"Mutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... You have given me youth, and I accept it," he said aloud, perhaps addressing that mutable goddess who presides over all follies. "Regret it in my old age? Not I! I shall have lived for one short month. Youth was given to us to enjoy, and I propose to press the grape to the final drop. And when I grow old this adventure shall be the tonic to wipe out many wrinkles of care. ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs Uniting their close union; the woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue light of day, And the night's noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... was fire and fickleness,[343] a child Most mutable in wishes, but in mind A wit as various,—gay, grave, sage, or wild,— Historian, bard, philosopher, combined;[ks] He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of their talents: But his own Breathed most in ridicule,—which, as the wind, Blew where it listed, laying all things prone,— ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... was his only joy for years onward. In the streets he would observe a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to express to a hair's-breadth in mutable flesh what he was at that moment wishing to express in durable shape. He would dodge and follow the owner like a detective; in omnibus, in cab, in steam-boat, through crowds, into shops, churches, theatres, public-houses, and ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of the day I have also lightly touched upon; but, while craving the indulgence of the public in these interpolations, I may remark I have only treated them to a very cursory glance; considering that, in the present mutable state of legislation in Queensland, to enter more fully into detail would be inadvisable. The colony is young, but the government is infantine; though, notwithstanding that it is little more than two years old, it ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... layings-down Of other and of other life-abodes, Which the wise know, and fear not. This that irks— Thy sense-life, thrilling to the elements— Bringing thee heat and cold, sorrows and joys, 'Tis brief and mutable! Bear with it, Prince! As the wise bear. The soul which is not moved, The soul that with a strong and constant calm Takes sorrow and takes joy indifferently, Lives in the life undying! That which is ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... an annual vote, was obviously uncertain; and it became necessary to declare the terms on which it was enjoyed. The minister of the day notified to the officers of the Anglican and Scotch churches that incomes dependent on variable resources and mutable opinions were liable to casualties. He therefore warned them that, beyond the fair influence of the crown and the equitable claims of existing incumbents, no guarantee could be given.[223] During a financial crisis these views were reiterated by one governor, who reminded the council that the warning ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... designs on my peace in standing for our county at the next election, I wished to defeat them, and I have done so; and now I have commenced a course of travel. I had intended on starting to confine it to my native country. Intentions are mutable. I am going abroad. You shall hear of my whereabout. I write this from the house of Leopold Travers, who, I understand from his fair daughter, is a connection of yours; a man to be highly ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... being, shone, For ever varying, in one figure now Reflected, now in other. Reader! muse How wond'rous in my sight it seem'd to mark A thing, albeit steadfast in itself, Yet in its imag'd semblance mutable. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... in the United States had been as mutable as her politics. Fauchet, who succeeded Genet, retired in June, 1795, and was succeeded by Adet, who like his predecessors, carried on active interference with American politics, and even attempted to affect the presidential election by making public a note addressed to the Secretary ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... the township before the moon went down. He was very heavy with his own reflections. How magnificent! It had all surpassed his most extravagant imaginings—in audacity, in expedition, in simple mastery of the mutable many by the dominant one. He forgave Stingaree his gibes and insults; he could have forgiven a horse-whipping from that king of men. Stingaree had been his imaginary god before; he was a realized ideal from this night forth, and the reality ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... he, "was the hour that brought me to this country; yet not in search of you did I come, but of the mutable and ill-fated Belfield. Erring, yet ingenious young man! what a lesson to the vanity of talents, to the gaiety, the brilliancy of wit, is the sight of that green fallen plant! not sapless by age, nor withered by disease, ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... which rendered them the standard of value in all other countries, were adopted in this as well to establish its commercial standard in reference to foreign countries by a permanent rule as to exclude the use of a mutable medium of exchange, such as of certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some States as a tender for debts, or the still more pernicious ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... flight in which I leave earth behind and hasten through the wide ocean of air, know the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature—the immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and supports ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... through God being changed in any way from the state in which He had been from eternity, but through His having united Himself to the creature in a new way, or rather through having united it to Himself. But it is fitting that a creature which by nature is mutable, should not always be in one way. And therefore, as the creature began to be, although it had not been before, so likewise, not having been previously united to God in Person, it was afterwards united ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... lady there so joyful I beheld As unto the brightness of that heaven she entered More luminous thereat the planet grew, And if the star itself was changed and smiled What became I who by my nature am Exceeding mutable in every ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... been conveyed to it through countless channels, and which must continue to influence its path throughout its future existence. The air is one vast library on whose pages is forever written all that man has ever said or even whispered. There, in their mutable, but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest signs of mortality, stand forever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled; perpetuating, in the movements of each particle, all ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... grace of the mutable Hathors," the young man muttered as he dropped back into his seat, "my father may yet decorate a temple to Set, but by the same favor, it seems that I shall be snatched from ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... of man's excelling dignity in the inexhaustible depth of his nature and in his noble discontent with every finite and mutable thing. The soul of man is "too big for earthly designs and interests." There is forever a restless appetite within man for some infinite Good without which he can never be satisfied. Everything which he attains or achieves still leaves him in "pinching ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Hollanders is remarkable. M. Havard, who has made a careful study of the country and its people, and who writes of them in a lively style, has left excellent descriptions of these unique works. "We know," he says, "what the Zealand soil is—how uncertain, changing, and mutable; nevertheless, a construction is placed upon it, one hundred and twenty yards long, sixteen yards wide at the entrance, and more than seven and a half yards deep below high water. Add to this, that the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... to taunt them with cowardice (Act 3, Sc. 3). They are the "mutable, rank-scented many" (Act 3, Sc. 1). His friend Menenius is equally complimentary to his fellow citizens. ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... strapped up and buckled to the wagon, we left the negro settlement for the French settlement. They are all in "settlements," here, the people of this Province. Centuries are mutable, but prejudices never alter ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... of England it hath ever been the custom to dine previously to transacting business. This habit is one of those few which are not contingent upon the mutable fancies of fashion, and at this day we see Cabinet Dinners and Vestry Dinners alike proving the correctness of our assertion. Whether the custom really expedites the completion or the general progress of the ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... decked thy scutcheon with that sturdy phrase, To be, rather than seem. As eve's red skies Surpass the morning's rosy prophecies, Thy life to that proud boast its answer pays, Scorning thy faith and purpose to defend. The ever-mutable multitude at last Will hail the power they did not comprehend— Thy fame will broaden through the centuries; As, storm and billowy tumult overpast, The moon rules ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... hovel was placed near the verge of a sand-bank. The oven was erected on the very brink. This bank, being of a loose and mutable soil, could not sustain my weight. It sunk, and I sunk along with it. The height of the bank was three or four feet, so that, though disconcerted and embarrassed, I received no injury. I still grasped my gun, and resumed my feet ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... Arabella Crane had not, however, attained to that last state of wickedness, which, consistent in evil, is callous to remorse; she was not yet unsexed. In her nature was still that essence, "varying and mutable," which distinguishes woman while womanhood is left to her. And now, as she sat gazing on the throng below, her haggard mind recoiled perhaps from the conscious shadow of the Evil Principle which, invoked as ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... compacted from the minute portions of those seven divine and active principles, the great soul, or first emanation, consciousness, and five perceptions; a mutable ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... but seeing things did not alter, as though the world were established and content, desiring no new thing. I did not know that the old house, even then, quiet and still as it seemed, was actually rocking on the flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, sick with anxiety and bewilderment in guiding his home in the years he did not understand, which his experience had never charted, was sinking nerveless at his helm. For he heard, when his children ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... come at the probable meaning of this fable, we must have recourse to Egyptian antiquities. The Horus of the Egyptians was the most mutable figure on earth, for he assumed shapes suitable to all seasons, and to all ranks. To direct the husbandman he wore a rural dress; by a change of attributes he became the instructer of smiths and other artificers, whose instruments he appeared adorned with. This Horus of the smiths had a short ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... Neither (for the same reason) becomes it a Law to other Judges, though sworn to follow it. For though a wrong Sentence given by authority of the Soveraign, if he know and allow it, in such Lawes as are mutable, be a constitution of a new Law, in cases, in which every little circumstance is the same; yet in Lawes immutable, such as are the Lawes of Nature, they are no Lawes to the same, or other Judges, in the like cases for ever after. Princes ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... his universe to feel And know and be; the clinging stream Closes his memory, glooms his dream, Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides Superb on unreturning tides. Those silent waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering masses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... she felt all the tenderness of that divine precept which enjoins love of the Creator as the engrossing principle of the soul. For, oh! the unutterable anguish that heart must endure which lavishes all its best affections on a creature mutable and perishable as itself, from whom a thousand accidents may separate or estrange it, and from whom death must one day divide it! Yet there is something so amiable, so exalting, in the fervour of a pure and generous attachment, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... middle age. On my being introduced to him he was very glad to see me, as my friend R—- told me he would be. He seemed to know all about me, even that I understood Welsh. We conversed on various subjects: on the power of the Welsh language; its mutable letters; on Huw Morris, and likewise on ale, with an excellent glass of which he regaled me. I was much pleased with him, and thought him a capital specimen of the Welsh country clergyman. His name was ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the dark shades of deep allegory, So neatly weaved, like arras, they descry Fables with truth, fancy with history. So that thou hast, in this thy curious mould, Cast that commended mixture wished of old, Which shall these contemplations render far Less mutable, and lasting as their star; And while there is a people, or a sun, Endymion's story with ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... therefore, of the Conquest was exercised upon the visible and mutable things of the country rather than upon the nourishing inward things: but it was very great, and in nothing was it greater than in its inception of new buildings and the use everywhere of stone. Under the Normans very nearly all the great religious foundations of England re-arose, and that ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... irrepressible instinct among some modern nations. Conservatism is the converse of variation, and as it springs from mental inertia it is always a progressively salient characteristic of each group in the descending scale. The Spaniard is less mutable than the Englishman, the Hindoo than the Spaniard, the Hottentot than the Hindoo, and the ape than the Hottentot. Therefore, a power whose existence depends upon the fixity of custom must be inimical to progress, but ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... state of man, always mutable; Never at one. Sometimes we feed on fancies With the sweet of our desires: sometimes again We feel the heat of extreme miseries. Now am I in favour about the court and country, To-morrow those favours will turn to frowns, To-day I live revenged on my foe, To-morrow I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for thus only can the load of prejudice by which this ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... wide-spread revolution. North and South, tribe was giving place to tribe, language to language; for the Indian, hopelessly unchanging in respect to individual and social development, was, as regarded tribal relations and local haunts, mutable as the wind. In Canada and the northern section of the United States, the elements of change were especially active. The Indian population which, in 1535, Cartier found at Montreal and Quebec, had disappeared ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... the other hand the first formation of some islets is known to the present inhabitants. In such cases, it would be exceedingly difficult to detect a gradual subsidence of the foundation, on which these mutable structures rest. ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... in his praise. Edward is her favourite; and Frank stands now almost as high on her list as he was but a little while ago the reverse; for Edward is continually talking of him to her, and every word he says is orthodox. But opinions like these are too light, too full of prejudice, too mutable to be ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... laughing and then crying. As for faith, and modesty, and justice, and truth, they long since, as one of the poets hath it, have abandoned this spacious earth, and retired themselves unto heaven. What is it then that doth keep thee here, if things sensible be so mutable and unsettled? and the senses so obscure, and so fallible? and our souls nothing but an exhalation of blood? and to be in credit among such, be but vanity? What is it that thou dost stay for? an extinction, or a translation; either of them with a propitious and contented mind. But still that ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... hour is fresh in the memory, we will again turn sadly away from the spot teeming with so many remembrances, and where were instilled the first principles of virtue and religion. O, may these remain and grow "brighter and brighter unto the perfect day," while all mutable things decay. Dear old house, farewell; these eyes may never again behold you; these feet never again cross your threshold; but while reason remains, the memory of these haunts will be tenderly cherished. And so we pass again from the spot ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... came. At sunset she went outdoors, suffering a torment of accumulating suspense. She faced the desert, hoping, praying for strength. The desert did not influence her as did the passionless, unchangeable stars that had soothed her spirit. It was red, mutable, shrouded in shadows, terrible like her mood. A dust-veiled sunset colored the vast, brooding, naked waste of rock and sand. The grim Chiricahua frowned black and sinister. The dim blue domes of the Guadalupes seemed to whisper, to beckon to her. Beyond them somewhere was Stewart, awaiting the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... characteristics. For the English of three hundred years ago we need a glossary, and to carry down his immortal thoughts in their pristine vigor, must have, every two hundred years, a Johnson to modernize a Shakspeare. To probe the causes of the change of language, to ascertain why even a WRITTEN language is mutable, to pick up this garment of thought and run its threads back through all their vagaries to their origin and points of divergence, is one of the grand tasks for the intellectual historian. He, indeed, must give us the history of ideas, of which all art, including language, is but the fructification. ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... whose spirit is neither depressed nor elated, but is moderate in inclinations and temperate in desires; to him pleasure is not pleasure, having ever present the end of it; equally, pain to him is not pain, because by the force of reasoning he has present the end of that too. So the sage holds all mutable things as things that are not, and affirms that they are no other than vanity and nothingness, because time has to eternity the proportion of ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... small and fragile foreheads, they hang for ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious lords. Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable element in things, or that the library had been handed down from father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by devious lines of descent. It was a tradition in the family that its men should be scholars and its women beauties, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... sciences or of things in general, properly an attempt to find the absolute in the contingent, the immutable in the mutable, the universal in the particular, the eternal in the temporal, the real in the phenomenal, the ideal in the real, or in other words, to discover "the single principle that," as Dr. Stirling says, "possesses within itself the capability of transition into all existent variety and varieties," ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... It seems that God is not altogether immutable. For whatever moves itself is in some way mutable. But, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit, viii, 20), "The Creator Spirit moves Himself neither by time, nor by place." Therefore God is in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... who thus received one minute a favour, at another a threat, now a pat on the face, and now a kick, now a kind word, now a cruel one, reflected how mutable court fortune is, and would fain have been without the acquaintance of the King. But knowing that to reply to great men is a folly, and like plucking a lion by the beard, he withdrew, cursing his fate, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... adoration, like the donors and their families in a Flemish picture. Among these you may wander for hours by little rambling paths, over white and red and golden flowers, and, continually, you spy little lakes, hidden away, each a shy, soft jewel of a new strange tint of green or blue, mutable and lovely.... And beyond all is the glacier and the vast fields ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... "Too bright—too mutable," answered the doctor, shaking his head. "She is right. You keep her too close. Let her run wild, like any other country girl. Let her rise early and go out into the barnyard, see the cows milked, inhale their odorous breathings, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... in a vivid picture more instructive than many a long treatise what faith is, and what it does for us. As a man leans his trembling hand on a staff, so we lay our weak and changeful selves on God's strength; and as the most mutable thing is steadied by being fastened to a fixed point, so we, though in ourselves light as thistledown, may be steadfast as rock, if we are bound to the rock of ages by the living band of faith. The metaphor makes ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... that the soul was a self-moving member,—called Unity and Duality deities, considering the former as the first male existence, ruling in heaven, father and Jupiter; the latter as the female, as the mother of the Gods, and the soul of the universe, which reigns over the mutable world under heaven. He approximated to the Pythagoreans in considering Number as the principle of consciousness, and consequently of knowledge; supplying, however, what was deficient in the Pythagorean theory by the definition of Plato, that it is only in as far as number ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... evolutionary standpoint, we must suppose that in 40 years such advance had shrunk in his recollection to the dimensions of "vague doubts." The letter to Zacharias shows I think some forgetting of the past where the author says, "But I did not become convinced that species were mutable until, I think, two or three years had elapsed." It is impossible to reconcile this with the contents of the evolutionary Note Book of 1837. I have no doubt that in his retrospect he felt that he had not been ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... boldest most precious and dear shall be torn from thy keeping, And from the heights of Olympus, down shalt thou fall in the dust; Still the contemplative eye discerns under mutable sand-drifts Stable foundations of stone, marble and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... changes; sway to and fro, shift to and fro; change and change about; waffle, blow with the wind (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c. 314; vibrate between, two extremes, oscillate between, two extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c. 