"Immutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... means by which its effects are sustained, and under the operation of which they are beginning to combine into a habit of holiness. He rejoices in the hope of its duration to the end of life, solely he would say from the confidence he has in the immutable love and faithfulness of the Holy Being, who has wrought so great a work in him. And let philosophers cavil and doubt, if they must; but this man's example is a refutation in fact of a thousand of their sceptical theories. He is a new man, and the change was effected chiefly before discipline, or ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... perfection of any special object is: this needs the knowledge of what its nature is. And we have to rest content with very general terms defining God's Holiness as the essential and absolute good. 'Holiness is the free, deliberate, calm, and immutable affirmation of Himself, who is goodness, or of goodness, which is Himself' (Godet on John xvii. 11). 'Holiness is that attribute in virtue of which Jehovah makes Himself the absolute standard of Himself, of His being ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... egotism; and a certain crude state of law and opinion had helped her to do it, had confused the moral values and falsified her conscience. But she was not yet brutalized. Moreover, do what she would, she was still in a world governed by law; a world at the heart of which broods a power austere and immutable; a power which man did not make, which, if he clash with it, grinds him to powder. Its manifestations in Daphne's case were slight, but enough. She was not happy, that certainly was clear. She did not suppose she ever ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rocks are immutable; So are his laws, and so shall his glory be. Time is the Victor of Nations, Sparta the ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... which introduced the reformation in England. The more we attempt to interfere with the arrangements of the Almighty, the more we shall make evident our own folly and blindness, and his unsearchable and immutable wisdom,—Good night, my boy." ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and persons that are one and the same, are of one and the same number. The number of Johns who trust, is the same as the number of Johns who come. Both these elements of concord are immutable. ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... presence whose name was Fire-Tongue might have paused, might have hesitated, might even have changed his plans, which, in a certain part of the world, were counted immutable, had he known the manner of man whom he had summoned ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... a very bad day for England when that time comes," the financier said. "If only the people could study evolution and the meaning of things there would not be any of this nonsensical class hatred. The immutable law is that no one long retains any position unless he, or she, is suitable for it. Nothing endures that is not harmonious. It is because England is now out of harmony, that this seething is going on. You and your race have been fitted for what ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with, him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful illegality ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... clearly and firmly taught and informed what that godly Confession is which we and the churches and schools of our realms at all times professed and embraced, we emphatically testify that next to the pure and immutable truth of God's Word we wish to embrace the first Augsburg Confession alone which was presented to the Emperor Charles V, in the year 1530, at the famous Diet of Augsburg, this alone (we say), and no other." (15.) At the same time the princes furthermore protest that also ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... eyes; he felt, with his fine, instinctive tact, that the soul within was infolded in some crystalline sphere of protection, transparent, but adamantine, so that he could not touch it. What was that secret poise, that calm, immutable centre on which she rested, that made her, in her rustic simplicity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... tribesmen away off to the north, and as I ride along I am overtaken by a sensation of being all alone in the company of an overshadowing and awe-inspiring presence. One's attention seems irresistibly attracted toward the mighty snow-crowrned monarch, as though,the immutable law of attraction were sensibly exerting itself to draw lesser bodies to it, and all other objects around seemed dwarfed into insignificant proportions. One obtains a most comprehensive idea of Ararat's 17,325 feet when viewing it from the Aras Plain, as it rises sheer ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... longer disposed to ridicule or condemn religious sentiment, though he was nearly as far from actually believing in Religion itself as ever. The attitude of his mind was still distinctly skeptical—the immutable pride of what he considered his own firmly rooted convictions was only very slightly shaken—and he now even viewed the prospect of his journey to the "field of Ardath" as a mere fantastic whim—a caprice ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... his teacher was but a man like himself, erring and weak, who made himself perfect, and that even as his teacher has done, so, too, may he if he do but observe the everlasting laws of life which the Buddha has shown to the world. These laws are as immutable as Newton's laws, and come, like ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, ... but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... would not be morally wrong. He would have to say, 'here I am amongst barbarians, who not only refuse to do justice, but encourage the greatest of all crimes. I am therefore in a state of nature: for, so far as there is no law, it is a state of nature: and consequently, upon the eternal and immutable law of justice, which requires that he who sheds man's blood should have his blood shed[273], I will stab ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... soldier fighting his country's battles except from a conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and, second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant change; unique among ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the causes of things ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... thirteenth century, though its devout adherents claimed that it had been orally transmitted through the intervening ages from Adam in Paradise. According to the teaching of the Cabala, the original Godhead, called En-Soph, the Infinite, is in essence {135} incomprehensible and immutable, and capable of description only in negations. God, the En-Soph, is above and beyond contact with anything finite, material, or imperfect. It would be blasphemous to suppose that God the infinitely perfect, God the absolutely immutable One, by direct act made a world of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... idols, but one God do I acknowledge and confess, in three persons glorified, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but in one nature and substance, in one glory and kingdom undivided. He then is in three persons one God, without beginning, and without end, eternal and everlasting, increate, immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, alone good and righteous, who created all things out of nothing, whether visible or invisible. First, he made the heavenly and invisible powers, countless multitudes, immaterial and bodiless, ministering ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... use as this of the grace of God. What, because Christ is a Saviour, thou wilt be a sinner; because his grace abounds, therefore thou wilt abound in sin! O wicked wretch, let me tell thee before I leave thee, as God's covenant with Christ for his children stands sure, immutable, and unchangeable, so also hath God taken such a course with thee, that unless he deny himself, it is impossible that thou shouldst go to heaven, dying in that condition. They tempted God, proved him, and turned his grace into lasciviousness; so he sware in his wrath, They shall not enter into ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... indestructible; and therefore every spirit must at last return to the Good. For the Good alone exists; evil has no existence, no substance. This is a doctrine which we shall meet with again. Man, he expressly asserts, cannot be consubstantial with God, for man can change, while God is immutable. He does not see, apparently, that, from the point of view of the Platonist, his universalism makes man's freedom to change an illusion, as belonging to time only and ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... of those who assert moral obligation to be founded on an immutable and universal law; and that which is usually called the moral sense, to be determined by the peculiar temper of the imagination and the ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... one God, and of all the ancient philosophers appears to be the most opposed to mythology, to belief in a multiplicity of gods resembling men, a doctrine which he despises as being immoral. There is one God, eternal, immutable, immovable, who has no need to transfer Himself from one locality to another, who is without place, and who governs all ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... the law is immutable. If you again have the audacity to go in there, a thousand blows shall ...
— Amphitryon • Moliere
... emigration of the Jews from Egypt, their miraculous passage through the Red Sea, their settlement in the Holy Land, the institutions and ceremonies of the law, the splendor of Jerusalem in its most flourishing times, the magnificence of the temple, and the supreme, eternal and immutable nature of their worship, are related by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... The immutable fact remained that he was married to Felicity. Though he had ceased to attend his own church from the days of his boyhood, the Catholic doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage remained as one of his traditions, and this too in spite of the fact that he ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... own mouths. We speak as our fathers spoke; and they did but follow the generations before. Occasional pronunciations have altered, new words have been added, and old ones forgotten; but some basal sounds of names, some root-thoughts of the heart, have proved as immutable as the superficial elegancies are changeful. "Father" and "mother" mean what they have meant for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... be one, were enough to put an end to all intelligible discussion; especially since, with a just perception that the truths which philosophy pursues are general truths, it was soon laid down that these general substances were the only subjects of science, being immutable, while individual substances cognizable by the senses, being in a perpetual flux, could not be the subject of real knowledge. This misapprehension of the import of general language constitutes Mysticism, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... maintains the sky to be what men call Jupiter; the air, which pervades the sea, to be Neptune; and the earth, Ceres. In like manner he goes through the names of the other Deities. He says that Jupiter is that immutable and eternal law which guides and directs us in our manners; and this he calls fatal necessity, the everlasting verity of future events. But none of these are of such a nature as to seem to carry any indication of divine virtue in them. These are the doctrines ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... These antecedents alarmed Madame des Ursins on her own account, and did not appear much more assuring for Philip V. Was it not known, on the other hand, that Portugal—especially since the treaty of Utrecht, since the Bourbons had become, in spite of that nation, the immutable possessors of Spain—dreaded those neighbouring kings, after having previously loved them so much as liberators, and on that account had placed herself under the protection of England, the enemy of all the reigning branches of that powerful ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... really be that the Law has changed? I had thought it immutable," said the Angel, causing his teeth to meet with difficulty: "What will be the nature of the suit to which we ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... strength of the enemy, and the listlessness of thousands who would hail freedom with rapture, but who now stand aloof in despair—and along with all this and intensifying it, the voice of our self-complacent practical friend, who has but sarcasm for a high impulse, and for an immutable principle the latest expedient of the hour. Through such an experience must the soldier of freedom live. But as surely as such an hour comes, there comes also a star to break the darkened sky; let those who feel the battle-weariness ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... and bodies, but all beings, and all things, wert undefilable and unalterable, and in no degree mutable; yet understood I not, clearly and without difficulty, the cause of evil. And yet whatever it were, I perceived it was in such wise to be sought out, as should not constrain me to believe the immutable God to be mutable, lest I should become that evil I was seeking out. I sought it out then, thus far free from anxiety, certain of the untruth of what these held, from whom I shrunk with my whole heart: for I saw, that through enquiring the origin ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... truck and huckster. The sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose reign, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders. Spain in her provinces submits to this immutable condition, the eternal law of extensive and detached empire." Still Burke did not conceive the idea of proclaiming the independence of America. On the contrary, like Chatham, he contended for the general supremacy of parliament, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... could ever have fallen, since it at last drives us to search for the key to escape from this labyrinth; and when this key is found, it further discovers that which we did not seek but yet had need of, namely, a view into a higher and an immutable order of things, in which we even now are, and in which we are thereby enabled by definite precepts to continue to live according to ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... which so oft has united us in soul and sentiment, as the aspirations of our hearts simultaneously ascended to the mercy-seat of the great Jehovah! The remembrance of emotions like these are ineffaceable by care or sorrow, and only blotted out by the immutable hand of death. These halcyon hours of budding existence are to memory as the oasis of the desert, where we may recline beneath the soothing influence of their umbrage, and quaff in the goblet of retrospection the lucid draught that refreshes for the moment, and is again forgotten. Permit ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... "righteousness exalteth a nation, but that sin is a reproach to any people." It is here where our real danger lies—not in the secession of States from the Union, but in the secession of the Union itself from the great and immutable principles of right, of justice, of fair play for all regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The fact that the Union has been saved, that these rebellious States have been brought back into it, will amount to nothing unless it can be saved from this still greater ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... it may like a shadow and the phantom of itself,—is the only substance that we possess, the one immutable fact. To-day is but the asymptote of to-morrow, that curve perpetually drawing near, but never reaching the straight line flying into infinity. To-morrow, the great future, belongs to the heaven where it tends. Were it otherwise, seeing the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... comeliest, most vigorous, and most cultivated races of mankind in spite of centuries of endeavour to extirpate it. If a vice in spite of such efforts can still hold its own among the most polished nations, it must be founded on some immutable truth or fact in human nature, and must have some compensatory advantage which we cannot ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... men who go down to the sea in ships; they are full of resource, the results of long experience of danger, and constant practice in sudden emergencies, where a loss of presence of mind means a forfeiture of life. Their ways and all their dealings are bound fast by a hundred immutable customs, handed down through countless ages, which no man among them dreams of violating; and they have, moreover, that measure of romance attaching to them which clings to all men who run great risks, and habitually carry their lives in ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... accepted by popular assemblies in the provinces which they concern. And such revisions are infrequent. The royal prerogative in legislation is limited by a popular prejudice, which regards the customary law as sacred and immutable. The Capitularies are chiefly administrative ordinances; the "law of the land," which is the same everywhere and for all persons, is an ideal to be realised in England alone of medieval states. Elsewhere the king's law is a supplement, a postscript; the privilege of the free man is to live under ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... enthusiasm in the ranks of the Girondist party, a bitter indignation amongst the moderate party. "To propose the printing of such a speech," said Lecos, a constitutional bishop, "is to propose the printing of a code of atheism. It is impossible that a society can exist, if it have not an immutable morality derived from the idea of a God." Derisive sneers and murmurings hailed this religious protest. The decree against the priests, presented by Francois de Neufchateau, and adopted by the legislative ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... from the doctrine of the occasional retrograde motions of some branches of the lymphatic system: for how can matter, absorbed and mixed with the whole mass of blood, be so hastily collected again in any one part? and is it not an immutable law, in animal bodies, that each gland can secrete no other, but its own proper fluid? which is, in part, fabricated in the very gland by an animal process, which it there undergoes: of these purulent translations innumerable and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... intervention of any of the more subtile agencies whatever. The granting of this postulate will put me on quite easy terms with regard to the very positive objection entertained by me towards a certain Mr. Desole Arcubus, who, by provision of an immutable Medo-Persic edict promulgated by Mrs. Silvernail, occupied the chair next mine at the first-rate table of that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Polo," and his abundant notes, we learn much of Asiatic textile art in the thirteenth century, and its early traditions in the immutable East, and Sir G. Birdwood's books on this Indian art are ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Bible. Since the sixteenth century we have reconstructed our religion to fit our modern ideas and mores. Every religious reform in history has come about in this way. All religious doctrines and ritual acts are held immutable by strong interests and notions of religious duty. Therefore they fall out of consistency with the mores, which are in constant change, being acted on by all the observation or experience of life. Sacral harlotry is a case, the ethical horror of which is very great and very obvious ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... always been afraid of him. I've met him three times since then, and he puts such a frightful look in his eyes—and he was so violent, and headstrong, and so terribly angry,—that time. He accused me of leading him on, and playing with him; and he said something about an immutable law of chance, and a governing balance of events—that I couldn't understand, only where he said that for all the suffering we inflict on others, we receive an equal amount ourselves. Then he went away—in such a passion. I've imagined ever since ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... imitation; a word is either the perfect expression of a thing, or a mere inarticulate sound (a fallacy which is still prevalent among theorizers about the origin of language). He is at once a philosopher and a sophist; for while wanting to rest language on an immutable basis, he would deny the possibility of falsehood. He is inclined to derive all truth from language, and in language he sees reflected the philosophy of Heracleitus. His views are not like those of Hermogenes, hastily taken up, but are ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... immutable immortal laws Impress'd on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE, Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife Organic forms, and kindled into life; How Love and Sympathy with potent charm Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm; ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... rode across the open country, his eyes turned to the far range and to Music Mountain. The rounded, distant, immutable peak—majestic as the sun, cold as the stars, shrouding in its unknown fastnesses the mysteries of the ages and the secrets of time—meant to him now only this mountain girl whom its solitude sheltered and to whom his thoughts ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... revelation; for, from his almost immutable reserve, I had supposed that the Commodore never meddled immediately with the concerns of the ship, but left all that to the captain. But the longer we live, the more we learn ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... their consequences are known to be so, whilst the great catholic acts of life are entirely (and, if we may so phrase it, haughtily) independent of consequences. For instance, fidelity to a trust is a law of immutable morality subject to no casuistry whatever. You have been left executor to a friend—you are to pay over his last legacy to X, though a dissolute scoundrel; and you are to give no shilling of it to the poor brother of X, though a good man, and a wise man, struggling with adversity. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... cannot come out of light"—all these, and a dozen other similar propositions, formerly admitted without hesitation as axioms, were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be untenable. How absurd in these people, then, to persist in putting faith in "axioms" as immutable bases of Truth! But even out of the mouths of their soundest reasoners it is easy to demonstrate the futility, the impalpability of their axioms in general. Who was the soundest of their logicians? Let me see! I will go and ask Pundit and be back in a minute.... Ah, here we have ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... up and to defend, by external measures, not excluding violence, that Church which, by its own declaration, was established by God Himself and could not be shaken by the gates of hell nor by anything human. This divine and immutable God-established institution had to be sustained and defended by a human institution—the Holy Synod, managed by Toporoff and his officials. Toporoff did not see this contradiction, nor did he wish to see it, and he was therefore much concerned lest some Romish priest, some pastor, or ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... that darkness where Isabel's own special chairs were, and her own special books, and the two great walnut wardrobes filled with her dresses and wraps? What tragic argument might be there vainly striving to confute the gentle dead? "In God's name, what else could I have done?" For his mother's immutable silence was surely answering him as Isabel in life would never have answered him, and he was beginning to understand how eloquent the dead can be. They cannot stop their eloquence, no matter how they have loved the living: they cannot choose. And so, no matter in ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... affected, moreover, by a difference in the spirit of the law. The Roman jurist derived his whole sanction from reason and never allowed religious considerations, as such, to influence him when legislating on women. He recognised that laws are not immutable, but must be changed to fit the growth of equity and tolerance. No previous authority was valid to him if reason suggested that the authority's dictum had outlived its usefulness and must be adapted to larger ideas. It never occurred to him to make ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... Master!" he murmured. "We knew not that the immutable Soul was speaking from within you, calling one among us towards the Light!" He glanced quickly over his shoulder to where the massive form and agitated face of Bale-Corphew was framed in ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... many small feet have swept off the early dew of life, leaving the path black behind them! But to think that you should go before me! It almost sends me forward on my way, to receive and welcome you. If indeed, O Beatrice, such should be God's immutable will, sometimes look down on me when the song to Him is suspended. Oh! look often on me with prayer and pity; for there all prayers are accepted, and all pity is devoid of ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... and Municipal Elections Act of 1872, the Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894, and the Parliament Act of 1911. In the fourth place there is the Common Law, a vast body of legal precept and usage which through the centuries has acquired fundamental and immutable character. The first three elements mentioned, i.e., treaties, solemn political engagements, and statutes, exist solely, or almost so, in written form. The rules of the Common Law, however, have not been reduced to writing, save in so far as they are contained in reports, legal opinions, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... ceremonies, which may be traced through different channels to the primitive liturgies of Rome and Antioch. It is also one of those striking illustrations, which Rome presents, of the unity and catholicity of the church; and at the same time of the adaptation of her immutable doctrines and sacred practices to the feelings and customs of widely-separated nations who, having little in common but human nature, yet all acknowledge "one Lord, one faith, and one baptism". (Ephes. ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... blinded, but also fascinated, by the repeated swift visions of an unknown shore, a sight always so inspiring, as much perhaps by its vague suggestion of danger as by the hopes of success it never fails to awaken in the heart of a true adventurer. And its immutable aspect of profound and still repose, seen thus under streams of fire and in the midst of a violent uproar, made it appear ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... cracked beneath the heel, And jolting jarred the window-frames. 'Tis not so now. Like gentle dames We glide along a floor of wax. However, the mazurka lacks Nought of its charms original In country towns, where still it keeps Its stamping, capers and high leaps. Fashion is there immutable, Who tyrannizes us with ease, Of modern Russians ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... heavy retribution which shall assuredly be demanded of those who have thus borne false witness against their neighbour. Men forget too often, in the headlong eagerness of controversy, that truth is eternal and immutable, and that no amount of self-deceit or successful deception of others can alter its purity and integrity in the eyes of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... once held these views as "the immutable first principles of Irish Nationalism" and was now so vigorously loyal and energetically military, appeared to the Sinn Feiners to have changed its ground, and thus to be betraying Ireland—quite forgetting ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... Laugier found in the mould of Muggendorf, besides phosphate of lime, 0.10 of animal matter. I was struck, during my stay at Steeben, with the ammoniacal and fetid smell produced by it, when thrown on a red-hot iron.) Nature in every zone follows immutable laws in the distribution of rocks, in the form of mountains, and even in those changes which the exterior crust of our planet has undergone. So great a uniformity led me to believe that the aspect of the cavern of Caripe ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... tongues, there is a double pronunciation, one cursory and colloquial, the other regular and solemn. The cursory pronunciation is always vague and uncertain, being made different in different mouths by negligence, unskilfulness, or affectation. The solemn pronunciation, though by no means immutable and permanent, is yet always less remote from the orthography, and less liable to capricious innovation. They have however generally formed their tables according to the cursory speech of those with whom they happened to converse; and concluding that the whole ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... Stadium."] If movement is not everything, it is nothing, and if we postulate, to begin with, that the motionless is real, then we shall be incapable of grasping reality. The philosophies of Plato, of Aristotle, and of Plotinus were developed from the thesis that there is more in the immutable than in the moving, and that it is by way of diminution that we pass from ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... man with a large family, doubtless things would have been uncomfortable enough to stir the villagers out of their habitual philosophic acceptance of the "rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate" as an inevitable and immutable law. But they couldn't actively dislike either squire or parson, and although the agricultural labourer is slow of speech he is not lacking in shrewdness, and those at Redmarley realised that things would be much worse than they were if Squire ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... nature, which are observed by all nations alike, are established, as it were, by divine providence, and remain ever fixed and immutable: but the municipal laws of each individual state are subject to frequent change, either by the tacit consent of the people, or by the ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... Aphorisms, or Theory of Nature; founded on the immutable basis of Meteoric Action. By P. Murphy,[817] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... not try to establish any school of discipline or systematic thought. They revealed throughout the dawn of an experience of an immutable Reality as the self of man, as the only abiding truth behind all changes. But Buddhism holds that this immutable self of man is a delusion and a false knowledge. The first postulate of the system is that impermanence is sorrow. Ignorance about sorrow, ignorance about the way it originates, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... spread-outness and alternation that he will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures. But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her results, will always ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... these "Recollections" is a fallible man, like other fallible man. He has shown at least this, that he is ready to stand by his convictions, living and dying; and he holds this conviction fixed and immutable, that there is a crisis coming on us of overtopping and overwhelming magnitude, and demanding the American people should come together and look each other honestly in the face, that they may take into their hearts this weight and extent of the reasons ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... of the world he inhabits for beings who can procure him a happiness denied to him by Nature, let him study this Nature, learn her laws, contemplate her energies, observe the immutable rules by which she acts.—Let him apply these discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to her precepts, which nothing can alter.—Let him cheerfully consent to be ignorant of causes hid from him under the most impenetrable veil.—Let him yield to the decrees of a universal ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... futile unless they are made to center about some definite conception of its aims and methods. We need principles, yea dogmas, in Judaism as we need working hypotheses in any great undertaking. But dogmas, in the sense of abstract principles, regarded as immutable, are both superfluous and dangerous. If such dogmas are nothing more than the common denominator of all that has been identified with Judaism in the course of its history, they are sure to be banal and colorless. If they are to be fixed and unalterable, they are bound ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... years past it has been common to lay great stress upon the importance of national characteristics in art. This has been very natural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of the revolt against the conception of the one permanent and immutable standard of perfection of the Neo-classicists of the Renaissance. Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world, had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probably superior to that of the classicists, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... the perpetual thought of God is like sandal paste smeared on the body, to him nothing else is delight: His work and his rest are filled with music: he sheds abroad the radiance of love. Kabr says: "Touch His feet, who is one and indivisible, immutable and peaceful; who fills all vessels to the brim with joy, and whose ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... demonstrably Christian Science, the natural law of harmony which overcomes discord, - not because this Science is supernatural or pre- 134:24 ternatural, nor because it is an infraction of divine law, but because it is the immutable law of God, good. Jesus said: "I knew that Thou hearest me al- 134:27 ways;" and he raised Lazarus from the dead, stilled the tempest, healed the sick, walked on the water. There is divine authority for believing in the superiority ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... across the surface of the water like a woman stealing out to a tryst—it was a picture full of harmony. That mere speck full of movement was a starting-point whence the soul of man could descry the immutable vast of space. Solitude and bustling life, silence and sound, were all brought together in strange abrupt contrast; you could not tell where life, or sound, or silence, and nothingness lay, and no human ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... philanthropy, they borrow the terms only to perplex the ignorant and seduce the imagination. They have their systems and their theories, and in theory they pretend that the general good of society is their sole immutable rule of morality, and in practice they make the variable feelings of each individual the judges of this general good. Their systems disdain all the vulgar virtues, intent upon some beau ideal of perfection or perfectibility. ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... are unwilling to let the thrifty reap the rewards of their savings and abstinence," lectured the Political Economist of the standard school. "The law of wages and capital is immutable. More ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... collision of two strong and kindred natures, every advantage was at present on the father's side: age, experience, authority, resolution, hidden and powerful motives, to which my reader even has no clue as yet; a purpose immutable and concealed. Add to these a colder nature and a far colder affection; for Alfred ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... to wipe away much guilt. This Mahabharata contains the history of the gods, of the Rishis in heaven and those on earth, of the Gandharvas and the Rakshasas. It also contains the life and actions of the one God, holy, immutable, and true,—who is Krishna, who is the creator and the ruler of this universe; who is seeking the welfare of his creation by means of his incomparable and indestructible power; whose actions are celebrated by all sages; ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... river, which, in obedience to the laws of all-powerful wisdom, overflows every year, at a fixed period, its limits, and spreads itself, like a vast sea, to water and to vivify these immense plains, which are afterwards covered with rich harvests. If this immutable and beneficent order of Nature did not endure, all these fertile districts would be but a desert waste, where no living creature ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... directly by the States.... This Government unequivocally and absolutely denies its possession of any power whatever over the subject, and cannot entertain any proposition in relation to it.... The policy of the Confederacy is as fixed and immutable on this subject as the imperfection of human nature permits human resolve to be. No additional agreements, treaties, or stipulations can commit these States to the prohibition of the African slave trade with more binding efficacy than ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... dutiful lover of our earth. He says himself in one of his descriptive passages: "Nous autres que seduit la terre . . ." It was true. The earth had for him a compelling charm. He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real passion. His is the power of detecting the one immutable quality that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the ever-shifting surface of life. To say that he could not embrace in his glance all its magnificence and all its misery is only to say that ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... nature to his use—himself a divine instrument. Science discovers these laws of power, motion, and transformation; industry applies them to the raw matter which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge; art teaches us the immutable laws of beauty and symmetry, and gives to our productions forms in accordance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... Mr Meldrum, drawing her fondly to his side, and speaking as if they were alone together. "You have taught me a lesson, and I will repine no longer about the immutable. It is best to look forward, as you say. We ought to recollect that all our days must not necessarily be gloomy because for the moment they may ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... God there is—over Space, over Time; While the Human Will rocks, like a reed, to and fro, Lives the Will of the Holy—A Purpose Sublime, A Thought woven over creation below; Changing and shifting the All we inherit, But changeless through all One Immutable Spirit! ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... to those who should know most about it. It is all those animals or plants which have descended from a single pair of parents; it is the smallest distinctly definable group of living organisms; it is an eternal and immutable entity; it is a mere abstraction of the human intellect having no existence in nature. Such are a few of the significations attached to this simple word which may be culled from authoritative sources; and if, leaving terms and theoretical subtleties aside, we turn to facts and endeavour ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... truth.'" We may find no better place than this to refer to her relations to Christianity. There are many people who do not believe in the progress of religion. They are right in one respect. God's truth cannot be progressive because it is absolute, immutable and eternal. But the human race is struggling up to a higher comprehension of its own destiny and of the mysterious purposes of God so far as they are revealed to our finite intelligence. It is in this sense that religion is progressive. The Christianity of this ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... art, I know thy doubt; And gladly will I loose the knot, wherein Thy subtle thoughts have bound thee. From this realm Excluded, chalice no entrance here may find, No more shall hunger, thirst, or sorrow can. A law immutable hath establish'd all; Nor is there aught thou seest, that doth not fit, Exactly, as the finger to the ring. It is not therefore without cause, that these, O'erspeedy comers to immortal life, Are different in their shares of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... and cheers the watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him, was the greatest; the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. He preferred the artificial to the natural in external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw, than admiration of that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred the artificial ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... still more powerful than the laws, may render modifications necessary, which it is utterly impossible for me to foresee; still the great fundamental principles upon which every sensible plan for such an Establishment must be founded, appear to me to be certain and immutable; and when rightly understood, there can be no great difficulty in accommodating the plan to all those particular circumstances under which it may be carried into execution, ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... all that a man could bring to the world, or take from it, there was vanity and death; but many things were vain merely because they were not eternal, and many things perished because where life is, change must be. Immutable, permanent possessions were the gifts of God to men. But the gifts of men to God would always be imperfect—whether they offered the sacrifice of their wills or their imagined earthly happiness. Yet if this imperfection were a mean ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... know nothing except the immutable laws of material life. All the rest is a dream—a beautiful dream, if you like—a consolation to that kind of temperament which can take comfort from dreams; but for anyone who has read much, and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... which streamed through the narrow defiles of the hills. None but sailors, well practised in treading the deck of a rolling ship, could possibly have maintained their footing: for the boatswain, the wooden leg, and the fisherman, kept up their horses inexorably to their duty of an immutable gallop; the hearse and its plumes flew through the solitary valley; the post-chaises, carrying a similar crew on their upper decks, flew after the hearse; and in the rear of the whole, with all the sail they could crowd (but haud passibus aequis) ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... and despairing. Who can battle against the ten thousand million trees? Who can hope to make headway against the innumerable adverse conditions which doom the dweller in Darkest England to eternal and immutable misery? What wonder is it that many of the warmest hearts and enthusiastic workers feel disposed to repeat the lament of the old English chronicler, who, speaking of the evil days which fell upon our forefathers in the reign of Stephen, said "It seemed ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... Adams, hardly abused and cruelly misappreciated in his own day but whom subsequent generations already begin to honor as one of the greatest of American statesmen, not only preeminent in ability and acquirements, but even more to be honored for profound, immutable honesty of purpose and broad, noble humanity ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... that happens in her neighborhood, and devoted, either from fear or habit, to the tribe, whose straggling members she feeds and lodges. This people, ever moving and changing, though controlled by immutable customs, has its eyes everywhere, executes, without judging it, a WILL,—for the oldest Companion still belongs to an era when men had faith. Moreover, the whole body professes doctrines that are sufficiently true and sufficiently mysterious ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way. I perceived by this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the life-long education of my body and members. They were steeped in ignorance; they knew nothing—nothing which it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Do the swift elements of thought contend To form a whole which life may comprehend. Only to those of high intent Is life revealed, and quick dreams sent - Half glimpsed truths omnipotent. Out of the silence of an unborn space A spirit moves, and thought comes face to face With the immutable, and time is past, And the spent soul, done, meets truth at last. Chance, fate, occasion, circumstance, In interfused radiance Are lost. Past, present, future, all combined In one sure instantaneous grasp of mind, And all infinity unrolls at our command, And beast and man and God unite, as worlds ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... restrained within a very limited sphere of action; it is not, as are both the Congress and the State Legislatures of the Union, bound hand and foot by the articles of a rigid Constitution; it is not compelled to respect any immutable maxims of legislation. Hence the Victorian Parliament—in this resembling its creator, the British Parliament—exercises an amount of legislative freedom unknown to most foreign representative assemblies. It can, and does, legislate on education, on ecclesiastical ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before us; and as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and listening. His opinions on government were ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Kessin, Miss Marietta Trippelli, will arrive here to sojourn in our midst till tomorrow morning. On the 17th she expects to be in St. Petersburg, where she will give concerts till the middle of January. Prince Kotschukoff is again opening his hospitable house to her. In her immutable kindness to me, Miss Trippelli has promised to spend this evening at my house and sing some songs, leaving the choice entirely to me, for she knows no such thing as difficulty. Could Madame the Baroness consent to attend this soiree musicale, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... one arm was the flat cocked hat with the twopenny tricolour rosette, which was already reproduced in his pictures. In his right hand he held a little riding switch with a metal head. He walked slowly forward, his face immutable, his eyes fixed steadily before him, measured, inexorable, the ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inspiration, even the fountain of life itself. It is spontaneous, generous, infinite. To its presence we are indebted for all that is good, true, and beautiful in Art and Nature. It endows humanity with countless virtues, and throws a mystic veil over our many faults. It is this feeling, this immutable law, which controls the destiny of the race. From its influence empires have fallen, scepters have been lost. Literature owes to Love its choicest gems. The poet's lay is sweeter when Cupid tunes the lyre. The artist's brush is truer when guided ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... moral and religious conduct. While it no more demands regular and persevering beneficent action than it demands other Christian duties, it imperiously demands regular and persevering beneficent action as an essential branch of Christian conduct, inevitably resulting from those immutable principles which form the basis of the Christ-like character. Thus the particular or individual system grows, by a moral necessity, out of the general system of thoughts, affections, and volitions, here unfolded; it being a moral impossibility for one cordially to adopt ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... harmoniously into his sensitive temperament the loveliness and the power of both the world of the past and the world of art, and he renders them back in description as they were mirrored in himself; the stir of Roman life, its antiquity, its still and immutable forms of picture and sculpture, are given back with full sympathy and as clearly as the autumn woodland of the old Puritan town in his first romance; and this realism, for such it is notwithstanding its glamour, is the substance of the ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... Athenians expressed practically by their oyster shells, and have been led to cast doubts on Washington's perfection as the only consolation for their own sense of injury. Then, again, Washington's fame has been so overshadowing, and his greatness so immutable, that he has been very inconvenient to the admirers and the biographers of other distinguished men. From these two sources, from the general jealousy of the classic Greek variety, and the particular jealousy born of the necessities of some other hero, ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... directions, absolute and immutable, are at the disposal of mankind. They will carry you through the atmosphere wherever and whenever you choose. That is, if you know how to control them. Now, here is a ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... Mr. Brott gave signs of the man underneath. The air of polite interest had left his face. He glanced swiftly and keenly at his companion. Mr. Sabin's expression was immutable. It was he who scored, for he marked the change, whilst Mr. Brott could not be sure whether he had noticed it ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... these pages one day meet the eye of him who subdued my virgin heart, whom the immutable, unerring laws of nature had pointed out for my husband, but whose sacred decree the barbarous customs of society ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the Union is a measurement of the many elements of which it is composed—a political union of diverse States, an economic union of varying interests, an intellectual union of common convictions, and a moral union of immutable ideals. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... course he changed his name and his designation; he was placed in another group. But the pressure of political independence has been latterly bringing into prominence the idea of Race. Odysseus, from whose book I quote again, gives us the very curious fact that even race is not immutable, it changes like religion, with the political movement; it has become a question of political expediency. When a separate State has been organised, as in Bulgaria, or when a league for shaking off the Turkish yoke is being organised, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... God, and whom can I desire on earth, in comparison of Thee?' (Psalm lxxiii. 25). Herein the state of your ladyship's case is still the same, if you cannot with greater clearness and with less hesitation pronounce these latter words. The principal causes of your joy are immutable, such as no supervening thing can alter. You have lost a most pleasant, delectable earthly relation. Doth the blessed God hereby cease to be the best and most excellent good? Is His nature changed? His everlasting covenant reversed or annulled, which is ordered in all things, and sure, and is to ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... start, David could hardly tear himself away from that outlook, which makes such a mystical appeal to most of us—huddling roofs and chimneys under a morning sky. But when he did turn to look at Dr. Lavendar, tucking things into his valise and singing to himself, it was to realize again the immutable past. "No," he said slowly, "you can't get back behind, and begin ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... builds as he can, And beauty he adds for his joy, But all the hues of sublimity My pinnacled walls employ. Slow shadows iris them all day long, And silvery veils, soul-stilling, The moon drops down their precipices, Soft with a spectral thrilling. For all immutable dreams that sway With beauty the earth and air, Are ever at play, by night and day, My house of eternity to ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... trod a deck, and upheld with all the strength of civilized man the flag of the feeblest power. Amid the changing revolutions of the human will, amid the fall of empires and the ruin of dynasties, it alone was immutable. It was the tie of nations, which bound men in one universal brotherhood, and gathered peoples about a common altar. No private rule, no immemorial custom, no formal statute, controlled its operations; but right reason in all its supremacy enacted its provisions, and justice, ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... where they are ranged symmetrically upon the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced works of art. These figures, seen amid the golden reflections and twinkling light of the lamps, easily assume a phantasmagorical life, capable ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... descendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. "The whole is one," Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that same sense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logical terms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that an indistinguishable immutable substance was omnipresent in the world. Parmenides carried association by similarity to such lengths that he arrived at the idea of what alone is similar in everything, viz., the fact that it is. Being exists, and nothing ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... be a sin to ruin it by carelessness and by pursuing erroneous ideas and principles. You are too impatient; too apt to be fascinated by novelty, and to neglect rules hallowed by time and experience, laws immutable as those of the Medes. Beware, lest you become a mere fashionable painter. Your colours, I observe, are not unfrequently selected in defiance of good taste; your drawing is often feeble, sometimes positively ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... there were ripples on the lake, or sands upon its shores, without perceiving that more seconds had elapsed than were required for a single respiration. When the immortal dwellers in heaven first lose the consciousness of the duration of time, they must feel thus; it was an immutable thought, in the eternity of ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... argument in which he had expended the finest flowers of his contradictory faculties, the stanch immobility of his obstinacy, his unswerving singleness of purpose in seeing only one side of a question, this afternoon, a few short hours since! The mutability of the affairs of the most immutable ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... spirit met and faced the ultimate issue—for there was that in Garth's voice which told her that his decision not to marry her was immutable. Could she—oh God!—could she give him what he asked? Give only part to the man to whom she longed to give all that a woman has to give? It would be far easier to go away—to put him out ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... reason can be drawn why the history of nature should not still be studied, and observations and experiments made, which, that they are of use to mankind, and enable us to draw any general conclusions, is not the result of any immutable habitudes or relations between things themselves, but only of God's goodness and kindness to men in the administration of the world. See sect. 30 and 31 Fourthly, by a diligent observation of the phenomena within our view, we may discover the general laws of nature, and from ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind. There is but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires, to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities of life can be built—duty. When this rock has been faithfully clung to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble resolution has been clung to never to base personal ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... with your remarks on geological distribution in Celebes. It is impossible that anything could be better put, and [it] would give a cold shudder to the immutable naturalists. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Profit of the Earth is for all;' Yet how deplorably destitute are the great Mass of the People? Nor is it possible for their situations to be radically amended, but by the establishment of a system, Founded on the immutable basis of Nature and Justice. Experience demonstrates its necessity; and the rights of mankind ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... education has grown to suit the work, we must silently sit by and willingly receive the work when handed out for use by the producer. At this point I will say that an intelligent Osteopath is willing to be governed by the immutable laws of nature, and feel that he is justified to pass the fluid on from place to ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... in these things, and follow the example of the Lord; being firm and immutable in the faith, lovers of the brotherhood, lovers of one another: companions together in the truth, being kind and gentle towards each ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... astonished? His mental revolution took place when he saw the first match struck. It is manifestly impossible for any one to make fire instantaneously by rubbing one small stick. When for the first time he saw it done, he was indeed vastly astounded. The immutable had been changed. The law had been transcended. The impossible had been accomplished. And then, as logical sequence, his mind completed the syllogism. If the white man can do this impossibility, why not ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... splendour, positively tiring and paining the eye. It was a new and strange feeling to be altogether hemmed in by mountains. It was oppressive to a plain- dweller to be shut in thus, and not to be able to get away from the immutable sheet of snow, with its jagged summits. Along the valley of the stream, the road ran between marvellously fresh walnut-trees, plane- trees, and avenues of apple trees; but sometimes we drove through valleys so narrow that the sun only shone on them two or three hours of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... intimate view. Nick was embarrassed: he scarcely knew what he was there for from the moment he could give his good old friend no conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs. Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square thick house, where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows and tinkle in the quieter bells, all these things represented best the kind of supreme solace to which ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... indelible mark upon these islands. You do not need to look deep to know that they were men of force, men of the same kind as they who have left an equally deep impress upon so large a part of our Western States; men and women who had formed their own lives according to certain fixed and immutable rules, who knew no better country than New England, nor any better ways than New England ways, and to whom it never occurred to think that what was good and sufficient in Massachusetts was not equally good and fit in any part of the ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... admitted. "And yet, you see, the immutable law comes in here. The stronger must possess—not only the stronger by arms, mind, but by intellect, by learning, by proficiency in science, by utilitarianism. The really cruel part, the part I was thinking of then, as I looked ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pushing him off the train. Then she watched from the, platform the three receding figures in the yellow smoky light until the car slipped out from under the roof into the blackness of the night. Some faint, premonitory divination of what they represented of immutable love in a changing, heedless, selfish world came to her; rocks to which one might cling, successful or failing, happy or unhappy. For unconsciously she thought of them, all three, as one, a human trinity ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... might come into His presence in Heaven. Alas! the shrinking from suffering we cannot help. That part of her prayer was vain. And as for the rest, was not the sure justice of His law finding her out even now? His laws once broken, His justice and the very nature of those laws bring the immutable retribution; but if we turn penitently to Him, He enables us to bear our punishment with a meek and docile heart, "for ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a case which forms a strong appeal to the candor, the magnanimity, and the honor of this people. Much is due to courtesy between nations. By a short delay we shall lose nothing, for, resting on the ground of immutable truth and justice, we can not be ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Monroe • James Monroe
... their influence?) After nearly thirty years of association with ether and chloroform, who can positively answer as to their modus operandi? It is thus with nearly the whole domain of medicine. It is not yet, by far, among the sciences, with immutable laws, such as we have in chemistry. Experimentation is giving us more specific knowledge, and "practice alone has tended to make perfect." (Then, gentlemen will not set at naught my assertion and practical results. When I have stated my case in full it is for ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... consideration, which ought alone to have sufficient weight with us to deter us from attempting to carry out this tyrannical enactment. All history, and all experience, show it to be an immutable law of God, that whosoever injures another, injures himself in the process. These frequent scuffles between despotism and freedom, with despotism shielded by law, cannot otherwise than demoralize our people. They unsettle the popular mind concerning eternal principles ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... patient and were told that he had just that morning begun a four days' gakt[n]ta which, among other provisions, excluded all visitors. It was of no use to argue that we had come by the express request of Tsiskwa. The laws of the gakt[n]ta were as immutable as those of the Medes and Persians, and neither doctor nor patient could hope for favorable results from the treatment unless the regulations were enforced to the letter. But although we might not enter the house, there was no reason why we should not ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the literal rule of interpretation. No other rule would ever have been thought of, if the Devil had let the minds of men alone. By this rule the true Sabbath would always have been maintained a perfect safeguard against idolatry in the earth; the law would have held its place as a perfect, immutable, and eternal rule of conduct, a safeguard against the antinomianism of all ages and the Spiritualism of to-day; the view that the dead remain unconscious in the grave till the resurrection, would always have been held, and then there ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... his successors have come to the same temple to receive the same consecration, can they be confounded with the multitude of human events, to be buried and lost in the endless annals? To what, O great God! if not to the persistence of Thy immutable decrees, can we attribute, on this earth, always so changing and mobile, the supernatural gift of ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... that the ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment, and not authority; she is teaching it to estimate the value of evidence; she is creating a firm and living faith in the existence of immutable moral and physical laws, perfect obedience to which is the highest possible aim ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... endeavour to perpetuate a changeless formulation of religious dogma and hierarchy; the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas was the endeavour to settle forever changeless paths for the human mind to walk in. To that ancient world as a whole the perfect was the finished, and therefore it was immutable. ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... a vast granite boulder, a man who looked at us. His glance, like that of the flash of a cannon, came from two bloodshot eyes, and his stoical immobility could be compared only to the immutable granite masses that surrounded him. His eyes moved slowly, his body remaining rigid as though he were petrified. Then, having cast upon us that look which struck us like a blow, he turned his eyes once more to ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... analytical. But he holds out the fetter of authority, and he decides as a judge who expounds laws; not the best decision, when new laws are required to abrogate obsolete ones. And what laws invented by man can be immutable? D'Avenant was thus tried by the laws of a country, that of Greece or Rome, of which, it is said, he was not even ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Josephine, strong as were the political motives which led to it, was a violation of the immutable laws of God. Like all wrong-doing, however seemingly prosperous for a time, it promoted final disaster and woe. Doubtless Napoleon, educated in the midst of those convulsions which had shaken all the foundations of Christian morality, did not clearly perceive the extent of the ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott |
