"Mutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is the great regulator of quantity. Though the quantity of our syllable is fixed, in words separately pronounced, yet it is mutable, when [the] words are [ar]ranged in[to] sentences; the long being changed into short, the short into long, according to the importance of the words with regard to meaning: and, as it is by emphasis only, that the meaning can be pointed out, emphasis must be the regulator of the quantity."—L. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... box upon a shelf of rock. It would remain there unaffected by dust, moisture, heat, time. How long had those painted images been there clear and sharp on the dry stone walls? There were no trails in that desert, and always there were incalculable changes. Cameron saw this mutable mood of nature—the sands would fly and seep and carve and bury; the floods would dig and cut; the ledges would weather in the heat and rain; the avalanches would slide; the cactus seeds would roll in the wind to catch ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... Diotima, "the Ancient Beauty! Look how its petals expand, and what comes forth from its heart!" A vast and glowing breath, mutable and opalescent, spread itself between heaven and earth, and out of it slowly descended a radiant form like a god's. It drew nigh, radiating lights, pure, beautiful, and star-like. It stood for a moment by the child and placed its hand on his head, and then it was gone. The old ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Shapes all 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 world, a shifting world, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... be remembered that Mr. Molloy's book is not a new one; but then Touraine is neither new nor mutable. Nothing changes in its beautiful old towns, the page of whose history has been turned for centuries. What if motors now whirl in a white dust through the heart of France? They do not affect the lives of the villages through which they pass. The simple and primitive desire ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... since now her bloom is fled): Fair as the Forms that wove in Fancy's loom, Float in light vision round the Poet's head. Whene'er with soft serenity she smiled, Or caught the orient blush of quick surprise, How sweetly mutable, how brightly wild. The liquid lustre darted from her eyes! Each look, each motion, waked a new-born grace That o'er her form its transient glory cast: Some lovelier wonder soon usurped the place, Chased by a charm still ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... happened in Hazel's brain. It was the realization of life in relation to self. It marks the end of childhood. She no more saw herself throned above life and fate, as a child does. She saw that she was a part of it all; she was mutable and mortal. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... know what spells of infinite choice, To rouse or lull, hath the sweet human voice; Then did I seem to seize the sudden clue To that grand troublous Life Antique—to view, Under the rockstand of Demosthenes, Mutable Athens ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... not tell whether he was mocking at me or not. I think he was, for Francis Nicholson's moods were as mutable as the tides. In every word of his there ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... place, there could be no motion. So all things were really perfectly compact and at rest, and all our impressions of change were the illusions of the thoughtless and the simple-minded. Since one of the chief satisfactions of the metaphysicians is to get away from the welter of our mutable world into a realm of assurance, this doctrine exercised a great fascination over many minds. The Eleatic conviction of unchanging stability received a new form in Plato's doctrine of eternal "ideas", and later developed into the comforting conception of the "Absolute", in which logical and ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... for the last year are again chosen excepting General Ward in the Room of Mr Dana. I own it is not becoming an old Man to be mutable—and yet I am intimately acquainted with one who took his Leave of his good Friends in Philadelphia with almost as much Formality as if he was on his dying Bed soon after resolving to visit them once more. In [your] horrid Catalogue of evil Dispositions with which Age is infested we do not ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... have to send all the weights and measures up to the Tower now and then, to get them stamped and certified. And, as I believe, this fluctuation of our moral judgments shows the need for a fixed pattern and firm unchangeable standard, external to our mutable selves. A light on deck which pitches with the pitching ship is no guide. It must flash from a white pillar founded on a rock and immovable amid the restless waves. Our need of such a standard raises a strong presumption that a good God will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood |
