"Protean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pantheism, it reverences not only Gautama the historic Buddha, but also, large numbers of the Hindu deities, the group of idols called Jiz[o], the god Fudo, and Kuannon the god or goddess of mercy, under his or her protean forms. In its early history this sect welcomed to its pantheon the Shint[o] gods, who, according to the scheme of Riy[o]bu Shint[o], were declared to be avatars or manifestations of Buddha. The three sub-sects still differ in their worship of the avatars selected as supreme deities, but ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... itself, 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 ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... but simply affords man an opportunity to produce it; you forgot to add—provided the landlord doesn't prevent him. You say in another place, "Figure it as you will, adjust it as you may, a tax is a fine on industry and will so remain until you get blood from turnips," etc. This very objection in protean form is continually being raised by a class of shallow-thinking men with whom the editor of the ICONOCLAST should not be proud to herd. "What difference docs it make," they say, "whether I pay rent to the government or to a landlord when I've got to pay it anyhow? And what difference ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... There are two remarkable pictures of Giordano,—one in the Roman style, which would not be unworthy of the great Sanzio himself, a Holy Family, drawn and colored with that scrupulous correctness which seems so impossible in the ordinary products of this Protean genius; and just opposite, an apotheosis of Rubens, surrounded by his usual "properties" of fat angels and genii, which could be readily sold anywhere as a specimen of the estimate which the unabashed Fleming placed upon himself. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion, instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two last being ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... combustion—I must first of all tell you that this water may exist in different 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... archetype of protean protein clay All the human's space has room for, for whom time makes a day, From the sage whose words of wisdom prince or parliament obey, To the parrots who but prattle, and the asses who but bray— So full was this Atom-Molecule, Of the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... All these protean expressions of endocrine determination may now begin to be looked upon with the hopeful and optimistic attitude of him who understands cause and effect and can control. The advances made in the last ten years in the practical manipulation of the ductless glands from without, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 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 she was ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... quinine such as would make an English doctor raise his eyebrows have hitherto only succeeded in provoking the Calendaro microbe to more virulent activity. Nevertheless, on s'y fait. I am studying him and, despite his protean manifestations, have discovered three principal ingredients: malaria, bronchitis and hay-fever—not your ordinary hay-fever, oh, no! but such as a mammoth might conceivably catch, if thrust back from his germless, frozen tundras into ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... disappear below them. Mars with its canals and mossy deserts loomed ahead—swerved aside, and was behind them, Jupiter with its red clouds and its protean "eye" reached out for them and was left behind. The planets became smaller. They winked at them and cheered them on with a far halloo. Then Pluto loomed ahead, lost and forgotten up there in the night. And to Odin's surprise, one last tiny planet, frozen to the color of a moonstone, looked at ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... 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 ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... the hope of everlasting life, with the acknowledged vanity of desire? It is accomplished through the medium of an emotion which more than any I have touched upon reveals the character of the religious sentiment—Love. This mighty but protean feeling I shall attempt to define on broader principles than has hitherto been done. The vague and partial meanings assigned it have led to sad confusion in the studies of religions. In the language ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... element discovered in the sun. Messrs. Trowbridge and Hutchins of Harvard College concluded in 1887,[679] on the ground of certain spectral coincidences, that this protean substance is vaporised in the solar atmosphere at a temperature approximately that of the voltaic arc. Partial evidence to the same effect had earlier been alleged by Lockyer, as well as by Liveing and Dewar; and the case was rendered tolerably complete ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... portions of the 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 ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... emptiness of moral and intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various. Few writers, at the same time, illustrate the vices of decadence more luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity. Few display more clearly the 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' None teach the dependence of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this drunken Helot of genius. His indifference to truth, his defiance of sobriety, his conviction that the sole ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... But it will be understood that 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
... that 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 palace of the Savoy ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... natural history, paints with unrivalled fidelity and force the flat shores and tideways of his native East Anglia. They are both therefore prophets of a love of Nature, in one of the senses of the Protean word. Cowper, who prophesied the fall of the Bastille and denounced luxury, was to some extent an unconscious ally of Rousseau, though he regarded the religious aspects of Rousseau's doctrine as shallow and unsatisfactory. Crabbe shows the attitude ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... unobserved 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 ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... 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
... Of all the 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 ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... 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 them, ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sum you won't return: You take it: is this madness, I would learn? Were it not greater madness to renounce The prey that Mercury puts within your pounce? Secure him with ten bonds; a hundred; nay, Clap on a thousand; still he'll slip away, This Protean scoundrel: drag him into court, You'll only find yourself the more his sport: He'll laugh till scarce you'd think his jaws his own, And turn to boar or bird, to tree or stone. If prudence in affairs denotes ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... which might become a something to us with any modification on our parts but which, till such modification has arisen, does not exist in relation to us, though very conceivably doing so in relation to other entities. But this Protean nothing, capable of appearing as something, is not the absolute, eternal, unchangeable nothing that we mean when we say ex ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... selling, in an atmosphere of geniality, generosity, and mutual helpfulness. Mr. Belloc, with a harder grip upon the realities of life, would have the widest distribution of proprietorship, with an alert democratic government continually legislating against the protean reappearances of usury and accumulation and attacking, breaking up, and redistributing any large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared. But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social Life, and equally enemies of the New. The so-called "socialist" land legislation ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... comprehensive 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren |
