"Fragility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; rather that ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... face of the whole earth; and, in pursuit of this their resolution, promised, confirmed, swore, and covenanted amongst them all, by the pure faith they owe to the nocturnal Sanct Rogero. But O the vain enterprises of women! O the great fragility of that sex feminine! They did begin to flay the man, or peel him (as says Catullus), at that member which of all the body they loved best, to wit, the nervous and cavernous cane, and that above five thousand years ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... seeing my invention duly catalogued and placed, I gave myself up to pondering the scene about me. As I dwelt upon that shining pageant of arts, and moving concourse of nations, and reflected that here was the pride of the world glorying in a glass house, a sense of the fragility of worldly grandeur profoundly impressed me. And I said to myself, I will see if this occasion of vanity cannot supply a hint toward a better profit than was designed. Let some world-wide good to the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... in small quantities from the specially-selected edges of the petiole, and this material is used by the natives for weaving. The quantity procurable is limited, and the difficulty in obtaining it consists in the frequent breakage of the fibre whilst being drawn, due to its comparative fragility. Its commercial value is about double that of ordinary first-class cordage hemp. The stuff made from this fine fibre (in Bicol dialect, Lupis) suits admirably for ladies' dresses. Ordinary hemp fibre is used for the manufacture of coarse native stuff, known in Manila as Sinamay, much worn by ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... limbs are constantly breaking off in high winds, just as happens with our native elms. Ours is not a very long-lived tree; between two and three hundred years is, I think, the longest life that can be hoped for it. Since I have heard of the fragility of the English elm, which is the fatal fault of our own, I have questioned whether it can claim a greater longevity than ours. There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... good deal of stress is laid on femininity as an attraction in a woman, and this may be so to very strong natures, but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary empire over men are those with a certain virility in their character and passions. If with this virility they combine a fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in another way at the same time, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... abundant flaxen hair which had been brushed and brushed until it shone and glinted like raw gold in sunshine. She would have looked almost too perfect to be genuine, had it not been for her vivid health. She was so dainty in her fragility that one longed and yet scarcely ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... but they were perfectly satisfactory to me. My dressing-room mates had remembered me, too, in the most characteristic fashion. The pretty, woolly-brained girl had with smiling satisfaction presented me with a curious structure of perforated cardboard and gilt paper, intended to catch flies. Its fragility may be imagined from the fact that it broke twice before I got it back into its box; still there was, I am sure, not another girl in Cleveland who could have found for sale a fly-trap ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... respect, admiration, obedience; but there was about Donnegan something which touched her in an intimate and disturbing manner. She had felt the will-o'-the-wisp flame which burned in him in his great moments. It was possible for her to smile at Donnegan; it was possible even to pity him for his fragility, his touchy pride about his size; to criticize his fondness for taking the center of the stage even in a cheap little mining camp like this and strutting about, the center of all attention. Yet there were qualities in him which escaped her, a possibility of metallic ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... chair with her eyes shut. Marjorie was not in the least fragile physically, but she was so little and slender that, in spite of her wild-rose flush and her red lips, she always impressed men with a belief in her fragility. ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... sturdy health of most frontier women, both of us unusually small and slight. Back of Ida Mary's round youthful face and steady eyes, however, there were grit and stamina and cool-headed common sense. She would never stampede with the herd. And for all my fragility, I had the will to ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... than ever conscious, as he climbed the stairs of the house in Downing Street an hour or so later, of a certain fragility of appearance in Mr. Foley, markedly apparent during these last few weeks. He was standing talking to Lord Armley, who was one of the late arrivals, as Maraton entered, talking in a low tone and with an obviously serious manner. At the sound of ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Gay's face embarrassed her only less than did the intimate pleasantry of Jonathan's tone. Every detail of the library—the richness and heaviness of the furniture, the insipid fixed smiles in the family portrait, the costly fragility of the china ornaments—all these seemed to unite in some occult power which overthrew her self-possession and ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... about this unnatural bloom that I dropped it on the table. As I did so I uttered an exclamation; for in spite of the stranger's assurances on the point, I had by no means overcome my idea of the thing's fragility. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... stars were beginning to twinkle. The gulf was drowsing under the leaden coverlet of its water, exhaling a mysterious freshness that was spreading to the mountains and trees. All the landscape appeared to be acquiring the fragility of crystal. The silent air was trembling with exaggerated resonance, repeating the fall of an oar in the boats that, small as flies, were slipping along under the sky arching above the gulf, and prolonging the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Fired with an abstract love of Virtue, she, My Dian of the Ephesians, Lady Adeline, Began to think the Duchess' conduct free; Regretting much that she had chosen so bad a line, And waxing chiller in her courtesy, Looked grave and pale to see her friend's fragility, For which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... what had from time to time urged itself upon his perception. If the broken ties which once bound her to the past were beginning to knit again, her recovery otherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her beauty had signally the distinction of fragility, the delicacy of shattered nerves in which there was yet no visible return to strength. A feeling, which had intimated itself before, a sense as of being in the presence of a disembodied spirit, possessed ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... because we cannot make them into heads of hammers. Nay, so far from our admiration of the jewel shaft being dependent on its doing work for us, it is very possible that a chief part of its preciousness may consist in a delicacy, fragility, and tenderness of material, which must render it utterly unfit for hard work; and therefore that we shall admire it the more, because we perceive that if we were to put much weight upon it, it would be crushed. But, at all events, it is very clear that the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... vessels is added their fragility, their high price, and the impossibility of obtaining them of the dimensions that large apparatus would call for. The selection of asbestos cloth is therefore clearly indicated; but, as it does not entirely separate the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... family, and in every way a desirable husband. He was himself getting old, he said, and it was necessary that his daughter should marry. Your mother loved me dearly, as I did her. Gentle soul, with her soft, dark, appealing eyes, with her flower-like fragility and womanly dependence. Ah me! it was hard that your grandfather should have been ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... the milliner's bill. And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly. Religious they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a perpetual direction in the affairs of life. But ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... part of his hope: during which period he had been scrupulous not to use force of any kind, spiritual or physical, on the girl whom he doubly loved—the girl whom he held in his arms every night for years with a passionate tenderness due to his feeling of her physical fragility and her social unhappiness, rather ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... redemption, and offering up to God before the altar prayers in their behalf, he also ascended the pulpit to speak of life and death in all their sublime relations. "There was nothing touching," says Talfourd, "in the instability of fortune, in the fragility of loveliness, in the mutability of mortal friendship, or the decay of systems, nor in the fall of States and empires, which he did not present, to give humiliating ideas of worldly grandeur. Nor was there anything heroic in sacrifice, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... a pronounced cleavage. It should therefore be used in brooches, pendants, and such jewels, rather than in rings. Lapidaries dislike to cut it under some conditions because of its fragility. ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... will be an end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride—the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... menu, saying they would return in an hour. As the host let out pleasure boats, they asked him to come and detach one. Laurent selected a skiff, which appeared so light that Camille was terrified by its fragility. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... the charm of an infinite fragility. The bosom, whose curves were so faint that they were epicene, was set in a bodice of white broche, joining a skirt of white satin, with an overskirt of tulle, and the only touch of colour was a bunch of pink and white azaleas worn on the left shoulder. And ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... add that in these times of lax morality they had no more delicacy with respect to the mistresses; and that the latter almost always left them valuable and durable remembrances, as if they essayed to conquer the fragility of their sentiments by the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... been pale, but now she was snow-white, and the extreme delicacy and even fragility of her appearance were thrown into strong relief by the dead black of her mourning gown. Her eyes were full of tears, and her lips were quivering; but Brian knew in a moment, by instinct, that she at least believed in the innocence of his heart, although his hand had taken ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... After the triumph of his return to Paris, amidst the desert which was forming around the Parliament, "the martyr, the hero of liberty," as his enthusiastic admirers had been wont to call him, had to realize that instability of human affairs and that fragility of popularity to which he had shut his eyes even in his prison, when Mirabeau, ever biting and cynical, wrote ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot |
