"Transitory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its character, the Myth will be seen to be one of the transitory expressions of the religious sentiment, which in enlightened lands it has already outgrown and should lay aside. So far as it relates to events, real or alleged, historic or geologic, it deals with that which is indifferent to pure religion; and so far as it assumes to reveal the character, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... birth, riches, or a large family, are of no avail: That all are transitory; virtue alone resisting the funeral pile. That this lady was first married to a duke, then to Stoke, a gentleman; And lastly, by the grave espoused ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... letters to whom show that their common interests were mainly moral and intellectual, and were mingled with no emotion more fiery than gratitude. At the other extreme stand relations like that with Anne Park, the heroine of Yestreen I had a Pint o' Wine, which were purely passionate and transitory. Between these come a long procession affording excellent material for the ingenuity of those skilled in the casuistry of the sexes: the boyish flame for Handsome Nell; the slightly more mature feeling for Ellison Begbie; the various phases of his passion for Jean Armour; the perhaps ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... religious toleration at the very time when despotic Russia begins to make a show, at least, of conceding it. In the presence of these facts, it would surely be absurd to assume that the Church must look with favour on the feeble and transitory constitutions with which the revolution has covered half the Continent. It does not actually appear that she has derived greater benefits from them than she may be said to have done from the revolution itself, which in France, for instance in 1848, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... might puzzle a plain man to answer. But opinion in such matters is not determined by arguments, but by instincts. God, in his wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect, when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart. And if wicked institutions, laboriously organized by dominant tyranny and priestcraft, and strong with the might, not merely of bad passions, but of perverted learning and prostituted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... boy think like us. Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... stimulate him for once to make the effort. But it cannot be continued—it may not be repeated. Great were that folly which should build on such a promise—insane that credulity which should mistake the transitory rain-pool, holding in its hollow one draught, for the perennial spring yielding ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... wrong side gave Mr. Polly no choice but to get on to the pavement and dismount. He was always accustomed to take his time and step off his left pedal at its lowest point, but the jamming of the free wheel gear made that lowest moment a transitory one, and the pedal was lifting his foot for another revolution before he realised what had happened. Before he could dismount according to his habit the pedal had to make a revolution, and before ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... was a transitory calamity; the state had suffered a diminution of its glory, but not of its power.[3] The war was carried on as usual, for many years; the power of the Samnites declining every day, while that of the Romans gained fresh vigour from every victory. 10. Under the conduct of Papir'ius ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... phenomenon, superinduced by an ephemeral agitation of the nebular strata, whereby air, (hot or cold), impelled into transitory activity, generates a prolonged passage through space, owing to certain occult ethereal stimuli, and results in zephyrs, breezes, blows, blow-outs, blizzards, gales, simoons, hurricanes, tornadoes or typhoons. Barred from Kansas Cyclone-cellars ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz
... gratification of the senses, and the tendency toward an elevated and platonic conception of friendship. Shakespeare sought in both of these a compensation for his own disastrous love affair and marriage. But the healing that either could give was at best transitory. There remained to him as a poet of genius one resource. He could gratify his own burning desire for a pure and unselfish love by living in his mighty imagination the lives of his characters. "He who in his yearning for the highest ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... There are (though this may to some seem strange) people who consider the Church at least as important as the State, and even more so, inasmuch as its concernments relate to an eternal instead of a transitory order. What are the prospects of the Church? Here the mists are thicker than ever. Is the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State any nearer realization than it was three years ago? All sorts of discordant voices reach me through the layers of cloud. Some cry, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... hope somehow to cajole them; but it is this vast, unimpassioned, unconscious tribunal, this average judgment of intelligent minds, which is truly formidable,—something more undying than senates and more omnipotent than courts, something which rapidly cancels all transitory reputations, and at last becomes the organ of eternal justice ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing. What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not defined by such transitory affairs as mountain ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... testing artistic growth best exist that modern art is at once most humble and most aspiring: conscious of its own power and in many respects superior technical advantages, both it and the public are still content to go to the past for instruction, and each to seek to rise above the transitory bias of fashion or local passions to a standard of taste that will abide ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... continues the same author, "as insisted on by Plato, is the decomposition of the whole into its separate parts—is seeing the one in many. Definitions were to Plato, what general or abstract ideas were to later metaphysicians. The individual thing was transitory; the abstract idea was eternal. Only concerning the latter could philosophy occupy itself. Socrates, insisting on proper definitions, had no conception of the classification of those definitions which must constitute philosophy. Plato, by the introduction of this process, shifted philosophy ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... frightful danger in which he stood, and then tear the note before his eyes, and leave its payment to his honor. He even realized the peace which would flow from such a deed. Nor were these feelings transitory, his better nature pleaded so hard with him that he walked his room hour after hour under their influence, and their power over him was such as delayed all action in the ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... look back upon your life," says Drummond, "that the moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life ... Everything else ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... young and old, had their several circles of gossip in various parts of the crowd. Apart from them all Fleda sat in her window, probably voted "elegant" by others than the doctor, for they vouchsafed her no more than a transitory attention, and sheered off to find something more congenial. She sat watching the people, smiling very often as some odd figure, or look, or some peculiar turn of expression or tone of voice, caught ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the Seventh Article of our Church gives a plain and positive answer. For it says that those are not to be heard who pretend that the old Fathers, i.e. Moses and the Prophets, looked only for transitory promises—i.e. for promises which would pass away. No. They looked for eternal promises which could not pass away, because they were according to the eternal laws of God, which stand good both for this world and for all worlds for this life and for ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... powers. He had once more yielded to worldly pleasure. The kiss of her beautiful soft lips had been sweet, the melody of her voice still more blissful. It had given him hours of rapture; but were these joys worth the long repentance which was already beginning? It was wise to sacrifice the transitory pleasures of earth to loftier purposes. One thing alone promised permanent duration even here—what he was achieving for the future greatness of his own name and that of his race. For them he was now going ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... restrained and harnessed to prudence, which must really be regarded as the probationary era of the Revival. It is in no sense a depreciation of the incalculable value of the work done by the Canadian apostles of the new faith, to say that their splendid efforts might well have proved of no more than transitory effect, but for that stern, silent period of repression, of rigid, self-administered discipline, which followed the access to office of the first Free Government.[1] That period may be regarded as the crucible ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the dead that man first conceived the idea of the supernatural, and to have a hope beyond what he saw. Death was the first mystery, and it placed man on the track of other mysteries. It raised his thoughts from the visible to the invisible, from the transitory to the eternal, from the human ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... is different for different places; it is at present west in Europe and Africa, and east in Asia and the greater part of North and South America. The declination is subject to (a) secular, (b) annual and (c) diurnal variations. These are classed as regular; others due to magnetic storms are transitory and are classed as irregular, (a) Secular variations. The following table shows the secular variations during some three hundred years at Paris. These changes are termed secular, because they require ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... days had been full, at night she had gone to bed to sleep in happy dreamlessness. The hotel bedrooms with their litter of trunks suggesting imminent flight had held no restfulness. To Gillian the transitory sensation had strained already over-excited nerves and heightened the dreamlike feeling that made everything seem unreal. But here, the visible evidences of travel removed, the deep silence of a large country house penetrating her mind and conducing to peace, she could think at last. The surroundings ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... family of wealth, and he had been a young lion at Pasadena during the winter just past. He owned automobiles and a yacht and—an extensive wardrobe. These notable assets had much to do with the conquest of Mrs. Rodney: she looked with favour upon the transitory Mr. Ulstervelt, and believed in her heart that he had something to do with the location of the shining sun. But of this affair more anon, ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... other leaders of the working-class movement. There was no great sympathy between them. If the common fight—with difficulty—produced unity of action, it was very far from creating unity of feeling. It was easy to see the external and purely transitory reality to which the distinction between the classes corresponded. The old antagonisms were only postponed and marked: but they continued to exist. In the movement were to be found men of the north and men of the south with their fundamental scorn of each other. The trades were jealous of each ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... especially the lives of men, are transitory, ever advancing from their beginning to their decline and ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... them? as it is painful to see how often the books of eminent men are ruthlessly, or at least unhappily, dispersed on their decease. Without answering in detail, I shall assume that the book-buyer is a book-lover, that his love is a tenacious, not a transitory love, and that for him the question is how best to keep ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... of this man's life was his steadfast and brave opposition to the witchcraft mania of 1692. This deplorable madness was in New England a mere transitory panic, from which the people quickly recovered; but while it lasted it almost silenced opposition, and it required genuine heroism to lift a voice against it. No country of Europe was free from the delusion during ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... was entirely successful. The illusion that the imperial authority was only a transitory expedient made necessary by the civil wars, and that it might one day be entirely abolished, was still deeply grounded in the Roman aristocracy. Every relaxation of authority was specially pleasing to the senatorial circles. The government of Nero therefore began under the most favorable ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... shall be taught! Why sorrow is our element—why sin Is native in us—by what curse we bear An ever aching, crushing void within Our secret souls! and why the little share Of happiness that mingles with our fate, Is of such fleeting, transitory date 1 ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... all her powers and energies to the service of the blessed Saviour! How much more important is it to be educated to shine in Heaven than to be a star in this world of sorrow and affliction, where there is no solid enjoyment, and where all is transitory and evanescent. I pray that you may be led to a wise ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... faith. To abstain from attaching one's self to any of the forms which captivate the adoration of men, is not to deprive ourselves of the enjoyment of that which is good and beautiful in them. No transitory appearance exhausts the Divinity; God was revealed before Jesus—God will reveal Himself after him. Profoundly unequal, and so much the more Divine, as they are grander and more spontaneous, the manifestations ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... tinge her future life, I argued with something of man's selfishness. I would not, indeed, that she should make herself miserable about me; but if, when her face had faded from my thoughts, some little record of myself should pleasantly remain with her, and now and then bring a transitory pang of musing regret, who ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... light she caught a transitory gleam in the American's eyes, though his face was as impassive as usual. And the worst of it was that it suggested humor, not resentment. Even in the tumult of wounded pride that took her heart by storm, she realized that her fiery vehemence had gone perilously ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... The attentive student of the Pentateuch must see, especially when assisted by the best commentators, that several ordinances are the creatures of circumstance and time, and consequently of an essentially transitory character. Among these stand foremost all such as refer to the treatment of, and relations with, the Canaanitic families. The strict separation of Israel from those corrupt and idolatrous populations, and their ultimate destruction, were conditions necessary to the establishment ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... even the signs of national prosperity into symptoms of decay and ruin. And our author, who so loudly disclaims popularity, never fails to lay hold of the most vulgar popular prejudices and humors, in hopes to captivate the crowd. Even those peevish dispositions which grow out of some transitory suffering, those passing clouds which float in our changeable atmosphere, are by him industriously figured into frightful shapes, in order first to terrify, and then to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the sentiment of Death was present in some form or other. The hallowed mummies of their ancestors were the most sacred mortgages of their debts, and to redeem them speedily was a point of the highest honor. They had corpses at their feasts to remind them how transitory were the glory and happiness of the world, how ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... of the emotional vigour without the characteristic defects of Kipling, and in many cases a charm which was entirely his own. But he very early shook off what there was of that Kipling influence. It was superficial and transitory. Mr. Kipling, as I have said, represented a transition period; and another—an experimental period—has followed. It is probable that Joseph Conrad became a far more potent influence on the imagination of Mr. Masefield ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... down upon her beloved garden, she could not seem to see anything but brown stalks and dead blossoms. All that lavish colour looked fictitious and transitory; she had somehow lost ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... again and again in the history of his race, yet nothing can take from it its touching features. At six years old even the intimation of a father's death, especially when taking place at a distance, would make but a transitory impression upon the mind; yet we may well imagine the child taken from his toys, wrapped from head to foot in some royal mantle, with a man's crown held over his baby head, receiving with large eyes of wonder and fright easily translated into tears, the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... weariness, and as they descended through the bare woods there were moments when she lost the exact sense of things, and seemed to be sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch of summer bending over them. But this illusion was faint and transitory. For the most part she had only a confused sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current; and she abandoned herself to the feeling as a refuge from the ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... whose symptoms Lanyard had remarked had been a transitory humour. Mr. Blensop was now in what seemed the most equable and blithe of tempers. His very posture at the telephone eloquently betokened as much: he had thrown himself into the chair with picturesque nonchalance, sitting with body ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor Hepzibah's brow. Her scowl,—as the world, or such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly persisted in calling it,—her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor does it appear improbable ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... transitory, however; they swept across him like a wind, and then he looked again at the old man and saw only his simplicity, his unworldliness,—saw little more than the worn and feeble individual in the Hospital garb, leaning on his staff; and then ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... principles and practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, an elaborate review of Pope's writings seriatim, doing him certainly full justice, but ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire," wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal. . . . He stuck to {201} describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... evening without thinking of God. It is in my garden that all things become clearer to me, even that miracle whereby one who has offended may still see God; and this I think a wonderful thing. In my garden I understand dimly why evil is in the world, and in my garden learn how transitory it is. ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... conceal his assent. Yes, she was a trifle crazy. But with all her absurdities that made him alternate between hope and despair, she was more attractive, with her merry nonsense, and her transitory fits of anger, than the woman at home, implacable, silent, shunning him with ceaseless repugnance, but following him everywhere with her weeping, uncanny eyes, that became as cutting as steel, as soon as, out of sympathy or remorse, he ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... out his vocation. He was therefore obliged to write at his home at Villeparisis in the midst of distractions and discouragements. In these unpropitious circumstances he produced in five years—with different collaborators, whose names are now rescued from absolute oblivion by their transitory connection with him—eight novels in thirty-one volumes. That he managed to find a publisher for most of his novels, and to make forty pounds, sixty pounds, or eighty pounds out of each, is according to his sister, a remarkable proof of his strength of will, and also of his power of fascination. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... too large for the limited number of guests entertained within them, to the silence which one feels astonished to find in them after so many flourishes of trumpets, to the immobility of their luxurious furniture, which attests by the aspect of age and decay it gradually assumes the transitory character of dynasties, the eternal wretchedness of all things; and this exhalation of the centuries, enervating and funereal, like the perfume of a mummy, makes itself felt even in untutored brains. Rosanette yawned immoderately. They went ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... decide the solemn question, whether they would, by wise and magnanimous efforts reap the fruits of independence and of union, or whether by giving way to unmanly jealousies and prejudices, or to impartial and transitory interests, they would renounce the blessings prepared for them by the Revolution," and conjuring them "to concur in such further concessions and provisions as may be necessary to secure the objects for which that government was instituted, and make the United States as happy ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... become black as charred wood; it was as if they had been cast into a pit of fire. When my uncle saw this spectacle, he spat in his son's face and said, "Thou hast thy deserts, O thou hog![FN196] this is thy judgment in the transitory world, and yet remaineth the judgment in the world to come, a durer and a more enduring "— And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... dispositions disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified; only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference. They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhaps one stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point where all that transitory dignity must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... already said, it is the business of criticism to separate what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external conditions under which a book like the New Heloisa is produced, from the living qualities in the author which gave the external ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... him with coldness, and often sent him from the headquarters on disagreeable services. However, the General-in-Chief having opposed him to Mourad Bey, Murat performed such prodigies of valour in every perilous encounter that he effaced the transitory stain which a momentary hesitation under the walls of Mantua had left on his character. Finally, Murat so powerfully contributed to the success of the day at Aboukir that Bonaparte, glad to be able to carry another laurel plucked ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... means, that all the multifarious and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the continuance of the species. Even those manifestations of intellect, of feeling, and of will, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are not excluded from this classification, inasmuch as ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... I mean to flatter kings, or court the great: Ye powers of truth that bid my soul aspire, Far from my bosom drive the low desire. And thou, fair Freedom, taught alike to feel 365 The rabble's rage and tyrant's angry steel; Thou transitory flower, alike undone By proud contempt or favor's fostering sun, Still may thy blooms the changeful clime endure! I only would repress them to secure: 370 For just experience tells, in every soil, That those who think ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... his hand as if he had been an old friend just returned after a long absence. He made all the apologies in the world for being called away suddenly, and consequently, unable to render that attention to his business which his feelings had prompted. Like all secessionists, George was very fiery and transitory in his feelings. He expressed unmeasurable surprise when the Captain told him the condition of his man in the old jail. "You don't say that men are restricted like that in Charleston? Well, now, I ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... credit into disrepute. As one event that occurred offers an apposite parallel to what I have now to advance, I shall make a tender of the facts in the way of illustration. The circumstances show the awful uncertainty of things in this transitory life, Captain Ludlow, and forewarn the most vigorous and youthful, that the strong of arm may be cut down, in his pride, like the tender plant of the fields! The banking-house of Van Gelt and Van Stopper, in Amsterdam, had dealt largely in securities issued by the Emperor for the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of the business was already present to his ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... decided standpoint which alone could maintain peace was also the German policy observed in further developments. It was upheld when confronted by strong pressure from Russia, as also against other tendencies and a certain transitory ill-feeling in Vienna. ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... yet active and strong for his age, seized with a transitory feeling of pity, took Madame de Fermont in his arms, pushed open the door, and entered, saying, "Mademoiselle, pardon me for coming in while you are in bed, but I must bring in your mother; she has ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... entertained thoughts of denouncing war against the whole community, and supplying his own wants with the spoils he should win. At other times he was tempted with the desire of putting an end to his miseries and life together. Yet these were but the transitory suggestions of temporary madness, that soon yielded to the dictates of reason. From the execution of the first he was restrained by his own notions of honour and morality; and, from using the other expedient, he was deterred by his love for Monimia, together with the ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... lost; but the answer to it is preserved, in which Petrarch tells the monarch that his epitaph rendered his niece an object rather of envy than of lamentation. "O happy Clementina!" says the poet, "after passing through a transitory life, you have attained a double immortality, one in heaven, and another on earth." He then compares the posthumous good fortune of the princess to that of Achilles, who had been immortalized by Homer. It is possible that King Robert's letter ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... your liberty: but all is written for our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to exercise and follow virtue by the which we may come and attain to good fame and renown in this life, and after this short and transitory life to come unto everlasting bliss in heaven" (Preface of William Caxton to ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar
... of entering into a kind of transitory union with certain substances, and this is what has been called phosphorescence. Bodies that are possessed of this property, after being exposed to the sun's rays, appear luminous in the dark. The shells of fish, the bones of land animals, marble, limestone, and a variety ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... is preeminently the home fruit. It is not transitory. It spans every season. In an indifferent cellar I keep apples till apples come again. The apple stands up, keeps well on the table. Children may handle it. In color and form it satisfies any taste. Its rondure is perfect. The cavity is deep, graceful and well moulded, holding the good stem securely. ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... we take all the characters of it, in any other man—such a calmness of depth, placid, joyous strength, all things in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil, unfathomable sea.... It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice; it is a deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye—a great intellect, in short.... It is in delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great.... The thing ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Encyclopaedia Britannica," says: "How far natural selection suffices for the production of species remains to be seen. Few can doubt that, if not the whole cause, it is a very important factor in that operation; and that it must play a great part in the sorting out of varieties into those which are transitory, and those which are permanent. But the causes and conditions of variation have yet to be thoroughly explored; and the importance of natural selection will not be impaired, even if further inquiries should prove that ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... transitory effect; they have folded their arms and gone to sleep again. I am, of course, gratified by your favourable appreciation of my effort, but I differ with you as to its result. The surging waves of Northern faction and fanaticism already break ominously against our time-honoured ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... call our own any of these perishable joys? A day, perhaps a year, at most a lustrum. But eternity is long, and those who, for its sake, forget time and set all their hopes on eternity—which is indeed time to the soul—soon cease to bewail the loss of any transitory treasure, were it the noblest and dearest. Oh, would that I could lead you to place your hopes on eternity, best of women and most true-hearted mother! Eternity, which not the wisest brain can conceive of!—I tell you, lady, for you are a philosopher—that is the hardest and therefore the grandest ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... India. But Plotinus seems to me nearer to India than were the Gnostics and Manichaeans, because his teaching is not dualistic to the same extent. He finds the world unsatisfying not because it is the creation of the Evil One, but because it is transitory, imperfect and unreal. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Being, since your last meeting, in His holy providence to remove from this transitory life, our late excellent Governour Hancock, the multitude of his surviving fellow-citizens, who have often given strong testimonials of their approbation of his important services, while they drop a tear, may certainly profit by the ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... "Anti-Pamela, or Feign'd Innocence detected, in a Series of Syrena's Adventures: A Narrative which has really its Foundation in Truth and Nature ... Publish'd as a necessary Caution to all young Gentlemen. The Second Edition."[30] Mrs. Haywood's venture as a publisher was transitory, for we hear no more of it. But taken together with a letter from her to Sir Hans Sloane,[31] recommending certain volumes of poems that no gentleman's library ought to be without, the bookselling enterprise shows that the novelist ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... matters," Norbanus said, "all these things are but transitory." He then began to talk on his favourite topic —the religions of the world, while Beric drew Aemilia, who had been weeping since the scene between her parents, into ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... polytheistic, nothing is gained by transferring the eternity to an impersonal Word. If the generation of the Son is materializing, so also is the coming forth of the Word. If the work of creation is unworthy of God, it may as well be delegated to a created Son as to a transitory Word. So far Athanasius. Indeed, to Marcellus the Son of God is a mere phenomenon of time, and even the Word is as foreign to the divine essence as the Arian Son. If the one can only reveal in finite measure, the other gives but broken hints of an infinity ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... [U.S.]. V. be transient &c adj.; flit, pass away, fly, 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^. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that wishing never yet has brought The things that seem to us would satisfy the heart, And that anticipated pleasure, when at last 'tis caught, Has naught but transitory solace to impart; And yet, somehow, I've ever felt and thought A joy there is that never can depart— (As long as we are capable of feeling—wishing)— And that's to leave ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... experience, just as there is in the passage of a star across the sky a single climactic moment, and in the life of a rose an instant when it reaches its most transcendent beauty. They all attain their zenith and then begin to wane; that one brilliant but transitory instant of perfect bliss can no more be recalled than the passing stroke of a bell, the vanished glory of a sunset, or the last sigh of a dying friend; and many of the vainest and most unsatisfying struggles of life are ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... your Grace and my Lords to be advertised that this present Sunday, the 6th September, Edward Lewkner, prisoner, attainted by long sickness, departed this transitory life to God, about the hour of eight of the clock of the night. Who was a willing man in the forenoon of this day to have received the blessed Sacrament, but the priest that did serve in the absence of the . . . * did think him so well that it was meet to be ministered to him but ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... the magnetic wires, troop all the famous performers from the four quarters of the globe. Looked at from a point of criticism, tiny puppets they seem all, as the editor sets up his booth upon my desk and officiates as showman. Now I can truly see how little and transitory is life. The earth appears almost as a drop of vinegar, on which the solar microscope of the imagination must be brought to bear in order to make out anything distinctly. That animalcule there, in the pea-jacket, is Louis Philippe, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... itself all the essential elements of a reformer. Happily, Isabella was permitted to see before her death, if not the completion, at least the commencement, of a decided amendment in the morals of the religious orders; an amendment, which, so far from being transitory in its character calls forth the most emphatic eulogium from a Castilian writer far in the following century; who, while he laments their ancient laxity, boldly challenges comparison for the religious communities of ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Dorset, Lord Buckhurst, 1536-1608: author, or rather originator of "The Mirror for Magistrates," showing by illustrious, unfortunate examples, the vanity and transitory character of human success. Of Sackville and his portion of the Mirror for Magistrates, Craik says they "must be considered as forming the connecting link between the Canterbury ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... long; thank God, there is nothing more transitory than a child's grief, deep and inconsolable as it ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... he was the most able, active, and zealous partisan of those changes with which the country was at present threatened. The principles of the noble earl were principles by which any man might safely abide; the principles of Mr. Canning fluctuate daily, and depend upon transitory reasons of temporary expediency. These are the conscientious reasons of my resignation." As for the absurd calumny, that he had threatened the king with his resignation unless he was made prime minister, the duke said it hardly deserved ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... proofs of its former splendour: here I could not help lamenting the ravages and devastations of time, of which that once noble structure exhibited such a melancholy proof. I walked round it several times, meditating on the fleeting and transitory nature of all terrestrial things; on the eastern end were the remains of a lofty tower, near forty feet high, overgrown with ivy, the top apparently flat; I surveyed it on every side very minutely, thinking that if I could gain its summit I should ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... immortality, he applies himself to the study of the Srraka-Mmms, which consists in a systematic discussion of the Vednta-texts, and has for its result the accurate determination of their sense. That the fruit of mere works is transitory, while the result of the knowledge of Brahman is something permanent, the Vedanta-texts declare in many places—'And as here the world acquired by work perishes, so there the world acquired by merit perishes' (Ch. Up. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... useful to men than in any of our subordinate posts. There we torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success, to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument of evils that are by no means small. All our small benefits are transitory, while the light that a man of letters is able to diffuse must, sooner or later, destroy all the artificial evils of the human race, and place it in a position to enjoy all the goods that nature offers.' It is clear that we can only accept Turgot's preference, on condition that the man of letters ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... the abnormal for the normal: he had imagined that these splendid opportunities were the natural evolvements of an endless sequence of everyday events; and when the sequence was abruptly broken, and when last of the seven fat kine vanished off the transitory scene of life, to make way for a dismal succession of lean kine, there was no sanguine youngster newly admitted to the sacred privileges of "The House" more astounded by the change ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... community as ours. Of all societies since the Roman Republic, and not even excepting the Roman Republic, England has been the most emphatically and essentially political. She has passed through military phases and through religious phases, but they have been transitory, and the great central stream of national life has flowed in political channels. The political life has been stronger than any other, deeper, wider, more persistent, more successful. The wars which built up our far-spreading empire ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... mental attitude which it displays than in the detail of its criticism. The author insists, with much force, on the value of a grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating a poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore that Pope was so ready to forget that "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal." We need not then be surprised when Joseph Warton boldly protests that no other part of the writings of Pope approaches Eloisa to Abelard in the quality of being "truly poetical." He was perhaps led to some indulgence by the fact ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... would better suit the present interests of your Royal Highness and of us all, than some Heir of your Royal Highness's making! Perhaps the tranquil convenience with which your Royal Highness at Reinsberg can now attend to that object, will be of better effect than all those hasty and transitory visits at Berlin were. At least I wish it with the best of my heart. I beg pardon, Monseigneur, for intruding thus into everything which concerns your Royal Highness;'—In truth, I am a rather impudent busybodyish fellow, with superabundant dashing manner, speculation, utterance; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... vessels of the germinative area, which soon spread over its whole surface, are, therefore, real embryonic organs, or temporary parts of the embryo, and have a transitory importance in connection with the nutrition of the growing later body; the latter may be called the "permanent ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. Fix not thy heart on what is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of Khalifs is extinct. If thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date-tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... work of creative genius is accomplished in the intervals of this purturbation of the nerves which by some is deemed so essential to intellectual labour. When the nerves are excited to the highest pitch, they occasionally suffer, the transitory cessation from which is the divine moment of human creation. It seems to me, however, that this ought to be left to nature, and that every attempt to produce artificial excitement, for the purpose of producing creations of ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... that he saw nothing in the circumstances under which the new government had been set up, or the principles it professed to act upon, which could tend to make foreign powers regard it as either more stable or more trustworthy than the transitory forms it had supplanted." ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... constitution. We find this disposition in the mind of angels. They are ministering spirits. They are doing the will of God. How often we read in the Book that tells of heaven how angels have visited this transitory world of ours on errands of help, mercy, and consolation. They have closed the mouths of lions, opened prison doors, stilled the waves, whispered comforting words, rolled away the stone, and ministered strength and help ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... abuse then existing. The old spiritual power had lost its instinct, once so keen and effective, of wise direction. Instead of being the guide and corrector of the organs of the temporal power, it was the worst of their accomplices. The Encyclopaedia was an informal, transitory, and provisional organisation of the new spiritual power. The school of which it was the great expounder achieved a supreme control over opinion by the only title to which control belongs: ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... religion exercised him. His mind was naturally devout. Thomas a Kempis was his constant companion. "Rejoice in nothing but a good deed;" "Through labor to rest, through combat to victory;" "The glory which men give and take is transitory," these and like phrases were already deeply engraven on the fleshly tablets of his heart. Amid all his glowing triumphs he was developing a curious disinclination to appear in public; he seemed to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... to her body. Her back was broad. She was certainly over forty. Forty, thought Maurice, the dangerous age—the desperate age. From forty to fifty, the flower in full bloom, the period of engulfing passions, of urgent transitory satisfactions. For how many women must it not be a ten years' ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... pl., loan-days, transitory days (of earthly existence as contrasted with the heavenly, unending): acc. pl. ln-dagas, 2592; gen. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... moralists in and out of the church. The desire, the personal desire, to acquire property is a fundamental trait of character more or less strong in every individual. If a society cannot be adjusted to that trait it will fail. We think one can be. We think ours is so, as fairly as the nature of our transitory conditions will allow. We want capital here. That we can make it here in time, there is no doubt, but we must labor long to secure a plus of labor that we can dry and store for future use. Meanwhile we want to build a suitable unitary building, which is almost an absolute ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... reincarnation. The last of these terms best expresses Indian, especially Buddhist, ideas but still the usual Sanskrit equivalent, Samsara, means migration. The body breaks up at death but something passes on and migrates to another equally transitory tenement. Neither Brahmans nor Buddhists seem to contemplate the possibility that the human soul may be a temporary manifestation of the Eternal Spirit which comes to an end at death—a leaf on a tree or a momentary ripple on the water. It is always ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... lovers will be aiming towards an ideal which recognizes that in wedded life all that is lasting in affection, in tender courtesy, in most intimate companionship, in sweetest demonstration, is possible without the physical union, which in itself is the most transitory of pleasures, but which in unlimited indulgence becomes the most domineering of passions, exhaustive of physical power and of mental vigor, and ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... his Dialogues merely as literary compositions. Any ancient work which is worth reading has a practical and speculative as well as a literary interest. And in Plato, more than in any other Greek writer, the local and transitory is inextricably blended with what is spiritual and eternal. Socrates is necessarily ironical; for he has to withdraw from the received opinions and beliefs of mankind. We cannot separate the transitory from the permanent; nor can we translate the language of irony ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... better than the first disciples at first did, scarcely seem to us fit to be turned into subjects of petition, partly because we have wrong notions as to the sphere and limits of prayer, and partly because they seem to be such transitory things that it is a shame to trouble Him about such insignificant matters. Well, go and tell Him, at any rate. I do not think that Christians ought to have anything in their heads or hearts that they do not take to Jesus Christ, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... die instead of Christ and as a type of Christ; and so it was a temporal testament in the blood of the paschal lamb, which was shed for the obtaining and possessing of that land of Canaan. And as the paschal lamb, which died in the old testament for the land of Canaan, was a temporal and transitory thing, so too the old testament, together with that possession or land of Canaan allotted and promised therein, was temporal ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... the same, the position of superintendent must not be bartered away for the transitory pleasures of a foot-bridge. "We had better hurry, if ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... of science, who does not work with the idea of producing a sensation in the world, who loves the truth better than the transitory blaze of to-day's fame, who comes to his task with a single eye, finds in that task an indirect means of the highest moral culture. And although the virtue of the act depends upon its privacy, this sacrifice of self, this upright determination to accept the truth, no matter how ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... tolerably well with them, and they were not bleared. I felt my arms, and thighs, and teeth—they were strong and sound enough; so now was the time to labour, to marry, eat strong flesh, and beget strong children—the power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly transitory. I bethought me that a time would come when my eyes would be bleared, and, perhaps, sightless; my arms and thighs strengthless and sapless; when my teeth would shake in my jaws, even supposing they did not drop out. No going a wooing then—no ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... ease, or luxury, or happiness? How many thousands saintly souls have flung aside all that the world could offer sweet and beautiful to embrace this hard, this cruel Cross! And meet they no reward? Hard Cross and cruel to eyes not comprehending, because separate from transitory joys, but yielding balm and incense sweeter and more as most closely pressed to the heart. And woman, first at the sepulchre, first in every good word and work, is it not her glory to suffer for the Cross of Christ? How much has she of His spirit, ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... requested a season of prayer, in which her husband, Rev. Charles Galpin, led. Her prospect was bright, and, clearly foreseeing the ransomed throng she was soon to join, said she, "Oh! how vain, how transitory, does all earthly treasure appear at this hour—a mere bubble upon the water." About a half an hour before she left us, she said, "Hark! don't you hear that beautiful music? Oh! what music; I never heard anything like it! Don't you hear it?" ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... book to its very last page. The subtle distinction of religious worship into latria, dulia, and hyperdulia, the refined classification of prayer under the two heads of direct, absolute, final, sovereign, on the one hand, and of oblique, relative, transitory, subaltern, on the other, swell indeed many elaborate works of casuistry, but are not discoverable in the remains of primitive Christians, nor in the writings of God's word have they any place. ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... twigs from the hedges, wreathed here and there in wild roses, brushed almost against their cheeks. On their left was the sound of a reaping-machine and the perfume of new-mown hay. The sun was growing stronger at every moment. A transitory gleam ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me? The girl who does not know and cannot answer for the least portion of herself? or the stream of which she is a transitory eddy, the tree of which she is the passing fruit? The race exists; it is old, it is ever young, it carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the sea, individual succeeds to individual, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... coming from her as they did a few days only before the news of her son's death paralyzed her whole frame, they appear peculiarly appropriate: "Observing and considering the mischances and uncertainties of this changeable and transitory world." The will bears date ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... partial, and the residuum ever consisted in the main of musical instruments. Every man has his own superstitions, and for some reason Mr. Hucks—who had not a note of music in his soul—deemed it unlucky to part with musical instruments, which was the more embarrassing because his most transitory tenants happened to be folk who practised music on the public for a livelihood—German bandsmen, for instance, not so well versed in English law as to be aware that implements of a man's trade stand exempt from seizure in execution. Indeed, the bulk of the exhibits in ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... accommodate Elisha with a chamber: the gratitude manifested by the prophet in offering to speak for her to the king: her reply expressive of contentment: various considerations calculated to promote this disposition, advantages of a daily and deep impression of the transitory nature of our possessions, and of keeping another life ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... well with her. And it is well with her father, since he, throughout her transitory life, spoke no word to hurt or grieve her. Poor old Rory! Reaching Goolumbulla, after his sorrowful journey, his soft heart would be stabbed afresh by the sight of two picture-books, which I had posted a fortnight before. And how many memories and associations would confront him ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... going to evening parties with clustering ringlets, as jetty as your own, changed by the breath of Father Frost to silvery whiteness; so that you could almost fancy the fair damsels had been suddenly metamorphosed to their ancient grannies; fortunately for youth and beauty such change is but transitory. ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... instructions,—I wished to see what you would do. You have no conception as yet of what you HAVE done!—but that does not matter. You have passed one test successfully—for had you remained passive in your place till someone came to remove you, I should have known you for a creature of weak will and transitory impulses. But you are stronger than I thought—so to-night I have come to give you your ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... clerks who attended him when he sate in council could not refrain from sneering at his frivolous remarks, and at his childish impatience. Neither gratitude nor revenge had any share in determining his course; for never was there a mind on which both services and injuries left such faint and transitory impressions. He wished merely to be a King such as Lewis the Fifteenth of France afterwards was; a King who could draw without limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private tastes, who could hire with wealth and honours persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the field where gallant Baker fell, We crossed the famous river and advanced To Frederick. There a transitory cloud Gloomed the Grand Army—Hooker was relieved: Fell from command at victory's open gate The dashing, daring, soul-inspiring chief, The idol of his soldiers, and they mourned. He had his faults—they were not faults ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... illuminating a charm that it had become scarcely possible to take up any newspaper or magazine and not find some reference to his work and name. Both series of letters—even one mainly concerned, as the Vailima Letters are, with matters of interest both remote and transitory—had been read in edition after edition: and readers had been and were continually asking for more. The time was thought to have come for a new and definitive edition, in which the two series of letters already published should be thrown into one, and as much new material added as could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... knit close by the urgency of making both ends meet, strengthened by the necessity of withstanding rapacious, or negligent, or tyrannous landladies, sweetened by kindnesses and courtesies which cost the giver little, but mean much to the receiver! Did sickness of a transitory sort (for grievous illness is little known in lodgings) fall on the ground-floor tenant, then did not the first-floor come down to comfort him in the evenings? First-floor might be tired after a long day's work, and note when his frugal ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... Lord Cornwallis, during his transitory stay, made his headquarters nearly on the summit of the rising ground, two hundred and fifty yards east of the Mill, on which had been fought the severe battle between the Whigs, under Colonel Francis Locke, and the Tories, under Lieutenant Colonel ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... complain, the silliest of them will make you think that her glove is more precious than fortune, and that nothing is so glorious as to be her slave. They will all tell you that they bestow happiness, and thus lull you to forget your nobler destiny. Believe me, the happiness they give is transitory; your great career will endure. You know not with what perfidious cleverness they contrive to satisfy their caprices, nor the art with which they will convert your passing fancy into a love which ought to be eternal. The day when they abandon you they will tell you that the words, "I no longer ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... impressionable to the sun, air, trees, children, women, men, cattle, landscapes, the ocean. Such swift, vivid notation of the fluid life about him is rare; it would be photographic were it not the personal memoranda of a selecting eye; it would be transitory impressionism were it not for a hand magical in its manipulation of pigments. Brain and brush collaborate with an instantaneity that does not perplex because the result is so convincing. We do not intend to quote that musty flower of rhetoric ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... of a teacup to the very last scowl, and I have hated good, handsome property ever since. For my part I love cheap things, trashy things, things made of the commonest rubbish that money can possibly buy; things as vulgar as primroses, and as transitory ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... as they passed, they saw De Chaulieu lying on a sofa fast asleep, in which state he continued when his wife returned. At length, however, the driver of their carriage begged to know if Monsieur and Madame were ready to return to Paris, and it became necessary to arouse him. The transitory effects of the champagne had now sub sided; but when De Chaulieu recollected what had happened, nothing could exceed his shame and mortification. So engrossing indeed were these sensations that they quite overpowered his previous ones, and, in his present vexation, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... is an example of the true goods which all mortal men desire to obtain, tho they by various ways think to arrive at them. For every man has natural good in himself, because every man desires to obtain the true good; but it is hindered by the transitory goods, because it is more prone thereto. For some men think that it is the best happiness that a man be so rich that he have need of nothing more; and they choose life accordingly. Some men think that this is the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... ended to administer the laws and regulations applicable to the fisheries with as little occasion for friction as was possible, and the temperate representations of this Government in respect of cases of undue hardship or of harsh interpretations have been in most cases met with measures of transitory relief. It is trusted that the attainment of our just rights under existing treaties and in virtue of the concurrent legislation of the two contiguous countries will not be long deferred and that all existing causes of difference may be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... With smiles to think on some delightful dream, That waved o'er the charmed sense its gladsome wing! For when thou leadest all thy soothing strains More smooth along, the silent passions meet In one suspended transport, sad and sweet; And nought but sorrow's softest touch remains; That, when the transitory charm is o'er, Just wakes a tear, and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... How transitory is earthly happiness! How certain its uncertainty! A little week had passed, and the "Heir of Applebite" gave notice of his intention to come into his property during an early minority, for his once happy progenitor began to entertain serious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... a temporal object, and a transitory possession; but so are other things in themselves which we make much of and pursue. The moralist will tell us that man, in all his functions, is but a flower which blossoms and fades, except so far as ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... it from each incarnation; and so, because there is present in the body of man this long-traveled soul, bearing with it traces of its eternal past, these letters which are the elements of its speech have impressed on them a correspondence, not only with the forces natural to its transitory surroundings, but also with that vaster evolution of nature in which it has taken part. These correspondences next claim ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... him who was, however, only the pretext of that exemption. She trembled to-day, not only at not loving him any more, but at hating him, and above all she felt herself a prey to that repugnance for the useless cares of the world, to that lassitude of transitory hopes, to that nostalgia of repose in God, undeniable ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... women, and the other that the average age of wage-earning women is so much younger than that of men employed in similar work that the need for help from without in any effective effort for relief from bad conditions is more apparent. The transitory character of much of women's work makes the permanent personnel of any Trade Union League of women a smaller minority of its membership than in the case of men. It is said that in any trade where both the men and the women ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... there was a transitory interval of weakness. Even before Lord Roberts' occupation of Pretoria Kruger wrote doubtfully to Steyn; and after it Botha was inclined to negotiate with the invader. He was with his commandos at Hatherley, a few miles east of Pretoria. A Council of War was held in the office of a Russian ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... Plutarch says that at an Egyptian feast a skull was displayed, either as a hint to make the most of the pleasure which can be enjoyed but for a brief space, or as a warning not to set one's heart upon transitory things.] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... became more settled, much of their main food supply, the acorns, was consumed by the domestic animals of the ranchers, and their mode of living became more precarious and transitory, and many of them were, at times, in a condition near to starvation. In these straitened and desperate circumstances, many of their young women were used as commercial property, and peddled out to the mining camps and gambling saloons for money ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... holiness not for the sake of external reward, but because it is the health of the soul, while vice is its disease—that goodness is unity and harmony, while evil is discord and disintegration—that it is our duty and happiness to rise above the visible and transitory to the invisible and permanent. It may also be a pleasure to some to trace the fortunes of the positive and negative elements in Plato's teaching—of the humanist and the ascetic who dwelt together in that large mind; to observe how the ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... it reminded him of the towns along the Pacific railways of the United States during the course of their construction. The comparison, he said, was favorable to the Australian town, as the inhabitants seemed far more orderly than did those of the transitory American settlements. During the time of their stay there was not a single fight, and the coroner was not called upon to perform his usual ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... nostril. For convenience of examination the eyelids can readily be everted. Paleness means weak circulation or poor blood. Increased redness occurs physiologically in painful conditions, excitement, and following severe exertion. Under such conditions the increase of circulation is transitory. In fevers there is an increased redness in the mucous membrane, and this continues so long as the fever lasts. In some diseases red spots or streaks form in the mucous membrane. This usually indicates an infectious ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture |
