"Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... communicate them freely to Madeline as they walked. No; there was no longer the slightest touch of hypocrisy in her pleasant manner and eager voice as she answered, "No, papa, I have not heard. Was it Mr. So-and-so?" and she named an ephemeral literary giant of the day. "No," said the judge, "it was not So-and-so; but yet you might guess, as you know the gentleman." Then the slight shade of hypocrisy came upon her again in a moment. "She couldn't guess," she said; "she didn't know." But as she thus spoke the tone of her voice was ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... thou the image of a thought that fares Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead, Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares, To where our lives are but the ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... and the highest walks in life have the hardiest weeds, she knew what love should be. Here was a love—it may be modern, advanced, chic, fin-de-siecle, up-to-date, or anything the coming generation may choose to call it—but it was eminently cheap and ephemeral because it could not make a little sacrifice of vanity. For the sake of the man she loved—mark that!—not only the man to whom she was engaged, but whom she loved—Millicent Chyne could not forbear pandering to her own vanity by the sacrifice of her own modesty and purity of thought. There ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of keeping or winning for ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... mind the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it suggested—absurdly and abominably—a certain cheap drink of sudden and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined, extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably wandering about ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... and oppressive weight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be the poet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to do the amazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral and shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepened and matured and increased in stature; he has not even stood still, remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadily deteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... you from the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her. Adrian's book had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... And sees the tide of Life roll calm along, Where glittering phantoms rise, a luring throng; And voiceful Fame holds out the laurel bough: Where rapturous applause is loud and long, Frail guerdon for the heart!—which lights the brow With the ephemeral smile of Mind's ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... and boy should go on to the hard and unlighted life that inevitably awaited them, if neither had the opportunity of development. She would be at forty a later edition of the Widow Miller. He had seen the widow. Sally's charm must be as ephemeral under the life of illiterate drudgery and perennial child-bearing as her mother's had been. Her shoulders, now so gloriously straight and strong, would sag, and her bosom shrink, and her face harden and take on that drawn misery of constant anxiety. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... ephemeral, were once replaced in the toilets of ladies by artificial ones. The artificial flower industry originated in China, and from thence passed into Italy and afterward into France. In course of time people got tired of artificial flowers for decorative purposes, and then imitation fruits made their ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... wasp and tutored bee sing sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; with broad coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts alee. Beside a brown coated stone in the shadowed stream a brown trout watches for the puffs that slay the May-flies. Their ephemeral wings were made for a more exquisite life; they endure but one sun; they bear not the touch of the water; they die like a dream dropping into the river. To the amethyst in the deep ditch the wind comes; no petal ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Posthumus to Tetricus, its connections with Italy ceased, and it maintained its own emperors and its own legions. This was in sympathy with the rising spirit of nationalities, awakened throughout the empire by Septimus Severus, but in this ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille Jullian before the Academie des Inscriptions in 1896, "as we would willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening of the third century, it was entirely superficial, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... westward, came to the Great Salt Lake, where, as he told his followers, he was instructed by divine revelation to plant the City of the Saints. It proved more permanent than might have been expected, as zion—cities usually are quite ephemeral affairs. ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... pains and croissants for breakfast, the order having gone forth that bakers, being short-handed, are to make only pain de menage. Similarly, because the majority of journalists and popular writers are under arms, Paris does without its accustomed daily refreshment of ephemeral literature, its comic and illustrated press, its literary and artistic causeries, its feuilletons, and chroniques. It does without its theatres, its music halls, without politics, art, and social amenities, without barbers, florists, and motor cars, partly because there are not men enough ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small in the poetic world have the same general attitude toward their gift. It is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the subject of their nature than have greater ones, but ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... bitter a hatred of fools. He has suffered, as Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is, indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be justified, by the correctness of his judgment. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... above the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of the little chapel or the walls of the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth." ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... explained the matter. The explanation brought Lionel relief. But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... from peat (sphagnol), Swedish wood tar, permanganate of potash, perborates and percarbonates of soda and ammonia, chlorine compounds, but none of these has at present come much into favour, and some had only ephemeral existence. Of the many drugs that it has been suggested to admix in soap for use in allaying an irritable condition of the skin, the majority are obviously better applied in the form of ointments, and we need not ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... not resume in this our exile, and with more prospect of continuity, the emotions which were so agreeable in our former state? So agreeable—although, as you justly say, too ephemeral [coming a little closer]. Can you not teach us to moderate and ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... is debarred me. I will not sit even at your table with a muzzled tongue. When you are gone, Caroline, I shall devote myself to what, after all, must be the work of my life, and I shall finish the biographical history of our great hero in verse,—which I hope may at least be not ephemeral. From month to month I shall send you what I do, and you will not refuse me your friendly criticism,—and, perhaps, some slight meed of approbation,—because you are dwelling beneath the shade of a throne. Oh, Caroline, let it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... because its motif has been singing itself of its own accord in his heart, and its rhythm was the dream nightingale to which he bade Her hearken. Behind the tradition lies the fact. The expression may be ephemeral, the song flat, the motto conventional, but the feeling which prompted it is true. Else it could not have survived. And it has more than survived. It has grown with growth. For centuries it lodged in the nature of man, lulled in acquiescence, then, when the sense of recognition awoke, back in those ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... thought; but time has washed it out as it has washed out mountains and continents." She raised herself on her elbow. "And what if we could help mankind, and leave the traces of our work upon it to the end? Mankind is only an ephemeral blossom on the tree of time; there were others before it opened; there will be others after it has fallen. Where was man in the time of the dicynodont, and when hoary monsters wallowed in the mud? Will he be found in the aeons that are to come? We are sparks, we are shadows, we are pollen, ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... was phlegm personified. Never, either from anger or passion, had any emotion whatever hastened the beating of this man's heart, or flushed his face; never had his pupils contracted under the influence of any irritation, however ephemeral. He invariably wore good clothes, neither too large nor too small, which he never seemed to wear out. He was shod with large square shoes with triple soles and silver buckles, which lasted so long that his shoemaker was in despair. Upon his head he ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... these propositions may at first seem strange, but they are founded. The quantity of trash I have received as books is incalculable, and neither amused nor instructed. Reviews and magazines are at the best but ephemeral and superficial reading: who thinks of the grand article of last year in any given Review? In the next place, if they regard myself, they tend to increase egotism. If favourable, I do not deny that the praise elates, and if unfavourable, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... and the Methodist Connexion were much too well adapted to human needs to disappear with their authors. On the other hand, movements and systems which depend wholly upon one man do not often prove to be more than ephemeral. But none would deny that there is much to be learnt from The Salvation Army and from the earnest, strenuous, and resourceful personality of the man who made it. Let us hope that, if The Army as an Organisation should ultimately fade away, the great ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... dependencies:—the existence of places without the London radius is seldom brought home to the readers of our daily metropolitan papers, except some "Frightful Murder," or "Painful Accident," or "Dreadful Calamity" occurs, to fasten ephemeral ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... their force is not contained in these few brilliant and striking exceptions, but in the millions of mere ordinary paragraphs which meet the eye from day to day, in the columns of the daily and weekly press, and which have apparently but an ephemeral existence. The dashing torrent and the mighty river are the more noticeable objects to the casual observer. But it is the minute myriad drops of the rain and the dew that cause the real wonders of vegetation. ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... product of the United States from 1815 to 1830 is contained in magazines rather than in books. Prose and verse which could never have found a publisher separately appeared in periodicals of every description. Most of these were ephemeral publications. The more serious reviews, like the American Biblical Repository, the American Law Journal, and the religious reviews, had a longer life; but the lighter magazines, like the Ladies' Literary Cabinet, the Young Ladies' Parental Mentor, and the Casket: ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... wore when dancing with him, and she remembered him specially in her prayers. Henceforward, one devouring desire occupied her mind. She wished—and praiseworthily—to be Burton's wife. To him, on the other hand, she was but an ephemeral fancy—one of the hundred and fifty women—his fair cousins in England and the softer and darker beauties of France and Italy—to whom he had said tender nothings. Later, when Miss Arundell saw him flirting with another girl, a certain "Louise" [100] (not to be confused ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... ephemeral. Taste and public opinion having no corporal identity, are nothing but the passing fancy of a ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the use of the poor papers were restricted to newspapers and other ephemeral literature, but when, as is often the case, paper of very poor quality is used for books of permanent literary interest, ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... distribution of the volcanoes which have been in a state of activity during historical times, the great number of insular and littoral volcanic mountains, and the occasional, although ephemeral, eruptions in the bottom of the sea, early led to the belief that volcanic activity was connected with the neighborhood of the sea, and was dependent upon it for its continuance. "For many hundred years," says Justinian, or rather Trogus Pompeius, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the first step towards its composition, on Weber's part, was the study of the English language itself, the right understanding of which, Weber justly considered as preliminary to any attempt to marry Mr. Planche's ephemeral verses to his own immortal music. These exertions increased his weakness so much, that he found it necessary to resort to a watering-place in the summer of 1825. In December he returned to Berlin, to bring out his Euryanthe there in person. It was received, as might have been anticipated, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as "An Irish Folk Song." Like "O Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wouldn't suppose now, my young Clive, that the same hand which pens the Art criticisms, occasionally, when His Highness Pendennis is lazy, takes a minor theatre, or turns the sportive epigram, or the ephemeral paragraph, should adopt a grave theme on a Sunday, and chronicle the sermons of British divines? For eighteen consecutive Sunday evenings, Clive, in Mrs. Ridley's front parlour, which I now occupy, vice Miss Cann promoted, I have written the Pencillings—scarcely ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... everything is arranged in accordance with a most purposeful plan and is most strictly subjected to laws and rules. And the very strict order, on account of which the existence of your creations is so short lived, and, I may say, ephemeral, is full of the profoundest wisdom. Allowing you to perfect yourself in your art, it wisely guards other people against the perhaps injurious influence of your productions, and in any case it completes ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... case of ordinary stars these changes no doubt occupy many millions of years, which represent the average duration of solar life; but the temporary stars run through similar changes in a few months: they resemble ephemeral insects — born in the morning and doomed to perish with the going down of ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... are subdivided into ephemeral fevers, which last but a short time and terminate by critical phenomena; intermittent fevers, in which there are alterations of exacerbations of the febrile symptoms and remissions, in which the body ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... Life was an ephemeral preface to the interminable and actual existence of immortality. Temporal things were transient and only of probationary value. The tomb was the ultimate and hoped-for, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... enfold a legion of children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... and now he has produced "Les Corbeaux" at the Odeon, where it has been definitely accepted and consecrated as a masterpiece. I could not refrain from going to Paris specially to see it. It was years since I had been in the Odeon. Rather brighter, perhaps, in its more ephemeral decorations, but still the same old-fashioned, roomy, cramped, provincial theatre, with pit-tier boxes like the cells of a prison! The audience was good. It was startingly good for the Odeon. The play, too, at first ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... may assert the presence of a foreign body, or may even volitionally swallow or aspirate objects. It is a mistake to do a bronchoscopy in order to cure by suggestion the delusion of foreign body presence. Such "cures" are ephemeral. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former days. As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the recalcitrant. "If you don't stop eating that mustache you'll have stomach trouble that no Scotch whisky will ever cure. The whole thing is in a nutshell," a sly humor creeping into his eyes. "I am tired of writing ephemeral things. I want to ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... still intending to go to America were now gathered in one vessel. Whatever previous disposition of them had been made, or whatever relations they might have had in the disjointed record of the exodus, were ephemeral, and are now lost sight of in the enduring interest which attaches to their final and successful "going forth" as ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... once told me that the paper was regarded with but little encouragement by the occupants of an omnibus in which he was riding, one gentleman, after looking gravely through its pages, tossing it aside with the remark, "One of those ephemeral things they bring out; won't last a fortnight!" Dr. Thompson, Master of Trinity, informed Professor Herkomer that he, too, was riding in an omnibus on the famous 17th of July, when he bought a copy from a paper-boy, and began to look at it ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... was set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor; the stupid good, the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... been contained inside of the citadel but hid from the view by its towering walls. This castle was beautiful beyond description. It was fairer far than the castles of the kings seem to be, except when "distance lends enchantment to their view." But the second scene was as ephemeral as the first. We beheld its fascinating beauties only a few seconds when its four walls again dropped into the abyss below, and there issued from its inner apartment a host of beautiful little actresses such as I did not see upon any other stage in Europe. These little ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... glorious revolution; upon his attempts afterwards to improve the government of his own country and to place some check upon the despotic power of a selfish, calculating ministry; upon his uniform resolute, and fearless opposition to the wild projects of factious men, who obtained ephemeral influence in France, but whose conduct was equally hostile to the rights and welfare of the people as that of the agents of an absolute monarch; upon his steady and firm support of the constitution, formed by the deputies of the people, and designed to guarantee ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... stolidly. "By their own bulk—like a big snowball. And by their own badness. People are rolling back to the country—the country they came from. Improved transportation will do it." The troubles of the town were ephemeral—he waved them aside. But his face was set in a frown—doubtless at the thought of the perdurable ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without mischief—they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning sand, and leave depression ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... smiling radiance, Through orifice, through rift and aperture, Invades the storm, and dissipates the clouds, Which scatter, cowering and ephemeral, Hugging the cliffs, and o'er the dire abyss Hover, in fleecy, ever changing form, And in a transient season disappear; Vanish, as man must vanish, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... it carried in its bony, glowing hand a great, nicked scythe. Its rattling tread echoed hollowly on the floor. Stooping walk, shuffling gait, the great metal scythe scraping on the floor, half seen as the gray, luminous cloak blew open in some unfelt breeze of its ephemeral world, revealing bone; dry, gray bone. Only the scythe seemed to know Life, and it was red with that Life. Slow running, ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... allotted to the celebrated Council of Five Hundred. During their ephemeral reign, these very rooms were designed for their halls of audience, and levees, the rich mouldings, and cornices of which were half gilt, and covered with silver paper to preserve them: the poor council were never indulged in a ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... restoration of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He soon mixed with the gayest society, and became well known as a prolific writer of songs, prologues, epilogues, masques, and the lighter dramatic fare. Much of this work is not lacking in wit and volatile smartness, but it is all far too ephemeral to have any permanent value as literature. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, but is perhaps best remembered for his translation of Don Quixote, and his concluding Urquhart's version ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... character depicted; the charm of an almost unequaled simplicity and directness. He possessed the rare gift of being able to envelop every topic that he touched with an atmosphere of elegance and distinction. His productions are not ephemeral, but are of the kind ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... actions, or when his environment is still very ignorant and superstitious, the crowd of believers increases still more rapidly, and thus one sees even at the present day in less-civilized countries new sects or religious guilds, more or less ephemeral, in which the spirit of the prophet sometimes stirs ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the Ministry here, three groups are represented: one declines to take Lenin seriously, regarding him as an ephemeral personage, the second does not take this view at all, but is nevertheless unwilling to treat with a revolutionary of this sort, and the third consists, as far as I am aware, of myself alone, and I will treat with him, despite the possibly ephemeral character of his position and the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... discern his nature that she might educate him wisely. It seemed at times as if she had but that one child. Diard, seeing that the eldest, Juan, was in a way neglected, took him under his own protection; and without inquiring even of himself whether the boy was the fruit of that ephemeral love to which he owed his wife, he made him ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... must have some joy, natural or merely manufactured, in order to go on living, it forced me to cultivate other interests, which, perhaps, had I been happy, I should have neglected for brighter but more ephemeral joys. So I am not frightened of my own society, and that, though a rather dreary achievement, is by no means to be despised. It enables me to wander about alone and yet be happy; it permits me to travel with no ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... their gaiety and daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language: and there were other strange words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral existence. ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... object that M. France—attestedly, indeed, since he remains unjailed-cannot himself believe all this, and that it is with an ironic glitter in his ink he has recorded these dicta. To which the obvious answer would be that M. France (again like all great creative writers) is an ephemeral and negligible person beside his durable puppets; and that, moreover, to reason thus is, it may be precipitately, to disparage the plumage of birds on the ground that an egg has no feathers... Whatever M. France may believe, our concern ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... the novel "Fathers and Children" rises above a picture of Russian politics in the sixties, and remains forever an immortal work of art. For the greatness of this book lies not in the use of the word Nihilist, nor in the reproduction of ephemeral political movements; its greatness consists in the fact that it faithfully portrays not merely the Russian character, nor the nineteenth century, but the very depths of the human heart as it has manifested itself in all ages and among ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... produces while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can recall nothing but a succession of flavors. It is not to be expected that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning are impressional. He is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the mistletoe of English literature whose roots are not in the soil ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... and her look and tone were both solemn. "You ask me what good it can do? Reflect! If the history of a single leaf is so vast and yet ephemeral, what may not be the history of a single world? What, after all, are we when such an infinitesimal space can contain such wonderful transactions in ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... leaf-cloak, the solitary erect bud slowly rises from its embrace, sheds its sepals, expands into an immaculate golden-centered blossom that, poppy-like, offers but a glimpse of its fleeting loveliness ere it drops its snow-white petals and is gone. But were the flowers less ephemeral, were we always certain of hitting upon the very time its colonies are starring the woodland, would it have so great a charm? Here to-day, if there comes a sudden burst of warm sunshine; gone tomorrow, if the spring winds, rushing through the nearly leafless ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... aside and scorned the Moslem menace as a bogey. What was the result? Troubles in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India. Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral, entente between the two great ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... is not a mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over and over ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... dusk complexions, shed around them a rich barbaric lustre. Not that they eschew adventitious means to blanch their sun-shadowed tints. For days some of the senoras and senoritas have worn a mask of a white clayey mixture to give them an ephemeral whiteness for this occasion. Those who could procure nothing else have worn a pasty vizard kneaded of common clay, to effect in some degree a like result by protecting their faces from the sun and wind. Should you visit New Mexico, and as you ride along slowly in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... all ephemeral, and freaks; they produced, however, somewhat of the same effect on me as on my father, in persuading me that he was born for the sphere he occupied, and rendering me rather callous as to the sources of ways ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... than forty miles north of Liyang. At this point Gordon experienced his first serious rebuff at the hands of Fortune, for the earlier reverse at the Soochow stockades was so clearly due to a miscarriage in the attack, and so ephemeral in its issue, that it can ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... may be inadvertently classed with those ephemeral fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue and the incidents are veritable creations. It may here be asked how could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... superiority. Among the terms stipulated, the Dominion was to assume the colonial debt of British Columbia, amounting to over two million dollars; the building of a road from the Atlantic to the Pacific within a stipulated time. The alliance, however, contained more advantage than the ephemeral assistance of making a road or the assumption of a debt, for with confederation came the abolition of the "one-man system of government" and in its place a responsible one, with freedom of action for enterprise, legislation to encourage development, and assist budding industries; the permanent ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... in Brahmanism and Buddhism. But in Hinduism and Buddhism you will look in vain for any parallel to the Jewish doctrines of "a nothing quickened into life," or of "a world made in time," which cannot be humble enough in its thanks and praises to Jehovah for an ephemeral existence full of ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Clagny was admitted, after requesting an interview, the story of the announcement was known to all Paris. Some persons regarded it as one of those waggish calumnies, a sort of stab to which every reputation, even the most ephemeral, is exposed; others said they had read the paper and returned it to some friend of the La Baudraye family; a great many declaimed against the immorality of journalists; in short, this last remaining specimen was regarded as a curiosity. Florine, with whom Nathan was living, had shown it about, stamped ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the trail of ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... lone man who, reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark, And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, Why human buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral That has his day; while shrivell'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss: Rites, which custom does impose, Silver bells, and baby ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... nation, however small, that has not possessed the right of withdrawing, and that has not withdrawn itself, from the disgrace of obeying a prince imposed upon it by an enemy temporarily victorious. When Charles VII. re-entered Paris, and overturned the ephemeral throne of Henry VI., he acknowledged, that he held his crown from the valour of his brave people, and not from the Prince ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... of Moldavia and Wallachia. During the interval between the death of John Sigismond Zapolya in 1571, and the election of Michael Abaffi in 1661, not fewer than thirteen princes, besides nearly as many ephemeral pretenders, had occupied the throne; and, though at one time the family of Batthori, and, subsequently, that of Racoczy, established a kind of hereditary claim to election, their tenure was always precarious; and, on more than one occasion, the prince was imposed on the states ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... veiled, is at bottom neither more nor less than Atheism. On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... and ephemeral, but it comes from the home world of the spirit and though so fleeting it is recognized by the spirit as a soul-speech fresh from the celestial realms, an echo from the home whence we are now exiled, and therefore it touches a cord in our ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... might not utter a syllable that would jeopardize the interests or safety of her father. The word analyzed is a dead thing; the word in use is a living thing. The word merely analyzed is apt to be ephemeral; the word in use is abiding and increasingly significant. As the child puts more and more content into the word, he, himself, expands at the same rate in the scope and power of his thinking. Words are the materials out of which ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... neck-ribbons round their snowy throats and coquettish patches on their delicate skin and bouquets of flowers in their high-dressed hair and sheeny bodices. They look at us with arch eyes and smile with melting mouths, more frivolous than depraved; sweet, ephemeral, irresponsible in every relation of life. Older men and women there are, too, when those artificial years have produced a succession of rather dull, sodden personages, kindly, inoffensive, but stupid, and still trifling heavily with ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... position, or to rally to its standard all who were in fact its friends. Old parties encumbered the ground. Men were slow to give up old associations and leave the discussion of obsolete, immaterial, or ephemeral issues. ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... straightforward, effective way, without fuss or feathers, and I suppose that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause of the pit. But nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause of education a vast amount of harm. I know a principal who won ephemeral fame by introducing into his school a form of the Japanese jiu-jitsu physical exercises. When I visited that school, I was led to believe that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the American people. Whole classes of girls and ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... discipline of trying to make allowance for those making none, to be charitable to their want of charity, and cool without being cold. But I don't know when I have felt such an aversion to my environment, and prayed so earnestly day by day,—"O, Eternal! purge from my inmost heart this hot haste about ephemeral trifles," and "keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... freely; but not that he should allow himself to be stuck up as a ninepin only to be knocked down! There are politicians for whom such occupation seems to be proper;—and who like it too. A little office, a little power, a little rank, a little pay, a little niche in the ephemeral history of the year will reward many men adequately for ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... and expense in which, when aware what my income was, I indulged myself freely was the purchase of Martial literature. Only ephemeral works are as a rule printed in the phonographic character, which alone I could read with ease. The Martialists have no newspapers. It does not seem to them worth while to record daily the accidents, the business incidents, the prices, the amusements, and the follies of the day; and politics ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... and—not to put too fine a point of it—sell. His books have a regular market value, and this value increases rather than diminishes with years. This is, we confess, rather a suspicious circumstance. Did Milton sell? Did Wordsworth sell? Must not the fame that is instantaneous prove hollow and ephemeral? Are we not acquainted with a certain volume of poems that shall be nameless, the whole edition of which lies untouched and unclaimed on the publisher's shelves? And are we not perfectly well aware that those poems—well, we can wait. If Mr. Saxe would only put ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... that had been long undisturbed and that yielded reluctantly to that candle's intrusion, a darkness that properly became the place and was a part of it and had long been so, in the face of which the candle appeared an ephemeral thing devoid of grace or dignity or tradition. And indeed there was room for darkness in that chamber, for the walls went up and up into such an altitude that you could scarcely see the ceiling, at which mine host's eyes glanced, and Rodriguez ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... you now am no more than the record contained in a book. In terms of personality, Homer is the hidden structure giving strength and substance to a false facade. 'I' am the false facade, faithfully copied from another structure. 'I' am a superimposure of ephemeral data, governing its own employment by a mind that has been restricted from developing its own data. The 'I' that speaks to you has no real existence, though its pattern is being subtly and continuously altered by that which it ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... crowned and installed." Thus concluded this remarkable ceremony. Those who remember having beheld it, must now doubt whether they were waking, or whether fancy had framed a vision so dazzling in its appearance, so extraordinary in its origin and progress, and so ephemeral in its endurance. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... textural change; and though her hair had not lost colour it was considerably thinner than heretofore. She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a widow. Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about eighteen, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... and weighing all the various opinions concerning Nathan's book; and while he was in the humor, he hit off another of his short sketches for Lousteau's newspaper. Inexperienced journalists, in the first effervescence of youth, make a labor of love of ephemeral work, and lavish their best thought ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Evening is another charming thing; the skit on how Rossini's Stabat Mater came to be composed is amusing, and is cruel with a cruelty that was justified. The other articles are of no particular value, save, perhaps, that on the overture; they are of an ephemeral character and were evidently concocted when the writer was fully aware he was writing for French readers, and if he hurt French feelings or vanity, a French editor wouldn't print, wouldn't publish, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... with several others of ephemeral interest, was composed by Lockhart, to be sung at the mess of the Mid-Lothian Yeomanry, of which he was a member. Of the songs produced for these festive occasions, a collection for private circulation was printed in 1825, at the Ballantyne press, with the title, "Songs of the Edinburgh Troop," ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... superseded the sword, for Victor and Eugene were scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to founding a periodical of ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... larva. When all the brood have disappeared, the aperture of the nest is thus hung with a branch of fine, short threads, twisted and knotted together, like dried white of egg. Each thread is expanded into a tiny cup at its free end. These are very delicate and ephemeral relics, which perish at a touch. The least ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... of pleasure is equally ephemeral. Time and experience rob even amusement of its charm, and the night before is not worth next morning's headache. Practical success alone makes early middle-age the most pleasurable period of a man's career. What has been worked for in youth then comes ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... this favour, declaring the revenues from the abbacy were indifferent to him, as he would only use them to restore to its pristine splendour the falling church in which reposed the holy relics of SS. Gratian, Fidelius, and Carpophorus. The peace between the two countries was too ephemeral to permit the ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... assumed and gladly laid aside; for he was one of those exceptional Americans who have no love of political distinction or public office. A lawyer's life leaves little to be recorded; the triumphs of the bar are proverbially ephemeral, and lawyers themselves are willing to forget the cases they have tried and the verdicts they have won. Had Mr. Choate been merely and exclusively a lawyer, the story of his life could have been told in half a dozen pages; but though he was a great lawyer and advocate, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between excited ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... merrily about so long as the sun of opportunity shines upon them. A piece like the Despair of Jocrisse, which, after a lapse of years, may be still occasionally brought out, passes justly among the ephemeral productions for a classical work that has gained the crown of immortality. We must, however, see it acted by Brunet, whose face is almost a mask, and who is nearly as inexhaustible in the part of the simpleton as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... scenical and dramatic life of the diary of a man of genius, like Swift, who wrote one, or even of a lively observer, who lived amidst the scenes he describes, as Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, which form a regular diary, only show that they are better acquainted with the more ephemeral and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... and expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way. How should she have distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have profited its ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... do. I reason on the most honorable hypothesis. What hindered me from concealing, for some years to come, the abstract theory of the equality of fortunes, and, at the same time, from criticising constitutions and codes; from showing the absolute and the contingent, the immutable and the ephemeral, the eternal and the transitory, in laws present and past; from constructing a new system of legislation, and establishing on a solid foundation this social edifice, ever destroyed and as often rebuilt? Might I not, taking up the definitions of casuists, have clearly ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... to the uncertainties of a world to come, the minds of others have dwelt on the prospect of a life beyond the grave till the thought of it has risen with them to a passion, almost to an obsession, and has begotten a contempt for the fleeting joys of this ephemeral existence by comparison with the hoped-for bliss of an eternal existence hereafter. To the sceptic, examining the evidence for immortality by the cold light of reason, such peoples and such individuals may seem to sacrifice the substance for the shadow: to adopt a homely comparison, they are like ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... in the folds of Gertrude Sinclair's annual letter to Mrs. Robson. As Claire had grown older she had grown also impatient of the memory of her mother squandering what should have gone for thick shoes and warm plaid dresses upon the ephemeral joys of a Christmas tree. But now she suddenly understood, and she felt glad for a mother courageous enough to lay hold upon the beautiful symbols of life at the expense of all that was hideously practical. Shoes wore out and plaid dresses finally found their way to the rag-bag, ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... hasten their decay to allow seeds to ripen, but materially enfeebles the entire plant. It is wise to secure as much beauty as is possible just now from your gardens, as a single and unexpected frosty night will destroy almost everything; nothing is more ephemeral than floral beauty. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... as it shapes itself the straight road to her desires. She is a carpet adventurer—an explorer amongst the nerves of moral sensation, to whom the discovery of an untrodden mental tract is a pure delight, and the more delightful the more ephemeral. She flits from guest to guest, shooting out to each a little proboscis, as it were, and happy if its point touches a speck of honey. She gathers from all, and stores the sweet agglomerate, let us hope, to feed upon it in the winter of her ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... without leaving by their coming and going more trace than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... generous ambition. If Columbus had found rivals and enemies resembling Amerigo, I should not see, as now, the magnificent scene of his triumph so suddenly changed into mourning and horror, the gloomy night of ignominy and mockery succeed the brief light of ephemeral happiness, and that invincible leader, who redoubled the power and dominions of ungrateful Castile, groaning under the weight of infamous chains, while he asks for nothing but liberty to carry her arms to the most ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... there was ephemeral fever on the twelfth day, it is right to make a deduction, and to estimate the number of beats in that day as midway between the twelfth and twenty-third days, or 18,432. Adopting this, the mean daily excess of beats during the alcoholic days was 14,492, or ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... provinces or from other lands; the next floor had been divided into a succession of private rooms, comfortably furnished, where, screened behind thick curtains, dined somewhat "irregular" patrons: lovers who were in either the dawn, the zenith, or the decline of their often ephemeral fancies. On the top floor, spacious salons, richly decorated, were used for large and elaborate receptions ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... The result is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable body of workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with new groups of acquaintances, with whom the relations established are transient or ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none the less for the time being. The human proclivity to ostentation, reenforced by sentiments of good-fellowship, leads them to spend freely in those directions which will best serve these needs. Here as elsewhere prescription ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... EMPIRE OF THE WORLD, not only at the present time, but since the beginning of human history. Neither the artificial combination of Alexander of Macedonia nor the ancient Roman Empire, neither Spain of Charles V. nor Napoleon's ephemeral dominion were nearly so great as the British Empire of to-day. Never has a nation possessed so much sea and so much land as the British. This wonderful Empire includes people of every race, countries ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... most precious lessons are moral ones. It expands the range of our vision, and teaches us in judging the true interests of nations to look beyond the immediate future. Few good judges will deny that this habit is now much wanted. The immensely increased prominence in political life of ephemeral influences, and especially of the influence of a daily press; the immense multiplication of elections, which intensifies party conflicts, all tend to concentrate our thoughts more and more upon ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... has felt of the white beaver hat of Sir Walter Scott knows that he has touched part—and a very considerable part—of Sir Walter. The hat, the boots, the waistcoat are far less ephemeral than the body they protect, and indicate almost as much of the wearer's character as his hands and face. So I am not ashamed of my silk pajamas or of the geranium powder I throw in my bath. They are ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... a hive, or swarm, is from fifteen to twenty thousand bees. Nineteen thousand four hundred and ninety-nine are neuters or working bees, five hundred are drones, and the remaining one is the queen or mother! Every living thing, from man down to an ephemeral insect, pursues the bee to its destruction for the sake of the honey that is deposited in its cell, or secreted in its honey-bag. To obtain that which the bee is carrying to its hive, numerous birds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... competitor who has gone to college will, perhaps, not be doing this. He will probably be "resting his mind" with an ephemeral novel or the discursive hop-skip-and-jump reading of current periodicals. Thus he will day by day be weakening his strength, diminishing his resources. At the very same time you, by the other method, will hourly be adding to your powers, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... In France the Mayor is appointed by the State, and he is the tool of the Ministry. In Great Britain the City Fathers are honorary and unpaid. In Germany they are salaried servants, and yet elected by the people. In Great Britain magistrates are temporary, ephemeral figure-heads. They are not even allowed time to serve their apprenticeship. They remain in office one, two, or at most three years, receive a knighthood in the larger provincial towns, and retire into private life. In Germany the Burgomaster and Aldermen are permanent servants, at ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... gallop, vanish, fade, evaporate; pass away like a cloud, pass away like a summer cloud, pass away like a shadow, pass away like a dream. Adj. transient, transitory, transitive; passing, evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c. v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous[obs3]. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, insecure; impermanent. brief, quick, brisk, extemporaneous, summary; pressed for time &c. (haste) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus |
