"Unstable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shot; for nothing could have been less complimentary to the jealous and quick-tempered captain of the house than to be mistaken for his self-conceited and unstable inferior, with whom, he was in the habit of congratulating himself, he had little or ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... machinery of all kinds, manned by highly trained men to operate it, and commanded by officers fit to be intrusted with such responsibilities, is a highly developed and sensitive organism—and, like all highly developed and sensitive organisms, exists in a state of what may be called "unstable equilibrium." As pointed out in previous pages, the high skill needed to perform well any very difficult task can be gained only by great practice in overcoming difficulties and eliminating errors of many kinds; and when the difficulties are manifold ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... nothing without paper-credit and other fictions; so let them pass current. Don't steal their chips; don't puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come down on their pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their brittle and unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names will be household words a thousand years ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I have offered many an example of what religion can do, and of what the want of it will produce. I have uttered many a warning. One more I must repeat: Remember that this world affords no rest to the soul—this world is unstable and fleeting—those who persist in making the utmost it can offer their aim, are striving to clutch a passing shadow. Oh! never forget it is but a place of preparation—a place of trial—for all human beings alike. To commence mother life all are hastening—all must commence ere long. High and ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... however unstable or inglorious it might appear to those few who understood the interests, and felt for the honour of their country, was nevertheless not unwelcome to the nation in general. The British ministry will always find it more difficult to satisfy the people at the end of a successful campaign, than at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... running water, unstable, and that cannot excel; and he answers to Aquarius, his ensign being a man. The water poured out by Aquarius flows toward the South Pole, and it is the first of the four Royal Signs, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Many of his books are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers, Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to "Barnes on the Acts of the Apostles." An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If, some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is absent, to "clear up," a damage is done that requires weeks to repair. For many days the question is, "Where is my pen? Who has the ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... theory on this. He supposes the surface air intensely cooled over the continental and Barrier areas, and the edge of this cold region lapped by warmer air from the southern limits of Lockyer's cyclones. This would produce a condition of unstable equilibrium, with great potentiality for movement. Since, as we have found, volumes of cold air at different temperatures are very loath to mix, the condition could not be relieved by any gradual process, but continues until the stream is released by some minor cause, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... on the subject. The ingenuity of etymologists displayed itself in suggesting derivations for the words in question, which were sometimes absurd, sometimes plausible, but never more than very doubtful conjectures. No sound historical critic could be content to base a positive view on any such unstable foundation, and nothing remained but to decide the controversy on other than ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... succeeded—and who, attracted by the magnet of gold discovery, for a short time had acted as manager of the Langlaagte Estate and Mr. J. B. Robinson's interests at Johannesburg. With political principles thus unstable and a mind strangely sensitive to any emotional appeal, it is not surprising that Mr. Merriman displayed the proverbial enthusiasm of the convert in his new political creed. His original perception of the imprudence and administrative incompetency ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... 'tis no false glory For which now you peril life,— For no worthless aim unholy, Do ye plunge into the strife; No unstable, fleeting vision Bright before your gaze hath shone, No day dream of wild ambition, Now your footsteps ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... not, however, conceal from myself, that this was but a very unstable and ill-linked chain of reasoning, and there were moments, when the appearances against Glanville wore so close a semblance of truth, that all my friendship could scarcely drive from my mind an intrusive suspicion that he might have deceived me, and that the accusation ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dialectic demonstration of what is best for us—to do only what is in reason best for us—we must simply cease to live, though we do continue to breathe. Even in physics, of what use are logical demonstrations, when the premises are only a foundation more unstable than quicksand—purely provisional? ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... subside (even among the Communists) as soon as the Poles had been driven back from Kiev to their own frontiers, although the Poles are occupying an enormous area of non-Polish territory, although the Communists have had to conclude with Poland a peace obviously unstable, the military position of Soviet Russia is infinitely better this time than it was in 1918 or 1919. In 1918 the Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of the Ukraine was in the hands of General Krasnov, the author ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... sure that this would not have happened to Shelley, that as he grew older he would always have returned to much the same impressions; for his mind, of one piece through and through, had that peculiar rigidity which can sometimes be observed in violently unstable characters. The colour of his emotion would have fluctuated—it took on, as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy; but there is no indication that the material on which it ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... appeasing his conscience, the remark completed his descent into the state of disenchantment he had been approaching for hours. The shock of his mother's illness, coming after three days of marriage, had been too much for his unstable equilibrium, and he felt smothered by an oppression which, in some strange way, seemed closing upon him from without. It was in the air—in the faded cretonne of the room, in the grey flashes of the swallows from the eaves of the house, in the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... merit in France and Germany than in the countries where Sterne's own tongue is spoken.[1] His place among the English classics has, from the foreign point of view, never been a dubious question, amatter of capricious taste and unstable ideals. His peculiar message, whether interpreted and insisted upon with clearness of insight, or blindness of misunderstanding, played its not unimportant part in certain developments of continental literatures, and his station in English literature, as viewed from ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... exquisitely beautiful falls seen there.' A narrow lane with high hedges leads round the shoulder of the hill to the steep little valley, where the Tavy jostles against obstructive boulders, and a high, narrow, unstable-looking bridge of tarred timber (sometimes called a 'clam' bridge) crosses the stream. Climbing up on the farther side, the road soon reaches the village of Mary Tavy. In reference to these villages a very old joke ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... English governing class to have called upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least boast of being constant. But science boasts of being in a flux for ever; boasts of being unstable ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... current situation: Democratic Republic of the Congo is a source and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; much of this trafficking occurs within the country's unstable eastern provinces and is perpetrated by armed groups outside government control tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - Democratic Republic of the Congo is on the Tier 2 Watch List for its failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat trafficking in persons in 2007; while some significant ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... nutrition and pathology has been investigated, we shall not see much progress towards the extermination of disease. Medical science by its curative methods is simply pruning the evil, which, meanwhile, is sending its roots deeper into the unstable ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... on the lights ahead. Heavy feet, dragging like hundredweights, carried them over the last weary mile. Into the outskirts of the little town they slunk. The streets were deserted, muddy, and lighted but meagerly from widely separated oil lamps set at the tops of as many unstable posts. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... Laupepa side it would be unfair to blame any but the king himself. Capable both of virtuous resolutions and of fits of apathetic obstinacy, His Majesty is usually the whip-top of competitive advisers; and his conduct is so unstable as to wear at times an appearance of treachery which would surprise himself if he could see it. Take, for example, the experience of Lieutenant Ulfsparre, late chief of police, and (so to speak) commander of the forces. His men ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sittlichkeit, which we here mean when we speak of "good form." But that was not the faith of his critics in Berlin. They wanted to have Russia, and if possible France also, along with their navies, on the side of Germany. Peace, yes, but peace compelled by fear—a very unwholesome and unstable kind of peace, and deadly for the interests of an island ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... Cyprus or Asia Minor, the learned are no less divided than about the date. Many of the grounds on which their opinions rest appear unstable. The relations of Aphrodite to the wild beasts under her wondrous spell, for instance, need not be borrowed from Circe with her attendant beasts. If not of Homer's age, the Hymn is markedly successful as a continuation of the Homeric tone ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... succession of jerking leaps, each higher than its predecessor, flung their silver crests against the sky. For a few minutes the fountain held its own, then all at once appeared to lose its ascending power. The unstable waters faltered, drooped, fell, "like a broken purpose," back upon themselves, and were immediately absorbed in the depths of the ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... case of the stolen ore had cleared his path of difficulties he would have been forced by current events to a rude awakening. He had been neither flattered nor deceived. He knew very well that a prop put under an unstable boulder may obscure the manifestation of gravity; but he never deceived himself with the thought that it had been eliminated. The warming-up process, recommended by Pierre, was being actively exploited. ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... a superficial soil which has no depth of earth, and so with joy it receives the word; but the seed has no depth of earth and quickly withers away. This sort of soil receives quickly and as quickly lets go. It is like that unstable man of whom St. James writes and who is like the wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. We see the wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine as it leaps and crowned with its spray, and then we look again for it, and where ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... 1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable inputs, or may ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... become happy almost without knowing it in the pursuit of other things once despised, such as work, friendship, the need of earning, or the love of an abstract subject. What a contrast then does this "afflicted," this "peculiar" one afford to the restless, imaginative, gifted but unstable Pauline, in whom the quest of happiness had so far only resulted in entanglement and riot of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... they are an obvious instance of inconstancy. In the second place we have considered the group of inconstant or sporting varieties, which of course we must exclude when studying the stability of other types. However, even these sporting varieties are unstable only to a certain degree, and in a broader sense will prove to be as true to their character as ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... not very talkative—only persons of inconstant ideas and unstable judgment are prone to verbosity. His profound moral sense made him sparing of words in the disputes in which the men of the day are prone to engage on any and every subject, but in polite conversation he displayed an eloquence full of wit and intelligence, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... and south to meet his foe, besides the levy of Media, a province which now seems to include most of the ancient Assyria. These hundreds of thousands constitute a host untrained, undisciplined, unstable, unused to service, little like the ordered battalions of an essentially military power such as ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... to capsize. This is true of model boats just as much as it is true of large boats. The model boat builder must keep the weight of his boat as near the bottom as possible. For instance, if a heavy cabin were built on a frail little hull, the boat would be very unstable and ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... obscure of mankind, viz.: That a degenerated nerve condition has been inherited which renders the sufferer specially susceptible to this and allied neuroses, such as epilepsy, idiocy and suicide. The inheritance of an unstable nervous system makes the individual easily affected by what I must call 'alcoholic surroundings.' In other words, the provocation to drink which would have no influence upon an ordinary, stable nervous organization, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... confessions the doctrines which they believe the Scriptures affirm. They are bound not only to accept Scripture as the rule of faith, but to make known the sense in which they understand it. As unlearned and unstable men wrest and subvert the Sacred Writings, it is fitting that those who are learned and not unstable should publish sound expositions of their contents. In the light of creeds, converts are enabled to test their own position, and to put to proof the claims of those who profess to be teachers ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... coaxed or wheedled him into giving up something of which she did not approve, he would quietly approach his object in some other way, and gain his point, or sulk till he did. When he set his heart upon anything he was not as "unstable as water." While but an indifferent and superficial student, who had habitually escaped lessons and skipped difficulties, he occasionally became nettled by a perplexing problem or task, and would work at it with a sort of vindictive, unrelenting earnestness, as if he were subduing an ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... sentiment, so happily disguised; Pope, in the chair of wisdom, tells much that every man knows, and much that he did not know himself; and gives us comfort in the position, that though man's a fool, yet God is wise; that human advantages are unstable; that our true honour is, not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own, and that happiness is always in our power." The reader, when he meets all this in its new array, no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse. But, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... done with a genius so unstable, so erratic? Nothing, apparently, but to let him qualify for orders, and for this he is too young. Thereupon ensues a sort of 'Martin's summer' in his changing life,—a disengaged, delightful time when 'Master Noll' wanders irresponsibly from house to house, fishing and flute-playing, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... nose, were relieved by a moustache, and a beard square and slightly forked in the midst. This moustache hid a mouth which was the characteristic feature of the face. No physiognomist would have placed the slightest confidence in the owner of that mouth. It was at once sanctimonious and unstable. The manners of its possessor might be suave or severe; his reputation might be excellent or execrable; but with that mouth, a Pharisee and a hypocrite at heart he must be. This gentleman found it convenient not to be too invariably known by a single name, and that whereby he had been introduced ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... impression, too, of a momentous conversation, of a name—he could not tell what name—that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of dazzling unstable ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... would disband their force he would do the same, and that he would confirm the royal edict and give full security for the maintenance of their civil and religious privileges. The Protestants refused to disband, knowing that they could place no reliance upon the word of the unstable monarch who was crowded by the rising power of the energetic Ferdinand. The ambitious naturally deserted the court of the sovereign whose days were declining, to enlist in the service of one who was just entering upon ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... decayed matter mixed up with it. In the centre of this, and underneath it, ran a broad, deep, and rapid stream. As the guides proceeded across, the men stole after them with cautious footsteps. As they arrived near the centre we began to see this unstable grassy bridge, so curiously provided by nature for us, move up and down in heavy languid undulations, like the swell of the sea after a storm. Where the two asses of the Expedition moved, the grassy waves rose a foot high; but ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and women, Maria Dmitrievna. There are, unfortunately, some who are—of an unstable character; and then there is a certain time of life—and, besides, good principles have not been instilled into them ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... beauties, that all their pleasure-seats are built on its banks, where they have, at the same time, the most beautiful prospects in Europe and Asia; there are near one another some hundreds of magnificent palaces. Human grandeur being here yet more unstable than any where else, 'tis common for the heirs of a great three-tailed bassa, not to be rich enough to keep in repair the house he built; thus, in a few years, they all fall to ruin. I was yesterday to see that of the ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... perfectly calm weather, for in any wind the heavy guns caused them to careen over so as to make it difficult to keep them right side up, and impossible to fire. Even in smooth water they could not be fought at anchor, requiring to be kept in position by means of sweeps; and they were very unstable, the recoil of the guns causing them to roll so as to make it difficult to aim with any accuracy after the first discharge, while a single shot hitting one put it hors de combat. This last event rarely happened, however, for they were not often handled with any approach to temerity, and, ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... rest for myself," the Duke replied. "I know that Blenavon is uncertain and unstable to a degree. When I heard that he had left for the Continent, I was not particularly surprised or interested. I have only just discovered the manner of his leaving. It puts an entirely different complexion ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Plato, of Aristotle, and of Plotinus were developed from the thesis that there is more in the immutable than in the moving, and that it is by way of diminution that we pass from the stable to the unstable. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... when it was full to the brim, the lining was unsightly; and this became more so. One day Ithuriel must have visited Euphemia's apartment, and the tarnished brilliancy of the thing stood confessed. For some days there was an interregnum, and a coal-scuttle from downstairs—a black unstable thing on flat foot and with a vast foolish nether lip—did ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... than significant of the deeper shame beneath and prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: "Behold the outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people! Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words! We have believed ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of staid New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson Alcott. It ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... lad, what is't you read— Romance or fairy fable? Or is it some historic page Of kings and crowns unstable?' The young boy gave an upward glance— 'It is ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... disdain for the hunches of Kit, even while his eyes smiled response to the ever-living call of youth. To Rhodes there was ever a "next time." He was young enough to deal in futures, and had a way with him by which friends were to be found for even unstable venturings with no backing more substantial ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the air, and became a globe, a globe of brown. But it changed, and disappeared. Morey recognized the signal. "He will now make the artificial matter into all the elements, and many nonexistent elements, unstable, atomic figures." There followed a ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... of the past to show, that of all national governments a democratic one was the most unstable, fluctuating, and short-lived; and that despotism, arising from a centralization of power in the national government on one hand, and anarchy, incident to the instability of democracy—"the levelling spirit of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... of course, represent the number of men in the field at any one time. It is an estimate of the numbers of all who bore arms against the British troops at any time whatever during the campaign. The Boer army numerically was the most unstable known to history,[78] varying in strength as it varied in fortune in the field, varying even with the weather, or with that mercurial mental condition of which, in irregular forces, the numbers present at the front best mark the barometer. Those numbers, even in ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... turned chill and foggy. The heart of the town, with its noises, was left behind. Reflected from the high vapours, its distant lights were manifest in quivering, cone-shaped streamers, in questionable blushes of unnamed colours, in unstable, ghostly waves of far, electric flashes. Now that the darkness was become more friendly, the wall against which the street splintered developed a stone coping topped with an armature of spikes. Beyond it loomed what appeared to be the acute angles of mountain peaks, pierced ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... of the beautiful, Home of all art, all elegance, all grace; Whose orators and poets sway the soul As the winds move the sea's unstable face; O wonderous city, nurse and home of mind, This is my oracle to you this day— No generous growth from starved roots will you find, But fruitless ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears. What a freak of nature! A bird's beak on a mollusk! Its body was spindle-shaped and swollen in the middle, a fleshy mass that must have weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms. Its unstable color would change with tremendous speed as the animal grew irritated, passing successively from bluish gray to ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life. Specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has isolated him from others, and confined him within ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... gives no conscious attention; just as when I say—"any thing," I may imagine a poker or a plate; but I pay no attention to its being this rather than that; and the very image itself is so wandering and unstable that at this moment it may be a dim shadow of the one, and in the next of some other thing. In this sense, idea is opposed to image in degree instead of kind; yet still contra-distinguished, as is evident by the sequel, "much ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... to lose Lots by rail, and 'bus, and cable! And the banks his notes refuse, Now they think his state unstable. This may be a story strange Of the bulls and bears on 'change, Where the truth, in age and youth, Is often ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... father, that he leaves this country knowing how thorough is my self-reproach for the past, and my wish that his absence may be eternal. I believe that I do really wish it, but see how my poor frame is shaken! I must have more strength or my heart will be unstable like-wise." Florence held up her clasped hands that were trembling like leaves in the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... was in my sensations to-day. Added to which, scarcely an hour before Elena's kiss, I had a moment of lofty lyrical emotion at Donna Maria's side. Of all this not one vestige remains. To-morrow, most assuredly I shall begin the same game over again. I am unstable as water; incoherent, inconsistent, a very chameleon! All my efforts towards unity of purpose are for ever vain. I must resign myself to my fate. The law of my being is comprised in the one word—Nunc—the will ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... advance. He was apparently on the eve of forming his Indian alliance when he returned home to find that his brother the Prophet had just been defeated at Tippecanoe. The defeat itself was no great thing. But it came precisely at a time when it could exert most influence on the unstable Indian character and be most effective in breaking up the alliance of the tribes. Tecumseh, divining this at once, lost no time in vain regrets, but joined the British next year at Amherstburg. He came ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... me—never from me. For what am I? Untrue to myself, as you are untrue to yourself; false to others, as you are false to others; passionate, unstable, like yourself; like yourself, a coward. I —I was to lead women! I was to show them, in your company, how laws— laws made and laws that are natural—may be set aside or slighted; how men and woman may live independent and noble lives without rule, guidance or sacrament. I was to be the ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... revolved around the charge of the usurpation of government by an "aristocracy." Incontrovertible proof of this charge was found in special legislation chartering banks and other corporations. The banks were indicted upon two counts. First, the unstable bank paper money defrauded the wage earner of a considerable portion of the purchasing power of his wages. Second, banks restricted competition and shut off avenues for the "man on the make." The latter accusation may be understood only if we keep in mind that this was ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... Governor of Erzerum till he fell sick and Ahmed Fevzi took his place. He had a peevish mouth and big blue pouches below his eyes. He was supposed to be a good engineer and to have made Erzerum impregnable, but the look on his face gave me the impression that his reputation at the moment was a bit unstable. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... more confused, and finds it all the while harder to keep upright. What he fears is a mossy stone and a rolling stone. The small cakes of ice were as slippery as a mossy stone in a brook, and as treacherously unstable as a rolling stone; and in two particulars they were vastly more difficult to deal with; they were all in motion, and not one of them would bear the weight of a man. There was more ice in the lane. It was a mere scattering of fragments and a gathered patch ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... have lost all influence, and the newspapers only reflect opinion. As for statesmen, far from directing opinion, their only endeavour is to follow it. They have a dread of opinion, which amounts at times to terror, and causes them to adopt an utterly unstable ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart! How can I be anything but 'unstable'—wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not unstable in thinking about ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... homogeneity in the social aggregate is an unstable one. The primary political differentiation originates from the primary family differentiation. Men and women very early respectively form the two political classes of rulers and ruled. The slave class acquires separateness only as fast as there arrives ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... somebody's inner processes, putting herself in somebody's else skin and doing the thing that would reach him in the right way. She would like, an instant, just an instant, to be in her own skin, she thought, penetrated with a sense of the unstable equilibrium of personal relations. To keep the peace in a household of young and old highly differentiated personalities was a feat of the Blondin variety; the least inattention, the least failure in judgment, and opportunities ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and shook himself impatiently. "I don't know." he answered, in a testy sort of voice. "I don't like the cliff top... It's so dangerous, don't you know? So unsafe. So unstable. The rocks go off so sheer, and stones ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... (Matt. xiv. 31.) He had God's eternal word, which was sure footing, and better than either marble, granite or iron; but the moment he took his eyes off Christ down he went. Those who look around cannot see how unstable and dishonoring is their walk. We want to look straight at the "Author and Finisher ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... "business as usual" in war time deceives nobody. If it did, nobody would gain by the deception. Enforced loans from the reserve fund of insurance companies to the state mean the depreciation of reserves. The substitution of unstable government bonds means robbery of the bond holders. The yielding to the state, by enforced "voluntary action," of reserves of savings banks and insurance companies represents a form of state robbery. This is now in practice on the continent of Europe. Such funds ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... not. In the city, seeing the two men together, she had turned to Gratton. Now, here in her father's log house in the mountains, she wondered that she could have done so. Did men change colour like chameleons, shifted from one environment to another? Or was it she who had been unstable, she who was the chameleon? A queer sensation which had been hers before, and which she was to know more than once in days to follow, mastered her. It seemed that within her, coexistent and for ever in conflict, there were two Glorias: a girl who was ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... a mighty Niagara to produce practical righteousness in daily living. No church is better adapted to this end than the Protestant Episcopal. (a) She seeks after the example of her Master's method to develop the permanent power of the will, rather than the unstable prop of emotionalism. This is evidenced in her majestic liturgies and dignified but helpful services. (b) In doctrine, discipline and worship the Protestant Episcopal Church is the school of mental, moral and spiritual training, that a people but now coming to the light from the darkness ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... and very comical. At last the eighth plane came and succeeded in reaching the man a line without being winged. The roof batteries shot at the plane in vain—then the roof gunners became filled with good German hate, and one of them aimed, not at the plane, but at the man swinging on the unstable wire line two thousand metres beneath. The shell exploded so near that the man disappeared as by magic, and the plane flew off ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... Linnaeus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods was a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal evolution ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... is my system false, but all philosophy is impossible; since the only ground of certitude—our consciousness—is pronounced unstable, our only means of knowing the truth is ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a good swimmer, and was not afraid of the water, the current was so swift, and her own footing so unstable, it was doubtful if Ruth Fielding could save both the miller and herself from the peril that ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... the traitor doth presage his harm, See how he glories at his own decay, See how he triumphs at his proper loss; O fortune wild, unstable, fickle, frail! ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... not that any one of us can say what these bounds are, for every day of our experience is extending them in both the inner and outer worlds; and we never can be very sure whether the things which rise upon the distant horizon of our nocturnal visions are less unstable and uncertain than those that exist under our noses. True it is, at any rate, that the legend was narrated to me in a meagre form by a lady, sufficiently ancient to be supposed to be a lover of strange stories, and not imaginative or ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... became nearly deranged towards the end of the voyage, and one, who was sea-sick all the way out, seriously thought of suicide, but incapacity for any physical effort whatever happily saved him. In short, Junkie was the innocent cause of many dreadful thoughts and much improper language on the unstable scene of his nativity. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... then, must we seek for the cause of the futility of these efforts? All those who know the savages will understand it; it is in the fickle character of these children of the woods, a character more unstable and volatile than that of infants. God alone knows what restless anxiety the conversions which they succeeded in bringing about caused to the missionaries and the pious Bishop of Petraea. Yet every ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... three things, charity, fasting, and truth, and have been great murderers. But sinful as Sir Lancelot was, since he went into the quest he never slew man, nor shall, till he come into Camelot again. For he has taken upon him to forsake sin. And were he not so unstable, he should be the next to achieve it, after Galahad his son. Yet shall he die an holy man, and in earthly sinful ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... is, that this goodly drummer carried the doom of all enduring relationships in his own lightsome manner and unstable fancy. He went merrily on, assured that he was alluring all, that affection followed tenderly in his wake, that things would endure unchangingly for his pleasure. When he missed some old face, or found some door finally shut to him, it did not grieve him deeply. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... much embarrassed how to break with her handsomely; and it must be confessed, that after what had passed, this was no very easy matter to accomplish.—Make what pretence he would, he could not expect to escape the censure of an unstable fluctuating man.—This is indeed a character, which all men are willing, nay industrious, to avoid, yet what there are few men, but some time or other in their lives, give just reason to incur.—Natura very well knew, that to court ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... Alexander with the consent of Napoleon, there was preparing at this time an event which was soon to assure to the fifth European coalition one of its most useful supports. The King of Sweden, Gustavus IV., unstable, violent, and eccentric enough to warrant doubts as to the soundness of his reason, had been deposed on the 10th of May, 1809, by the assembled States, as the result of a military conspiracy. His uncle, the Duke of Sudermania, elevated to the throne under the title of Charles XIII., ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... highest pitch of felicity? That of teaching him not to trust in his prosperity; of removing that vain confidence he has in his power and greatness, as if they were to endure for ever; of making him understand, that every thing which belongs to and depends upon fortune, is as unstable as herself; and that there is often but the space of a moment between the highest elevation ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... democratic, as in Sparta. Only then would it be sure to last. Polybius accepted the principle of the Mixed Constitution, but found his ideal in the constitution of Rome, which later history was to prove so violently unstable. Cicero, De Republica, takes the same line (Polyb. vi. 2-10; Cic. De Rep. i. 45; ii. 65). Dicaearchus treated of similar political subjects in his public addresses at Olympia and at ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the sheriff of Kent, who killed him in a garden in which he had taken shelter. A reward of 1000 marks followed this deed of bravery. Some of the insurgents were afterwards executed as traitors; but the majority even of the ringleaders escaped unpunished, for Henry's seat upon the throne was so unstable, that it was deemed better to win the people by a manifestation of clemency, rather than to provoke them by an ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... at his glasses with trembling fingers as though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. "I should of course," he said, "tell you things about myself. I know it is rather unusual my speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has been so accidental—or providential—and I am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting a lonely ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... there must have been there a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... no longer cared; and the thought of it did not make her happy. Clearly Love was not, after all, a limitless dominion, without other bounds than those set by the farthest stars, but a narrow, dark, and unstable realm. That these two should dwell in the same town, walk the same street, at the same hour, without any desire to see and speak to each other, was ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... much pleased as I am with the devil, who I believe set many of them agoing. Ye have got an idea that every thing must be changed—Unstable as water, ye shall not excel—I tell ye, there have been more changes in this poor nook of yours within the last forty years, than in the great empires of the East for the space of four thousand, for what ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of the eighteenth century was geographically a large state, but a variety of circumstances contributed to render it weak and unstable. In the first place, it was without natural boundaries or adequate means of defense. To the west it was separated from Prussia and Austria by an artificial line drawn through level plains or over low-lying hills. To the south a fluctuating ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... judging they were sung in respect for my soul by those who were thus famishing my body. They went, however, and I waited long for food—no wonder—the gouty Sacristan was even too busy with his own provender to mind mine. At length down he came, with an unstable step and a strong flavour of wine and spices about his person. Good cheer had opened his heart, for he left me a nook of pasty and a flask of wine, instead of my former fare. I ate, drank, and was invigorated; when, to add to my good luck, the Sacristan, too totty to discharge ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... there were strong reasons why she should not: his own confession of his shortcomings; the unfortunate complication in the Dillingham affair; his subsequent disappearance. It was but natural that she should have been brought to see the folly of pinning her faith to such an unstable proposition as himself. His first agonized protest against her marriage had given place to a stoical acceptance of the fact. He was paying the price many a man has paid for the follies of his youth, and he was ready to pay without a protest, if only she could be ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... feelings, padre, but Catholicism is the only religion. A faith is only justified if it carries conviction. What's the use of a creed or a dogma which is as transient as a philosophy? Being condemned by my profession to study beings whose moral balance is unstable, I am in a position to assert that the Roman Church has a complete understanding of human nature. As a psychologist and a doctor, I admire the uncompromising attitude of the Councils. So much weakness ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... the face of its evident advance upon the Earth. The law of the unconstrained cell is growth on an ever increasing scale; and although we assume the organic configuration, whether somatic or reproductive, to be essentially unstable, so that continual inflow of energy is required merely to keep it in existence, this does not vitiate the fact that, when free of all external constraint, growth gains on waste. Indeed, even in the case of old age, the statement remains essentially true, ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... it was to injure oneself, since it was composed of "every particular man." The sovereign power was unlimited, and was not to be questioned. Whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was the form of government was unimportant, though Hobbes preferred monarchy, because popular assemblies were unstable and apt to need dictators. Civil laws were the standard of right and wrong, and obedience to autocracy was better than the resistance which led to civil war or anarchy—the very things that induced men to establish ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... wrong as the thought of Amadis de Jocelyn came into his head and stayed there. What was he that he should creep into the unspoiled sphere of a woman's opening life? A painter, something of a genius in his line, but erratic and unstable in his character,—known more or less for several "affairs of gallantry" which had slipped off his easy conscience like water off a duck's back,—not a highly cultured man by any means, because ignorant of many of the finer things in art and letters, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... I ever entertain so wild a hope? This wood-nymph, with her robust yet graceful figure, her clear-headedness, her energy and will-power, could she ever have loved a being so weak and unstable as myself? No, indeed; she needs a lover full of life and vigor; a huntsman, with a strong arm, able to protect her. What figure should I cut by the side of so ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bodies. But Barere had no principles at all. His character was equally destitute of natural and of acquired strength. Neither in the commerce of life, nor in books, did we ever become acquainted with any mind so unstable, so utterly destitute of tone, so incapable of independent thought and earnest preference, so ready to take impressions and so ready to lose them. He resembled those creepers which must lean on something, and which, as soon as their prop is removed, fall down in utter helplessness. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me! From the moment when I first recognized him and became so—tangled up—I've just chattered and chattered. You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do you?" ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... a hail of metal at us. It's lucky that aeroplanes are such unstable gun-platforms. When platforms and targets are alike swerving it's hard to hit anything. We're going to rise and dive, and rise and dive and swerve and swerve, John, so be ready. I'll signal to Caumartin to do the same, and maybe the machine gun ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... civilization, as they call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... matrimonial state. The youth gives way to natural appetites and associates himself with women of low repute. He is of wandering habits, works, when he does work, but intermittently, is restless, and totally disinclined towards matrimony. Socially, industrially and morally he is unstable. It is these conditions of his life which so contrast him with that species of criminality which the "Jukes" family presents. And it is these same conditions which support the statement of Fere and Ellis, that he is generally a celibate and non-productive. Concerning the progeny of the female ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... centered round it, been subservient to it, that Charmian could scarcely conceive of life without it. She would be quite alone with Claude. Now they were a menage a trois. She recalled the beginnings of her married life. How fussy, how anxious, how unstable they had been! Now the current flowed strongly, steadily, evenly. The river seemed to have a soul, to know whither ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... full-rounded corn-stacks almost lean against the blind wall, so that the maids will not pass that way unattended—for fear of Wringham Pollixfen, or poor hot-blooded, turbulent Richard, his victim, or perhaps more exactly the victim of his own unstable will. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... better to say about it—any bright scheme to propose that offers to soften the blow?" demanded the other, pausing in his movement toward slipping off his unstable seat. ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... differently from the Reverend Dr. Price and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? For this plain reason—because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the South, to which Grant was prompted both by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,—just or unjust, benignant or cruel,—would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large would not at once abandon its protectorate over its recent ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... committing foolish or rash acts likely to compromise British prestige in Africa. The refugees were for the most boisterous people. They insisted upon being heard, and expected the whole world to agree with their conclusions, however unstable these might be. It was absolutely useless to talk reason to a refugee; he refused to listen to you, but considered that, as he had been—as he would put it—compelled to leave that modern paradise, the Rand, and to settle at Cape Town, it became the responsibility of the inhabitants of Cape ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... unsubstantial as thou art like froth, unstable like a fruit (falling when ripe), dependent on time, and mortal, having entered into an agreement in respect of time, which is infinite and immeasurable, quick like a shaft or flowing like a stream, and carrying everything before it like death itself, how canst regard ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the cabin this morning at an early hour, found we were off the old fort, Point Comfort. Fort Calhoun, a work on which enormous outlay has been made, is not yet completed: the great difficulty appears to be the unstable nature of the bank on which the works are placed: upon the elevation of the terre-plain alone, nearly four thousand cubic yards of sand have been employed; all of which is shipped from the main, and deposited within the fort. It is computed that, by the time this place is fitted ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... could believe and receive the miracles of Scripture heartily, if only they were authenticated by a veracious history; though, if that is not the case with the Pentateuch, any miracles, which rest on such an unstable support, must necessarily fall to the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of Steward, Kwaque, Cocky, and Scraps, and he ran with it as ancient forbears had ran with their own kind in the hunting. The steerage was the lair of this pack, and, out of the steerage, it ranged the whole world, which was the Mary Turner ever rocking, heeling, reeling on the surface of the unstable sea. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... under the action of the sun when exposed to it. Comparatively solid in the morning, it would crack to pieces and slide down the mountain side before night. A sixty-foot cut had already been made into the precipitous mountain side, and the result was an unstable road-bed, hardly four feet in width, which threatened to ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... Mistress Croale had seen Gibbie dart like an imp out of the court—to take him in charge, and, all the weary way home, hover, not very like a guardian angel, but not the less one in truth, around the unstable equilibrium of his father's tall and swaying form. And thereupon commenced a series of marvellous gymnastics on the part of wee Gibbie. Imagine a small boy with a gigantic top, which, six times his own size, he keeps erect on its peg, not by whipping it round, but by running round it himself, unfailingly ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be a higher good ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Water is proverbially "unstable," but what occurred to Major Mitchell's party on the Yarrayne, may serve for a specimen of the peculiar uncertainty of the waters of Australia. In the evening a bridge across that stream had been completed, and everything was prepared for ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... at once to Clement's earnest request that the road of penitence might be smoothed at first to this unstable wanderer, and after some opposition, she entered heartily into his views as to her actual reception. To give time for their little preparations Clement went slowly back, and seating himself by Mary soothed ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a whole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individual worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no one is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and improves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at the inception of the human Charter, take the place of the obviousness ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... successors of what fatal consequence any sort of assuming may be. However, it is my advice that while we are sober we pitch upon a man of courage and skilled in navigation, one who by his council and bravery seems best able to defend this commonwealth, and ward us from the dangers and tempests of an unstable element, and the fatal consequences of anarchy; and such a one I take Roberts to be—a fellow, I think, in all respects worthy ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... or four camp-stools set in a row. Anything was better than lying on the damp ground in such a storm; but Schenck long remembered the aching weariness of that night, as he balanced upon the narrow and unstable supports which threatened to tumble him upon the ground at the least effort to change the position of stiffened body and limbs. One could not desire better companionship than we had during our waking ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... prompted Anthony, it seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him. It was too late—everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water. The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some profound and uncharted pride she had made ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... after committing this act he surrendered himself to the police. He also showed striking evidences of a psychopathic personality with a strong suggestion of epilepsy, but with intact intelligence. He was given to periods of depression and was unstable mentally. He was easily suggestible and his general conduct was not only controlled by environmental influences, but also by his mood. Suicidal ideas and jealousy played a very important role in his mental ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the world of Harvey. For our miracles of human progress are not always done with prunes and prisms. The truth does not come to men always, nor even, generally, as they are gazing in joyful admiration at the good and the beautiful. Sudden conversions of men to good causes are rare, and often unstable and sometimes worthless. The good Lord would find much of the best work of the world undone if he waited until men guided by purely altruistic motives and inspired by new impulses to righteousness, did it. The world's work is done by ladies and gentlemen ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... architecture, until the pile reached an altitude that is little known, except in the dwellings of princes. Colonnades, medallions, and massive cornices overhung the canal, as if the art of man had taken pride in loading the superstructure in a manner to mock the unstable element which concealed its base. A flight of steps, on which each gentle undulation produced by the passage of the barge washed a wave, conducted to a vast vestibule, that answered many of the purposes of a court. Two or three gondolas were ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... is an accidental cause and a casual consequence in things which proceed from the election and counsel of men. Aristotle, that it is an accidental cause in those things done by an impulse for a certain end; and this cause is uncertain and unstable: there is a great deal of difference betwixt that which flows from chance and that which falls out by Fortune; for that which is fortuitous allows also chance, and belongs to things practical; but what is by chance cannot be also by Fortune, for it belongs to things without action: Fortune, moreover, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... born at Alessandria; was leader of the extreme party in the Sardinian Chamber in 1849, and was several times minister, but was unstable in his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... stood in unstable equilibrium, anon stooping to his finger-tips, then straining doubtfully forward with struggling arms from a too backward poise: for not only did the trousers lie a twisted emptiness far below his feet, but the feet themselves were lost in Young's boots, so he stood like Scaramouch, a mere sack, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel |
