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More "Fickle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spirit upon the smaller profits to be derived from petty transactions in the bill-discounting line, and a championship of penniless sufferers of all classes, from a damsel who considered herself jilted by a fickle swain, in proof of whose inconstancy she could produce documentary evidence of the "pork-chop and tomato sauce" order, to a pedestrian who knocked his head against a projecting shutter in the Strand, and straightway walked home ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Trade's fickle signets coined From Mammon's molten dust, With reverence conjoined, Proclaim "In God we trust." Nor doth the legend lie: The People, patient, bide, Trusting the Lord on high, To thunder ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... soon the VAPOUR OF THE WOODS will wander afar, And the fickle moon will fade, and the stars disappear, Then, cheerless will they be, tho' they fairies are, If I, with my ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... her—for she sleeps well:[535] The fickle reek of popular breath,[536] the tongue Of hollow counsel, the false oracle, Which from the birth of Monarchy hath rung Its knell in princely ears, till the o'erstung Nations have armed in madness—the strange fate Which tumbles mightiest sovereigns,[537] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... never shall be mine To mourn the loss of such a heart; The fault was Nature's fault, not thine, Which made thee fickle as thou art. ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... peculiar change Which creeps into the air, and speaks of night While yet the day is full of golden light, We felt steal o'er us. Vivian broke the spell Of dream-fraught silence, throwing down his book: "Young ladies, please allow me to arrange These wraps about your shoulders. I know well The fickle nature of our atmosphere, - Her smile swift followed by a frown or tear, - And go prepared for changes. Now you look, Like—like—oh, where's a pretty simile? Had you a pocket mirror here you'd see How well my native talent is displayed In shawling ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... we work and toil and hustle in our life of haste and bustle, All that makes our life worth living comes unstriven for and free; Man may weary and importune, but the fickle goddess Fortune Deals him out his pain or pleasure, careless what his worth ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... white gate, respected (as a white gate always is) from its strong declaration of purpose. Outside of it, things may belong to the Crown, the Admiralty, Manor, or Trinity Brethren, or perhaps the sea itself—according to the latest ebb or flow of the fickle tide of Law Courts—but inside that gate everything belongs to the fine ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... excellent and able person. That the King, who not long ago did say of Bristoll, that he was a man able in three years to get himself a fortune in any kingdom in the world, and lose all again in three months, do now hug him, and commend his parts every where, above all the world. How fickle is this man [the King], and how unhappy we like to be! That he fears some furious courses will be taken against the Duke of York; and that he hath heard that it was designed, if they cannot carry matters against the Chancellor, to impeach ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... know about that," rejoined his angry rival. "If he wanted to steal back my bride he could take no surer course for doing it. Juliet, who is fickle as the wind, already looks from his face to mine as if she were contrasting us. And he is so damned handsome and suave ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... right hand to catch a view of a small but celebrated hill rising within the city near that on which he stood, called the Pnyx, where standing on a block of bare stone, Demosthenes and other distinguished orators had addressed the assembled people of Athens, swaying that arrogant and fickle democracy, and thereby making Philip of Macedon tremble, or working good or ill for the entire civilized world. Immediately before him looking upon the crowded city, studded in every part with memorials sacred to religion or patriotism, and exhibiting the ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... impatiently aside, "and what's more I knew then that I had loved you all my life without knowing it," he pursued. "You may taunt me with fickleness, but I'm not fickle—I was merely a fool. It took me a long time to find out what I wanted, but I've found out at last, and, so help me God, I'll have it yet. I never went without a thing I wanted ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... poor but they may build fairy castles in the air; none so wretched but they may fondly gaze upon the fickle star of Hope, flaming ever in that Heaven ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... gentleman but his worde and his promise? I must nowe saue this vilaines lyfe in any wise, And yet at hym already my handes doe tickle, I shall vneth holde them, they wyll be so fickle. But lo and Merygreeke haue not ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... he exclaimed; "Heaven protect me from fastening such a yoke upon myself, or putting my happiness in the power of any creature so fickle, vain, capricious, haughty, obstinate, and heartless as a woman. Conrad, where did you get this wild idea? you know that I hate women; no, not hate, but fear them, as the lamb ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... appointed for it. Moreover, each work or duty should be accomplished in its appointed time; and this can be secured only by a strong will. The power of will admits of education, culture, improvement, as much as any faculty of the mind or quality of character. A fickle, planless life cannot accomplish much. System in our plans, and firmness of will in their execution, will place us beyond the reach of ordinary disasters; yet how often do young men go through a course of school studies without a plan, even for the moment, and enter ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... often made by railroad managers that excesses in railroad competition are the result of the peculiar conditions of their business, which has heavy fixed charges on one hand and a fickle patronage on the other; that the uncertainty of through business compels them to rely upon the local business for such revenue as is necessary to meet these fixed charges; and that, inasmuch as their trains must run, and any through freight hauled by them is so much business taken from ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... while a subdued hissing sound. The significance of this conduct I do not profess to have understood; it ended with his suddenly darting at the female, who took wing and was pursued. Not improbably the robin finds the feminine nature somewhat fickle, and counts it expedient to vary his tactics accordingly; for it is getting to be more and more believed that, in kind at least, the intelligence of the lower animals is not ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... said so sadly when he was a prisoner in Germany: "In France one must never be unfortunate." What was then left for her to do in that volcano, that land which swallows all greatness and glory, amid that fickle people who change their opinions and passions as an actress changes her dress? Where Napoleon, with all his genius, had made a complete failure, could a young, ignorant woman be reasonably expected to succeed in the face of all Europe? Were her hands strong ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... seems to me, ought to account for, and will possibly satisfy, the spectroscopic conditions observed just before, during, and after totality; which has probably led to the epithet used by some leading observers—"the fickle corona." The peculiar phenomenon observed in the spectroscope, the flickering bands or lines of the solar spectrum flashing upon and across the coronal spectrum, has caused ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... for a time to bear The badge which none but fickle lives should wear. How oft the envious tongue creates the dart That cleaves the saintly soul and breaks the heart: How oft the hasty ear full credence gives To words in which no grain of truth survives: Were Juno just, her heart would now delight ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... le coeur a rire, Thy heart was made for laughter, Moi je l'ai-t a pleurer; My heart 's in tears to-day; J'ai perdu ma maitresse Tears for a fickle mistress, Sans pouvoir la trouver. Flown from its ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... for the nearer you approach to nature the greater in all cases is your chance of success. And here, in concluding this chapter on Fly Fishing, let me advise every angler to make or learn to make his own flies; by so doing he will never be at a loss for a fly to suit the fickle Trout. Really, many of the flies from the tackle shops look neat and gaudy enough, but like Hodge's razors, are they not made to sell? When a man makes a fly for himself, he makes, I take ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... musingly—"public favor, it is light as zephyr, as fickle as the seasons, it passes away like the latter, and when the north wind moves it, it will disappear." [Footnote: Le ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... Time-Spirit is active, or fickle perhaps, and Mr. Yeats has already almost ceased to be a quite modern poet. He, like Mr. Gosse, formed his technique in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century is casting about with feverish energy for a new technique ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... the fire was becoming fickle. Once in a while the flame would start up, and give quite some little illumination. Then dying down lower than ever, it allowed a condition of half darkness ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... consciously and definitely set to the task of making more marriages successful even when they have developed difficulty of adjustment, rather than one allowed to act as a means of easy separation of even fickle, selfish, and childish people ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... told, is a blind and fickle foster-mother, who showers her gifts at random upon her nurslings. But we do her a grave injustice if we believe such an accusation. Trace a man's career from his cradle to his grave and mark how Fortune has treated him. You will find that when he ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "Fickle as the wind," murmured Sabina, threatening him with her finger. "Show me the stone—it is one of the largest and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... flashing and classic brown fingers never still, while he expounded to me his strange, half pagan, half Christian fatalism. He was of the South, "well toward the Boot Heel, signore," but Love, the master mariner, had driven him out of his course and brought him within fifty miles of Rome to court a fickle beauty of the hills, whose brother had come down for the wood-cutting and was friendly to ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... "Brothers, the English are not fickle. They do not withdraw their friendship without cause. As long as the red men are faithful to their promises they will find the English their steadfast friends. But if the Indians are false or do any injury to the English, the ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... Here by the way, good reader, thou hast one example worthie to be marked of fickle fortunes inconstancie, whereof the poet speaketh verie excellentlie; [Sidenote: M. Pal. in suo scor.] —— variat semper fortuna tenorem, Diuerso gaudens mortalia voluere casu, Nam qui scire velit, cur hunc fortuna vel illum ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (4 of 12) - Stephan Earle Of Bullongne • Raphael Holinshed
... us hasten: for this generosity in the heathen is unwonted; and fickle-mindedness has ever been an attribute of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with one hand upon the door-post, and with the other he sought to brush this monstrous illusion from his fickle eyes. But Mauburn and the details of his deadly British breakfast became only more distinct. The appalled observer groaned and rushed for the sideboard, whence a decanter, a bowl of cracked ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... diamond set in flint! hard heart in haughty breast! By a softer, warmer bosom the tiger's couch is prest. Thou art fickle as the sea, thou art wandering as the wind, And the restless ever-mounting flame is not more hard to bind. If the tears I shed were tongues, yet all too few would be To tell of all the treachery that thou hast shown to me. Oh! I could chide thee sharply—but every maiden knows ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... me!" the Deep Voice cried, "So long enjoyed, so oft misused Alternate, in thy fickle pride, Desired, neglected, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... their own King with the means of curbing France, lest those means should be used to destroy the liberties of England. The conflict between these apprehensions, both of which were perfectly legitimate, made the policy of the Opposition seem as eccentric and fickle as that of the Court. The Commons called for a war with France, till the King, pressed by Danby to comply with their wish, seemed disposed to yield, and began to raise an army. But, as soon as they saw that the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... enough, I gave order to the masters of the ships to cast anchor a good way off the land, that the people of Tiberias might not perceive that the ships had no men on board; but I went nearer to the people in one of the ships, and rebuked them for their folly, and that they were so fickle as, without any just occasion in the world, to revolt from their fidelity to me. However, assured them that I would entirely forgive them for the time to come, if they would send ten of the ringleaders of the multitude to me; and when they ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... rough and cheerless! what though Spring Nor kiss thy brow nor cool it with a flower, Yet will I hail thee, hail thy flinty couch, Where Valour and where Virtue have reposed." The nymph said, sweetly smiling, "Fickle man Would not be happy could he not regret! And I confess how, looking back, a thought Has touched and tuned or rather thrilled my heart, Too soft for sorrow and too strong for joy: Fond foolish maid, 'twas ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... ever awake and her tender heart filled with remorse for the sorrow she had caused the Queen. The brief years of enchantment were soon over, to be followed by disillusionment, when it was revealed to Louise that the fickle heart of Louis had succumbed to other charms; the final flight from court and the long years of repentance at ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... you are superior to the fickle public. In fact, you are now a part of the capricious public, my dear," he added in a jocular tone, "and may applaud the 'heavy father,' myself, or prattle about prevailing styles while the buskined tragedian is strutting below your box. Why turn to a blind bargain? Fame ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... close the imperfect story of my somewhat romantic life. I have experienced many ups and downs, but still am stout of heart. The labor of a lifetime has brought me nothing in a pecuniary way. I have worked hard, but fortune, fickle dame, has not smiled upon me. If poverty did not weigh me down as it does, I would not now be toiling by day with my needle, and writing by night, in the plain little room on the fourth floor of ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... Peter went one day to see her, prepared to make any amends in his power for his brother's sin. And beside the sofa where the girl lay he met Joan Whitby. And such are the vagaries of human nature, with its beginning on that day, the gay, light heart, the fickle fancies, light loves, wild escapades of the devil-may-care young sportsman, all vanished away into thin air before a love that filled his whole being. Lovelier, gayer, cleverer women, ready enough to meet ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... holdest as true) concerning pleasure and pain. But perhaps what men call Fame allures thee? Behold how quickly all things are forgotten! Before us, after us, the formless Void of endless ages! How vain is human praise! How fickle and undiscriminating those who seem to praise! How limited the sphere of the greatest fame! For the whole earth is but a point in space, thy dwelling-place a tiny nook therein. How few are those who dwell therein, and what manner of men are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... that flow into the Missouri and Mississippi from the westward are notoriously fickle and changeable. Within a very few years, some of them have changed their course so that farms are divided into two parts, or are nearly wiped out by the wandering streams. In at least one instance, artful men have tried to steal part of a State by changing the boundary line along the bed ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... attempted to show how the intelligence of fashionable people, even the brightest of them, is without value, foundation, or weight; how slight is the basis of their beliefs, how feeble and indifferent is their interest in intellectual things, how fickle ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... merriment, Of thy sparkling, light content, Give me, my cheerful brook, That I may still be full of glee And gladsomeness, where'er I be, Though fickle fate hath prisoned me In some ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... despise them utterly; but the troops and the mobiles are sufficient to man the forts and the walls, and I believe that middle-class corps, like the one I have entered, will fight manfully; and the history of Paris has shown over and over again that the mob of Paris, fickle, vain-headed, noisy braggadocios as they are, and always have been, can at least starve well. They held out against Henry of Navarre till numbers dropped dead in the streets, and until the Spaniards came ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... subject of our conversation, and seem to be come in good time to receive the honors allotted you. I was interceding with the marchioness for her interest in your favor, with the lady Julia; but she absolutely refuses it; and though she allows you merit, alleges, that you are by nature fickle and inconstant. What say you—would not the beauty of lady Julia ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... effort (1832), the Government, still persisting in its plans, engaged the services of Ephraim Moses Pinner of Posen, who published specimens of his intended translation in his Compendium (Berlin, 1831). But the fickle or restless emperor seems to have tired of the plan, or perhaps he found Pinner too Jewish for his purposes. Of the twenty-eight volumes planned, only one, which was dedicated to Nicholas, appeared during the decade following Chiarini's death, and the ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... Toros, Senor," he went on, speaking rapidly and tensely, "the throngs cry, 'Bravo, matador!' and toss coins into the ring. Yet in a moment the same throngs may shout until their throats are hoarse: 'Bravo, toro!' A King is like a bull in the ring, Senor—he has a fickle fate. To me he is nothing—if it pleases them—it is their King—let them do as they wish." He ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... approve. The one, because I always think it dangerous unless it be absolutely necessary, the other, because I think it wholly unsuited to the emergency. For an extraordinary commission is a measure suited rather to the fickle character of the mob, one which does not at all become our dignity or this assembly. In the war against Antiochus, a great and important war, when Asia had fallen by lot to Lucius Scipio as his province, and when he was thought to have hardly spirit and hardly vigour enough for it, and ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... he felt repaid for all he had suffered in voluntarily severing himself from Gina Montani; and from that time he forgot her, or something very like it. And for this he could not be condemned, for it was in the line of honor and of duty. Yet it was another proof, if one were wanting, of the fickle nature of man's love. It has been well compared to words written on the sands. Many weeks elapsed ere the Lady Adelaide was convalescent; and some more before she ventured to join in the gayeties and festal meetings of the land. A two days' fete, given at the Capella Palace, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... parish minister, one of whose daughters his friend subsequently married. He himself became attached to an ex-pupil of Irving's, a Miss Margaret Gordon, with some of whose graces he afterward endowed the dark and fickle Blumine, of "Sartor Resartus." She reciprocated Carlyle's affection, but the aunt with whom she lived put a stop to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small lusts which the Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and blood characteristics. So also Ariosto's ladies: the charming, bright women, coquettish or Amazonian, are frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible to a court lady, who should be neither prudish nor coquettish; doing unchaste things and listening to unchaste words simply, gracefully, without prurience or horror; perfectly well-bred, gentili, as Ariosto calls them; prudent ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... their ally, and not as their foe, and that if they would join with him they should be citizens of the American republic, and treated in all respects on an equality with their comrades. The Creoles, caring little for the British, and rather fickle of nature, accepted the proposition with joy, and with the most enthusiastic loyalty toward Clark. Not only that, but sending messengers to their kinsmen on the Wabash, they persuaded the people of Vincennes likewise to cast off their allegiance to the British ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... It was nine o'clock on the next day, 22nd October, and we were on deck waiting for the arrival of the steamer from Norddeich. There was no change in the weather—still the same stringent cold, with a high barometer, and only fickle flaws of air; but the morning was gloriously clear, except for a wreath or two of mist curling like smoke from the sea, and an attenuated belt of opaque fog on the northern horizon. The harbour lay open before us, and very commodious and civilized it looked, enclosed between two long piers ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... came, and the fickle climate proceeded to show what it could do. When the thaw had been going on for a day and a night a terrific winter hurricane broke over the forest. Trees were shattered as if their trunks had been shot through by huge cannon balls. Here ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ask our country for the largest possible armies that can be raised, as so important a thing as the self-existence of a great nation should not be left to the fickle chances ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... fickle and false; he might have seen some other fairer face, which might have enchained his fancy, and woven for him a new heart's chain; death might have stepped between him and the realization of his fondest hopes; loss of fortune might have made ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... breast. He footed it on dusty roads, or sped magnificently in freight cars, counting time as of no account. And when he had found the heart of a city and listened to its secret confession, he strayed on, restless, to another. Fickle Raggles!—but perhaps he had not met the civic corporation that could engage and hold his ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... again lost her liberties; so the exiled family returned to position and power; so the fickle Florentines, who, in a fury of patriotism, had sacked the palace of Lorenzo, now shouted themselves hoarse for "Palle and ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... through the woods, tearing the pretty clothing of the trees to pieces and rudely hurling the dust of the street in one's face. The sun got behind the clouds and in grief and dismay hid his face while this dismal looting went on unrebuked and unrestrained. But Nature is fickle, possibly because she is feminine. At all events, she can change both mind and conduct, and in short order. So ere long she came out of her November rage and sat down in still, mellow sunshine, and gathering her children about her, whispered beautiful stories ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... The fickle goddess was late; she kept us waiting till after ten o'clock. Just before her arrival, when the horizon began to grow perceptibly brighter, and the opposite shore to assume a milky, silvery tint, a sudden wind rose. The waves, that had gone quietly to sleep at the feet of gigantic reeds, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... he! Can I mistake the clustered curls Upon his hated hyacinthine head? Have they not wiled from me the fickle heart Of perjured BANDOLINA! There, he stands Before my window, where a winsome form, Rotating slow with measured self-display, Has caught his errant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... delivered from their debt of gratitude; and the nominal gifts of the Carlovingians were no more than the just and irrevocable restitution of a scanty portion of the ecclesiastical state. The sovereignty of Rome no longer depended on the choice of a fickle people; and the successors of St. Peter and Constantine were invested with the purple and prerogatives of the Caesars. So deep was the ignorance and credulity of the times, that the most absurd of fables was received, with equal reverence, in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... inconstancy. The one deceives, the other teaches; the one enchains the minds of those who enjoy her favour by the semblance of delusive good, the other delivers them by the knowledge of the frail nature of happiness. Accordingly, thou mayst see the one fickle, shifting as the breeze, and ever self-deceived; the other sober-minded, alert, and wary, by reason of the very discipline of adversity. Finally, Good Fortune, by her allurements, draws men far ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... within my eyes,—but a hatred which never returned, to curse my memory, from that day unto this. I may have found much to test my patience, much to dislike about him in those weary weeks which followed, much of weakness and of fickle spirit, but naught ever gave birth anew to the deep resentment ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... mean it!' said the repentant captain, hastening after. 'I do love her best—indeed I do—and I don't love you at all! I am not so fickle as that! I merely just for the moment admired you as a sweet little craft, and that's how I came to do it. You know, Miss Garland,' he continued earnestly, and still running after, ''tis like this: ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... did not wish him to marry me. He told me so. 'A fickle foreigner,' you said. And you were right, but it was not pleasant to me. I hated you then, though I had never spoken to you nor seen you; not because I wanted him, but because you interfered. He said once to me that you had told the truth in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... windmills are also used for pumping, but the wind is a fickle thing to depend on, and his utter dependence on the water supply makes the Egyptian agriculturist unwilling to run such risks. Steam-engines, both stationary and portable, are observed at frequent intervals. Both the engines and the coal for fuel ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... young man did well docilely to obey her whispered directions. In a month, there were a thousand young men about town, far above the station of a Gregoriev, who would have given half their prospects for Ivan's present position. But the fickle goddess loves well to show her face to him who has never sought to lift her veil; and to Ivan, whom she had hitherto served so ill, she chose suddenly to shower with all the things that youth desires. The young man found that, many and varied as had been ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Margray, looking after her with a perplexed gaze, and dropping her scissors. "Surely, Mary, you shouldn't tease her as you do. She's worn more in these four weeks than in as many years. You're a fickle changeling!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... from waking up Ginger just at that moment. A fickle breath of wind pounced upon an outspread newspaper lying on the grass, fluttered it for a moment, and then, getting fairly under the printed sheet, heaved it into ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... is essentially fickle; and Gordon's lambent spirit, which had for some time almost ceased to strive for anything, suddenly swept round to the other extreme, and was filled with the desire to reassert itself at all costs. Suddenly, almost without realising it, Gordon was fired with the wish to finish his school career ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... specksioneer, absence was equivalent to faithless forgetfulness. He thought that he had just grounds for this decision in the account he had heard of Kinraid's behaviour to Annie Coulson; to the other nameless young girl, her successor in his fickle heart; in the ribald talk of the sailors in the Newcastle public-house. It would be well for Sylvia if she could forget as quickly; and, to promote this oblivion, the name of her lover should never be brought up, either in praise or blame. And Philip would be ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... that champion's glorious career!" cried the Secretary. "Let the hydra alone. Like the antique god of mythology, it eats up its own children as soon as they get large enough to be eaten. It is a fickle beast, and the idol of to-day it ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... seen of the Kaiser that he has gone to the trenches. Probably he is dead. Let us forgive the barber. But let us bear in mind that the futile fancies of youth may be deadly things, and that one of them falling on a fickle mind may so stir its shallows as to urge it to disturb and set in motion the avalanches ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... elegant trifling which shows itself everywhere as a national characteristic, does not prepare one to believe that some of the greatest of mathematicians, philosophers, and scientific men are Frenchmen and Parisians; but such is the fact. The French are fickle, love pleasure, and one would think that these qualities would unfit men for coolness, perseverance, and prolonged research; and I am sometimes inclined to think that the proficiency of the French in philosophy, the arts, and sciences, is not so much the ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... Adagio!" With a sibilant cry she fell into his out-stretched arms. "Mio, mio," she echoed in ecstasy, "I am yours and you are mine!" So lightly was the first stepping-stone passed on her reckless path of immorality and vice. Her fickle heart soon tired of the debonair Vibrato, and in a fit of satiated pique she had his ears cut off and his tongue removed and tied to his big toe. Thus was her ever-increasing lust for bloodshed apparent even at that early ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... accountable for the act he had so thoughtlessly committed that day, and a burden of responsibility settled upon his weight of sorrow that made him groan aloud. For a moment his soul cried out against it in rebellion. Why could he not have loved this sweet self-sacrificing girl instead of her fickle sister? Why? Why? She might perhaps have loved him in return, but now nothing could ever be! Earth was filled with a black sorrow, and life henceforth meant renunciation and one long struggle to hide his trouble ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... was a fitting opportunity for an ambitious and courageous woman who, though she might not find full measure of happiness and love which only comes with respect, yet would meet with adventure, would dare fate and hazard chance with fickle fortune. The prospect to her mind was more pleasing than to be the wife of a gentleman farmer and grow fat and matronly—the other chance ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... now, then. Put your hair round your mamma's neck, and give me one good long kiss, and I won't talk any more in that way about your lover. After all, some young men are not so fickle as others; but even if he's the ficklest, there is consolation. The love of an inconstant man is ten times more ardent than that of a faithful man—that is, while ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... P'an was, by nature, gifted with a fickle disposition; to-day, he would incline to the east, and to-morrow to the west, so that having recently obtained new friends, he put Hsiang Lin and Y Ai aside. Chin Jung too was at one time an intimate friend of his, but ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... him as tenant under the crown. It seems, however, as if Essex had his eye still upon the property.' Under such circumstances, it was easy to assume that O'Neill was still playing false. So he resolved that he should not be able to do so any longer. 'He determined to make sure work with so fickle a people.' He returned to Clandeboye, as if on a friendly visit. Sir Brian and Lady O'Neill received him with all hospitality. The Irish Annalists say that they gave him a banquet. They not only let him off safe, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... of confidantes," said Richard, "I want my cousin Ada to understand that I am not captious, fickle, and wilful about John Jarndyce, but that I have this purpose and reason at my back. I wish to represent myself to her through you, because she has a great esteem and respect for her cousin John; and I know ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... pondered reverently, The fickle folk began to move away. "It is but one star less for us to see; And what does one star signify?" quoth they: "The heavens are full of them." "But, ah!" said he, "That star was bright while yet she lasted." "Ay!" They answered: "Praise her, Poet, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... however, did not last, for, as the settlers became more firmly fixed in the land, the Indians, fickle and changeable, grew jealous and resented their intrusion, and refused to sell corn, hoping by this ...
— The Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith • E. Boyd Smith
... poor Henry was to blame for not accepting your generous offer; but that does not excuse this heartless, fickle girl." ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... Mr. Yankee Adventurer. Again we are not mistaken, for we find that what few critics are present when the curtain is rung up, leave the house when the first act ends with the death of the aforesaid adventurer. How the fickle dame flirts with all the neighboring young men, and at last, at the end of the second act, has her attention led by Captain Location to the hero of the piece as a suitable mate for her wayward daughter, Miss Prosperity,—all this is usually written up from hearsay. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... will discipline her imagination till she shall conceit the Neapolitan a Moor and an infidel. Just San Teodoro, forgive me! But thou canst remember the time, my friends, when the penance of the church was not without service on thine own fickle tastes ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of the male students were animated by a wild and reckless spirit, the result of a fickle roving from town to town. The pretext for this course was the necessity of hunting up skilful teachers; but with many it was only love for a career of frolic and idleness. The oldest and strongest scholars, young men of ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... onslaught in the columns of the leading newspaper. It was positively the worst blast from the black trumpet of the wind-god AEolus then possible for any inhabitant of England; and not even that poor company of suitors to whom, in Chaucer's poem, fickle Queen Fame awarded this black blast from the wind-god, instead of the blast of praise from his golden trumpet which they were expecting, can have been more discomfited than most persons would have been had they been in Milton's place a day or two after Palmer's sermon. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the blue violet, which, though it had been taught to bloom far away from the mossy bed where it had first opened its meek eye to the light, had not yet forgotten its gentleness and modesty; and not far from them were the fickle hydrangea, the cardinal flower with its rich, showy petals, and the proud, vain, and ostentatious, but beautiful crimson and white peonias. The dahlias had yet put forth but very few blossoms, but they were elegant, and the swelling buds promised that ere long there ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... "Women are fickle. See that pretty woman by the window? She was smiling at me flirtatiously a few minutes ago and now she looks ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... The fickle Muse! As ladies will, She sometimes wearies of her wooer; A goddess, yet a woman still, She flies the more that we pursue her; In short, with worst as well as best, Five months in six, your hapless poet Is just as prosy as the rest, But cannot ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... antagonist in cavalry, at least equal in infantry, had simply to remain in its existing position, in order to compel the enemy either to attempt in the winter season the passage of the river and an attack upon the camp, or to suspend his advance and to test the fickle temper of the Gauls by the burden of winter quarters. Clear, however, as this was, it was no less clear that it was now December, and that under the course proposed the victory might perhaps be gained by Rome, but would not be gained by the consul Tiberius Sempronius, who held the sole command ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 1825, shows the excited state of the poet at this period. 'I fear,' wrote Clare, 'I shall get nothing ready for you this month; at least I fear so now, but may have fifty subjects ready tomorrow. The muse is a fickle hussy with me; she sometimes stirs me up to madness, and then leaves me as a beggar by the wayside, with no more life than what's mortal, and that nearly extinguished by melancholy forebodings.' Further on he breaks out into the exclamation: ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... garment of rebellion With some fine colour, that may please the eye Of fickle changelings, and poor discontents, Which gape and rub the elbow at the news Of hurlyburly innovation.—HENRY THE ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... who, like Downing, had been proud of the honour of lacqueying his coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and addresses. Venal poets might transfer to the king the same eulogies little the worse for wear, which they had bestowed on the Protector. A fickle multitude might crowd to shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of the greatest Prince and Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch cannon startled an effeminate tyrant in his own palace, when the conquests which had been won by the armies of Cromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of Charles, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... devotes to this subject, she says, "The friendships of women are much more common than those of men; but rarely or never so firm, so just, or so enduring." But then she proceeds, justly, though with a little inconsistency, to say, "With women these relations may be sentimental, foolish, and fickle; but they are honest, free from secondary motives of interest, and infinitely more respectable than the time-serving, place-hunting, dinner-seeking devotion which Messrs. Tape and Tadpole choose to denominate friendship." That the sharper and sincerer ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... York earlier than usual, worked steadily at my profession and with increasing success, and began to accept opportunities (which I had previously declined) of making myself personally known to the great, impressible, fickle, tyrannical public. One or two of my speeches in the hall of the Cooper Institute, on various occasions—as you may perhaps remember—gave me a good headway with the party, and were the chief cause of my nomination for the State office which I still hold. (There, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... she murmured aloud as she went down, with Jock frisking and barking before her. "What will he think of me when he gets my letter? He will believe me fickle; he will believe that I have another lover. That is certain. Well, I must allow him to believe it. We have parted, and we must now, alas! remain apart for ever. Probably he will seek from my father the truth concerning my disappearance from Glencardine. Dad ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... remarkable feats, of which his flight above the Atlantic, his race with the torpedo-boat-destroyers across the North Sea, and his sensational display during the military man[oe]uvres on Salisbury Plain, impressed his name and personality firmly upon the fickle mind of the public, and explains the tremendous excitement caused by his inexplicable disappearance during the great aviation meeting at Attercliffe, near London, towards the end of ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... poverty of its leader, throned on a borrowed colt, and attended, not by warriors or dignitaries, but by poor men unarmed, and saluted, not with the blare of trumpets, but with the shouts of joyful, though, alas! fickle hearts. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... humour's giddy range Mislead the brutal mind? Can elephants their friendship change, As fickle as mankind? ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... wisdom, born to rule a mighty State, Fair Draupadi, ever faithful, wins the smiles of fickle Fate! ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... Ceylon pearl-fishery; compared with it, any state lottery pales to insignificance. From the taking of the first oyster to the draining of the last vatful of "matter," every step is attended by fickle fortune; and never is the interest of the people of Portugal or of Mexico keener over a drawing of a lottery, the tickets of which may have been sold at the very thresholds of the cathedrals, than is that of the natives of Ceylon ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... shortening words was very popular in the 17th century, from which period date cit(izen), mob(ile vulgus), the fickle crowd, and, pun(digrion). We often find the fuller mobile used for mob. The origin of pundigrion is uncertain. It may be an illiterate attempt at Ital. puntiglio, which, like Fr. pointe, was used of a verbal quibble or fine distinction. Most ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... no one would do the honor of shoveling him under. The Duke of Wellington refused to have his iron fence mended, because it had been broken by an infuriated populace in some hour of political excitement, and he left it in ruins that men might learn what a fickle thing is human favor. "But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting to them that fear Him, and His righteousness unto the children's children of such as keep His covenant, and to those who remember His commandments to do them." This ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... was fickle in his passions is shown by an anecdote of George Sand's. According to her, he was in love with a young Parisienne, who received him very kindly. All went well until one day he visited her with another musician, who was at that time better known than Chopin in Paris. Because the ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... kinsman his character assumes a most revolting aspect. Envious, revengeful, subtle, he was as fickle and petulant as he was suspicious and cruel. His brother, even the offspring of his brother, became to him objects of jealousy, if not of hatred. Their friends must, he thought, be his enemies, and applause bestowed upon them was odious to his soul. There were many horrid tragedies in ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Mobilis alis hora, nec ulli Praestat velox Fortuna fidem. SENECA. Hippol. 1141. On fickle wings the minutes haste, And fortune's ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... vain, unsteadfast state of mortal things! Who trust this world, leans to a brittle stay: Such fickle fruit his flattering bloom forth brings, Ere it be ripe, it falleth to decay." The joy and bliss that late I did possess, In weal at will, with one I loved best, Is turned now into so deep distress, As teacheth me to know the world's unrest.[42] For neither wit nor princely stomachs serve Against ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... unquestionably be freed, and the only question for us is how to soften the blow. There is no doubt that our slaves, both at the Orangery and at the other plantations, are contented and happy; but you know how fickle and easily led the negroes are, and in the excitement of finding them selves free and able to go where they please, you may be sure that the greater number will wander away. My proposal is, that we should at once mark out a plot of land for each family and tell them that as ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... And him, the rising Sun, adore and love. When Doeg, who with Egypt did combine, And to enslave Judea did designe, Accus'd of Treason by the Sanhedrim, Kept in the Tower of Jerusalem; The Object prov'd of fickle Fortunes sport, And lost the Honours he possest at Court. Elam in favour grew, out stript by none, And seem'd a Prop to Amazia's Throne. He had in foreign parts been sent to School, And did in Doeg's place the Kings thin Treasure rule. He to Eliakim was neer alli'd; ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... gentle and good; not easily excited; clever and penetrating, seeing things very clearly in her mind, and expressing herself well and in few but careful words; easily finding a way out of a difficulty, and choosing her line of conduct in the most embarrassing circumstances; light-minded and fickle; unstable, paying no attention if the same thing were said several times over. For this reason," continued the doctor, "I was obliged to alter what I had to say from time to time, keeping her but a short time ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... be pursued; and the inexperienced youth, after ascending another flight of stairs, is, on the second-floor, ushered into a brothel. Cloyed or disgusted there, he is again induced to try the humour of the fickle goddess, and repairs once more to the gaming-table, till, having lost all his money, he is under the necessity of descending to the entresol to pawn his watch, before he can even procure a ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... used in the ceremonial of Buddhist worship, but the heart of the ancient faith was atrophied by the indifference of the people, and the zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. No definite creed succeeded in gaining ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... foundation that is laid. We must lay our affections deep down in the man Christ Jesus. As we see Him in men—and, when we cannot see that, see men in Him—we shall be more stable, less childish, less fickle. We never go deep enough. We skim over {84} life. We must get into its heart. We must never begin an affection which can have an end. For all affection must draw us into God, and God has no end. The moment we see any ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... many people in the belief of her heartlessness; but the reason which probably determined her action on this latter occasion was that she had already met the one man, who, she recognised, could enchain her fickle ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... matters it to him, the Nation's love or the Nation's blame, restin' there by the calm waters he loved. The tides come in, and the tides go out; jest as they did in his life; the fickle tide of public favor that swept by him, movin' him not on his heavenly mission of ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... that this other lover was richer than Giles and had a title, but of course he found out that this was the case. The fickle Irish beauty had caught the fancy of an elderly English nobleman with a large family of grown-up sons and daughters. My dear, it was a very heartless piece of work: it changed Giles completely. He never spoke about it to any one, but if ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... what had happened to her? He must despise her to have imagined it. His outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulant resentment. Were all men self-seeking? Did all men think women shallow and fickle? Could a man and a woman never be honestly and simply friends? If he had made love to her, he could not possibly—and there was the sting of it—feel towards her maiden dignity that romantic respect which she herself cherished towards it. For it was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by a variety of indications, it was manifest that the winter of the tropical year was at hand. The steady easterly breezes, which, with occasional variations of south-easterly, had hitherto prevailed, were succeeded by violent and fickle winds, blowing sometimes from a dozen different and opposite points of the compass in the course of twenty-four hours. The brief and sudden showers which we had had at intervals for some time past gradually became more heavy and frequent. At length, one calm, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... stationed herself at his shoulder, at last; and the young man did well docilely to obey her whispered directions. In a month, there were a thousand young men about town, far above the station of a Gregoriev, who would have given half their prospects for Ivan's present position. But the fickle goddess loves well to show her face to him who has never sought to lift her veil; and to Ivan, whom she had hitherto served so ill, she chose suddenly to shower with all the things that youth desires. The young man found that, many and varied as had been his dreams ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... father's friend and my own, has been with me on the spot: he thinks the bargain practicable. I am myself, on a more serious review of the lands, much better pleased with them. I won't mention this in writing to any body but you and Ainslie. Don't accuse me of being fickle: I have the two plans of life before me, and I wish to adopt the one most likely to procure me independence. I shall be in Edinburgh next week. I long to see you: your image is omnipresent to me; nay, I am convinced I would soon idolatrise it most seriously; so much do absence and memory ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... mattered. The intermediary phases were of no account. It had been a period of struggle, hardship and, as far as the stage itself was concerned, disillusion. After the first year or so, the goddess Fortune, more fickle in Theatreland, perhaps, than anywhere else, passed him by. London had no use for his services, especially when it learned that he aspired to play parts. It even refused him the privilege of walking on and understudying. He drifted into the provinces, where, when he obtained an engagement, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of fruit and leaves together so closely that mildew and rot will follow almost as a natural consequence, and those who follow it are almost ready to give up grape-culture in despair. Nor is this surprising. With their tenacious adherence to so fickle a variety as the Catawba, and to practices and methods of which experience ought to have taught them the utter impracticability long ago, we need not be surprised that grape-culture is with them a failure. We have a class of grape-growers who never ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... to the governor himself, who appeared determined to release him if he could do it without risk of personal popularity, and who yet, in order to avoid accusation at Rome, gave sentence according to the people's will. The fickle populace crying "crucify him," the disciples who forsook him, the rock-apostle who denied even so much as knowledge of the man, show how all the currents of life about him were stirred and full of tumult. ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... unpalatable advice and which prevented him from exacting vengeance on some occasions, he had scarcely a trait whereon the mind can rest with any satisfaction. Weak and easily led, puerile in his gusts of passion and his complete abandonment of himself to them—selfish, fickle, boastful, cruel, superstitious, licentious—he exhibits to us the Oriental despot in the most contemptible of all his aspects—that wherein the moral and the intellectual qualities are equally in defect, and the career is ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... if she would refuse me if you only acted a sister's part! But you are impenetrable as a rock, and the whole of your fickle sex could not match your ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was transpiring around him, David seemed to be entirely unconscious and at last the fickle crowd ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... not bring this about," exclaimed Scharnhorst, "but it was our great friend Stein who did it. God Himself sent Minister von Stein to Russia, that he might stand as an immovable rock by the side of the mild and fickle Alexander, and that his fiery soul might strengthen the fluctuating resolutions of the czar, and inspire him with true faith in, and reliance on, the great cause of the freedom of the European nations, which was now to ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... its mastery of the kosmos. So with the emotions or passions: they are drawn this way or that by the objects of the senses, and the "senses move after their appropriate objects"; it is not the "I," the Self, which moves. And so also with the mind. "The mind is fickle and restless, O Krishna, it seems as hard to curb as the wind," and the mind lets the senses run after objects as a horse that has broken its reins flies away with the unskilled driver. All these forces are set up; and there is one more thing to remember. These ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... achievement and record fell to my brother R. C. It was too much good luck ever to come my way. Fame is a fickle goddess. R. C. had no ambition to make a great catch of swordfish. He angles for these big game of the sea more to furnish company for me than for any other reason. He likes best the golden, rocky streams where the bronze-back ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... for us, and a kind hearty pit; For he, who pleases, never fails of wit: Honour is yours; And you, like kings at city-treats, bestow it; The writer kneels, and is bid rise a poet; But you are fickle sovereigns, to our sorrow; You dub to-day, and hang a man to-morrow: You cry the same sense up, and down again, Just like brass-money once a year in Spain: Take you in the mood, whate'er base metal come, You coin as fast as groats at Birmingham: Though 'tis no more like sense, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... is strange that he was to have almost no influence on the development of the novel in England. When we read of Harry Bailly and the Wife of Bath, of the modest Oxford clerk and the good parson; when we turn the pages of the inimitable story of Troilus and the fickle, tender, charming Cressida, it seems as if nothing was lacking to the production of perfect novels. All the elements of the art are there complete: the delicate analysis of passions, the stirring plot, the natural play of various characters, the very human ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... De Wilton, "yet a strange companionship—one rather of accident than design, I fancy. There is little in either to attract the other, nor is it any secret that the Lord Chamberlain does not love the fickle Stanley." ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... Dickens can write the history of "Boy Slavery," of boys whose aspirations and longings have been silenced forever by ignorant parents; of boys persecuted as lazy, stupid, or fickle, simply because they were out of their places; of square boys forced into round holes, and oppressed because they did not fit; of boys compelled to pore over dry theological books when the voice within continually ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... and manner, however, much of that old grace which had first endeared him to Elizabeth, and even now served to fix her fickle favor. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... Kate, and piquant; she presumed upon her youth, upon her age. She was a child when you expected her to be a woman, and a woman where you looked for the child. No dream of romance was romantic enough to hold her fickle soul constant to it—to satisfy the hopes of her heart. Every man she met was a prince; yet was he, too, bare and poor and mean compared with The Man to come. The child in her was gauche and crude, sitting in judgment—as ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the historian De Thou has drawn of this fickle prince much too charitable a portrait (iii. 337). It seems to be saying too much to affirm that "his merit equalled that of the greatest captains of his age;" and if "he loved justice, and was possessed of uprightness," ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... lean man persisted obstinately; and he cast a suspicious glance at Tignonville's clothes. It was evident that the two had discussed him, and the motives of his presence there. "Have the dice proved fickle, my lord, and are you for the jewellers' shops on the bridge to fill your purse again? If so, take my word, it were better to go three than one, and ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... in whose vast hold lay stored The priceless riches of all climes and lands, Say, wouldst thou let it float upon the seas Unpiloted, of fickle winds the sport, And of wild waves and ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... when in comrade's ear Some yeoman, wondering in his fear, Thus whispered forth his mind:- "Saint Mary! saw'st thou e'er such sight? How pale his cheek, his eye how bright, Whene'er the firebrand's fickle light Glances beneath his cowl! Full on our lord he sets his eye; For his best palfrey, would not I ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... rippling by, and glides Into the silent hollow of the past; What is there that abides To make the next age better for the last? Is earth too poor to give us 70 Something to live for here that shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon? The little that we see From doubt is never free; 75 The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, 80 Only secure in every one's conniving, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... our enemies will give credit to, a good deal depends on their own natural disposition. A fickle and arbitrary people, who are continually breaking their faith, can have little belief in the constancy of a sinking fund, but they will be perfectly well inclined to believe, that men of property may be compelled, and will even be glad to pay one per cent. a year, for ten years, to ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... bantered by imitating his way of talking. Nor did he spare Tiberius, who was fond of obsolete and far-fetched expressions. He charges Mark Antony with insanity, writing rather to make men stare, than to be understood; and by way of sarcasm upon his depraved and fickle taste in the choice of words, he writes to him thus: "And are you yet in doubt, whether Cimber Annius or Veranius Flaccus be more proper for your imitation? Whether you will adopt words which Sallustius Crispus has borrowed from the 'Origines' ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... for the swallow, sir?" touching an imaginary cap. "Shall I say that 'Dark and true and tender is the North,' and 'Fierce and false and fickle is the South,' or any ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... thing like this. How fickle public opinion is, after all! Day before yesterday M. de Boiscoran could not have passed through the town without being mobbed. If he should show himself to-day, they would carry him in triumph. He has been condemned, and now he is a martyr. It is known already that the ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... flint! hard heart in haughty breast! By a softer, warmer bosom the tiger's couch is prest. Thou art fickle as the sea, thou art wandering as the wind, And the restless ever-mounting flame is not more hard to bind. If the tears I shed were tongues, yet all too few would be To tell of all the treachery that thou hast shown to me. Oh! I could chide thee sharply—but every maiden knows That she ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... in the valet. "In the first place he is as fickle as the wind, and awfully suspicious. He never leaves anything about,—no letters, no cigars, and no money. He spends half his time in locking things up, and goes to bed with his keys under ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... greatest advantage with his subjects, giving tilts and tournaments and other public festivities in which the Moors delighted. The loss of the castles of Cambil and Albahar and of the fortress of Zalea, however, checked this sudden tide of popularity, and some of the fickle populace began to doubt whether they had not been rather precipitate in deposing his brother, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... practical bill-poster himself. To get the most conspicuous sites for bills and to keep those bills up until the attraction played became the chief task of the advance-agent. The provincial bill-posters were fickle and easily swayed. The agent with the most persuasive personality, sometimes with the greatest drinking capacity, ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... he knows also how to feel at home, when he cares to, in the mimic universe of Lichfield and Fairhaven, where gay ribbons perpetually flutter, and where eyes and hands perpetually invite, and where love runs a deft, dainty, fickle ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... bow to what they will call destiny. "Heaven has declared against us," is an expression that I already hear frequently uttered. It is indeed as impossible to predicate here, as it is in London, what may be the mood of this fickle and impulsive population a week hence. All I can positively say is, that at the present moment they are in "King Cambyses' vein." We ought not to judge a foreign nation by our own standard, but it is impossible not to re-echo Lord Bolingbroke's ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... obtenir aucun bien en droit d'amour," from the object of his passion, and, in disgust, he turned to make love to Laura de S. Jorlan, sister of Berald des Baux. But the other account is that he made love to both ladies at once, and that Adelasia cast him off because she found that his fickle heart was turning to the fresher charms of Laura. Anyhow, he made his rejection by Adelasia the subject of poetical laments, and prosecuted with vigour his siege of the heart and virtue of his patron's sister. And then ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... and La Fontaine will also be guests. If it please you to be one of us, La Fontaine will regale you with two new stories, which, I am told, do not disparage his former ones. Come Marquis—But, again a scruple. Have I nothing to fear in the undertaking we contemplate? Love is so malicious and fickle! Still, when I examine my heart, I do not feel any apprehension for myself, it being occupied elsewhere, and the sentiments I possess toward you resemble love less than friendship. If the worst should happen and I lose my ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... my asseveration, my father knew not whose veracity to impeach; but, charitably concluding there was some mistake, or that I was, as heretofore, a fickle, thoughtless being, considered himself bound in honour to communicate the substance of our conversation to Mr Somerville; and the latter no sooner received it, than he placed the letter in Emily's hands—a very comfortable kind of avant-courier for a lover, after an absence ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... philosophical air and demeanour, though with real kindness and desire to show sympathy, "thou art either entangled by worldly scruples, leading thee to disdain the wholesome art of healing, or thou art, like thy brother, the victim of the fickle sex." ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 'False and fickle one!' said he. 'One indeed came who set thee free, and he is now near thee again; but how have you used him? Ought he to have had such treatment from thee?' Then he went out and sent away the company, and said the wedding was at an ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... heavy eyebrows twinkle with star-dust. Dodging occasional flying meteors, which harass him as flies harass a landscapist out of doors on a hot day, he is ever active, this mighty artist of the changing desert sky. So fickle his moods, so versatile his genius, so quick to creation his fancy, that he never knows what his next composition will be till the second ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... bewilder; I build because I am a builder. Crescent and street and square I build, Plaster and paint and carve and gild. Around the city see them stand, These triumphs of my shaping hand, With bulging walls, with sinking floors, With shut, impracticable doors, Fickle and frail in every part, And rotten to their inmost heart. There shall the simple tenant find Death in the falling window-blind, Death in the pipe, death in the faucet, Death in the deadly water-closet! A day is set for all to die: Caveat ...
— Moral Emblems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... always fickle, and easily swerved by success or failure. In this instance we had no reason to complain of want of applause, for cheer after cheer was raised in honor of our perseverance, and Colonel Hensen was despatched by the governor to thank us on the ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... comment. There may be reasons for breaking one engagement, but when it comes to the second, Mrs. Grundy makes remarks, and is inclined to blame the girl, either for too great haste to wed, or for being fickle and capricious, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... sheen of glorious splendor; when, conscious of her immense wealth in coal, minerals, and fisheries, her delightful climate and geographical position, she bid for commercial supremacy. It is said of States, as of women, they are "fickle, coy and hard to please." For, changed and governed from England's Downing Street, "with all its red tape circumlocution," "Tile Barncal," incapacity, and "how-not-to-do-it" ability that attached to that venerable institution, its people were ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... Behold how fickle Fortune the great ULYSSES treats, Gives him victories in war-time, in peace heaps up defeats. His Southern laurels linger a coronet of praise; But a friendly Senate withers ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... of her vulgarity and repulsiveness have been circulated; but in making up our estimate of her, the fact that she held Goethe in loyal bonds for eight and twenty years must not be passed over lightly. Fickle as he was in youth, and admiring as he did brilliant women in his manhood, Christine Vulpius must have had charms, and not of a light order, to have held him thus her willing slave. No mere fat and vulgar Frau without ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... "Alas! the fickle orb!" murmured Oriana; "it rises but to mock us, and hides itself already in the bosom of that sable cloud. Is there not a threat of rain there, ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... between the leading society and the second-class society of Soulanges, brought about by the despotism of the queen, who could not tolerate the empire founded and established over the heart of the brilliant Lupin by the beautiful Euphemie Plissoud, for she herself laid permanent claim to his fickle fervors. ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... 5. The fickle, frivolous, volatile character of so many divinity students is excellently hit off by Bunyan in our pilgrim's impatience to be out of the Interpreter's House. No sooner had he seen one or two of the significant rooms than this easily satisfied student was as eager to get out of that ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... then. Put your hair round your mamma's neck, and give me one good long kiss, and I won't talk any more in that way about your lover. After all, some young men are not so fickle as others; but even if he's the ficklest, there is consolation. The love of an inconstant man is ten times more ardent than that of a faithful man—that is, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... is a young girl's nonsense," observed the old lady. "I was like that once myself. But when one grows a little older and fatter, and there is less about one to take a man's eye,—a fickle thing, Katje, a fickle thing,— one looks for more in a husband than a light foot and ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... Light and fickle as is the public taste for literature, we are disposed to think that, (barring the influence of great names) the chances of success are as frequent in this as in any other field of human ingenuity; and we can assure the public that our repose has not always been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... righteousness of Christ, when, and unto whom, God shall impute it for justice; Psalm xxxvi. In the margin it is said to be like the mountain of God; to wit, called Mount Zion, or that Moriah on which the temple was built, and upon which it stood; all other bottoms are fickle, all other righteousnesses are so feeble, short, narrow, yea, so full of imperfections; for what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, Christ did for us in the similitude of sinful- flesh. But what could not the law do? Why, it could not ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... out the orders they receive, is most clearly taught both by reason and experience; how subjects ought to be guided so as best to preserve their fidelity and virtue is not so obvious. (18) All, both rulers and ruled, are men, and prone to follow after their lusts. (19) The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair, for it is governed solely by emotions, not by reason: it rushes headlong into every enterprise, and is easily corrupted either by avarice ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... three are daily reported to headquarters at Washington. In these telegrams a cipher is used—as much, we presume, to ensure accuracy in the figures as for purposes of secresy. In this cipher the fickle winds are given the names of women with a covert sarcasm quite out of place in the respectable old weather-prophet whom every housewife consults before the day's work begins. Thus, when the telegraph operator receives the mysterious message, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... against them—and Maluco affairs were not failing to give Joan de Esquivel, the master-of-camp, sufficient to do. He was acting as governor there and had but little security from the natives, who, being a Mahometan people, and by nature easily persuaded and fickle, are restless, and ready for disturbances and wars. Daily and in different parts the natives were being incited and aroused to rebellion; and although the master-of-camp and his captains were endeavoring to punish ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... position next to mine in the Life School—when I saw Ewing hugging Fanchette on the stairs, on the very landing sacred to my embraces, I knew that Paragot was right, and that Fanchette was just a fickle, naughty little model like the others. But if Paragot had not taken her measure before my eyes at Fontainebleau and made a figured drawing so to speak of her heart and soul, shewing their exiguous dimensions, I might have cast myself beneath the wheels of an omnibus like the pig ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... he started afresh with new hopes. Medicine had been his last fancy, and he had set to work with so much ardor that he had just qualified after an unusually short course of study, by a special remission of time from the minister. He was enthusiastic, intelligent, fickle, but obstinate, full ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... matters. We are not prudent. Unlike the calm blood of Englishmen, ours rushes swiftly through our veins—it is warm as wine and sunlight, and needs no fictitious stimulant. We love, we desire, we possess; and then? We tire, you say? These southern races are so fickle! All wrong—we are less tired than you deem. And do not Englishmen tire? Have they no secret ennui at times when sitting in the chimney nook of "home, sweet home," with their fat wives and ever-spreading families? Truly, yes! But they are ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... more delusive hopes; they actually built a nest in a neighbor's yard, the family in the house maintaining an appearance of the utmost indifference, so as not to alarm the birds till they were committed to that nest. For so little does madam regard the labor of building, and so fickle is she in her fancies, that she thinks nothing of preparing at least two nests before she settles on one. The nest was made on a big branch of cedar, perhaps seven feet from the ground,—a rough affair, as this bird always makes. In it she even placed an egg, and ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... on the other; low hills far away before her; out of them all, the dark torrent of the river showing the swift way to freedom and the great sea? She drew in a full breath, as if close air oppressed her.—A bird flew over her then, high above her head, careering in fickle circles, and at length sailing down out of sight far into other heavens. Flor watched him bitterly; she comprehended Zoe's scorn of her past content;—if only she had wings to spread! But Sarp had told her, that, if she went ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... none but herself to rely on for preserving the fickle smiles of the Court and the public. The King, too indifferent to serve her as a guide, as yet had conceived no love for her, notwithstanding the intimacy that grew between them at Choisy. In his ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... was not pleasant. He put it away impatiently. It cut him. Why had she talked so much about the lady? The lady! Ah! How was it the lady came no more into his thoughts? The memory of her haughty face no more quickened his heart-beats. Was he fickle that he could lose what he had supposed was a lifelong passion in ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... and, straightway arising, she despatched her servants and all who were with her in quest of her spouse; but they happened not on any trace of him nor could they hear aught of his news. So she bethought herself concerning the case and plained and wept and groaned and sighed and blamed Fortune the fickle, bewailing the changes of Time and reciting ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... balanced thought the silent grief That sinks the bosom of the fallen chief. With all the joy that laurel crowns bestow, A world reconquer'd and a vanquished foe. Thus thro extremes of life, in every state, Shines the clear soul, beyond all fortune great; While smaller minds, the dupes of fickle chance, Slight woes o'erwhelm and sudden joys entrance. So the full sun, thro all the changing sky, Nor blasts nor overpowers the naked eye; Tho transient splendors, borrowed from his light, Glance on the mirror ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... was hard, because it was unequal, humiliating, and sometimes degrading, making her to be either timorous, frivolous, or artful. Her amusements were trivial, her taste vitiated, her education neglected, her rights violated, her aspirations scorned. The poets represented her as capricious, fickle, and false. She rose only to fall; she lived only to die. She was a victim, a toy, or a slave. Bedizened or burdened, she was either an object of degrading admiration ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... fancy of Ovid metamorphosed from a restless man to a fickle sea-god; the other assumed so many deceptive shapes to those who visited his cave, that his memory has been preserved in the word Protean. Such fancies well apply to a part of Nature which shifts like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Song is my mistress, fickle she, Yet dear beyond all dearth of speech; Child of the winds of land and sea She charms me with the charm of each— Full soft and sweet she sings and then She sings ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... the female heart is so capricious and fickle! You pressed it upon me, I assure you. I own that I was not loath ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dream-life here is past, and, face to face with truth, "rapt from the fickle and the frail," for thee the illusion has vanished! Mayest thou also know the fulness of joy in the unbroken and serene activities of ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... and with it I close the imperfect story of my somewhat romantic life. I have experienced many ups and downs, but still am stout of heart. The labor of a lifetime has brought me nothing in a pecuniary way. I have worked hard, but fortune, fickle dame, has not smiled upon me. If poverty did not weigh me down as it does, I would not now be toiling by day with my needle, and writing by night, in the plain little room on the fourth floor of No. 14 Carroll Place. And yet I have learned to love the garret-like room. ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... you will speedily pronounce the fairies fickle," said she, "for our drive will soon be over, and you will find ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... dearest friend and her authority for the knowledge that while all men will bear watching, married men will bear a most minute scrutiny. Mrs. Pennycook knew that as a wife she was approaching the unlovely age when fickle husbands tire and cast about for younger and prettier women. Hence she decided to trim her mental lamps and light the dastard Daniel ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... heaped upon Montfort by the weak and fickle King, who would far better have understood him, if, like the selfish kinsmen who encircled the throne, he had struggled for his own advantage, and not for the maintenance of the Great Charter. Richard was too young to remember the early days when his elder brothers had been companions, ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Gods Love to Mankind did dispence, The sacred Wedlock, which did then commence: Not founded as some Criticks say, by chance; But Heaven it self, did this blest State advance. Not subject to the various Revolutions, Of fickle fading human Institutions. A Married Life was first contriv'd above, To be an Emblem of Eternal Love; And after by Divine indulgence sent, To be the Crown of Man, and Wife's content; Yet black Mouthed Envy Strives with all its might; ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... who was raising him to his feet. Marahna was beside him, robed in the golden garment of the priest. She placed her hands beside his face to turn him toward the further wall. The light was fickle, but it showed him, as it rose and fell, the blackened, swollen body of the monster, still writhing in its death struggle. And beside it, blasted and charred, the head of the obscene sun god, severed by ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Lorenzo the Magnificent. To this palace came the Pazzi conspirators to lure Giuliano to the Duomo and his doom. Here did Charles VIII—Savonarola's "Flagellum Dei"—lodge and loot, and it was here that Capponi frightened him with the threat of the Florentine bells; hither came in 1494 the fickle and terrible Florentine mob, always passionate in its pursuit of change and excitement, and now inflamed by the sermons of Savonarola, to destroy the priceless manuscripts and works of art; here was brought up for a year or so the little Catherine de' ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Other Fellow The Marionettes The Marquis and Miss Sally A Fog in Santone The Friendly Call A Dinner at ——* Sound and Fury Tictocq Tracked to Doom A Snapshot at the President An Unfinished Christmas Story The Unprofitable Servant Aristocracy Versus Hash The Prisoner of Zembla A Strange Story Fickle Fortune, or How Gladys Hustled An Apology Lord Oakhurst's Curse Bexar Scrip No. 2692 Queries and Answers Poems The Pewee Nothing to Say The Murderer Some Postscripts Two Portraits A Contribution The Old Farm Vanity The Lullaby Boy Chanson de ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... nations, it is true, were superstitious, because all nations, in those ages were intensely superstitious; and each, after a fashion of its own, intensely credulous. But the Roman superstition was coloured by something of a noble pride; the Grecian by vanity. The Greek superstition was fickle and self-contradicting, and liable to sudden changes; the Roman, together with the gloom, had the unity and the perseverance of bigotry. No Christian, even, purified and enlightened by his sublime faith, could ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... came lately to Bath, where he has been exhibiting himself among the bucks and gamesters of the place. Eastgate followed him hither; but he should not have quitted him for a moment, at his first emerging into life. He ought to have known he was a fantastic, foolish, fickle fellow, who would forget his college-attachments the moment they ceased appealing to his senses. Tom met with a cold reception from his old friend; and was, moreover, informed, that he had promised the living to another ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... given a blithesome promise, and anchored it with oaths; but oaths and anchors equally will drag; naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy. Contrary winds from out unstable skies, or contrary moods of his more varying mind, or shipwreck and sudden death in solitary waves; whatever was the cause, the blithe stranger never ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... determined to do my duty," and he dismissed the envoy with the assurance that if the post fell into Proctor's hands it would be in a manner to do him more honor than any surrender could do. The fight then continued until the British general found his fickle savage friends deserting him, and on the 12th day raised ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness as is consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should ever have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the contrary is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age in its aspirations. His aspirations change ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... bowed to Mrs. Carew, and answered: "I met the artist, while upon his sketching tour, and was deeply interested in his success. At one time, I hoped he would cast matrimonial anchor in San Francisco, and remain among us; but his fickle fair one deserted him for a young naval officer, and after her marriage, California possessed few charms for him. I pitied ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... possible for any one to remain faithful here, to be completely steadfast? This doubt often depressed him, and he expresses it, as an artist expressed his doubt, in artistic forms. Elizabeth, for instance, can only suffer, pray, and die; she saves the fickle and intemperate man by her loyalty, though not for this life. In the path of every true artist, whose lot is cast in these modern days, despair and danger are strewn. He has many means whereby he can attain to honour and might; peace and plenty persistently ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... could be fair, and yet not fond, Or that their love were firm, not fickle still, I would not marvel that they make men bond By service long to purchase their good will; But when I see how frail those creatures are, I muse that men ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... eating; Belching of wind; Nausea; Vomiting of food; Water brash; Pain in the stomach; Heartburn; Bad taste in the mouth in the morning; Palpitation of the heart; Cankered mouth; loss of flesh; Fickle appetite; depression of spirits; Lack of ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... quite right, lad," the admiral said. "All governments are ungrateful, and republics most of all. Where all are supposed to be equal, there is ever envy and jealousy against one who rises above the rest. The multitude is fickle and easily led; and the first change of fortune, however slight, is seized upon by enemies as a cause of complaint, and the popular hero of today may be an exile tomorrow. Like enough I shall see the inside of a Venetian ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... next day was the Sabbath, thirty-six hours of suspense must elapse before we could know whether this was but a passing kindness from the fickle goddess, or the herald ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... usage forms an exception to the rule; in the other two the noun is understood, and should be supplied by the parser. Such terms, if elliptical, are most commonly of the plural number, and refer to the word persons or things understood; as, "The careless and the imprudent, the giddy and the fickle, the ungrateful and the interested, everywhere meet us."—Blair. Here the noun persons is to be six times supplied. "Wherever there is taste, the witty and the humorous make themselves perceived."—Campbell's Rhet., p. 21. Here the author meant, simply, the qualities wit ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... deluding joyes, The brood of folly without father bred, How little you bested, Or fill the fixed mind with all your toyes; Dwell in som idle brain And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess, As thick and numberless As the gay motes that people the Sun Beams, Or likest hovering dreams The fickle Pensioners of Morpheus train. 10 But hail thou Goddess, sage and holy, Hail divinest Melancholy Whose Saintly visage is too bright To hit the Sense of human sight; And therefore to our weaker view, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... year after year subject-pictures continued to be painted on an ambitious scale, which after a few months' exhibition on the walls of Burlington House passed to their tomb in provincial museums, or reappeared as ghosts in the sale-room only to fetch a derisory price and to illustrate the fickle ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... should my love now wax Unconstant, wavering, fickle, unstaid? With nought can she me tax: I ne'er recanted what I once said. I now do see, as nature fades, And all her works decay, So women all, wives, widows, maids, From ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... himself. Scipio represented, that in case time should be allowed for disciplining the new levies during the winter, they would be much fitter for service in the ensuing campaign; that the Gauls, who were naturally fickle and inconstant, would disengage themselves insensibly from Hannibal; that as soon as his wounds should be healed, his presence might be of some use in an affair of such general concern: in a word, he besought him earnestly not to proceed ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Barbee's natural way to swing along with his hat far back, so that he might see the stars. Now his hat brim was dragged low, and for Barbee the stars were only less remote and frigid than a certain fickle woman. ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... ye steer through the perilous midnight, Let your faithful glances go To the steadfast stars above her, From their fickle gleams below. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... without any three miles of dalliance. The time-serving water made the best of this, forsook its ancient bed (as classic nymphs and fountains used to do), and left poor Bruntsea with a dry bank, and no haven for a cockle-shell. A new port, such as it is, incrusted the fickle jaw of the river; piles were driven and earth-works formed, lest the water should return to its old love; and Bruntsea, as concerned her traffic, became but a mark of memory. Her noble corporation never demanded ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... two wounds, {138} one in the knee and one in the leg, which hindered him from walking. Still he urged the Hurons to renew the attack. But in vain. From overweening confidence the fickle savages had passed to the other extreme. Nothing could inspire them to another assault. Moreover, Champlain had lost much of his peculiar influence over them. They had fancied that, with him in front, success was sure. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... novelties of this small volume, not the least remarkable is the dedication of this fairy romance to the public, which excited great attention, and charmed and provoked our author's fickle patron. Du Clos here openly ridicules, and dares his protector and his judge. This hazardous attack was successful, and the author soon acquired the reputation which he afterwards maintained, of being ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... filled with the life-blood Of men doomed to die; The seats of the gods He stains with red gore; Sunshine grows black The summer thereafter, All weather gets fickle. Know you ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... endeavouring to stop my ears against popular platitude, but rather, in a spirit of real earnestness, to point out to the mob how it has been cruel to George. I do not despair of success. I think I shall make converts. The mob is really very fickle and ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... Swallow, thou that knowest each, That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, And dark and true and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... PERSON, "There lies the ruins of the noblest nephew of his uncle that ever lived in France or elsewhere. He was unscrupulous, I admit, but he knew how to rule. Shall we stay and hear MARK ANTONY praise him, and set the fickle rabble at the throats of ROCHEFORT and BRUTUS, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... landmarks likely to attract hostile fire, and thus occasion them the unpleasant sensation of living on top of a volcano, while we were slap-bang in the middle of a conspicuous cross road, with a constant stream of traffic coming and going through: yet, so strange and fickle are the fortunes of war that, while we escaped unharmed, our comrades next ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... that without this preliminary training nothing else can be learned well; and that whatever otherwise seem to be accomplishments, turn out, at length, to be fantasies that vanish in the turmoil and struggle of life, or mislead men into a false and fickle management of affairs. Wherefore he felt the peculiar responsibility of his position with all the intenseness of his earnest and far-reaching mind. He knew that his department, though most difficult to be commended to young men in ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... is often made by railroad managers that excesses in railroad competition are the result of the peculiar conditions of their business, which has heavy fixed charges on one hand and a fickle patronage on the other; that the uncertainty of through business compels them to rely upon the local business for such revenue as is necessary to meet these fixed charges; and that, inasmuch as their trains must run, and any through freight ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... call me fickle, Keen to pursue and loth to keep. Ah, could they see these tears that trickle From eyes erstwhile too proud to weep. Could see me, prone, beneath the sickle, While pain and sorrow stand ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... Carthage had overcome Rome. For Carthage was possessed of almost every bad quality which could work ill to the human race. Greed for money was her passion, and in order to obtain wealth she proved herself fickle, short-sighted, lawless, and boundlessly cruel. The government of Rome, which the Eternal City handed on to the countries she conquered, was founded not only on law, but on common-sense. Considering the customs of the world during the thousand years of her greatest glory, ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... over the head of France, so to speak—boilings on the surface, with which the great personality of the nation if such a word may be used, has little to do, and cares but little for; while she herself, the great race, neither giddy nor fickle, but unusually obstinate, tenacious, and sober, narrow even in the unwavering pursuit of a certain kind of well-being congenial to her—goes steadily on, less susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less excitable ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... husband and kinsman his character assumes a most revolting aspect. Envious, revengeful, subtle, he was as fickle and petulant as he was suspicious and cruel. His brother, even the offspring of his brother, became to him objects of jealousy, if not of hatred. Their friends must, he thought, be his enemies, and applause bestowed upon them was odious to his soul. There were ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... peerage given to the "man," and the vendetta of the Polish Countess, both introduced rather late in Vol. II., must have been after-thoughts. However, the end of the story is both novel and entertaining. The feeble, fickle heroine is made to marry, as her second husband, the man who (as an accessory after the fact) has been the murderer of her first! And the best of the joke is—she does not know it! My "Co." has also been much amused by a brightly-written Novel, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... honorable nature could or ought to place confidence, and who was unworthy even of an explanation. Mary M'Loughlin could have borne everything but this. Yes; the abandonment of friends—of acquaintances—of a fickle world itself; but here it was where her moral courage foiled her. The very hope to which her heart had clung from its first early and innocent impulses—the man to whom she looked up as the future guide, friend, and partner of her life, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... for men to resolve at the first approaches of the amorous but fickle pair upon interdicting even an accidental temporary junction: for the astonishing sweetness of the couple when no more than the ghosts of them have come together in a projecting mind is an intoxication beyond fermented grapejuice or a witch's brewage; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Rebel regiment from the whole line of eleven guns, at point-blank range, which must inevitably have cut it all to pieces. The fate of the day hung balanced right there and then—with all the chances in favor of McDowell. But those chances are now reversed. Such are the fickle changes ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... good-for-nothing beggar,' he answered, with a sudden air of weary self-loathing and disdain. 'I know. I've got a way of taking everything in deadly earnest for an hour or two. But,' with a sudden swerve into the track of self-justification, 'if that makes you think I'm fickle and weak-willed, you're all wrong, darling. There are some fellows—I know plenty—who go through life like a lot of oysters. They don't feel anything—they don't care about anything, or anybody. But, bless your heart, my dear, they ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... I had convinced my friend that a letter from me ought not to be expected earlier than Monday. I left her to gratify no fickle humour, nor because my chief pleasure lay anywhere but in her company. She knew of my design to make some stay at this place, and that the business that occasioned my stay would leave me ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... injudicious things are said even by some who ought to have more discretion. People talk without thinking, or make such statements to cover their own shortcomings and faults. Why shall they not stand? are they in the keeping of a feeble or fickle Saviour? isn't His grace as strong as sin? is not Jesus always mightier than the devil? and have not millions of the greatest sinners who have found the Lord, stood firm against the snares of the world, and all the devices ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... that from the stronger he had most to fear. Therefore in colonial days France, in later days Great Britain, in both cases Canada, derived more apparent profit from their employment than did their opponent, whose more numerous white men enabled him to dispense with the fickle and feebler aid ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... an hour until a bridge was reached a little below the town that did not admit of the stack going under, and as this was built of bricks, there was a great crash and instant stoppage. Trevithick and Jones were of the old-fashioned school of men who did not believe in impossibilities. The fickle crowd, too, who had hurrahed like mad, hung back and said 'It won't do'; but these heroes, the advance-guard of a race who had done more to make England famous than battles by land or sea, sprang to the ground and worked like Britons, never ceasing until they had repaired the ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... she came up to me laughing once, at a time when I stood alone and was, indeed, thinking of Marjorie who was busy in her hut at some task that Lancelot had set her. Barbara began to banter with me in a way that seemed strange with her, saying that I was fickle like all my sex, that I was sighing for fair hair now, who had doted on black locks a few years ago, and much more idle talk to the same want of purpose. At last she asked me bluntly if I had loved her once, and when I answered yes, she asked me if I loved her ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... on the borrower's land or house, or goods, for, we will say, one-half or one-third their value; the borrower then assumes all the chances of life in his efforts to repay the loan. If he is a farmer, he has to run the risk of the fickle elements. Rains may drown, droughts may burn up his crops. If a merchant, he encounters all the hazards of trade; the bankruptcy of other tradesmen; the hostility of the elements sweeping away agriculture, and so affecting commerce; the tempests that smite his ships, etc. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... unseen the while, Stanley broke Lennox and Argyle; Though there the western mountaineer Rushed with bare bosom on the spear, And flung the feeble targe aside, And with both hands the broadsword plied. 'Twas vain: but Fortune, on the right, With fickle smile cheered Scotland's fight. Then fell that spotless banner white, The Howard's lion fell; Yet still Lord Marmion's falcon flew With wavering flight, while fiercer grew Around the battle-yell. The Border slogan rent the sky! A Home! ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... his senseless sleep, and of that last tender, yearning, pitiful look of love, came back on him to arouse successive surges of grief. Contrast Christ's love with your ingratitude, Christ's constancy with your fickle devotion, Christ's meekness to take the yoke of His Father's will, and your unwillingness to bear His cross of shame, and ask if you, too, have no cause for tears like ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... my happiness at one time doth everything in his power maliciously and wantonly to make me miserable at another, I am very little obliged to such a person. And let it be a comfort to my dear Billy, that, however other friends may prove false and fickle to him, he hath one friend, whom no inconstancy of her own, nor any change of his fortune, nor time, nor age, nor sickness, nor any accident, can ever alter; but who will esteem, will love, and doat on him for ever." So saying, she flung her snowy arms about his neck, and ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... the heads of the Mountain pardoned this man, and admitted him into partnership with themselves, it was not without exacting pledges such as made it impossible for him, false and fickle as he was, ever again to find admission into the ranks which he had deserted. That was truly a terrible sacrament by which they admitted the apostate into their communion. They demanded of him that he should himself take the most prominent ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... European powers, looked upon them in a friendly manner. Prussia, indeed, solemnly promised assistance; and in the month of March, 1790, Frederic William even concluded a defensive alliance with Poland. But the friendship of courts is variable, and the favour of monarchs fickle. The King of Prussia had attached himself to the cause of Poland, not from any respect for her rights, but from a spirit of jealousy towards Russia, and in the hopes of obtaining something for himself. He was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... well enough the fickle nature of these savages, who might upon the morrow demand another council and perhaps arrive at different conclusions. Hearing there were no white prisoners in the villages farther to the west, he resolved to ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... unsociable, to mingle with his neighbours. His habits were indeed peculiar: not much to be envied or imitated; as they sometimes betrayed the flights of a madman, and sometimes the asperities of a cynic. His attachments were warm, but fickle both in choice and duration. He would frequently part from one, with whom he had lived on terms of close intimacy, without any assignable cause; and his enmities, once fixed, were immovable. There was, indeed, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... warped away from their opponents until they took the ground. This increase of distance was in every way a gain to the party standing on the defensive, and a corresponding loss to the assailants. Saumarez ordered the cables cut and sail made to close once more; but the light and fickle airs both baffled this effort and further embarrassed the British, through the difficulty of keeping their broadsides in position. Here happened the great disaster of the day. One of the outer ships, the Hannibal, tried to pass inside the headmost of the French, not realizing that the latter had ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... sends her outcast sons— I hail your joyless shores! my weary bark Long tempest-tost on Life's inclement sea, Here hails her haven! welcomes the drear scene, The marshy plain, the briar-entangled wood, And all the perils of a world unknown. For Elinor has nothing new to fear From fickle Fortune! all her rankling shafts Barb'd with disgrace, and venom'd with disease. Have pierced my bosom, and the dart of death Has lost its terrors ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... Abbott now just any minute." She added, eying the crowd—"I saw Fran on the street, long and merry ago!" Her accent was that of condemnation. Like a rock she sat, letting the fickle populace drift by to minstrel show and snake den. The severity of her double chin said they might all go thither—she would not; let them be swallowed up by that gigantic serpent whose tail, too long for bill-board illustration, must needs be left to coil in the imagination ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... said the fence-rail; "you are so fickle, so unsettled; you must always be travelling about into foreign lands when the cold commences here. You have no love of fatherland in you. There can be ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... unsteadfast state of mortal things! Who trust this world, leans to a brittle stay: Such fickle fruit his flattering bloom forth brings, Ere it be ripe, it falleth to decay." The joy and bliss that late I did possess, In weal at will, with one I loved best, Is turned now into so deep distress, As teacheth me to know the world's unrest.[42] ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... even his brilliance that appealed to me.... He touched my heart by the tokens of true love he gave me, and I do think he loved me truly. He was tender, impassioned. I asked no pledge save of his heart, and alas! his heart was fickle.... I blame no one but myself; it is my confession I am making, not his. I lay nothing to his charge, for indeed he is become a stranger to me. Ah! believe me, Evariste, I swear it, he is no more to me than if ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... awaiting his good pleasure. No visitor could fail to be delighted with the pretty, prosperous little island, and with its genial and hospitable inhabitants. For Americans, too, the place was a godsend, for in forty-eight hours they could escape from the extreme and fickle climate of New York, and find themselves in warm sunshine, tempered, it is true, by occasional downpours, for Nature, realising that the inhabitants were dependent on the rainfall for their water ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his fickle hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow'st. If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... with Judge Kemble, a fine of twenty-five dollars, and lectures from all the grown people of his acquaintance, prevented him from regarding his escapade as a feat to boast of. He discovered, also, how fickle a thing is public favor, for very soon those who had praised began to tease, and it took all his courage, patience, and pride to carry him through the next week or two. The lads were never tired of alluding to No. 11, giving shrill whistles in his ear, asking if ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... common-sense tells her that a plunge into the concert field is still dangerous. Accordingly she remains two, or possibly three, more years and at the end if she has worked hard she is convinced that with proper management she may stand some chance of winning that fickle treasure, public favor. ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... remained there upward of two years. At first he met with brilliant success, and deprived the Carthaginians of a great part of the island. Subsequently, however, he received a severe repulse in an attempt which he made upon the impregnable town of Lilybaeum. The fickle Greeks now began to form cabals and plots against him. This led to retaliation on his part, and he soon became as anxious to abandon the island as he had been before to leave Italy. Accordingly, when his Italian allies again begged him to come to their assistance, he readily complied ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... work for the comfortable life of a country gentleman. Of his later plays, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and Pericles show a decided falling off from his previous work, and indicate another period of experimentation; this time not to test his own powers but to catch the fickle humor of the public. As is usually the case with a theater-going people, they soon turned from serious drama to sentimental or more questionable spectacles; and with Fletcher, who worked with Shakespeare and succeeded him as the first playwright of London, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... up everything of our own; mother and I have felt the rub of hardship before today. The hardest of all was the falling away of those whom we believed to be friends. We learned that the favors of society are as fickle as those of fortune, and that they ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... that he had seen her only yesterday? Or was his visual memory so fickle that he had forgotten what she was like? She was so different from what ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... each other since his day, would never have given their sanction to the costumes and the acting had they not known that the Madonna approved of them. Why should She now think differently? The Mother of God was not a fickle earthly creature, to change Her mind from ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... night lowered black, and the circling shroud Of storm rolled near, and stout hearts learned dismay; Not Hers! To her tried Lord a Light and Stay Even in the Earthquake and the palpable cloud Of those dark months; and when a fickle crowd Panted for blood and pelted wrath and scorn On him she loved, her courage never stooped: But when the clouds were driven, and the day Poured Hope and glorious Sunshine, she who had borne, The night with ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... beyond the waters The fickle feet may roam, But they find no light so pure and bright As the one fair star of home; The star of tender hearts, lady, That glows in an ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the antediluvian ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a lasting feeling of any description. Hers was a life lived for the present only. A tea-party next week was of more importance to her than a change in fortune next year. Some people are thus, and Heaven help those whose lives come under their fickle influence! ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... incapacity finally led to the worst disaster that befell a British army during the nineteenth century, only one officer escaping from among the 4500 troops and 12,000 camp followers who sought to cut their way back through the Khyber Pass[281]. A policy of non-intervention in the affairs of so fickle and savage a people naturally ensued, and was stoutly maintained by Lords Canning, Elgin, and Lawrence, who held sway during and after the great storm of the Indian Mutiny. The worth of that theory of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... youth! It may not happen to me once— once in an age: but when I love then I am young. I loved when I was in Paris. Bathilde, Bathilde, I loved thee—ah, how fondly! Wine, I say, more wine! Love is ever young. I was a boy at the little feet of Bathilde de Bechamel—the fair, the fond, the fickle, ah, the false!" The strange old man's agony was here really terrific, and he showed himself much more agitated than when he had been speaking ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
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