"Evanescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disciples of the Grammarian; while the "cold music" of Galuppi's Toccata seems to be echoed inauspiciously in these lingering trochaics. Something of both moods survives, but the dominant tone is a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote indeed from the oppressive sense of evanescence, the crumbling mortality, of the second poem, remote no less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but rapturous ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... reached the town, on his way to George Macwha. It was a still lovely night, clear and frosty, with—yes, there were—millions of stars overhead. Away in the north, the streamers were shooting hither and thither, with marvellous evanescence and re-generation. No dance of goblins could be more lawless in its grotesqueness than this dance of the northern lights in their ethereal beauty, shining, with a wild ghostly changefulness and feebleness, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... us, the World of Thought, is like a will-o-the-wisp which none may catch or hold, it is gone again as soon as it has made its appearance. But there is in color and music a compensation for this increasing evanescence. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... is told, in Buddhi-theosophic schools, There are rules, By observing which, when mundane labor irks One can simulate quiescence By a timely evanescence From his Active Mortal Essence, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... him further, increased his tenderness. This maturer feeling, if finer and higher, was less convenient than the old. Ardours of passion could be felt as in youth without the recuperative intervals which had accompanied evanescence. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... told it was greater. But it does not follow, that this equally holds good of each component part. An evidence of the most cogent clearness, unknown to the primitive Christians, may compensate for the evanescence of some evidence, which they enjoyed. Evidences comparatively dim have waxed into noon-day splendour; and the comparative wane of others, once effulgent, is more than indemnified by the 'synopsis' [Greek: ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of Gabriel de Mirabeau. They embody the spirit of his sterile philosophy, and are in unison with the evanescence of his genius.[16] As Cagliostro observed the limbs convulsed and the eyes glazed with a simultaneous pang, he was caught up again into the darkness, and again his soul hearkened to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... happened immediately after. Being Roman did not mean being subject, in the sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense that the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horrible hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and conquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seem to us to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... another art of which all have felt the want, though Themistocles only confessed it. We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful; and it may be doubted whether we should be more benefited by the art of memory or the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... — N. transience, transientness &c adj.^; evanescence, impermanence, fugacity [Chem], caducity^, mortality, span; nine days' wonder, bubble, Mayfly; spurt; flash in the pan; temporary arrangement, interregnum. velocity &c 274; suddenness &c 113; changeableness &c 149. transient, transient boarder, transient guest [U.S.]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... only irrational but visionary. The evanescence and fluency of Nature would matter little, but man himself, with his ingenuities of wit and triumphs of ambition, is whirled from form to form in "a fine revolution if we had the trick to see it." This is a favourite idea, it lends itself so easily to ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... of life. We need a Niuka again to repair the grand devastation; we await the great Avatar. Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... upon the mail,—the scenical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared,—all these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail itself, which features at that time lay—1st, in velocity unprecedented; 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses: 3dly, in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... will say they are the most beautiful and majestic on earth. Beautiful and impressive contrasts meet you everywhere: the colors of tree and flower, rock and sky, light and shade, strength and frailty, endurance and evanescence, tangles of supple hazel-bushes, tree-pillars about as rigid as granite domes, roses and violets, the smallest of their kind, blooming around the feet of the giants, and rugs of the lowly chamaebatia where the sunbeams ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir |
