"Mutability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... absolutely necessary for them to know Sorrow and Pain to be in their right Senses. Prosperous People (for Happy there are none) are hurried away with a fond Sense of their present Condition, and thoughtless of the Mutability of Fortune: Fortune is a Term which we must use in such Discourses as these, for what is wrought by the unseen Hand of the Disposer of all Things. But methinks the Disposition of a Mind which is truly great, is that which makes Misfortunes and Sorrows ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Tom and Jerry, to show the mutability of human affairs and the evanescent nature of reputation, we have been to the British Museum and no less than five circulating libraries in quest of the book, and "Life in London," alas, is not to be ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... chief, shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts,—her influence and her glory will still survive, fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... have been, from the beginning, an exemplification of the power that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man's life. With regard to myself, this came almost by inheritance. My father was one of those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast by Fate into the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Juan mused on mutability, Or on his mistress—terms synonymous— No sound except the echo of his sigh Or step ran sadly through that antique house; When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh, A supernatural agent—or a mouse, Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... "is the changeableness of earth, and the emptiness of its pursuits!" They urge us to seek the noblest end, the unfailing treasure. They bid us to find our hope and our rest, our only constant joy in Him, who alone, amid this mutability ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... known to prehistoric man that he employed this method, as various savage tribes employ it to this day, for the altogether practical purpose of making a fire; just as he employed his practical knowledge of the mutability of solids and liquids in smelting ores, in alloying copper with tin to make bronze, and in casting this alloy in molds to make various implements and weapons. Here, then, were the germs of an elementary science of physics. Meanwhile such observations as that of the solution of salt ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Canada hung as if by a thread, Adam Lymburner, more prudent than loyal, retired from the sorely beset fortress to Charlesbourg, possibly to Chateau Bigot, a shooting box then known as the "Hermitage," to meditate on the mutability of human affairs. Later on, however, in the exciting times of 1791, Adam Lymburner was deputed by the colony to England to suggest amendment's to the project of the constitution to be promulgated by the home authorities. His able ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... if we lay to heart the deceptiveness and mutability of all the external species of matter, at the same time considering that we have no reason to deem it capable of change in its ultimate and imperceptible particles; if, also, we reflect, that whatever is not palpable in itself is yet indicated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... be said but again to wish the Laird joy, to taste a cup of his liquor, and to walk back again to St. Leonard's, musing on the mutability of human affairs and human resolutions. The expectation that one day or other Jeanie would be Lady Dumbiedikes, had, in spite of himself, kept a more absolute possession of David's mind than he himself was aware of. At least, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... answer for great bodies of Christians organizing themselves to Christianize the world. No institution can remain changeless in a changing world. "The one immutable factor in institutions," writes Professor Pollard, "is their infinite mutability." Almost all the divisive factors in Christendom are taken out of the past, by those who claim that a certain polity or creed or practice is that authoritatively prescribed for all time, by Christ Himself, or by His Spirit through His personally appointed apostles. The chief question ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... mutability, this inherent changeableness in man, is the key to many of the darkest chapters of the world's history. The prodigal, the traitor, the vow-breaker, these have ever been far more fruitful sources of anguish and misery than the ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... like a rascal in the business; my mother took my part, in course, and declared I acted rightly, as I always did: and I got leave of absence from the regiment in order to press my beloved Magdalen to marry me out of hand—knowing, from reading and experience, the extraordinary mutability ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... forward in 1874 with the extravagant view that the various bacteria are only different states of one and the same organism which he called Cocco-bacteria septica. From that time the question of the pleomorphism (mutability of shape) of the bacteria has been hotly discussed: but it is now generally agreed that, while a [v.03 p.0158] certain number of forms may show different types of cell during the various phases of the life-history,[2] yet the majority of forms are uniform, showing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... courtiers and great nobles, whose mutability of faith had so happily corresponded with every ecclesiastical vicissitude of the last three reigns, political and personal considerations may well be supposed to have held the first place; and though ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... there, suh. De po' lamb fell—No, suh"—the old woman's racial mutability swept her into a sudden flare of indignation —"old Cindy ain't gwineter lie for dat debble. He done it, suh. May de Lawd wither de hand what—dar now! Cindy promise her sweet lamb she ain't gwine tell. Miss Amy got hurt, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Gabriel Harvey). 'The Second Part of the Faery Queene', containing Bks. IV-VI, begins at sig. Q5 with separate titlepage 'Imprinted at London for Mathew Lownes. 1609.'. The fragment of the seventh book 'Of Mutability' first appears in this edition with head-title at sig. 2H 4. The copy described in the Huth catalogue, which has the date in the colophon printed '16012' belongs, as the collation shows, to the ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... depresses, as well as something that exhilarates, in the first day of a Session of Parliament. In the months which have elapsed, there have been plenty of events to emphasize the mutability and the everlasting tragedy of human life. Some men have died; figures that seemed almost the immortal portion of the life of Parliament have disappeared into night, and their place knows them no more; others ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... epistle, you have already reached the frontiers of Egypt, advance with confidence, and depend on the succor of God and of your brethren." The experience, perhaps the secret intelligence, of Amrou had taught him to suspect the mutability of courts; and he continued his march till his tents were unquestionably pitched on Egyptian ground. He there assembled his officers, broke the seal, perused the epistle, gravely inquired the name and situation of the place, and declared his ready ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... erected than under those of that Aristotelian Realism, which was at bottom a dialectic between the Platonic Realism and Nominalism; and which was represented as capable of uniting immanence and transcendence, history and miracle, the immutability of God and mutability, Idealism ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... set forth, and after courtesies and compliments exchanged, Aunt Eliza, greatly condescending, talked the fashions with Mrs Larkin; while the farmer and I, perspiring with the unusual effort, exchanged remarks on the mutability of the weather and the steady fall in the price of corn. (Who would have thought, to hear us, that only two short days ago we had confronted each other on either side of a hedge,—I triumphant, provocative, derisive; he flushed, wroth, cracking his whip, and volleying forth profanity? So powerful ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... author in verse and prose, original and translated, and is certainly to be reckoned among the predecessors of Shakespeare in dramatic composition. His earliest work, as far as can be now ascertained, was "The Mirror of Mutability," 1579, when he was in his 26th year: he dedicates it to the Earl of Oxford, and perhaps then belonged to the company of players of that nobleman, to which he had again attached himself on his return from Italy.[150] The Council Registers show that this nobleman had a company ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... strings of his harp seem as the hand of age, as the tale of other times passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain—'Roll on, ye dark brown year, ye bring no joy in your wing to Ossian!'" "The poet Gray, too," says Wilson, "frequently in his Letters expresses his wonder and delight in ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... of what Spain was at no remote period of time, but in her instance we have an example showing us that states are no more exempt than individuals from the mutability of fate. So was it with Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Rome, though in their case we look far back into the vista of history to recall the change, whereas in the instance of Spain we are contemporary witnesses. From a first-class power, how rapidly she has ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... Fortune's mutability, And seize her fickle favours ere they flee; If others never mourned departed bliss, How should a turn ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... not lost on Cleopatra. On the contrary, she registered them every one with the accuracy of a trained observer. And as surely as the cumulative evidence of all she saw began to point with ever greater precision in the direction of her sister's fickleness and mutability, the more her health improved, and the more cheerful she became. It is remarkable how the state of being overanxious spoils a creature's humour and mars the brightest sally. A week previously Cleopatra could say nothing, however bright, that did not fall flat, even ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... of this pamphlet carries his zeal, and ill manners still farther, and informs the world of the meanness of our author's birth, and education, 'most of his relations (says he) are Barbers, and of the baseness, falseness, and mutability of his nature, too many evidences may be brought. He closed with the Whigs, contrary to the principles he formerly professed, at a time when they took occasion to push their cause, upon the breaking out of Oates's plot, and was ready to fall off from, and return ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... called mutable by a power in itself, thus also in some manner every creature is mutable. For every creature has a twofold power, active and passive; and I call that power passive which enables anything to attain its perfection either in being, or in attaining to its end. Now if the mutability of a thing be considered according to its power for being, in that way all creatures are not mutable, but those only in which what is potential in them is consistent with non-being. Hence, in the inferior bodies there is mutability both as regards ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... may be taken that our laws against blasphemy have moved a good deal since Lord Coleridge's famous summing-up concerning the essential mutability of the Common Law about blasphemy which he gave in Regina v. Ramsey and Foote; if the restriction were removed what power would prevent the atheists from producing distinctly anti-Christian plays ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... evolution took a firm hold upon the mind of Darwin, in an instant, one day while on board the "Beagle." From that very hour the thought of the mutability of species was the one controlling impulse of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Persia, are the following remarkable words: "The passions of men may, by long acquaintance, be thoroughly known; but the passions of women are inscrutable; therefore they ought to be separated from men, lest the mutability of their tempers should ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... his garments, and another puts them on. Every one knows the story of the Tartarian dervise, who mistook the royal palace for a caravansera, and who proved to his majesty by genealogical deduction, that he was only a lodger. In this sense the mutability, which so eminently characterises every thing sublunary, is immutability under ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... It was this mutability, this power to detach herself from her environment and view it with the stoical indifference of a spectator that caused Wilton with its harsh New England standards, to characterize Celestina as "easy goin'." In fact, this popularly termed "flaw" in her make-up was what had ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... appearance of a shield of blued steel. No gaping tourists loitered, eyeing with their glasses, or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient river-god. All tended to harmonize with the natural grandeur of the scene. I gazed long. I saw how here mutability and unchangeableness were united. I surveyed the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like toppling ambition, o'er-leaping themselves, they fall on t' other side, expanding into ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Icarian wing, we seek to ascend to that skiey elevation whence only can the understretching regions of an impassive mutability be satisfactorily contemplated; and if, in our heterogeneous ambition, aspirant above self-capacity, we approach too near the flammiferous Titan, and so become pinionless, and reduced again to an earthly prostration, what marvel is it, that ——, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... quid, treats it as true of the same term simpliciter, and then, of course, applies it to the term secundum aliud. A {281} good example of this is found in the first triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever is by the same act is not, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus the irremediable torrent of life about which so ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... defects of his youth are well brought out by the radical friar who wrote the Song of Lewes. Even to the partisan of Earl Simon, Edward was "a valiant lion, quick to attack the strongest, and fearing the onslaught of none. But if a lion in pride and fierceness, he was a panther in inconstancy and mutability, changing his word and promise, cloaking himself by pleasant speech. When he is in a strait he promises whatever you wish, but as soon as he has escaped he forgets his promise. The treachery or falsehood, whereby he is advanced, he calls prudence; the way ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... and mutability of mind enough to deter any one by its own deformity? We are to demonstrate, as was said of every perturbation, that there are no such feelings which do not consist entirely of opinion and judgment, and are not owing to ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... had formerly given him true to his cost, which was, "That men, however fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy, till they had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives, by reason of the uncertainty and mutability of human things, which upon very light and trivial occasions are subject to be totally chang'd into a quite ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... years old. Mr. Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant, adopted the child and gave him a splendid home. How scantily Poe appreciated and improved the advantages of this kindness he himself confesses in a letter to Lowell in 1844. "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to anything—to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim—impulse—passion—a longing for solitude—a scorn of all things present in an earnest desire for the future." He was a dreamer who had a fair chance to be happy, but ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the ear of princely dames, young ladies, gentlewomen, and courtiers,[407] none the less much poetry has a didactic purpose. Satire was first invented to administer direct rebuke of evil, comedy to amend the manners of common men by discipline and example, tragedy to show the mutability of fortune and the just punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life, pastoral to inform moral discipline, for the amendment of man's behavior, or to insinuate or glance at greater matters under the veil of rustic persons and rude speeches.[408] ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... his ambition was always climbing up the apparently inaccessible heights of fame,— fame, that he then imagined was the greatest glory any human being could aspire to. He smiled as he recollected this, and thought how changed he was since then! What a difference between the former discontented mutability of his nature, and the deep, unswerving calm of patience that characterized it now! Learning and scholarship? these were the mere child's alphabet of things,—and fame was a passing breath that ruffled for one brief moment the on-rushing flood of time—a bubble blown ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... foregoing letter is published in the "Life and Letters," II., page 29. It is interesting as giving his views on the mutability of species. Thus he wrote: "With respect to books on this subject, I do not know any systematical ones, except Lamarck's, which is veritable rubbish; but there are plenty, as Lyell, Pritchard, etc., on the view of the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... men and women in these terms every day, and Evelyn thought of some celebrated sayings that life's mutability has inspired. She remembered some from the Bible, and some from Shakespeare; and those she remembered from Fitzgerald, from his "Omar Khayyam," took her back to the afternoon she spent with Owen by the Serpentine, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven Remain the records of their vain endeavour, Frail spells,—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance and mutability. ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, "inhale great draughts of space," wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity. Pile note on ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... to perish by those of the satrap Bessus. All antecedent historical parallels—the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Croesus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition—sank into trifles compared with the overthrow of this towering Persian colossus. The orator AEschines exprest the genuine sentiment of a Grecian spectator when he exclaimed (in a speech delivered at Athens shortly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Mutability, Or on his Mistress—terms synonymous— No sound except the echo of his sigh Or step ran sadly through that antique house; When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh, A supernatural agent—or a mouse, Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... wondered; they complained. And where are they now? All dead and gone. Wilt thou also be like one of them? Or rather leaving to men of the world (whose life both in regard of themselves, and them that they converse with, is nothing but mere mutability; or men of as fickle minds, as fickle bodies; ever changing and soon changed themselves) let it be thine only care and study, how to make a right use of all such accidents. For there is good use to be made of them, and they will prove fit ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... the light of the infinite. The achievements in art most distinctive of the present age—the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance—proclaim the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed, the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... men who live by the life of the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, empirical, parts of a vast nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural, psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on" incorruption and immortality. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... oppressive. This conviction, indeed, strikes us in a very peculiar manner as we read, that no more genial nature ever penetrated that dismal and incredible East, to avouch the eternal freshness of man against the decay of nature and the mutability of institutions. An actually weird effect is produced by the sight of this plump and rosy Christian pervading the graves of dead empires, and thinking democracy amidst the listening ghosts of the Pharaohs. Did these solemn empires, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... half-stripped tree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thought of skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. They seemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability of all things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to live and exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creeping changes and the insidious passing away of youth and all it meant to her! "I hate autumn, most awfully," she had confessed ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... come as rapidly as possible to the extraordinary happenings of that Saturday afternoon, which as much as any other event in this entire history, portrays the mutability of the feminine mind. I had gone out to the cabin to see that everything was in order, and Jerry was to follow later, while a few of the men fished up stream, Marcia and some of her guests driving in motors to the upper gate, cutting ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... life. Politics, for instance, are the roast beef of the times; essays, the plum pudding; and poetry the fritters, confections, custards, and all the et cotera of the table, usually denominated trifles. Yet the four winds are not liable to more mutability than the vehicles of these entertainments; for instance, on Monday, it is whispered—on Tuesday, it is rumoured—on Wednesday, it is conjectured—on Thursday, it is probable—on Friday, it is positively asserted—and, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... is developed in time, or change, the perfection of the faculty that places men in relation with the world will necessarily be the greatest possible mutability and extensiveness. Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action (autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... reapers in the vales would sometimes see his gaunt figure monstrous on the sky-line, cowled and with uplifted arms, adoring (it was supposed) the sun, or leaning on his staff, motionless and rapt, meditating death and mutability. He lost nothing by such change apparitions; on the contrary, he gained the name of a wise man who had powers of divination and healing. In the cottage whither he went once a week for bread, a ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... the universe is much more easy of comprehension, much more demonstrable than that of an other being to whom, they would attribute all the effects, all the mutations which take place. Nature is not more to be accused of mutability, on account of the succession of its forms, than the eternal Being is by the theologians, by the diversity of his decrees. Here we shall be able to perceive that, supposing the laws by which nature acts to be ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... resolving to have the upper hand and never deviating from that aim, by bringing all our actions to bear on it, all our ideas, our cajolery, we subjugate these eminently capricious natures, which, by the very mutability of their thoughts, lend us ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... this great work (the "Origin of Species") may be stated summarily thus: it affirms the mutability of species and the descent of living forms, separated by differences of more than varietal value, from one stock. That is to say, it propounds the doctrine of evolution as far as biology is concerned. So far, we have merely a restatement of a doctrine which, in its most general form, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... he wrote the "Shepherd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or thought of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability," ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Lords, the evils which would thence arise to the public would inflict a greater wound upon his heart than any loss he might himself sustain by such irregular proceedings. He flourished much on generosity and forgiveness of mutual injuries, and hinted at the mutability of human affairs, always favourite topics with the weaker party in politics. He pathetically lamented, and gently censured, the haste which had been used in depriving him of his situation of Lord Keeper, which his experience had enabled him to fill with ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... countless ages, during which whole continents have been submerged, whole seas become dry land, again and again. Even now the heavens and the earth are being shaken by researches into the antiquity of the human race, and into the origin and the mutability of species, which, issue in what results they may, will shake for us, meanwhile, theories which are venerable with the authority of nearly eighteen hundred years, and of almost every great ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... pillar, some issuing on a scroll from angels' trumpets—on the emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and the combined effect of so many of them in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this secular fluctuation of the constellation figures is not without keen interest for the meditative observer. It is another reminder of the swift mutability of terrestial affairs. To the passing glance, which is all that we can bestow upon these figures, they appear so immutable that they have been called into service to form the most lasting records of ancient thought ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... fountain, 1 John iv. 9, 10; Rom. iii. 24, 25. God hath been framing this righteousness from all eternity, and even this world seems to be made for this end. All God's dispensation with Adam, his making a covenant of works with him, his mutability and liableness to fall, and so governing all things in his holy providence that he should fall from his own righteousness, and involve all his posterity in the same condemnation with himself,—all this seems to be ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... OEnothera Lamarckiana, obtained at the end of a few generations a certain number of new species. The theory he deduces from his experiments is of the highest interest. Species pass through alternate periods of stability and transformation. When the period of "mutability" occurs, unexpected forms spring forth in a great number of different directions.[28]—We will not attempt to take sides between this hypothesis and that of insensible variations. Indeed, perhaps both are partly true. We wish merely ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... parable and a prophecy of the perpetual relation between the absent Lord and the toiling Church. He is on the mountain while we are on the sea. The stable eternity of the Heavens holds Him; we are tossed on the restless mutability of time, over which we toil at His command. He is there interceding for us. Whilst He prays He beholds, and He beholds that He may help us by His prayer. The solitary crew were not so solitary as they thought. That little dancing speck on the waters, which held so much blind love ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... possesses spiritual or political courage has made up his mind to a prospect of immutable mutability; but even in a "transformation" there is something catastrophic in the removal of the back scene. It is a truism to say of the wise and noble lady who is gone from us that we shall always remember her; ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally darken counsel. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... something about him," though what it was she couldn't really say. Only from the first she had had that feeling in her heart—"He will not be permanent." The joy she had in his youth and mystery was drenched with the pathos of mutability. Mrs. Downey rebelled against mutability's decree. "Perhaps," she said, "we might come to ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... without question succeeds. In the whole of London the number of Casuals in the wards at night is only 1,136. That is to say, the conditions which are imposed are so severe, that the majority of the Out-of-Works prefer to sleep in the open air, taking their chance of the inclemency and mutability of our English weather, rather than go through the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... I entirely dissent from Francisco de Ubeda in this matter, and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that, if my quill display no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From the jargon, therefore, of the Highland gillies, I pass to the character of their Chief. It is an important ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... withholding from the scene will naturally arouse disturbing wishes; but to be present lulls; for then we live, we are in our element. And who could expect, what sane person can desire, perpetual good luck? Fortune, the goddess, and young Love, too, are divine in their mutability: and Fortune would resemble a humdrum housewife, Love a droning husband, if constancy were practised by them. Observe the staggering and plunging of the blindfold wretch seeking to be persuaded ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is properly perceived by the visual faculty amounts to no more than colours with their variations and different proportions of light and shade; but the perpetual mutability and fleetingness of those immediate objects of sight render them incapable of being managed after the manner of geometrical figures, nor is it in any degree useful that they should. It is true there be ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... would have been a poor, helpless, isolated creature,—a universal life which connected him with his fellow-men, with the absolute source and original fountain of life.... He proclaimed the absolute vitality of Nature, the endless change of matter, the mutability and perishability of all individual things in contrast with the eternal Being,—the supreme harmony which rules over all." To trace the divine energy of life in all things was the general problem of the philosophy of Heraclitus, and this spirit was akin to the pantheism of the East. But ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile "simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature, since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted, brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... not, the life of our spirits is not at the mercy of changing events. We look back on a lifetime of changing scenes through which we have passed, and forward to a similar succession, and this mutability is sad to many of us, and in some aspects sad to all, so powerless we are to fix and arrest any of our blessings. Which we shall keep we know not; we only know that, as certainly as buds and blossoms of spring drop, and the fervid summer darkens to November fogs and December frosts, so certainly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... bethought her of the proud creature she had known, raging terribly through the obsequious ranks of clerks, and carrying desolation to the Hutches and the many-headed editorial department. She looked, and was filled with reflections on the mutability of human affairs. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... cup of suffering to the very extremity of what his peculiar nature allowed. And in no life of so short a duration, have there ever been crowded equal extremities of gorgeous prosperity and abject infamy. It may be added, as another striking illustration of the rapid mutability and revolutionary excesses which belonged to what has been properly called the Roman stratocracy then disposing of the world, that within no very great succession of weeks that same victorious ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... surprising mutability of temper which was the most striking characteristic of his nature, M. Wilkie was already consoled for ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... instant, announce that the resolution has been taken at Vienna to deprive the Duke of Parma of the administration of his states, and to put in a regency, of which Ward is to be the head. The elevation of Ward affords not only a singular instance of the mutability of human affairs, but of the tendency of the Anglo-Saxon race, when transplanted to foreign countries, to emerge to eminence, and surpass others by the homely but rare qualities of common-sense and unfaltering energy. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... one may in the literature which was open to Dante, one finds evidence of his universal reading. We take up such a book as Otto of Freising's Annals (to which, with his Acts of Frederick I., we shall have to refer again), and find the good bishop moralising thus on the mutability of human affairs, with especial reference to the break-up of the Empire in the ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... to tramp over many miles of country to return the money they had been at such pains to collect. Even Mrs. Fraser was disappointed in the minister's action, for she had been in hopes that Annie would be the organist, and she sighed long and deeply over the mutability of the young minister. Such sudden changes of opinion, she declared, denoted an unstable character, and she feared he would not have a good influence over the wild and unsettled ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... regime had, however, other features about it which must not be forgotten. For instance, in this growth of a new territorial body upon the ruins of the monastic orders, in this sudden and portentous increase of the wealth and power of the squires of England, the mutability of the new system is perhaps as striking as ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... Any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B. It had become a mere name in a directory. I was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. Time could work wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... as he went on smoking; the old carelessness, mutability, and indolent philosophies were with him still, and were still inclined to thrust away and glide from all pain, as it arose. Though much of gravity and of thoughtfulness had stolen on him, much of insouciance remained; and there were times when there was not a more reckless or a more nonchalant ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Bismarck and the manoeuvres of those whom he 'allowed to do what they liked and say what they liked—or rather to do what they thought he would like done, and say what they thought he would like said—and then suddenly sent them about their business to ponder in poverty and disgrace on the mutability of human affairs'. In a passage like this Morier's letters show that he could distinguish between a lion and his jackals, between ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... with her simplest ornaments, and family life in the most unpretending tranquillity. But nothing was wanting. I had space, verdure, affection, conversation, liberty, and employment,—the necessity of occupation, that spur and bridle which human indolence and mutability so often require. I was perfectly content. When the soul is calm, the heart full, and the mind active, situations the most opposite to those we have been accustomed to possess their charms, ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... father's confidential valet, was so much scandalized, as to intimate a possibility that we might one day change conditions. These two accidental communications seemed to me a key to certain long lectures, with which my father used to regale us boys, but me in particular, upon the extreme mutability of human affairs,—the disappointment of the best-grounded hopes and expectations,—and the necessity of being so accomplished in all useful branches of knowledge, as might, in case of accidents, supply any defalcation in our rank and fortune;—as if any ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser's "Fairy Queen," above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many a dark eschatological superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism, which was even then tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to give him altogether a freer and more ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... come thither, they were glad they had so good a harbor: but fortune, who is like the chameleon, variable with every object, and constant in nothing but inconstancy, thought to make them mirrors of her mutability, and therefore still crossed them thus contrarily. Thinking still to pass on by the by-ways to get to Lyons, they chanced on a path that led into the thick of the forest, where they wandered five or six days without meat, that they were almost ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... the considerations which led Sapor to send as envoys to the Roman camp at Dura the Surena and another great noble, who announced that they came to offer terms of peace. The great king, they said, having respect to the mutability of human affairs, was desirous of dealing mercifully with the Romans, and would allow the escape of the remnant which was left of their army, if the Caesar and his advisers accepted the conditions that he required. These conditions would be explained to any envoys whom ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... write about suggests some obvious reflections on the mutability of our national manners. Was the wisdom of our ancestors really so much greater than our own, as many profess to believe? If so, it is strange with how much of that wisdom we have learnt to dispense. One by one their old customs have fallen away from us, and I ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... autocrat, riding in the poverty of a lean run, will have plenty of opportunity to count the telegraph poles and reflect on the mutability of men and things. The Pullman Company denies that this is part of its system; but it does happen—time ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... Reflections on the mutability of fortune, on money expended, and on the duties of love and friendship: A strange incident, shewing the propensity of man to superstitious terrors: A lamentable ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... all that's unlucky," exclaimed I; and downstairs I ran, with one arm in, and one out of my jacket, leaving Thomas to conclude his speculations on the mutability of human affairs as ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... variety of hypotheses she has one on mutability. 'Little, she says, as we know of matter and spirit, we still know enough to perceive they are both instantaneously, eternally, and infinitely changing. Of what the world has been, through this series of never beginning ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... tiarella, with its darling leaf, and along under the yellow birches the lady's slipper he had transplanted, year after year, and that finally took root and showed a fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy, wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Vedas. Philosophically, they are an early manifestation of the mental bias which leads to pantheism, metempsychosis, and the feeling that all things and persons are transitory and partial aspects of the one reality. But evidently the mutability of the Vedic gods is also due to their nature: they are bundles of epithets and functions without much personal or local centre. And these epithets and functions are to a large extent, the same. All the gods are bright and swift and helpful: all love sacrifices and bestow wealth, sons and cows. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot |
