"Unstable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brothers. Many of the personal effects of Karl and Augustus are in my keeping—by the Archduke's own wish. You have spent your life studying human nature, and you know as well as I do that half the world would believe my story if I said I was the Emperor's nephew. In the uneasy and unstable condition of your absurd empire I should be hailed as a diversion, ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... might have overawed the Parisian mob; but there is not the slightest reason to suspect them of any design against the unity of the state. Barere, however, really was a federalist, and, we are inclined to believe, the only federalist in the Convention. As far as a man so unstable and servile can be said to have felt any preference for any form of government, he felt a preference for federal government. He was born under the Pyrenees; he was a Gascon of the Gascons, one of a people strongly distinguished by intellectual and moral character, by manners, by ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,'" he answered. "A man weak as any child, and as easily led astray. If he be your head, Avery, I would say it were scarce worth to turn out for the cause. You would have an halter round your neck in ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... glacier in the flesh,—Mr. Young, one of the doctors, and myself. Paddling to the nearest and driest-looking part of the moraine flat, we stepped ashore, but gladly wallowed back into the canoe; for the gray mineral mud, a paste made of fine-ground mountain meal kept unstable by the tides, at once began to take us in, swallowing us feet foremost with becoming glacial deliberation. Our next attempt, made nearer the middle of the valley, was successful, and we soon found ourselves on firm gravelly ground, and made haste to the huge ice wall, which seemed to recede ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... constancy can'st thou e'er hope to find In that unstable, and soon conquered mind? What piety can'st thou expect from her, Who could forgive a brother's murderer? Or, what obedience hop'st thou to be paid, From one who first ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... headstrong, impulsive, and opinionated. If he had the strength of a giant in battle, he lacked the wisdom of the sage in council. If he was irresistible in his own appropriate sphere of moral and economic discussion, he was uncertain and unstable when he ventured beyond its limits. He was a powerful agitator and a matchless leader of debate, rather than a master of government. Those who most admired his honesty, courage, and power in the realm of his true greatness, most distrusted his fitness to hold the reins of administration. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... round of the theme, in its unstable pace (of 5/4), has a strange power of motion, ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... multitude of those mean and timid politicians who naturally gravitate towards the stronger party. The friends of the government were few and disunited. Hamilton brought but half a heart to the discharge of his duties. He had always been unstable; and he was now discontented. He held indeed the highest place to which a subject could aspire. But he imagined that he had only the show of power while others enjoyed the substance, and was not sorry ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the beautiful, Home of all art, all elegance, all grace; Whose orators and poets sway the soul As the winds move the sea's unstable face; O wonderous city, nurse and home of mind, This is my oracle to you this day— No generous growth from starved roots will you find, But fruitless ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... so much to that which happened about her, as to that which occurred within her. She carried responsibility upon each shoulder; her life was in the shaping and she and none other must make it what it would be; her brother's character was at that unstable stage when it was ready to run into the mould. She had brought him here, from the city to the rim of the desert—the step had been her doing, nobody's but hers. And she had come here far less for the sake of Elmer Page's cough than for the sake of his ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... custom in less high-toned quarters. There are the very high curbstones too, so that Lady Teazle or Mrs. Sneerwell could step out of coach or sedan chair without soiling her dainty satin shoes. It brings home to me what an unstable chemical compound man is. Here are the stage accessories as good as ever, while the players have all split up into hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon, with traces of iron and silica and phosphorus. A tray full of chemicals and three buckets of water,—there is the ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... are formed for diff'rent seed; Some when converted sigh in sore amaze, And some are wrapt in joy's ecstatic blaze; Others again will change to each extreme, They know not why—as hurried in a dream; Unstable, they, like water, take all forms, Are quick and stagnant; have their calms and storms; High on the hills, they in the sunbeams glow, Then muddily they move debased and slow; Or cold and frozen rest, and neither rise nor flow. Yet none the cool ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... insidious stab, Snatched from Zenobia's side her gallant lord, And threw into her hand the exigencies Of an unstable and capricious throne. Yet was her genius not inadequate. The precepts of experience, intertwined With intellectual power of lofty grade, Combined to raise Palmyra's beauteous queen High in the golden scale of moral greatness. Under the teachings of the good Longinus ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... the visible man of flesh and blood do all things beautiful and true emanate, nor from the material and unstable, but from the one source that is God, as apprehended and realized by His idea, the real, invisible, spiritual man. Beauty, worth, can only be in ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... extremity. But I cannot advise you to obtrude it yet. I understand what it would cost you, and the sacrifice you would make is too great for the doubtful good which might follow. Neither must you trust me to act for you in this matter. My own position is too unstable for me to be of assistance to any one. I can sympathise with you, possibly as no one else can; but I cannot reach Arthur, either by word or by message. Your father is the man to appeal to in case interference ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... argue, adroitly stole an arrow out of his own quiver, and addressed him as he had frequently heard him address others. And there was just enough truth mixed with the sophistry of his argument to carry conviction to the mind of one as unstable as Ashton; for he did feel all unnerved. He had broken off suddenly from a long-continued drunken spree, and was beginning to have premonitions of something which he dreaded only second to death. He had already twice suffered the horrors of delirium tremens, ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places. There he was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly rash and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... fortune unstable! Like to the scorpion so deceivable,* *deceitful That fhatt'rest with thy head when thou wilt sting; Thy tail is death, through thine envenoming. O brittle joy! O sweete poison quaint!* *strange O monster, that so subtilly canst paint Thy giftes, under hue of steadfastness, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... even the most trivial of situations. The vacillating frame of mind is so distressing at times as to arouse thoughts of suicide. When these symptoms concur in the type of personality whom I shall describe as the unstable adrenal-centered individual, there is evidence for explaining the process as the effect of an insufficiency of secretion ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... answered he to me and said, O my friend Aristomenus, now perceive I well that you are ignorant of the whirling changes, the unstable forces, and slippery inconstancy of Fortune: and therewithall he covered his face (even then blushing for very shame) with his rugged mantle insomuch that from his navel downwards he ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... forbearance of a woman in this matter who has made cross-loves and crooked entanglements her trade for years? I thank ye, Giles, for finding it out; but it makes my plan the harder that she should have belonged to that unstable tribe." ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... greater was her agony; the boat was drifting fast into the middle of the lake; the oar was swimming far away from her. She saw no one on the shore; and, indeed, if she had, it would have been of no service to her. Cut off from all assistance, she was floating on the faithless, unstable element. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... sub-ways for the passage of trade-vehicles across the Park, with an aggregate length of two miles, and twenty-one miles of walk. As an item of city property, Central Park is at present valued at six million dollars; but this, of course, is quite a nominal and unstable valuation. The worth of the Park to New York property in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... poorer were the love. Lord, I would have me love thee from the deeps— Of troubled thought, of pain, of weariness. Through seething wastes below, billows above, My soul should rise in eager, hungering leaps; Through thorny thicks, through sands unstable press— Out of my dream to him who ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... the South, to which Grant was prompted both by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,—just or unjust, benignant or cruel,—would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large would not at once abandon its protectorate over its recent wards, the freedmen. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... seemed to be gradually dominating the din of the many warning whistles that sounded ahead, astern, and all around the steamer. This voice, like that of a strong man knowing his own mind in an assembly of excited and unstable counsellors, had long been raised with a persistence which at last seemed to command all others, and the steamer moved steadily towards it; for it was the siren fog-horn at the pier-head. At one ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... grand conception of a life beyond death. These substitutes are (1) the living over again in posterity, (2) long life in this world. With regard to the first he argues that the brood of the ungodly is unstable and accursed: better is childlessness with virtue. As to the hopes of long life, he argues that the old age of the wicked is without honour; whereas a life cut short may ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... him to be the active military commander. It was his misfortune that he prided himself more if possible on his civil and political knowledge and his administrative ability than on his military skill and capacity. As a politician his opinions were often chimerical, unstable, and of little moment; but his military knowledge and experience were valuable. With headquarters at Washington, and for thirty years consulted and trusted by successive administrations of different parties in important emergencies, internal and external, and at one time the selected candidate ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... for a while into private life; a pleasanter companionship for us, we confess, than the unstable glories of the political arena at Rome. In his family and social relations, the great orator wins from us an amount of personal interest and sympathy which he fails sometimes to command in his career as a statesman. At forty-five years of age he ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... investigation, to present a fundamental dichotomy into units of two beats. Only one, that characterized by secondary accentuation, has no such discriminable quality of phases. Of this form two things are to be noted: first, that it is unstable and tends constantly to revert to that with initial stress, with consequent appearance of secondary accentuation; and second, that as a permanent form it presents the relations of a triple rhythm with a grace ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... marvel of urban stability in an unstable country, a hand fell lightly on his shoulder. He looked up and recognized the old lieutenant. His face had put off its expression of sternness, and he smiled ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... dethroned by Beornulf. The reign of this usurper, who was not of the royal family, was short and unfortunate: he was defeated by the West Saxons, and killed by his own subjects, the East Angles [q]. Ludican, his successor, underwent the same fate [r]; and Wiglaff, who mounted this unstable throne, and found every thing in the utmost confusion, could not withstand the fortune of Egbert, who united all the Saxon kingdoms into one great monarchy. [FN [o] Ingulph. p. 6. [p] Ibid. p. 7. Brompton, p. 776 [q] Ingulph. p. 7. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... in mid-channel. But the incident had lodged itself in her memory, acquiring a sort of symbolic significance, as of a turning-point in her relations with her husband. Not that these were less happy, but that she now beheld them, as she had always formerly beheld such joys, as an unstable islet in a sea of storms. Her present bliss was as complete as ever, but it was ringed by the perpetual menace of all she knew she was hiding from Nick, and of all she suspected ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... seated on uncomfortable, unstable chairs, and the noise of their uneasy movements sent squeaks up and down the building as though it had been a barn filled with ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... largely economic factors entered into the political situation which the Secretary of State and the Viceroy were primarily concerned to study. India is, and probably must always remain, essentially an agricultural country, and its economics must always suffer from the exceptionally unstable conditions to which, except within the relatively small areas available for irrigation, dependence upon a precarious rainfall condemns even the most industrious agricultural population. Many circumstances had combined to retard the development of its vast natural resources and the growth ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... CHRIST'S fold; the sealed of Asher to the happy ones, who bless the LORD at all times; those of Naphtali, to those satisfied with favour, full with the blessing of the LORD; those of Reuben, to the once unstable as water, but now fully saved ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... Moreover, it is necessary to endeavour to secure the free development of these centres and their unimpeded functional activity, because otherwise the development of the higher centres is hindered, and the whole nervous system rendered unstable and insecure. ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... lord, I think, more wise,— Some doubloons from the window threw, And render'd thus the count untrue. The padlock'd room permitted Its owner, when he quitted, To leave his money on the table. One day, bethought this monkey wise To make the whole a sacrifice To Neptune on his throne unstable. I could not well award the prize Between the monkey's and the miser's pleasure Derived from that devoted treasure. One day, then, left alone, That animal, to mischief prone, Coin after coin detach'd, A gold ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... I would ask them to consider, in the light of the Veda, that it is probable that the early notions of future life turn to the visible heaven with its sun and moon, rather than to the topographically unstable and elusive caves and gullies that lead to a wide-gated Hades. In heaven, therefore, and not in hell, is the likely breeding spot of the Cerberus myth. On the way to heaven there is but one pair ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... impressions with silver nitrate is dependent on the fact that the sodium chloride (the same substance as common table salt) present in the perspiration which forms the ridges in most latent impressions reacts with the silver nitrate solution to form silver chloride. Silver chloride is white but is unstable on exposure to light and breaks down into its components, silver and chlorine. The ridges of the fingerprints developed in this manner appear reddish-brown against the background. Immersion in the silver nitrate solution will wash traces of fat and oil from the paper; ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... fundamental notion which every one has learned in mechanics, as to the difference between stable and unstable equilibrium. The conceivable possibility of making an egg stand on its end is a practical impossibility, because nature does not like unstable equilibrium, and a body departs therefrom on the least disturbance; on ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... is a very unstable substance—as we have seen many substances are whereof nitrogen is a component part—and it possesses active properties which are not present in the non-living, or inorganic world. In the latter, differences of temperature will produce motion in the shape ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... Pascataquack, & borrowed a suite of cloaths, and got means to come to Plimoth. A strang alteration ther was in him to such as had seen & known him in his former florishing condition; so uncertaine are y^e mutable things of this unstable world. And yet men set their harts upon them, though they dayly see ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... considerate to the aged, the weakly or the helpless, and to captives, kind to their wives and proud of their children, whom they often over-pet; but when angered, cruel, jealous, treacherous and vindictive, and always unstable. They are bright and merry companions, talkative, inquisitive and restless, busy in their own pursuits, keen sportsmen and naturally independent, absorbed in the chase from sheer love of it and other physical occupations, and not lustful, indecent, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of men who had been at her feet it was said that but one was so fortunate as to engage her fancy. To President Miraflores, the brilliant but unstable ruler of Anchuria, she yielded the key to her resolute heart. How, then, do we find her (as the Coralians would have told you) the wife of Frank Goodwin, and happily living a life of dull ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... Pembroke, died in 1324. As he left no issue, his earldom swelled the alarmingly long roll of lapsed dignities. None of the few remaining earls could step into his place, nor give Edward the wise counsel which the creator of the middle party had always provided. Warenne was brutal, profligate, unstable, and distrusted; Arundel had no great influence; Richmond was a foreigner, and of little personal weight, and the successors of Humphrey of Hereford and Guy of Warwick were minors, suspected by reason of their fathers' treasons. The only new earl was Henry of Lancaster, who in 1324 obtained ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Umbecast, cast about, Umberere, the part of the helmet which shaded the eyes, Umbre, shade, Unavised, thoughtlessly, Uncouth, strange, Underne, - A.M., Ungoodly, rudely, Unhappy, unlucky, Unhilled, uncovered, Unr the, scarcely, Unsicker, unstable, Unwimpled, uncovered, Unwrast, untwisted, unbound, Upright, flat on the back, Up-so-down, upside down, Ure, usage, Utas, octave of ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... Bishop of Bamberg, and bears him off to his castle at Jaxthausen. The contrasted characters of the two chief personages in the play are now brought before us—Gottfried the rough soldier, honest, resolute, and Weislingen, more of a courtier than a soldier, weak and unstable. Overborne by the stronger nature of Gottfried, Weislingen agrees to break his alliance with the Bishop, and, as a pledge for his future conduct, betroths himself to Gottfried's sister Marie, who, weakly devout, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Rodney as one of the lost birds dashed senseless against the glass; one of the flying bodies of which the air was full. But he and Katharine were alone together, aloft, splendid, and luminous with a twofold radiance. He pitied the unstable creature beside him; he felt a desire to protect him, exposed without the knowledge which made his own way so direct. They were united as the adventurous are united, though one reaches the goal and the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and powerful, but, besides, very dishonest and very experienced in the practice of every kind of cheatery, who would never rest until they had effected his ruin, were his cause as just as Christ's. I told him not to trust too much to the king's protection, the favor of princes being unstable and their affections easily alienated by the artifices of informers. . . . And if all this could not move him, I told him not to involve me in his business, for, with his permission, I was not at all inclined to get into any tangle with legions of monks and a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... through countless forms, on the lower planes of existence. The sacrifice of its angelic innocence, the imperious defiance and deathless courage, symbolized by Leo, have obtained the victory over the lower kingdoms; which will be incorporated into his vast empire. Yet, unstable as water, it cannot excel; or, in other words, cannot rise to a higher state within this ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... mistresses are unmarried. The normal condition of a healthy adult is marriage, and for all those who are not defective upon this side (and that means an incapacity to understand many things) celibacy is a state of unstable equilibrium and too often a quite unwholesome condition. Wherever there are celibate teachers I am inclined to suspect a fussiness, an unreasonable watchfulness, a disposition to pry, an exaggeration of what are called "Dangers," a painful idealization ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... that Kitty had suffered in the first weeks after her child's death. She seemed now, indeed, to have forgotten little Harry, so far as outward expression went; but who could tell what was passing in her strange, unstable mind? And it often seemed to Margaret that the signs of the past summer were stamped on her indelibly, for those who ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... forget that riding away from the old vicomte's preparations to make a match of it between Adeliza and me. About us the woods sighed and whispered, dappled by the moonlight with unstable chequerings of blue and silver. Tightly he clung to my crupper, that swart tireless horseman, Care; but ahead rode Love, anterior to all things and yet eternally young, in quest of the Castle of Content. The horses' hoofs beat against the pebbles as if in ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... must have been there a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... comest." "From Egypt." "Art thou from Cairo?" "Why askest thou?" said the boy? "Because," replied Hyjauje, "her sands are of gold, and her river Nile miraculously fruitful; but her women are wanton, free to every conqueror, and her men unstable." "I am not from thence, but from Damascus," cried the youth. "Then," said Hyjauje, "thou art from a most rebellious place, filled with wretched inhabitants, a wavering race, neither Jews nor Christians." "But I am not from ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... be superfluous to mention here certain analogous fields where the human mind gives a series of unstable forms to objects in themselves indeterminate.[9] History, philosophy, natural as well as moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All theory is a subjective form given to an indeterminate material. The material is experience; and although each part ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... prevent them from committing foolish or rash acts likely to compromise British prestige in Africa. The refugees were for the most boisterous people. They insisted upon being heard, and expected the whole world to agree with their conclusions, however unstable these might be. It was absolutely useless to talk reason to a refugee; he refused to listen to you, but considered that, as he had been—as he would put it—compelled to leave that modern paradise, the Rand, and to settle at Cape Town, it became the responsibility of the inhabitants ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... I might shake hands as equals in folly!" concluded Fandor.... Just then the trunk began to move. They were trying to lift it. Whilst trying to preserve an unstable equilibrium, he said to himself in a ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... earliest notoriety was achieved in very much the same way,—that is, by a series of comic sketches, as many of my admirers no doubt remember,—I soon perceived the unstable character of my reputation. I was at the mercy of the next man who should succeed in inventing a new slang, or a funnier way of spelling. These things, in literature, are like "fancy drinks" among the profane. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... went to Percivale and kissed him, and commended him to God; and so he went to Sir Bors and kissed him, and commended him to God, and said: "Fair lord, salute me to my lord, Sir Launcelot, my father, and as soon as ye see him, bid him remember of this unstable world." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... perceived that order reigned where before they had imagined that confusion revelled; and that, by adapting their operations to the ascertained laws of Providence, they could, even upon the seemingly unstable sea, avoid dangers and delays of many kinds, and oftentimes place themselves in highly favourable circumstances. Navigators no longer dash recklessly into the Gulf Stream, and try to stem its tide, as they did of yore; but, as circumstances require, they either take advantage of the counter-currents ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... protect person and property. He wants by licence and not liberty to hasten the advent of that murderous political power prophetically depicted with the statue standing upon feet of clay and iron: supreme authority vested in the world's proletariat in unstable and uncohesive union with militarism, Satan himself the actual lawless animator.[14] As to the scope for outlets in the East, it is more restricted to industries and commerce, but those enterprises, however ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... man, with no strong political convictions, who was always ready to carry out the king's plans. Barrington was succeeded as secretary-at-war by Charles Townshend, a brilliant wit and orator, "the delight and ornament" of the house of commons,[30] a reckless and unstable politician, who was destined to bring evil on his country. A month earlier, one of Bute's adherents, George Grenville, the treasurer of the navy, a brother of Earl Temple, lord privy seal, and a brother-in-law of Pitt, was rewarded by a seat in the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... accordance with the wants and demands of the age, and that policy is still adhered to, though meantime the general aspect of affairs is sadly changed, and Sardinia herself has experienced the sorest reverses. The weak, unstable King whose ambition first conspired to throw her into the current of the movement for the liberation of Italy, has died defeated and broken-hearted, but his wiser son and heir has taken his stand deliberately and firmly on the liberal side, and cannot be driven from his course. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... he was shackled. But as he remarked the change which nights of watching and of tears had made in her appearance, he felt half consoled. The only result of this meeting was to harrow the heart of the poor victim of political expediency, and to prove to her upon how unstable a foundation she had ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... What an unstable foundation on which to erect a seat of empire! Yet the capital has been located in this vicinity more than once or twice within the last twenty-five centuries. The first occasion was during the dynasty of Chou (1100 B. c.), when the ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... course this was the spirit, which had to be removed before a cure could be effected. The Manga-anito danced around the patient and bad him dance and turn somersaults. This was to make the spirit sorry he had chosen such an unstable abiding place. Finally she took hold of his hands, gave a mighty tug and then dropped back stiff. The spirit had passed from the body of the ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... running water, unstable, and that cannot excel; and he answers to Aquarius, his ensign being a man. The water poured out by Aquarius flows toward the South Pole, and it is the first of the four Royal Signs, ascending ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of his mess were mostly men of character with ideas better at least than ordinary as to what became a man; and their influence on one by no means of a low, though of an unstable nature, was elevating. It is true that a change into a regiment of jolly, good-mannered, unprincipled men would within a month have brought him to do as they did; and in another month would have quite silenced, for a time at least, his poor little conscience; but he was ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... made for geese. To these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new; that self-interest, well understood, will produce social concord; that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits; that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in our power. Surely a man of no very ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... cancel each other, any more than the opposite poles of an electric pile destroy each other; that they are the procreative cause of motion, life, and progress; that the problem is to discover, not their fusion, which would be death, but their equilibrium,—an equilibrium for ever unstable, varying with the development ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... according to the aim of those that made it, take it, swear to it. Who but an atheist can refuse the first? who but a papist the second? who but an oppressor, or a rebel, the third? who but the guilty, the fourth? who but men of fortune, desperate cavaliers, the fifth? who but light and empty men, unstable as water, the sixth? In a word, the duty is such, that God hath ordained; the matter is such, as God approveth; the taking such, as God observeth; and the consequences such, as God hath promised. And in them stands my third caution, to ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... disaccord Hath exiled so from Truth the mind unstable? Why of its blest reward Forgetful, lost, unable, Seeks it each ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... the tentacle; though this change is probably of a very different nature from that in a nerve. Finally, as so many and such widely different causes excite aggregation, it would appear that the living matter within the gland-cells is in so unstable a condition that almost any disturbance suffices to change its molecular nature, as in the case of certain chemical compounds. And this change in the glands, whether excited directly, or indirectly by a stimulus received from other glands, is transmitted from cell to cell, ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... are quite beyond the masculine comprehension. One notices that when a woman takes action in this incomprehensible way her lady friends are never surprised; they seem to have some subtle sympathy with her. It is only the men who look puzzled, as if the ground beneath their feet were unstable. Therefore there must be some influence at work, probably the same influence, under different forms, which urges women to those strange, inconsequent actions by which their lives are rendered miserable. Men have ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... Italian statesman, born at Alessandria; was leader of the extreme party in the Sardinian Chamber in 1849, and was several times minister, but was unstable in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... cannot make up his mind. Now he will do this and now he will do that, uncertain and unstable, putting his hand to the plough and removing it again, my Californian at home would call him "wivel-minded." "Wivelly" means undecided, wavering, not to be depended on. It sounds like it. If the labourer gets his clothes soaked, he says they are "sobbled." The ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Politicians unstable and vague May well take example from HAIG, Who talks to the Huns In the voice of his guns Till they dread him far worse ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... had everything centered round it, been subservient to it, that Charmian could scarcely conceive of life without it. She would be quite alone with Claude. Now they were a menage a trois. She recalled the beginnings of her married life. How fussy, how anxious, how unstable they had been! Now the current flowed strongly, steadily, evenly. The river seemed to have a soul, to know ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Owners of lands fronting on the river have increased their holdings by filling in beyond the channel line. Buildings have been erected upon these tracts and the builders have not hesitated to extend retaining walls still farther into the river bed. Refuse from the city's streets, light and unstable in character, has been freely deposited upon the bank to be carried out into the river. Thus the channel has been constricted laterally, the bottom raised, and there is left for the flood waters no alternative than that of extending themselves in the ...
— The Passaic Flood of 1903 • Marshall Ora Leighton
... very unstable affairs, and kingdoms were overthrown in a twinkling. Readers of ancient history will recall many such instances of ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... or in the scene of the counter-stroke which precedes it, we sometimes find a peculiar effect. We are reminded of the state of affairs in which the conflict began. The opening of Julius Caesar warned us that, among a people so unstable and so easily led this way or that, the enterprise of Brutus is hopeless; the days of the Republic are done. In the scene of Antony's speech we see this same people again. At the beginning of Antony and Cleopatra the hero is about to leave Cleopatra for Rome. Where the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... stocked folds I saw at the sons of Fitjung, Now they carry beggars' staffs; Wealth is Like the twinkling of an eye, The most unstable ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... course on the eve of an expedition, and his squadron had absorbed so much of his attention, that he had forgotten to speak of the matter earlier; and the discovery was the last touch needed to upset Evelyn's unstable equilibrium. Her collapse was the more complete by reason of the strain ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... daily life unbearable for many Iraqis. Robberies, kidnappings, and murder are commonplace in much of the country. Organized criminal rackets thrive, particularly in unstable areas like Anbar province. Some criminal gangs cooperate with, finance, or purport to be part of the Sunni insurgency or a Shiite militia in order to gain legitimacy. As one knowledgeable American official put it, "If there were foreign forces in New Jersey, Tony ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... folded their sails and would ride at anchor, all night, upon the sea. But what mattered rain or storm? In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial ill-temper expressed by the permanent, underlying fine weather; a very different thing from the fluid and unstable 'fine weather' of winter, its very opposite, in fact; for has it not (firmly established in the soil, on which it has taken solid form in dense masses of foliage over which the rain may pour in torrents without weakening the resistance offered by their real and lasting happiness) hoisted, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... through, and in his anxiety not to foul either of the posts the old Squire, who could not see well because of the overhanging hay, drove a few inches too close to one of them, and a wheel passed over a small stone beside the wheel track. The jolt was slight, but it proved sufficient to loosen the unstable "podgum." The load had barely cleared the posts when the entire side of it came sliding down—and grandmother Ruth with it! We heard her cry out as she fell, and then all of us who were behind scaled the wall and ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... them British subjects. What the word "subjects" meant, they themselves hardly knew. The English told them that it meant children; the French that it meant dogs and slaves. Events had tamed the fierce confederates; and now, though, like all savages, unstable as children, they leaned in their soberer moments to a position of neutrality between their European neighbors, watching with jealous eyes against the encroachments of both. The French would gladly have enlisted them and their tomahawks in the war; but seeing little hope of this, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... covered by bright-coloured grocers' almanacs. Feminine wrappings hung from pegs upon the door, and the floor was covered with a varied collection of fragments of oilcloth. The Windsor chair he sat in was unstable—which presently afforded material for humour. "Steady, old nag," he said; "whoa, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... and in some six hours will set you down here. I know not what your engagements are; but I say to myself, Why not come at once, and rest a little from your sea-changes, before going farther? In six hours you can be out of the unstable waters, and sitting in your own room here. You shall not be bothered with talk till you repose; and you shall have plenty of it, hot and hot, when the appetite does arise in you. "No. 5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea": come to the "London Terminus," ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... extreme of the state rights view, and drew the resolutions of the Virginia legislature declaring the Alien and Sedition laws "utterly null and void and of no effect," so that he has also been called the "Father of Nullification." However unstable his opinions may have been, there is no questioning his patriotism or the purity of ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... emerged from that cottage by the wayside the unstable framework of a man dragging through seas of melting snow a tottering female of dejected aspect. Forlorn, crippled, famishing, and discouraged, these melancholy relics held on their way until they came ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... me all about her. She really belongs in some exotic romance, not in New York. She's entirely irresponsible, perfectly unstable. There is in her a generous sort of recklessness which is quite likely to drive her headlong into any extreme. And what sort of mate would such a girl be for a young man whose ambition is to make good in the real estate business, marry a nice girl, have a pleasant home and agreeable children, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... sainted martyr Charles on the scaffold, ''T is no concern of the common people's how they are governed.' A common man equal to a Talbot! Fight, my son, if you must; but oh, fight for the king, even an usurper, before a republic, a mob in which so-called equality stands in very unstable equilibrium,—fight for the rightful ruler of the ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... afterwards, "you are a noble heart as ever God made!" Poole had indeed in a marked degree the genius for friendship. Strength of character, sympathy, and self-effacing devotion, combined with prudence and sincerity, made this man a tower of refuge for the unstable ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... light-spot shivering and spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... being prolonged, multiplied, for the Church, the number of urgent cases, and, for the sovereign pontiff the number of cases of intervention. Since 1789, the entire civil order of things, constitutional, political, social and territorial, had become singularly unstable, not only in France but in Europe, not only on the old continent but likewise on the new one. Sovereign states by hundreds sunk under the strokes and counter-strokes, indefinitely propagated and enforced by the philosophy of the eighteenth century and of the French ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... this should be his character by and by, when the work of grace in him was finished. The new name was a prophecy of the man that was to be, the man that Jesus would make of him. Now he was only Simon—rash, impulsive, self-confident, vain, and therefore weak and unstable. ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... were he to cede one supremacy confirmed by the sacred hands of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps make even the crown of the French Empire unstable. He did not deny that Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy and Italy. Might not circumstances turn out so favourably ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... wounds of victours raging blade, Nor ruthlesse spoyle of souldiers blood-desiring, The which so oft thee, Rome, their conquest made, Ne stroke on stroke of fortune variable, Ne rust of age hating continuance, Nor wrath of gods, nor spight of men unstable, Nor thou oppos'd against thine owne puissance, Nor th'horrible uprore of windes high blowing, Nor swelling streames of that god snakie-paced* Which hath so often with his overflowing Thee drenched, have thy pride so much abaced, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... incompatible with that conception of universal law which the developing reason evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods was a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal evolution ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... their opponents to elect as governor a man who had achieved a reputation as a reformer—Grover Cleveland. That some of the states which had been Democratic in 1882, had become Republican again in 1883 illustrates the unstable character of the politics of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... father of Dorothea, is a vague and shadowy memory. He seems to have had little of his father's energy or good sense. Unstable in many of his ways, he lived a migratory life, "at various spots in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as well as in Worcester and Boston, Mass." When Dorothea was born, he was living at Hampden, Maine, adjoining his father's Dixmont properties, presumably as his father's land agent. He probably ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... and mingled exquisitely with her dark melancholy. And she found delight in reading her poor mother like an open book, as she supposed. And all the while her mother was dreaming upon the first year of Hilda's life, before she had discovered that her husband's health was as unstable as his character, and comparing the reality of the present with her early illusions. But the clever girl was not clever enough ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... use this principle for the purpose of reaching a permanent settlement. When with the assistance of the South he effected the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he honestly thought that he was replacing an arbitrary and unstable territorial division of the country into slave and free states, by a settlement which would be stable, because it was the logical product of the American democratic idea. The interpretation of democracy which dictated the proposed solution was sufficiently perverted; but it was nevertheless ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... dynamic, not static; not a condition but a movement. "Not enjoyment and not sorrow" is its end or justification. It is a rush of forces, an evolution towards greater activities and higher adjustment, the growth of a stability which shall be ever more unstable. This onward motion is recognized in the pessimistic philosophy of Von Hartmann, as a movement towards ever greater possibilities of pain. With him life is "the supreme blunder of the blind unconscious force" which created man and developed ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... I ever entertain so wild a hope? This wood-nymph, with her robust yet graceful figure, her clear-headedness, her energy and will-power, could she ever have loved a being so weak and unstable as myself? No, indeed; she needs a lover full of life and vigor; a huntsman, with a strong arm, able to protect her. What figure should I cut by the side of so ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... another grapple with the whirling peg-top, and again he mastered the dizzying confusion. Made bold by success, he got his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments had once more come ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Tremain, pausing, "I am not so sure about that. You see, their Government is so very unstable. The country itself is rich enough in mineral wealth, if that is what you mean." All the while Howard stood there with his mouth agape, and I felt like shoving my fist ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... exceptional. On this head, Mr. Mivart remarks, "As, according to Mr. Darwin's theory, there is a constant tendency to indefinite variation, and as the minute incipient variations will be in ALL DIRECTIONS, they must tend to neutralize each other, and at first to form such unstable modifications that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how such indefinite oscillations of infinitesimal beginnings can ever build up a sufficiently appreciable resemblance to a leaf, bamboo, or other object, for natural selection to ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... to headquarters. Half an hour later he had started, the letter tightly wrapped in a bit of rubber blanket before he had placed it inside his jacket, for he had already had enough experience with the native boats to know how unstable they would be in the current ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... were clambering a trifle laboriously over the broken rocks at the foot of the dike, swearing a little at their unstable footing, but all apparently much in earnest in their conversation. Even as Bennington looked they came to a halt, and then sank down each on a convenient rock, talking interestedly. One was Old Mizzou, one was the man ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... accumulation will after a time delay the disintegration of the underlying rocks and of the more deeply seated particles. For the humus-acids which are generated chiefly in the upper layer of vegetable mould, are extremely unstable compounds, and are liable to decomposition before they reach any considerable depth. {66} A thick bed of overlying soil will also check the downward extension of great fluctuations of temperature, and in cold countries will check the powerful action of frost. The free access of air will ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin |
