"Fragility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; rather that ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... face of the whole earth; and, in pursuit of this their resolution, promised, confirmed, swore, and covenanted amongst them all, by the pure faith they owe to the nocturnal Sanct Rogero. But O the vain enterprises of women! O the great fragility of that sex feminine! They did begin to flay the man, or peel him (as says Catullus), at that member which of all the body they loved best, to wit, the nervous and cavernous cane, and that above five thousand years ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... seeing my invention duly catalogued and placed, I gave myself up to pondering the scene about me. As I dwelt upon that shining pageant of arts, and moving concourse of nations, and reflected that here was the pride of the world glorying in a glass house, a sense of the fragility of worldly grandeur profoundly impressed me. And I said to myself, I will see if this occasion of vanity cannot supply a hint toward a better profit than was designed. Let some world-wide good to the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... in small quantities from the specially-selected edges of the petiole, and this material is used by the natives for weaving. The quantity procurable is limited, and the difficulty in obtaining it consists in the frequent breakage of the fibre whilst being drawn, due to its comparative fragility. Its commercial value is about double that of ordinary first-class cordage hemp. The stuff made from this fine fibre (in Bicol dialect, Lupis) suits admirably for ladies' dresses. Ordinary hemp fibre is used for the manufacture of coarse native stuff, known in Manila as Sinamay, much worn by ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... limbs are constantly breaking off in high winds, just as happens with our native elms. Ours is not a very long-lived tree; between two and three hundred years is, I think, the longest life that can be hoped for it. Since I have heard of the fragility of the English elm, which is the fatal fault of our own, I have questioned whether it can claim a greater longevity than ours. There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
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