"Unfixed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... They perceive that they are nothing but branches, wrenched from the great African banyan, not yet planted in genial soil, and affording neither shelter nor food to the beasts of the forest or the fowls of the air—their roots unfixed in the earth, and their tender shoots withering as they hang pendent ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... lines, covering the whole city front, looked magnificent, and it was dreadful to think that such a splendid body of men must march into such a slaughter-pen. Their movement was a repetition of ours. With bayonets unfixed they moved forward and attempted to maintain a firing-line under Marye's Heights on the ground from which we had been driven, only to be hurled mercilessly back as we had been. Our line had been the first to make this effort, and for some reason we had approached to within about ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... the man out on the rack. They did not stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning they may have seen witches everywhere—because their minds were fixed on witchcraft. But they did not see things to burn everywhere, because their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the stake, with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and pestilence, they did not say to each other, "A little burning is what my Aunt Susan wants, to cure her of back-biting," or "Some of these faggots ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... the same kind as though vaster in scope than the human. Partly through the influence of mythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Little by little, it works out the substance of the Hegelian formula: "Whatever is, is according to reason: whatever is according to reason, that ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... and a queen!" "O Dalica!" the shuddering maid exclaimed, "Could I encounter that fierce, frightful man? Could I speak? no, nor sigh!" "And canst thou reign?" Cried Dalica; "yield empire or comply." Unfixed though seeming fixed, her eyes downcast, The wonted buzz and bustle of the court From far through sculptured galleries met her ear; Then lifting up her head, the evening sun Poured a fresh splendour on her burnished throne— The fair Charoba, the young queen, complied. But ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... that when you looked for it, it was gone; or if this be thought the delicate fiction of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild spasms of "wild justice," half punishment, half outrage: but anyhow, being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... But as that idea crumbled away from him, Augustus and his affairs became more and more distasteful to him. After all, it ought to be wished that Mountjoy should become the elder son,—even Mountjoy, the incurable gambler. It was terrible to Mr. Grey that the old, fixed arrangement should be unfixed, and certainly there was nothing in the character of Augustus to reconcile him ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... indefinite article, leave the meaning unfixed, or, in some degree, vague. With a slight shade of difference in meaning, we say, Give me a paper, one paper, any paper, some paper, and so on. Though these words restrict the meaning of the noun, they do not fix it to a particular ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... Cecilia had yet written no answer; the evening came, and her resolution was still unfixed. Delvile, at length, was again announced; and though she dreaded trusting herself to his entreaties, the necessity of hastening some decision deterred her from refusing to ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... vocabulary of nature. They grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. They never sheathed their claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the integument of nature. Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were very bright. At night they scraped out their earths like a badger, and, like the badger's, those earths were exceeding clean. The men were numbered off by threes from the flank, and one in three watched ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... of labour. The first was field work: every year each man was bound to do a fixed amount of ploughing on the domain land (as it was called later on), and also to give what was called a corvee, that is to say, an unfixed amount of ploughing, which the steward could demand every week when it was needed; the distinction corresponds to the distinction between week work and boon work in the later Middle Ages. The second kind of labour which every owner of a farm had to do on the monks' land was called handwork, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... only relations, and her husband had none. Still to be under the constant yoke of an overpowering woman with unfixed opinions seems to be an unmitigated evil for her and her boys; and no one's feelings need be hurt by her fixing herself near some public school for her sons' education. However, she is settled for this year, and at ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... table, eats, drinks, indulges in badinage with his servant, and listens to the music of his private band. The musicians play melodies from popular operas of the period in which Mozart wrote—not Spanish melodies of the unfixed time in which the veritable Don ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... breakfast-room was often haunted by visitors, unknown to me by face or name,— ladies, who used to pity me and even to pet me, until I became nimble in escaping from their caresses. Everything seemed to be unfixed, uncertain; it was like being on the platform of a railway-station waiting for a train. In all this time, the agitated, nervous presence of my Father, whose pale face was permanently drawn with anxiety, added to my perturbation, and I became miserable, stupid—as if I ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... de Vergennes has, within these ten days, had a very severe attack of what is deemed an unfixed gout. He has been well enough, however, to do business to-day. But anxieties for him are not yet quieted. He is a great and good minister, and an accident to him might ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Madhu! yet again, this Yog, This Peace, derived from equanimity, Made known by thee—I see no fixity Therein, no rest, because the heart of men Is unfixed, Krishna! rash, tumultuous, Wilful and strong. It were all one, I think, To hold the wayward ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... and worked out my deliverance in the predestined way. What I liked then was regularity, uniformity, exactness. I did not conceive of literature as the expression of life, and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, mutable, and unfixed, even if at the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... beseeching plaints of the wounded," said a French soldier, describing one of these scenes. "We had no use for prisoners and on both sides there was no quarter given in this Argonne wood. Better than fixed bayonets was an unfixed bayonet grasped as a dagger. Better than any bayonet was a bit of iron or a broken gun-stock, or a sharp knife. In that hand-to-hand fighting there was no shooting but only the struggling of interlaced ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... proceeded so far, that a large proportion of the phylogenetic hypotheses are regarded as very nearly certain, and can hardly undergo any further essential modifications; while the greater number of them are still in an unfixed state, and one systematist tries to improve them in this ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... 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, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the left hand at the balance (center of gravity, bayonet unfixed) the thumb clasps the piece; the sling is included in the grasp ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... organisms, as the Hematococci and Protococci, evenly imbedded in a mass of mucus, or dispersed through the Arctic snow, display no differentiations of surface: the several parts of the surface being subjected to no definite contrasts of conditions. The Thalassicolla above mentioned, unfixed, and rolled about by the waves, presents all its sides successively to the same agencies; and all its sides are alike. A ciliated sphere like the Volvox has no parts of its periphery unlike other parts; and it is not to be expected that it should have; seeing that as it ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... harness, and was said most truly. Punch was more congenial to him, and no doubt more generous, than Fraser. There was still something of the literary Bohemian about him, but not as it had been before. He was still unfixed, looking out for some higher career, not altogether satisfied to be no more than one of an anonymous band of brothers, even though the brothers were the brothers of Punch. We can only imagine what were his thoughts ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... my promise, and absolve my vow! 'Tis more than Mahomet himself can do!— The word, which I have given, shall stand like fate; Not like the king's, that weather-cock of state. He stands so high, with so unfixed a mind, Two factions turn him with each blast of wind: But now, he shall not veer! my word is past; I'll take his heart by the roots, and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... over to the House of Commons, as completely as the American people part with it to the President? They give it over for four years: we for a period which on the average is somewhat more: they, to resume it at a fixed time; we, on an unfixed contingency, and at a time which will finally be determined, not according to the popular will, but according to the views which a Ministry may entertain of ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... first prick of the lancet David shivered, and, as the blood escaped, his eye unfixed, and the pupils contracted and dilated, and once he sighed. "Good sign ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... changed by millenniums of a different environment, remain in Malaysia, known there as the aborigines (Orang-Benoa), by the majority races. D'Urville said the Harfouras of Celebes were identical physically with the Polynesians. At some unfixed date the first of the Polynesians pushed out in their insecure craft for this sea, driven away by the Malay-Hindu invasion or ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... to a plain fact, attested by three-and-twenty witnesses. To assert the doctrine of the fixed laws of nature, was ridiculous, when there were so many people of credit to prove that they might be unfixed. Years rolled on; the story ceased to engage attention, and it was forgotten, unless when occasionally ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... invented first to damn mankind! Nature took care to dress you up for sin; Adorned, without; unfinished left, within. Hence, by no judgment you your loves direct; Talk much, ne'er think, and still the wrong affect. So much self-love in your composure's mixed, That love to others still remains unfixed: Greatness, and noise, and shew, are your delight; Yet wise men love you, in their own despite: And finding in their native wit no ease, Are forced to put your ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... fuor che agli occhi piace—to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma universale—that abstract form of beauty about which the Platonists reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting and unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... was, what it became, how it was to be distinguished from sorcery—these are questions that we have tried to answer very briefly. We have dealt in a cursory way with a series of cases extending from Anglo-Saxon days down to the fifteenth century in order to show how unfixed was the matter of jurisdiction. We have sought also to explain how Continental opinion was introduced into England through Jewel and other Marian exiles, to show what independent forces were operating in England, and ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... seen; But—it might be with twenty years between, Or haply less—at unfixed interval There would a semblance be of festival. A Seneschal and usher would appear, And troops of servants many baskets bear. Then were, in mystery, preparations made, And they departed—for till night none stayed. But 'twixt the branches gazers ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... by Merlin's calculation, Was under Venus, Mercury, and Mars; His mind with all their attributes was mixed, And, like those planets, wandering and unfixed. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... frightened; the men passengers looked grave, the Lascars rather unsteady; but we had forty English seamen and a hundred invalid soldiers on board, who could all be depended upon. The guns were loaded and shotted, and the invalid soldiers were mustered; muskets and ammunition handed up; the bayonets fixed, unfixed again; and then they were ordered to remain on the booms with their accoutrements on and their muskets by their sides. The officers still kept their glasses on the lugger, until at last the fog came down and we could see her ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... back a photograph of the uncovered countenance, with its one unvarying granite story for all. There is one glory of the Gazetteer with his fixed facts, and another of the Poet with his variable quantities of fancy. The fixed fact may be unfixed next year, like an almanac, but the hasty sketch of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... things entailed only one inconvenience. Nothing had any stability; so that the slightest push or jerk would upset everything that was not fixed. However, I had so far anticipated this that nothing of any material consequence was unfixed, and except that a touch with my spoon upset the egg-cup and egg on which I was about to breakfast, and that this, falling against a breakfast cup full of coffee, overturned that, I was not incommoded. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... besides, it was explained that his destination in India was unfixed. On going home it had been a kind of promise that one of the twin brothers should have an appointment in the civil service, the other should enter the bank of Kendal and Kendal, and the survivor was unconsciously suspended between these alternatives, while the doubt served as a convenient ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strength, under God, consisting in the bodies of their citizens, proper and stout men, who, if they come to fight pro aris et focis, for religion, liberty, wives and children, and estates, for their all, are full of courage; not like mercenary, unfixed, unfaithful men, whose trade is in blood, and ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... sailor's rude eulogy—"Well, poor George is gone! His cruise is up soon! He knew his work, and did his duty, and was a good shipmate." Then usually follows some allusion to another world, for sailors are almost all believers; but their notions and opinions are unfixed and at loose ends. They say,—"God won't be hard upon the poor fellow," and seldom get beyond the common phrase which seems to imply that their sufferings and hard treatment here will excuse them hereafter,—"To ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken before they were written; and while they were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with great diversity, as we now observe those who cannot read to catch sounds imperfectly, and utter them negligently. When this wild and barbarous jargon was ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... in this bath face down, and one under, instead of on top of another. The tray should be occasionally rocked. With a fresh bath prints will fix in ten minutes, but where many prints are made at one time it will be well to use a second fixing bath. The emulsion of an unfixed print will appear a yellowish tinge in the unfixed portions when examined by transmitted light; but this is not an easy or certain test. It is better to make absolutely certain of thorough fixing by continued immersion, ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant
... they bought out or crushed their rivals, until by 1882 most of the traffic in petroleum was under his control. Economy and sagacity had much to do with the success, but were less significant than transportation. Railway rates were yet unfixed by law and every road sold transportation as best it could. Rockefeller learned to bargain in freight rates, and through a system of special rates and rebates gained advantages over every competitor. His lobby made it difficult to weaken ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... arises from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity, properly so-called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed and chaotic intellect.... Now if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... he can. But the distance of ornament is never fixed to the general spectator. The tower of a cathedral is bound to look well, ten miles off, or five miles, or half a mile, or within fifty yards. The ornaments of its top have fixed distances, compared with those of its base; but quite unfixed distances in their relation to the great world: and the ornaments of the base have no fixed distance at all. They are bound to look well from the other side of the cathedral close, and to look equally well, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... incomparable and masterly sagacity as usual, but for want of any trustworthy record of Celtic words and forms to work upon, the truth remained concealed or obscured until the publication of the Gramatica Celtica. Dr. Arnold, a man of the past generation, who made more use of the then uncertain and unfixed doctrines of comparative philology in his historical writings than is done by the present generation in the fullest noonday light of the Vergleichende Grammatik, was thus justified in his view by the philology of the period, to which he merely gave an enlarged historical expression. The ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... lies, or an old mythological legend, they interest no principle in man's moral heart; they make no oracular answers, put forth no secret agitation, they provoke no question. But Christianity, merely by her settlements and fixing of truths, has disengaged and unfixed a world of other truths, for sustaining or for tempting an endless activity of the intellect. And the astonishing result has thus been accomplished—that round a centre, fixed and motionless as a polar tablet of ice, there has been in the remote offing a tumbling sea of everlasting agitation. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... I told you, two years and upwards that we remained at Venice and thereabout, in the greatest hesitation imaginable, irresolute and unfixed to the last degree. William's sister importuned us daily to come to England, and wondered we should not dare to trust her, whom we had to such a degree obliged to be faithful; and in a manner lamented her ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... force. The effect of even a small number of successful interventions will be to confirm right habits of choice, which may then, as new opportunities arise, be applied to further cases. Among the cases of linguistic usage which are varying and unfixed at the present time, and in which therefore a deliberate choice is possible, the following ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... that he also went regularly to church. He declared that he was not an infidel, who denied the Scriptures and wished to remain in unbelief; on the contrary, he was desirous to believe, as he experienced no happiness in having his religious opinions so unsteady and unfixed. But he could not, he added, understand the Scriptures. "Those people who conscientiously believe, I always have respected, and was always disposed to trust in them more than in others." A desultory conversation then ensued, respecting the language and translations ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... will be clear that an extempore prayer may be part of a form of Service, just as much as a printed prayer. If the Service is composed of, The short Prayer, a Lesson, the long Prayer, the Sermon and several Hymns at fixed, or unfixed, places, the Service is a form. The description of the Holy Communion in the time immediately after the death of S. John the Evangelist (Justin Martyr, Apology i. 65-67, {3} see p. 58) shows us a form which provided for the essentials of such a service, with prayers, praises, lessons, offertory, ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... fifth centuries, literary fabricators had the skill and the audacity to make such additions and interpolations as these, what may they have done when no one had thought of a canon; when oral tradition, still unfixed, was regarded as more valuable than such written records as may have existed in the latter portion of the first century? Or, to take the other alternative, if those who gradually settled the canon did not know of the existence of the oldest codices which have come down to us; or if, knowing them, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... even later than the fourth or fifth centuries, literary fabricators had the skill and the audacity to make such additions and interpolations as these, what may they have done when no one had thought of a canon; when oral tradition still unfixed, was regarded as more valuable than such written records as may have existed in the latter portion of the first century? Or, to take the other alternative, if those who gradually settled the canon did not know of the oldest ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... the general wishes of the people, and it appeared to him that they were in favour of triennial parliaments. At the same time, in the bill which he proposed to bring in, he intended to leave the term of future parliaments unfixed, so that it might form a subject of debate in committee. His bill contained two clauses, one to repeal the septennial act, and the other to determine the period of each parliament's existence. The resistance of the proposition was left to ministers themselves, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore; Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose, Quick as her eyes and as unfixed as those; Favours to none, to all she smiles extends, Oft she rejects, but never once offends. Bright as the sun her eyes the gazers strike, And, like the sun, they shine on all alike. Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride, Might hide her faults, if belles had faults ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... an obscure tale of a revolt of an unfixed date, but which must have happened between 1048 and 1053. The rebel, William Busac of the house of Eu, is said to have defended the castle of Eu against the duke and to have gone into banishment in France. ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... those of Sismondi, however much their force may be felt on the Continent, could be formidable at home, as we have said, in only a time of revolution, when the very foundations of society would be unfixed, and opinion set loose, to pull down or reconstruct at pleasure. But it is surely not uninteresting to mark how, in the course of events, that very law of England which, in the view of the Frenchman, has done ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... I'm told Some ancients like my rusty lay, As Grandpa Noah loved the old Red-sandstone march of Jubal's day I used to carol like the birds, But time my wits has quite unfixed, Et quoad verba,—for my words,— Ciel! Eheu! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Much may remain unfixed; but the negative of that is a thing fixed: in the Slouch-hatted heads, in the French Nation's head. Double representation, and all else hitherto gained, were otherwise futile, null. Doubtless, the 'powers must be verified;'—doubtless, the Commission, the electoral Documents of ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle |
