"Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 profited its people ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... 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
... of some tribes are taken up with religious ceremonies. Religion is, however, essentially "divinatory," that is, its chief end and aim is toward the future, not the present, and therefore the impress it leaves on national character is far less permanent, much more ephemeral, than either government or language. This is constantly seen in daily life. Persons change their religion with facility, but adhere resolutely to the laws which protect their property. The mighty empire of Rome secured ethnic unity to a degree never since equalled in parallel circumstances, ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... Norman pillars and a rounded vault, speaking of very distant days. Everything save pews and choir stalls was of granite, its rosy color making the stone seem warm rather than cold. Vines, holly and flowers heaped about the interior emphasized by their ephemeral beauty the solemn enduring majesty of the church itself. Ten or twelve young people were working more or less steadily to the accompaniment of ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... a mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... mother! so commonplace, too, neutral tint—no effect. Quite a failure, one cannot even stare, and you know, Granville, the object of all these strange speeches is merely to make fools stare. To be the wonder of the London world for a single day, is the great ambition of these ephemeral fame- hunters 'insects that shine, buzz, and fly-blow ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... work he elected to do; he had to establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now, more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy to rank ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... entered the family of nations. But the position it was to assume, and the advantages it was to be allowed to enjoy, were yet to be ascertained and fixed. Its independence, confessed to be only a doubtful experiment at home, was naturally thought ephemeral in Europe. Its example was ominous, and the European Powers willingly believed that, if discountenanced and baffled, America would soon relapse into colonial subjugation. Such prejudices were founded in the fixed ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... Purpose was a proven fact; and, though in its completeness inscrutable, it could at least in part be divined from the fact that all these varied and eternal splendours had for their centre our Earth and its ephemeral master. The Purpose, though it is not our Purpose, is especially concerned with us and circles round us. It is the purpose of a God ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... heterogeneous nations united under one head; but with all his genius he was unequal to the task of its accomplishment. Napoleon entertained the same plan with his confederation of the Rhine; but all such systems are ephemeral when power is centralized, and the minor states are looked upon as instruments, and not as principals. Austria is the only empire on record that has succeeded under those circumstances. The cabinet of Austria, when it seeks the solution of any internal ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... branches of trees and cling on to rocks, there emerge these peerless aristocrats of the flower-world, finished, polished, immaculate, and reigning supreme through sheer distinction and excellence at every point—and also because theirs is clearly no ephemeral convolvulus-like beauty which will fade and vanish away in a twinkling, but is a beauty intensely matured, strong and ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... acquired an immense fortune, concluded to round out his political career by inaugurating a reform that would in some manner atone for his past excesses, and did succeed in giving India more than a Roman peace and abating some of the worst abuses; but the reform was ephemeral. In his essay on Warren Hastings, Lord Macaulay—who wonders that the conquest of India is "distasteful" reading to Englishmen—gives us the following pen-picture of conditions under the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... at 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, ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... 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 ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... cold—almost repellant to all who had poured their ephemeral and seldom varying homage in her ear—no woman's heart ever beat with more kind—more generous—more devoted sentiments, than her own. Possessed of a vivid imagination, which the general quietude of her demeanor in a great degree disowned, she had already sketched within her glowing ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... period during the reign of the former in which the French navy was superior in number and equipment to the English and Dutch; but the policy and ambition of the sovereign was always directed to continental extension, and his naval power, resting on inadequate foundations, was ephemeral. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century there was practically no check to the sea power of England; great as were its effects upon the issues of the day, the absence of a capable rival made its operations barren of military ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... been consistently exhibited by Him. The natural conclusion of such thought need not be pursued here. Suffice it that, taking their stand on pure reason, such thinkers deny the least evidence of any life beyond the grave; to them, therefore, this ephemeral progression is the beginning and the end, and they live every precious moment with a yearning zest beyond the power of conventional ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... pamphleteers. More than ever, both in France and Germany, are pamphlets the order of the day. In Paris alone, the year 1860 has given birth to hundreds of these writings of circumstance,—political squibs, visionary remodellings of European states,—vying with each other for ephemeral celebrity. They fill the windows of the book-shops, and are spread by scores along the stands in the numerous galleries which the Parisian population throngs of evenings. Those issued in the early part of the year have gradually descended ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... would-be singer, a song written by a would-be poet, and set by a would-be musician. Verve was there none in the whole ephemeral embodiment. When it died a natural death, if that be possible where never had been any life, Vavasor said, "Thank you, Raymount." But Hester, who had been standing with her teeth clenched under the fiery rain ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... heart bleed,—we may well understand how all these causes may have given rise to some moments of misanthropy, such as are betrayed by a few expressions in his journal; but it was a misanthropy that existed only in words, a plant without roots, of ephemeral growth, and most natural to a fine nature. We feel, notwithstanding all these real palpable causes of ennui, that his principal sufferings ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... one's surprise, the capital he had accumulated in the stone trade was of large amount for a business so unostentatiously carried on—much larger than Jocelyn had ever regarded as possible. While the son had been modelling and chipping his ephemeral fancies into perennial shapes, the father had been persistently chiselling for half a century at the crude original matter of those shapes, the stern, isolated rock in the Channel; and by the aid of his cranes and pulleys, his trolleys and his boats, ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... financial condition 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 the first of his cares he saw to ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... a moment, however. George had married—a year afterward I had imitated him. My wife was an angel upon earth—she is an angel in heaven now—and in comparison with the deep affection which I felt for her, the ephemeral fancy for the young lady whom my rival had married, appeared the veriest trifle. William Conway had also married, and he and George, with their wives, were living at Five Forks. William was judge of the circuit—George managed the estate—and ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... 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
... that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... estimated by the general public. Famous cricketers and famous actors are applauded by those they entertain or amuse. The chess master receives no applause; over the board, however, he enters into conversation with amateurs, and is rewarded by friendships that far outweigh the wildest ephemeral outbursts of approval. The friendships so formed by Zukertort have now been snapped, and his removal has caused, in the words of the old player Bird, "a severe blank." Bird himself is an interesting character. ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... and death of us, in action or in sleep. Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all! Thou that in all and over all, and through and under all, incessant! Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm, Holding Humanity as in the open hand, as some ephemeral toy, How ill ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... 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 attention ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... It 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 ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... alive to action. Death, then, was but an ephemeral part of this big game; he was fighting not only for today, but for the future; fighting for the peace and righteousness of years to come, long, long after he, in any case, would have been dead! He turned impulsively to the staring eyes, and whispered: "Thanks, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... my opinion is debarred me. I will not sit even at your table with a muzzled 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 not ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... looked surprised as well as a bit annoyed. Truth to tell, Mistress Susan, with her capacity for admiring and being admired, had conceived a momentary interest in the stranger, a fancy as light as it was ephemeral. That touch of melancholy when his face was in repose inspired a transitory desire for investigation in this past-mistress of emotional analysis. But the arrival of the coach which had passed the couple soon diverted Susan's thoughts to ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... is resting upon us. The difficulty is, however, that the results are not permanent; the facts learned do not have time to seek out and link themselves to well-established associates; learned in an hour, their retention is as ephemeral as the application which ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... of talent and learned professional pride have been overbalanced by a democratic press. The whole nation writes, and the individual writer is either swallowed up in the mass or gains but ephemeral fame. Every writer, almost without exception, affects a popular style. But, in this rich literary field, all springs up freely without connection or guidance. No party is concentrated or represented by any reigning journal, but each individual ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... size. They kept turning their heads to admire their father, suddenly glorified by his military trappings. At his side was marching his wife, affable and resigned, feeling in her simple soul a revival of love, an ephemeral Spring, born of the contact with danger. The man, a laborer of Paris, who a few months before was singing La Internacional, demanding the abolishment of armies and the brotherhood of all mankind, was now going in quest ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;—but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the first edition of the Pencillings Willis explains that the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence gave a sufficient warrant to his mind that his descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and that therefore he had indulged himself in a freedom of detail and topic only customary in posthumous memoirs. He expresses ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... intending to go to America were now gathered in one vessel. Whatever previous disposition of them had been made, or whatever relations they might have had in the disjointed record of the exodus, were ephemeral, and are now lost sight of in the enduring interest which attaches to their final and successful ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... was satisfied that her gaolers were at supper, whereupon she stole out of the house as quietly as a kitten, and was out of sight of it as quickly. Not a creature was to be seen. The gutters were all choked and the streets had become river-beds, already torn with the rush of the ephemeral torrents. But through it all she dashed fearlessly, bounding on ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... vital change in the political faith of Kentucky, was wrought by Henry Clay. All previous interruptions to the opinions which she had acquired as her birthright from Virginia, were but partial, and would have been ephemeral, but the spell which the great magician cast over his people was like the glamour of mediaeval enchantment. It bound them in helpless but delighted acquiescence in the will of the master. Their vision informed them, not of objects as they were, but as he willed that they should seem, and his patients ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... war with the Commonwealth, chose to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being princes and chancellors. Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom and, even under the ephemeral governments which followed his death, no foreign state ventured to treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came back not as a mediator between his people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator between internal factions. He found the Scotch Covenanters and the Irish Papists alike subdued. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... time I was writing—in a very humble and obscure way, certainly, but still writing. I wrote in local newspapers and Parish Magazines. I published anonymous comments on current topics. I contributed secretly to ephemeral journals. I gave lectures and printed them as pamphlets. It was all very good exercise; but the odd part of it seems to me, in looking back, that I never expected pay, but rather spent my own money ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the proposition made than it was adopted; but we were saved from the ephemeral disgrace of posing as petty amphibious pirates, degenerate Schinderhannes of the Bidassoa. We saw a boat; a girl was near. The boat was her father's; she engaged to take us over for a consideration—I am certain she had set her heart on a string of straw-coloured ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... intervention that decided the point. She vehemently disapproved; a gift of techniques should be withheld until she had examined their cultural traditions. But Martin Lord was a trade agent, and he had no intention of allowing his mission to be wrecked by the ephemeral doubts of a teacher. Here at the onset was the time to make it clear that he was in command. He gave the natives ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... shadows can any more trouble the enjoyments of the future,—no moments of reflection retard its activities; and that the new-born population of a world without a record and without a ruin may, in the fullness of ephemeral felicity, dispose itself to eat, and to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... tarpaulin—that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown—and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... had none of the dim impressiveness of a mediaeval church, that seems reared with a view to Heaven rather than Earth, and whose arches, massive or soaring, neither gain nor lose by the accidental presence of ephemeral human creatures below them. No, the building seemed to cry out for a congregation, and the mind's eye involuntarily peopled it with its Sunday complement of substantial citizens and ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the paraphernalia cost large sums of money. They become either worn out or practically valueless through the exhaustion of the mines. Even surface machinery when in good condition will seldom realize more than one-tenth of its expense if useless at its original site. All mines are ephemeral; therefore virtually the entire capital outlay of such works must be redeemed during the life of the mine, and the interest on it must ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... of trelliage and an appreciation of its practical application to modern needs is a conjurer's wand—you can wave it and create all sorts of ephemeral constructions that will last your time and pleasure. You may give your trellis any poetic shape your vision may take. You may dream and realize enchanting gardens, with clipped hedges and trellis walls. You may transform a commonplace ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... and virtue. The author is already known to the public by the two novels announced in her title-page, and both, the last especially, attracted, with justice, an attention from the public far superior to what is granted to the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering-places and circulating libraries. They belong to a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... pages of the periodical a theatre of special activity, a way to the entertainment and instruction of the many; and though much of what is thus produced may bear, as we have hinted, a character more or less ephemeral, we are sometimes presented also with the earlier blossoms and the fresher odors of a rich and perennial growth of genius, everywhere known and acknowledged in the realms of belles-lettres, philosophy, and science, crowded here as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... and her look and tone were both solemn. "You ask me what good it can do? Reflect! If the history of a single leaf is so vast and yet ephemeral, what may not be the history of a single world? What, after all, are we when such an infinitesimal space can contain such wonderful transactions ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... "Teach-'em-everything-in-no-time-Society" as if its natty laws were a library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without mischief—they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning sand, and leave depression growing ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... flat passages, to afford the author a spring to comparative elevation. But imitation always approaches to caricature; and the powers of Churchill have been unable to protect him from the oblivion into which his poems are daily sinking, owing to the ephemeral interest of political subjects, and his indolent negligence of severe study and regularity. To imitate Dryden, it were well to study his merits, without venturing to adopt the negligences and harshness, which the hurry of his composition, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... the fate of the humbug at home, and destruction to the jaunty career of the art critic, whose essence of success lies in his strong sense of his ephemeral existence, and his consequent horror of ennuyering his world—in short, to perceive the joke of life is rarely given to our people, whilst it forms the mainspring of the Parisian's savoir plaire. The finesse of the Frenchman, acquired in long loafing and clever cafe cackle—the glib go and ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... 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
... was an argument, at least to my mind, in disproof of the efficacy of this precaution. Beauty, the creation of a Sovereign and Divine Power, may, indeed, be frail and ephemeral, may vanish in an instant; but the idea of beauty is eternal, and, once perceived by the mind, it lives there an immortal life. The beauty of this woman, such as it manifests itself to-day, will disappear in a few short years; the graceful form, ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... and all its environing scenes disappeared behind Mousehole and St Clement's Isle, Baptista's ephemeral, meteor-like husband impressed her yet more as a fantasy. She was still in such a trance-like state that she had been an hour on the little packet-boat before she became aware of the agitating fact that Mr Heddegan was on board with ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... expansion for thought, they devoted themselves to fine arts and poetry; painting and the theatre rose to a higher level than in any other country; they were the safety valves of the national genius; but this spring of art was only ephemeral, for in the midst of the seventeenth century a grotesque and ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... it but the glory—and little of that. We contrive and scheme and run about all day getting a story. And then we write it at fever heat, searching our souls for words that are cleancut and virile. And then we turn it in, and what is it? What have we to show for our day's work? An ephemeral thing, lacking the first breath of life; a thing that is dead before it is born. Why, any cub reporter, if he were to put into some other profession the same amount of nerve, and tact, and ingenuity and finesse, and stick-to-it-iveness that he expends in prying ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... part of this crowd had been living in tents round the inclosure, and laid the foundations of a town which has since been called "Ardan's Town." The ground bristled with huts, cabins, and tents, and these ephemeral habitations sheltered a population numerous enough to rival the largest cities ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... literary style. They are merely a fad, which is already of the past; and to-day public and publisher turn in nausea from a mess of dialect which yesterday they would have greedily devoured; so that now there is even no pecuniary excuse for dialect stories. They were doomed to an ephemeral existence, for what little charm they ever possessed was based upon the human craving for something odd and new; the best stories of Barrie and Maclaren live because of their intense human feeling, and they would have succeeded as well and endured ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... must be told. Adam had entirely forgotten that in the intricacies of his mechanical lurked the papers that might overthrow a throne! Magnificent Incarnation was he (in that oblivion) of Science itself, which cares not a jot for men and nations, in their ephemeral existences; which only remembers THINGS,—things that endure for ages; and in its stupendous calculations loses sight of the unit of a generation! No, he had thoroughly forgotten Henry, Edward, his own limbs ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... eternal beauty, and place their ephemeral life in the infinite. Others live without much thought. But by that alone they submit to fair Nature, and they are happy and beautiful in the joy of living only, and give glory to the supreme artist ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... into various 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 ...
— 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
... perishes, passes away. It is only the world that remains; only time that endures. I walk between two eternities. To whatever side I turn my eyes, the objects that surround me tell of an end, and teach me resignation to my own end. What is my ephemeral existence in comparison with that of the crumbling rock and the decaying forest? I see the marble of the tomb falling to dust, and yet I cannot bear to die! Am I to grudge a feeble tissue of fibres ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Liberals, Reformists, Unionists, Moderates, and men of other political parties disputed over the direction of the nation's affairs at the point of the sword, and as each party obtained an ephemeral victory it hastened to send its partizans to govern these islands. The new governors invariably proceeded at once to undo what their predecessors had ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... wit were meant rather to "tickle the ears of the groundlings" than as just subjects for criticism by later scholars. We know that old jokes, bad puns, and innuendoes are needed on the stage at the present day. Shakspeare used them for the same ephemeral purpose then; and had he sent down corrected versions to posterity, they would have been ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... abandoned except in the case of persons of a lower condition of life than your daughter, that I am sorry to think of the observations it may excite. The whole scheme has appeared to me from the beginning most foolish, and if you knew what I know of the state and fortune of our ephemeral literature, you would use what influence you have with her to induce her to condemn her 'contributions' to the adorning of a private annual rather than the purpose in unhappy question. I wish I dared to appeal ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... musing again, and it is doubtful if he heard her. He saw before him immense, primeval forests, black, shadowy; vast, sluggish rivers, above which hung a thick and fever-laden air; trees from whose topmost branches swung gorgeous, ephemeral flowers; and then long stretches of yellow beach, where a brazen ocean tumbled and hissed. Then many cities, squalid and splendid, colorful and fantastic as the erection of a dream, and through all these he saw himself ever ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... a little ephemeral fame from instituting a jubilee for Thomson.(826) I fear I shall not make my court to Mr. Berry, by owning I would not give this last week's fine weather for all the four Seasons in blank verse. There is more nature in L'Allegro and Penseroso, than in all the laboured ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... succeeded him. Sometimes a man less well known, but elegant and sought after, one of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of the ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... said the Professor with a slight shudder. He was resigned to an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book's ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Nathan's book; and while he was in the humor, he hit off another of his short sketches for Lousteau's newspaper. Inexperienced journalists, in the first effervescence of youth, make a labor of love of ephemeral work, and lavish ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that our ancestors were wiser than we are; they were certainly less informed, and probably were, on that account, in the general case, less judicious. But time has swept away their follies, which were doubtless great enough, as it has done the worthless ephemeral literature with which they, as we, were overwhelmed; and nothing has stood the test of ages, and come down to us through a series of generations, of their ideas or institutions, but what had some utility in human feelings and necessities, and was on the whole expedient ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Abode of Fancy. Latterly the various tea-masters substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tea-room, and the term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical. It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... of such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn, the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice and the executioner can conceive of he sees, suffers and sinks under. He ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... inadvertently classed with those ephemeral fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue and the incidents are veritable creations. It may here be asked how could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events of a time so long past. I do not pretend or wish it to be thought that these interviews ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... which under him expanded to embrace the empire. Where is there another conqueror in the annals of the world who has such solid claims to everlasting renown? Alexander overthrew many nations; but he set up nothing permanent. Julius Caesar instituted the Roman Empire; but its duration was ephemeral in comparison with that of the empire founded by Shi-hwang-ti, ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Godfrey of Bouillon, ephemeral king of Jerusalem, took his homeward road back to France, accompanied by three cavaliers, in all, 'then, four horses, one more than Rashi had predicted. Godfrey remembered the rabbi's prophecy, and determined to carry out his threat. But when he entered the city of Troyes, a large rock, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... ladyhood". Blessed with a discriminating governess and chaperon, who while fostering a genuine love of the beautiful, had endeavored to guard her pupil from straying into any of those fashionable "art crazes", which in their ephemeral exaggeration approach caricatures of aestheticism, Leo became deeply imbued with the spirit of classic literature and art; and grew especially fond of the study of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... alternative to which he would not long submit without, it might be, losing his reason and taking his life. Strong, black and fragrant, he would die without that beverage for which—and for Racine, by the way—Madame de Sevigne prophesied an ephemeral popularity. Taken immediately after meals, it removes the fumes of the claret and champagne he has drunk, and leaves him feeling as clear-headed as Plato and grateful as a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... But natural flowers, being ephemeral, were once replaced in the toilets of ladies by artificial ones. The artificial flower industry originated in China, and from thence passed into Italy and afterward into France. In course of time people got tired of artificial ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... Ambrose's with the greatest energy, and perhaps somewhat less judgment than if Mr. Dutton had been at hand. Being without natural taste for intellectual pursuits, unless drawn into them by his surroundings, he had dropped them entirely, and read nothing but the ephemeral controversial literature of his party, and not much of that, for he was teaching, preaching, exhorting, throughout his spare time; while the vicar was in too great need of help to insist on deepening the source from which his zealous assistant drew. As Miss Nugent observed, teetotalism ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... in England at the same moment that a good novel appeared, the American publishers would have given us immediately a horrid reprint of the novel; but we should have heard nothing of Abbott's book, till its success had been abundantly tried abroad; nor even then, if some ephemeral novel had started up which promised to ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... washed it out as it has washed out mountains and continents." She raised herself on her elbow. "And what if we could help mankind, and leave the traces of our work upon it to the end? Mankind is only an ephemeral blossom on the tree of time; there were others before it opened; there will be others after it has fallen. Where was man in the time of the dicynodont, and when hoary monsters wallowed in the mud? Will he be found in the aeons that are to ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... safeguard the will of the people. In France the Mayor is appointed by the State, and he is the tool of the Ministry. In Great Britain the City Fathers are honorary and unpaid. In Germany they are salaried servants, and yet elected by the people. In Great Britain magistrates are temporary, ephemeral figure-heads. They are not even allowed time to serve their apprenticeship. They remain in office one, two, or at most three years, receive a knighthood in the larger provincial towns, and retire into private life. In Germany the Burgomaster and Aldermen are permanent ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... to be happy that you do to imagine troubles, our life would be perfect. What matters the storm? and even if you do see an omen in it, what is there so very terrible? Clouds are vapor, thunder is a sound, both are equally ephemeral; only the blue sky, which they can obscure but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... sort of quiet pressure on that portion of the community just beneath it—on a special class peculiarly subject to its influence. To-day we have added to this effect that of a moving multitude of more or less ephemeral books, which appear, do their work, and pass on out of sight. They are light, but they make up for their lack of weight by the speed and ease with which they move. Owing to them the use of books is becoming less and less limited to ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... certainly without any desire to achieve that ephemeral notoriety which accrues from having one's portrait in the pictorial press and being besieged by interviewers in search of a "story," I found myself, without seeking adventure, one of the chief actors in a drama which was perhaps one of the strangest and most astounding ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... noonday sun, which did its best to heat it through. This shaft will endure forever. The polish of eighteen centuries ago, as yet but half rubbed off, and the heat of to-day's sunshine, lingering into the night, seem almost equally ephemeral in relation to it." ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... protraction of the fulfilment of the most yearning expectation and fulfilled desire will seem but as the winking of an eyelid when we get to estimate duration by the same scale by which He estimates it, the scale of Eternity. The ephemeral insect, born in the morning and dead when the day fades, has a still minuter scale than ours, but we should not think of regulating our estimate of long and short by it. Do not let us commit the equal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the printing-press has ushered into the world, there is one book which stands out in prominent and ornamental relief—a book written by a member of the Church of England, a scholar and a gentleman; and the influence of which, either for good or for harm, is not likely to be ephemeral. Few, even of the most incredulous, can read with attention the first half of "Facts in Mesmerism, by the Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend," of which a second edition has recently appeared, without being staggered. The author leads the reader up ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... literary world, and would communicate them freely to Madeline as they walked. No; there was no longer the slightest touch of hypocrisy in her pleasant manner and eager voice as she answered, "No, papa, I have not heard. Was it Mr. So-and-so?" and she named an ephemeral literary giant of the day. "No," said the judge, "it was not So-and-so; but yet you might guess, as you know the gentleman." Then the slight shade of hypocrisy came upon her again in a moment. "She couldn't guess," she said; ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... 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, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... fools. He has suffered, as Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is, indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be justified, by the correctness ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... said that, the more popular he is in the one day, the more utterly forgotten he is likely to be in the other. Besides the obvious facts that his popularity must always have been gained by the adoption of some more or less ephemeral fashion, and that plenty of his own kind are always ready to take his place—doing, like the heir in the old story, all they can to substitute Requiescat in Pace for Resurgam on his hatchment—there is a more mechanical reason for his occultation. The more widely he or she has been ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and tint of the frail little vase he has wished to fix for all time the ephemeral forms and colors of all ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... profession, at least—as a promising writer; and was already, to more than a few, personally known as a very agreeable, gentlemanly fellow, so that in the following season he had a good many invitations. It was by nothing beyond the ephemeral that he was known; but may not the man who has invented a good umbrella one day build a good palace? His acquaintance was considerably varied, but of the social terraces above the professional, he knew for ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... of a cloud-hill revealed; Now crescent, low, wandering sun-dazed away, Unconscious of her own star-mingled ray, Her still face seeming more to think than see, Makes the pale world lie dreaming dreams of thee! No mood, eternal or ephemeral, But wakes obedient at ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... throats and coquettish patches on their delicate skin and bouquets of flowers in their high-dressed hair and sheeny bodices. They look at us with arch eyes and smile with melting mouths, more frivolous than depraved; sweet, ephemeral, irresponsible in every relation of life. Older men and women there are, too, when those artificial years have produced a succession of rather dull, sodden personages, kindly, inoffensive, but stupid, and still ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... alas, his name 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 ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... (of the Kaurava army) and said words which caused them great delight: "In this transient world everything is continually flitting (towards the jaws of Death). Thinking of this, I regard everything as ephemeral. When, however, all of you were here, how could Bhishma, that bull among the Kurus, immovable as a hill, be thrown down from his car? When that mighty car-warrior, viz., the son of Santanu, hath been ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... writings too hurriedly read and reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti's claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently. But nothing will shake ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... constructive force that could endure much beyond the lifetime of some exceptionally gifted conqueror. The Mauryan and the Gupta dynasties succumbed as irretrievably to the centrifugal forces of petty states and clans perpetually striving for mastery as the more ephemeral kingdoms of Kanishka and Harsha. They all in turn crumbled away, and, in a land of many races and languages and climates, split up into many states and groups of states constantly at strife and constantly changing masters and frontiers. Hinduism alone always survived with its crowded and ever-expanding ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... journalism on the West Coast is still in the lowest stage of Eatanswillism, and the journal is essentially ephemeral. The newspapers of twenty years ago are all dead and forgotten. Such were the 'African Herald,' a 'buff' organ, edited by the late Rev. Mr. Jones, a West Indian, and its successor, the 'African Weekly ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... ephemeral Thespian efforts, cheap dens of the most brutal vice, and dark lairs abound, where sailors, laborers, and crowding criminals lurk, ready for their human prey. Their female accomplices are only the sirens watching these great strongholds of brazen vice. A greater luxury only ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... 