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More "Unstable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... running water, unstable, and that cannot excel; and he answers to Aquarius, his ensign being a man. The water poured out by Aquarius flows toward the South Pole, and it is the first of the four Royal Signs, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Many of his books are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers, Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to "Barnes on the Acts of the Apostles." An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If, some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is absent, to "clear up," a damage is done that requires weeks to repair. For many days the question is, "Where is my pen? Who has the ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... theory on this. He supposes the surface air intensely cooled over the continental and Barrier areas, and the edge of this cold region lapped by warmer air from the southern limits of Lockyer's cyclones. This would produce a condition of unstable equilibrium, with great potentiality for movement. Since, as we have found, volumes of cold air at different temperatures are very loath to mix, the condition could not be relieved by any gradual process, but continues until the stream is released by some minor cause, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... on the subject. The ingenuity of etymologists displayed itself in suggesting derivations for the words in question, which were sometimes absurd, sometimes plausible, but never more than very doubtful conjectures. No sound historical critic could be content to base a positive view on any such unstable foundation, and nothing remained but to decide the controversy on other than ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... succeeded—and who, attracted by the magnet of gold discovery, for a short time had acted as manager of the Langlaagte Estate and Mr. J. B. Robinson's interests at Johannesburg. With political principles thus unstable and a mind strangely sensitive to any emotional appeal, it is not surprising that Mr. Merriman displayed the proverbial enthusiasm of the convert in his new political creed. His original perception of the imprudence and administrative incompetency ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... 'tis no false glory For which now you peril life,— For no worthless aim unholy, Do ye plunge into the strife; No unstable, fleeting vision Bright before your gaze hath shone, No day dream of wild ambition, Now your footsteps ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... not, however, conceal from myself, that this was but a very unstable and ill-linked chain of reasoning, and there were moments, when the appearances against Glanville wore so close a semblance of truth, that all my friendship could scarcely drive from my mind an intrusive suspicion that he might have deceived me, and that the accusation ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dialectic demonstration of what is best for us—to do only what is in reason best for us—we must simply cease to live, though we do continue to breathe. Even in physics, of what use are logical demonstrations, when the premises are only a foundation more unstable than quicksand—purely provisional? ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... subside (even among the Communists) as soon as the Poles had been driven back from Kiev to their own frontiers, although the Poles are occupying an enormous area of non-Polish territory, although the Communists have had to conclude with Poland a peace obviously unstable, the military position of Soviet Russia is infinitely better this time than it was in 1918 or 1919. In 1918 the Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of the Ukraine was in the hands of General Krasnov, the author ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... sure that this would not have happened to Shelley, that as he grew older he would always have returned to much the same impressions; for his mind, of one piece through and through, had that peculiar rigidity which can sometimes be observed in violently unstable characters. The colour of his emotion would have fluctuated—it took on, as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy; but there is no indication that the material on which it ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... appeasing his conscience, the remark completed his descent into the state of disenchantment he had been approaching for hours. The shock of his mother's illness, coming after three days of marriage, had been too much for his unstable equilibrium, and he felt smothered by an oppression which, in some strange way, seemed closing upon him from without. It was in the air—in the faded cretonne of the room, in the grey flashes of the swallows from the eaves of the house, in the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... merit in France and Germany than in the countries where Sterne's own tongue is spoken.[1] His place among the English classics has, from the foreign point of view, never been a dubious question, amatter of capricious taste and unstable ideals. His peculiar message, whether interpreted and insisted upon with clearness of insight, or blindness of misunderstanding, played its not unimportant part in certain developments of continental literatures, and his station in English literature, as viewed from ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... exquisitely beautiful falls seen there.' A narrow lane with high hedges leads round the shoulder of the hill to the steep little valley, where the Tavy jostles against obstructive boulders, and a high, narrow, unstable-looking bridge of tarred timber (sometimes called a 'clam' bridge) crosses the stream. Climbing up on the farther side, the road soon reaches the village of Mary Tavy. In reference to these villages a very old joke ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... English governing class to have called upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least boast of being constant. But science boasts of being in a flux for ever; boasts of being unstable ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... current situation: Democratic Republic of the Congo is a source and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; much of this trafficking occurs within the country's unstable eastern provinces and is perpetrated by armed groups outside government control tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - Democratic Republic of the Congo is on the Tier 2 Watch List for its failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat trafficking in persons in 2007; while some significant ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... nutrition and pathology has been investigated, we shall not see much progress towards the extermination of disease. Medical science by its curative methods is simply pruning the evil, which, meanwhile, is sending its roots deeper into the unstable ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... on the lights ahead. Heavy feet, dragging like hundredweights, carried them over the last weary mile. Into the outskirts of the little town they slunk. The streets were deserted, muddy, and lighted but meagerly from widely separated oil lamps set at the tops of as many unstable posts. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... Laupepa side it would be unfair to blame any but the king himself. Capable both of virtuous resolutions and of fits of apathetic obstinacy, His Majesty is usually the whip-top of competitive advisers; and his conduct is so unstable as to wear at times an appearance of treachery which would surprise himself if he could see it. Take, for example, the experience of Lieutenant Ulfsparre, late chief of police, and (so to speak) commander of the forces. His men ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sittlichkeit, which we here mean when we speak of "good form." But that was not the faith of his critics in Berlin. They wanted to have Russia, and if possible France also, along with their navies, on the side of Germany. Peace, yes, but peace compelled by fear—a very unwholesome and unstable kind of peace, and deadly for the interests of an island ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... Cyprus or Asia Minor, the learned are no less divided than about the date. Many of the grounds on which their opinions rest appear unstable. The relations of Aphrodite to the wild beasts under her wondrous spell, for instance, need not be borrowed from Circe with her attendant beasts. If not of Homer's age, the Hymn is markedly successful as a continuation of the Homeric tone ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... succession of jerking leaps, each higher than its predecessor, flung their silver crests against the sky. For a few minutes the fountain held its own, then all at once appeared to lose its ascending power. The unstable waters faltered, drooped, fell, "like a broken purpose," back upon themselves, and were immediately absorbed in the depths of the ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... case of the stolen ore had cleared his path of difficulties he would have been forced by current events to a rude awakening. He had been neither flattered nor deceived. He knew very well that a prop put under an unstable boulder may obscure the manifestation of gravity; but he never deceived himself with the thought that it had been eliminated. The warming-up process, recommended by Pierre, was being actively exploited. ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... a superficial soil which has no depth of earth, and so with joy it receives the word; but the seed has no depth of earth and quickly withers away. This sort of soil receives quickly and as quickly lets go. It is like that unstable man of whom St. James writes and who is like the wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. We see the wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine as it leaps and crowned with its spray, and then we look again for it, and where ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... 1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable inputs, or may ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... become happy almost without knowing it in the pursuit of other things once despised, such as work, friendship, the need of earning, or the love of an abstract subject. What a contrast then does this "afflicted," this "peculiar" one afford to the restless, imaginative, gifted but unstable Pauline, in whom the quest of happiness had so far only resulted in entanglement and riot of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... they are an obvious instance of inconstancy. In the second place we have considered the group of inconstant or sporting varieties, which of course we must exclude when studying the stability of other types. However, even these sporting varieties are unstable only to a certain degree, and in a broader sense will prove to be as true to their character as ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... not very talkative—only persons of inconstant ideas and unstable judgment are prone to verbosity. His profound moral sense made him sparing of words in the disputes in which the men of the day are prone to engage on any and every subject, but in polite conversation he displayed an eloquence full of wit and intelligence, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... and south to meet his foe, besides the levy of Media, a province which now seems to include most of the ancient Assyria. These hundreds of thousands constitute a host untrained, undisciplined, unstable, unused to service, little like the ordered battalions of an essentially military power such as ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... to capsize. This is true of model boats just as much as it is true of large boats. The model boat builder must keep the weight of his boat as near the bottom as possible. For instance, if a heavy cabin were built on a frail little hull, the boat would be very unstable and ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... obscure of mankind, viz.: That a degenerated nerve condition has been inherited which renders the sufferer specially susceptible to this and allied neuroses, such as epilepsy, idiocy and suicide. The inheritance of an unstable nervous system makes the individual easily affected by what I must call 'alcoholic surroundings.' In other words, the provocation to drink which would have no influence upon an ordinary, stable nervous organization, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... confessions the doctrines which they believe the Scriptures affirm. They are bound not only to accept Scripture as the rule of faith, but to make known the sense in which they understand it. As unlearned and unstable men wrest and subvert the Sacred Writings, it is fitting that those who are learned and not unstable should publish sound expositions of their contents. In the light of creeds, converts are enabled to test their own position, and to put to proof the claims of those who profess to be teachers ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... coaxed or wheedled him into giving up something of which she did not approve, he would quietly approach his object in some other way, and gain his point, or sulk till he did. When he set his heart upon anything he was not as "unstable as water." While but an indifferent and superficial student, who had habitually escaped lessons and skipped difficulties, he occasionally became nettled by a perplexing problem or task, and would work at it with a sort of vindictive, unrelenting earnestness, as if he were subduing an ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... sentiment, so happily disguised; Pope, in the chair of wisdom, tells much that every man knows, and much that he did not know himself; and gives us comfort in the position, that though man's a fool, yet God is wise; that human advantages are unstable; that our true honour is, not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own, and that happiness is always in our power." The reader, when he meets all this in its new array, no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse. But, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... done with a genius so unstable, so erratic? Nothing, apparently, but to let him qualify for orders, and for this he is too young. Thereupon ensues a sort of 'Martin's summer' in his changing life,—a disengaged, delightful time when 'Master Noll' wanders irresponsibly from house to house, fishing and flute-playing, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... nose, were relieved by a moustache, and a beard square and slightly forked in the midst. This moustache hid a mouth which was the characteristic feature of the face. No physiognomist would have placed the slightest confidence in the owner of that mouth. It was at once sanctimonious and unstable. The manners of its possessor might be suave or severe; his reputation might be excellent or execrable; but with that mouth, a Pharisee and a hypocrite at heart he must be. This gentleman found it convenient not to be too invariably known by a single name, and that whereby he had been introduced ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... impression, too, of a momentous conversation, of a name—he could not tell what name—that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of dazzling unstable ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... would disband their force he would do the same, and that he would confirm the royal edict and give full security for the maintenance of their civil and religious privileges. The Protestants refused to disband, knowing that they could place no reliance upon the word of the unstable monarch who was crowded by the rising power of the energetic Ferdinand. The ambitious naturally deserted the court of the sovereign whose days were declining, to enlist in the service of one who was just entering upon ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... decayed matter mixed up with it. In the centre of this, and underneath it, ran a broad, deep, and rapid stream. As the guides proceeded across, the men stole after them with cautious footsteps. As they arrived near the centre we began to see this unstable grassy bridge, so curiously provided by nature for us, move up and down in heavy languid undulations, like the swell of the sea after a storm. Where the two asses of the Expedition moved, the grassy waves rose a foot high; but ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and women, Maria Dmitrievna. There are, unfortunately, some who are—of an unstable character; and then there is a certain time of life—and, besides, good principles have not been instilled into them ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... beauties, that all their pleasure-seats are built on its banks, where they have, at the same time, the most beautiful prospects in Europe and Asia; there are near one another some hundreds of magnificent palaces. Human grandeur being here yet more unstable than any where else, 'tis common for the heirs of a great three-tailed bassa, not to be rich enough to keep in repair the house he built; thus, in a few years, they all fall to ruin. I was yesterday to see that of the ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... perfectly calm weather, for in any wind the heavy guns caused them to careen over so as to make it difficult to keep them right side up, and impossible to fire. Even in smooth water they could not be fought at anchor, requiring to be kept in position by means of sweeps; and they were very unstable, the recoil of the guns causing them to roll so as to make it difficult to aim with any accuracy after the first discharge, while a single shot hitting one put it hors de combat. This last event rarely happened, however, for they were not often handled with any approach to temerity, and, ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... rest for myself," the Duke replied. "I know that Blenavon is uncertain and unstable to a degree. When I heard that he had left for the Continent, I was not particularly surprised or interested. I have only just discovered the manner of his leaving. It puts an entirely different complexion ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Plato, of Aristotle, and of Plotinus were developed from the thesis that there is more in the immutable than in the moving, and that it is by way of diminution that we pass from the stable to the unstable. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... when it was full to the brim, the lining was unsightly; and this became more so. One day Ithuriel must have visited Euphemia's apartment, and the tarnished brilliancy of the thing stood confessed. For some days there was an interregnum, and a coal-scuttle from downstairs—a black unstable thing on flat foot and with a vast foolish nether lip—did ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... than significant of the deeper shame beneath and prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: "Behold the outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people! Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words! We have believed ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of staid New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson Alcott. It ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... lad, what is't you read— Romance or fairy fable? Or is it some historic page Of kings and crowns unstable?' The young boy gave an upward glance— 'It is ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... disdain for the hunches of Kit, even while his eyes smiled response to the ever-living call of youth. To Rhodes there was ever a "next time." He was young enough to deal in futures, and had a way with him by which friends were to be found for even unstable venturings with no backing more substantial ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the air, and became a globe, a globe of brown. But it changed, and disappeared. Morey recognized the signal. "He will now make the artificial matter into all the elements, and many nonexistent elements, unstable, atomic figures." There followed a ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... of the past to show, that of all national governments a democratic one was the most unstable, fluctuating, and short-lived; and that despotism, arising from a centralization of power in the national government on one hand, and anarchy, incident to the instability of democracy—"the levelling spirit of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... of course, represent the number of men in the field at any one time. It is an estimate of the numbers of all who bore arms against the British troops at any time whatever during the campaign. The Boer army numerically was the most unstable known to history,[78] varying in strength as it varied in fortune in the field, varying even with the weather, or with that mercurial mental condition of which, in irregular forces, the numbers present at the front best mark the barometer. Those numbers, even in ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... turned chill and foggy. The heart of the town, with its noises, was left behind. Reflected from the high vapours, its distant lights were manifest in quivering, cone-shaped streamers, in questionable blushes of unnamed colours, in unstable, ghostly waves of far, electric flashes. Now that the darkness was become more friendly, the wall against which the street splintered developed a stone coping topped with an armature of spikes. Beyond it loomed what appeared to be the acute angles of mountain peaks, pierced ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... of the beautiful, Home of all art, all elegance, all grace; Whose orators and poets sway the soul As the winds move the sea's unstable face; O wonderous city, nurse and home of mind, This is my oracle to you this day— No generous growth from starved roots will you find, But fruitless ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears. What a freak of nature! A bird's beak on a mollusk! Its body was spindle-shaped and swollen in the middle, a fleshy mass that must have weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms. Its unstable color would change with tremendous speed as the animal grew irritated, passing successively from bluish gray to ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life. Specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has isolated him from others, and confined him within ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... gives no conscious attention; just as when I say—"any thing," I may imagine a poker or a plate; but I pay no attention to its being this rather than that; and the very image itself is so wandering and unstable that at this moment it may be a dim shadow of the one, and in the next of some other thing. In this sense, idea is opposed to image in degree instead of kind; yet still contra-distinguished, as is evident by the sequel, "much ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... to lose Lots by rail, and 'bus, and cable! And the banks his notes refuse, Now they think his state unstable. This may be a story strange Of the bulls and bears on 'change, Where the truth, in age and youth, Is often ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... father, that he leaves this country knowing how thorough is my self-reproach for the past, and my wish that his absence may be eternal. I believe that I do really wish it, but see how my poor frame is shaken! I must have more strength or my heart will be unstable like-wise." Florence held up her clasped hands that were trembling like leaves in the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... was in my sensations to-day. Added to which, scarcely an hour before Elena's kiss, I had a moment of lofty lyrical emotion at Donna Maria's side. Of all this not one vestige remains. To-morrow, most assuredly I shall begin the same game over again. I am unstable as water; incoherent, inconsistent, a very chameleon! All my efforts towards unity of purpose are for ever vain. I must resign myself to my fate. The law of my being is comprised in the one word—Nunc—the will ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... advance. He was apparently on the eve of forming his Indian alliance when he returned home to find that his brother the Prophet had just been defeated at Tippecanoe. The defeat itself was no great thing. But it came precisely at a time when it could exert most influence on the unstable Indian character and be most effective in breaking up the alliance of the tribes. Tecumseh, divining this at once, lost no time in vain regrets, but joined the British next year at Amherstburg. He came ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... me—never from me. For what am I? Untrue to myself, as you are untrue to yourself; false to others, as you are false to others; passionate, unstable, like yourself; like yourself, a coward. I —I was to lead women! I was to show them, in your company, how laws— laws made and laws that are natural—may be set aside or slighted; how men and woman may live independent and noble lives without rule, guidance or sacrament. I was to be the ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... revolved around the charge of the usurpation of government by an "aristocracy." Incontrovertible proof of this charge was found in special legislation chartering banks and other corporations. The banks were indicted upon two counts. First, the unstable bank paper money defrauded the wage earner of a considerable portion of the purchasing power of his wages. Second, banks restricted competition and shut off avenues for the "man on the make." The latter accusation may be understood only if we keep in mind that this was ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... Governor of Erzerum till he fell sick and Ahmed Fevzi took his place. He had a peevish mouth and big blue pouches below his eyes. He was supposed to be a good engineer and to have made Erzerum impregnable, but the look on his face gave me the impression that his reputation at the moment was a bit unstable. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... more confused, and finds it all the while harder to keep upright. What he fears is a mossy stone and a rolling stone. The small cakes of ice were as slippery as a mossy stone in a brook, and as treacherously unstable as a rolling stone; and in two particulars they were vastly more difficult to deal with; they were all in motion, and not one of them would bear the weight of a man. There was more ice in the lane. It was a mere scattering of fragments and a gathered patch ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... have lost all influence, and the newspapers only reflect opinion. As for statesmen, far from directing opinion, their only endeavour is to follow it. They have a dread of opinion, which amounts at times to terror, and causes them to adopt an utterly unstable ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart! How can I be anything but 'unstable'—wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not unstable in thinking about ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... homogeneity in the social aggregate is an unstable one. The primary political differentiation originates from the primary family differentiation. Men and women very early respectively form the two political classes of rulers and ruled. The slave class acquires separateness only as fast as there arrives ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... somebody's inner processes, putting herself in somebody's else skin and doing the thing that would reach him in the right way. She would like, an instant, just an instant, to be in her own skin, she thought, penetrated with a sense of the unstable equilibrium of personal relations. To keep the peace in a household of young and old highly differentiated personalities was a feat of the Blondin variety; the least inattention, the least failure in judgment, and opportunities ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and shook himself impatiently. "I don't know." he answered, in a testy sort of voice. "I don't like the cliff top... It's so dangerous, don't you know? So unsafe. So unstable. The rocks go off so sheer, and stones ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... (Matt. xiv. 31.) He had God's eternal word, which was sure footing, and better than either marble, granite or iron; but the moment he took his eyes off Christ down he went. Those who look around cannot see how unstable and dishonoring is their walk. We want to look straight at the "Author and Finisher ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... "business as usual" in war time deceives nobody. If it did, nobody would gain by the deception. Enforced loans from the reserve fund of insurance companies to the state mean the depreciation of reserves. The substitution of unstable government bonds means robbery of the bond holders. The yielding to the state, by enforced "voluntary action," of reserves of savings banks and insurance companies represents a form of state robbery. This is now in practice on the continent of Europe. Such funds ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... not. In the city, seeing the two men together, she had turned to Gratton. Now, here in her father's log house in the mountains, she wondered that she could have done so. Did men change colour like chameleons, shifted from one environment to another? Or was it she who had been unstable, she who was the chameleon? A queer sensation which had been hers before, and which she was to know more than once in days to follow, mastered her. It seemed that within her, coexistent and for ever in conflict, there were two Glorias: a girl who was ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... a mighty Niagara to produce practical righteousness in daily living. No church is better adapted to this end than the Protestant Episcopal. (a) She seeks after the example of her Master's method to develop the permanent power of the will, rather than the unstable prop of emotionalism. This is evidenced in her majestic liturgies and dignified but helpful services. (b) In doctrine, discipline and worship the Protestant Episcopal Church is the school of mental, moral and spiritual training, that a people but now coming to the light from the darkness ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... and very comical. At last the eighth plane came and succeeded in reaching the man a line without being winged. The roof batteries shot at the plane in vain—then the roof gunners became filled with good German hate, and one of them aimed, not at the plane, but at the man swinging on the unstable wire line two thousand metres beneath. The shell exploded so near that the man disappeared as by magic, and the plane flew off ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... Linnaeus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods was a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal evolution ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... is my system false, but all philosophy is impossible; since the only ground of certitude—our consciousness—is pronounced unstable, our only means of knowing the truth is ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a good swimmer, and was not afraid of the water, the current was so swift, and her own footing so unstable, it was doubtful if Ruth Fielding could save both the miller and herself from the peril that ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... the traitor doth presage his harm, See how he glories at his own decay, See how he triumphs at his proper loss; O fortune wild, unstable, fickle, frail! ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... not that any one of us can say what these bounds are, for every day of our experience is extending them in both the inner and outer worlds; and we never can be very sure whether the things which rise upon the distant horizon of our nocturnal visions are less unstable and uncertain than those that exist under our noses. True it is, at any rate, that the legend was narrated to me in a meagre form by a lady, sufficiently ancient to be supposed to be a lover of strange stories, and not imaginative or ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... became nearly deranged towards the end of the voyage, and one, who was sea-sick all the way out, seriously thought of suicide, but incapacity for any physical effort whatever happily saved him. In short, Junkie was the innocent cause of many dreadful thoughts and much improper language on the unstable scene of his nativity. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... then, must we seek for the cause of the futility of these efforts? All those who know the savages will understand it; it is in the fickle character of these children of the woods, a character more unstable and volatile than that of infants. God alone knows what restless anxiety the conversions which they succeeded in bringing about caused to the missionaries and the pious Bishop of Petraea. Yet every ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... three things, charity, fasting, and truth, and have been great murderers. But sinful as Sir Lancelot was, since he went into the quest he never slew man, nor shall, till he come into Camelot again. For he has taken upon him to forsake sin. And were he not so unstable, he should be the next to achieve it, after Galahad his son. Yet shall he die an holy man, and in earthly sinful ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... is, that this goodly drummer carried the doom of all enduring relationships in his own lightsome manner and unstable fancy. He went merrily on, assured that he was alluring all, that affection followed tenderly in his wake, that things would endure unchangingly for his pleasure. When he missed some old face, or found some door finally shut to him, it did not grieve him deeply. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... much embarrassed how to break with her handsomely; and it must be confessed, that after what had passed, this was no very easy matter to accomplish.—Make what pretence he would, he could not expect to escape the censure of an unstable fluctuating man.—This is indeed a character, which all men are willing, nay industrious, to avoid, yet what there are few men, but some time or other in their lives, give just reason to incur.—Natura very well knew, that to court ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... Alexander with the consent of Napoleon, there was preparing at this time an event which was soon to assure to the fifth European coalition one of its most useful supports. The King of Sweden, Gustavus IV., unstable, violent, and eccentric enough to warrant doubts as to the soundness of his reason, had been deposed on the 10th of May, 1809, by the assembled States, as the result of a military conspiracy. His uncle, the Duke of Sudermania, elevated to the throne under the title of Charles XIII., ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... highest pitch of felicity? That of teaching him not to trust in his prosperity; of removing that vain confidence he has in his power and greatness, as if they were to endure for ever; of making him understand, that every thing which belongs to and depends upon fortune, is as unstable as herself; and that there is often but the space of a moment between the highest elevation ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... democratic, as in Sparta. Only then would it be sure to last. Polybius accepted the principle of the Mixed Constitution, but found his ideal in the constitution of Rome, which later history was to prove so violently unstable. Cicero, De Republica, takes the same line (Polyb. vi. 2-10; Cic. De Rep. i. 45; ii. 65). Dicaearchus treated of similar political subjects in his public addresses at Olympia and at ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the sheriff of Kent, who killed him in a garden in which he had taken shelter. A reward of 1000 marks followed this deed of bravery. Some of the insurgents were afterwards executed as traitors; but the majority even of the ringleaders escaped unpunished, for Henry's seat upon the throne was so unstable, that it was deemed better to win the people by a manifestation of clemency, rather than to provoke them by an ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... at his glasses with trembling fingers as though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. "I should of course," he said, "tell you things about myself. I know it is rather unusual my speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has been so accidental—or providential—and I am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting a lonely ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... there must have been there a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... no longer cared; and the thought of it did not make her happy. Clearly Love was not, after all, a limitless dominion, without other bounds than those set by the farthest stars, but a narrow, dark, and unstable realm. That these two should dwell in the same town, walk the same street, at the same hour, without any desire to see and speak to each other, was ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... much pleased as I am with the devil, who I believe set many of them agoing. Ye have got an idea that every thing must be changed—Unstable as water, ye shall not excel—I tell ye, there have been more changes in this poor nook of yours within the last forty years, than in the great empires of the East for the space of four thousand, for what ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of the eighteenth century was geographically a large state, but a variety of circumstances contributed to render it weak and unstable. In the first place, it was without natural boundaries or adequate means of defense. To the west it was separated from Prussia and Austria by an artificial line drawn through level plains or over low-lying hills. To the south a fluctuating ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... judging they were sung in respect for my soul by those who were thus famishing my body. They went, however, and I waited long for food—no wonder—the gouty Sacristan was even too busy with his own provender to mind mine. At length down he came, with an unstable step and a strong flavour of wine and spices about his person. Good cheer had opened his heart, for he left me a nook of pasty and a flask of wine, instead of my former fare. I ate, drank, and was invigorated; when, to add to my good luck, the Sacristan, too totty to discharge ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... there were strong reasons why she should not: his own confession of his shortcomings; the unfortunate complication in the Dillingham affair; his subsequent disappearance. It was but natural that she should have been brought to see the folly of pinning her faith to such an unstable proposition as himself. His first agonized protest against her marriage had given place to a stoical acceptance of the fact. He was paying the price many a man has paid for the follies of his youth, and he was ready to pay without a protest, if only she could be ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... feelings, padre, but Catholicism is the only religion. A faith is only justified if it carries conviction. What's the use of a creed or a dogma which is as transient as a philosophy? Being condemned by my profession to study beings whose moral balance is unstable, I am in a position to assert that the Roman Church has a complete understanding of human nature. As a psychologist and a doctor, I admire the uncompromising attitude of the Councils. So much weakness ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... the face of its evident advance upon the Earth. The law of the unconstrained cell is growth on an ever increasing scale; and although we assume the organic configuration, whether somatic or reproductive, to be essentially unstable, so that continual inflow of energy is required merely to keep it in existence, this does not vitiate the fact that, when free of all external constraint, growth gains on waste. Indeed, even in the case of old age, the statement remains essentially true, ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... it was to injure oneself, since it was composed of "every particular man." The sovereign power was unlimited, and was not to be questioned. Whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was the form of government was unimportant, though Hobbes preferred monarchy, because popular assemblies were unstable and apt to need dictators. Civil laws were the standard of right and wrong, and obedience to autocracy was better than the resistance which led to civil war or anarchy—the very things that induced men to establish ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... wrong as the thought of Amadis de Jocelyn came into his head and stayed there. What was he that he should creep into the unspoiled sphere of a woman's opening life? A painter, something of a genius in his line, but erratic and unstable in his character,—known more or less for several "affairs of gallantry" which had slipped off his easy conscience like water off a duck's back,—not a highly cultured man by any means, because ignorant of many of the finer things in art and letters, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... I ever entertain so wild a hope? This wood-nymph, with her robust yet graceful figure, her clear-headedness, her energy and will-power, could she ever have loved a being so weak and unstable as myself? No, indeed; she needs a lover full of life and vigor; a huntsman, with a strong arm, able to protect her. What figure should I cut by the side of so ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bodies. But Barere had no principles at all. His character was equally destitute of natural and of acquired strength. Neither in the commerce of life, nor in books, did we ever become acquainted with any mind so unstable, so utterly destitute of tone, so incapable of independent thought and earnest preference, so ready to take impressions and so ready to lose them. He resembled those creepers which must lean on something, and which, as soon as their prop is removed, fall down in utter helplessness. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me! From the moment when I first recognized him and became so—tangled up—I've just chattered and chattered. You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do you?" ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... a hail of metal at us. It's lucky that aeroplanes are such unstable gun-platforms. When platforms and targets are alike swerving it's hard to hit anything. We're going to rise and dive, and rise and dive and swerve and swerve, John, so be ready. I'll signal to Caumartin to do the same, and maybe the machine gun ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... civilization, as they call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... matrimonial state. The youth gives way to natural appetites and associates himself with women of low repute. He is of wandering habits, works, when he does work, but intermittently, is restless, and totally disinclined towards matrimony. Socially, industrially and morally he is unstable. It is these conditions of his life which so contrast him with that species of criminality which the "Jukes" family presents. And it is these same conditions which support the statement of Fere and Ellis, that he is generally a celibate and non-productive. Concerning the progeny of the female ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... centered round it, been subservient to it, that Charmian could scarcely conceive of life without it. She would be quite alone with Claude. Now they were a menage a trois. She recalled the beginnings of her married life. How fussy, how anxious, how unstable they had been! Now the current flowed strongly, steadily, evenly. The river seemed to have a soul, to know whither ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... full-rounded corn-stacks almost lean against the blind wall, so that the maids will not pass that way unattended—for fear of Wringham Pollixfen, or poor hot-blooded, turbulent Richard, his victim, or perhaps more exactly the victim of his own unstable will. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... better to say about it—any bright scheme to propose that offers to soften the blow?" demanded the other, pausing in his movement toward slipping off his unstable seat. ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... differently from the Reverend Dr. Price and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? For this plain reason—because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the South, to which Grant was prompted both by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,—just or unjust, benignant or cruel,—would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large would not at once abandon its protectorate over its recent ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... committing foolish or rash acts likely to compromise British prestige in Africa. The refugees were for the most boisterous people. They insisted upon being heard, and expected the whole world to agree with their conclusions, however unstable these might be. It was absolutely useless to talk reason to a refugee; he refused to listen to you, but considered that, as he had been—as he would put it—compelled to leave that modern paradise, the Rand, and to settle at Cape Town, it became the responsibility of the inhabitants of Cape ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... unsubstantial as thou art like froth, unstable like a fruit (falling when ripe), dependent on time, and mortal, having entered into an agreement in respect of time, which is infinite and immeasurable, quick like a shaft or flowing like a stream, and carrying everything before it like death itself, how canst regard ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the cabin this morning at an early hour, found we were off the old fort, Point Comfort. Fort Calhoun, a work on which enormous outlay has been made, is not yet completed: the great difficulty appears to be the unstable nature of the bank on which the works are placed: upon the elevation of the terre-plain alone, nearly four thousand cubic yards of sand have been employed; all of which is shipped from the main, and deposited within the fort. It is computed that, by the time this place is fitted ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... could believe and receive the miracles of Scripture heartily, if only they were authenticated by a veracious history; though, if that is not the case with the Pentateuch, any miracles, which rest on such an unstable support, must necessarily fall to the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of Steward, Kwaque, Cocky, and Scraps, and he ran with it as ancient forbears had ran with their own kind in the hunting. The steerage was the lair of this pack, and, out of the steerage, it ranged the whole world, which was the Mary Turner ever rocking, heeling, reeling on the surface of the unstable sea. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... under the action of the sun when exposed to it. Comparatively solid in the morning, it would crack to pieces and slide down the mountain side before night. A sixty-foot cut had already been made into the precipitous mountain side, and the result was an unstable road-bed, hardly four feet in width, which threatened to ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... Mistress Croale had seen Gibbie dart like an imp out of the court—to take him in charge, and, all the weary way home, hover, not very like a guardian angel, but not the less one in truth, around the unstable equilibrium of his father's tall and swaying form. And thereupon commenced a series of marvellous gymnastics on the part of wee Gibbie. Imagine a small boy with a gigantic top, which, six times his own size, he keeps erect on its peg, not by whipping it round, but by running round it himself, unfailingly ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be a higher good ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Water is proverbially "unstable," but what occurred to Major Mitchell's party on the Yarrayne, may serve for a specimen of the peculiar uncertainty of the waters of Australia. In the evening a bridge across that stream had been completed, and everything was prepared for ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... at once to Clement's earnest request that the road of penitence might be smoothed at first to this unstable wanderer, and after some opposition, she entered heartily into his views as to her actual reception. To give time for their little preparations Clement went slowly back, and seating himself by Mary soothed ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a whole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individual worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no one is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and improves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at the inception of the human Charter, take the place of the obviousness ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... successors of what fatal consequence any sort of assuming may be. However, it is my advice that while we are sober we pitch upon a man of courage and skilled in navigation, one who by his council and bravery seems best able to defend this commonwealth, and ward us from the dangers and tempests of an unstable element, and the fatal consequences of anarchy; and such a one I take Roberts to be—a fellow, I think, in all respects worthy ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... or four camp-stools set in a row. Anything was better than lying on the damp ground in such a storm; but Schenck long remembered the aching weariness of that night, as he balanced upon the narrow and unstable supports which threatened to tumble him upon the ground at the least effort to change the position of stiffened body and limbs. One could not desire better companionship than we had during our waking ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... prompted Anthony, it seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him. It was too late—everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water. The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some profound and uncharted pride she had made ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... after committing this act he surrendered himself to the police. He also showed striking evidences of a psychopathic personality with a strong suggestion of epilepsy, but with intact intelligence. He was given to periods of depression and was unstable mentally. He was easily suggestible and his general conduct was not only controlled by environmental influences, but also by his mood. Suicidal ideas and jealousy played a very important role in his mental ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the world of Harvey. For our miracles of human progress are not always done with prunes and prisms. The truth does not come to men always, nor even, generally, as they are gazing in joyful admiration at the good and the beautiful. Sudden conversions of men to good causes are rare, and often unstable and sometimes worthless. The good Lord would find much of the best work of the world undone if he waited until men guided by purely altruistic motives and inspired by new impulses to righteousness, did it. The world's work is done by ladies and gentlemen ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... architecture, until the pile reached an altitude that is little known, except in the dwellings of princes. Colonnades, medallions, and massive cornices overhung the canal, as if the art of man had taken pride in loading the superstructure in a manner to mock the unstable element which concealed its base. A flight of steps, on which each gentle undulation produced by the passage of the barge washed a wave, conducted to a vast vestibule, that answered many of the purposes of a court. Two or three gondolas were ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... is an accidental cause and a casual consequence in things which proceed from the election and counsel of men. Aristotle, that it is an accidental cause in those things done by an impulse for a certain end; and this cause is uncertain and unstable: there is a great deal of difference betwixt that which flows from chance and that which falls out by Fortune; for that which is fortuitous allows also chance, and belongs to things practical; but what is by chance cannot be also by Fortune, for it belongs to things without action: Fortune, moreover, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... born at Alessandria; was leader of the extreme party in the Sardinian Chamber in 1849, and was several times minister, but was unstable in his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... stood in unstable equilibrium, anon stooping to his finger-tips, then straining doubtfully forward with struggling arms from a too backward poise: for not only did the trousers lie a twisted emptiness far below his feet, but the feet themselves were lost in Young's boots, so he stood like Scaramouch, a mere sack, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... conception of universal law which the developing reason evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods was a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal evolution of their ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... where the life has been what is counted happy. He insisted on sending her home in his auto, himself taking a taxi to the Players' where the supper was given. The moment she was alone for the short ride home, her gayety evaporated like a delicious but unstable perfume. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... any one but you could have drawn me to Germany at all?" he said, softly. "Forgive me, Egon. I am an unstable nature and have always been a ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... and moral aim. Which was all perfectly true, and much truer than the cheap criticism which could not see beyond superficial differences, or the fossil theories of the old school. But Pre-Raphaelitism was an unstable compound, liable to explode upon the experimenter, and its component parts to return to their old antithesis of crude naturalism on the one hand, and affectation of piety or poetry or antiquarianism, on the other. And that their new champion ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... all their pleasure-seats are built on its banks, where they have, at the same time, the most beautiful prospects in Europe and Asia; there are near one another some hundreds of magnificent palaces. Human grandeur being here yet more unstable than any where else, 'tis common for the heirs of a great three-tailed bassa, not to be rich enough to keep in repair the house he built; thus, in a few years, they all fall to ruin. I was yesterday to see that of the late grand Vizier, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... ranges until the snows begin to lighten and some shouldering peak lifts through a rent. Mornings after the heavy snows are steely blue, two-edged with cold, divinely fresh and still, and these are times to go up to the pine borders. There you may find floundering in the unstable drifts "tainted wethers" of the wild sheep, faint from age and hunger; easy prey. Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and once we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... very much, and are indeed unstable from their very nature, constantly becoming formed and again decomposed, the primitive mythologies of all people are in like manner very various, indefinite, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... his shoulders and shook himself impatiently. "I don't know." he answered, in a testy sort of voice. "I don't like the cliff top... It's so dangerous, don't you know? So unsafe. So unstable. The rocks go off so sheer, and stones topple ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... crest about three feet in width, with an inclination of about 20 degrees N. 51 degrees E. As soon as I had gratified the first feelings of curiosity I descended, and each man ascended in turn, for I would only allow one at a time to mount the unstable and precarious slab, which it seemed a breath would hurl into the abyss below. We mounted the barometer in the snow of the summit, and, fixing a ramrod in a crevice, unfurled the national flag, to wave in the breeze, where never flag waved before. During our morning's ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... and the strategic plan adopted to meet it by the British. The former of these was described in the House of Commons by William Pitt at the beginning of the war in words which may be used without change at the present time. On 16th May 1803 the war, which had been interrupted by the unstable Peace of Amiens, was definitely resumed. The struggle was now to be a war not so much between the United Kingdom and the French nation as between the United Kingdom and the great Napoleon, wielding more than the resources of France alone. Speaking a week after the declaration of war, Pitt ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... not help her to laughter, for it set forth with diabolic skill the life of a woman who loathed her husband, dreaded maternity, and hated herself—a baffling, marvellously intricate and searching play—meat for well people, not for those mentally ill at ease or morally unstable. Of a truth, Bertha saw but half of it and comprehended less, for she could not forget the leaden hands and flushed face of the man she called husband—and whom she had left in his bed to sleep away his hours of intoxication. She pitied ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... CaO2.8H2O, by P. Thenard (Ann. Chim. Phys., 1818, 8, p. 213), who precipitated lime-water with hydrogen peroxide. It is permanent when dry; on heating to 130 deg. C. it loses water and gives the anhydrous dioxide as an unstable, pale buff-coloured powder, very sparingly soluble in water. It is used as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of his mess were mostly men of character with ideas better at least than ordinary as to what became a man; and their influence on one by no means of a low, though of an unstable nature, was elevating. It is true that a change into a regiment of jolly, good-mannered, unprincipled men would within a month have brought him to do as they did; and in another month would have quite silenced, for a ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... prolonged, multiplied, for the Church, the number of urgent cases, and, for the sovereign pontiff the number of cases of intervention. Since 1789, the entire civil order of things, constitutional, political, social and territorial, had become singularly unstable, not only in France but in Europe, not only on the old continent but likewise on the new one. Sovereign states by hundreds sunk under the strokes and counter-strokes, indefinitely propagated and enforced ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... intersect the different routes across our continent are broad and shallow, and flow over beds of quicksand, which, in seasons of high water, become boggy and unstable, and are then exceedingly difficult of crossing. When these streams are on the rise, and, indeed, before any swelling is perceptible, their beds become surcharged with the sand loosened by the action of the under-current from the approaching flood, and from ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... which was hers by divine election and privilege, we achieve, if we achieve it at all, by virtue of great spiritual discipline. We are, to be sure, brought into union with God through the sacraments, but the union so achieved is, if one may so express it, an unstable union; it is union that we have to maintain by daily spiritual action and which suffers many a weakening through our infidelity, even if it escape the disaster of mortal sin. We sway to and fro in our struggle to attain the equilibrium of perfection ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... potent with the tongue and with the pen, commanding in presence, eloquent and persuasive in discourse. Yet this Crichton of France had proved himself an associate nowise desirable. His sleepless intellect was matched with a spirit as restless, vain, unstable, and ambitious, as it was enterprising and bold. Addicted to dissent, and enamoured of polemics, he entered those forbidden fields of inquiry and controversy to which the Reform invited him. Undaunted by his monastic vows, he battled for heresy with tongue and pen, and in the ear of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... confirmed by the sacred hands of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps make even the crown of the French Empire unstable. He did not deny that Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... unfair to blame any but the king himself. Capable both of virtuous resolutions and of fits of apathetic obstinacy, His Majesty is usually the whip-top of competitive advisers; and his conduct is so unstable as to wear at times an appearance of treachery which would surprise himself if he could see it. Take, for example, the experience of Lieutenant Ulfsparre, late chief of police, and (so to speak) commander of the forces. His men were under orders for a certain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ears, not offering to lend him a hand, secure in the knowledge that he could climb back unaided into the unstable craft without the ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... carrying out of other people's plans; but men and women as a rule mind their own business, and are not much concerned to intervene in the designs and activities of others. Yet a man whose mental equilibrium is unstable is apt to think that if he is disappointed or thwarted it is the result of a deliberate conspiracy on the part of other people. If he is a writer, he thinks that other writers are aware of his merits, but are determined ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... against it, its victory rests upon the coercion of its opponents rather than upon their conversion. Though defeated, the opponents still entertain their old concepts and look forward to the day of retribution, or to the counter-revolution. A social order so established rests upon a very unstable foundation. Revolutionaries have attempted in such circumstances to "liquidate" all the opposition, but it is doubtful that they have ever been completely successful in doing so. The ruthless use of violence in the process of liquidation has usually ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... that, though they might not burst, they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly—nay, they would go mad. And I may say, further, that a certain amount of care or pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times. A ship without ballast is unstable and will not ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... so stately by, they all walked so gracefully, Balancing their bodies on lithe unstable hips, As if music moved them that swelled in their bosoms And was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... early 19th century were cheaply and hastily built. They were characterized by inferior roadbeds, steep grades, sharp curves, and rough track. In spring, poor drainage and lack of ballast might cause the track to sink into the soggy roadbed and produced an unstable path. In winter this same roadbed could freeze into a hard and unyielding pavement on which the rolling stock was pounded ...
— Introduction of the Locomotive Safety Truck - Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology: Paper 24 • John H. White
... little faith! Wherefore didst thou doubt?" (Matt. xiv. 31.) He had God's eternal word, which was sure footing, and better than either marble, granite or iron; but the moment he took his eyes off Christ down he went. Those who look around cannot see how unstable and dishonoring is their walk. We want to look straight at the "Author ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... as in others the simplest explanation is the pertinent truth; theory raised on other than scriptural foundation is unstable. Christ unequivocally associated demons with Satan, specifically in His comment on the report of the Seventy whom He authorized and sent forth, and who testified with joy on their return that even the devils had been subject unto ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... keeping his feet with difficulty, ran hugging the bluff. Rocks, slipping beneath the bay's incautious hoofs, rattled down the steep slope. Finally mastered by that tugging weight, he settled to an unstable pace and so passed the ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... of grass, with much decayed matter mixed up with it. In the centre of this, and underneath it, ran a broad, deep, and rapid stream. As the guides proceeded across, the men stole after them with cautious footsteps. As they arrived near the centre we began to see this unstable grassy bridge, so curiously provided by nature for us, move up and down in heavy languid undulations, like the swell of the sea after a storm. Where the two asses of the Expedition moved, the grassy waves rose a foot ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Peyster sank overcome into a chair, drew up her veil, and gazed about her. The other of Mrs. Gilbert's "easy"-chairs had a seat of faded and frayed cotton tapestry; there was a lumpy and unstable-looking couch; a yellow washstand with dandruffy varnish and cracked mirror; wall-paper with vast, uncataloguable flowers gangrenous in suggestion; on the ceiling a circle of over-plump dancing Cupids; and ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... number of workers, compelling them to remain wholly or partially unemployed, until they have "adjusted" themselves to the new economic conditions. (2) Miscalculation and temporary over-production, to which machine industries with a wide unstable market are particularly prone, bring about periodic deep depressions of "trade," temporarily throwing out of work large bodies of skilled and unskilled labour. (3) Economies of machine-production in the staple industries ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... (Psal. 117.)—"Thei shal be lyik unto images that mack thame, and all that trust in thame." He that trusteth in his awin thoughts doeth ungodlie. "Curssed be he that trustith in man." "Bidd the rich men of this warld, that thei trust nott in thair unstable riches, but that thei trust in the leving God." "It is hard for them that trust in money to enter in the kingdome of God." Moirovir, we should trust in him onelie, that may help us [God onlie can help us.]—Ergo, we should ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... The unstable craft lurched and dipped dangerously, and, realizing the futility of her mad impulse, she sank back on ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... conforming his or her behavior to the standards of society and will be incapable of giving proper parental care to children. So a considerable percentage of our petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, and dependent are found to be feeble-minded. They are unstable, suggestible, easily victimized. ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... "Unstable dream, according to the place Be steadfast once, or else at least be true. By tasted sweetness, make me not to rue The sudden loss of thy false feigned grace. By good respect in such a dangerous case Thou brought'st not her into these tossing seas ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... firmly-knit, powerful frame, every movement of which was eloquent of health and strength and inexhaustible endurance, while it was characterised by that light and easy floating grace that is only to be acquired by the habitual treading of such an unstable platform as a ship's deck. He was very dark, his hair, moustache, and beard being coal-black and wavy, while his skin—or at least the exposed parts that met my eye—was tanned to so deep a bronze as to give him quite ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... and though a person may be sincerely and truly pious, with only the knowledge of a few simple principles, yet, without a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of religious truth, the Christian character will be weak and unstable, easily led astray, and carried about by every wind of doctrine. Knowledge is also essential to a high degree of usefulness. It expands and invigorates the mind, and enables us, with divine aid, to devise and execute plans of usefulness, with ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... furie of the flames aspiring, Nor the deep wounds of victours raging blade, Nor ruthlesse spoyle of souldiers blood-desiring, The which so oft thee, Rome, their conquest made, Ne stroke on stroke of fortune variable, Ne rust of age hating continuance, Nor wrath of gods, nor spight of men unstable, Nor thou oppos'd against thine owne puissance, Nor th'horrible uprore of windes high blowing, Nor swelling streames of that god snakie-paced* Which hath so often with his overflowing Thee drenched, have thy pride so much abaced, But that this nothing, which they have thee left, Makes the world ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... marry her? Surely, it is easy after the King has given his permission. Have you already fallen out of love with her, after all your efforts to make her a Princess? Truly, man is as unstable as sand and water! Ah, but you fooled us all to the top of our bent. You knew from the first that she was a Princess; but you could not find the proofs. Hermann and I were the means to the end. But who shall blame ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... were wroth to think that the fortunes of the whole people had been thus trusted to the hands of three soldiers; and Mettus, being of an unstable mind, was led away to evil in his desire to do them a pleasure. And as before he had sought for peace when others were desirous of war, so now he desired war when others were minded to be at peace. But because he knew that ...
— Stories From Livy • Alfred Church
... lighted up the world to view, Nor moon did yet her blunted horns renew, Nor yet was earth suspended in the sky, Nor, poised, did on her own foundations lie, Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown; But earth, and air, and water were in one. Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable, And water's dark abyss unnavigable. No certain form on any was impressed; All were confused, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... not cancel each other, any more than the opposite poles of an electric pile destroy each other; that they are the procreative cause of motion, life, and progress; that the problem is to discover, not their fusion, which would be death, but their equilibrium,—an equilibrium for ever unstable, varying with the development ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... ambition may crumble," he said. "Since I am speaking frankly of one thing, Captain Prescott, I may speak likewise of another. Have you ever thought how unstable may prove this Southern Confederacy for which we are spending ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... one method of work to another, from marble to bronze, and from bronze to clay, did this not by reason of laziness or because he was, as many are, capricious, unstable, and discontented with his art, but because he felt himself drawn by nature to new things and by necessity to an exercise according to his taste, both less fatiguing and more profitable. Wherefore the world and the arts of design became the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... to suppose that the clouds are among the most fitful and irregular appearances in the world; fleeting and unstable in their nature, uncertain in their forms, apparently subject to no fixed laws, and obedient neither to times nor seasons. Attentive observers, however, have proved that the beauty and harmony which are everywhere found to prevail in ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... an injury. He whose hair is of a brownish colour, and curled not too much nor too little, is a well-disposed man, inclined to that which is good, a lover of peace, cleanliness and good manners. He whose hair turns grey or hoary in the time of his youth, is generally given to women, vain, false, unstable, and talkative. [Note. That whatever signification the hair has in men, it has the same ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... inconsistent; he neither represents his ideas clearly to his own mind nor can he express them lucidly to others, even if he wishes to do so. And his thought is not only vague and inconsistent; it is fluid and unstable, liable to shift and change under alien influence. For these and other reasons, such as the distrust of strangers and the difficulty of language, which often interposes a formidable barrier between savage man and the civilised enquirer, the domain ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... repression of 'Governor Eyre's rebellion,' as everybody calls it locally. All night long I heard somebody, as I thought, practising with a revolver in my own back garden: a sound which somewhat alarmed me under those very unstable social conditions. An earthquake about midnight, it is true, diverted my attention temporarily from the recurring shots, but didn't produce the slightest effect upon the supposed rebel's devotion to the improvement of his marksmanship. When morning dawned, however, I found ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. ...
— The Federalist Papers
... dark color of the skin blended with the areola surrounding the roots of the hair, so that one uniform black surface resulted. In many places the dark color changed into black. The irides were brown. The man was of very unstable character, extremely undecided in all his undertakings, and had a lively but silly expression of countenance. A distinct smell, as of mice, with a mixture of a garlicky odor, was emitted from those parts where the excessive secretion ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... a deputy-governor, Lieutenant-Colonel Armstrong,—a person of ardent impulses and unstable disposition. He applied himself with great zeal and apparent confidence to accomplishing the task in which his principal had failed. In fact, he succeeded in 1726 in persuading the inhabitants about Annapolis to take the oath, with a proviso that they ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. xvi): "Our thoughts will not be unstable, going to and fro from one thing to another; but we shall see all we ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... good many things besides how to drop tinctures and shake out powders. Thus, he knew a horse, and, what is harder to understand, a horse-dealer, and was a match for him. He knew what a nervous woman is, and how to manage her. He could tell at a glance when she is in that condition of unstable equilibrium in which a rough word is like blow to her, and the touch of unmagnetized fingers reverses all her nervous currents. It is not everybody that enters into the soul of Mozart's or Beethoven's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the young ruler, but when they know what being a Christian means, they go away. There are many who, at the time of a Confirmation or a Mission, declare that they will follow Christ whithersoever He goeth. But, after a little while, the enthusiasm dies out, they grow weary in well-doing, unstable as water, they follow no more after Him. If we would reach our journey's end, we must keep on walking, steadily, patiently, perseveringly. "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." Again, walking in ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... is out. The red wrath! It has undone me in this, my present life. Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am dead. The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the red wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the slimy things ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the eyes of her hostess to capture such noble and learned lovers as Mathieu de Montmorency, Prince Augustus of Prussia, Ampere, and Chateaubriand. It was only when that ill-named Benjamin Constant allowed his unstable affections to wander from the dahlia to the lily that Germaine de Stael's anger was aroused against her friend. For a short period Madame Recamier ceased to be the "belle Juliette" and the "dear angel" of the mistress of Coppet until, with a truly angelic ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... that cannot be suggested by writing. Job had not got the Semitic instinct of keeping. The art of acquisition he possessed to some extent, that was his right hand; but somehow the half-crowns slipped away through his unstable left hand, and fortune was a greasy pole to him. His left hand was too cunning for him, it wanted to manage things too cleverly. If it had only had the Semitic grip, digging the nails into the flesh to ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Alike the lion, fox, and ape Are followed by time-serving slaves, Rich prostitutes, and needy knaves. Who, then, shall glory in his post? How frail his pride, how vain his boast! The followers of his prosperous hour Are as unstable as his power. 50 Power by the breath of flattery nursed, The more it swells, is nearer burst. The bubble breaks, the gewgaw ends, And in a dirty tear descends. Once on a time, an ancient maid, By wishes and by time decayed, To cure the pangs of restless ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... only one of the multitude of other worlds on which I have set my feet, worlds which all pay tribute to Malfero of Lodore. It is safer and swifter to ride the magnetic currents than it is to ride the unstable currents of the air." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... men liberally and without reproach, and it will be given him. Only let him ask with faith, with never a doubt, for the man who doubts is like the waves of the sea, driven and tossed by the winds. Let not such a man think, that a half-hearted man, unstable in all his ways, will ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... violate it without scruple when they saw their way to securing a predominant position among their neighbours; and although the ideal of Panhellenic unity had been put before Greece by Gorgias and Isocrates, its realization did not go further than the formation of leagues of an unstable character, each subject, as a rule, to the more or less tyrannical domination ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once settles back to his previous condition again; much as more materially, after a lifetime spent ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... very unstable affairs, and kingdoms were overthrown in a twinkling. Readers of ancient history will recall many such instances of the ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... the foolish world willingly yields it, are in reality so few and so ephemeral. Mere human froth are they, worked up by the churning of the world-sea—rainbow-tinted froth, lovely thinned water, weaker than the unstable itself out of which it is blown. Great as their ordinance seems, it is evanescent as arbitrary: the arbitrary is but the slavish puffed up—and is gone with the hour. The life of the people is below; it ferments, and the scum is ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... may not be superfluous to mention here certain analogous fields where the human mind gives a series of unstable forms to objects in themselves indeterminate.[9] History, philosophy, natural as well as moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All theory is a subjective form given to an indeterminate material. The material is experience; and although each part ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... trade speculation, and over-banking, and the tariff of the same year was really passed to help avert the panic threatening. It had the contrary effect, it is believed, for it still further, of course, unsettled rates for goods, when prices were already unstable. But the point is to be noted that in reality tariff change followed practical panic in this instance rather than practical panic tariff change. The high protective war tariffs, beginning in 1860, and increased for war purposes and granted largely as an offset for those ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... his misfortune that he prided himself more if possible on his civil and political knowledge and his administrative ability than on his military skill and capacity. As a politician his opinions were often chimerical, unstable, and of little moment; but his military knowledge and experience were valuable. With headquarters at Washington, and for thirty years consulted and trusted by successive administrations of different parties in important emergencies, internal and external, and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... astounding revelation had stopped him?... After all, he knew nothing of her—but that she was lovely and wilful and enchanting—with a capacity for risk—and a dire disregard of consequences.... She was volatile, unstable, bewildering—so he thought stiffeningly as he looked at her, but ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... step prompted from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him. It was too late—everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water. The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some profound and uncharted ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... truth after your knowledge, Saracen," said the Christian knight; "and yet, trust me, I fable not, according to mine. Heat, in this climate, converts the soil into something almost as unstable as water; and in my land cold often converts the water itself into a substance as hard as rock. Let us speak of this no longer, for the thoughts of the calm, clear, blue refulgence of a winter's lake, glimmering to stars and moonbeam, aggravate the horrors of this fiery desert, where, methinks, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... at once, her black eyes turned to Razumov, her mind tried to get at the heart of that outburst. It had some meaning. No one is born an active revolutionist. The change comes disturbingly, with the force of a sudden vocation, bringing in its train agonizing doubts, assertive violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the final appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She had seen—often had only divined—scores of these young men and young women going through an emotional crisis. This young man looked like a moody egotist. And besides, it was a special—a ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... three-year mandate to create a permanent national Somali government. The TNG does not recognize Somaliland as an independent republic but so far has been unable to reunite either Somaliland or Puntland with the unstable regions in the south. Numerous warlords and factions are still fighting for control of Mogadishu and the other southern regions. Suspicion of Somali links with ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... central figure, with his story of the letter he had found in the Honorable Freddie's coat pocket. Now the importance of his story had been engulfed in that of this later and greater sensation, Mr. Judson was learning, for the first time, on what unstable foundations popularity stands. ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... injustice to man or woman, intentionally, and at more than one moment of my career have accepted the worse horn of a dilemma rather than permit a wrong to happen to another; and if I have been erratic and unstable it has not been from selfish or perverse motives. I have always been what most people would call visionary, and material objects of endeavor have not had the value they ought to have had in my eyes. As I look back upon a career which has brought me into contact with many people and many interests ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... it depends on the constantly changing nature of the objects which come into relation with us; the other, on the contrary, is a constant, since it expresses the contribution of our nerve substance, and, though this last is of very unstable composition, it necessarily varies much less than the series of excitants. We consequently see faintly that these two elements differ sufficiently in character for us to be able to suppose that they are separable ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... figure in rough breeches, coat, and cap, was a staggering apparition. The beauty of the surprised face did not appeal to Kathryn, but she was not for one instant deceived as to the sex of the person on the threshold, and her none-too-pure mind made a wild and dangerous leap to a most unstable point of disadvantage. ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... daily life unbearable for many Iraqis. Robberies, kidnappings, and murder are commonplace in much of the country. Organized criminal rackets thrive, particularly in unstable areas like Anbar province. Some criminal gangs cooperate with, finance, or purport to be part of the Sunni insurgency or a Shiite militia in order to gain legitimacy. As one knowledgeable American official put ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... whose names mean the Male-Who-Invites and the Female-Who-Invites. The heavenly kami commanded these two gods to consolidate and give birth to the drifting land. Standing on the floating bridge of heaven, the male plunged his jewel-spear into the unstable waters beneath, stirring them until they gurgled and congealed. When he drew forth the spear, the drops trickling from its point formed an island, ever afterward called Onokoro-jima, or the Island of the Congealed Drop. Upon this island they descended. The creative pair, or divine man and woman, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... lonely, Cooper told himself. That was why he hung around like a homeless dog—except that he was too big and awkward to have much pet-appeal and, more than likely, his temper was unstable. ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... accountable to Man. A reforming Pope is a lucky accident, and dull indeed must be the brain which believes in the possibility of a long succession of reforming Popes, or which can regard as other than precarious and unstable the discordant combination of a constitutional government ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... South, to which Grant was prompted both by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,—just or unjust, benignant or cruel,—would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large would not at once abandon its protectorate over its recent wards, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... of the blacker shame to come, I should say: "Behold the outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people! Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words! We have believed ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... heart the wish to help himself! She had been content to bribe Ralph, as a spoiled child is bribed to be good; had felt a glow of gratified vanity in the knowledge that her own favour was the prize to be won. If the foundations of her buildings were unstable, what wonder that the edifice had fallen to the ground? The thought softened her heart towards the handsome culprit by her side, and when she spoke at last it was in blame of herself rather than ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... A narrow, unstable bearing which mental spindle-shanks try to stand upon when they have no ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz
... obscurity, sudden fallings back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... around the charge of the usurpation of government by an "aristocracy." Incontrovertible proof of this charge was found in special legislation chartering banks and other corporations. The banks were indicted upon two counts. First, the unstable bank paper money defrauded the wage earner of a considerable portion of the purchasing power of his wages. Second, banks restricted competition and shut off avenues for the "man on the make." The latter accusation may be understood only if we keep in mind that this was a period when ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... things, from a fungus to a giant of the forest, from a stone to a cluster of stars whose light takes 4000 years to reach us. It is only a question of time when our own sun shall set in impotence and rise again no more. All things are passing away, everything is unstable, change is at the heart of all. How solemn, how true the words, whose melancholy haunts the more the memory dwells on them: "this world passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the uncertainties of this unstable world, that we encounter the greatest trials and difficulties precisely where we expect to find none. As Tom walked along the entry, with one hand on the rail that protected the staircase to guide him, he struck his foot against the pole upon which Fred ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... can be but we read in the following verses, "But let him ask in faith nothing doubting: for he that doubteth is like the surge of the sea driven by the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord; a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways." The baptism with the Spirit, as we have already seen, is for those believers in Christ, who have put away all sin and surrendered absolutely to God, who ask for it, but even though ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... the Emperor Alexander with the consent of Napoleon, there was preparing at this time an event which was soon to assure to the fifth European coalition one of its most useful supports. The King of Sweden, Gustavus IV., unstable, violent, and eccentric enough to warrant doubts as to the soundness of his reason, had been deposed on the 10th of May, 1809, by the assembled States, as the result of a military conspiracy. His uncle, the Duke of Sudermania, ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... finer form of Akenside's address to the unstable Pulteney (see biographical sketch above) must not be confused its later embodiment among his odes; of which it is 'IX: to Curio.' Much of its thought and diction were transferred to the Ode named; but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... taking French leave. It was necessary for him to run to the station and meet the young lady—a lovesick, pretty little milliner from Cologne—who for the time being dwelt in his unstable heart. ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... higher aim: the very object of his toil is to secure the sympathy and respect of men; and the rewards of his toil may be paid in money, fame, or consciousness of earnest effort. The first of these may sometimes be gained without Sincerity. Fame may also, for a time, be erected on an unstable ground, though it will inevitably be destroyed again. But the last and not least reward is to be gained by every one without fear of failure, without risk of change. Sincere work is good work, be it never so humble; and sincere work is not only an indestructible delight to the worker ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... deer were seen to rush out of the jungle and dash down an open glade, with noses up and antlers resting back on their necks. A shot from Bunco's gun alarmed but did not hit them, for Bunco had been taken by surprise, and was in an unstable canoe. Before the deer had disappeared, two or ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... tribute from royalty from the lips of the Princess of Wales. But that strong-minded woman, Caroline Dorothea Wilhelmina, steadily looked away from the mayor's consort. She would not do what Queen Anne had not thought worth the doing; and Lady Humphreys, we are sorry to say, stood upon her unstable rights, and displayed a considerable amount of bad temper and worse behaviour. She wore a train of black velvet, then considered one of the privileges of City royalty, and being wronged of one, she resolved to make the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... How unstable is human nature! On sitting down in meeting this evening I got into a state of unwatchfulness, which continued so long as to deprive me of the refreshment my poor mind so often stands in ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... green sights and its wonderful sounds, of the drowsy insects in the sunshine, of the sheep-bells, and of the pines whose voices hold within them all the eternal secrets, increased the intensity of his misery. He realized how unstable are the foundations of human happiness, and his house of life ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home. It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness, habituated to frivolous pleasures, and guided ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... majority, and the rapid as well as absolute manner in which its decisions are executed in the United States, has not only the effect of rendering the law unstable, but it exercises the same influence upon the execution of the law and the conduct of the public administration. As the majority is the only power which it is important to court, all its projects are taken up with ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... on Babalatchi, in a low monotone, as if pursuing aloud a train of thought that had its beginning in the silent contemplation of the unstable nature of earthly greatness—"yes. He has been rich and strong, and now he lives on alms: old, feeble, blind, and without companions, but for his daughter. The Rajah Patalolo gives him rice, and the pale woman—his daughter—cooks it for him, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... element), would also be capable of dealing with these barbaric "Administered Territories"? A day may come when Tripoli, Nigeria, the French and the Belgian Congo will be all under one supreme control. We may be laying the foundations of such a system to-day unawares. The unstable and fluctuating conferences of the Allies to-day, their repeated experiences of the disadvantages of evanescent and discontinuous co-ordinations, may press them almost unconsciously toward this building up of ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... stab, Snatched from Zenobia's side her gallant lord, And threw into her hand the exigencies Of an unstable and capricious throne. Yet was her genius not inadequate. The precepts of experience, intertwined With intellectual power of lofty grade, Combined to raise Palmyra's beauteous queen High in the golden scale of moral greatness. Under the teachings of the good Longinus The ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... quarrels, and all sorts of marital woes. But, the situation once mastered, by the most loving and accurate of scientific methods of procedure, a happy married life is certain to result. Otherwise, the "married state" will always be in a condition of "unstable equilibrium." So let every bride and bridegroom begin, from the first, to try to establish the greatly to be desired accomplishment. If anything further on this point should be desired, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... was now too late to affect tenderness of heart and reverence for the constitution of the realm. The contrast between the new Declaration and the preceding Declaration excited, not without reason, general suspicion and contempt. What confidence could be placed in the word of a Prince so unstable, of a Prince who veered from extreme to extreme? In 1692 nothing would satisfy him but the heads and quarters of hundreds of poor ploughmen and boatmen who had, several years before, taken some rustic liberties with him at which his grandfather Henry the Fourth would have had a hearty laugh. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the right time and just in the right place, to save the poor unstable young man from changing his political complexion once more. He had been on the point of beginning to totter again, but this prop shored him up and kept him from floundering back into democracy and re-renouncing aristocracy. So he went home glad that he had asked the fortunate question. The girl ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was to arise between them; and of how she would die without his knowing of her death for two whole months; and of how his life thereafter would be changed, somehow, and the world would become an unstable place in which you could no longer put cordial faith. And he foreknew all the remorse he was to shrug away, after the squandering of so much pride and love. But these things were not yet: and besides, these things ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... shown, that at a much later period, since the tertiary shells of Patagonia lived, there must have been there a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... exiled so from Truth the mind unstable? Why of its blest reward Forgetful, lost, unable, Seeks it each shadowy fraud ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... what I am here to say. The time is come to give up the shifts and unstable expedients that we needed, or thought we needed, in our early beginnings. Let us pull down all these scaffoldings and stages that have helped us to build, and let us see whether our fabric will stand upon its base, erect, without the paltry support of a few rotting timbers. Let us substitute ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... nuncio, with the assistance of their faithful allies, the Spanish ambassador and the Guises, Montmorency and St. Andre, were successful in seducing the unstable King of Navarre from his allegiance to the Protestant faith, this, and the disastrous results of his defection, will be developed in a subsequent part ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... himself, while the power is nominally and apparently in the hands of the boys. Should this not be the case, or should the teacher, from any cause, lose his personal influence in the school, so that the institution should really be surrendered into the hands of the pupils, things must be on a very unstable footing. And, accordingly, where such a plan has been adopted, it has, I believe, in every instance, been ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... perpetuity. Not content with being the poet of men, and with describing human passions and ordinary events, he aspired to present the destiny of the whole race of mankind, to tell the story of creation, and to reveal the councils of heaven and hell. And he would raise this structure upon no unstable base, but upon the sure foundation of the written word. It would have been a thing incredible to Milton that the hold of the Jewish Scriptures over the imagination of English men and women could ever be weakened. This process, however, has already commenced. The demonology of the poem ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... boundaries undefined; a mile nearer or farther, what does it matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic occupation of the land leads to oscillations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within. Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed boundaries; hence, the vagueness as to the extent of tribal domains among all savage peoples, and the conflicting land claims which are the abiding ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... This moustache hid a mouth which was the characteristic feature of the face. No physiognomist would have placed the slightest confidence in the owner of that mouth. It was at once sanctimonious and unstable. The manners of its possessor might be suave or severe; his reputation might be excellent or execrable; but with that mouth, a Pharisee and a hypocrite at heart he must be. This gentleman found it convenient not to be ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... he said, "is in a condition of unstable equilibrium so far as its insides are concerned. The outer crust is solid, but after you get down sixty or seventy miles the rocks are nearly in a fluid condition owing to great pressure upon them. They flow to adjust themselves ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... over the unstable buttresses of Vesuvius, and the inhabitants sleep o' nights: Why not? Quite unaware that he was much of their condition, Mr. Madison bade his incidental gossip and the tiny Lottie good-night, and sought his early bed. He maintained in good faith that Saturday night was "a great night ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... and rolling, the groaning of penitent travelers, and the laboring of the vessel as she climbed those dark unstable mountains, my mind reverted feebly to Huxley's statement, that the bottom of this sea, for over a thousand miles, presents to the eye of science a vast chalk plain, over which one might drive as over a floor, and I tried ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... young; you cannot expect that his ardent and passionate heart should be buried under the ashes of the vase of tears in which our love, in its beauty and bloom, crumbled to dust. But his heart, however unstable it may appear, turns ever back faithfully to that fountain, and he seeks to purify and sanctify the wild and stormy present by the remembrance of the beautiful and innocent past. You say that Trenck forgot me in his prosperity: well, then, sire, in his ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... grunted disdain for the hunches of Kit, even while his eyes smiled response to the ever-living call of youth. To Rhodes there was ever a "next time." He was young enough to deal in futures, and had a way with him by which friends were to be found for even unstable venturings with no backing more substantial than ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Tremain, pausing, "I am not so sure about that. You see, their Government is so very unstable. The country itself is rich enough in mineral wealth, if that is what you mean." All the while Howard stood there with his mouth agape, and I felt like shoving ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... tall, slim man, named Houp; Peter Houp, that was his name. He was a very steady, upright, and honest man, married, had a small, comfortable family, and to all intents and purposes, settled down for life. How deceptive, how unstable, how uncertain is man, to say nothing of the more frail portion of the creation—woman! Peter Houp one fair morning took his basket on his arm, and off he went to get a leg of mutton and trimmings for his next Sunday's ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... while in some of the smaller plants a few were sometimes found doing labor which required some skill. When employers were asked why this was the case they generally replied in a two-fold manner: first, the Negro migrants were inefficient and unstable; and secondly, the opposition on the part of white laborers to work with Negroes prohibited their employment of them to do ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... mannerism into a region of masculine imaginative art. We feel Simone's charm mostly in single heads and detached figures, some of which at Assisi have incomparable sweetness. "Molles Senae," the delicate and femininely variable, fond of all things brilliant, and unstable through defect of sternness, was the fit mother of this ingenious ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... happens that a river valley attains old age before it has sunk beneath the sea or been refreshed by further upliftings. In the unstable conditions of the continents, one or the other of these processes, sometimes in different places both together, is apt to be going on. Thus if we take the case of the Mississippi and its principal tributaries, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... us, yet their house is unstable. The slayers' hands are warm—the sound of their riding Reached us down the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... celestial was Leonardo, the son of Ser Piero da Vinci; and in learning and in the rudiments of letters he would have made great proficience, if he had not been so variable and unstable, for he set himself to learn many things, and then, after having begun them, abandoned them. Thus, in arithmetic, during the few months that he studied it, he made so much progress, that, by continually suggesting doubts and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... composed of "every particular man." The sovereign power was unlimited, and was not to be questioned. Whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was the form of government was unimportant, though Hobbes preferred monarchy, because popular assemblies were unstable and apt to need dictators. Civil laws were the standard of right and wrong, and obedience to autocracy was better than the resistance which led to civil war or anarchy—the very things that induced men to establish sovereignty. ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... that something in her that was of her essence was irrevocably dedicated to youth and the beauty of youth, which is like no other beauty. The wildness of her which did not die, which probably would never die, was capable of trampling over Sir Seymour's fidelity to get to unstable, selfish and careless youth, was capable of casting away his fidelity for the infidelity of youth. As she met her host's grave eyes, she sentenced him in her heart to eternal watching at her gate. She could not, she never would ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... two hands can cover. Thousands of walls are indicated by signs that hint at once of their plan and material. Elsewhere there are marked deviations, which must be corrected; gaps to be filled and harmoniously joined to the rest, vast surfaces that are unstable and will need support. The enterprise is hopeful, but full of hardship and danger. It would seem to have been conceived by some sovereign intelligence, that was able to divine most of our desires, but has executed them clumsily, being hampered by its very ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... hint of growing anger. The blacks moved uneasily, like a herd of cattle, at the sound of his voice. But not one spoke. All eyes, however, were staring at him in certitude of expectancy. Something was about to happen, and they were waiting for it, waiting with the unanimous, unstable mob-mind for the one of them who would make the first action that would precipitate all of them into a common action. Sheldon looked for this one, for such was the one to fear. Directly beneath him he caught sight of the muzzle ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... that, which could carry them far. We all know that they have a marked genius: great gifts of their own. In a civilization of super-ants or bees, there would have been no problem of the hungry unemployed, no poverty, no unstable government, no riots, no strikes for short hours, no derision of eugenics, no thieves, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... want to get rid of the war-mind. With that in view we are developing a policy which should make for stability in Central Europe. The most dangerous word used in propaganda against us in 'Balkanization'—as if to suggest that all these regions had become unstable and liable to Balkan quarrels. But, in truth, in three years we have made great progress towards a settled ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... placed in them. Of course there, as elsewhere, the faith of the missionaries has been tried. Storms, and floods, and disease have visited the island; evil-disposed persons have come from other lands and endeavoured to introduce drunkenness, and to turn the unstable to their own bad courses. Still I may safely say, that there are not twenty persons in the island, and very few in the whole group, who ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... making known God's counsel, darken counsel by words without knowledge? The apostle speaks of some that did more than darken counsel; for they wrested the counsel of God; 2 Pet. iii. 16. In Paul's epistles, saith he, "are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction." Some things in the Scriptures are hard to be known, and they are made harder by such unlearned teachers as utter their own notions by ...
— An Exhortation to Peace and Unity • Attributed (incorrectly) to John Bunyan
... the unstable nature of fame the names of some of the above literary worthies necessitate reference at this period in ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... both bold and unstable, Indecisive yet keen, Alfred Vargrave seem'd able To dazzle, but not to illumine mankind. A vigorous, various, versatile mind; A character wavering, fitful, uncertain, As the shadow that shakes o'er a luminous ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... city of the beautiful, Home of all art, all elegance, all grace; Whose orators and poets sway the soul As the winds move the sea's unstable face; O wonderous city, nurse and home of mind, This is my oracle to you this day— No generous growth from starved roots will you find, But ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... taking the document and bowing, "this is a noble reward; but everything in the world is unstable, and the man who happened to fall into disgrace with your majesty might ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the witness of our loves. She recognised me at once, and I her, but not as she ought to have recognised me, or I her. But who is there in the world that can boast of having fathomed or understood the wavering mind and unstable nature of a woman? Of a truth no one. To proceed: as soon as Luscinda saw me she said, 'Cardenio, I am in my bridal dress, and the treacherous Don Fernando and my covetous father are waiting for me in the hall ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
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