"Insubstantial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from Congress," he said. "It is no place for me in times so insubstantial. There is darkness and beggary ahead for all your Southern race. There is a crisis coming which will be followed by desolation. The generation to which your parents belong is doomed! I open my arms to you, dear girl, and offer you a home never yet gladdened by a wife. Accept it, and ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... and Are melted into air, thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... patriotic men to keep this great popular faculty always in view, to satisfy its natural demand for clearness and practicality in the measures proposed, and not to distract it and render it nugatory by the insubstantial metaphysics of abstract policy. From the splitting of heads to the splitting of hairs would seem to be a long journey, and yet some are already well on their way to the end of it, who should be the leaders of public opinion and not the skirmishing harassers ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... shadowy Oceanides, Jove's warders of the island trees, The tufted pillars tall and stout, And all the bosky camp about, Maintain our lives in sounding shades Of old aeolian colonnades; But post about the neighbor land In woof of insubstantial wear: Our ways are on the water sand, Our joy is in the desert air. The very best of our delights Are by the moon of summer nights. Darkness to us is holiday: When winds and waves are up at play, When, on the thunder-beaten shore, The swinging ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... good sense, Madam, to be imposed upon by my arguments, if they are insubstantial. You do know that I have had my terrors for Mr. Conway; but at present they are out of the question, from the insignificance of his island. DO not listen to rumours, nor believe a single one till it has been canvassed over and over. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... reflected, must be caused by some person or thing. A ghost is a spirit, and insubstantial, and I had never heard that the ghost which some of the townsfolk (chiefly servant maids) had seen in St. Alkmund's Churchyard had done more at any time than glide silently among the tombs. And even as I decided that the sound must ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... daring hand will steal from the rainbow that is directed by a mind, condemned, in a world like this, to prove its noble origin, by panting after unattainable perfection; ever pursuing what it acknowledges to be a fleeting dream. An imagination of this vigorous cast can give existence to insubstantial forms, and stability to the shadowy reveries which the mind naturally falls into when realities are found vapid. It can then depict love with celestial charms, and dote on the grand ideal object; it can imagine a degree of mutual affection that shall refine the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... bridged over. Theosophy has undertaken to bridge that gap. But, examined more carefully, one sees that the abyss has been crossed by nothing more solid than a fabric of cloudy speculation. True enough these speculations are ingenious and touched with suggestive light, but they are strangely insubstantial. After all they do absolutely nothing more than our Western affirmation of the immanence of God in life and force and law, and our Western thought has the advantage alike in simplicity, in scientific ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... to no one on earth but Iris Wayne, yet that insubstantial grey shadow which seemed to speak was only another ghost, a figment of his overwrought brain. He wished—how he wished—that these ghosts would leave him, would return to the haunted place whence they came and allow him to sink once more into the blessed ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... listened with a beery sadness in their eyes, suddenly reminded that you were here to-day and gone to-morrow, pierced with a sense of the tragic brevity of Life, their hearts oppressed with a pleasant anguish at the pity and wonder of this insubstantial world. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... navigation. It was a Sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be said here that John Quarles was not the chief original of that lovely character in The Gilded Age. That was another relative—James Lampton, a cousin—quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial dreams. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... western clime irradiate chang'd From azure tinct to white; and, as I pass'd, My passing shadow made the umber'd flame Burn ruddier. At so strange a sight I mark'd That many a spirit marvel'd on his way. This bred occasion first to speak of me, "He seems," said they, "no insubstantial frame:" Then to obtain what certainty they might, Stretch'd towards me, careful not to overpass The burning pale. "O thou, who followest The others, haply not more slow than they, But mov'd by rev'rence, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... place her where, though she would not have much to call her own, at any rate she would have hope of better things, with much more to the like effect; which professions, though made with every appearance of good will, proved, like most of his schemes, insubstantial as air, and came ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... long kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale beatitude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It swept away hesitation, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... put the thought from her mind; it had not been there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each day was so rich that it absorbed her.... Now her first feeling was that everything would be different, and that she herself would be a different being ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... fascination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple picture: only an arm of mist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making a near horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. All day I gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herself has taken on nobler forms forever more. When the mountain storm beats the pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hour before dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; but the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... seem to vision in San Carlos' garden, That rises salient in the upper town, His name, and date, and doing, set within A filmy outline like a monument, Which yet is but the insubstantial air. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... authors? But the demeanor of Athenodorus has the grand air of the classical period, of one qui connait son monde, and feels the superiority of a living philosopher to a dead Philistine. How far above all modern armament is his prophylactic against his insubstantial fellow-lodger! Now-a-days men take pistols into haunted houses. Sterne, and after him Novalis, discovered that gunpowder made all men equally tall, but Athenodorus had found out that pen and ink ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... she lay there weaving long chains of reasoning from the flowers of her innocent fancy, chains so brittle and insubstantial, they would have offered no support to any creature less light than she. If Tyson was more than usually sulky, that was the serious side of him coming out; if he was silent, well, everybody knows ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... something like relief in his voice, "you are no insubstantial spirit, damsel. Yet would I ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... Mrs. Peyton fluttered in. It was the afternoon of the second day, as the girl phrased it in the dismal re-creation of her universe. She had been thinking so hard of Mrs. Peyton that the lady's silvery insubstantial presence seemed hardly more than a projection of the thought; but as Kate collected herself, and regained contact with the outer world, her preoccupation yielded to surprise. It was unusual for Mrs. Peyton to pay visits. For years she had remained enthroned ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... original in form, and among the most musical in the language, full of a haunting, almost magical melody. Mystery, symbolism, shadowy suggestion, fugitive thought, elusive beauty, beings that are mere insubstantial abstractions—these are the characteristics, but designedly so, of Poe's poetry. A poem to him was simply a crystallized mood, and it is futile for his readers to apply any other test. Yet the influence of this verse has been wide and important, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... running between rows of tall houses, built of stone, the fronts of which were occasionally richly ornamented with mason-work—a circumstance which gave the street an imposing air of dignity and grandeur, of which most English towns are in some measure deprived, by the slight, insubstantial, and perishable quality and appearance of the bricks ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... the close Elia says, "Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while—peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic—insubstantial—like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece; be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past." The names may have been mostly fantastic—in one case we know that it was not, for "Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters" is known ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... directing agency; the admission of which would destroy the responsibility of a human being both here and hereafter, and degrade his ennobled condition to the instinct of the speechless brute. To endow these insubstantial and reflected phantasms with some activity and mimic play, a theory of the association of Ideas has been erected, without having previously established that they are capable of such confederation. A wearisome catalogue of faculties, many of which are conjectural, has been enumerated; ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... cook's place during the latter's holiday, and had sent up for Sir Denis's dinner a little clear soup, a bit of turbot with a sauce which was in itself genius, a bird roasted to the nicest golden brown, and a pudding which was only ground rice, but had an insubstantial delicacy about it quite unlike what one associates ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Polynesians are subject to a disease seemingly rather of the will than of the body. I was told the Tahitians have a word for it, erimatua, but cannot find it in my dictionary. A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to succumb to this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two days has seen them cured. But this other remedy is more original: a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement—perhaps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and mechanical, and the romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view, have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific circles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanical rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion. The chronic belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions, miraculous changes ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... asked; she believed in fine things and she never could long persuade herself that fine things missed were as beautiful as fine things achieved. Once Rowland passed an angry day. He had dreamed—it was the most insubstantial of dreams—that she had given him the right to believe that she looked to him to transmute her discontent. And yet here she was throwing herself back into Roderick's arms at his lightest overture, and playing with his own half fearful, half shameful hopes! Rowland ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James |
