"Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... parties, rivals for favour and the power derived from favour. The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling their actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a state of perpetual fluctuation. The bishops locally situated in these changing districts would have been themselves divided. In fact, the Arian bishops had no common centre. They were the nominees and partisans of their several ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... of British Columbia, amounting to over two million dollars; the building of a road from the Atlantic to the Pacific within a stipulated time. The alliance, however, contained more advantage than the ephemeral assistance of making a road or the assumption of a debt, for with confederation came the abolition of the "one-man system of government" and in its place a responsible one, with freedom of action for enterprise, legislation to encourage development, and assist budding industries; ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... He looked back upon the episode with nausea—the inevitable psychological reaction—marvelling at himself that until yesterday he should have found her so desirable, and cursing himself that for the sake of that ephemeral and worthless gratification he should seriously have imperilled his chances of winning Mademoiselle de Kercadiou to wife. There is, after all, nothing very extraordinary in his frame of mind, so that I need not elaborate it further. It resulted from the ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Music is intangible and ephemeral, but it comes from the home world of the spirit and though so fleeting it is recognized by the spirit as a soul-speech fresh from the celestial realms, an echo from the home whence we are now exiled, and therefore it touches a cord in our being, regardless of whether we realize ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... answered Aylmer,—"pluck it, and inhale its brief perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself." ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... can be aware of such intervals; and a single day of life might well appear to the gnat as long as the period of a month to a man. Indeed, we have reason to suppose that to even the shortest-lived insect life does not appear short at all; and that the ephemeral may actually, so far as felling is concerned, live as long as a man—although its birth and death does occur between the rising and the setting ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... in a mirror will be still more ephemeral than fame in a dream. That fine splendour will fleet how soon! Make no further allusion to embroidered curtain, to bridal coverlet; for though you may come to wear on your head a pearl-laden coronet, and, on your person, a jacket ornamented with phoenixes, yours ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... distressed. "It's just that, frankly, we feel they're getting too far away from reality. Trips to Mars and Venus—strange creatures.... It's not real—it's not dignified. Frankly, we question whether an institution like ours can afford to be connected with anything so—so ephemeral. After all ..." ...
— Reel Life Films • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... of France, and, in biting and scornful words, in the language of sadness and despair, developed the need and the misfortune of the land. The king gave the chief minister of police strict injunctions to send him all these ephemeral publications. He wanted to read them all, wanted to find the kernel of wheat which each contained, and, from his enemies, who assuredly would not flatter, he wanted to learn how to be a good king. And ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... that Theology made the mistake of degrading sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only, we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret of eternal ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... not a compound of mind and matter, for we have seen that all things are mental, even matter itself. He is a sort of mentality, a counterfeit of real mind. His body and his universe are in himself. And, like all that is unreal, he is transient, passing, ephemeral, mortal." ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise Omar ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... to enfold a legion of children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a Colonel the other day, ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... relations upon which rests human nature. They are the living, free expression of man's place in creation. The most elaborate schemes and powerful organizations are soulless without these basic principles of morality and have but an ephemeral existence. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... female life. Dr. Johnson was as noted for his fondness for tea as for his other excesses at the table. Many sober minds make coffee and tea the pis a tergo of their daily intellectual labor; just as a few of greater imagination or genius seek in opium the spur of their ephemeral efforts. In the United States, the young imbibe them from their youth up; and it is quite as possible that a part of the nation's nervousness may arise from this cause, as it is probable that our wide-spread dyspepsia begins ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... sudden unreasoning enthusiasms. After the ephemeral flame of their first ardor has burned itself out we shall but find ourselves seated by the mass of ashes formed of our mistakes and ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... metropolis, much less take notice of our dependencies:—the existence of places without the London radius is seldom brought home to the readers of our daily metropolitan papers, except some "Frightful Murder," or "Painful Accident," or "Dreadful Calamity" occurs, to fasten ephemeral ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... supreme importance and arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life" for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses unlimited "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He only seems to have made them in order that they may reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and then die like ephemeral insects. I said, reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and I adhere to that expression. What is there, as a matter of fact, more ignoble and more repugnant than that filthy and ridiculous act of the reproduction of living beings, against which all delicate minds always have ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and it must be confessed he began to wonder whether his services to the nation were worth so much hardship, such complete isolation. The stream sang of the eternities, and his own short span of life (half gone already without any permanent accomplishment) seemed pitifully ephemeral. The guardians of these high places must forever be solitary. No ranger could rightfully be husband and father, for to bring women and children into ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... made through missing a suburban train, expressed a common feeling when he said he could weep at the thought that it was all to be destroyed—that the creation evolved from the best brains of America should be dissolved. Much of our human toil is lost and wasted, and much of our work is more ephemeral than we think; but this was a conscious creation of hundreds of beautiful buildings for a six months' existence. Nowhere else except in America could the thing have been done, and nowhere else in America but ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Cunningham published, in Montreal, a rival publication, the Canadian Review, and Literary and Historical Journal, which appears to have excited the ire of the editor of the Canadian Magazine, for he devotes several pages of one issue to a criticism of its demerits. But these publications had only an ephemeral existence, and were succeeded by others. One of those was the Museum, edited by ladies in Montreal, in 1833. It contained some articles of merit, with a good deal of sentimental gush, [Footnote: The veteran editor ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... poet's traditional right to round off a human destiny in death. "Call no man happy till his life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face, without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... mould, the form, the sort of composite photograph of hundreds of thousands of Laura Jadwins. Yes," she continued, her brows bent, her mind hard at work, "what I am, the little things that distinguish me from everybody else, those pass away very quickly, are very ephemeral. But the type Laura Jadwin, that always remains, doesn't it? One must help building up only the permanent things. Then, let's see, the individual may deteriorate, but the type always grows better.... Yes, I ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... more especially. Not only does it hasten their decay to allow seeds to ripen, but materially enfeebles the entire plant. It is wise to secure as much beauty as is possible just now from your gardens, as a single and unexpected frosty night will destroy almost everything; nothing is more ephemeral than floral beauty. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... case of ordinary stars these changes no doubt occupy many millions of years, which represent the average duration of solar life; but the temporary stars run through similar changes in a few months: they resemble ephemeral insects — born in the morning and doomed to perish with the going down ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... marvels. The new world has riches, and the old world has ideas. It would be to the advantage of both if an exchange could be effected. The Asiatic philosophers teach that all religions are the expressions of the Eternal Verity. Life is ephemeral, they say, its chief value consisting in the opportunities it affords of doing ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... long-winded Letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners, dining repartees, and other ephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remind us of what we know well already: that however it may be with Metaphysics, and other abstract Science originating in the Head (Verstand) alone, no Life-Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), such as this of Clothes pretends ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... comes back again To the lone man who, reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark, And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark Why human buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral That has his day; while shrivell'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. —Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss: Rites, which custom ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... ten years preceding his mission to Spain, Irving kept fagging away at the pen, doing a good deal of miscellaneous and ephemeral work. Among his other engagements was that of regular contributor to the "Knickerbocker Magazine," for a salary of two thousand dollars. He wrote the editor that he had observed that man, as he advances in life, is ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... was only a victim prepared for the sacrifice. Since that time much bad gunpowder has been burned over the heads of the trees, and the roots have been shaken by the discharge of the cannon of the castle at every change of rulers, as one ephemeral government succeeded another, but these cypresses still remain unharmed, and may ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... work, page by page, poem by poem, has passed under | | the educated criticism and scholarly eye of WILLIAM CULLEN | | BRYANT, a man reverenced among men, a poet great among | | poets. | | | | This is a Library of over 500 Volumes in one book, whose | | contents, of no ephemeral nature or interest, will never | | grow old or stale. It can be, and will be, read and re-read | | with pleasure as long as its leaves hold together. Over 800 | | pages beautifully printed, choicely illustrated, handsomely | | bound. Sold only through Agents, by subscription. | ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... ephemeral writings obtained turned his thoughts in the direction of authorship. His tastes and associations led him to employ his powers in two directions: first, in preparing for the general public a series of works which would acquaint them with anatomy, physiology, hygiene, sanitary science, nursing, and ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... only too quickly, to right it. Circumstances have made him coarse and brutal, but below all this surface beats a heart full of true instincts and honest impulses. I am certain the recording angel will blot out many of his sins, as he did those of Uncle Toby. His means exhausted, he abdicates his ephemeral kingdom, and, uncomplaining, takes his pick and shovel, his frying-pan, bacon, and flour, and starts over the mountains for new diggings. Yet he gains no wisdom by experience. The same bacchanalian orgies follow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... ephemeral. They will roll away, and we shall once more gladly recognise the lineaments of an essentially lofty character, of one who, though a man of genius and of letters, neither outraged society nor stooped to it; was neither a rebel nor a slave; who in poverty scorned wealth; who never ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... consistent in his words and actions, or when his environment is still very ignorant and superstitious, the crowd of believers increases still more rapidly, and thus one sees even at the present day in less-civilized countries new sects or religious guilds, more or less ephemeral, in which the spirit of the prophet sometimes stirs ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... ephemeral and insignificant dynasties, with the fate of which we need not long detain the reader. In less than sixty years they all vanished from the page of history. The struggle for power between Chuwen, the founder of the so-called ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... drew in connection with his new method of criticism, and somewhat allied to the details of his accommodation-theory, was between the local and temporary, the permanent and eternal, in the Scriptures. A large portion of the Bible, he held, is only ephemeral, and was never intended to be anything else. There was a local interest in the accounts of the writers; but after the change of government, or the lapse of a generation or two, they had no further application to mankind. Nor do they now meet the wants of the world; they are only ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... hurried across the vast untroubled sky—shepherdless, futile, imponderable—and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... correlative circumstances, and those circumstances are of too grave a character, to allow of my indulging so natural a wish. And therefore, though in this new Edition I have managed to omit nearly a hundred pages of my original Volume, which I could safely consider to be of merely ephemeral importance, I am even for that very reason obliged, by way of making up for their absence, to prefix to my Narrative some account of the provocation out ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... numbers by the insane. Hysterical individuals may assert the presence of a foreign body, or may even volitionally swallow or aspirate objects. It is a mistake to do a bronchoscopy in order to cure by suggestion the delusion of foreign body presence. Such "cures" are ephemeral. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... though Nash died of a disease attributed to coarse and unwholesome cheap food. His fame proved to be singularly ephemeral. So far as I am aware, no book of his was reprinted after his death, with the single exception of "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," which was issued again in 1613. His name was mentioned and some interest in his writings was awakened at the close of the next century by Winstanley and by Langbaine, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... than on those which confessedly transcend our understanding. Thus is it ever with men. The wonders of creation meet them at every turn, without awakening reflection, while their minds labor on subjects that are not only ephemeral and illusory, but which never attain an elevation higher than that the most sordid ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... of those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, with a number of political and other pamphlets, was the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... excellent lunch in the most expensive restaurant to be found, they walked arm-in-arm westwards along Piccadilly, Mr Bunker pointing out the various objects of historical or ephemeral interest to be seen in that thoroughfare, the Baron drinking in this information with the serious ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... her nose out of joint. She wanted to go away now. It all seemed no good. Hermione was established for ever, she herself was ephemeral and had not yet ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... married Colonel Leigh, and had a numerous family, most of whom died young. Her eldest daughter, Georgiana, married Mr. Henry Trevanion. The fourth, Medora, had an unfortunate history, the nucleus of an impertinent and happily ephemeral romance. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... about time enters widely into our opinions. To one person an institution which has existed for the whole of his conscious life is part of the permanent furniture of the universe: to another it is ephemeral. Geological time is very different from biological time. Social time is most complex. The statesman has to decide whether to calculate for the emergency or for the long run. Some decisions have to be made on the basis of what will happen in the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... west spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness of ephemeral growths into which we ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Bridgewater House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor Hugo's play of "Hernani," ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... explained the matter. The explanation brought Lionel relief. But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. In his eyes it ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... poem he had two objects in view: first the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that of recommending himself to the permanent approval of his own and following ages as a poet, and especially as a moral poet. To meet the first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in contemporary ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... hoary patriarchal oak, which had flung its shade over the tombs of countless generations, and, as it stood forming a link between the present and the past, won men's reverence by force of contrast with their own ephemeral existence—yet atones for his delinquencies by softening the bitterness of grief, blunting the sharp edge of pain, and affording to the broken-hearted the rest, and to the slave the freedom, of the grave;—old Time, I say, who should be praised at all events for his perseverance ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... paces ahead, flanked by Robin and the local doctor, who were each endeavouring to secure her undivided attention. She was looking very lovely, in an elusive frock of some ephemeral material veiling a delicate prismatic undertone of colour. She always dressed rather wonderfully, every detail perfect. There was a kind of frail, worldly charm about her clothes—the sort of charm you never find in the clothes of a thoroughly good and virtuous woman, ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... friend. Hampton did not contain him,—of this she was sure; and in her efforts to visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... other, the compositions and "arrangements" of the editors. Here and there a modern tune strikes the public taste or sinks deeper to the heart, and it takes its place thenceforward with the "Old Hundredth," with "Martyrs," and "Mear"; but the greater number of these compositions are as ephemeral as newspaper stories. Every conductor of a choir knows, however, that, to maintain an interest among singers, it is necessary to give them new music for practice, especially new pieces for the opening of public ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... beloved petits pains and croissants for breakfast, the order having gone forth that bakers, being short-handed, are to make only pain de menage. Similarly, because the majority of journalists and popular writers are under arms, Paris does without its accustomed daily refreshment of ephemeral literature, its comic and illustrated press, its literary and artistic causeries, its feuilletons, and chroniques. It does without its theatres, its music halls, without politics, art, and social amenities, without barbers, florists, and motor cars, partly because ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... Ephemeral as the sunset glow Is human grandeur. Mortal life Was given that souls might seek and know Immortal truths; and through the strife That shakes the earth from land to land The ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... increase. This was a new mystery which she could not understand, in spite of much pondering over it, much praying for light, and many conversations on the subject with her religious friends. So sweet and good and pure- hearted and pliant a girl; but alas! alas! it was only that ephemeral fictitious kind of goodness which springs from temper or disposition, which has no value in the eyes of Heaven, cannot stand the shocks of time and circumstance. It was not through any remissness of her own; ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... before his birth It had been—the great pageant to whose essence Being belonged—endless aeons after his ephemeral passing It would still throb and glow, still offer to the surrendered human soul the supreme uplift. He had but a moment to contemplate It, yet to understand Its essence, to know the great laws of Its workings, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the distant haze of a peak. Trackless and tortuous, the way underfoot was incredibly difficult. Yet the distances melted in ephemeral slopes as lovely in their tints as they were accursed in their reality of cruelty. Rhoda, unaccustomed to day travel, panted and gasped as they walked. But she held her own fairly well, while DeWitt, sick and overstrained at the start, was ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... "I didnt think youd have any difficulty in reading my handwriting." And in fact the whole business was absurd, for if there's anything I pride myself on it's the gracefulness and legibility of my penmanship. Typewriters might well be mandatory for the ephemeral news item, but I had been hired as a special correspondent and someday my manuscript would be a ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... mankind, but which man can, up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth." ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of keeping or winning ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Palaces, and of its inhabitants, prove how accurately she had seized their characteristic features. Here her pen was called into incessant activity; besides various contributions to Annuals and other ephemeral works, Miss Roberts undertook the formidable task (doubly formidable in such a climate) of editing a newspaper, and the Oriental Observer, whilst under her direction, was enriched by some valuable articles written by herself, indicating the versatility of her talents, the ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... existed here. Five hundred yards above or below there is no sign of water, but in that intermediate space a stream gushes out of the ground, fills a splendid little trough, and gushes into the ground again: emblematic indeed of the ephemeral existence of humanity—we rise out of the dust, flash for a brief moment in the light of life, and in another we are gone. We planted seeds here; I called it Titania's Spring, the watercourse in which it exists I ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... sense of affliction to the strength of those who have to bear it. Only a woman can know what it is to lose a love which sprang from the heart and was genuine throughout, a passion which was not ephemeral, and satisfied at once the spirit and the flesh. How rare it is to find a man so gifted that to worship him brings no sense of degradation! If such supreme fortune befall us once, we cannot hope for it a second time. Men of true greatness, whose strength and worth are veiled by poetic grace, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... volume of ephemeral essays to you in recognition of your worth as a man and a scientist, and as ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... that the living standard is going down all the time, isn't it?" asked Mr. Tanter, keeping his ephemeral smile. "What about those three thousand ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... literary product of the United States from 1815 to 1830 is contained in magazines rather than in books. Prose and verse which could never have found a publisher separately appeared in periodicals of every description. Most of these were ephemeral publications. The more serious reviews, like the American Biblical Repository, the American Law Journal, and the religious reviews, had a longer life; but the lighter magazines, like the Ladies' Literary Cabinet, the Young Ladies' ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... of Greek culture; Caesar, to destroy the stifling institutions of a worn-out system; Charles the Great, to realize the "city of God" on earth; Napoleon, for nationality, individual liberty, popular sovereignty. What was personal and petty in the work of these Titans, being ephemeral, disappeared in the death of each; what was human and large has endured and will endure. The creative ideas of the revolutionary era with which Napoleon's name is so closely connected are no longer called ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... A.D. 1584. Sparrow, 194. I admit, indeed, that Protestant canons have but a fleeting and ephemeral authority even among themselves, and that the canons must yield to the spirit of the times, not the times to the canons. I dare say that even few Protestant theologians are familiar with the canons to which I have referred. Some people have a convenient faculty of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... middle. I never see those wings slide on but I feel as if seeing my old acquaintance unexpectedly.' Of the particular plays assisted by De Loutherbourg's brush, small account has come down to us. They were, no doubt, chiefly of a pantomimic and ephemeral kind. For the 'Christmas Tale,' produced at Drury Lane in 1773—the composition of which has been generally assigned to Garrick, though probably due to Charles Dibdin—De Loutherbourg certainly painted scenes, and the play enjoyed a considerable run, thanks rather to his merits than ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... nature. An immortality in his life would confer immortality on his abode. The winds should be his breath, the seasons his moods, and he should impart of his serenity to Nature herself. But such as we know him he is ephemeral like the scenery which surrounds him, and does not aspire to an enduring existence. When we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the public than Defoe's paper was ever able to establish. Steele was responsible for many more periodicals, such as the Englishman, the Lover, the Reader, Town Talk, the Tea-Table, Chit-Chat, the Plebeian, and the Theatre, most of which had a rather ephemeral existence. Among his other services to literature he helped to purify the stage of some of its grossness, and he became the founder of that sentimental comedy which in the days of the early Georges took the place ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... suggestion, but a suggestion less wide of the truth than certain theories now almost unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. That such may be the case with literature, particularly the more ephemeral kinds thereof, is very likely, since literature, save in the great complex structures of epos, tragedy, choral lyric, is but the development of daily speech, and possibly as upstart, as purely passing, as daily speech itself; moreover, in its less ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... considered sacred a sash which she wore when dancing with him, and she remembered him specially in her prayers. Henceforward, one devouring desire occupied her mind. She wished—and praiseworthily—to be Burton's wife. To him, on the other hand, she was but an ephemeral fancy—one of the hundred and fifty women—his fair cousins in England and the softer and darker beauties of France and Italy—to whom he had said tender nothings. Later, when Miss Arundell saw him flirting with another girl, a certain ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the accumulations of bones ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... whither one may go at will, without thought of any infirmity. The name "Frantz," uttered mechanically by her mother, because of a chance resemblance, represented to her a whole lifetime of illusions, of fervent hopes, ephemeral as the flush that rose to her cheeks when, on returning home at night, he used to come and chat with her a moment. How far away that was already! To think that he used to live in the little room near hers, that they used to hear his step on the stairs and the noise made by his table when he dragged ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... hero. There is malice enough in gossip, but most of it is the purest kind of mental and emotional satisfaction. Our interest in it is of exactly the same kind as our interest in novels and romances. The stories which we tell about ourselves and our friends make up the ephemeral, yet real prose ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue. It was in the company of Mr. Edward W. Townsend. I ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... of acres are now entirely devoted to their culture. For our own part, we scarcely consider the tulip as in any way justifying the praise which is lavished upon it even in the present day, because its beauty is, to say the least, ephemeral, whilst its showiness is far from being either chaste or delicate. It will be, however desirable to have six or even a dozen bulbs, which only cost about a penny apiece. They can be planted any time during the present month, from ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of operations for an ambitious ruler. Otto first crossed the Alps in 951, married the widow of one of the ephemeral Italian kings, and, without being formally crowned, was generally acknowledged as king of Italy. The revolt of his son compelled him to return to Germany, but a decade later the pope called him to his assistance. Otto answered the summons ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... by it; as if a man wanted to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick. But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but there is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to crush ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... in the pages of books to have an intimate and inspiring acquaintance with the heroes of the nations. If we wish our children to be fine types of men and women, we must form their tastes in these large directions before they are overwhelmed by what is so ephemeral and worthless in literature ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... It will afford no legitimate development of Christian doctrine, and the whole scheme of its religion will rest for its execution upon unreliable agencies extraneous to home itself. Hence we find that the piety of those families or individuals that isolate themselves from the church, is at best but ephemeral in its existence, contracted in spirit, moving and operating by mere impulse and irregular starts, and withal destitute of vitality and saving influence. A death-bed scene may awaken a transient and visionary sense of duty; adversity may startle the drowsy ear, and cause the parents to ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... ephemeral fevers, which last but a short time and terminate by critical phenomena; intermittent fevers, in which there are alterations of exacerbations of the febrile symptoms and remissions, in which the body returns to its normal ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... he found in the will of the gods a law superior to the justice of man. But our excuse or pretext of to-day is fraught with the more peril to our morality inasmuch as it reposes on a law, or at least a habit, of Nature, that is far more real, more incontestable and universal than the will of an ephemeral and ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... thing; and most probably the shallowness of much of the music produced in such abundance towards the close of the eighteenth century spurred them on to higher efforts. Dussek had lived an irregular, aimless sort of life; he had wandered from one country to another, and had acquired the ephemeral fame of the virtuoso. Perhaps he was a disappointed man; there is a tinge of sadness about these last sonatas which supports such a view. Perhaps a feeling that his life was ebbing away made him serious: his music now shows no trifling. ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... cents—and in any case at a profit of only two or three cents. Of course it was done to widen the establishment's patronage—to bring people into the store. Equally of course, it was destroying the book business and debauching the reading tastes of the community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular literature of the season, the book-store proper could not keep up its stock of more solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all. On the other hand, "Thurston's" dealt with nothing save the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... service came to hold with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group solidarity; ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... a new kingdom entered Florence on the 12th of April 1801; but the reception given him by the Tuscans was not at all similar to what he had experienced at Paris. The people received the royal pair as sovereigns imposed on them by France. The ephemeral kingdom of Etruria lasted scarcely six years. The King died in 1803, in the flower of his age, and in 1807 the Queen was expelled from her throne by him who had constructed ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and more awful; and though there is constantly intervening the crushing thought of what a poor thing I am, and my life is, and I am sometimes disheartened and tempted to be reckless, and to say, "It's no matter what this ephemeral being, this passing dust and wind, shall come to,"—yet ever, like the little eddying whirlwinds that I see in the street before me, this dusty breath of life struggles upward. I am very sad and glorious by turns; and sometimes, when mortality is heavy and hope is weak, I take refuge in simple ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... hands, to the whole household. A draught of wine cannot go round to the mourners, but he must minister it. A chair may hardly be restored to its place by a less solemn hand than his. He takes upon himself all functions, and is a sort of ephemeral major-domo! He distributes his attentions among the company assembled according to the degree of affliction, which he calculates from the degree of kin to the deceased; and marshals them accordingly in the procession. He himself is of a sad and tristful countenance; yet such as (if ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... prison, where we have the sad pleasure of being confined, everything is arranged in accordance with a most purposeful plan and is most strictly subjected to laws and rules. And the very strict order, on account of which the existence of your creations is so short lived, and, I may say, ephemeral, is full of the profoundest wisdom. Allowing you to perfect yourself in your art, it wisely guards other people against the perhaps injurious influence of your productions, and in any case it completes logically, finishes, enforces, and makes clear the meaning of your solitary confinement. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... process, looked back and reviewed the past. On such occasions I have been half inclined to make the reflection, common to all journalists, when they survey the monumental works of our brethren in the superior ranks of the literary profession: "Have I not cast my life and energy away on things ephemeral and unworthy? Have not I preferred a kind of glorified pot-boiling to the service of the spirit?" In the end, however, like the painter with the journalist's heart in Robert Browning's poem, I console myself for having enlisted ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language: and there were other strange words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral existence. ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... virtue, became a highly-cultivated writer; he sate in his spacious library of well-selected books, arranged with a finical preciseness, apportioning his day between various literary pursuits. He made an income; he wrote excellent ephemeral volumes; he gained a somewhat dreary reputation. But Wordsworth, with his tiny bookshelf of odd tattered volumes, with pages of manuscript interleaved to supply missing passages, alone kept his heart and imagination active, by deliberate ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... incompetent, self-deceived ministry; if our own chosen, set-up, and maintained minister is himself an uninstructed, unspiritual, unsanctified man; and if the books we buy and borrow and read are all secular, unspiritual, superficial, ephemeral, silly, stupid, impertinent books, then the impossibility of our salvation is absolute, and we are as good as in hell already with all our guilt and all our corruption for ever on our heads. Now, that ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... is really ludicrous to observe the ridiculous pride of some of these ephemeral things;—during their mayoralty, the gaudy city vehicle with four richly caparisoned horses is constantly in the drive, with six or eight persons crammed into it like a family waggon, and bedizened out in all the colours of the rainbow;—ask for them six months ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... casual strays, which I alone have had the good fortune to follow through all its episodes, seemed to me too unique and valuable a chapter in the annals of life to be withheld entirely from the scientific world of your eager, ephemeral, nineteenth century humanity. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... has now almost passed from the memories of men; the veil of time has settled over him; no distinct image is recalled by the mention of his name. How suggestive this, of the ephemeral fame of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... critics had assigned. Of this work it may be said with truth, that the highest praise falls short of its merit, the most favorable critic has not said too much in its commendation. And this promises to be more than an ephemeral popularity—the book will live—it will be read with pleasure and profit, as long as genuine Catholic literature ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... distracted the reader from the spirit behind the form;—for the spirit is the life,—and few who read these Sonnets will deny that the spirit of Nizamat Jung is that of the true poet, ever striving to look beyond ephemeral sorrows up to the Eternal Beauty—now hidden behind a veil, but some day to be revealed in all its splendour ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... liar and a thief. And Disraeli knew him too, and he said that in these respects Disraeli and Moliere were brothers. That he said so matters as little now as ever it did; for though the whippersnapper is immortal in kind, he is nothing if not futile and ephemeral in effect, and it was seen long since that in life and death Disraeli, as became his genius and his race, was the Uncommonplace incarnate, the antithesis of Grocerdom, the Satan of that revolt against the yielding habit of Jehovah-Bottles the spirit whereof is fast coming to be ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... salutation among this people is, Hoe vaart uwe? How do you sail? adopted no doubt in the early periods of the Republic, when they were all navigators and fishermen. The usual salutation at Cairo is, How do you sweat? a dry hot skin being a sure indication of a destructive ephemeral fever. I think some author has observed, in contrasting the haughty Spaniard with the frivolous Frenchman, that the proud steady gait and inflexible solemnity of the former were expressed in his mode of salutation, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... are presently to die, let us then enjoy to its full relish the remnant of our lives. Sordid care, avaunt! menial labours, and pains, slight in themselves, but too gigantic for our exhausted strength, shall make no part of our ephemeral existences. In the beginning of time, when, as now, man lived by families, and not by tribes or nations, they were placed in a genial clime, where earth fed them untilled, and the balmy air enwrapt their reposing limbs with warmth more pleasant than beds of down. The south is the native ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... rains Had left some scarlet stains Of color on the landscape's neutral ground; Those fine ephemeral things, The winged motes of sound, That sing the "Harvest Home" Of ripe Autumn in the gloam Of the deep and bosky woods, in the field and by the river, Sang ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... tongue. When you are gone, Caroline, I shall devote myself to what, after all, must be the work of my life, and I shall finish the biographical history of our great hero in verse,—which I hope may at least be not ephemeral. From month to month I shall send you what I do, and you will not refuse me your friendly criticism,—and, perhaps, some slight meed of approbation,—because you are dwelling beneath the shade of a throne. Oh, Caroline, let it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Severa He hath laid up his guns. But the Virgin, the Daughter of Roma, She hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn,—The Daughter of Tiber, She hath shaken her head and built barricades against thee! Will they fight? I believe it. Alas! 'tis ephemeral folly, Vain and ephemeral folly, of course, compared with pictures, Statues, and antique gems!—Indeed: and yet indeed too, Yet, methought, in broad day did I dream,—tell it not in St. James's, Whisper it not in thy courts, O Christ Church!—yet ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... uncertainly for several years, passing through all the stages of government from red radicalism to absolute conservatism, finally adjusting itself to the middle course of constitutional monarchism. During the effervescent and ephemeral republic there was sent to the Philippines a governor who set to work to modify the old system and establish a government more in harmony with modern ideas and more democratic in form. His changes were ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... yeast, tar from peat (sphagnol), Swedish wood tar, permanganate of potash, perborates and percarbonates of soda and ammonia, chlorine compounds, but none of these has at present come much into favour, and some had only ephemeral existence. Of the many drugs that it has been suggested to admix in soap for use in allaying an irritable condition of the skin, the majority are obviously better applied in the form of ointments, and we need not ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... a greater variety than the population of these ephemeral cities in the climax of their splendour. We have first the people who immediately surrounded the Pharaoh,** the retainers of the palace and of the harem, whose highly complex degrees of rank are revealed to us on the monuments.*** His person was, as it were, minutely ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Apparently ephemeral in wood, growing quickly and perishing as quickly, the willows nevertheless supply us with an important preservative element, extracted from their bitter juices. Salicylic acid, made from willow bark, prevents change and arrests decay, and it is ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... probably regarded as a stranger who had drifted into the church to enjoy the familiar yet interesting spectacle of a man and a maid bound together by a rite which was the more interesting because it seemed so ephemeral, yet meant so much. ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... influence in the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... better providing for the welfare of communities of men. He would smile at their earnestness and zeal, all spent in supplying the necessaries of the day, or, at most, providing for the revolution of the seasons, or for that ephemeral thing we call the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benet, Clinton Scollard, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... None will deny that this type of education has an important place. Even in the more descriptive courses appeal should be made to the higher intellectual qualities of the class, leaving a lasting disciplinary result rather than a memory stored with merely ephemeral and mostly ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... changeless. All must vary, must progress or retrograde; the very rocks in the bowels of the earth undergo organic alterations, while the eternal hills that cover them increase or are worn away. Much more is this obvious in the case of ephemeral man, of his thoughts, his works, and everything wherewith he has to do, he who within the period of a few short years is doomed to appear, wax, wane, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the tale was of extreme delicacy in both sentiment and design. It was a little fanciful, a little elaborate, but of an ephemeral poetry. It was all "atmosphere," and its success depended upon the minutest precision of phrasing and the nicest harmony between idea and word. There was much in mere effect of words; and more important than mere plot was the feeling produced by the balancing ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... of sociology would make it include everything in human society. A third faulty conception is that it is the science of human institutions. This is faulty because it again is too narrow. An institution is a sanctioned form of human association, while sociology deals with the ephemeral and unsanctioned forms, such as we see in the phenomena of mobs, crazes, fads, fashions, and crimes, as well as with the sanctioned forms. A fourth conception which might be criticized is that sociology ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... were held in as much contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular, sprang from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reputation is so slight," he said, "one of those ephemeral productions that are forgotten in a day, that it will serve our purpose well. We must have a password—the less noticeable the better. When do you ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... thou the image of a thought that fares Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead, Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares, To where our lives ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... the mere blind laws of supply and demand should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic literature—that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of inherited instinct, and opposes the foolish ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... two schools of thought relating to amendment of the Constitution. One need not be committed to the belief that amendment is weakening the fundamental law, or that excessive amendment is essential to meet every ephemeral whim. We ought to amend to meet the demands of the people when sanctioned by deliberate ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... of the pamphlet class, and, like its confraternity, destined at longest to the life ephemeral. But, to say truth, I found all that sort of thing done so much better, spicier, cleverer, in numberless newspaper articles, than my lack of the particular knowledge requisite, and my little practice in controversy, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... links large portions of mankind together, connects the living with the dead, and thus secures to each generation the full intellectual inheritance of our race. Without that historical consciousness the life of man would be ephemeral and vain. The more we can see backward, and place ourselves in real sympathy with the past, the more truly do we make the life of former generations our own, and are able to fulfill our own appointed duty in carrying on the work which was begun centuries ago in Athens and at Rome. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller |
