; ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... the snow of spring-time, nor night-old ice; The serpent when he sleepeth, nor girl's advice; The mind of changeful woman not long abideth, And fickleness of ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... "The fickleness is all on her ladyship's part,—not on mine," said Lord George; whereupon Lady Eustace walked out of the room and was not ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... design and its frustration were almost simultaneous. Her brain was still in a hideous tumult. Weakened by suffering, the shock of Helena's fickleness and injustice, the sudden perception that her sacrifice had been useless, if not absurd, had disturbed her mental balance for a few seconds, and left her at the mercy of passions hitherto in-existent to her consciousness. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the greatest warrior of the age—conqueror of Italy—humbler of Germany—terror of the North—saw him account all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you are now in a condition to win—saw him contemn the fickleness of fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... anybody else could have analysed their composition. He was apt to be the more moody and irritable because his resentments clothed themselves spontaneously in the language of some nobler emotion. If his friends are cold, he bewails the fickleness of humanity; if they are successful, it is not envy that prompts his irritation, but the rarity of the correspondence between merit and reward. Such a man is more faithful to his dead than to his living friends. The dead cannot change; they always come back to his memory in their old colours; ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of fixed principles," he would say, "should express them in the looks of his house. New York changes its domestic architecture too rapidly. It is like divorce. It is not dignified. I don't like it. Extravagance and fickleness are advertised in most of these new houses. I wish to be known for different qualities. Dignity and prudence are the things that people trust. Every one knows that I can afford to live in the house that suits me. It is a guarantee ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... was forever having a "crush" on some girl or other, getting suddenly over it, and seeking another affinity with bewildering fickleness. Eva Larry had been proclaimed her dearest friend for a longer term than most who ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... there is any one desirous of the like fame, how will he guess what it is I have omitted,[1] so as to wish to hand down that same to posterity; since each man has a turn of thinking of his own, and a tone peculiar to himself. It was not, therefore, {any} fickleness, but assured grounds, that set me upon writing {again}. Wherefore, Particulo,[2] as you are amused by Fables (which I will style "Aesopian," not "those of Aesop;" for whereas he published but few, I have brought out a great many, employing the old style, but with modern subjects), now at your ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... period began, England was a Commonwealth. Charles I., by obstinate insistence upon absolutism, by fickleness and faithlessness, had increased and strengthened his enemies. Parliament had seized the reins of government in 1642, had completely established its authority at Naseby in 1645, and had beheaded the king ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... setting down company at the nearest possible point of access to your venerable gateway. Besides, even you have too much regard to the land of Kit North, to entertain any desire to see its most attractive shrine of pilgrimage too suddenly eclipsed; and why should you court such an exposure of popular fickleness, when about to become yourself "the comet of a season," and to go through that brilliant perihelion, in which, reversing the feat of Horace with his lofty head, you will sweep away all other stars with a swinge of your luminous caudality? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... which desires that all be happy as far as it is possible. I will say as much of the fourth section, where there is mention of the source of wrong elections, which are error or ignorance, negligence, fickleness in changing too readily, stubbornness in not changing in time, and bad habits; finally there is the importunity of the appetites, which often drive us inopportunely towards external things. The fifth section ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... set of the wind, or the rates of pay on various lines, or stowage, or freights, or rigs, or currents, or the characters of various skippers and mates, or the liveliness or sulkiness or homeliness or fickleness of this or that kind of cargo, they would revert extra-professionally to Uncle Tibe: of whom the old stories would be repeated over and over, with long pauses, chuckles, slow appreciations—'Ay, Tibe! . . . He was a ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... danger of delay from calms in the tropical latitudes, through which we should have to pass—from storms off Cape Horn, renowned among mariners for the fickleness of its wind—other obstacles might be encountered, and the voyage protracted far beyond the period ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... the sly twist he gave her hair as he passed her desk on his way to the spelling class. As for Miss Lucy, who saw herself displaced, she wrote to Philemon Ward, and told him of her jilting, and railed at the fickleness and ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... such a hold over Marie Antoinette that they begin to furnish some topics for her letters to her mother, one of which shows that she had already formed that opinion of French fickleness which she had afterward too abundant cause to maintain. "I do hope," she says, "that the good intelligence between our two nations will last. One good thing in this country is, that if ill-natured feelings are quick to arise, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... loses, as he is almost sure to do, it is because he is playing against more expert hands than himself. This is what is called a "square game." Everything is open and fair, and the bank relies on the fickleness of the cards and the superior skill of its dealer. In the second-class houses, however, the visitor is literally fleeced. Every advantage is taken of him, and it is morally certain that he will lose every cent he risks. In first-class ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... seldom art thou found Without annoyance in this earthly state! For, haply, thou dost feed some rankling wound, Or on thy youth pale poverty doth wait, Till years, on heavy wing, have rolled away; Or where thou most didst hope firm faith to see, Thou meetest fickleness estranged and cold; Or if some true and tender heart there be, On which, through every change, thy soul might trust, Death comes with his fell dart, and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... It has many heroines, but only one hero, and this comes no doubt from the peculiar purpose of the writer to portray different varieties and shades of female characters at once, as is shadowed in Chapter II, and also to display the intense fickleness and selfishness of man. ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child?—of Helena, against the petulance and insult of a careless youth?—of the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the "unlessoned girl," who appears among ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... British. "Had they destroyed it, we were most certainly all lost; however, we joined the main body." Colonel Smith now had his force together, and had done all that could be done, yet for two hours more he, by futile marchings and countermarchings, "discovered great Fickleness[68] and Inconstancy of Mind." The delay was serious; he had earlier sent to Gage for reinforcements, and he ought now to have considered that every minute was bringing more Americans to the line of his retreat. When, about ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... so that Diogenes's messengers, being sufficiently mocked and derided, were forced to return to their master. King Demetrius himself also sent a ship, wherein Aratus was to be brought to him in chains. And the Athenians, exceeding all possible fickleness of flattery to the Macedonians, crowned themselves with garlands upon the first news of his death. And so in anger he went at once and invaded Attica, and penetrated as far as the Academy, but then suffering himself to be pacified, he did no further act of hostility. And the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... me. Sit down again, for I have a long story to tell. I have not changed my mind, nor am I guilty of any special fickleness. But circumstances have arisen which make it impossible for me to keep my engagement. Captain Bertram sees this as plainly as I do. He is ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... she fix on me her wayward fickleness, My heart will be grateful for the good she does me; Does she wish to show elsewhere her benevolence, I give her back her gifts without pain—without regret. Filled with strongest virtue, I will espouse Poverty, If for dower she brings me ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... to Avignon, &c. you shall not change that intention or mode of travelling, without first satisfying the fermiers for two posts further than the place you repent at—and 'tis founded, continued he, upon this, that the Revenues are not to fall short through your fickleness— ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... present: 'The men who framed the Constitution had studied thoroughly all former attempts at Republican government. History was strewn with the wrecks of unsuccessful democracies. Sometimes the usurpation of the executive power, sometimes the fickleness and unbridled license of the people, had brought popular governments to destruction. To guard against these dangers, they placed their chief hope in the Senate. The Senate which was organized in 1789, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... upon the fickleness of popular favor that the time was so short before these universal favorites dropped out ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... did determine,—and did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with Parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his fortitude, to steady their fickleness by his constancy, to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom, to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious,—to make England, inclined to shrink ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... mankind. When Sirius[2] o'er the welkin rages, Our kindly help his fire assuages; But woman is a cursed inflamer, No parish ducking-stool can tame her: To kindle strife, dame Nature taught her; Like fireworks, she can burn in water. For fickleness how durst you blame us, Who for our constancy are famous? You'll see a cloud in gentle weather Keep the same face an hour together; While women, if it could be reckon'd, Change every feature every second. Observe our figure in a morning, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... astrologer, enters and not only announces that Chrysa is dead, but tells the equally grateful news that Octavia, Nero's wife, has been condemned to die. Nero himself now appears upon the scene, and a duet follows in which Poppoea reproaches him for his fickleness and he seeks to console her with flattery. At its close the death of Octavia is announced, and Poppoea is appeased by the prospect of sharing the throne. Meanwhile Chrysa has fallen into the custody of Agrippina, Nero's mother, who keeps close charge of her ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... formidable, especially when supported by a powerful king, nobly descended, and legally invested with the crown. A natural sympathy, too, had been awakened for the emperor, as numbed with cold he besought the pity of the Pontiff; and, with proverbial fickleness, men, in ascribing humility to the king, imputed arrogance to the Pope. Owing to these causes, it was not long before Henry found himself stronger than ever. Inflamed with new ardor, he loudly lamented his submission at Canossa, and cursing ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... entangled he was sitting upon the turf, and eight or ten men—the night was dark, and he was rather too confused to count—standing round him, apparently waiting for him to recover. He mournfully assumed that he was captured, and would probably have made some philosophical reflections on the fickleness of fortune, had not his internal ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... But in a little while, Eumolpus, mouthpiece of the distressed and author of the present good understanding, fearing that the general good humor might flag for lack of amusement, began to indulge in sneers at the fickleness of women: how easily they fell in love; how readily they forgot even their own sons! No woman could be so chaste but that she could be roused to madness by a chance passion! Nor had he need to quote from old tragedies, or to ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... with the steamer, in company with twenty to thirty English men and women. Next day the number of English increased to fifty. If I ever marry, it must be an English woman." Some years later, however, with the fickleness of genius, he writes about Ernestine, the daughter of a rich Bohemian Baron, "a delightfully innocent, childish soul, tender and pensive, attached to me and to everything artistic by the most sincere love, extremely ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... majesty to believe I would not have come from so remote a country as I have done, the name of which perhaps may be unknown in your dominions, if I had not been certain of the cure I propose. What would not the world say of my fickleness, if, after such great fatigues and so many dangers as I have undergone in the pursuit, I should abandon this generous enterprise? Even your majesty would lose that esteem you have conceived for me. If ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... the accession of Charles X. to his own fall, M. de Villele not only made no stand against the inconsiderate fickleness of the King, but even profited by it to strengthen himself against his various enemies. Too clear-sighted to hope that Charles X. would persevere in the voluntary course of premeditated and steady moderation which Louis XVIII. had followed, he ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of my early character was plasticity and fickleness. I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a rapidity that astonished him, and instead of trying to forget, he found himself trying to remember. He had not foreseen this turn of affairs, and was not prepared for it. He was disgusted with himself, surprised at his own fickleness, and full of a queer mixture of disappointment and relief that he could recover from such a tremendous blow so soon. He carefully stirred up the embers of his lost love, but they refused to burst into a blaze. There was only a comfortable glow that warmed and did him good without putting him into ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... came nearer to the normal type of the men of the early Renaissance. It may be added parenthetically, that even in respect to his moral character he will not be fairly judged, if we listen solely to the complaints of the German Church, which his fickleness helped to balk of the Council ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Egyptian"—individualized and placed before us. Her mental accomplishments, her unequalled grace, her woman's wit and woman's wiles, her irresistible allurements, her starts of irregular grandeur, her bursts of ungovernable temper, her vivacity of imagination, her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, her childish susceptibility to flattery, her magnificent spirit, her royal pride, the gorgeous eastern coloring of the character; all these contradictory elements has Shakspeare seized, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Sciagurato!" A circumstance which tended to embitter a good deal the close of Weber's life was the arrival in London of Rossini, to whom and to whose works the public immediately transferred its demonstrations of passionate admiration with even more, than its accustomed fickleness. Disparaging comparisons and contrasts to Weber's disadvantage were drawn between the two great composers in the public prints; the enthusiastic adulation of society and the great world not unnaturally followed the brilliant, joyous, sparkling, witty Italian, who was a far better subject for ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... its sons and daughters skillful, you see that it is this line more than any other. "The people in their wisdom"—this is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it was in the beginning, they ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... nothing else. "I swear to you," wrote Moultou, "that I could not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I could have sworn that he loved you."[130] And there really was no acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing with "one all fire and fickleness, a child." ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... whatever cares and labors, turn to the time when thought shall people their solitude as with the presence of angels. They hear heavenly voices asking, Why stay ye on the earth, unless to grow? Vanity, frivolity, and fickleness die within them; and they grow to be humble and courageous, disinterested and laborious, strong and persevering. The cultivation of their higher nature becomes the law of their life; and the sense of duty, "stern daughter of the voice of God," which of all motives that sway the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... different persons, and in the same person at different times. These fluids, and particularly the saliva, assist in the formation and change of taste. This accounts not only for the different tastes of different persons, but also for the varying taste of the same persons, and for that fickleness of taste which is so common in sickness, when the fluids of the mouth, in a disordered and deranged state, mix with the food, and produce the disagreeable taste so often complained of at such times, and which, moreover, occasionally ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... to Windsor, and thither on the Friday—the 6th of September—came Alvarez de Quadra to seek the definite answer which the Queen had promised him on the subject of the Spanish marriage. What he had seen that night at Whitehall, coupled with his mistrust of her promises and experience of her fickleness, had rendered him uneasy. Either she was trifling with him, or else she was behaving in a manner utterly unbecoming the future wife of the Archduke. In either case some explanation was necessary. De Quadra must ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the person possessed of it, or such as incapacitates him for business and action, it is instantly blamed, and ranked among his faults and imperfections. Indolence, negligence, want of order and method, obstinacy, fickleness, rashness, credulity; these qualities were never esteemed by any one indifferent to a character; much less, extolled as accomplishments or virtues. The prejudice, resulting from them, immediately strikes our eye, and gives us the sentiment ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... afterwards, the wind, true to its proverbial character of fickleness, died away, and we were left without any guide by which to steer our course across the trackless deep. Still we pulled on, I fancied, in the direction of the coast. We should have been wise had we laid on our oars, and gone to sleep. ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... at last, after long years of delusion and endurance, the scales drop from the eyes of the wife, and revenge or despair drives her into a hostile position towards her lord and master, she is an inhuman criminal, and the hue and cry against the fickleness of women and the falsity of their nature is endless. Oh, the injustice of society and the injustice of cruel man. Is there no relief for helpless women that are bound by the ties of marriage to men who ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... that the mother of his new pupil might be induced to defray the expenses of this Review, but he did not wish to move too rapidly lest he should frighten the lady away; he intended to prepare the way gently. Unfortunately, Madame de Barancy, on account of her very fickleness of nature, was difficult to reach. She would continually change the conversation just at the important point, because she found it ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... band to bind me willingly To heaven and to thee. At noon-day, when the tumult and The din of life is heard, When in life's battle each heart is With various passions stirred, I turn me from the blazonry, The fickleness of life, And think of thee in earnest thought, My dearest one-my wife! When the daylight hath departed, And shadows of the night Bring forth the stars, as beacons fair For angels in their flight, I think of thee as ever mine, Of thee as ever ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... my work, said good bye to my acquaintances, and went on board. Fifteen minutes before the steamer sailed I had my luggage tumbled from her deck back on to the wharf, and came ashore, swearing at myself for a fool, and knowing that I would be well laughed at and quizzed for my fickleness by every one ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... that the whole sea was always as calm as was then the portion they beheld. Storms, if less frequent, are certainly not less violent than in other portions of the world. We certainly very frequently experienced the fickleness of the elements. As we were about to haul up to the northward, the wind suddenly shifted round to that very quarter, and then shifted somewhat to the eastward. We stood away on the starboard-tack, but were evidently making a great deal of lee-way. ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... President Grant my heart-history has been allowed to drag like a lazy funeral train. Before, all was bright and luminous, with beautiful aspirations; but from that time suspense has coiled around me, hope has flared up, blinked, and almost died out. I did not understand it then. It seemed to me that fickleness was in the heart of ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... cannot help remarking that this circuit of the wind from SW. by W. to NW. or N., from our insular position, imparts to our climate its fickleness and inconstancy. How often will our brightest sky become suffused by the blackest vapours on the slightest breach of SW. wind, and the clouds will then disappear as speedily as they formed, when ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... chief bridesmaid's mother shook her head at him, and called him fickle, but then his fickleness was of so open and boyish an order that it could hardly be regarded as a fault, especially since no one—with the exception of the chief bridesmaid—ever took him seriously. And to her at least young Noel Wyndham was always tenderly faithful ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... (1) The dangers of fickleness (1:6; 4:9; 15:16). (2) The methods of false teachers: (a) Their chief method is to attack men prominent in the movement, (b) They usually put forward some one else for leader; They would supplant Paul with Peter, (c) One may well ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... him with a pang about her heart. From which side of the house had come this fickleness, this instability and love of change in Oliver's character? she asked herself—a new interest every day—all the traditions of his forefathers violated. How could she overcome it in him? how make him more practical? Years before, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... his characters had taken the matter into their own hands, against his will. Or is it art, and art of the subtlest order, which in Kjartan Olafsson, the glorious hero, still leaves something of lightness, of fickleness, as compared both with the intensity of the passion of Gudrun and the dogged resolution of Bolli? There is another Saga in which a hero of the likeness of Kjartan is contrasted with a dark, malevolent, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... other emotions, strengthening and supporting him, was a secret bitterness towards Kate—a certain contempt of her fickleness, her lightness, her shallow love, her readiness to be off with the old love and on with the new. There was a sort of pride in his own higher type of devotion, his sterner passion. Pete invited him to the wedding, but he would not go, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... victorious Esperantists, at present in possession of the field, poke fun at these new-fangled schemes. A parody in Esperanto verse, entitled Lingvo de Molenaar, and sung to the tune of the American song Riding down from Bangor, narrates the fickleness of Pan-Roman and how it changed into Universal. It is said that a group of Continental Esperantists, at a convivial sitting, burnt the apostate Idiom Neutral in effigy by making a bonfire of Neutral literature. On the other side amenities are not wanting. It ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... any of that severity which would break my heart, none of that fickleness of manner which would be worse than death ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... But it was not so much that Barabbas was loved as that Jesus was hated, and it was not the multitude so much as the rulers that hated him. Many of those now shrieking 'Crucify Him!' had shouted 'Hosanna!' a day or two before till they were hoarse. The populace was guilty of fickleness, blindness, rashness, too easy credence of the crafty calumnies of the rulers. But a far deeper stain rests on these rulers who had resisted the light, and were now animated by the basest self-interest in the garb of keen regard for the honour of God. There were very different ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... this proof of the rapidity of feminine fickleness, I began to congratulate her effusively on having obtained such an excellent substitute for my worthless self, and to wish the happy couple all earthly felicities, when she explained that he was not a fiance, but merely a sort of friend, and Mrs MANKLETOW severely added that they had come to ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... can be possible, as it appears to me, without the co-operation of the leading commercial nations. Even with that co-operation its accomplishment and permanence may not be absolutely certain, unless the late transcendent fickleness of the supply and demand subsides, or unless the ratio of value can be adjusted with more consummate accuracy than has hitherto been found by any single nation to be practicable. One-tenth of one per cent. difference ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... mortification to one in whose bosom pride still rested. She would not have thus tormented herself with turning and twisting Mary's information into such ideas, had she not felt assured that he had penetrated her weakness, and despised her. Fickleness was no part of St. Eval's character, of that she was convinced; but it was natural he should cease to love, when he had ceased to esteem, and in the society and charms of Louisa Manvers endeavour to ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... this information, and then made his farewells. Edna's good wishes were couched in a spirit of frigid magnanimity. She had too much self-respect to let him perceive that she resented his fickleness. ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... public life in 1851, as one of the three representatives for Melbourne in Victoria's first Parliament. But, doubtful perhaps, with his anti-radical temperament as to the fickleness of large town populations, as well, possibly, as the dread of his liability to get compromised by the over-zeal of supporters, he changed the venue to the small semi-Irish town of Kilmore, where his seat was always secure, until, in his advancing years, ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... Eyebright had expected, and she had a little sore feeling at her heart, as if the others cared less about losing her than she should have cared had she been in their place. This idea cost her some private tears; she comforted herself by a poem which she called "Fickleness," and which began: ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... aspersions, as their friends, perhaps however willing, may at that distance of time be incapable of removing." With this author, Mr. Masters, Cole had quarrelled so often, that Masters writes, "I am well acquainted with the fickleness of his disposition for more than forty ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... sisters, daughters—have you not watched those dear to you in the many moods of which a feminine heart is capable; have you not seen them affectionate, tender, and impulsive? Would you love them so dearly but for the fickleness of their moods? Have you not worshipped them in your hearts, for those sublime impulses which put all man's plans and calculations to shame? Look on the accused, citizens. She loves the Republic, the people of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... red," of startling if somewhat factitious beauty. To say that the plot now thickens would be to use too coarse a word; it becomes slightly tinged with incident, inasmuch as Euphues falls in love with Lucilla, the destined bride of Philautus. She reciprocates his passion, and the double fickleness of mistress and friend forms an excellent opportunity, which Lyly does not fail to seize, for infinite moralizings in euphuistic strains. Philautus is naturally indignant at the turn affairs have taken, and the former friends exchange ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... imperial aristocracy. Even in the first steps of his enterprise he was made to feel the need of caution, and it was by statute, after all, not by decree, that the whole matter was finally regulated. So curious is popular fickleness that an Emperor who could boldly tyrannize in almost any other direction felt that he dared not take the risk of constituting himself a fountain of honor, such as ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... respectful gratitude. Yet avoiding all allusion to the past, guarding himself scrupulously from confidential converse, and observing a frigid politeness to Mademoiselle Marie, there remained doubt in his mind that, the fickleness of the fair sex aiding him, the young mother of the girl would renounce her chimerical project. His error was great: and it may be here remarked that a hard and scornful scepticism may in this world engender as many false judgments and erroneous calculations as candor ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... amuse all cricketers, and while from the male point of view it may serve as a good illustration of the fickleness of woman and the impossibility of forecasting what course she will take, the fair sex will find in it an equally shining proof of the colossal vanity ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... usurped the government, and Shawer applied to the King of Jerusalem, Amalric, for assistance. Amalric in turn attempted usurpation, and again the officers of Noureddin came to the aid of Shawer. The vizier paid the penalty of his fickleness by losing his head, and his post was occupied by Chyrkouh, who, while ruling Egypt as a vizier of the Fatimite caliph, was in ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... it is no mere change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... they have affinities, and form a new union or partnership. In many chemical changes the atoms divorce themselves, each forsaking its mate or mates, and seeking some newer affinity in the shape of a more congenial atom. The atoms manifest a fickleness and will always desert a lesser attraction for a greater one. This is no mere bit of imagery, or scientific poetry. It is a scientific statement of the action of atoms along the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Iron Cross'—a generous supply of these decorations being carried in a basket by one of his orderlies, following him about as he walked along. Meantime the King, leaving Napoleon in the chateau to ruminate on the fickleness of fortune, drove off to see his own victorious soldiers, who greeted him with huzzas that rent the air, and must have added to the pangs of the ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... Majesty, his crown and dignity," and condemn the said forgery to be burnt on the 8th at Westminster, and three days later at the Exchange? How could they sentence King to less than six months of Newgate and a fine of L50, though, in their gentleness or fickleness, they ultimately released him from some of the former and all the latter penalty? Happy those who possess this political curiosity, and can compare it with the speech which the King really did make on the same day, and which, perhaps, ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... earned. He had never seemed stirred by the popular odium, he never seemed to prize the popular praise, which he received; it was not for praise that he had worked, but for simple duty; and his experience of the fickleness of public favour might make him something scornful of it. To the honours which his Sovereign delighted to shower on him—honours perhaps never before bestowed on a subject by a monarch—he was sensitive. The Queen to him was the noblest personification of the country whose good had ever been, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... beautiful as an interview of first love, went on our first meeting with this Northern river. But water, the feminine element, is so mobile and impressible that it must protect itself by much that seems caprice and fickleness. We might be sure that the Penobscot would not always flow so gently, nor all the way from forests to the sea conduct our bark without one shiver of panic, where rapids broke noisy and foaming over rocks that showed their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... so, Elsie on her side did not attempt to break through these little restraints that had fallen around them. It was natural that she should be glad to escape from the gloom which surrounded Elizabeth, and in this respect the fickleness of her character was fortunate; from her lack of concentrativeness, the girl was able to throw off any trouble the moment its actual danger ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... round hole. Moreover, we are to insist on the essential and increasing individuality of women, which is to a large extent a recent phenomenon. The cynical commonplace is "All women are alike"—and then follows the specific accusation—"in fickleness", "in extravagance", "in unreasonableness", in this trick or that. The chief effort of conservatism is to make them alike, to fit each one for the same life by the same training in ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... turn the great events in the life of man! If I had received a cool letter from my intended wife; if I had only heard a rumour of any thing from which fickleness in her might have been inferred; if I had found in her any, even the smallest, abatement of affection; if she had but let go any one of the hundred strings by which she held my heart: if any of these, never ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... the Union from the disobedience of the States, the States from the exaggerated claims of the Union, the public interest against private interests and the conservative spirit of stability against the fickleness of the democracy." The contrast between these observations and the disheartened words in which Jay declined renomination to the chief justiceship in 1801 gives perhaps a fair measure ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... the English captain, had imposed a heavy fine upon the Kohong (a company of merchants possessing the monopoly of the European trade,) although the members of this body could have no concern in the transaction." Capt. K. is decidedly of opinion, that nothing but resolute conduct will overcome the fickleness and knavery of the Chinese. He pays a high compliment to our countrymen, especially Mr Drummond, president of the factory, who interfered in his behalf when at Whampoa, and with effect, when they could easily have thwarted his plan, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... had as one of their gods, Yahveh, whom they endowed with their qualities; qualities inherent in a primitive people: jealousy and might, trickery and fickleness. They evolved a worship that contained in a modified form many of the ceremonials that they witnessed when they came into contact with the Babylonians and Phoenicians. Their Bible they maintained to be a collection ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... not, constancy is not. This perspicuous proverb from the Persian (which I made up myself for the occasion) is cited in mitigation of the Tyro's regrettable fickleness, he—to his shame be it chronicled—having practically forgotten the woe-begone damsel's very existence within eighteen short hours after his adventure in knight-errantry. Her tear-ravaged and untidy plainness had, in that brief time, been exorcised ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... internal discord, was not less so in 1848. The history of the court was one of scandal, and of the government one of weakness, fickleness, and incapacity. The year 1847 closed by a change of ministry, when the infamous Narvaez was in the ascendant, and his creatures were gathered around him in the guise of a cabinet. The queen-mother, it was declared, had been married in December, 1833, to her ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not,[II-E] dreamed once upon a night, that the figure of Proserpina, whom he had long worshipped, visited his slumbers with an angry and vindictive countenance, and menaced him with vengeance, in resentment of his having neglected her altars, with the usual fickleness of a polytheist, for those of some more fashionable divinity. Not that goddess of the infernal regions herself could assume a more haughty or more displeased countenance than that with which Lady Binks looked from time to time upon ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... and depressed, for she was a faithful little soul, and was true to all her likes and dislikes; fickleness to her friends was not in her nature; if she liked a person she ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... some are slaves to them; some even find rivals in them. Some are prevented from forming friendships, by tyranny on one side or by insubordination on the other; by selfishness there or by heartlessness here. Envy, vanity, fickleness, spite, festering incompatibilities of character, often prove fatal in these veiled and intimate relations. But when the characters of mother and daughter are happy accords, or accurate counterparts, rich, lofty, ardent, and disinterested, the solidly ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... representatives, according to population. There were, in fact, fifteen members. The first election passed off quietly in the autumn of the same year. Dr. Carson, the father of Home Rule, stood for St. John's, and Mr Justice Prowse has usefully noted that he was defeated. The fickleness and ingratitude of the people were never more dramatically illustrated. "He had been the pioneer of the new movement, had suffered in the people's cause, and yet the public, 'that many-headed monster thing—the mob,' were the ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... altogether. Rightly or wrongly, I have the reputation of fickleness in regard to women, and Aniela must have heard remarks about it; maybe it is for that very reason the dear girl shows such unbounded confidence in me. I understand, and can almost hear the pure soul saying: "They wrong you,—you ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... For ease of illustration, I have joined together the details of so delicate a scrutiny by a thread of fiction. The outward body of it matters little. The essential point is to remember that such things were not caused, as they try to persuade us, by human fickleness, by the inconstancy of our fallen nature, by the chance persuasions of desire. There was needed the deadly pressure of an age of iron, of cruel needs: it was needful that Hell itself should seem a shelter, an asylum, by contrast ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... attempting to describe the fashions of his countrymen, gave up the effort in sheer despair over the variety and fickleness of costume, and drew a naked man with a pair of shears in one hand and a piece of cloth in the other, to the end that he should shape his apparel as he himself liked; and this he called an Englishman. Even the gentle Harrison, who ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... life, they had played together as children; more than this, though now he would have been quite willing to forget the whole episode and even more than willing that she should forget it, there had been a time when he had moped in wretched melancholy because of what he had then considered her utter fickleness. Shortly after this he had been sent East to college and had borne the separation with a fortitude that had rather surprised him when he recalled how bitter a thing ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
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