"Transient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Prince Ivan, whose transient moodiness had passed away like a bad devil exorcised by the power of good wine, joined heartily in the praise bestowed on this ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... scarcely so successful, for he could remember nothing but the Christmas Carol by which he had risen to transient fame; and as it contained some slight but obvious allusions to Raspall's French rolls and Sally Lunns, with a distant but rhyming reference to rich plum-cake and currant buns, a few disrespectful ejaculations were heard from some unruly boys on the side benches, ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... before, sent on by an Oil City agency, and Mrs. Rawling had accepted the Amazon as manna-fall. The lumber valley was ten miles above a tiny railroad station, and servants had to be tempted with triple wages, were transient, or married an employee before a month could pass. The valley women regarded Rawling as their patron, heir of his father, and as temporary aid gave feudal service on demand; but for the six months of his family's residence each year house servants ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... men, whose names are in every one's mouth, and of whose lives every one is curious to know the particulars. Great battles have been fought, and important sieges maintained, of which the details are as yet preserved only in the newspapers, or in the transient publications of the day, but which ought now to take their place ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... falling, thrown many drops upon her face, which gave her so much pain at the moment, that she thought she was scalded much worse than she really was, as did those around her; but Ellen, as she watched her slumbers, now perceived that this was a very transient injury, and she observed to her mamma, that she hoped Matilda's good looks would not be spoiled by the accident, at least that her beauty would be restored before her mother's arrival from ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... situation, her ignorance of the world, and her embarrassment under this overpowering condescension, the good-tempered and fussy daughter of Lord de Mowbray proceeded to re-assure Sybil, and to enforce on her that this perhaps unprecedented descent from superiority was not a mere transient courtliness of the moment, and that she really might rely on her ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... until about June, 1862. The Union troops had taken Fort Pillow. We had heard the firing of cannon, and did not know what it meant. One morning I was in the city after the mail, and I learned that a transient boat had just come down the river, which had lost a part of her wheelhouse. She was fired on from Fort Pillow, sustaining this serious damage from the shot. This increased the excitement among the people; and our folks became alarmed right away, and commenced talking of moving ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... importance, and value, finished the same in a ludicrously deflated condition—and a quiet civilian, to whom the cub had been shamefully insolent, was moved to present him with a little poem of his composition commencing "There was a puppy caught a wasp," which gave him the transient though salutary gift of sight of himself as certain ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... be, in the very highest sense, the experience of sensation without thought: the essential sensation, the "savouring" to which some of the mystics invite us, of which our fragmentary bodily senses offer us a transient sacrament. So here at last, in this intimate communion, this "simple seeing," this total surrender of you to the impress of things, you are using to the full the sacred powers of sense: and so using them, because you are concentrating upon them, accepting ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... to her ring, Joe knocked and entered, respectful admiration in his eye. You may remember Joe, "the brightest boy in the office." In the three years that Mary had known him, he had grown and was now in the transient stage between office boy and clerk—wore garters around his shirt sleeves to keep his cuffs up, feathered his hair in the front, and wore a large black enamel ring with the initial "J" worked out ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... flesh and blood fighting freely in the open, he was a match for the lustiest. But New York, with its submerging, jostling multitudes, its thickly crowding human vastness, and, more than all, its atmosphere of dollar-chasing, apparent and oppressive even to the transient passer-by, ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... impression of the grandeur of his oratory long prevailed among the Greeks, from which we may form a clear conception of his style. The sole object of the oratory of Pericles was to produce conviction; he did not aim to excite any sudden or transient burst of passion by working on the emotions of the heart; nor did he use any of those means employed by the orators of a later age to set in motion the unruly impulses of the multitude. His manner was tranquil, with hardly ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... fingers, "you cannot conceive the unutterable bitterness of the pang which rends the heart of him who feels that he is not only despised, but loathed, hated, execrated, by her whom his soul idolizes! Mine was no boyish, transient passion: it has grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength. My life has been but one long dream of her. All that my soul had drunk in of beauty in the visible earth and heavens—the light of setting suns—the radiance of the silver stars—the breath of summer flowers, together with ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... reached without agency of the war, certainly without participation in it. Of the interval only those few events ultimately mattered which had connection with his life at home. They seemed in the night of the war transient as falling stars; they proved themselves lodestars of his destiny. They seemed nothing, yet even as they flashed and passed he occupied himself with them as the falling star catches the attention from all the fixed and constant. They were of his own ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... friend who is an amateur photographic artist, which be it known is quite a different thing from a kodak fiend. The latter is continually snapping a machine at incongruous things; he delights in catching people in absurd postures; he pictures the foolish, the irrelevant, the transient and the needless. But what does my friend picture? I'll tell you. He catches pictures only of beautiful objects: swaying stalks of goldenrod, flights of thistle-down, lichen on old stone walls, barks of trees, oak-leaves, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... at all; the whole of the rest of the passage quoted is founded upon "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear"—that is, upon the earlier productions of what we must call Shakspere's sceptical period. But these plays represent an essentially transient state of thought. Shakspere was to learn and to teach that those who most deeply meditate and most passionately mourn are not the men of noblest or most influential character—that such may command our sympathy, but hardly our respect or admiration. Still less ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... duty, or a wish to excel. Whatever it is, an idea may stimulate to extraordinary achievements. Adopt some compelling aim if you have none. A vocational aim often serves as a powerful incentive throughout one's student life. An idea may operate for even more transient purposes; it may make one oblivious to present discomfort to a remarkable degree. This is accomplished through the aid of suggestion. When feelings of fatigue approach, you may ward them off by resolutely suggesting to yourself ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... coast of America was made by La Perouse, in latitude sixty degrees north: from this latitude he carefully traced and examined it to the Spanish settlement of Monterey.—an extent of coast of which Cook had had only a transient and imperfect view. Of this he constructed a chart, which at the time was justly regarded as extremely accurate and complete, but was subsequently rendered much more so by the survey of particular points and bays made by the vessels engaged in the fur trade, and especially by ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... fatuous Orientals, transient as it was, was of far greater duration than that of most individual impressions from the London crowd. London is a flood of life, from which in a powerful light you may catch the shimmering facet of a specific wavelet; but these fleeting glimpses leave only a blurred record ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags—fails—a revulsion ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a transient revelation of a perpetual truth, and has shed light on many a dark dungeon where God's servants have lain rotting. It breathed heroic constancy into the Twelve. How striking and noble was their prompt obedience ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural fact, a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very different thing. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event is transient and superficial. Take one instance out of a score. The rainbow links heaven and earth. Iris, then, to the myth-making Greek, was Jove's messenger, intermediary between God and Man. That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the type of all growth; but as in crystals the law is more obvious, their material being more simple, and for the most part more transient and fleeting, would it not be as philosophical as convenient to consider all growth, all filling up within the limits of nature, but a ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... else was down, seemed to have no interest for Mr. Norbury; who, however, noted that no new topic had dawned upon the conversation when he returned from a revision of the breakfast-table. The fact was that the Hon. Percival had detected in Miss Dickenson a fossil, and was feeling ashamed of a transient interest in her last night, when she had shown insight, under the guidance—suppose we say—of champagne. Her bloom had gone off, too, in a strange way, and bloom was a sine qua non to this gentleman. She for her part was conscious ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... them."—"And yet if you were to see them again, you would perhaps not know them."—"Very possibly," replied she. "But I can see no reason why every affection should be necessarily permanent. We never pretend to permanence. We are certainly transient, but not insincere." ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... a moment to every man, who faces an imminent danger, when the mental vision expands and he sees beyond. By this transient gift of prescience he knows what the end will be, whether he is to live or die. As Maurice looked into the merciless eyes of his enemy, a dim knowledge came to him that this was to be an event and not a catastrophe, a fragment of a picture yet to be fully drawn. His confidence and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... legislature, mindful of their situation, provided this special act for their relief. The preamble recites their "resolute stand and sufferings," as deserving a right of pre-emption. The legislature had no eye to any person who was not one of the occupiers after the commencement of the war, and a transient settler removed, (no matter how,) is not an object of the law. This is our construction of the act. James Hughes under whom the plaintiff claims, died before the war, the other occupied the premises ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... Sinai, feeling for the immortality which was not yet revealed to it, even "as through a glass darkly." Here and there, but thinly scattered through the ages, divinely illumined men caught, through the parting seams of the veil, a transient glimpse and ray of the life to come. Here and there, obscurely and hesitatingly, they refer to this vision of their faith. Here and there we seem to see a hope climbing up out of a good man's heart into the pathless mystery ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... feature of the way many honest men looked at the West was their inability to see how essentially transient were some of the characteristics to which they objected. Thus they were alarmed at the turbulence and the lawless shortcomings of various kinds which grew out of the conditions of frontier settlement and sparse ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... attachment. In the prime of life, brave and active, handsome and fond of show, he had all the qualities which render a chief popular with the multitude; "but popularity, when not based upon great benefits, is transient; it is founded upon a principle of egotism, because a whole people cannot have personal sympathies." Ambition led him to desert the royal cause which he had served for nine years; and vanity blinded him to the dangers that surrounded ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... interrupted, but these are unattainable by our instruments. The aspect of fiery meteors had led the ancients likewise to the idea of clefts or openings ('chasmata') in the vault of heaven. These openings were, however, only regarded as transient, while the reason of their being luminous and fiery, instead of obscure, was supposed to be owing to the p 153 translucent illuminated ether which ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... world, and how to derive benefit from the changing events of life. In respect to outward things, the sacred writer inculcates a cheerful, liberal, and charitable use of them, without expecting from them permanent or satisfying delight. He counsels us to take the transient pleasure which agreeable circumstances can afford, as far as consists with the fear of God; to be patient under unavoidable evil; not to aim at impracticable results; to fill up our allotted station in a peaceable, equitable, and prudent manner; to be contented, meek, and affectionate; ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... degrees: even the despotic prince is only that monarch whose subjects claim the fewest privileges, or who is himself best prepared to subdue them by force. All these varieties are but steps in the history of mankind, and, mark the fleeting and transient situations through which they have passed; while supported by ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... in a country, either by purchase or treaty, excellent positions which would perhaps hardly be got by war. It learns to profit by all opportunities of settling on some chosen point of a coast, and to render definitive an occupation which at first was only transient." A generation that has seen England within ten years occupy successively Cyprus and Egypt, under terms and conditions on their face transient, but which have not yet led to the abandonment of the positions ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... and take on bloom, and fill with perfume, and bring back the nightingale that sang to it so many years ago. So Margaret loved her mother's old face, and learned to know the meaning of every line on it. Privileged to see that old face in all its private moments of feeling, under the transient revivification of deathless memories, she was able, so to say, to reconstruct its perished beauty, and realize the romance of which it was once the alluring candle. For her mother had been a very great beauty, ...
— Different Girls • Various
... may, I was sitting with him one morning when the door opened and his aunt appeared, leading in Miss Walton. I could observe a transient glow upon his face as he rose from his seat. She begged him to resume his seat, and placed herself on the sofa beside him. I took my leave, and his aunt accompanied me to the door. Harley was left with Miss Walton alone. She inquired anxiously about ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... beyond those which mere science propounds. What led men to imagine gods at all? What still prompts enlightened nations to worship? Is prayer of any avail, or of none? Is faith the last ground of adoration, or is reason? Is religion a transient phase of development, or is it the chief end of man? What is its warrant of continuance? If it overlive this day of crumbling theologies, whence ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... parable, and Peter asked an exposition. The Lord explained that the food one eats is but temporarily part of his body; having served its purpose of nourishing the tissues and supplying energy to the organism, it is eliminated; therefore the food that enters the body through the mouth is of small and transient importance compared with the utterances that issue from the mouth, for these, if evil, are truly defiling. As Jesus set forth: "Those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... was no spurious or transient feeling. For this child Gustave Lenoble evinced an unchanging fondness. It was indeed no part of his nature to change. The little one was his comfort in affliction, his joy during every brief interval of prosperity. When the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... much altered of late." Precisely what was in his mind when he said "of late" does not appear, but the phrase itself shows that the conditions which induced any momentary equality between ships and forts when brought within range were essentially transient. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... emotion, it gains perhaps its greatest assurance of immediate popularity. If the idea is of vast social importance, this popularity may continue. But if it is born of immediate circumstance, like the hatred of slavery in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or if it is still more transient, say, the novelty of a new invention, like the airplane or wireless, then the book grows stale with its theme. The like is true of a story that teaches a lesson a generation are willing to be taught—it lives as long as the lesson. What has become of Charles Kingsley's novels, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... were, the dazzling brilliancy of the peculiar colours of this people; to depict the noble destiny of a people in the similitude of an individual in a work which will last for all time, thereby making his nation itself eternal, and redeeming it from the ever-shifting element of transient things: all this is possible for the genius only when he has been brought up and come to maturity in the tender care of the culture of a people; whilst, on the other hand, without this sheltering home, the genius will ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... time since we have heard from you, except by transient reports that your family was pretty well. I suppose you are all anxious about publick affairs as well as other folks. 'T is a dreadful dull time for writing; this suspense that we are in seems to absorb every Faculty of the mind, especially in our situation where we seldom ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Such doubts were very transient. Dear old Griff was too delightful, too bright and too brave, too ardent and too affectionate, not to dispel all clouds by the sunshine he carried about with him. If rest and reliance came with Clarence, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... interest are sufficiently obviated, I am yet unable to determine; but by a reflection upon the multiplicity of relations to be considered, and the variety of circumstances to be adjusted in a provision of this kind, I am inclined to think that, it is not the business of a transient inquiry, or of a single clause, but that it will demand a separate law, and engage the deliberation and regard of this ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... involving the esophagus, may produce intermittent and transient dysphagia. The lesions are rarely limited to the esophagus alone; they may occur in any portion of the gastrointestinal, genitourinary, or respiratory tracts, and concomitant cutaneous manifestations usually render the diagnosis ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... of an attack,—no measures to secure a retreat, nor council held as to whither their course should be directed in case of such a necessity. The time was consumed in disputes, as to whether the wearied Vendeean army should pursue its transient success, and go on to Paris, or yield to the desire of the generality of the soldiers, and return to their beloved home, by crossing the Loire, which so many regretted ever to have passed. It appears that there were ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the transient hour! Improve each moment as it flies. Life's a short summer, man a flower; He dies, alas! how ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... feeling of relief, followed the actor downstairs and into the tap-room. A dozen men were there, gathered around two tables that had been drawn together. Transient lodgers, in various stages of dishabille, popped out of all sorts of passageways and joined the throng. The men about the table, on which was stretched the figure of the wounded man, were undoubtedly natives: farmers, woodsmen ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... cannon, and teams. The latter still kept toward the James, but the nags suffered greatly from lack of corn. Only indispensable material had been hauled from the Chickahominy, and the soldiers who fought the ensuing protracted battles were exhausted from hunger. Everything had an uncomfortable, transient, expectant appearance, and the feeble people that limped toward the ultima ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the level of national happiness, and in estimating the value of different pleasures many which, considered in themselves, might appear to rank low upon the scale, will rank high, if in addition to the immediate and transient enjoyment they procure, they contribute to form a strong and healthy body. No branch of legislation is more really valuable than that which is occupied with the health of the people, whether it takes the form of encouraging the means by which remedies may be discovered ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of the architect; it seems, so to speak, kneaded according to the slightest caprice of his imagination. One can hardly conceive how the plans were traced, in what terms the orders were explained to the workmen. The whole thing appears a transient thought, a brilliant revery that at once assumed a durable form—-the realization ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ah! a sad and mournful tale Was hers who so enjoyed The transient bliss of these fair shades— By youth and ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... face to the wall and pressed her hands to her eyes. The noise of the storm she no longer heard, but the picture filled her with terror. What right had either he or she to consider so insignificant and transient a thing as human happiness, the welfare of the body that began its decay with its birth? Genius of mental creation was the most mysterious, the most God-like of all gifts, as well as the rarest; the herd of small composers counted no more than the idle gossip that ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... been started among the Indians, where the leaders were chiefly from those who had been members at Santee. But the societies not connected with mission schools have been transient, or intermittent in their life. Those at Santee and Sisseton, and one at Fort Berthold mission school in North Dakota, have lived. A society is to be started at ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... connect this increase of beauty directly with our freedom and good sense in the matters we have been speaking of: they believe that a child born from the natural and healthy love between a man and a woman, even if that be transient, is likely to turn out better in all ways, and especially in bodily beauty, than the birth of the respectable commercial marriage bed, or of the dull despair of the drudge of that system. They say, Pleasure begets ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... that we have reached this stage, Lady mine. My mission on this plane now is so fierce a one, and the work which I must do is so absorbing, that I must renounce all but transient physical pleasures. But I must keep some radiant star as my lodestone for spiritual delights, and ever since we met and spoke at the Russian Embassy it seems as though step by step links of memory are awakening and comforting me with knowledge of satisfied desire in a former birth, so ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... life is dealt out to us in parcels. For us to speak of our "years" is natural, but when we look up to Him that is unmeasured, infinite, eternal, then this word "years" becomes but the representative of our small transient life when trying to contrast itself with his broad and Infinite Being. We are constantly speaking of two things wherewith we find ourselves related—space and time: and what are they? We hardly know. We know but something like this: space is a measured ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... which might have made even exile dear; Though on his brow were graven lines austere, And tranquil sternness, which had ta'en the place Of feelings fiercer far but less severe, Joy was not always absent from his face, But o'er it in such scenes would steal with transient trace." ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... suffer me to live with him,—near him, I mean,—perhaps the sight of him as he enters the door, perhaps the sound of his voice, asking, "Where is my Bess?" might produce a smile. Such a one as the very thought produces now,—yet not, I hope, so transient, and so quickly followed by a tear. Women are born, they say, to trouble, and tears are given them for their relief. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... Mar, has afforded a subject of comment to two men of very different character, John Lockhart of Carnwath, and the Master of Sinclair. Neither of the portraits drawn by these master-hands are favourable; and they were, in both instances, written under the influence of strong, yet transient impressions of disappointment and suspicion. The mind naturally seeks for some safer steersman to guide opinion than the intemperate though honest Jacobite, Lockhart, or the sarcastic and slippery friend, Sinclair. The worst peculiarity in the career of Mar was, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... all, but partake of the same benumbed state: for we cannot suppose that, after a month's absence, house-martins can return from southern regions to appear for one morning in November, or that house-swallows should leave the districts of Africa to enjoy, in March, the transient summer of a couple ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic divines. Out of this idea the truth grew, next ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... insignificance of life, one is sceptical of all worth save such as may be tasted in the moment of its purchase. If one's ideas and experiences are no concern of the world's, but incidents of a purely local and transient interest, they will realize most when they realize an immediate gratification. Where one does not believe that he is a member of the universe, and a contributor to its ends, he does well to minimize the friction that arises from its accidental propinquity, and to kindle some little fire ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... lassitude, even in its less acute degrees, was rare with her; for she possessed a nature of so fresh a buoyancy that she was able, as a rule, to extract diversion from any environment. Her mind took impressions with the vivid clearness of a mirror, and also, it should be owned, with a mirror's transient objectivity. To-day, however, the mirror was clouded. She looked out of the window; a level row of grey houses frowned at her across the street. She looked upwards; a grey pall of cloud swung over the rooftops. The interior of the room appeared to her ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... frightful condition of existence?" she continued, with a sad smile. "I cannot use this transient power. At such times I am like the knights who could not strike a fallen adversary. To see in the dust a man whom we ought to honor, to raise him only to enable him to deal other blows, to suffer from his degradation more than he suffers ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the world do not touch him; its most stirring events are to him but the dusty incidents of bygone annals. All the fortune of the world without his mistress is misery; and with her all its mischances a transient dream. Revolutions, earthquakes, the change of governments, the fall of empires, are to him but childish games, distasteful to a manly spirit. Men love in the plague, and forget the pest, though it rages about them. They bear a charmed ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Yes. Her transient weakness has passed o'er; at least, It settled into tearless silence: her Pale face and glittering eye, after a glance Upon her sleeping children, were still fixed Upon the palace towers as the swift galley ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... enough of raw material on hand to keep him so employed for twenty years to come, we cannot refuse him the justice of believing that he is a sincere convert to his own system, and must ascribe the peculiarities of his composition, not to any transient affectation, or accidental caprice of imagination, but to a settled perversity of taste or understanding, which has been fostered, if not altogether created, by the circumstances to which we have ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... being refracted by the crystal and coming to a focus in its interior, but this diffusion jarred with his physical conceptions. He approached the crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with a transient revival of the scientific curiosity that in his youth had determined his choice of a calling. He was surprised to find the light not steady, but writhing within the substance of the egg, as though that object ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... fitness of his epitaph and the consistency of his end, dying, as he had lived, a hater of mankind. And some there were who fancied a conceit in the very choice which he had made of the sea-beach for his place of burial, where the vast sea might weep forever upon his grave, as in contempt of the transient and shallow tears ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and the world. Beautiful era! time of star and flower, when the "young moon is on the horizon's verge," and the young heart, lovelier still, seems on the brink of rapture, and hallows existence with its own unshadowed and seraphic light. We have cause to be grateful that this episode is transient, that reality contradicts its hopes, for could its illusions last, who would pause to think of heaven, with so much of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... to the condition of any man who lives at ease, and shares in every fancied pleasure, that the toil, the sweat, and blood of slaves can procure. Alas for the tyrant slave-holder when God shall make his award to his poor, oppressed, and despised children, and to those who seek a transient and yet delusive means of present happiness by trampling his fellow and brother in the dust, and appropriating the soul and body of his own crushed victim to the gratification of his depraved appetites and passions. I would rather enter the gloomy ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... Maurepas absurd enough to sing at supper at Versailles. Banishment ensued; and lest he should ever be restored, the mistress persuaded the King that he had poisoned her predecessor Madame de Chateauroux. Maurepas is very agreeable, and exceedingly cheerful; yet I have seen a transient silent cloud when politics ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... found, however, that Mr. Lathrop had imputed to him a theory—my theory—which that philosopher would have doubtless repudiated emphatically. What Hegel does is simply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transient gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not as a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does not generalize, says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainly never dreamt of such a thing as asserting ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the ardour of our public enthusiasm. Wolfe had none. His nearest relation was Warner, and it may readily be supposed that with the pensive and contemplative artist he had very little in common. He had never married, nor had ever seemed to wander from his stern and sterile path, in the most transient pursuit of the pleasures of sense. Inflexibly honest, rigidly austere,—in his moral character his bitterest enemies could detect no flaw,—poor, even to indigence, he had invariably refused all overtures of the government; ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... impulse was to say that he knew of no job, or else to refer his accoster to the head canvas man, who hired transient help in putting up the main top and in pulling or driving stakes. But as Joe observed the man curiously watching him, he had another idea. Before he could act on it, however, the ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... a head higher than his flock of goats, the Preacher exhorted whatever transient and shifting audience the north wind doled out to him. It was a slave market. Fifteen cents bought you a man. You deeded him to Morpheus; and the recording angel gave ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... sensuous world of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would fain have made him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its struggle for life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient perturbation of the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite things whatever, time itself, the most durable achievements of nature and man, and all that seems most like independent energy, are no more than ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... to our own day, and to times when religious feeling is more vigorously controlled by purely social forces, these manifestations of sexuality become less frequent, less widely spread, and more transient in character. Still they do occur. For reasons that do not concern us here, America has in recent years been a favourable ground for these religio-sexual developments. A sympathetic account of many of these American sects will be ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... general and permanent principle, or gave the Executive a general and extraordinary power, inconsistent with the spirit of the constitution, though the occasions which gave rise to those measures were but partial or transient. I refer for instances to the Convention Act, the Insurrection Act, the Gunpowder Act, and the Press Bill, a measure which, in my enumeration of the violent steps taken by the Irish government, escaped ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... embellishment. They combine to one result with the merely outward and ceremonial ornaments of royalty, its pageantries, flaunting so naively, so credulously, in Shakespeare, as in that old medieval time. And then, the force of Hotspur is but transient youth, the common heat of youth, in him. The character of Henry the Sixth again, roi faineant, with La Pucelle* for his counterfoil, lay in the direct course of Shakespeare's design: he has done much to fix the sentiment of the "holy Henry." Richard the Third, touched, like John, with ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... examination. He discovered signs of the loftiest virtues and most heroic enterprise in the Brahmin; and, near the bottom of one of his nails, a deep-rooted sorrow, which would leave him only with his life. A transient shade of gloom on the Brahmin's countenance was soon succeeded by a piercing, inquisitive glance cast on the diviner. He saw the other's eyes directed on the miniature which he always wore, and which discovered ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... caprice which she, perhaps, regretted afterwards, she ill-treated him, and the fool died of grief. Count de Canes. ambassador of Maria Theresa, had some inclination for her, as well as the Count of Zinzendorf. The person who arranged these transient and short-lived intrigues was a certain Guasco, an abbe not over-favoured with the gifts of Plutus. He was particularly ugly, and had to purchase small favours ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... transient smile, But come to grace thy western isle, 20 By warlike Honour led; And, while around her ports rejoice, While all her sons adore thy choice, With ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... cushions of a morris chair, threw back the covers of an iron bed in one corner and felt of the mattress, then went and stood before the bare little dresser. "Why, the place expresses no more personality than a room in a transient hotel!" ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... her basket comfortably. It is so easy to think people cruel and coarse who have more money than ourselves! Not for Andy, however. His agrarian proclivities were shallow and transient enough. So presently, as they bowled along the level road, he forgot Joe Starke, and began drumming on the foot-board and humming a tune,—touching now and then the stuffed breast-pocket of his coat with an inward chuckle of mystery. And when little Ann Mipps, at the toll-gate, came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... so very popular," he said. "And of course I'm only a transient and don't matter. But some evening one of the admirers may be on the Patten's porch, while another is with you on the bench. ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... temper into his practice. The man whose skeleton was now before us had ranked amongst the most chivalrous of his order, and was regarded by some people as vindicating the national honor in a point where not very long before it had suffered a transient eclipse. In the preceding generation, it had been felt as throwing a shade of disgrace over the public honor, that the championship of England upon the high road fell for a time into French hands; upon French prowess rested the burden of English honor, or, in Gallic phrase, of English ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... regard to some of the principal actors. Looking back on these two eventful years, not a woman who took part in that struggle would wish to have been inactive in that heroic hour. It is an inspiration and an ennobling of all the faculties that they have once been lifted above all personal aims and transient interests; and for all who caught the true meaning of the moment, life can never again touch the low level of indifference. The officers of the State Association who were most active in the canvass are here mentioned with a word ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the moon. When the light broke—a thin, transient gleam—he started. A few fathoms forth the ice began to yield. A moment later he stopped short and recoiled. There was a hole—gaping wide and almost under his feet. He stopped. The water overflowed and the ice cracked. He must not stand still. To ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... the infants suffered any great harm, and the popular estimate of the crime of extinguishing a life before any interests had clustered around it was very lenient. "The criminality of abortion was immeasurably aggravated when it was believed to involve not only the extinction of a transient life, but also the damnation of an immortal soul."[978] The religious interest was thus brought to reenforce the love of children in the struggle against the old custom. The canon law also construed it as murder. Through the Middle Ages the sale of children was not common, but the custom of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... and help me!" exclaimed she, as she saw a strange look of repugnance cloud over the boy's face, and felt a slight motion on his part to extricate himself from her hold. It was as slight, as transient as it could be—over in an instant. But she had taken her hands away, and covered up her face with them as quickly—covered up her face in shame before her child; and in the bitterness of her heart she was wailing out, "Oh, would to God I had died—that I had died as a baby—that I had ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... her gay parade. When Pleasure's transient roses fade, And wither in the tomb, Unchang'd is thy immortal prize; Thy ever-verdant laurels rise In ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... explication, but it is observable, which perhaps everyone has not considered, that those parts which appear the darker part of the wave, in one position to the light, in another appears the lighter, and the contrary; and by this means the undulations become transient, and in a continual change, according as the position of the parts in respect of the incident beams of light is varied. The reason of which odd phaenomena, to one that has but diligently examin'd it even with his naked eye, will be obvious enough. But he that observes it ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... word, but they did not; for Happy Jack was never eager to heed warnings or to take advice, preferring always to abide by the rule of opposites. Stiff-legged from long riding, the knees of his old, leather chaps bulging out in transient simulation of bowed limbs, he came clanking down upon the cook-tent with no thought but to ease ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... autumn was upon her, she looking etherealised and even youthful, as does a penitent cleansed from the soil of past transgressions by fasting and tears. No doubt she would sin again and befoul herself, for the melting moods of a great city are transient; yet for the moment she showed very meek and mild. The atmosphere was clear, with the exquisite clarity which follows abundant and welcome rain after a spell of heat and drought. The trees, somewhat sparse in foliage, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... as to make right living easy and smooth for others. Happy is he whose soul automatically oils all the machinery of the home, the market and the street. And this ambition to be universally helpful must not be a transient and occasional one—here and there an hour's friendship, a passing hint of sympathy, a transient gleam of kindness. Heart helpfulness is to enter into the fundamental conceptions of our living. With vigilant care man is to expel ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... effect of the plum-blossom is surprisingly beautiful; and in the autumn a luxuriant effect is given by the heavily-laden trees bending beneath their weight of yellow or purple fruit. But against these transient effects we must place the tiresome regularity of the fruit-trees, their uniform size and height, and the absence or monotony of colour during a great part of the year, when the ground, the bushes, and ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... to notice. The Duchesse de Polignac also took me by the hand, and told me how happy she was that she had been with the Queen at a moment when she stood in need of a friend. I never knew what could have created in the Queen so lively and so transient an alarm; but I guessed from the particular care she took respecting the King that attempts had been made to irritate him against her; that the malice of her enemies had been promptly discovered and counteracted by the King's penetration ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Prague at once. The immediate consequences of this step were, the foundation of the universities of Leipzig, Rostock, and Ingolstadt; and the building up of those of Heidelberg, Erfurt, and Cracow. Prague never again became what it had been; although it obtained a transient lustre through the victory itself, and the eminence and martyrdom of some of its national teachers. Before we proceed, we must devote a few words to the personal merits and fortunes of ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... encircled glade in the densest part of the wood, whereon the moon, that had imperceptibly added its rays to the scene, shone almost vertically. It was an exceptionally soft, balmy evening for the time of year, which was just that transient period in the May month when beech-trees have suddenly unfolded large limp young leaves of the softness of butterflies' wings. Boughs bearing such leaves hung low around, and completely enclosed them, so that it was as if they were in a great green vase, which had moss ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... pleasure of observing the general murmur of applause. When Waverley spoke, her ear was exclusively filled with his voice, when others answered, her eye took its turn of observation, and seemed to watch his reply. Perhaps the delight which she experienced in the course of that evening, though transient, and followed by much sorrow, was in its nature the most pure and disinterested which the human mind is capable ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... thy journeyings hast thou made thee instant friends, Found, to be loved a little while, and lost, to meet no more; Friends of happy reminiscences, although so transient in their converse, Liberal, cheerful, and sincere, a crowd ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... had remained standing, was a slim replica of her mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes. Her small head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might have had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her round mouth. It was hard to say whether her expression implied ill-temper or apathy; but Wyant was struck by the contrast between the fierce vitality of the doctor's age and the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... transient showers came late in the autumn; the wind blew so coldly down the back of the old willow trees, that it cracked within them. It did not do to fly about in summer garments, for even love itself would then grow cold. The butterfly however ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... enthusiasm over earthly progress serious pause. This earth, once uninhabitable, will be uninhabitable again. If not by wholesale catastrophe, then by the slow wearing down of the sun's heat, already passed its climacteric, this planet, the transient theatre of the human drama, will be no longer the scene of man's activity, but as cold as the moon, or as hot as colliding stars in heaven, will be able to sustain human life no more. "The grandest material works of the human race," wrote Faye ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... the margin of the lake, (7) he surveyed the host of captives and valuables as they were brought out. Beside the prisoners, to guard them, stepped the Lacedaemonian warriors from the camp, carrying their spears—and themselves plucked all gaze their way, so readily will success and the transient fortune of the moment rivet attention. But even while Agesilaus was still thus seated, wearing a look betokening satisfaction at some great achievement, a horseman came galloping up; the flanks of his charger streamed with sweat. To the many inquiries ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... urged by a friend to try the water-cure, and at last agreed to go to Dr. Gully's establishment at Malvern. His letters to Mr. Fox show how much good the treatment did him; he seems to have thought that he had found a cure for his troubles, but, like all other remedies, it had only a transient effect on him. However, he found it, at first, so good for him that when he came home he built himself a douche-bath, and the butler learnt to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... vowels or diphthongs may be uttered alone, the notion of quantity is of course as applicable to them, as to any of the more complex sounds in which consonants are joined with them. All sounds imply time; because they are the transient effects of certain percussions which temporarily agitate the air, an element that tends to silence. When mighty winds have swept over sea and land, and the voice of the Ocean is raised, he speaks to the towering cliffs in the deep tones of a long quantity; the rolling billows, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hurt your feelings, padre, but Catholicism is the only religion. A faith is only justified if it carries conviction. What's the use of a creed or a dogma which is as transient as a philosophy? Being condemned by my profession to study beings whose moral balance is unstable, I am in a position to assert that the Roman Church has a complete understanding of human nature. As a psychologist and a doctor, I admire the uncompromising ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... the Greek women is transient. Hughes ('Travels in Sicily, etc.', vol. i. p. 254, published in 1820) speaks of the three daughters of Madame Macri as "the 'belles' of Athens." Of Theresa, the eldest, he says that "her countenance was extremely interesting, and her eye retained much of ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... as her case seemed hopeless, another puff would come, and once more her sails would fill, and all on board hoped that she would make a good offing. Had they possessed sweeps, with the help of the transient breeze, they might have got to a safe distance from the land. As to anchoring, that was out of the question. Even had there been bottom to be found with such an inset, their cable would not have held them for an instant. When the schooner got near enough to the shore, ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... then see whether I have used them ILL or not, according to the opportunity there was!—Here, at any rate, my reader shall he free of it. Indeed he may perceive, the negotiation was by this time come to a safe point, the Nosti-Grumkows triumphant, and the interest of the matter mainly out. Farther transient anxieties this amiable couple had,— traceable in that last short croak from Grumkow,—lest the English might consent to that of the "Single-Marriage in the mean time" (which the English never did, or meant to do). For example, this other screech of Nosti, which ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... appeared at the drawn curtains of her transient home. She stepped from her wagon and came forward. Beautiful, but not radiant, she was; cold and calm, but not blushing and uncertain. Her wedding gown was all in white, true enough to tradition, though but of delaine, pressed new from its packing ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... exists an evil in the principle of population; an evil, not accidental, but inherent; not of occasional occurrence, but in perpetual operation; not light, transient, or mitigated, but productive of miseries, compared with which all those inflicted by human institutions, that is to say, by the weakness and wickedness of man, however instigated, are 'light;' an evil, finally, for which there is no remedy save one, which had been long overlooked, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... worker myself during open water in my little hospital ship, and in winter with dogs and sleigh, I recognize that it is but transient help which I can give alone. So I love the little hospitals, which speak of permanence. When a call for help comes for me, often enough my place is vacant. But the cheery haven of refuge is ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell |
