"Mutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Man was published in February, 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, but not, for a long time, with any intention of publishing. Although ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... And ficklenesse Pandoraes proper forme. Thou madst me sullen first, and thou Jove, proud; Thou bloody minded; he a Puritan: Thou Venus madst me love all that I saw, And Hermes to deceive all that I love; But Cynthia made me idle, mutable, Forgetfull, foolish, fickle, franticke, madde; These be the humors that content me best, And therefore will I stay with Cynthia.... Nat. Now rule, Pandora, in fayre Cynthias steede, And make the moone inconstant like thy selfe; Raigne thou at womens nuptials, and their birth; Let them be mutable ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... advised them, that two of them should go to accuse me before the multitude [at Jerusalem], that I do not manage the affairs of Galilee as I ought to do; and that they would easily persuade the people, because of their dignity, and because the whole multitude are very mutable. When, therefore, it appeared that John had suggested the wisest advice to them, they resolved that two of them, Jonathan and Ananias, should go to the people of Jerusalem, and the other two [Simon and Joazar] should be left behind ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... these fluctuations of feeling, it is possible for us to have, deep down below these, a central core of our personality, in which unchanging continuity may abide. The depths of the ocean know nothing of the tides on the surface that are due to the mutable moon. We can have in our inmost hearts steadfastness, immovableness, even though the surface may be ruffled. Make your spirits like one of those great cathedrals whose thick walls keep out the noises ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... man's personal equation are caused by variants of three emotions; a mutable fondness for women, according to temperament and opportunity, a more uniform feeling toward money, and the universal, devastating desire—the ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... Moresby, that the work of destruction is still in progress; but that on the other hand the first formation of some islets is known to the present inhabitants. In such cases, it would be exceedingly difficult to detect a gradual subsidence of the foundation, on which these mutable structures rest. ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... all the while retaining their identity and properties, and exerting their abilities according to the means they possess, till compelled to yield to a superior power, and learn to submit to the laws which operate in every department of this mutable world. ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... day or two after the final scene with Joe he had avoided seeing her. He had not been able to resist the temptation to go back on the same day, and he had spent some hours in considering that human affairs are extremely mutable. But the scenes about him were too new, and very many of the faces he saw were too attractive, to allow of his brooding for long over his misfortune. His first impulse had been to go away again on the very evening of ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... and change about; waffle, blow with the wind (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c. 314; vibrate between, two extremes, oscillate between, two extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c. 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform|; versatile. unstaid[obs3], inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c. v.; restless; agitated &c. 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c. 605; capricious &c. 608; touch and go; inconsonant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... such an arm as thine that should defend the bulwarks of the Church, and it is now directing the battering-ram against them, and rendering practicable the breach through which all that is greedy, and all that is base, and all that is mutable and hot-headed in this innovating age, already hope to advance to destruction and to spoil. But since such is our fate, that we can no longer fight side by side as friends, let us at least act as generous enemies. You ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... distinguish them. They show no signs of greatness. They have common talk. They have coarse ways. They walk with an ugly lurch. Their eyes are not eager. They are not polite. Their clothes are dirty. They live in cheap houses on cheap food. They call you "sir." They are the great unwashed, the mutable many, the common people. The common people! Greatness is as common as that. There are not enough honours and decorations to go round. Talk of the soldier! Vale to Welsby of Normanton! He was a common miner. He ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... So it gives in a vivid picture more instructive than many a long treatise what faith is, and what it does for us. As a man leans his trembling hand on a staff, so we lay our weak and changeful selves on God's strength; and as the most mutable thing is steadied by being fastened to a fixed point, so we, though in ourselves light as thistledown, may be steadfast as rock, if we are bound to the rock of ages by the living band of faith. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... our county at the next election, I wished to defeat them, and I have done so; and now I have commenced a course of travel. I had intended on starting to confine it to my native country. Intentions are mutable. I am going abroad. You shall hear of my whereabout. I write this from the house of Leopold Travers, who, I understand from his fair daughter, is a connection of yours; a man to be ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... these sweet words to her ears, Unto the ears of my loved nymph, and tell How many tears I shed, what bitter tears! Beg her to pity one who loves so well: Say that my life is frail and mutable, And melts like rime before the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and waiting to be revealed—you and I may belong to-day. 'We have a strong city.' You may lay hold of life either by the side of it which is transient and trivial and contemptible, or by the side of it which goes down through all the mutable and is rooted in eternity. As in some seaweed, far out in the depths of the ocean, the tiny frond that floats upon the billow goes down and down and down, by filaments that bind it to the basal rock, so the most insignificant ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... fierce eyes. The face was not pleasing; it was too squarely hewn, too emotional; it indexed the heart too readily, its passions, its loves and its hates. There was cunning in the lips and caution in the brow; but the face was too mutable. ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... scholar; an admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a fire-work. The girl resembled her. Why should she wish to run away from Patterne Hall for a single hour? Simply because she was of the sex born mutable and explosive. A husband was her proper custodian, justly relieving a father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at home, philosophy is needed for us to keep erect. Let the girl be Cicero's Tullia: well, she dies! The choicest of them ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... presume to say that men may not attain to a clearer, at the same time more full, comprehensive, and balanced sense of those words, than has as yet been generally received in the Christian world. As all else is transient and mutable, these only eternal and universal, assuredly whatever light may be thrown on the mental constitution of man, even on the constitution of nature and the laws which govern the world, will be concentered so as to give a more penetrating vision of those undying truths.... ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... fulness of time the destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... this Science all is mutable; but immortal man, in accord with the divine Principle of His being, God, neither sins, suffers, nor dies. The days 202:18 of our pilgrimage will multiply instead of di- minish, when God's kingdom comes on earth; for the true way leads to life instead of to death, and earthly ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... dilapidated villages, art and nature stand still, and the world forgets to turn round. The revolutions that distract other parts of this mutable planet reach not here, or pass over without leaving any trace. The fortunate inhabitants have none of that public spirit which extends its cares beyond its horizon, and imports trouble and perplexity from all quarters ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... free. He had arrived. Surmounting indescribable hazards and hardships he walked the pavement of New York. In an hour the mutable quicksands of a great city would swallow him forever. Free! He wanted to stroll about, peer into shop windows, watch the amazing electric signs, dally; but he still ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... divine precept which enjoins love of the Creator as the engrossing principle of the soul. For, oh! the unutterable anguish that heart must endure which lavishes all its best affections on a creature mutable and perishable as itself, from whom a thousand accidents may separate or estrange it, and from whom death must one day divide it! Yet there is something so amiable, so exalting, in the fervour of a pure and generous attachment, that few have been able to resist its overwhelming influence; ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... fight. Now, no one of these fundamentals can be rightfully attacked, except when the guardian of it has abused it to subvert one or more of the rest. The reason is, that the guardian, as a fluent, is less than the permanent which he is to guard. He is the temporary and mutable mean, and derives his whole value from the end. In short, as robbery is not high treason, so neither is every unjust act of a king the converse. All must be attacked and endangered. Why? Because the king, as 'a' to A., is a mean to ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... read it again and again, until I almost knew it by heart; and all through my childhood "Little Lord Fauntleroy" was my sweet and gentle companion. I have given these details at the risk of being tedious, because they are in such vivid contrast with my vague, mutable and confused ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... paradox. Who shall say what surprises are too fantastic for his contriving? Can the classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... properties which rendered them the standard of value in all other countries, were adopted in this as well to establish its commercial standard in reference to foreign countries by a permanent rule as to exclude the use of a mutable medium of exchange, such as of certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some States as a tender for debts, or the still more pernicious expedient of a paper currency. The last, from the experience of the evils of the issues of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... strike at all, since the owner had simply closed down the shops, torn down a few walls, sold the machinery and ore, and canceled all his business obligations. No sensation, however vital, lasts very long these days; and after these nine days it turned its attention to other things, this mutable public. Employers, however, and union leaders, all over the continent, went about their affairs thoughtfully. If one man could do this unheard-of thing, so might others, now that an example had been set before them. The dispersed men harbored no ill feeling ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... fellow had given the faithful Jemima this mutable love-gift three days before it came into my possession, on which occasion they had broken a crooked sixpence together. I moralised upon this, and came to the conclusion, that, whatever a tailor might be, a sailor ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... man, and wished a wife, as many do, merely as an ornament, a silken toy, I would take —— as soon as any I know. Her fantastic, impassioned and mutable nature would yield an inexhaustible amusement. She is capable of the most romantic actions,—wild as the falcon, voluptuous as the tuberose; yet she has not in her the elements of romance, like a deeper or less susceptible nature. My cold and reasoning ——, with her one love lying, perhaps never ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... gray, filled with poetry and passion; eyes which looked out under brows black and heavy and between lashes, curled and long, giving a peculiar significance to the glance. The lips were scarlet, the upper one being noticeably short and full; lips mutable and inviting, lips that were made for mine—and all this I knew in the first minute that our eyes met, when, as it seemed to me, our two ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... nothing but venal hirelings, and changed sides readily enough when their own private interests seemed to render it desirable. One of the most famous—or infamous, according to Anthony a Wood, who describes him as 'a most seditious, mutable, and railing writer, siding with the rout and scum of the people, making them weekly sport by railing at all that was noble,' etc.—was Marchmont Nedham. In 1643 he brought out the Mercurius Britannicus, one of the ablest periodicals on the Parliamentary side, whatever honest ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... surrounding element, and these again, once moved, communicate motion to others in endless succession." In like manner, "the air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or even whispered. There in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... carry down his immortal thoughts in their pristine vigor, must have, every two hundred years, a Johnson to modernize a Shakspeare. To probe the causes of the change of language, to ascertain why even a WRITTEN language is mutable, to pick up this garment of thought and run its threads back through all their vagaries to their origin and points of divergence, is one of the grand tasks for the intellectual historian. He, indeed, must give us ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... heart is in some degree relieved, all such appeals are too often vain, if not rather attended with unfavourable effects, but, in extreme cases, we are not entitled to rest upon the generality of theories where so various and mutable an essence as the human mind is the object to which they are to be applied. I was on the point of making a trial, by recurring to the position of his son and daughter, when I heard the sound of a horse's feet approaching, with great rapidity, the door. The sister started; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... of Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... a few drops of the cup of astrology from the venerable Professor Vallier. Angelique's finger pointed to the star Algol—that strange, mutable star that changes from bright to dark with the hours, and which some believe changes men's hearts ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... here, he should succeed elsewhere. This real indifference gave him advantages with Dora, which a man of feeling would perhaps never have obtained, or never have kept. Her father, though he believed in the mutable nature of woman, yet could scarcely think that his daughter Dora was of this nature. He could scarcely conceive that her passion for Harry Ormond—that passion which had, but a short time before, certainly affected her spirits, and put him in fear for her health—could have been conquered by a ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the mark of man's excelling dignity in the inexhaustible depth of his nature and in his noble discontent with every finite and mutable thing. The soul of man is "too big for earthly designs and interests." There is forever a restless appetite within man for some infinite Good without which he can never be satisfied. Everything which he attains or achieves still leaves him in "pinching penury," unsatiated with ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... having been rendered prominent by tarantism in different individuals, it could not but happen that other derangements of the nerves would assume the form of this whenever circumstances favoured such a transition. This was more especially the case with hysteria, that proteiform and mutable disorder, in which the imaginations, the superstitions, and the follies of all ages have been evidently reflected. The "Carnevaletto delle Donne" appeared most opportunely for those who were hysterical. Their disease received from it, as it had at other times from other extraordinary ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... one proof how much more commanding is that part of a literature which speaks to the elementary affections of men, than that which is founded on the mutable aspects of manners—it is a fact that, even in our elaborate system of society, where an undue value is unavoidably given to the whole science of social intercourse, and a continual irritation applied to the sensibilities ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... possible to be understood; wherein in mine opinion he hath deserved a perpetual laud and thank of all this noble royaume of England, and especially of them that shall read and understand it. For in the said book they may see what this transitory and mutable world is, and whereto every man living in it ought to intend. Then forasmuch as this said book so translated is rare and not spread ne known as it is digne and worthy, for the erudition and learning as such as be ignorant and not knowing of it, at request of a singular friend and ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... obstructed by competition. There are two objections, however, which I have not removed,—I allude to "the failure of the seasons and the ravages of the worm." Very little need be said to combat these. Seasons are mutable, and the same heaven that frowns this year on the labors of the husbandman, may smile the next; while a remedy for the "ravages of the worm" may be found in the mutation of the soil, the destruction of the grub, or the rotation of crops,—accessories ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... so joyful I beheld As unto the brightness of that heaven she entered More luminous thereat the planet grew, And if the star itself was changed and smiled What became I who by my nature am Exceeding mutable in every guise?" ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... trees. It was a lawn that spoke of many years of care; and in the middle of its velvet green, under the branches of two sheltering elms, stood the old red house. It looked comfortable and secure, in its homely simplicity; something to depend on in the otherwise mutable scenes of life. Aleck felt an instantaneous liking for it, and was glad that his errand, sad as it might possibly be, had yet led ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... have given me youth, and I accept it," he said aloud, perhaps addressing that mutable goddess who presides over all follies. "Regret it in my old age? Not I! I shall have lived for one short month. Youth was given to us to enjoy, and I propose to press the grape to the final drop. And when I grow old this adventure shall be the tonic ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... and hazy eyes; ladies of slender build, with small and fragile foreheads, they hang for ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious lords. Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable element in things, or that the library had been handed down from father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by devious lines of descent. It was a tradition in the family that its men should be scholars and its women ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... cried Diotima, "the Ancient Beauty! Look how its petals expand, and what comes forth from its heart!" A vast and glowing breath, mutable and opalescent, spread itself between heaven and earth, and out of it slowly descended a radiant form like a god's. It drew nigh, radiating lights, pure, beautiful, and star-like. It stood for a moment by the child and placed its hand on his head, and then it was gone. The old shepherd fell ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... his only joy for years onward. In the streets he would observe a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to express to a hair's-breadth in mutable flesh what he was at that moment wishing to express in durable shape. He would dodge and follow the owner like a detective; in omnibus, in cab, in steam-boat, through crowds, into shops, churches, theatres, public-houses, and slums—mostly, ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... regret we say it, the French Emperor has so much at heart; and without the aid and assistance of England, the ruler of France could not and durst not move an inch against us. Not the least, nor least strange, of the changes of this mutable world is to be seen in the circumstance that France should be restrained from undoing the work of the Bourbons and of Napoleon I. by England's firm opposition to the wishes and purposes of Napoleon III. The Bourbon policy, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... and then—indeed, for long passages—there is nothing very different from the matter to which, since the first warning in 1818, we have been accustomed. Scott is, if not the infinitely various but never mutable Scott of the earlier years, still constant in fun and kindness, in quaint erudition and hearty friendship, though he is all this in a slightly deadened and sicklied degree. But there are strange breaks-down and unfamiliar touches, now of almost querulous self-concern (the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... no reason to fear the penalty which that change so often brings in England, they would be ready to make it once a month. Caprice is the characteristic vice of miscellaneous assemblies, and without some check their selection would be unceasingly mutable. This peculiar danger of the present Constitution of France has however been prevented by its peculiar circumstances. The Assembly have not been inclined to remove M. Thiers, because in their lamentable present ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot |