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform|; versatile. unstaid[obs3], inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c. v.; restless; agitated &c. 315; erratic, fickle; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... control of myself: "the captain of my soul." But that is not respite; it is another stage and phase of expiation. My penance, constant in degree, is mutable in kind: one of its variants is tranquillity. After all, it is only a life-sentence. "To Hell for life"—that is a foolish penalty: the culprit chooses the duration of his punishment. To-day my ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... that primary divisions in the genus Agaricus are based, inasmuch as colour in the spores appears to be a permanent feature. In white-spored species the spores are white in all the individuals, not mutable as the colour of the pileus, or the corolla in phanerogamic plants. So also with the pink spored, rusty spored, black spored, and others. This may serve to explain why colour, which is so little relied upon in classification amongst ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... soul either in mind or body, where does personality lie? What is Real Self? How does it differ from soul? Self is living entity, not immutable like soul, but mutable and ever-changing life, which is body when observed by senses, and which is mind when experienced by introspection. It is not an entity lying behind mind and body, but life existent as the union ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... no weariness in clothing which had known no restraint in creating. But dilation and contraction are for molluscs, not for men; we are not ringed into flexibility like worms, nor gifted with opposite sight and mutable color like chameleons. The mind which molds and summons cannot at will transmute itself into that which clings and contemplates; nor is it given to us at once to have the potter's power over the lump, the fire's upon the clay, and the gilder's ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... inwardly, mutable. Take, for example, the title of Albemarle. It sounds eternal. Yet it has been through six different families—Odo, Mandeville, Bethune, Plantagenet, Beauchamp, Monck. Under the title of Leicester five different names have been merged—Beaumont, Breose, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... city—existent, immortal, and waiting to be revealed—you and I may belong to-day. 'We have a strong city.' You may lay hold of life either by the side of it which is transient and trivial and contemptible, or by the side of it which goes down through all the mutable and is rooted in eternity. As in some seaweed, far out in the depths of the ocean, the tiny frond that floats upon the billow goes down and down and down, by filaments that bind it to the basal rock, so the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions, or seeds unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty, without a divine marshal. The Scripture saith, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and corruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy, and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras, Hume, and ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... He is wilful, mutable, Shy, untamed, inscrutable, Swifter-fashioned than the fairies. Substance mixed of pure contraries; His vice some elder virtue's token, And his good is evil-spoken. Failing sometimes of his own, He is headstrong and alone; He affects the wood and wild, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... felicity, And ficklenesse Pandoraes proper forme. Thou madst me sullen first, and thou Jove, proud; Thou bloody minded; he a Puritan: Thou Venus madst me love all that I saw, And Hermes to deceive all that I love; But Cynthia made me idle, mutable, Forgetfull, foolish, fickle, franticke, madde; These be the humors that content me best, And therefore will I stay with Cynthia.... Nat. Now rule, Pandora, in fayre Cynthias steede, And make the moone inconstant like thy selfe; Raigne thou at womens nuptials, and their birth; Let them be mutable ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... moved, communicate motion to others in endless succession." In like manner, "the air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or even whispered. There in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony of man's changeful will." [6] In some such ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... slight unspeakably, Neat-footed, weak-fingered, in his face,— Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity,— There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... Theistical absurdities. The only dogma worth overturning, of the eight here noticed, is the first, for if that fall, the rest must fall with it. If, for example, the reader is convinced that it is more probable matter is mutable as regards form, but eternal as regards essence, than that it was willed into existence by a Being said to be eternal and immutable, he at once becomes an Atheist—for if matter always was, no Being could have been before it, nor can any exist after it. ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Burghley found, her Majesty one morning a towering passion, because, the Earl had not already laid down the government. The Lord Treasurer ventured to remonstrate, but was bid to bold his tongue. Ever variable and mutable as woman, Elizabeth was perplexing and baffling to her counsellors, at this epoch, beyond all divination. The "sparing humour" was increasing fearfully, and she thought it would be easier for her to slip out of the whole expensive enterprise, provided Leicester were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of Man was published in February, 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, but not, for a long time, with any intention of publishing. Although in the Origin of Species the derivation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the rules of the game of court procedure. The element of chance is made not by the court or the procedure, but by the fact that the pawns, the castles, and the knights are not of ivory, but are human and mutable. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Pontus stuffed his books with puerile tales. Sometimes he thinks the world a Deity, at other times the mind. He attributes divinity likewise to the wandering stars. He deprives the Deity of sense, and makes his form mutable; and, in the same book again, he makes earth and ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... whether the state in question were too commonly exhibited to be exceptional or idiosyncratic. Again, the two cases that I had witnessed coincided in characteristics; but could this coincidence be accidental? It might still be asked, 'Were the phenomena displayed uncertain, mutable, such as might never occur again; or were they orderly, invariable, the growth of fixed causes, which, being present, implied their presence also?' In fine, was mesmeric sleep-waking not only a state, but entitled to rank as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... divide under various circumstances, all the while retaining their identity and properties, and exerting their abilities according to the means they possess, till compelled to yield to a superior power, and learn to submit to the laws which operate in every department of this mutable world. ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... indicating character. Before the heroine had come on we knew that she was young and virtuous—had she not been so for the last five and twenty years?—the comic man had not to open his mouth for us to begin to laugh; a latent sibilance foreran the villain. Least mutable of all, the hero swaggered on, virtuous without mawkishness, pugnacious without brutality. How sublime a destiny, to stand for morals and muscle to the generations of Hoxton, to incarnate the copy-book crossed with the "Sporting ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... fell from his first estate, broke his allegiance to the Creator, and so became the leader of a vast and fearful rebellion against Almighty God. The case of man shows us the possibility of a being existing in a holy but mutable state, and lapsing, under certain inducements, into sin. What the inducements were in the instance of the prince of darkness we are not told; and thus the question of the origin of evil seems to be insoluble by us. But the identification of it with the personal defection ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... at the rejection of brilliant but fruitless proposals; or stopping with Boswell, one hand upon a street post, to shake the night air with his Cyclopean laughter. Varied as the colours in a kaleidoscope are the figures that will meet us in these perambulations; mutable as an opal are the feelings they arouse. To the man of facts they furnish facts; to the man of imagination, quick-changing fancies; to the man of science, curious memoranda; to the historian, bright-worded details, that vivify old ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... delights; nor revenge the contempt of temperance by the penalty of satiety. Were there an age of delight or any pleasure durable, who would not honour Volupia? but the race of delight is short, and pleasures have mutable faces. The pleasures of one age are not pleasures in another, and their lives fall short of our own. Even in our sensual days the strength of delight is in its seldomness or rarity, and sting in its satiety; mediocrity is its life, and immoderacy its ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Wharton's peculiarly mutable temperament he was not remiss in his duties toward Lorelei during the period that led up to the birth of their child. Utterly careless and improvident in his own affairs, he was naturally considerate ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... fellow had given the faithful Jemima this mutable love-gift three days before it came into my possession, on which occasion they had broken a crooked sixpence together. I moralised upon this, and came to the conclusion, that, whatever a tailor might be, a sailor is no match for a tailor's daughter, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... pardon me) effected. But this parliament continued not long after this, but another supream power outed them, whoe remained not long neither, nor his sonne after him.... And now my intelligence is not enough to tell me what incorporate, mixt, or individuall power there is.... Under all these mutable governments of divers natures and constitutions, I have lived most resigningly submissive: But, Mr. Speaker, it is one duty to live obedient to a government, and another of a very different nature to Command under it.... You have, Mr. Speaker, with great ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... happen to be in this state of unstable equilibrium are called mutable. They may be either latent or active, being in the former case derived from old active ones or produced as new ones (by the process, designated premutation). They may be inherited in this mutable condition during a long series of generations. I ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... among the mountains of the Cevennes, beggared, insulted, tortured, massacred—what wonder that these poor Protestants lost the balance of their mental powers and engendered a hysterical disease? The disease is (I believe), under its strangely mutable forms, well known to medical science, though science has never yet been able to probe all its mysterious depths. Its seat is, apparently, the great nervous ganglia of nutrition, which lie in the center of the body, and whose strange sympathetic action ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... sense our text is true. Because He lives we live also. He is the same for ever, therefore we are not consumed. The foundation of our being lies beyond and beneath all the mutable things from which we are tempted to believe that we draw our lives, and is in God. The true lesson to be drawn from the mutable phenomena of earth is—heaven. The many links in the chain must have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the wistful eyes, the earnest lips, only shamming? It cost him some bitterness to decide that they were. Her beauty fascinated, while it hardened him. Eternally, the beauty of women meant the undoing of men, whether they played the simple, inconsequential game of baseball, or the great, absorbing, mutable game of life. ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... and the five personal senses, are at [25] war; and peace can only be declared on the side of im- mutable right,—the health, holiness, and immortality of man. To gain this scientific result, the first and funda- mental rule of Science must be understood and adhered to; namely, the oft-repeated declaration ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... men may not attain to a clearer, at the same time more full, comprehensive, and balanced sense of those words, than has as yet been generally received in the Christian world. As all else is transient and mutable, these only eternal and universal, assuredly whatever light may be thrown on the mental constitution of man, even on the constitution of nature and the laws which govern the world, will be concentered ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... sir?" said Beauclerc, throwing back his head with an air of defiance in his countenance; there was as he looked at his guardian a quick, mutable succession of feelings, in striking contrast with the fixity of ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... certain of some attributes of truth. Do we know or can we know anything certain about justice? Is it something above and apart from the will of men, or is it simply a matter of convention among men? Is it immutable, or does its nature change with changing times and conditions? If mutable, does it change of itself or do men change it? Is it universal or local, the same everywhere or is it different in different localities? Is it the same for all men and races of men or does it differ according ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... different things to be fit for different members, and a thing formerly lawful, after a certain time not so; in one corner permitted or commanded, but in another rightly forbidden and punished. Is justice therefore various or mutable? No, but the times, over which it presides, flow not evenly, because they are times. But men whose days are few upon the earth, for that by their senses they cannot harmonise the causes of things in former ages and other nations, which they had not experience of, with these ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... God, but is one of those which are called powers, of whom also the locust and the caterpillar are called not only a power but a great power [Joel 2:2], and there are many other things like to the Son, concerning whom David says in the Psalms: "The Lord of Powers";(101) likewise the Logos is mutable, as are all things, and by His own free choice, so far as He wills, remains good; because when He wills He is able to change, as also we are, since His nature is subject to change. Then, says he, God foreseeing that He would be good, gave by anticipation ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... colossal Heart of redeemed humanity beats upon the throne, sending its mighty pulsations through every member of His body; so that, before the believer's spiritual life can be destroyed, Omnipotence must become feebleness, and Immutability become mutable! ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... changing its Ministry, that having no reason to fear the penalty which that change so often brings in England, they would be ready to make it once a month. Caprice is the characteristic vice of miscellaneous assemblies, and without some check their selection would be unceasingly mutable. This peculiar danger of the present Constitution of France has however been prevented by its peculiar circumstances. The Assembly have not been inclined to remove M. Thiers, because in their lamentable present ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... moment when Europe is coming to loathe her own grossness. Time is the master of paradox. Who shall say what surprises are too fantastic for his contriving? Can the classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... an extremely mutable thing. And, to be quite candid with you, it is a matter of great importance to us to have some admission of that sort from ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... explained. "I am not exactly all-to-myselfish, but I demand plenty of elbow-room in my existence. Generally speaking, my own society bores me less than the society of the mutable many. I like Hynds House. And I like you two women. You are not tiresome to the ear, wearisome to the mind, nor displeasing to the eye. I am even sensible of a distinct feeling of satisfaction in knowing that you are somewhere ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... are not only without authority, but they are very mutable. They change not only from generation to generation, but almost as often as the phases of the moon. It is a fact that the planets move. Once it was said that they were moved by spirits, then by vortexes, now by self-evolved forces. ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour! Not dull art Thou as undiscerning Night; But studious only to remove from sight Day's mutable distinctions.—Ancient Power! Thus did the waters gleam, the mountains lower, 5 To the rude Briton, when, in wolf-skin vest Here roving wild, he laid him down to rest On the bare rock, or through a leafy bower Looked ere his eyes were closed. By him was ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... to the Hawaiian mythology, presides over Kilauea, is, as some say all her sex are, variable, changeable, mutable. What I shall tell you about the appearance of the crater and lake is true of that time; it may not have been correct a week later; it was certainly not true of a month before. We climbed into the deep pit, and then stood upon a vast floor of lava, rough, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff |
