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More "Mundane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tortoise, which immediately sank into the sea and drowned all the human race save one man. [149] In Finnish mythology the world is not a tortoise, but it is an egg, of which the white part is the ocean, the yolk is the earth, and the arched shell is the sky. In India this is the mundane egg of Brahma; and it reappears among the Yorubas as a pair of calabashes put together like oyster-shells, one making a dome over the other. In Zulu-land the earth is a huge beast called Usilosimapundu, whose face is a rock, and whose mouth is very large and ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Lady's fingers.' And then he bewails the fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... presents itself whether the highest Person in this text be the so-called four-faced Brahm, the Lord of the mundane egg who represents the individual souls in their collective aspect, or the supreme Person who is the Lord of all.—The Prvapakshin maintains the former view. For, he argues, on the introductory question, 'He who here among men should meditate until death ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... of adventure, while some of his own personal experiences, and those of the former commanding officer, seem almost incredible when away from the glamour of the place. In the post records, sandwiched between such mundane things as requisitions for water-buckets or commissary supplies, one would read of atrocious murders committed by the Moros; piratical expeditions headed off, and their instigators punished; or attempted slave-raids ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... "wump" at the bottom. The after-capstan was a roundabout, with its squealing passengers suspended from capstan-bars. Each grim twelve-inch gun had a saddle strapped round the muzzle, on which one sat, thrilled and ecstatic, while the great guns rose slowly to extreme elevation and descended again to mundane levels. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... "Joseph's Legende" and "Eine Alpensymphonie" are makeshift, slack, slovenly despite all technical virtuosity, all orchestral marvels. Every one knows what the score of "Rosenkavalier" should have been, a gay, florid, licentious thing, the very image of the gallant century with its mundane amours and ribbons and cupids, its petit-maitres and furbelows and billets-doux, its light emotions and equally light surrenders. But Strauss's music is singularly flat and hollow and dun, joyless and soggy, even though it is dotted with waltzes and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Gestes are mundane stories, the History is a cosmic affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... precepts of the Christian Church, while pagan vices wore a halo borrowed from the luster of the newly found and passionately welcomed poets of antiquity. Blending the visionary intuitions of the Middle Ages with the positive and mundane ethics of the ancients, the Italians of the Renaissance strove to adopt the sentiments and customs of an age long dead and not to be resuscitated. At the same time the rhetorical taste of the nation inclined the more adventurous and passionate ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the wonder regions of the world; but nature placed California there without assistance from anybody. I do not refer alone to the scenery of California which is duplicated in no other spot of the sidereal system; nor to the climate which matches it; nor to its super-mundane fertility, nor to its super-solar fecundity. The railroad folder with its voluble vocabulary has already beaten me to it. I do not refer solely to that rich yellow-and-violet, springtime bourgeoning which turns California ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... movement in any one of these is reflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by the emancipation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They are enfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the military machine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundane influences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternally rational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is the work of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much from toothache as other mortals, and are, like others, open to the impressions of near ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... dallied with the subject of the monastic life, as lived by those same pious Benedictines here in England long ago. Its reasoned rejection of mundane agitations, its calm, its leisure, its profound and ardent scholarship were vastly to his taste,—A man touching middle-age might do worse, surely, than spend his days between worship and learning, thus?—He saw, and approved, its ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Jewish formula of belief in the same spirit as the herd,—the religion inculcated in the breast of Leila was different from that which Inez had ever before encountered amongst her proselytes. It was less mundane and material—a kind of passionate rather than metaphysical theism, which invested the great ONE, indeed, with many human sympathies and attributes, but still left Him the August and awful God of the Genesis, the Father of a Universe though the individual Protector of a fallen sect. Her attention ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stood silent for some time, and looked very composed, awaiting the commands of the knight. His mind was clearly in such a state of devotion that peradventure he might not have descended for a while longer to his mundane duties, had not Master Silas told him that, under the shadow of his wing, their courage had returned and ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... least commend my facility and variety, when you consider what I have done within the last fifteen months, with my head, too, full of other and of mundane matters. But no doubt you will avoid saying any good of it, for fear I should raise the price upon you: that's right: stick to business. Let me know what your other ragamuffins are writing, for I suppose you don't like starting too many of your vagabonds ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... be crushed or melted from its integral persistence of personality. Though plunged into the centre of a surrounding wilderness or ocean of minds, it must still retain itself unlost in the multitude. Therefore, if we admit the existence of an inclusive mundane Soul, it by no means follows that lesser souls received into it are deprived of their individuality. It is "one not otherwise than as the sea is one, by a similarity and contiguity of parts, being composed of an innumerable host of distinct spirits, as that is of aqueous particles; and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... is not the school logician erecting a consistent fabric of words, but that he is dominated by an imagination peopled with concrete personalities, and labouring to assign their places to the Father and the Son as separate agents in the mundane drama. The De doctrina Christiana is the prose counterpart of Paradise Lost and Regained, a caput mortuum of the poems, with ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... have had its origin prior to Mahometanism. It lasts for six days, and is supposed to be kept in commemoration of the Creation and the Deluge—events constantly synchronised and confounded in pagan cosmogonies. At this feast eggs are presented to friends, in obvious allusion to the Mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... "Some One I Know" is a lightly amatory piece of tuneful rhythm. "Night of Rain" gives a peculiarly pleasing aspect to a type of scene not usually celebrated in verse. The only jarring note is the rather mundane metaphor which compares the trees to a "beautiful mop". Though Mrs. Renshaw holds unusual ideas regarding the use of art in poetry, we contend that this instance of rhetorical frigidity is scarcely permissible. It is too much like Sir Richard Blackmore's description of Mount Aetna, wherein he ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Brahmans, with a system rather cosmogonical than chronological, divide the present mundane period into four ages or yugas as they call them: the Krita, the Treta, the Dwapara, and the Kali. The Krita, called also the Deva-yuga or that of the Gods, is the age of truth, the perfect age, the Treta is the age of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Druidical altars, in imitation of older heathen altars—a theory supported by reference to the stones called Petroma, near the temple of Eleusinian Damater in Arcadia: The Philistines pointed to the Deluge in their hieroglyphics of the serpent and mundane egg, the history which the serpent is supposed to designate being that of Noah, and the egg being reckoned an emblem of the ark, from the circumstance of it containing the rudiments of future life. The serpent is not unfrequently represented when reference is made to the betrayal ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... protest against a secular romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the society which was most indifferent ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... know, is of some importance, after all," said Mrs. Scudder, in that apologetic way in which sensible people generally acknowledge a secret leaning towards anything so very mundane. While the good lady spoke, she was reverentially unpinning and shaking out of their fragrant folds creamy crape shawls of rich Chinese embroidery,—India muslin, scarfs, and aprons; and already her hands were undoing the pins of a silvery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... the imminent end of the world had an important bearing upon his entire philosophy; for if the end of the world was so near it was far more important to prepare for life hereafter than to be concerned over mundane affairs. May we not view with doubt any of Jesus' teachings that depended upon his mistaken conception of the duration ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... voluntarily to the brutality of the crowd and the rigors of the law. Moreover, and from the start, notwithstanding threats and temptations, two-thirds of the clergy would not take the oath; in the highest ranks, among the mundane ecclesiastics whose skepticism and laxity were notorious, honor, in default of faith, maintained the same spirit; nearly the whole of them, great and small, had subordinated their interests, welfare and security to the maintenance ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... regardless of the piece of luncheon roll she held, thus promptly launching it over her shoulder, where it went merrily bounding across the polished floor to be gravely rescued by the irreproachable John. But Rosalie was in the realms of the gods and far above such mundane matters as a ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... of speculation, objects rising to the dignity of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language. Why particularly at this time? Simply, because the interest in that language rests upon two separate foundations: there are two separate principles ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... lessons suffered sometimes while they indulged in day-dreams, for it was hard to recall such mundane matters as the capital of Mexico, or the date of Magna Charta, when their thoughts were far away in the lantern room, busy with concealed prisoners or ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... man enters the higher evolution, this body comes into independent activity on this side of death, and he gradually becomes conscious of his heavenly life, even amid the whirl of mundane existence. Then he becomes "the Son of man which is in heaven,"[249] who can speak with the authority of knowledge on heavenly things. When the man begins to live the life of the Son, having passed on ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... something so soothing in it, that I can well imagine with what pleasure those engaged in the turmoils of war, or the scarcely less exciting arena of politics, in former ages, must have turned from their mundane cares to look on these personations of their fabled deities, whose tranquil beauty forms so soothing a contrast ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... papers on my desk. Looked at with the unclouded eye of a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these pettifogging transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the Cameron Stores, proofs of the weekly ad. for the Fishmongers' Journal, a telegram from the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires needed for one of the delivery trucks—how could I jeopardize ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... but especially the heat of the days and the dank mists of the night, should have to be told as of a real journey in this very repetitive and sui-similar world. How much rather I wish that being free from mundane and wide-awake (that is to say from perilously dusty) considerations and droughty boredoms, I might wander forth at leisure through the air and visit the regions where everything is as the soul chooses: to be dropped ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... words) were greeted with some laughter, and the ridiculed spellers sought their seats with hanging heads. By and by, however, the failures were not all at the bottom of the class; here and there such lists as "inane, profane, humane, insane, mundane, urbane," or, "staid, unlaid, mermaid, prayed, weighed, portrayed" began to pick out uncertain ones the entire length ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... beyond, which he cannot see, shut up in Rome. With us, the lowest amount of education that ever receives the name comprises at least the three R's, as they are termed,—Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic. But these are far too mundane matters for a Jesuit to occupy his time in expounding. The education of the Italian youth is a thoroughly religious one, taking the term in its Roman sense. The little catechisms I have spoken of are filled ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... mundane rumour but a breath Of wind, that comes now this way and now that, And changes name, because it ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... strains e'er heard on earth, Fill Heaven with light and song ineffable, Along the bright flow of eternity. Then swift in flight as saint and seraph there, She passes back through those vast gates of fire, And slowly drops upon some flowery peak, Or ocean isle, upon this mundane sphere; Then sleeps soft in the folds of some fair flower, Or, in the crystal bosom of ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... Grecian art, and abandon themselves to pleasure and money-making. The Roman grandees divide among themselves the lands and riches of the world, and this dwelling-place of princes looms up the proud centre of mundane glory and power. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... inherited curse would seem to be enough for any hero to totter under. It becomes unimportant, however, when we discover that he has furthermore been taken possession of at birth by the spirit of a wicked and fascinating Italian duchess, who wishes to expiate her crimes before leaving this mundane sphere. One might readily expect some startling effects from the development of a plot thus removed from the haven of probabilities and set afloat in a sea of the wildest romance. The Duchess Emilia's repentance, however, seems to have ended the interest of her career, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... however, grant without argument that religious ideals have always far outrun their very human devotees. Let us, then, turn to more mundane matters of honor and fairness. The world today is trade. The world has turned shopkeeper; history is economic history; living is earning a living. Is it necessary to ask how much of high emprise and honorable ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... and honest mind of to-day, as compared with a like mind some centuries ago, that it contemplates more directly the actual procedure of the universe, is less concerned with supernatural personages and transactions, and more attentive to what has happened and is happening in this mundane sphere? The piety of our ancestors contemplated the justice and mercy of God as manifested in the counsels of eternity,—his righteous condemnation of the wicked, and the love-inspired sacrifice of Christ. The philosophy of our ancestors was largely an attempt to map out a world-scheme ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... West, how joy's high seas expand, Reflecting, not a foolish, mundane pride That, thinking it does all, sets God aside— But Virtue which, with heart and head and hand, Works out God's purpose, with dear Christ for guide, And holy spirits Light ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... Barbara come in with their respective young men, Charles Lomax and Adolphus Cusins. Sarah is slender, bored, and mundane. Barbara is robuster, jollier, much more energetic. Sarah is fashionably dressed: Barbara is in Salvation Army uniform. Lomax, a young man about town, is like many other young men about town. He is affected with a frivolous sense of humor which plunges him at the most inopportune moments ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... what is that in me which makes me regret the Griffin, the real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and mundane. England, my desire, what ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read the paragraph. "Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely..." Yes; she was lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the papers—seen her represented in every conceivable attitude of the mundane game: fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her thoroughbred, dancing a gavotte, all patches and plumes, or fingering a guitar, all tulle and lilies; and once he had caught a glimpse of her at the theatre. Hearing that Ronald was ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... surprise to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under his arm; altogether equipped to such a high point of pedestrianism that a cynical ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... perceived that there was something wrong with Tryon. Miss Leary had no doubt that there was a woman at the bottom of it,—for about what else should youth worry but love? or if one's love affairs run smoothly, why should one worry about anything at all? Miss Leary, in the nineteen years of her mundane existence, had not been without mild experiences of the heart, and had hovered for some time on the verge of disappointment with respect to Tryon himself. A sensitive pride would have driven more than one woman away at the sight of the man of her preference sighing ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Catholicism. Overbeck felt that art was a religious question, and he determined that all his work should be a protest against the indifferentism and latitudinarianism which account all religions equal. He conceded that secular writings and mundane arts were not without their value and charm; in the arts may be permitted divers manifestations, such as landscape, animal, and flower painting. The Church is tolerant of all that is good, but on the highest pinnacle stands the Christian painter. Over ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... turns of history must have been more frequent than any dull avenue or easy sequence. Lady Sandgate was shiningly modern, and perhaps at no point more so than by the effect of her express repudiation of a mundane future certain to be more and more offensive to women of real quality and of formed taste. Clearly, at any rate, in her hands, the clue to the antique confidence had lost itself, and repose, however founded, had given way ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... purpose taking the object you have brought away?" he heard the Taoist inquire. To this question the Buddhist replied with a smile: "Set your mind at ease," he said; "there's now in maturity a plot of a general character involving mundane pleasures, which will presently come to a denouement. The whole number of the votaries of voluptuousness have, as yet, not been quickened or entered the world, and I mean to avail myself of this occasion to introduce this object among ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... landlady in the arts; only a sentimentalist would have hung that picture in her salon. Other decorations further proved her as belonging to both worlds. The chintzes gay with garlands of roses, with which walls, beds, and chairs were covered, revealed the mundane element, the woman of decorative tastes, possessed of a hidden passion for effective backgrounds. Two or three wooden crucifixes, a prie-dieu, and a couple of saints in plaster, went far to prove that this excellent bourgeoise had thriftily ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... persuaded me that I had time; and I'm always telling him lies, and pretending to be as well acquainted as he is with authors I hardly know by name,—he seems so fondly to expect it. He's really almost a disembodied spirit as concerns most mundane interests—his soul is in literature, as a lover's in his mistress's beauty; and in the next world, where, as the Swedenborgians believe, spirits seen at a distance appear like the things they most resemble in disposition, as doves, hawks, goats, lambs, swine, and so on, I'm ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Thus a poet names it, though I, the architect thereof, insist that it is wholly and beautifully mundane. To make it, pare eight firm apples, the higher-flavored the better, core, drop into cold water, as pared, let stand till you make the syrup. Take a cup of sugar to each two apples and a cup of water to each two cups of sugar. Bring to a boil, skim, clean twice, then throw in half a ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... down with straw, as though he had been a Horse or a Mule himself; and then a little fat Canon, who was the Buffoon or Jack Pudding of the party, sang songs over his drink which were not in the least like unto Hymns or Canticles, but rather of a most Mundane, not to say Loose, order of Chant. His Highness (who wore the Biggest Emerald ring on his right Forefinger, over his glove, that ever I saw) took a great fancy to my Master, and at Parting pledged ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... "We have done homage to that entrancing ideal by spatchcocking the Convention into the Treaty. There it remains as a finger-post to point the way to a new heaven on earth. But we observe that the Treaty itself is a good old eighteenth-century piece, drawing its inspiration from mundane and practical considerations, and paying a good deal more than lip service to the principle ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... glows with genuine fire, 'Tis yours, while care recoils, and envy flies, Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays, are mine, If by your looks my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big, Your fateful arms, the goose-quill, and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's somb'rous seal impress'd, Mysterious terrors, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... embodiment of religious ideas. The chief critical difficulty felt by this school is in identifying any concrete historic fact with the unchanging idea, that is, in making Jesus of Nazareth the incarnation of God. God is reinterpreted, and in place of an extra-mundane creator is an omnipresent life and power. The Christian attainment is nothing else than the thorough intellectual grasp of the absolute idea and the identification of our essential selves with God. With a less thorough-going ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... man be a good Presbyterian in Scotland, and also a good Episcopalian in England, or possibly a Nonconformist in both, unless he believes in the Divine origin and authority of some one ecclesiastical system, and the mundane origin of all others. With perfect consistency and sincerity he may dearly love his Church, but yet love Christians more, because he ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... of the work he was trying to do in his school. A clergyman has social licence to be serious which is not accorded to other men. Wherefore he spoke as a clergyman might speak to a friend, saying, in general terms, how steep is the ascent when, among mundane affairs, human beings try to tread only where the angels of the higher ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... in his place at the organ. Arthur's thoughts, too, were wandering; and—you know it is of no use to make people out to be better than they are—wandering to things especially mundane. Arthur had not ceased to look out for something to do, to replace the weekly funds lost when he left Mr. Galloway's. He had not yet been successful: employment is more easily sought than found, especially by one lying ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... unnatural, that the more they believe in it the less practical they become. They expect ravens to feed them, the cruse of oil to be inexhaustible, and the fish to come to the right side of the ship at breakfast time. They trust in God and loaf about. They would conduct mundane affairs as though men were angels and church business a series of miracles. But the successful church worker is one who recognizes the plain facts of life, and their relation to heavenly things; who is ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... nearly a hundred years. We may be sure that to the end he lived busily, for of idleness he speaks with abhorrence as the root of evil. Doubtless he was always a copious talker, and to many a pilgrim he must have gossiped delightfully, alternating mundane memories with counsel good for the soul. Only one of his monastic brethren is known to us as a man of any distinction: this was Dionysius Exiguus, or the Little, by birth a Scythian, a man of much learning. He compiled ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... nineties of course did away with the necessity for any further essays in this direction. And so at last after innumerable years of abuse but useful and indispensable work, the old punkah went the way of all things mundane. ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... the details. I had been for several months, whether wisely or unwisely doth not appear, a link in one of those human chain rings supposed to be as peculiarly receptive of extra and super and ultra mundane facts as a legislative 'ring' is of the loose change of the lobby; and had sought in vain for personal contact with the world to come, when one afternoon a streak of the 'od' lightning suddenly ran down my right arm, as I sat in my private apartment, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... himself from time to time brought up with a certain surprise, as he discovered, under all his savage cynicism, his overweening devotion to a depressing theory, a very real vein of refinement, of delicate mundane sensibility, revealed perhaps in a chance phrase or diffidence, or more often in some curiously fine touch to canvas of his rare, audacious brush. The incongruities of the man, his malice, his coarseness, his reckless generosity, gave Rainham much food ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... precincts, and retired there about 1655 to prepare for that unpleasant event which she put off as long as possible by the most assiduous care of her health. "If she was not devoted, she had the idea of becoming so," said Mademoiselle. But her devotion was in quite a mundane fashion. Her pleasant rooms were separate and independent, thus enabling her to give herself not only to the care of her health and her soul, but to a select society, to literature, and to conversation. She ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... a man Who does about the best he can Is plenty good enugh to suit This lower mundane institute— No matter ef his daily walk Is subject fer his neghbor's talk, And critic-minds of ev'ry whim Jest all git ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... comely and mundane countenance passed us, holding in leash a wheezing, vicious, waddling, brute of a yellow pug. The dog entangled himself with Bridger's legs and mumbled his ankles in a snarling, peevish, sulky bite. Bridger, with a happy smile, kicked the breath ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... colleges, and education generally. Active and intellectual, though not learned, they have infused new life into the fat indolence of the Spanish system. Men of this world rather than the next, they have adopted a purely mundane policy, abjured the gloomy cowl, raised gorgeous temples, and say, "He that cometh unto us shall in no wise lose heaven." Their chief merit, however, is the discovery of ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... saying to him sternly: 'If you think you can occupy this place all night on a ninepenny drink, you are mistaken. Either you ought to order another or hook it.' He braved it for several more ages, then paid, and went; and still it was only ten minutes to nine. All mundane phenomena were inexplicably contorted that night. As he was passing the end of the short street which contains the stage-door of Prince's Theatre, a man, standing at the door on the lookout, hailed him loudly. He hesitated, and the ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... to transfer Ziusudu's material craft to the heavens is surely without justification from the simple narrative. We have here no prototype of Ra sailing the heavenly ocean. And the destructive flood itself is not only of an equally material and mundane character, but is in complete harmony with its ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... in this age of magic and the belief in spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being alive, the gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed (1)—that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being—though there might be orders and degrees of ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... fine face; it even resembled the conventional portrait of Dante, but—I am asking the reader to tax his imagination—with humorous wrinkles set about the eyes, their high austerity clean taken away and replaced by a look of very mundane shrewdness, and lastly a grosser chin and mouth with a touch of the laughing faun in their folds and corners. "You are concealing your real reasons," said ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and poked a long rubber tube down and converted me into a patent pump, until the tartar-emetic, and the coffee, and the pumpkin-pie I had eaten for dinner had all revisited this mundane sphere. ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... resemblance to ourselves; or, perchance, they are a few old maids and bachelors, who sit round the kitchen hearth and listen to the singing of the kettle. "The oracles often give victory to our choice, and not to the order alone of the mundane periods. As, for instance, when they say that our voluntary sorrows germinate in us as the growth of the particular life we lead." The reform which you talk about can be undertaken any morning before ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... draught of it that he perished on the spot; then, through the simple old Grandsir, anxious to live for Pansie's sake; and, perhaps, through Pansie herself, who, coming into the enjoyment of some ennobling love, would wish to defeat death, so that she might always keep the perfection of her mundane happiness,—all these forms of striving to be made the adumbration of a higher one, the shadow-play that should direct our minds to the true ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a distant solitary spot, where the shadows deepened, and they were beyond the reach of mundane noises and malicious eyes of men, they shouted with delight like God's little birds to their companions to come and enjoy the delightful quiet where they could display their charms and enjoy themselves without fear of being surprised. Then one proposed to play at skipping and ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... dat chile up wid deir wings," chanted Aunt Dolcey. Then, descending to more mundane matters, she added a delighted chuckle: "I knowed she'd rise en shine one dese days. Holler at Marse Wes she did, name him names, plenty. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... anger shook her—anger with her benefactors, that they could not have introduced her to this mundane paradise as her simple self, Miss Manvers—Sarah with the vulgar h—by her own merits and defects to stand ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... all-seeing and personal God, and in the lore of this God, who is present in the depths of the soul, even when we refuse to follow the higher vocation to which he would persuade and solicit us—even were we carried away by the violence of mundane passions to commit, like Don Luis, almost all the capital sins in a single day—elevates the soul, purifies the other emotions, sustains human dignity, and lends poetry, nobility, and holiness to the commonest state, condition, and manner ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... in watching certain shadows stream past us on the Great White Road. Among them was that of a politician whom I had much admired upon the earth. In this land of Truth I was grieved to observe certain characteristics about him which I had never before suspected. It seemed to me, alas! that in his mundane career he had not been so entirely influenced by a single-hearted desire for the welfare of our country as he had proclaimed and I had believed. I gathered even that his own interests had ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... the jurisdiction of mundane mandamuses,' says I, 'by the unearthly statutes of female partiality. Let us praise the Lord and be thankful for whatever small mercies—' I begins; but I see Luke don't listen to me. Tired as he was, he calls for a fresh horse and starts ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... particular petty planet of ours. While the astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is growing ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... than the final departure of his father from things mundane was a tri-cornered conversation between Beatrice, Mr. Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their lawyers, and himself, that took place several days after the funeral. For the first time he came into actual cognizance ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... sanctity, made it at least equally probable that the supposed relic was taken from the head of a brother of the deceased prior, who had been executed for adherence to the Stuart family in 1745-6; and the motto, HAUD OBLIVISCENDUM, seemed to intimate a tone of mundane feeling and recollection of injuries, which made it at least doubtful whether, even in the quiet and gloom of the cloister, Father Hugo had forgotten the sufferings and injuries of ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... mind would fain ascend to the height of science, let its first and principal study be to know itself. Full knowledge of the rational spirit is a great and high mountain. This mountain transcends all the peaks of all mundane sciences, and looks down upon all the philosophy and all the science of the world from on high. Could Aristotle, could Plato, could the great band of philosophers ever ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... Faustus, ever-resident in the questioning spirit of immortal man, attempts his first outbreak into the domain of unlimited inquiry, unless he take heed of the needfully-cautious prudentialities of mundane observance, there infallibly attends him a fatal Mephistophelean influence, of which the malign tendency, from every conclusion of eventuality, is to plunge him into perilous vast cloud-waves of the dream-inhabited vague. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... of her heretical opinions. But though she gave a little too much heed to visions and dreamy imaginings, she had lost no whit of the practical common-sense and clearness of sight which had distinguished her in many mundane emergencies. She absolutely refused to make over her property for the good of the sisterhood, and would not undertake an office which would shut her up from her mission of proclaiming far and wide, as the Divine ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... Thomas," I answered, "and doubtless the lady will know that thee has a coat, when she hears thee speak. But in any event, it is wise not to think too much of these mundane things. Let ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... is just as absurd to deny the facts of spiritualism now as it was in the Middle Ages to ascribe them to the Devil." I think Mr. Owen attributes too much value to his facts. I do not think the things contributed from the ultra-mundane sphere are particularly valuable, apart from the evidence they give ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... twenty minutes. There were tears in his eyes, and I valued that little sign of human fellowship more than all the commonplaces he courageously enunciated. He talked in a soft, low tone, as if I was ill. He made no allusions to mundane things; and I am grateful to him for coming. He had dreaded his call, I am sure, and he had done it from a mixture of affection and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... jerk one way and another. That was because, as the general thought, the next letter was to be l, that is to say, Jeanne D'Arc, according to his idea, intended to say that souls would recognize each other only after they had been purged of everything mundane, or something to that effect, and that therefore the next letter ought to be l (posl, i. e., after); the artist, on the other hand, thought that the next letter would be v; that the soul intended to say that souls would recognize each other by the light—posv ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... posada, and of the character and purposes of those who frequented it, was tinctured by grave and philosophical doubts. This courteous and dignified scepticism generally took the formula of quien sabe to all frivolous and mundane inquiry. He would affirm with strict verity that his omelettes were unapproachable, his beds miraculous, his aguardiente supreme, his house was even as your own. Beyond these were questions with which the simply finite and always discreet human ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... Edition, Preface), who was so nervous about railway murders, and who refused to be consoled by being reminded that though the worst should happen, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street, and that he would not be missed: "the great mundane movement would still ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... houses consists largely of organic matter, and if spread over the land would in time decay and disappear almost entirely. It appears, however, from recent observations on the snow-fields of the Arctic regions, that some little meteoric dust of extra mundane ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... good. But, given the will to live, however powerful, we have seen that, in the ordinary course of mundane life, the throes of dissolution cannot be checked. The desperate, and again and again renewed struggle of the Kosmic elements to proceed with a career of change despite the will that is checking them, like a pair of runaway horses struggling ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... n't expostulate with me. It 's no use talking. My mind is made up. You may tell M. so. It will be hardest for her to believe it. She has partaken with me in that infirmity of noble minds,—a desire to look through the haze of this mundane atmospheric environment, and predict the future. But, alas I there is an infirmity of vision; we see through a glass darkly. We can't see through a millstone. The firmament has been very like that, for some days,—all compact with ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... sensation, as of busy fingers weaving threads within his skull and iron hands moulding the matter of his brain into new patterns. The demon things responsible for his torment only slept when he slept, or when, as had happened once or twice, he drank himself indifferent to all mundane matters. Yet he could not still them for long, and even Phoebe had heard mutterings and threats of the thread-spinners who were driving ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... courage from the warmth of her welcome. His heart beat high with a hope which no ordinary mundane affairs could have inspired. All the ill-fate behind him was wiped off the slate. The world shone radiant before eyes, which, at such times, are mercifully blinded to realities. An Almighty Providence sees that every man shall live to the full such moments as were his just then. It ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... atoms[389]. (And in the latter case we are not further advanced than before.)—For all these reasons the formation of aggregates cannot be accounted for. But without aggregates there would be an end of the stream of mundane existence ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... as to the highest part of the nature common to both, I at the same time assert her inferiority in what may be called its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this asserted superiority? Because man, and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Just so too the manner in which the more delicate parts of religion daily work in producing that 'moderation' which, upon the whole, and as a rule, is essential to long success, defining success even in its most narrow and mundane way, might be worked out in a hundred cases, though it would not suit these pages. Many of the finer intellectual tastes have a similar restraining effect they prevent, or tend to prevent, a greedy ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... our affinity with the past: it is a highly refined, highly civilised pursuit, demanding, for its success, a certain liberation from the life of instinct, and even, at times, a certain aloofness from all mundane hopes and fears. It is not in philosophy, therefore, that we can hope to see intuition at its best. On the contrary, since the true objects of philosophy, and the habit of thought demanded for their apprehension, are strange, unusual, and remote, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... evil and outwardly good are deprived of the good and left to their evil. The reverse occurs with the inwardly good who outwardly like other men have acquired wealth, sought distinction, delighted in the mundane, and indulged some lusts. Good and evil have not been commingled by them, however, but are separate, like internal and external; they have resembled the evil in many ways outwardly but not inwardly. Evil is separate from good in the evil, ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... to something more mundane, which also deserves consideration, I was informed that in Glasgow, with a population of about 900,000, there exists a floating class of 80,000 people, who live in lodging-houses of the same sort as, and mostly inferior to the Salvation Army ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... the earth, and certain distempered groanings wrenched from him at intervals he addressed (after they were out of him, reflectively) to the powers above, so that nothing of him should be lost which might get aid of anything mundane, infernal, or celestial. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the result is, above all else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein Mr. Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a society wherein Vautrin becomes chief of police, are upon the face of it extra-mundane. It suffices that, as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artist finds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper functions of the preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the photographer, or of the public ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... fared. The issue had been so satisfactory on the whole that it was considered advisable to tell James, who never failed to say day after day that he didn't know about Winifred's affair, he couldn't tell. As his sands ran out; the importance of mundane matters became increasingly grave to him, as if he were feeling: 'I must make the most of it, and worry well; I shall soon have nothing to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Brahman; that all phenomena are merely the result of ignorance; that after the destruction of that ignorance, and of its effects, all is merged again in Brahman, the true source of being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... round, and three cakes of rice are laid on it; and all the mourners sit round the mound until a crow comes and eats some of the cake. Then they say that the dead man's spirit has been freed from troubling about his household and mundane affairs and has departed to the other world. But if no real crow comes to eat the cake, they make a representation of one out of the sacred kusha grass, and touch the cake with it and consider that a crow has eaten it. After this the mourners go to a stream and put a little cow's urine on their ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... knowledge unnecessary." And Kant defines genius as "the talent to discover that which cannot be taught or learned."[8] This appears to be more of an evasion than a definition! But the intent here is to refer all that seems to transcend mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his sublimest intuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own source of light ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... her journey thither, there was not a flower, adds the chronicler, which did not greet her by opening a bud—not a mountain pigeon which remained in silence, whilst the breezes and the rivulets poured forth their silent murmurings of ecstasy. Saintly guardian of the soul, dispersing mundane evils!—no colours, the chronicler tells us, can paint the animation of the faithful; no discourse can describe the consolation of the pilgrims in their adoration at the Shrine of the Holy ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... they stumble, Over paths, to find what Truth is; Still in fog they are enveloped. To the first cause of all being We must needs go back, and bring the Last result of our researches In a concrete form together. Thus we comprehend the world well; For this purpose I am drinking Truly cosmogonically. Mundane space to me is nothing But a roomy vaulted cellar, Where as first and central wine-tun, Firmly stands the sun erected! Next to him the rank and file of Smaller casks, fixed stars and planets. As the divers casks are holding Wines of various sorts and flavours, So comprise ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... devious side-path of entertaining nonsense. Our home papers are almost uniformly staid; they are written conscientiously, laboriously, commendably. But, after all, the French are right in trying to inject as much entertainment as possible into the daily record of mundane things. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... sometimes more quickly than they had sickened. Thus soothing her inward tremors as best she might, she took more care than ever of her frail charge, stinting herself than she might nourish it, though the baby seemed to care less and less for mundane necessities, and only submitted to be fed, as it were, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... listened, hoping that the trailing clouds of glory so recently departed had left some trace of illumination in this their first expression in earth's language of their feelings and emotions. But we found them very mundane. Most of the conversation concerned their "saman," a comprehensive Indian word used by people with limited vocabularies to express all manner of things to play with. Their "saman" was various. Dolls, of course, and the remnants of dolls; tins and the lids thereof; ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... it be that a furtive hand, making its way through Jove's windows, may pluck forth a thunderbolt or two, or some article less destructive, but of manufacture equally divine? And in this consists the wisdom of the higher giants—that, in spite of their mundane antecedents, theories, and predilections, they can see that articles of divine manufacture are necessary. But then they never carry their supporters with them. Their whole army is an army of martyrs. "For twenty years ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... begin one letter with "Dear Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the highest and often of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Anne feeling altogether at ease and natural with congenial playmates. Even Sedley's tortures were preferable to Peregrine's attentions, since the first were only the tyranny of a graceless boy, the other gave her an indescribable sense of strangeness from which these ordinary mundane comrades were a relief ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she said, implying that there was every reason why a man of his mundane interests ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... possible, but it is a soul-harrowing thing to trundle along a mile of unridable road, in company with twenty importuning katir-jees, their diminutive donkeys filling the air with suffocating clouds of dust. There is nothing on all this mundane sphere that will so effectually subdue the proud, haughty spirit of a wheelman, or that will so promptly and completely snuff out his last flickering ray of dignity; it is one of the pleasantries of 'cycling through a country where the people have been riding donkeys and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... which might rival Bond Street, the Rue de la Paix, or Fifth Avenue for the richness and variety of their contents; a street whose pavements were thronged with well-dressed pedestrians and whose roadway was filled with motor cars—vehicles, these, scornful of the petrol tax and such-like mundane and vulgar restrictions—in fine, the street of ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... substances or mundane formations, astro- nomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of specu- 209:27 lative theories, based on the hypothesis of material law or life and intelligence resident in matter, will ulti- mately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... hereabouts his will is paramount; and, as I have had the honor to add, the devil is a gentleman. Sure, and as such, he cannot be expected to countenance your present behavior? Nay, never fear! Lucifer, already up to the ears in the affairs of this mundane sphere, lacks leisure to express his disapproval in sulphuric person. He tenders his apologies, sir, and sends in his stead your servant, with whose capabilities he is ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... studies literature. There is practically no barrier in China to becoming a "literate," and the classification means all that the word "gentleman" can in Europe. For this and other reasons thousands of men in Canton wear horn-rimmed spectacles, look wise, and discuss mundane affairs in a manner brooking no contention. The literary bureaucracy of Canton wields a mighty influence in the affairs of the nation, it is insisted. A member of this class may not be able to do the simplest sum ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... hundred yards to starboard of the Narcissus and informed Captain Michael J. Murphy that the latter had just fifteen minutes in which to save the ship's company; whereat Michael J. proved himself every inch a sailor, while Terence P. proved himself a marine engineer. If there was a word of opprobrium, mundane or nautical, which the port skipper didn't shout at that submarine commander, the port engineer supplied it. In all his life Cappy Ricks had never listened to such rich, racy, unctuous abuse; it lifted itself about the level of the commonplace and became a work ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love..... Nay, and since death, which wipes out man, Finds him with many an unsolved plan,.... Still gazing on the ever full Eternal mundane spectacle, This world in which we draw our breath In some sense, Fausta, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... third heaven may signify a supra-mundane vision. Such a vision may be called the third heaven in three ways. First, according to the order of the cognitive powers. In this way the first heaven would indicate a supramundane bodily vision, conveyed through the senses; thus was seen the hand of one writing on the wall (Dan. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... not mean that in Othello the suppression is marked, or that, as in Troilus and Cressida, it strikes us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject. Still it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it leaves an impression that in Othello we are not in contact with the whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... is further emphasized by the important circumstance that of all the phenomena described, only those most susceptible of mundane interpretation were witnessed by Glanvill or Mompesson. All of the more extraordinary—the great body with the red and glaring eyes, the levitated children, etc.—came to the narrator from second or third or fourth hand sources not always clearly indicated, and doubtless ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... with tales like those of the vampires or vroucolacas, which concern only what he considered a heretical church, and with which, therefore, he might deal according to his own will—apply to them the ordinary rules of evidence, and treat them as mundane affairs—there he is clear-sighted, critical and acute, and accordingly he discusses the matter philosophically and logically, and concludes without fear of sinning against the church, that the whole is delusion. When, on the other ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... however, recalled her to earth and prosaic mundane affairs: her supply of money was rapidly getting dangerously low. Barring accident, she would have enough to get her to Dyer, where Eddie was to meet her. But suppose they should be snowed up for a day or two? Only an hour ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... of whisky-bottles and of Sunday dinners, and sometimes of whole rows of intricate calculations, showing that men and women alike have had during their supposed hours of prayer and praise no thoughts but of business or of pleasure, of the desires or the anxieties of the lower form of mundane existence. ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... the Earth was regarded as the immovable centre of the universe, and surrounding it were ten crystalline spheres, or heavens, arranged in concentric circles, the larger spheres enclosing the smaller ones; and within those was situated the cosmos, or mundane universe, usually described as 'the Heavens and the Earth.' To each of the first seven spheres there was attached a heavenly body, which was carried round the Earth by the revolution of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... rule which gave to him an hour's more sleep than to the other monks, and now, although he had risen, he was quietly continuing his sleep in a large armchair as soft as eider down. The furniture of the room was more mundane than religious; a carved table, covered with a rich cloth, books of religious gallantry—that singular mixture of love and devotion, which we only meet with at that epoch of art—expensive vases, and curtains of rich damask, were some ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... became tired of her. He liked her flattery, and at first declared that she was clever and nice, but her niceness was too purely celestial to satisfy his mundane tastes. Mackinnon himself can revel among the clouds in his own writings, and can leave us sometimes in doubt whether he ever means to come back to earth, but when his foot is on terra firma he loves to feel the earthy substratum which supports his weight. ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... all mundane and marketable goods, after having been solemnly refused admittance by the Stoics at the front door, were smuggled in at a kind of tradesman's entrance under the name of things indifferent. We must now see how they had, as it were, two moral ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... is one of those young women who have been brought up in the spirit of the Restoration. She has principles, she fasts, takes the sacrament, and goes to balls and operas very elegantly dressed; her confessor permits her to combine the mundane with sanctity. Always in conformity with the Church and with the world, she presents a living image of the present day, which seems to have taken the word "legality" for its motto. The conduct of the marquise shows precisely enough religious devotion to attain under a new Maintenon ...
— Study of a Woman • Honore de Balzac
... dark, ardent, spiritual eyes, and a kind of proud hierarchical bearing. I have wondered how far the abbots and monks of this great and ancient abbey of Benedictines were occupied—in the intervals of more supra-mundane avocations—in perfecting, not only the ancient recipe of their liqueur, but also the physical type of the feminine population among which they laboured. The type I have in mind sometimes rather recalls the face of Baudelaire, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... topmost branches stands Asgard, the abode of the Asen, who are called the Rafters of the World,—to wit, Odin, Thor, Freir, and the other higher powers, male and female, of the old Teutonic religion. In Asgard is Valhalla, the hall of elect heroes. The roots of this mundane ash reach as far downwards as its branches do upwards. Its roots, trunk, and branches together thrid the universe, shooting Hela, the kingdom of death, Midgard, the abode of men, and Asgard, the dwelling of the gods, like so many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... pause here for a moment. When a man tells you after this that the planet of Saturn is not inhabited, tell him that you know better, that it is not only inhabited, but that the married couples up there have family fights the same as on this mundane sphere. In about ten minutes I will be ready again to explain the wonders and beauties of the sparkling heavens to such of you as prefer a million dollars' worth of scientific knowledge to ten cents in vile ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... gipsy contrabandista, who was at the time a very particular object of police inquiry. I daresay the interests of the Bible Society required the adventurous journey to the wilds of Finisterra. But I feel that if that association had been a mere mundane company and Borrow its agent, troublesome shareholders might have asked awkward questions at the annual meeting. Still, this sceptical attitude is only part of the official duty of the critic, just as, of course, Borrow's adventurous journeys into the most remote and interesting parts of Spain ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... physiognomy lady from the Common. Immediately around these celebrities were grouped a very pale gentleman in a short jacket, who looked as if he made his money by eating nothing and drinking a great deal, a plethoric female with a mundane face, in which was set a large and delicately distracted grey eye; and a gentleman with a jowl, a pug nose, and a large quantity of brass-coloured hair about as curly as hay, which fell down over a low collar, round which was negligently knotted a huge black tie. This ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... delighted in antitheses, was influenced by Descartes, Montaigne, and Epictetus. He, too, finds in mathematics the example for all science, and holds that whatever transcends mathematics transcends the reason. By the application of mathematics to the study of nature we attain a mundane science, which is certain, no doubt, and which makes constant progress,[1] but which does not satisfy, since it reveals nothing of the infinite, of the whole, without which the parts remain unintelligible. Hence all natural philosophy together is not worth an hour's ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of the monopolist about Mabel, and she lost no time in making Undine free of the Stentorian group and its affiliated branches: a society addicted to "days," and linked together by membership in countless clubs, mundane, cultural or "earnest." Mabel took Undine to the days, and introduced her as a "guest" to the club-meetings, where she was supported by the presence of many other guests—"my friend Miss Stager, of Phalanx, Georgia," or (if the lady were literary) ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the thrilling beauty of the covey of pink-lined dawn-clouds that made her eyes grow round, big and bright; that brought a faint flush to her cheeks; a quick intake of breath. It was something much more mundane that held her attention—the superb spectacle of Kurt Walters, mounted. The lean, brown horseman sat on his saddle as easily as though it were a cushion in a rocking chair. He was talking to three or four cattlemen and apparently paying no attention to his cavorting ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... universe as laws, and obeyed with an unwavering faith, a mute obedience that few religions have commanded. Women who yawn through Italy and the East have, when one meets them in the French capital, the intense manner, the air of separation from things mundane, that is observable in pilgrims approaching the shrine of their deity. Mohammedans at Mecca must have some such look. In Paris women find themselves in the presence of those high priests whom they have long worshipped from a distance. It is useless ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... acquaintance with botany, a science of which Ellen Armitage is an enthusiastic student. They were foolishly permitted to botanize together, and the result was, that Alfred Bourdon, acting upon the principle that genius—whether sham or real—levels all merely mundane distinctions, had the impudence to aspire to the hand of Miss Armitage. His passion, sincere or simulated, has never been, I have reason to know, in the slightest degree reciprocated by its object; but so blind is vanity, that when, about six weeks ago, an eclaircissement took place, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... of man will be swiftly completed, Franklin's good-humoured plea for the fullest experimentation is worth recalling. And the touch of piety with which he concludes his argument is a delightful example of the whimsical fashion in which he often undertook to bolster up a mundane theory with a reference ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... mountain eagle for his plumes, listen with her to the bulbul's song in valleys of roses, or hew out a throne for her in some vague and ungeographical empire, the reveries of Miss Maud grew more and more mundane and reasonable. She was too strong and well to dream much; her only visions were of a rich man who should love her for her fine eyes. She would meet him in some simple and casual way; he would fall ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder, and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend; and ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... sense of somebody, away up above all mundane affairs—not responsible for them, perhaps, but capable, at all events, of thoroughly taking them in—smiling at them all with a sort of ferocious cynicism. In the foreground of this impression were the good friends—the really good friends she had just been telling Portia ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... rose, and, invigorated by his bath, his thoughts became in a slight degree more mundane. They recurred to the events of the last few days of his life, but in a spirit of self-reproach and of conscious vanity and weakness. Why, he had not known her a week! This was Sunday morning, and last Sunday he had attended St. Mary's and offered up his earnest ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... another. But these changes follow rules, which we may investigate; and, by reasoning according to those rules or general laws, upon the present state of things, we may see the operation of those active principles or physical causes in very remote periods of this mundane system, and foresee future changes in the endless progress of time, by which there is, for every particular part, a succession of decay ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the big day when Reno was put on the map, was also Norcross Day, for the day when the first Pacific train passed through this town was the one when little Frank Norcross passed into our mundane existence to take his place—with the rest of us mortals: when so to say little Frank was "put on the map." His parents had come out to California as far back as 1850, Norcross' father being engaged in mining, ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... great skeleton of nature, and they hold together the gorgeous outline of river, valley, lake, and savannah that gives the earth all its varied beauty. Beautiful and grand as they are, they are as useful as ornamental, and serve a momentous necessity in mundane affairs. They are grand landmarks of the Almighty's power and mercy and goodness, and historically occupy a high position in the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... multitude of men, possibly the then whole human family, once more a fallen race, emigrate towards the East, and come to a vast plain in the region of Shinar, afterwards Chaldaea. Fertile, well-watered, apt for every mundane purpose, it yet wanted one great requisite. The degenerate race "put not their trust in God:" they did not believe but that the world might some day be again destroyed by water: and they required a point of refuge in the possible event of a second deluge from the broken ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the dear creature has, for some thousands of years, been robbed of her birthright and relegated to an inferior position in matters mundane simply because her biceps are not so large as those of her big brother, and she has no ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... whose whole soul is taken up with a few books of 'Aristotle and his Philosophy,'—to the merchant in the railway, with a head full of sums, an idea that tallow is "up," a conviction that teas are "lively," and a mind reverting perpetually from the little volume which he reads to these mundane topics, to the railway, to the shares, to the buying and bargaining universe. We must not wonder that the outside of books is so different, when the inner nature of those for whom they are written ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... faith, a mute obedience that few religions have commanded. Women who yawn through Italy and the East have, when one meets them in the French capital, the intense manner, the air of separation from things mundane, that is observable in pilgrims approaching the shrine of their deity. Mohammedans at Mecca must have some such look. In Paris women find themselves in the presence of those high priests whom they have long worshipped from a distance. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... would it not be worth while (I should be very curious to hear the result) to make a short list of the generally considered variable or polymorphous genera, as Rosa, Salix, Rubus, etc., etc., and reflect whether such genera are generally mundane, and more especially whether they have distinct or identical (or closely allied) species in their different ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... own. For the Ethics was condemned with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as an atheistic and immoral work. Only when the romantic philosophers of Germany, following the lead of Lessing and Jacobi, found in Spinoza a man who was, as they thought, after their own heart, did Spinoza's mundane fortune change. As a result of their efforts, Spinoza ceased to be a philosopher to be execrated in public (though furtively read in private), and became a philosopher to be eulogized on all occasions in most rhapsodic, if bewildering, terms. Many others too, besides professional philosophers, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... is not after man, Paul does not merely wish to state that his Gospel is not mundane. The false apostles made the same claim for their gospel. Paul means to say that he learned his Gospel not in the usual and accepted manner through the agency of men by hearing, reading, or writing. He received the Gospel by special ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... lasts for six days, and is supposed to be kept in commemoration of the Creation and the Deluge—events constantly synchronised and confounded in pagan cosmogonies. At this feast eggs are presented to friends, in obvious allusion to the Mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... antitheses, was influenced by Descartes, Montaigne, and Epictetus. He, too, finds in mathematics the example for all science, and holds that whatever transcends mathematics transcends the reason. By the application of mathematics to the study of nature we attain a mundane science, which is certain, no doubt, and which makes constant progress,[1] but which does not satisfy, since it reveals nothing of the infinite, of the whole, without which the parts remain unintelligible. Hence all natural philosophy together is not ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... destined to chastise. To attain this depth of infamy is at one and the same time to sin and to receive the penalty of sin. Here culminates repeated violence to the moral law. When one is sated with ordinary lusts and is bent on sweeping the whole gamut of mundane experiences and excitations, that one invariably descends to the unnatural and extraordinary, and lives a ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... terrible! Suppose, when we are married, my mind turns on such a mundane thing as beefsteak and onions? Will you simply ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... deplore me that this next sixty miles of way, but especially the heat of the days and the dank mists of the night, should have to be told as of a real journey in this very repetitive and sui-similar world. How much rather I wish that being free from mundane and wide-awake (that is to say from perilously dusty) considerations and droughty boredoms, I might wander forth at leisure through the air and visit the regions where everything is as the soul chooses: to be dropped at last in the ancient and famous town of ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... deities are, 1. the greater parts of the visible mundane system animated by intelligent souls, and called "sensible gods"—the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the earth itself, and known by the names Helios, Selena, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Dorking, and, becoming convinced that the world had been turned topsy-turvy, selected his grave, and gave instructions that he should be buried head downward, so that at the final setting right of mundane affairs he would rise correctly. In the Mole Valley, at the base of Box Hill, at a pretty little house called the "Fox and Hounds," Keats finished his poem of Endymion, and here Lord Nelson spent his last days in England before leaving on ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... me some surprise to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... was over, and she was descending into ordinary mundane life again, but the hand she had put on my arm chilled through ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... "What can Nature be about when she turns off the things they christen beauties from her pottery-wheel? Why, they are hardly worth the trouble of setting to work at them. But such cabinet pieces as you and I! there the creative power, or the principle of nature, or the soul of the world, or the mundane animal, or whatever title one chooses to give the thing, can look at its product with a certain degree of complacency and satisfaction. For it has your curved lines: it starts off into noticeable angles; it is jagged like corals; ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... this collection is in the engravings. The text is often mundane, is full of conundrums and puns popular in the early 1800's—and is mercifully short. No author is given credit for the text though the section titled, "The Autobiography of Andrew Mullins" may give ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... to a smattering acquaintance with botany, a science of which Ellen Armitage is an enthusiastic student. They were foolishly permitted to botanize together, and the result was, that Alfred Bourdon, acting upon the principle that genius—whether sham or real—levels all merely mundane distinctions, had the impudence to aspire to the hand of Miss Armitage. His passion, sincere or simulated, has never been, I have reason to know, in the slightest degree reciprocated by its object; but so blind is vanity, that when, about six weeks ago, an eclaircissement ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... in his rhapsody. He might have stood leaning over the sill a day or a second, when a sound, persistent and murmuring, haled him back to mundane things. Intermittently, but with growing volume, from somewhere beyond the wall of black, came the echoes of an army in passage. He could separate the different noises. That, he recognized by its deep grumbling noise, was cannon; ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... curious accidents of molecules—which is essentially Professor Loeb's view; or whether to look upon the living body as the result of a "specific something" that organizes, that is, of "dominating organic agencies," be they psychic or super-mundane, which dominate and determine the organization of the different parts of the body into a whole. Yet he is troubled with the idea that this specific something may be "nothing more than accidental chemical peculiarities of cells." But would these accidental peculiarities be ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... and beyond all hope, or knowledge, or understanding of earth, was blessed for evermore. And now I have finished the story of a man who saw and followed his Ideal, who loved and prized it, and clave to it above and through all lesser mundane things. Of a man whom the senses could not allure, nor the craving for knowledge, nor the lust of power, nor the blast of spiritual vanity, shake from his perfect rectitude and service. Of a man who, seeing the good and the beautiful way, turned ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... then a long silence; during which, Mrs Sparkler, lying back on her sofa again, shut her eyes and raised her eyebrows in her former retirement from mundane affairs. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... commensurate to the exalted nature of his expectancy; but the ideal varnish of his mental conception speedily vanished under the hard brushing of a monotonous official routine, and his romance succumbed to the realities of a mundane experience. Though the appointment, to which our young friend had been inducted, was all that could have been desired for the scion of a noble house, whose pampered whims and vices were to be ministered to by the lavish hand of a fond parent, and where the display of mental abilities ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... recoils, and envy flies, Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays, are mine, If by your looks my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big, Your fateful arms, the goose-quill, and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's somb'rous seal impress'd, Mysterious terrors, grim portents, invest; And shame ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... are mundane stories, the History is a cosmic affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as Jurgen ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... attached to her; so is Jane, and the children of course. Her parents and mine were close friends in the country—where I came from, you know. She and I were brought up together; that is, she was—I was mostly brought up before her appearance on this mundane sphere. We used to play in the haymow, and fall from the apple trees together, and all that. O, Clarice is quite a sister to me—a pretty good sister ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... just as absurd to deny the facts of spiritualism now as it was in the Middle Ages to ascribe them to the Devil." I think Mr. Owen attributes too much value to his facts. I do not think the things contributed from the ultra-mundane sphere are particularly valuable, apart from the evidence they give of ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... Idiot. "Because her life is an eternal sacrifice to Saphead's needs, and if there is a luxury in this mundane sphere that woman essentially craves it is the luxury of sacrifice. There is something fanatic about it. Sallie Wiggins voluntarily turned her back on seven men that I know of, one of whom is a Governor of his state; two of whom are now in Congress; one of whom is a judge ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... in an all-seeing and personal God, and in the lore of this God, who is present in the depths of the soul, even when we refuse to follow the higher vocation to which he would persuade and solicit us—even were we carried away by the violence of mundane passions to commit, like Don Luis, almost all the capital sins in a single day—elevates the soul, purifies the other emotions, sustains human dignity, and lends poetry, nobility, and holiness to the commonest state, condition, ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... there about 1655 to prepare for that unpleasant event which she put off as long as possible by the most assiduous care of her health. "If she was not devoted, she had the idea of becoming so," said Mademoiselle. But her devotion was in quite a mundane fashion. Her pleasant rooms were separate and independent, thus enabling her to give herself not only to the care of her health and her soul, but to a select society, to literature, and to conversation. She never practiced the severe asceticism ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... to say, "Why not, sir?" Old pro mercenaries seldom concerned themselves as to the issues or principles involved in a fracas. They chose their side by more mundane considerations. ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... with a truthfulness which she felt to be almost brazen, that her uppermost yearnings were of a wholly mundane character. ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... collect Bohemians as other people collect Venetian glass, from pure love of the material. His wife, with a silly woman's subtlety, having rather lower ideals—that is to say, a touch of the very human vulgarity known as social ambition—made use of his Bohemianism to help her on in her mundane success. This was the principle of the thing. If things were well done—and they always were at her house—would not a duke, if he were musical, go anywhere to hear the greatest tenor in Europe? And would not all the greatest celebrities go anywhere ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... little girl, to whom the fact of piracy was a sublimated sort of existence in which she had not considered it would be necessary to think of mundane things. ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... beloved science of Natural History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the highest and often of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... antiquarians believe that cromlechs are Druidical altars, in imitation of older heathen altars—a theory supported by reference to the stones called Petroma, near the temple of Eleusinian Damater in Arcadia: The Philistines pointed to the Deluge in their hieroglyphics of the serpent and mundane egg, the history which the serpent is supposed to designate being that of Noah, and the egg being reckoned an emblem of the ark, from the circumstance of it containing the rudiments of future life. The serpent ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... to call him Monsieur George to the end—shared with Dona Rita her perfect detachment from all mundane affairs; but he had to make two short visits to Marseilles. The first was prompted by his loyal affection for Dominic. He wanted to discover what had happened or was happening to Dominic and to find out whether he could do something for that man. But Dominic ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... the individual species have enormous ranges [the genus Mus I believe, however, is a strong exception to the rule]. Mr Gould informs me that the rule holds with birds, as in the owl genus, which is mundane, and many of the species range widely. The rule holds also with land and fresh-water mollusca, with butterflies and very generally with plants. As instances of the converse rule, I may give that division of the monkeys which is confined to S. America, and amongst plants, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... the work he was trying to do in his school. A clergyman has social licence to be serious which is not accorded to other men. Wherefore he spoke as a clergyman might speak to a friend, saying, in general terms, how steep is the ascent when, among mundane affairs, human beings try to tread only where the angels of the higher ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Pen'orth of Lady's fingers.' And then he bewails the fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... a pleasant condition of existence, nevertheless, to perplexity mankind is more or less doomed in every period of life and in every mundane scene—particularly in the jungles of central Africa, as Harold and his friends found out many a ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... expectation that I should ever write about them. My acquaintance with them, however, has served to give me a more elevated idea of human nature than I otherwise might have acquired in the ordinary course of mundane affairs, and it is with the hope of transmitting this impression to my readers that I publish the present account. Some of them have a world-wide celebrity, and others who were distinguished in their own time seem likely now to be forgotten; but they all deserve well of the republic of humanity ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... way the third heaven may signify a supra-mundane vision. Such a vision may be called the third heaven in three ways. First, according to the order of the cognitive powers. In this way the first heaven would indicate a supramundane bodily vision, conveyed through the senses; ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the Second Book by itself, we note that it falls into two portions: the Assembly of the People, which has been called together by Telemachus, and the communion of the youth with Pallas, who again appears to him at his call. The first is a mundane matter, and shows the Lower World in conflict with the divine order—the sides being the Suitors on the one hand and the House of Ulysses on the other. The second portion lifts the young hero into a vision of divinity, and should lift the reader along with him. Previously ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... difficulty felt by this school is in identifying any concrete historic fact with the unchanging idea, that is, in making Jesus of Nazareth the incarnation of God. God is reinterpreted, and in place of an extra-mundane creator is an omnipresent life and power. The Christian attainment is nothing else than the thorough intellectual grasp of the absolute idea and the identification of our essential selves with God. With a less thorough-going intellectualism other scholars reinterpret Christianity in terms of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... as well, Aladdin's ring, for then I could have found myself and party on the opposite side without further trouble; but not having either of these gifts I issued orders for an immediate crossing, for it was ill wishing sublime things before this most mundane prospect. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... must sound much more worth while in the ears of the mundane have followed, but those first days of free lancing seem to me to be among the choicest in a journalistic adventurer's experience. Encounters with a variety of celebrities since then have proved no whit more thrilling than the discovery that our host, Jerry South of Mountain Home, was ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... Brodie, jubilant at the prospect of his services being in requisition again. He had not yet learnt the application to all things mundane of Disraeli's quip that it ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... on the wind, or heaven prolongs my date. I see my hours run on with cruel speed, And in my doom the fate of all I read; A certain doom, which nature's self must feel When the dread sentence checks the mundane wheel. Go! court the smiles of Hope, ye thoughtless crew! Her fairy scenes disclose an ample view To brainless men. But Wisdom o'er the field Casts her keen glance, and lifts her beamy shield To meet the point of Fate, that flies afar, And with stern vigilance expects ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Court, but that he had supposed that M'riar was rather better off than usual, owing to recent liquidations by the firm for whom she and Mrs. Burr were at work upstairs. Mr. Jerry urged him on no account to fret his kidneys about mundane trifles of this sort. Everything, without exception, came to the same thing in the end, and weak concessions to monetary anxiety only provided ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... upon my visionary partner in the dance, at least until I am better able to substantiate the fact; and I shall listen to your lectures, worthy sir, with great delight, and, I doubt not, with equal benefit; but in the meantime, as carnal wants must be supplied, and mundane matters attended to, I propose, with our excellent host's permission, that we proceed ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bronchitis—that tone—you never heard of an auctioneer having it—"Suppose that once in a billion of years a bird were to come from some far, distant clime and carry off in its bill a grain of sand, when the time came when the last animal matter of which this mundane sphere is composed would be carried away," said he, "boys, by that time in hell it would not be sun up." We had this sermon in the morning and the same one in the afternoon, only he commenced at the other end. Then we ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... statism and cardinism, (as of the four cardinal points in the orientation of space,) are analogous with spiritualities and the spirit world; and that motism and ordinism (succession by steps) are analogous with temporalities, (transitory things) and so with the mundane or transitory sphere. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... humility, seven times refined in the fires of self-contempt, in which there remains no smallest touch of superiority or aloofness. How utterly depressing is the feigned interest of the imperfect human saint in matters of mundane concern! How it takes at once both the joy out of holiness and the spirit out of human effort! It is as dreary as the professional sympathy of the secluded student for the news of athletic contests, as the tolerance of ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unscathed; he lives constantly in an overstrained ecstasy, and by his mere presence, and the atmosphere which surrounds him, forces his wife and children to live in the same state of high nervous tension and unnatural abstraction from mundane reality and all its concerns. His wife, Clara, who loves him ardently, is gradually worn out by this perpetual strain, which involves a daily overdraft upon her vitality; and finally the break comes, and she is paralyzed. For, like everyone ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... mirum, in Berlin, he nearly fainted. The composer who most nearly approached him was Weber, and, as we have already seen, Berlioz only knew him late in life. But how much less rich and complex is Weber's music, in spite of its nervous brilliance and dreaming poetry. Above all, Weber is much more mundane and more of a classicist; he lacks Berlioz's revolutionary passion and plebeian force; he is less ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... masses, aggregations, classes, guilds—everywhere the genus and the species of humanity, rarely and by luminous exception individuals and persons. Universal ideals of Church and Empire clog and confuse the nascent nationalities. Prolonged habits, of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, volatilise the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, giving a false air of mysticism to love, shrouding art in allegory, reducing the interpretation ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... luncheon roll she held, thus promptly launching it over her shoulder, where it went merrily bounding across the polished floor to be gravely rescued by the irreproachable John. But Rosalie was in the realms of the gods and far above such mundane matters as a ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... fall into schism; they fell back into the ranks and gave themselves up voluntarily to the brutality of the crowd and the rigors of the law. Moreover, and from the start, notwithstanding threats and temptations, two-thirds of the clergy would not take the oath; in the highest ranks, among the mundane ecclesiastics whose skepticism and laxity were notorious, honor, in default of faith, maintained the same spirit; nearly the whole of them, great and small, had subordinated their interests, welfare and security to the maintenance ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of ignorance; that after the destruction of that ignorance, and of its effects, all is merged again in Brahman, the true source of being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies to all the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... domestic circles; and beside Would not you like your lot, that second taste Of nature and approval of the grounds! You might walk early or lie late, so shirk Week-day devotions: but stay Sunday o'er, And morning church is obligatory: No mundane garb permissible, or dread The butler's privileged monition! No! Pack off to Paris, nor wipe tear away!' Whereon how artlessly the happy flash Followed, by inspiration! 'Tell you what— Let's turn their flank, try things on t'other side! Inns for my ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... striving, climbing type, are tempted far more than those who are afraid to venture and who remain in the valley of mediocrity. This is true, not only of those who seek to climb the steep path of spiritual attainment, but also of those who are successful in mundane affairs. In each case, they have placed in their keeping great powers and influence such as the ordinary man little dreams of. This is a grave responsibility, for if these powers are used for self-aggrandisement the results are disastrous. ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution such as the London County Council, for instance. The above prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine being published in a French translation, a Parisian critic—I am almost certain it was M. Gustave Kahn in the "Gil Blas"—giving me a short notice, summed ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... of personality. Though plunged into the centre of a surrounding wilderness or ocean of minds, it must still retain itself unlost in the multitude. Therefore, if we admit the existence of an inclusive mundane Soul, it by no means follows that lesser souls received into it are deprived of their individuality. It is "one not otherwise than as the sea is one, by a similarity and contiguity of parts, being composed of an innumerable host ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... said Father Phil; "How that pretty creature, with the turn of a word and a curl of her lip, upset him that time! Oh! what a powerful thing a woman's smile is, doctor? I often congratulate myself that my calling puts all such mundane follies and attractions out of my way, when I see and know what fools wise men are sometimes made by silly girls. Oh, it is fearful, doctor; though, of course, part of the mysterious ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... to sing, but continued the dance, marking the time now with castanets, and the mundane instrument contrasted strangely with the glittering altar and with the kneeling priests. I wondered of what the archbishop thought, kneeling so humbly—of the boys dancing before the altar, fresh and young? Was he thinking of their white souls darkening with the ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Deal with her whenever you possibly can. When you want to purchase, ask her for anything under the canopy of heaven, from jewels, bijouterie, and curios to rare books and high-class articles of utility. When you want to sell, consign only to her, from choice gems to mundane objects. All transactions embodying the germs of small profits are welcome. As a sample of her stock please note: A superlatively exquisite, essentially beautiful, and important lace flounce for sale, at a reasonable price. ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... echo the last word of Abel's rhapsody, for Brother Moses had succumbed to mundane slumber, and sat nodding like a massive ghost. Forest Absalom, the silent man, and John Pease, the English member, now departed to the barn; and Mrs. Lamb led her flock to a temporary fold, leaving the founders of the "Consociate Family" to build ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... Murphy that the latter had just fifteen minutes in which to save the ship's company; whereat Michael J. proved himself every inch a sailor, while Terence P. proved himself a marine engineer. If there was a word of opprobrium, mundane or nautical, which the port skipper didn't shout at that submarine commander, the port engineer supplied it. In all his life Cappy Ricks had never listened to such rich, racy, unctuous abuse; it lifted itself about the level ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... notice such orderly successions, we must not at once assign them to a direct intervention, the issue of wise predeterminations of a voluntary agent; we must first satisfy ourselves how far they are dependent upon mundane or material conditions, occurring in a definite and necessary series, ever bearing in mind the important principle that an orderly sequence of inorganic events necessarily involves an orderly and corresponding progression ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... this dull and drowsy life, Far from all mundane tumult, that affrights me. If only for a moment I could shine, And blaze in splendor like a shooting star,— If only by a glorious deed I could Immortalize the name of Catiline With everlasting glory and renown,— Then gladly should I, in the hour ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... who is said to supply under contract all the meals of the Southern railway-restaurants, and who, "if ever fondest prayer for others' woe avail on high," will certainly be booked, with the vote of some of his victims, for a post-mundane berth a good deal warmer than his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad, red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see if the silhouetted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... argy that a man Who does about the best he can Is plenty good enugh to suit This lower mundane institute— No matter ef his daily walk Is subject fer his neghbor's talk, And critic-minds of ev'ry whim Jest all git ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... pains in collecting the insects, but excepting Tierra del Fuego, I never saw in this respect so poor a country. Even in the upper and damp region I procured very few, excepting some minute Diptera and Hymenoptera, mostly of common mundane forms. As before remarked, the insects, for a tropical region, are of very small size and dull colours. Of beetles I collected twenty-five species (excluding a Dermestes and Corynetes imported wherever a ship touches); of these, two belong ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... sigh. "I am very much discouraged over Mr. Bradlaugh," she admitted, wanly. "He is hovering too near this world. He cannot seem to get away from his mundane interests. He is as much concerned with parliamentary affairs now as when he ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... line and careers bounding down some devious side-path of entertaining nonsense. Our home papers are almost uniformly staid; they are written conscientiously, laboriously, commendably. But, after all, the French are right in trying to inject as much entertainment as possible into the daily record of mundane things. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... might fall in love with him and his mustache, would redeem him from his slavery to an occupation he hated, and lift him up to the sphere where he belonged. Laud was "soaring after the infinite," and so he rather neglected the mundane and practical, and his employer did not consider him a very ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... the more unreasonable to demand general ideas from Balzac himself, because he is so liberal of general imagery, and what is more, general prosopopoeia. Be the Balzacian world real, as some would have it to be, or be it removed from our mundane reality by the subtle "other-planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its complexity, its fullness, its variety, its busy and by no means unsystematic life and motion, cannot be denied. Why on earth cannot people be content with asking Platonism from Plato and Balzacity from ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... juncture, Solon suddenly went off, like "Mrs. Gamp," in a sort of walking swoon, apparently deaf and blind to all mundane matters, except the refreshments awaiting him ten miles away; and the benign old pastor disappeared, humming "Hebron" to the creaking accompaniment of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that my one and only object in alluding to these trifling details is to point out that the Whittingens, being entirely engrossed in matters mundane, were the very last people in the world to be termed superstitious, and although imaginative where future husbands' calls and cards were concerned, prior to the events about to be narrated had not an ounce of superstition in their natures. Indeed, until then they had ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... of what was going on;—too ill to allow Martha to talk to her at all about the outside public. When the invalid herself would ask questions about the affairs of the world, Martha would be very discreet and turn away from the subject. Miss Stanbury, for instance, ill as she was, exhibited a most mundane interest, not exactly in Camilla French's marriage, but in the delay which that marriage seemed destined to encounter. "I dare say he'll slip out of it yet," said the sick lady to her confidential servant. Then Martha had thought it right to change the subject, feeling it to be wrong that ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of Astrology; and people have found out that the stars are minding their own business instead of meddling with theirs." Now, while it is true that modern Astronomy has superseded the ancient system, and people have ceased to believe that the stars are intervening in mundane affairs, nothing could be further from the truth than the assertion that "Astronomy has shattered the fallacies of Astrology;" and those of our readers who will accord to this work an unprejudiced perusal can hardly fail to be convinced that a large majority of the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... of the manifestations of the life-giving and death-dealing Divine Cow, and therefore is able specially to protect mundane cows.[441] ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... Athens for me, but when suddenly a light knock came on the door outside my heart seemed to stand still and I could hardly find voice to say, "Come in." When she entered, dressed in her modern clothes and hat, and held out her hand, all the modern, mundane atmosphere came back and brought ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... further emphasized by the important circumstance that of all the phenomena described, only those most susceptible of mundane interpretation were witnessed by Glanvill or Mompesson. All of the more extraordinary—the great body with the red and glaring eyes, the levitated children, etc.—came to the narrator from second or third or fourth hand sources not always clearly indicated, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... arms and kiss you. Let us sit down here in this snug corner and try to imagine that we are back in the happy days when no cloud loomed between us, and we were looking forward to many joyous years together. We will talk mundane matters presently." ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... be easily understood that in the present disposition of his master nothing could be more disagreeable to Bazin than the arrival of d'Artagnan, which might cast his master back again into that vortex of mundane affairs which had so long carried him away. He resolved, then, to defend the door bravely; and as, betrayed by the mistress of the inn, he could not say that Aramis was absent, he endeavored to prove to the newcomer that it would be the height of indiscretion to disturb ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... face of the Marquis de Re. She saw it so precisely that it surprised her. The Marquis de Re had been presented to her by her father, who admired him, and he appeared to her grand and dazzling for his thirty years of intimate triumphs and mundane glories. His adventures followed him like a procession. He had captivated three generations of women, and had left in the heart of all those whom he had loved an imperishable memory. His virile grace, his quiet elegance, and his habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth far beyond ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... influence, provided that at the same time it has its own or an equal share in the direction of us. For instance, I believe the colonel was sincere in what he said, and really does love me, supposing me to be Caroline Stanhope, with the mundane advantages to be gained by the marriage, and that these better feelings of humanity are allowed to be exercised, and not interfered with by the adverse party, who is satisfied with its own Mammon share. But the struggle is to come when the evil spirit finds ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... at Saint-Sulpice, but, like Boufflers a little later, far from singing the Canticles, he employed his time in the more mundane occupation of scribbling love-songs. At the end of the winter he was appointed vicar in a little town of his native department. "Vicar!" said Joachim; "I'll not disturb myself for such a trifle." Shortly afterward he was nominated Abbe de Bernis; but not a step would he budge from the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... order and humanity for oppression and rapine. This fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a conceivable relation to the whole mundane process. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... and returned to his weary round of the constituency, feeling of stouter heart, with a greater faith in the decent ordering of mundane things. A world containing such women as Jane and Ursula Winwood possessed elements of sanity. Outside one of the polling stations he found Barney Bill holding forth excitedly to a knot of working-men. He ceased as the car drove up, and cast back a broad proud smile at the candidate's ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... her mother know how she had fared. The issue had been so satisfactory on the whole that it was considered advisable to tell James, who never failed to say day after day that he didn't know about Winifred's affair, he couldn't tell. As his sands ran out; the importance of mundane matters became increasingly grave to him, as if he were feeling: 'I must make the most of it, and worry well; I shall soon have nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... burden of mundane embarrassments, he turned with fresh enthusiasm to the skies, and his discoveries followed one another in bewildering profusion. He found various hitherto unseen moons of our sister planets; he made special studies of Saturn, and proved that this planet, with ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... sighed. "Dick says that if I build it I must build it for seven. We've got four sages now, and his heart is set on seven. He says never mind showers and such things, because what philosopher ever bathes? And he has suggested seriously seven stoves and seven kitchens, because it is just over such mundane things ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... and deposited in another. But these changes follow rules, which we may investigate; and, by reasoning according to those rules or general laws, upon the present state of things, we may see the operation of those active principles or physical causes in very remote periods of this mundane system, and foresee future changes in the endless progress of time, by which there is, for every particular part, a succession of decay ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the monopolist about Mabel, and she lost no time in making Undine free of the Stentorian group and its affiliated branches: a society addicted to "days," and linked together by membership in countless clubs, mundane, cultural or "earnest." Mabel took Undine to the days, and introduced her as a "guest" to the club-meetings, where she was supported by the presence of many other guests—"my friend Miss Stager, of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... imagination the grand stairways of those palaces; and ushered with eclat into drawing-rooms of splendour, I sun myself in the painted smiles of the Mayfair Jezebels, and glitter in that world of wigs and rouge and diamonds like a star. There I quaff the elixir and sweet essence of mundane triumph, eating truffles to the sound of trumpets, and feasting at sunrise ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... shelter themselves behind their license to fire at us their ruthless platitudes. If such could only struggle against that strong temptation of our fallen nature—the delight of hearing one's own sweet voice—so as to concentrate now and then! The best orators, spiritual and mundane, have been ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... is of some importance, after all," said Mrs. Scudder, in that apologetic way in which sensible people generally acknowledge a secret leaning towards anything so very mundane. While the good lady spoke, she was reverentially unpinning and shaking out of their fragrant folds creamy crape shawls of rich Chinese embroidery,—India muslin, scarfs, and aprons; and already her hands were undoing the pins ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... existence, would necessarily involve the suppression also of pleasure;—and certainly all progress, whether moral or material, depends upon the power to meet and to master pain. In a silkworm-paradise such as our mundane instincts lead us to desire, the seraph freed from the necessity of toil, and able to satisfy his every want at will, would lose his wings at last, and sink back to the condition ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... tries to live by them. I shall have to refer back to this when I speak of Cicero's philosophy more at length; but his common-sense crops up continually in the expressions which he uses for defending the ordinary conditions of a man's life, in opposition to that impossible superiority to mundane things which the philosophers professed to teach their pupils. He turns to Cato and asks him questions, which he answers himself with his own philosophy: "Would you pardon nothing? Well, yes; but not all things. ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... inwardly evil and outwardly good are deprived of the good and left to their evil. The reverse occurs with the inwardly good who outwardly like other men have acquired wealth, sought distinction, delighted in the mundane, and indulged some lusts. Good and evil have not been commingled by them, however, but are separate, like internal and external; they have resembled the evil in many ways outwardly but not inwardly. Evil is separate ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... fortunate that Monsieur Habert should have been here to give you information. Ah! Monsieur Habert, Monsieur Habert! Why, I fancied that you were always in the skies absorbed in your passion for art, and far removed from all base mundane interests! But you really understand these things like a banker or a notary. Nothing escapes ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... born. I came into this world without any consent of my own, sir, and as soon as I breathed the atmosphere of this mundane state I was bandaged and pinned, and felt very much as a mummy might be supposed to feel. I was then tossed from Matilda to Jerusha, and from Jerusha to Jane, and from Jane to others and others. I tried to laugh, but found I could n't; so I tried to cry, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... their departure he sat thus, amid a deep silence, broken only by an occasional giggle from the stateroom, or an idiotic sniggering from the direction of the mate's bunk, until, recalled to mundane affairs by the lamp burning itself out, he went, in ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... reader, stuffed with intolerably tedious stories of baptisms, conversions, and the exemplary deportment of neophytes; for these have become a part of the formula; but they are relieved abundantly by more mundane topics. One finds observations on the winds, currents, and tides of the Great Lakes; speculations on a subterranean outlet of Lake Superior; accounts of its copper-mines, and how we, the Jesuit fathers, are laboring to explore them for the profit of ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Hab.—Mundane; extremely common. On ships' bottoms from all parts of the world. Arctic Sea. Greenland. Pacific Ocean. Often attached to Coronulae on Whales. On slow-moving fish, according to Dr. A. Gould. Often associated with C. virgata, and Lepas anatifera, L. Hillii, ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... god-like wings, Taking no thought of wire or mud, Saps, smells or bugs—the mundane things That sour our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... conservatories, and on staircases; for Horace Smithson was much too shrewd a man too enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped by his forty years and his fourteen stone. He contrived to amuse Lesbia by his conversation, which was essentially mundane, depreciating people whom all the rest of the world admired, or pretended to admire, telling her of the secret springs by which the society she saw around her was moved. He was judicious in his revelations of hidden evil, and careful to say nothing which ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... substances that have fallen upon this earth, the endeavor to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees. Symons' Meteorological Magazine is especially prudish in this respect and regards as highly improper all advances made ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... groans that ancient tree, and the Jotun Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the ways of Hel, until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the mundane snake is coiled in jotun-rage. The worm heats the water, and the eagle screams; the pale of beak tears carcases; the ship Naglfar is loosed. Surt from the south comes with flickering flame; shines from his sword ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... position, like that of would-be aristocratic sons who conceal the humble origin of their parents. But it is more than that; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where there is nothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith in the efficiency of the biologic laws, or any mundane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasm that separates man from even the highest of the lower orders. His radical unlikeness to all the forms below him, as if he moved in a world apart, into which they could never ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... unreal, so unnatural, that the more they believe in it the less practical they become. They expect ravens to feed them, the cruse of oil to be inexhaustible, and the fish to come to the right side of the ship at breakfast time. They trust in God and loaf about. They would conduct mundane affairs as though men were angels and church business a series of miracles. But the successful church worker is one who recognizes the plain facts of life, and their relation to heavenly things; who is neither profane nor crazy, ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... itself whether the highest Person in this text be the so-called four-faced Brahm, the Lord of the mundane egg who represents the individual souls in their collective aspect, or the supreme Person who is the Lord of all.—The Prvapakshin maintains the former view. For, he argues, on the introductory question, 'He who here among men should meditate ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Each human being has a special goal toward which he or she strains, with nineteen chances out of twenty against reaching it in time; and if it be won, is it worth the race? With some of us it is love, ambition, mundane prosperity; with others, intellectual supremacy, moral perfection, exalted spirituality, sublimated altruism; but after all, in the final analysis, it is only hedonism! Each struggles with teeth and claws for that which gives the largest promise of pleasure to body, mind, or soul, as the individual ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the mundane theory of the Brahmans, in the multiplicity and superposition of worlds and the division of the earth into concentric continents, each separated by oceans of various fabulous liquids. Its notions of geography are at once fanciful and crude; and again borrowing from the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Mundane experience, like a badly mixed cake, has a tendency to run in streaks, and on the day following the incident related above Janet's heart was heavy. Ditmar betrayed an increased shortness of temper and preoccupation; and the consciousness that her love had lent her a clairvoyant ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
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