"Protean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Proteus itself is Protean, and must be grasped in its essence through all its appearances. The whole Odyssey is veritably a Protean poem as already said, whose study is to seize the one truth which is underneath all these shifting shapes and manifold events. What are we doing now but trying to grasp Proteus ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... not pursuing the Protean phantom of Holbein's Augsburg period is that,—apart from my own disagreement with many accepted views about the works it includes, and the utter lack of data or determining any position irrefutably,—it ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... appeal to Lord Gorell's judgment on all points. It is inevitable that a judge should be deeply impressed by his professional experience with a sense of the impotence of judges and laws and courts to deal satisfactorily with evils which are so Protean and elusive as to defy definition, and which yet seem to present quite simple problems to the common sense of men of the world. You have only to imagine the Privy Council as consisting of men of the world highly ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... timid; or the one was more ardent, the other more calm and placid; or again, the one was the more independent, original, and self-contained; the other the more generous, hasty, and vivacious. In short, the difference was that of intensity or energy in one or other of its protean forms; it did not extend more deeply into the structure of the characters. The more vivacious might be subdued by ill health, until he assumed the character of the other; or the latter might be raised by excellent health ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... one time the doctors think she has an attack of heart disease, at another time they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another they declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day this protean malady, that assumes a thousand forms and a thousand modes of attack, is attributed to the stomach, which is the great caldron and regulator of the body. This is why we have come here. For my part, I am rather inclined to think it is the nerves. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... as an irreverent thought, which he dared not for a moment be guilty of entertaining. It was besides, an idea too absurd to be indulged in by one who, in his wildest imaginations, always, through every Protean embodiment, sought and loved and clung to the real. His chief thought was simply to find favour in the eyes of the girl. His ideas hovered about her image, but it was continually to burn themselves in incense to her sweet ladyhood. As often as a song came fluttering ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... or tomb is a-building, there gather all the Mohurrum performers, the Nal Sahebs or Lord Horse-shoes, the tigers and the mummers of Protean disguise. The spot becomes an "Akhada" or tryst at which the tomb-builders entertain all comers with draughts of sherbet or sugared water, but not with betel which has no place in seasons of mourning. Here for ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... see the devil slink away from thee abashed, issuing like an adder from thy heart, and then, with a sudden Protean change, driven from thy hovel as a thunder-cloud dispersing, when Simon Jennings seized the jar, hugged it as his household-god—and took it home with him—and counted out the gold—and locked the bloody treasure in ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... us, too, the intimate connection of all sins. The common root of every sin is selfishness, and the shapes which it takes are protean and interchangeable. Lust dwells hard by hate. Sensual crimes and cruelty are closely akin. The one vice which Herod would not surrender, dragged after it a whole tangle of other sins. No sin dwells ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... upward to the heaven or was turned into stone, and it was by their aid and counsel that the savages who possessed the land renounced their barbarous habits and commenced to till the soil. There can be no doubt but that this in turn is but another transformation of the Protean myth we have ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... other modern dramatist is acknowledged, but it was his surgical calmness which enabled him to do it. The problem-plays of Alexandre Dumas fils flutter with emotion, with prejudice and pardon. But Ibsen, without impatience, examines under his microscope all the protean forms of organic social life and coldly draws up his diagnosis like a report. We have to think of him as thus ceaselessly occupied. We have seen that, long before a sentence was written, he had invented ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... I trust, in the charity business, as you call it; but charity is not like a pin, one to make the head, and the other the point; charity is a work to which a good workman may be competent in all its branches. I invented my Protean easy-chair in odd intervals stolen from meals ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Rivera developed a disconcerting straight-left. Again and again, attack after attack he straight-lefted away from him with accumulated damage to Danny's mouth and nose. But Danny was protean. That was why he was the coming champion. He could change from style to style of fighting at will. He now devoted himself to infighting. In this he was particularly wicked, and it enabled him to avoid the other's straight-left. Here he set the house wild ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... hesitated. The temptation was great, and the prospect of acquiring some knowledge of the Great Enemy's plans not the least trifling object. And if the truth must be told, there was a certain decorum about the stranger that interested the Padre. Though well aware of the Protean shapes the Arch-Fiend could assume, and though free from the weaknesses of the flesh, Father Jose was not above the temptations of the spirit. Had the Devil appeared, as in the case of the pious St. Anthony, in the ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... for us to get familiar with some of the protean metamorphoses of matter. Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great deal of mercury. How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless minute globules by hand. This metal, be it remembered, ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud. I was as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with shining shapes Protean,—alas! its gates are shut upon me now, and I shall enter ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... need for his working at all, because Ernest managed to earn enough from his translating to take care of the three of us. But father insisted on pursuing his favorite phantom, and a protean phantom it was, judging from the jobs he worked at. I shall never forget the evening he brought home his street pedler's outfit of shoe-laces and suspenders, nor the time I went into the little corner grocery to make some purchase and had him wait on me. After that I ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... protean forms of misery that meet us in the bosom of that "stony-hearted stepmother, London," there is none that appeals so directly to our sympathies as the spectacle of a destitute child. In the case of the grown man or woman, sorrow and suffering are often traceable to the faults, or at best to ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... streams Collecting, mimick'd the wrought oaken beams, Pillars, and frieze, and high fantastic roof, Of those dusk places in times far aloof Cathedrals call'd. He bade a loth farewel To these founts Protean, passing gulph, and dell, And torrent, and ten thousand jutting shapes, Half seen through deepest gloom, and griesly gapes, 630 Blackening on every side, and overhead A vaulted dome like Heaven's, far bespread ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... work, that dyspepsia is Protean in its symptoms, but single and uniform in its nature; the very reverse is the fact; its symptoms are of a single character, and of an uniform attack, while its nature is variable and inconstant. A dyspeptic will complain of a want of appetite, a degree of squeamishness ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of mankind, the principal agent, who in a thousand several shapes, after divers fashions, with several engines, illusions, and by several names, hath deceived the inhabitants of the earth, in several places and countries, still rejoicing at their falls." [269] Verily this protean, omnipresent, and malignant devil has proved himself a great convenience! He has been the scapegoat upon whom we have laid the responsibility of all our mortal woe: and now we learn that to his infernal influence we are indebted for our ignorance and superstition. Henceforth, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp which he signed by the pseudonym of Dapper Dicky; yet each would be suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to march through life like ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Gate" dictated by the spirit of Tom Castleton. The contrast was so extraordinary, so inexplicable. It was generally concluded that no writer but Adrian Boldero, in the world's history, had ever revealed two such distinct literary personalities as those that informed the two novels. The protean nature of his genius aroused universal wonder. His death was deplored as the greatest loss sustained by English letters since Keats. The press could do nothing but hail the new book as a masterpiece. Barbara and myself, who, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... excitator may be either good or evil; but is more frequently Satan himself, by reason of some previous oppignoration or compact with witches. The power, indeed, is in the witch, and not conferred by him; but this versipellous or Protean impostor—these are his words—will not suffer her to know that it is of her own natural endowment, though for the present charmed into somnolent inactivity by the narcotic of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... smoke. He smiled, the twisted smile which was the sole indication that one side of his face was the master work of a great surgeon-sculptor. A marvelous piece of work, that, but no less marvelous than the protean changes that Bolton himself could make in his appearance. It was this genius at impersonation that had won Bolton his commission in the Intelligence Service, when, in 1992, the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... that provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist "experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is considered justifiable, because the glory of one's experience is due, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of New York, the wit which had connected St. George with San Giorgio Maggiore, seemed to me incongruous with the present phase of his character. Quite possibly I had been so drilled in hatred of Standard Oil that I unconsciously revolted from the notion that any good could come out of that protean enterprise! And yet, when I reflected, I could not but wonder whether, after all, he, in his quiet efficiency, his sober sense, and his deliberate renunciation of the glory of romance, was not as logical a product of our modern age as the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... and Israel, and kept the foe off the timid crowd of slaves. Whatever forms our enemies take, fellowship with God will invest us with a defence as protean as our perils. The same cloud is represented in the context as being 'a pavilion for a shadow in the heat, and for a refuge and for a covert from storm and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... particular tone and temper of mind diffused at large through a discussion of so immense a variety of topics that in the last resort one feels is the man's real contribution to the art of living upon the earth. And when in pursuing the transformations of his protean intelligence through one critical metamorphosis after another we finally catch him in his native and original form, it is this form, with the features of the real Remy de Gourmont, which will remain in our mind when many of its incidental embodiments ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Mother was a prosaic person; that is, she had strong common-sense; yet through her sober personality there ran like a streak of light some hint of fairy lightness, derived probably from her Celtic origin. Now, as Rogers watched her, he caught a flash of that raciness and swift mobility, that fluid, protean elasticity of temperament which belonged to the fairy kingdom. The humour and pathos in her had been smothered by too much care. She accepted old age before her time. He saw her, under other conditions, dancing, singing, full of Ariel tricks and mischief—instead ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... art that have grown up in England and elsewhere and flourished side by side, vying with one another to express the protean graces of man, of architecture and domestic interior, of earth and sky and sea. Where is the Swiss school? Where, in any public gallery, will you find a masterpiece which triumphantly vindicates the charm of Swiss scenery? You will, find it vindicated only ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... a form of Herd's stanza xiv. of the English Otterburn (lxviii.), made soon after the battle. We see that the ORIGINAL ballad has protean variants; in time ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... topics of the day, novels, operas, pictures, and various phenomena of London life. She kept up the ball with him very smartly. She was every winter, May, and June, in London, mixed much in society, and saw everything that was to be seen. Lord Curryfin, with all his Protean accomplishments, could not start a subject on which she had not something to say. But she originated nothing. He spoke, and she answered. One thing he remarked as singular, that though she spoke with knowledge of many things, she did not speak as with taste or distaste of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... releasing by the act an amount of scientific energy which rapidly overran a vast domain, and embodied itself in the great doctrine known as the 'Conservation of Energy.' This doctrine recognises in the material universe a constant sum of power made up of items among which the most Protean fluctuations are incessantly going on. It is as if the body of Nature were alive, the thrill and interchange of its energies resembling those of an organism. The parts of the 'stupendous whole' shift and change, augment and diminish, appear and disappear, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... conclusion, as deduced from the study of Hieracium, that this is the common mode in which species arise. But I still continue to doubt much on this head, and cling to the belief expressed in the first edition of the "Origin," that protean or polymorphic species are those which are now varying in such a manner that the variations are neither advantageous nor disadvantageous. I am glad to hear of the Brunswick deposit, as I feel sure that the careful study of such cases is highly important. I hope ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... investigators, servants of truth, and we leave the great names of demi-gods and heroes a little contemptuously to the men of bygone times. As student-artists we are no longer content with the outward presentment and form of men: we want to discover the protean vanities, greeds and aspirations of men, and to lay bare, as with a scalpel, the hidden motives and springs of action. We dream of an art that shall take into account the natural daily decay and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... was Protean. Much of her work, the lawless part of it, was organized in the shape and dress of Mr. Michaelis. Some of her letters to the Press were signed Edgar McKenna, Albert Birrell, Andrew Asquith, Edgmont Harcourt, Felicia Ward, Millicent Curzon, Judith Pease, Edith Spenser-Churchhill, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... three were vehement in abuse of things and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... January the 9th, 1787, came safely to hand in the month of June last. Unluckily you forgot to sign it, and your hand-writing is so Protean, that one cannot be sure it is yours. To increase the causes of incertitude, it was dated Pen-Park, a name which I only know, as the seat of John Harmer. The hand-writing, too, being somewhat in his style, made me ascribe it hastily ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... grace, whose help once in life is the privilege of the most undeserving, flung open for him the portals of beyond, and in contemplating there the certitude immaterial and precious he forgot all the meaningless accidents of existence: the bliss of getting, the delight of enjoying; all the protean and enticing forms of the cupidity that rules a material world of foolish joys, of contemptible sorrows. Faith!—Love!—the undoubting, clear faith in the truth of a soul—the great tenderness, deep as the ocean, serene and eternal, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... A similar protean state, but little less remarkable, occurs in many of our British ferns, notably in Scolopendrium vulgare, of which Mr. Moore enumerates no fewer than 155 varieties,[366] many of the forms occurring on the same plant at the same time. Cultivators have availed themselves ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... take place in our Protean city! Already we have seen a palace in Blackfriars turn into a prison, and the old courts of Fleet Street, once mansions of the rich and great, now filled with struggling poor. The great synagogue in the Old Jewry became a tavern; the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... with individual differences, which seems to me extremely perplexing: I refer to those genera which have sometimes been called "protean" or "polymorphic," in which the species present an inordinate amount of variation; and hardly two naturalists can agree which forms to rank as species and which as varieties. We may instance Rubus, Rosa, and Hieracium amongst plants, several genera of insects, and several ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... people, old-fashioned country gentry, were regarded by Pargeter as hopelessly dowdy and "out of it," so none of them had been invited. With Laurence Vanderlyn alone had the young mistress of the house had any link of mutual interests or sympathies; but of flirtation, as that protean word was understood by those about ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... have a riot of unrelated impressions and a loss of time-value. I have no idea of how long we were in that vast everglade, but it must have been for weeks. My memories of what occurred invariably take the form of nightmare. For untold ages, oppressed by protean fear, I am aware of wandering, endlessly wandering, through a dank and soggy wilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us, and animals roared around us, and the mud quaked under us and ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... sensations and the certainties which taste, smell, and touch give me, I should be obliged to take my conception of the universe wholly from others. I should lack the alchemy by which I now infuse into my world light, colour, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered. The solid earth would melt from under my feet and disperse itself in space. The objects dear to my hands would become formless, dead things, and I should walk among them ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... herself taken as a young girl in the garb of a shepherdess of Provence. Her father used to like that picture of her, and to please him she often wore her hair in the fashion of Provence. She did so to-day. Why? The subtile thought in many Protean shapes played before her fancy, but she would not try to catch it—no! ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... so hedged about with curious and unreal conventions, is a strangely protean thing. The dear old proverb, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," is far truer than those who believe its many cynical counterparts would have us think, and especially is this true of ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... tongues,—but there is only one Mephistopheles. They have lived and loved and fallen and died. But he, indestructible, lives on to flash fire in the cups of beings yet unborn, and lurk with unholy intent in hearts which have not yet learned to beat. There is only one Mephistopheles; but he is protean in shape. The little gentleman in black, the hero of so many strange stories, is but the Teutonic incarnation of a spirit which takes many forms in many lands. Out of the brain of the great German poet he steps, in a guise which is known ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Gafsa, and afterwards there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to do. Cafes become tedious with their card-games, cowboy politics and persistent allusions to "la femme," that protean fetich which dominates and saturates the Gallic mind, oozing out, so to speak, at every pore of their social and national life. They never seem to grow out of the Ewig-weibliche stage. If only, like the Maltese, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... wonderful protean actress, says:—"I can not speak in too high praise of the opening remarks. If carefully read, will greatly assist. Have several books of choice selections, but I find some in 'Humorous Hits' never ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... remarkable genera in the family. The Pompilidae are species of great beauty, some closely resembling those of Australia in the banding and maculation of their wings; amongst the Vespidae will be found some of the most elegant and beautiful forms in the whole of that protean ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... day, or in a week, possibly in a month. But persistence and a protean adaptability to meet his moods might accomplish something. I don't say will, I only say might. If Sweetwater had the job, with unlimited time in which to carry out any plan he may have, or even for a change of plans ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... believed in the story of the Drac, a sort of merman, that lived in the Rhone, and had power to fascinate the women who ventured into the water. There was once a very widespread superstition concerning this Protean creature; and the women washing in the river often had a figure of the Drac, in the form of a lizard, carved upon the piece of wood with which they beat the linen, as a sort of talisman against his seduction. The mother of the Anglore had told her of ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... shimmerings of my Protean friend, Who means to couch them shortly. Thou wilt eye Many fantastic moulds of him ere long, Such as, bethink ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... nerves could endure, and in a fit of temper she attacked her husband, and rushed about the town denouncing him. Raleigh, in deepest depression of mind and body, wrote to Cecil, who had now taken another upward step in the hierarchy of James's protean House of Lords, and who was Earl of ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Lord's host; and as to Isaiah, in the year that the throne of Judah was emptied by the death of the earthly king, was given the vision of the Lord sitting on a throne, the King Eternal and Immortal. So to us all His grace shapes its expression according to our wants, and the same gift is Protean in its power of transformation; being to one man wisdom, to another strength, to the solitary companionship, to the sorrowful consolation, to the glad sobering, to the thinker truth, to the worker practical force—to each his heart's desire, if the heart's delight be God. So manifold ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... King, That he makes kings of his subordinate slaves: 30 Himselfe and them graduate like woodmongers Piling a stack of billets from the earth, Raising each other into steeples heights; Let him convey this on the turning props Of Protean law, and (his owne counsell keeping) 35 Keepe all upright—let me but hawlk at him, Ile play the vulture, and so thump his liver That (like a huge unlading Argosea) He shall confesse all, and you then may hang him. Shew me a clergie ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... saw the colts at first. He was seeing his protean hostess in a new role. Would her proteanness never end? he wondered, as he glanced over the magnificent, sweating, mastered creature she bestrode. Mountain Lad, despite his hugeness, was a mild-mannered pet beside ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Roman orator, and diverging only from the pure and polished exposition of his cause to awake a feeling of commiseration for the wrongs which he unfolded.[571] Tiberius played but on a single chord; Caius on many. Tiberius appealed to noble instincts, Caius appealed to all and his Protean manifestations were a symbol of a more complex creed, a wider knowledge of humanity, a greater recklessness as to his means, and of that burning consciousness, which Tiberius had not, that there were personal wrongs to be avenged ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Bailey was but an amateur at the Great Game, the game at which only two—only a man and a woman—can play, and yet which is capable of such infinite, such bewilderingly protean variations. So her next move, one which Paul de Virieu, smiling behind his moustache, foresaw—was to turn away ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... another name for your Protean cousin, I have to say it will be better for him he ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... universal underlying spirit, which is present in all things, cannot be too strongly insisted upon, we must remember that in dealing with it we are still dealing with a purely natural power which reappears at every point with protean variety of form, whether as person, animal, or thing. In each case what it becomes to any individual is exactly measured by that individual's recognition of it. To each and all it bears the relation of supporter of the race, and where the individual development ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... one point connected with individual differences which is extremely perplexing: I refer to those genera which have been called "protean" or "polymorphic," in which species present an inordinate amount of variation. With respect to many of these forms, hardly two naturalists agree whether to rank them as species or as varieties. We may instance Rubus, Rosa, and Hieracium among plants, several genera of insects, and of Brachiopod ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... roughened by the rude touch of Time, is a neutral ground that takes all the tints with which sun and moon, mist and cloud, paint and glaze the world: changeable as the chameleon's, the coating is never the same for two brief hours. The protean shape, seen in profile and foreshortened from the north or south, appears a block bristling with "Pins" and points, horns and beaks. Viewed from the east the range splits into a double line, whose ranks have never been "dressed" nor ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... every living thing, And all things are thy script and chart, Who rid'st upon the eagle's wing, And yearnest in the human heart; O Riddle with a single clue, Love, deathless, protean, secure, The ever old, the ever new, O ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... hair fairly stood up with fright, Mr. Charlton was very much shocked, but Miss Minorkey did not for a moment lose her self-possession. Besides having the advantage of quiet nerves, she had become inured to the presence of Death in all his protean forms—it was impossible that her father should be threatened in a way with which ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... the lowest fetichism does that, according to Mr. Parker, whom you defend. Now this Protean faith is what I do ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... takes any desired form. The process remains essentially the same as was worked out by the Hyatt brothers in the factory they set up in Newark in 1872 and some of their original machines are still in use. But this protean plastic takes innumerable forms and almost as many names. Each factory has its own secrets and lays claim to peculiar merits. The fundamental product itself is not patented, so trade names are copyrighted to protect the product. I have already mentioned three, "parkesine," ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... soul,—be irreverent, profane, or vulgar. He must know and keep his place. But he should have his place, and have it confessed; and that place is not quite at the end of the procession of the benefactors of the race. Punch, as we speak of him now, is but a generic name for Protean wit and humor, well and wisely employed. As such, let Punch have his mission; there is ample room for him and his merry doings, without interfering with soberer agencies. Let him go about tickling mankind; it does mankind good to be tickled occasionally. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... acuter form—hatred had added its taint and lent virulence to every emotion. The heathen were oppressed and angered, their rights abridged and defied; they saw the Christians triumphant at every point, and hatred is a protean monster which rages most fiercely and most venomously when it has lurked in the foul ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... main lines: it is mechanical, psychical and social. Our power to make and use things is essentially human; we alone have extra-physical tools. We have added to our teeth the knife, sword, scissors, mowing machine; to our claws the spade, harrow, plough, drill, dredge. We are a protean creature, using the larger brain power through a wide variety of changing weapons. This is one of our main and vital distinctions. Ancient animal races are traced and known by mere bones and shells, ancient human races by their buildings, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... conditions; and although you may now be acquainted with all its forms, they still require us to give a little attention to them for the present, so that we may perceive how the water, whilst it goes through its protean changes, is entirely and absolutely the same thing, whether it is produced from a candle, by combustion, or from ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... either obsolete or banished to rustic dialect, are found among our surnames. The tendency to accompany every noun by an adjective seems to belong to some deep-rooted human instinct. To this is partly due the Protean character of this part of speech, for the word, like the coin, becomes dulled and worn in circulation and needs periodically to be withdrawn and replaced. An epithet which is complimentary in one generation is ironical in the next and eventually offensive. Moody, with its ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... systems of ingenious gamblers. But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact—or, rather, of one protean fact—by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it assumes, as they shift their positions, any number of different aspects. This is the fact that out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... in prolonging the story of this wrestle; there was a certain sameness in every phase, though the dangers seemed to change with such protean swiftness. For three days it lasted, and on the third day Tom Lennard, Ferrier, the patients, and the crew, were far more interested in the steward's efforts to boil coffee than they were in the arrowy flight of the snow-masses or the menace of ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... kept benumbed by her temporal and spiritual master with the poison of tyranny and superstition, will find itself on awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child having first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech. It is safe to say tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain clinging to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... many persons of his time and class, was a man of protean employment—joiner, barber, and what not. No doubt he had much pithy and fluent conversation, all of which escapes us. He certainly impressed the Hon. Theodore Atkinson as a person of uncommon parts, for the Honorable Secretary ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... that man with the Protean countenance, across which storm and sunshine, God and the devil traced each minute new lines; who could be now an inspired enthusiast, and now a bloodthirsty tyrant; now a sentimental wit, and anon a wanton reveler; the king, on whose constancy nobody, ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... may scarce be so multitudinous and protean a host as this. But the search for them, and the choice of them when discovered, have given infinite exercise to the industry, the judgment, and the patience of successive editors; and literature has no more curious ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... no great man in evidence. And this want proved disastrous. In Germany, on the other hand, it was hardly felt. For it was compensated by the existence of a vast human machine, adaptable to every change of circumstance, capable of assuming countless Protean forms simultaneously, ready with a solution for the most unexpected problems, provided with organs suited to the discharge of every conceivable function, all directed to the same end. It was the same organism that had worked with such brilliant success for over thirty years, growing and perfecting ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... butler Cowie, who could throw more light on the case than Death had done, and that if some time were accorded to complete the inquiry, something might turn up which would alter the complexion even of this Protean mystery. The ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window, Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... tired and torpid mind conceives Fairer than roses brightening life's gloom, Thy protean charm can every form assume And turn ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly pitfalls, and of slavery, misery, meanness, the craft of tyrants and the credulity of the populace, in some of their protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are not. The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out—but soon and certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last forever. Yet is there an immortal courage and prophecy in every sane soul ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... completeness of the strength available for our many-sided weakness is marvellously revealed. There is 'infinite riches in a narrow room.' All power means every kind of power, be it bodily or mental, for all variety of circumstances, and, Protean, to take the shape of all exigencies. Most of us are strong only at points, and weak in others. In all human experience there is a vulnerable spot on the heel. The most glorious image, though it has a head of gold, ends in feet, 'part of iron ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... by the older, complacent cock-sureness with regard to the theologian's heaven, is still unshaken in its conviction that life is beneficent, the obligation of duty imperative, the meaning of existence spiritual. Puzzlingly protean in his expressional moods (his conversations in especial), he was constant in this intellectual, or temperamental, attitude: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," represents his feeling, and the strongest poem he ever wrote, "If ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... This Protean quality of De Stancy's, by means of which he could assume the shape and situation of almost any ancestor at will, had impressed her, and he perceived it with a throb of fervour. But it had done no more than impress her; for though in delivering the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells, one by one, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of the fairest flowers, were 'no sooner blown than blasted;' others have grown up to manhood, but with feeble bodies and disordered nervous system, which subjected them to hypochondriasis, dyspepsy, and all the Protean forms of nervous disease; others of the class of early prodigies exhibit in manhood but small mental powers, and are the mere passive instruments of those who in early life were ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... this general uniformity by no means excludes any amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, though no one doubts that, under all these Protean changes, it is one and the ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... indicates that they cannot be of much importance; for if important, they would long ago have been either fixed and preserved, or eliminated. In this respect man resembles those forms, called by naturalists protean or polymorphic, which have remained extremely variable, owing, as it seems, to such variations being of an indifferent nature, and to their having thus escaped the action of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... is an ancient species which puzzles most visitors by its Protean appearance. Its tints are always neutral, but they vary in depth from the lightest to the darkest shade, and are never mixed but in juxtaposition. Dirty yellows, cloudy reds, dim blues and purples, occur in the ground or in the round or waved blotches or ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... train. It would be an angel of light, if it were not a power of darkness; and it would be a power of darkness, if it were not an angel of light. But as it is, it is both by turns, and neither long, but runs through its Protean changes, according to the exigencies of the flowing discourse of the learned author. Surely such inconsistency, so glaring and so portentous, and all exhibited on one and the same page, is no evidence that the genius ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... concurrence of what an author has written will present to us the mental and moral features of the man. It is particularly true in the case of Moore. He appears to us in Protean shapes, indeed, but not without an affinity between them. Small in stature, of jovial appearance; devoted to the gayest society; not very earnest in politics; a Roman Catholic in name, with but little practical religion, he pandered at first to a frivolous public taste, and was even ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Englishman perhaps as much as anything in the Emperor's character at this time is the Cromwellian trait in it. This is a side of his Protean nature which never seems to have been adequately recognized in England, yet in a singularly baffling character-composition it is one of the fundamental elements. The view of Prussian monarchy, inherited from one Hohenzollern to another for generation after generation, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... of forms, most of which are prototypes of different kinds of dragons. Hence the homology of the elephant-headed god with the other dragons is further established and shown to be genetically related to the evolution of the protean ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... The vegetative phase differs from the corresponding phase of all other plants in that it exhibits extreme simplicity of structure, if structure that may be called which consists of a simple mass of protoplasm destitute of cell-walls, protean in form and amoeboid in its movements. This phase of the slime-mould is described as plasmodial and it is proper to designate the vegetative phase in any species, as the plasmodium of the species. It was formerly taught that the ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... Greek imagination,—imagination not involved and included in the religious sentiment, but playing in epic freedom and with various interpretation between religion and intellect; he has not the flowing, Protean, imaginative sympathy, the power of instant self-identification with all forms of character and life, which culminated in Shakspeare; but that imaginative vitality which lurks in faith and conscience, producing what we may call ideal force of heart, this he has eminently; and it is this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... touch of genius, have given birth to so many and totally diverse forms, memorable for ages and endeared to humanity, is in itself an infinite marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary's art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are "a joy forever," even to retrospection,—haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... was shown a man who was called "l'homme protee," or protean man. He had an exceptional power over his muscles. Even those muscles ordinarily involuntary he could exercise at will. He could produce such rigidity of stature that a blow by a hammer on his body ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... slowly through the sky toward the west, and for two or three successive days and nights it remains above the horizon, the sun overtaking and passing it again and again, while, in the meantime, its protean face swiftly changes from full circle to half-moon, from half-moon to crescent, from crescent back to half, and from half to full, and so ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... nothing, indeed, but a sort of household utensil, how greatly was life simplified! What a door for expenditure was there, as yet securely closed, and which no one had thought of opening! No milliner's or dressmaker's bills, no evening parties, no Protean fashions, no elegant furniture, no imperious necessity for Kleanthes to outshine Kleon, no coaches, no Chateau Margaux, no journeys to Arkadia in the summer! In such a state of society, as one may easily see, the labour of one man would support half a dozen. It cost the Athenian but ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... its idol, which has remained among these lineal descendants of the Armorican Druids for more than a thousand years after Christianity has become the professed religion of the country! Altars, professedly Christian, were raised under the protection of the Protean Virgin, to the demon Hatred; and have continued to the present day to receive an unholy worship from blinded bigots, who hope to obtain Heaven's patronage and assistance for thoughts and wishes which they ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... tentative if not purely unconscious artist, much of whose work is only not bad as art, while most, if not all of it, was originally produced with a minimum of artistic consciousness and design. This enormous error, which is protean in form, has naturally induced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousness and elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of this art have been framed—theories involving ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... is not many that do know him at all hours; however, he is here, sir." And he whipped off the red hair, and wiped off the black eye, and ho, Green ipse. He received their compliments on his Protean powers, and told them he had been just a minute too late. Mr. Hardie was gone, and so he had lost the chance of seeing who came to help him, and of hearing the first words that passed between the two. This, he said, was a very great pity; for it would have shown him in ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse leading itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and Pictures." Dismissing the further question of the authorship of "There was an old man of Tobago," we propose to give a few specimens of Mr. Lear's Protean powers as exhibited in the variation of this simple type. Here, to begin with, is a favorite verse, which we are very glad to have an opportunity of giving, as it is often incorrectly quoted, "cocks" being substituted for ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... in the secret of the generous ruse played upon them) firmly in their resolution to lead a better life. They are in nowise shaken from it by the displeasure which soon shows itself in the manner of the first and second ladies. The former is greatest in the so-called Protean parts of the play, and is obscured somewhat by the dancing of the latter; but she has a daughter who now comes on and sings a song. The pensive occasion, the favorable mood of the audience, the sympathetic attitude ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Velasquez is at his best in the Prado. The various backgrounds and those two views painted at Rome in the garden of the Villa Medici—a liquid comminglement of Corot and Constable, as has been pointed out—prove this man of protean gifts to have anticipated modern discoveries in vibrating atmospheric effects and colour-values. But, then, Velasquez will always be "modern." And when time has obliterated his work he may become the legendary Parrhasius of a ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker |