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 ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... ephemeral duration; the work which combats it does not carry within itself a principle of greatness or ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction. The fact that for years her friends had been the small group of the momentarily fashionable required, in her eyes, no explanation. So simple was her creed that she believed people were fashionable ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... we gloss them over with false colouring? Shall we describe things as they are, or as they are not? Shall we draw with the pencil of nature, or of art? Do we indeed paint life as it is, or as it is not? Cast thine eyes, reader, over the ephemeral circle of passing and fortuitous events; view the change of contingencies; mark well the varied and shifting scenery in the great drama of time;—seriously contemplate nature in her operations; minutely examine ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... born of the moment's desperation and strategy but, somewhat to her surprise, it served its ephemeral purpose. Rowlett released his hold and wheeled to look at the road, and with a flashing swiftness his victim leaped for the door and slammmed it ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... in hand, and virtually his intellectual life will be recorded in his cases. But with Mr. Choate, the dramatic genius and large scope and vision which made him superior to other great advocates at the same time prevented his overestimating the value of his work in kind or degree, showed him how ephemeral are the actual triumphs and how small the real value of nearly all the questions he thus vitalized into artistic reality, when compared with the great outlying truths and principles to which he allied them. Feeling this all through his cases, at the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... they had made, whether by argument or not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they fell. Then ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... When Single State 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 does impose, Silver bells, and baby ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of his own mind. The writer of whom we speak is deficient in these last. He has either not the faculty or not the will to impregnate his subject by an effort of pure invention. The execution also is much upon a par with the more ephemeral effusions of the press. It is light, agreeable, effeminate, diffuse. Sir Walter's Muse is a Modern Antique. The smooth, glossy texture of his verse contrasts happily with the quaint, uncouth, rugged materials of which it is composed; and takes away any appearance of heaviness ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... enough for a man of his fastidious and discerning taste. 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 ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... the specious and fatal brilliancy which had been the lot of her mother,—her simple peasant garb with those remembered visions of jewelry and silk and embroideries with which the partial patronage of the Duchess or the ephemeral passion of her son had decked out the poor Isella; and then came swelling at her heart a tumultuous thought, one which she had repressed and kept down for years with all the force of pride and hatred. Agnes, peasant-girl though she seemed, had yet the blood of that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... lovely child had startled and shocked him. The bereavement of the girl cut him to the heart as if she had belonged to him. It brought the other world so close. It made what had hitherto seemed the big worth-while things of life look so small and petty, so ephemeral! Had he always been giving himself utterly to things that did not count, or was this a perspective all out of proportion, a distorted brain again, through ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... hot-pressed by Nature's self; their circulation is wide over all the land; from castle to cottage they are regularly taken in; as old age bends over them, his youth is renewed; and you see childhood poring upon them pressed close to its very bosom. Some of them are ephemeral—their contents are exhaled between the rising and setting sun. Once a-week others break through their green, pink, or crimson cover; and how delightful, on the seventh day, smiles in the sunshine the Sabbath Flower—a Sunday publication ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... consisted of boiled beef, which was cooked and eaten hot once a week, and the remaining six days he subsisted on the cold remains. It seemed impossible to raise money for his present pressing necessities. He managed to sell "L'Initie,"[*] at a ridiculously small price, to an ephemeral journal called Le Spectateur Republicain, but only received in return bills at a long date, and it was doubtful whether he was ever paid ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... authors, was perhaps begotten of a natural wish to satisfy the public that qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary labors, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... often desired to be acquainted with the Abbe; but the Abbe had really hitherto passed him over as a mere young man of fashion, a mere Milord Anglois, one of the ephemeral race, who appear in Parisian society, vanish, and leave no trace behind. But now he did him the honour to enter into conversation with him. The Abbe peculiarly disliked all affectation of sentiment and exaggeration: they were revolting to his good sense, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear—there is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life. Like a dream which trembles and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... intervention, however well intentioned it might be. Above all, beware of offering aid to Europe in a spirit of opportunism rather than of high principle. Especially, do not try to take advantage of some circumstances in order to urge a lame and ephemeral peace. Public opinion will be bitterly divided if the war is brought to an end merely by lassitude and a desire for comfort. Public opinion will accept only a peace inspired with high ideals, without needless humiliation for the conquered, and equally without ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... ephemeral literature that pours from the press, it is well to be recalled by such publications as the "Laurel-Crowned Letters" to books that have won an abiding place in the classical literature of the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... lifetime. Being made of stucco, woodwork, plaster, and such perishable materials, it was unfortunately destined to decay. But Florence had always been liberal, nay, lavish, of her genius in triumphs, masques, magnificent street architecture, evoked to celebrate some ephemeral event. A worthier occasion would not occur again; and we have every reason to believe that the superb structure, which was finally exposed to view upon the 14th of July, displayed all that was left at Florence of the grand style in the arts of modelling and painting. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... carried their boldness to a pitch of madness, who were surprised by no novelty and arrested by no scruple, and who never hesitated to put any design whatever into execution. Nor must it be supposed that these new beings have been the isolated and ephemeral creation of a moment, and destined to pass away as that moment passed. They have since formed a race of beings which has perpetuated itself, and spread into all the civilised parts of the world, everywhere preserving the same ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... secret she had hoped to tell her patroness had turned bitter like that other secret of her dead love for Sidney, in the reaction from which she had written most of her book. How fortunate at least that her love had flickered out, had proved but the ephemeral sentiment of a romantic girl for the first brilliant man she had met. Sidney had fascinated her by his verbal audacities in a world of narrow conventions; he had for the moment laughed away spiritual aspirations and yearnings with a raillery that ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... public eye, would sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be predicted of some undoubted ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... incapable of it through grief. He is eyes, and ears, and 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 well examined) ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... society or social group, even the most ephemeral, will ordinarily have (a) some relatively formal method of defining its aim and formulating its policies, making them explicit, and (b) some machinery, functionary, or other arrangement for realizing its aim and carrying its policies into effect. Even in the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... allusion to smoking? Who can suggest a reason? Our great poet knew the human heart too well, and kept too steadily in view, the universal nature of man to be afraid of painting the external trapping and ephemeral customs of his own time. Does he not delight to moralize on false hair, masks, rapiers, pomandens, perfumes, dice, bowls, fardingales, etc? Did he not sketch for us, with enjoyment and with satire, too, the fantastic ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... "Transitory" is slightly preferable in that, though the element of temporariness is present in both words, it is more strongly emphasized in the latter. The usual habit of associating with it the ideas of "fleeting, evanescent, ephemeral, momentary, short-lived," may have an influence on hastening the completion of the installing ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... Hale, or the little Japanese girl who deliberately bit through her tongue that she might not utter a syllable that would jeopardize the interests or safety of her father. The word analyzed is a dead thing; the word in use is a living thing. The word merely analyzed is apt to be ephemeral; the word in use is abiding and increasingly significant. As the child puts more and more content into the word, he, himself, expands at the same rate in the scope and power of his thinking. Words are the materials out of which he weaves the fabric of life, and the pattern depends ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... 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
... may happen, that between the people of England and of France an improved and friendly feeling has grown up. But, as far as the war is concerned, your alliance depends on one life. The present dynasty may be a permanent, but it may be an ephemeral one, and I cannot but think that when men are looking forward to prolonged warfare they should at least take into consideration the ground on which they ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... life, else they would combine together to live long, instead of throwing away the lives of thousands as they do. And what matters a little tyranny in so short a life? What matters a form of government for such ephemeral creatures?" ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the old laws of composition 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... luxury and expense in which, when aware what my income was, I indulged myself freely was the purchase of Martial literature. Only ephemeral works are as a rule printed in the phonographic character, which alone I could read with ease. The Martialists have no newspapers. It does not seem to them worth while to record daily the accidents, the business incidents, the prices, the amusements, and the follies ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... basking in the rays of the Freedmen's Bureau and plentifully manured with promises and brotherly love by the open-mouthed and close-fisted philanthropy of New England. But like all dunghill products, the life of these was ephemeral. Its root struck no deeper than the refuse the war had left; and during its continuance the genus was so little known that a Carlyle, or a Brownlow, was looked upon with the same curiosity and disgust as a very rare, but ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... morning when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting the fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of the snow and ice, two beings crossed the fiord and flew along the base of the Falberg, rising thence from ledge to ledge toward the summit. What were they? human creatures, or two arrows? They might have been taken for eider-ducks sailing in consort ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... Reviewers, or have borne out the character which favorable 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 ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... I have but one word to add. I have written in support of no political movement, nor for any ephemeral purpose. I have written only to express a deep conviction which is the result of more than twenty years of study, and reflection ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... his hand, and urged him not to say anything further, but Marston, whose eyes were now lightened by that ephemeral light so often seen in the eyes ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... the century, a dynamic, more physiological attitude was apparent, and theories of development derived from an entirely different philosophic base. During this time, English investigators contributed much, some of ephemeral, some of lasting importance to the development of embryology. For this discussion, we will divide the seventeenth century into three overlapping, but generally distinct, periods; and, without pretence of presenting an exhaustive exposition, we will concentrate ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer |
