"Mundane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did not so frequently air her religious beliefs, she often pondered the subject, and when challenged to speak was not reticent. As regards sacred matters, she always had the courage of her convictions, even as she had in mundane affairs. ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... creation, universe, cosmos; globe; planet; macrocosm, microcosm. Associated Words: cosmology, cosmologist, cosmography, cosmogony, cosmographer, cosmogonist, cosmometry, cosmoplastic, cosmic, cosmolatry, cosmopolite, cosmopolitan, cataclysm, ante-mundane, secularize, secularization, secularist, supermundane, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sigh. "I am very much discouraged over Mr. Bradlaugh," she admitted, wanly. "He is hovering too near this world. He cannot seem to get away from his mundane interests. He is as much concerned with parliamentary affairs now as when ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... In actual mundane time, to use a somewhat halting expression, Professor Marmion's walk had occupied about a couple of hours. His strange experiences had, of course, occupied none, since they had taken place ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... school of technology. Greek and Latin exercises are comparatively worthless, and even mathematics, unless they can be converted into practical use. Philosophy, as ordinarily understood,—that is, metaphysics,—is most idle of all, since it does not pertain to mundane wants. Hence the old Grecian philosopher labored in vain; and still more profitless were the disquisitions of the scholastics of the Middle Ages, since they were chiefly used to prop up unintelligible creeds. Theology is not of much account, since it pertains ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... with apparent musical talent, but whose nature has not been developed to appreciate the beautiful and romantic in this wonderful world of ours, he will find it quite impossible to alter the pupil's individuality in this respect by work at the keyboard alone. The mundane, prosaic individual who believes that the sole aim of musical study is the acquisition of technic, or the magic of digital speed, must be brought to realize that this is a fault of individuality which will mar his entire career unless it is intelligently corrected. ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... give to understand, If e'er this coffin drive a-land, I, King Pericles, have lost This queen, worth all our mundane cost. Who her, give her burying; She was the daughter of a king: Besides this treasure for a fee, The gods requite his charity!' If thou livest, Pericles, thou hast a heart That even cracks for woe! ...
— Pericles Prince of Tyre • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... same time. The dog was howling more piteously than ever. Someone complained of the disturbance that had been caused by the creature's cries, during worship. The congregation continued to pour out, dividing into little groups to discuss the sermon or something of more mundane interest. An appearance of superhuman respectability pervaded the whole body. The important people, some of whom had their carriages waiting to drive them home, lingered a few moments, to exchange greetings, and to discuss sporting prospects ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... gust of anger shook her—anger with her benefactors, that they could not have introduced her to this mundane paradise as her simple self, Miss Manvers—Sarah with the vulgar h—by her own merits and defects to stand or ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... cars haint a-goin' to kill you Ef you don't drive 'crost the track; Crediters never'll jerk you up Ef you go and pay 'em back; You kin stand all moral and mundane storms Ef you'll on'y jist behave— But a' EARTHQUAKE:—well, ef it wanted you It 'ud husk ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... with intense delight one of Townsend's most characteristic sayings. In the course of a conversation which began on some mundane theme and drifted on to spiritual lines, I remember his suddenly throwing the noble horse of dialectic on to his haunches with the catastrophic remark: "Strachey, remember this. If there are angels, they ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the third heaven may signify a supra-mundane vision. Such a vision may be called the third heaven in three ways. First, according to the order of the cognitive powers. In this way the first heaven would indicate a supramundane bodily vision, conveyed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read the paragraph. "Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely..." Yes; she was lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the papers—seen her represented in every conceivable attitude of the mundane game: fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her thoroughbred, dancing a gavotte, all patches and plumes, or fingering a guitar, all tulle and lilies; and once he had caught a glimpse of her at the theatre. Hearing that Ronald was going to a fashionable first-night ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... he made one—about me. He said that my name was Hilaritas, signifying joy. He said, among other flattering things, that I was no common mundane contraption, though such I might seem to the untutored eye. In their studies of the Greek drama they had read of gods from the machine. I was a machine from the gods. In my cylinders I consumed nectar vapour, in my goo-cups ambrosia, in my radiator ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... lifted up, in the sheet of Paul the Apostle, to meet his God. There had been the most wonderful sense of elevation, a clearing of light, a gentler freshness in the air, a sudden sinking to remoteness of human voices and mundane sounds. From that moment in the Chapel life had been changed for him. He never seemed to come down again from that mysterious elevation. Human voices sounded far away from him; he could be urged, only with the greatest difficulty, to take his food, and he frequently ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... he sat out waltzes with her, in conservatories, and on staircases; for Horace Smithson was much too shrewd a man too enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped by his forty years and his fourteen stone. He contrived to amuse Lesbia by his conversation, which was essentially mundane, depreciating people whom all the rest of the world admired, or pretended to admire, telling her of the secret springs by which the society she saw around her was moved. He was judicious in his revelations of hidden evil, and careful to ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... cousin then. She was already the Phryne of Athens for me, but when suddenly a light knock came on the door outside my heart seemed to stand still and I could hardly find voice to say, "Come in." When she entered, dressed in her modern clothes and hat, and held out her hand, all the modern, mundane atmosphere came back and brought ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... deep bow, "let me suggest to you that the finest thing in this mundane state of ours is—reason. Suppose, now, that you complete your toilet, tell us what it is you have lost; leave us—your devoted servants—to begin the task of finding it, and while we are so engaged, hasten with Mr. Weiss to the hall to fulfil your engagement? ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... the greater parts of the visible mundane system animated by intelligent souls, and called "sensible gods"—the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the earth itself, and known by the names ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... certain that the ten tribes worshipped the Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar symbols:—secondly, that the cow, or Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the worship of nature, or the [Greek (transliterated): to pan], as God. In after times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only one portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A man's religious faith (whatever more special items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. In the more developed religions ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... ditches, draining the stagnant pools of life. Each human being has a special goal toward which he or she strains, with nineteen chances out of twenty against reaching it in time; and if it be won, is it worth the race? With some of us it is love, ambition, mundane prosperity; with others, intellectual supremacy, moral perfection, exalted spirituality, sublimated altruism; but after all, in the final analysis, it is only hedonism! Each struggles with teeth and claws for that which gives the largest promise of pleasure ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... evidence of genius in these first-fruits. None of them are meant to be thrilling or profound, but they all have some characteristic grace, some unexpected stroke of wit, some fascinating melody. I do not know any poems of a similar class which afford such unfailing delight. It is true they are mundane and their wit has often a satiric, "knowing" air; but the pleasantry is never mocking or malevolent; and the exuberance of spirit is contagious. Such a poem as "Terpsichore" (1843) is inimitable in its suggestions. The lines have ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the jurisdiction of mundane mandamuses,' says I, 'by the unearthly statutes of female partiality. Let us praise the Lord and be thankful for whatever small mercies—' I begins; but I see Luke don't listen to me. Tired as he was, he calls for a fresh horse ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... receptions are unconsciously a work of art, a kind of poetry, by which cultivated society reconstructs an idyll that is age-long dead. They are confused memories of the golden age, or aspirations after a harmony which mundane reality has not in it ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... devil's stronghold, and hereabouts his will is paramount; and, as I have had the honor to add, the devil is a gentleman. Sure, and as such, he cannot be expected to countenance your present behavior? Nay, never fear! Lucifer, already up to the ears in the affairs of this mundane sphere, lacks leisure to express his disapproval in sulphuric person. He tenders his apologies, sir, and sends in his stead your servant, with whose capabilities ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the unbroken circle of the earth and above the blue desert of sky, solitary, soundless. And the union of earth and heaven, like a mundane and spiritual collusion, lay between him and ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... new conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the society which was ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... had a host of enemies: he was a poet, a sage, a moralist and even a grammarian; brave as a lion, strong as a bull, a successful and experienced captain, yet a complete failure as a King. A mere child in mundane matters, he ever acted in a worldly sense as he should have avoided acting, and hence, after a short and disastrous reign, he also was killed. His two sons, Hasan and Husayn, inherited all the defects and few ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... prior to Mahometanism. It lasts for six days, and is supposed to be kept in commemoration of the Creation and the Deluge—events constantly synchronised and confounded in pagan cosmogonies. At this feast eggs are presented to friends, in obvious allusion to the Mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... we might know that these people are still covetous, and that almost all of them are attached to the world and to themselves—that is, they are worldly people, which shows the holiness of the spirit by which they are actuated! As regards Anna Salters, it was said she was mundane, carnal, covetous, and artful, although she appeared to be the most pious. Her sayings and discussions were continually mixed up with protestations of the presence and omniscience of God, and upon the salvation of ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... the case of Europeans by the use of chandu. Loosely, this is true. But this type of European never becomes an habitue; the habitue always sleeps. That dream-world to which opium alone holds the key becomes the real world "for the delights of which the smoker gladly resigns all mundane interests." The exiled Chinaman returns again to the sampan of his boyhood, floating joyously on the waters of some willow-lined canal; the Malay hears once more the mystic whispering in the mangrove swamps, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... the mill work or the procreative activity. The wheels are, on the one hand, the organs that grind out the child (producing the child like meal), and on the other hand they are the ten commandments whose mundane administration is the duty of the father, by means of strict education and punishment. In passing over the plank, the wanderer places himself above the ten commandments and above the privileges of the father. The wanderer always extricates ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... marriage register. He developed her character, educated her mind, and made her a devoted and companionable wife, full of faith in him. Their curious and retired menage was as happy in a practical and mundane aspect as could be hoped ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... colures^, equator, ecliptic, orbit. [Science of heavenly bodies] astronomy; uranography, uranology^; cosmology, cosmography^, cosmogony; eidouranion^, orrery; geodesy &c (measurement) 466; star gazing, star gazer^; astronomer; observatory; planetarium. Adj. cosmic, cosmical^; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious^, terraqueous^, terrene, terreous^, telluric, earthly, geotic^, under the sun; sublunary^, subastral^. solar, heliacal^; lunar; celestial, heavenly, sphery^; starry, stellar; sidereal, sideral^; astral; nebular; uranic. Adv. in all creation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mundane formations, astro- nomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of specu- 209:27 lative theories, based on the hypothesis of material law or life and intelligence resident in matter, will ulti- mately vanish, swallowed up in the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Christendom, in his three hats and heavy trailing gowns, blessing the air of heaven; the priest, in his alb and chasuble, dispensing of the blessings of the Pope; the judge, in his wig and bombazine, endeavouring to reconcile divine justice with the law's mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... builded many pretty villages, faire houses and chapels which are growne good benefices of 120 pounds a yeare besides their own mundall [mundane] industry. ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... same who had taken the war-path with his iconoclastic hatchet, delivered a tremendous philippic from the text, 'Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power.' Luckily for his congregation he had the voice of a Stentor, as there were several mundane competitors in an adjoining field, each bawling the word of command at the full pitch of his lungs. A conscientious diarist, though full of sabbatarian zeal, was fain to admit that 'Severall sorts of Busnesses was a-Going on: Sum a-Exercising, ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... woman feels this reluctance at first toward a suitor for her hand, but a sensitive young lady might well have a sense of awe on finding that she had attracted to herself such a mundane force as Hawthorne, and it is no wonder that this first impression was recollected throughout her life. There are many who would have refused Hawthorne's suit, because they felt that he was too great and strong for them, and it is to the honor of Sophia Peabody that she was ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... remains than these are still to be found in great numbers throughout Hindostan and Cashmere. Their form was sometimes that of a cross, emblematic of the four elements of which the earth is composed,—fire, water, air, and earth,—but more generally an oval, as a representation of the mundane egg, which, in the ancient systems, was ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... will certainly suppress vanity. He who having acquired great wealth performeth meritorious sacrifices, who having acquired all kinds of learning remaineth humble, and who having studied the entire Vedas devoteth himself to asceticism with a heart withdrawn from all mundane enjoyments, goeth to heaven. None should exult in having acquired great wealth. None should be vain of having studied the entire Vedas. In the world men are of different dispositions. Destiny is supreme. Both power and exertion are all fruitless. Knowing Destiny to be ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Deity. An equality in a plurality of Deities might be objectionable. But that is not at all necessary, rather the contrary; and so was the Pagan theory, which is not so absurd as the modern one. This universe or mundane system may be the work of one hand, another of another, and so on. Where is the absurdity of that? If the universe is applied to the solar system, there is an appearance of its being formed by one ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... some time, and looked very composed, awaiting the commands of the knight. His mind was clearly in such a state of devotion that peradventure he might not have descended for a while longer to his mundane duties, had not Master Silas told him that, under the shadow of his wing, their courage had returned and they were ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... this latter aspect blotted out the first triumphant joy of his discovery. Mundane things, such as Renata Aston's wishes, Caesar's consent, and even the person of Geoffry Leverson interposed between Patricia and him. This mood had its sway and in turn succumbed to an awakening of his dormant will ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... him to realize the mundane again immediately after these undreamed of and supernormal experiences. Holding Pearl, who still clung to him frantically, cowering and trembling against him, he leaned upon the rough, projecting walls of his cabin and gazed with awed and still unbelieving eyes into ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Idiot. "Because her life is an eternal sacrifice to Saphead's needs, and if there is a luxury in this mundane sphere that woman essentially craves it is the luxury of sacrifice. There is something fanatic about it. Sallie Wiggins voluntarily turned her back on seven men that I know of, one of whom is a Governor of his state; two of whom are now in ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... with love! Oh, Love, Love! And in my time, you know——" He made a sweeping, comprehensive gesture, and came back abruptly to mundane affairs. ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... person. His peruke was strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch his head; so that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a witness to an enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every other strong passion, so withdraws us from mundane considerations, that we lose all consciousness of the "I" within us. Raphael, the student and man of science, looked respectfully at the naturalist, who devoted his nights to enlarging the limits of human ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the nations they have conquered, adorn their capital with the wonders of Grecian art, and abandon themselves to pleasure and money-making. The Roman grandees divide among themselves the lands and riches of the world, and this dwelling-place of princes looms up the proud centre of mundane glory and power. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... that nothing exists but Brahman; that all phenomena are merely the result of ignorance; that after the destruction of that ignorance, and of its effects, all is merged again in Brahman, the true source of being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies to all the other ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... canopy of space, Bewildering, and boundless to the eyes, Knowest thou the unborn spirits' dwelling place? Knowest thou the distant regions of the skies Where rest the spirits freed from mundane strife, From mortal grief and care? Knowest thou the secret of the future life? Canst thou tell where? From Space infinite echoed the reply: Child of a transient day, thou too, to ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... have him here often, not lose a day of this precious time. Then we can leave Nevis without anxiety, or perhaps induce him to go with us." She reflected that were she mistress of Hunsdon Towers she should be quite willing to give the famous poet a turret and pass as his mundane redeemer. ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... divers and swimmers, the deep blue of the ocean and the silvery white of the cliff, had that striking air of indifference to the fact that his mind had been absent from them which we are apt to find in mundane things on emerging from a nap. The same people were sitting near him on the beach—the same, and yet not quite the same. He found himself noticing a person whom he had not noticed before—a young lady, who was seated in a low portable ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... observed Mr Stokes, whom the death of poor Jackson and his own narrow escape from a like fate had led to think of other matters besides those connected with his mundane profession. "It's Providence!" ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... a system rather cosmogonical than chronological, divide the present mundane period into four ages or yugas as they call them: the Krita, the Treta, the Dwapara, and the Kali. The Krita, called also the Deva-yuga or that of the Gods, is the age of truth, the perfect age, the Treta is the age of the three sacred fires, domestic ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... after her until she had disappeared, and then, like a man waking from a trance, he turned to the mundane business ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... end of the service she approached the crucifix, and kissed both it and the large red hand of the priest. Maria Dmitrievna invited him to take tea. He threw off his stole, assumed a sort of mundane air, and went into the drawing-room with the ladies. A conversation began, not of a very lively nature. The priest drank four cups of tea, wiping the bald part of his head the while with his handkerchief, stated ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... in several dioceses, including his own diocese of Meaux, a number of parishes kindled what were called ecclesiastical fires for the purpose of banishing the superstitions practised at the purely mundane bonfires. These superstitions, he goes on to say, consisted in dancing round the fire, playing, feasting, singing ribald songs, throwing herbs across the fire, gathering herbs at noon or while fasting, carrying them ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... is a process renewed after each kalpa, or vast mundane period. Brahma awakes from his slumber, and finds the world a waste of water. Then, just as in the American myths of the coyote, and the Slavonic myths of the devil and the doves, a boar or a fish or a tortoise fishes up the world out of the waters. That boar, fish, tortoise, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... consists of the exterior and earthly portion of the Soul, that portion which, being weighted with cares, attachments, and memories merely mundane, is detached by the Soul and remains in the astral sphere, an existence more or less definite and personal, and capable of holding, through a sensitive, converse with the living. It is, however, but as a cast-off vestment of the Soul, and is incapable ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... his place at the organ. Arthur's thoughts, too, were wandering; and—you know it is of no use to make people out to be better than they are—wandering to things especially mundane. Arthur had not ceased to look out for something to do, to replace the weekly funds lost when he left Mr. Galloway's. He had not yet been successful: employment is more easily sought than found, especially by one lying ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and dozed off into a dream about an establishment of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment, with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long procession all the scrofulous youths of the clubs and fraternities, mystic and mundane, in such numbers that she was compelled to install a ticket-office at ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... silent evidence of the futility of our pursuits and anticipations. We know that we must one day die, but we always wish to forget it. The continual remembrance would be too great a check upon our mundane desires and wishes; and although we are told that we ever should have futurity in our thoughts, we find that life is not to be enjoyed if we are not permitted occasional forgetfulness. For who would plan what rarely ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... besides their own were adroitly stuffed into them; nor were letters, arts, and sciences neglected, nor the mundane and social patter, accomplishments, and refinements, including poise, ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the Second Book by itself, we note that it falls into two portions: the Assembly of the People, which has been called together by Telemachus, and the communion of the youth with Pallas, who again appears to him at his call. The first is a mundane matter, and shows the Lower World in conflict with the divine order—the sides being the Suitors on the one hand and the House of Ulysses on the other. The second portion lifts the young hero into a vision of divinity, and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... dwelleth righteousness"; meaning thereby that we look for a new invisible power of control, Messiah's kingdom, and a new earth, society organized along new lines, to take the place of the old. The words here have no reference to the mundane sphere or globe upon ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... is a fact which official records go to substantiate. Although the "Reports of the Territories" take no cognizance of ghosts and spirits and other occult influence, dealing rather with such mundane facts as the condition of crops and the discipline of the races, yet the reports of that particular year in this one district made gloomy reading both for Hamilton and for the Administrator in his far-off ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... undoubtedly felt; and there it would be pleasant to leave the matter. But in the commanding interest of truth it must be added that this genuine disapproval was, unconsciously perhaps to herself, strengthened by more mundane feelings, which would, if analyzed, have been resolved into a sense of resentment against Stafford. He had come to her, as it were, under false pretenses. Relying on his peculiar position, she had allowed herself, without scruple, a freedom and expansion in her relations toward ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... both sides, but, in opposition to the overbold procedure of the constructive thinkers, who had fallen into a revived dogmatism, more in the spirit of caution and resignation. The second great work aroused glowing enthusiasm: "Kant is no mundane luminary," writes Jean Paul in regard to the Critique of Practical Reason, "but a whole solar system shining at once." The third, because of its subject and by its purpose of synthetic reconciliation between fields heretofore sharply separated, gained ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... regret the Griffin, the real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and mundane. England, my desire, what ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... as impregnating this virgin matrix with the seeds of cosmic life—quite an accurate conception from the modern point of view. Later on this idea became spiritualised in a much higher degree. The religious mind came to regard the physical, mundane, or distinctively human principle as the matrix upon which the spirit of God brooded, bringing to the birth a divine idea. And this is perfectly true too, as anyone can see. Nothing great and noble in human experience can be accounted ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... Rousseau in a letter, "makes knowledge unnecessary." And Kant defines genius as "the talent to discover that which cannot be taught or learned."[8] This appears to be more of an evasion than a definition! But the intent here is to refer all that seems to transcend mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his sublimest intuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own source of light ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... European, and the only person in the first class, but the second and especially the third were crowded full, although the passengers did not seem about to flow out of the windows, feet foremost, as so often on an Indian railway. The Chinese is beset by many fears, superstitious fears or real mundane ones, but he has the wit to know a good thing when he sees it, and it does not take him long to overcome any pet fear that stands in the way of possessing it. In 1870 the first Chinese railway was built by the great shipowners of ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... that please the high gods so immensely. They have an elementary sense of humour—like that of the funny fellow who pulls your chair from under you and shrieks with laughter when you go wallop on to the floor. Well, I don't grudge them their amusement. They must have a dull time settling mundane affairs, and a little joke goes a long way with them, as it does in the House of Commons. Fancy sitting on those green benches legislating for all eternity, with never a recess and never even a dinner hour! Poor high gods! Let ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... adjunct. But the advent of the electric fan also in the latter end of the nineties of course did away with the necessity for any further essays in this direction. And so at last after innumerable years of abuse but useful and indispensable work, the old punkah went the way of all things mundane. ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... which the successor is chosen by a select ecclesiastical synod, under a variety of foreign as well as of national influences; in which the chief usually ascends the throne at an age that ill adapts his mind to the idea of human progress, and the active direction of mundane affairs;—a principality in which the peculiar sanctity that wraps the person of the Sovereign exonerates him from the healthful liabilities of a power purely temporal, and directly accountable ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 'power' abstractions of India; to recognize Brahm[a] in El; and in Nu, sky, and expanse of waters, to see Varuna; especially when one compares the boat-journey of the Vedic seer with R[a]'s boat in Egypt. Or, again, in the twin children of R[a] to see the Acvins; and to associate the mundane egg of the Egyptians with that of the Brahmans.[18] Certainly, had the Egyptians been one of the Aryan families, all these conceptions had been referred long ago to the category of 'primitive Aryan ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... know, but we are living now upon this mundane sphere, and naturally our interests center here. A belief in heaven does not straighten out affairs on earth, nor make the burdens any the lighter ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... how was he to know whether or not his own ego was the sole ego in the universe—in fact, composed the universe? He wished to be informed whether he could possibly be nothing but an impression or somebody else's ego; and said finally, in a despondent tone, that it was hopeless to regard this mundane scheme as anything but a subjective phenomenon, mere Schein or maya, and that ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... together the gorgeous outline of river, valley, lake, and savannah that gives the earth all its varied beauty. Beautiful and grand as they are, they are as useful as ornamental, and serve a momentous necessity in mundane affairs. They are grand landmarks of the Almighty's power and mercy and goodness, and historically occupy a high position in the lives ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... in the estimation of the people, they are by no means exempt from the instability of mundane conditions, and the higher a man rises the less secure is his position. The power to see everything, to guard against evil, and to cure illness issues from the light of his heart, which was given him by Tata Dios. It enables him to see Tata Dios himself, to talk to him, to travel through ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... mundane stories, the History is a cosmic affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as Jurgen is ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... people fundamentally at peace with the world, wanting only instruction as to how to live, not encouragement to live at all. And its ethical instruction is not based upon any metaphysical or religious dogma; it is purely mundane. The result of the co-existence of these two religions in China has been that the more religious and contemplative natures turned to Buddhism, while the active administrative type was content with Confucianism, which was always ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... reflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by the emancipation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They are enfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the military machine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundane influences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternally rational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is the work of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... obeyed her, and we enjoyed an exhilarating drive together. The rest of the day passed with us all very pleasantly and our conversation had principally to do with the progress of art and literature in many lands, and maintained itself equably on the level of mundane affairs. Among other things, we spoke of the Spanish violinist Sarasate, and I amused Heliobas by quoting to him some of the criticisms of the London daily papers on this great artist, such as, "He plays pieces which, though adapted to show his wonderful skill, are the veriest clap-trap;" "He ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... be saying to him sternly: 'If you think you can occupy this place all night on a ninepenny drink, you are mistaken. Either you ought to order another or hook it.' He braved it for several more ages, then paid, and went; and still it was only ten minutes to nine. All mundane phenomena were inexplicably contorted that night. As he was passing the end of the short street which contains the stage-door of Prince's Theatre, a man, standing at the door on the lookout, hailed him loudly. He hesitated, and the man—it was the doorkeeper—flew forward ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... fidelity. She loved him tenderly, more than the whole of womankind together, with a love as azure, as deep, as boundless as the sky itself. Where could he ever find so delightful a mistress? What earthly caress could be compared to the air in which he moved, the breath of Mary? What mundane union or enjoyment could be weighed against that everlasting flower of desire which grew unceasingly, and yet was never over-blown? At this thought the Magnificat would exhale from his mouth, like a cloud of incense. He sang the joyful song of Mary, her ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... Harris rise up from Hegel's fatal blow? He rises like Antaeus from touching the earth, and triumphantly shows that syllogisms are the most necessary of all things to humanity in its mundane existence; that, in fact, we have all been syllogizing ever since we left the maternal bosom to look at the cradle, the cat, and the dog. In fact we never could have grown up to manhood, much less to be Concordian philosophers, if ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... God, the psychometric rhapsode, Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars that blink; All eternities hang round him like an old man's clothes collapsed, While he makes his mundane music—AND HE WILL ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... learn something about Easter eggs one has to turn to some such work as The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which tells us that "the practice of presenting eggs to our friends at Easter is Magian or Persian, and bears allusion to the mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of all things." The advantage of reading Tit-Bits is that one gets to know hundreds of things like that. The advantage of not reading Tit-Bits is that one is so ignorant of them that a piece of information of this ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... call him Monsieur George to the end—shared with Dona Rita her perfect detachment from all mundane affairs; but he had to make two short visits to Marseilles. The first was prompted by his loyal affection for Dominic. He wanted to discover what had happened or was happening to Dominic and to find out whether he could do something for that man. But ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... curtains, TV soap opera, and a corral full of little Mekstrom kids. I grinned. Funny how the proponents of the stratified society always have their comeuppance by the need of women whose minds are bent on mundane things ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune occurs. Are you in mourning, he avoids you. Are you confined, he awaits your churching before he visits you. He possesses a mundane frankness and a social intrepidity ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... string of five hundred jewels to Susanoo and, he, in turn, crunches them in his mouth and blows out the fragments which are transformed into five male Kami. The beings thus strangely produced have comparatively close connexions with the mundane scheme, for the three female Kami—euphoniously designated Kami of the torrent mist, Kami of the beautiful island, and Kami of the cascade—become tutelary goddesses of the shrines in Chikuzen province (or the sacred island ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... instant. I had feared to question Sola relative to the beautiful captive, as I could not but recall the strange expression I had noted upon her face after my first encounter with the prisoner. That it denoted jealousy I could not say, and yet, judging all things by mundane standards as I still did, I felt it safer to affect indifference in the matter until I learned more surely Sola's attitude toward the ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of a little Greek treatise on the nature of the gods, informs us that by Jupiter was meant the vegetable soul of the world, which restrained and prevented those uncertain alterations which Saturn, or Time, used formerly to cause in the mundane system.] ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Nero, and, with very limited powers, gradually substituting order and humanity for oppression and rapine. This fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a conceivable relation to the whole mundane process. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... sacred to him; Churchyards, where the flowers bloom; Gardens, drives, in fact the world is Just one mighty smoking room, And when once he quits this mundane sphere, And takes his outward flight, From the world he made a hades, Day he's turned ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... veneration, but joy and triumph; not fear, but love; not self-abasement, but self-exaltation; not sacrifice, but service: in fact, not religion at all in the old sense of the spiritual at war with the natural, the divine with the human, this world a vale of tears, and mundane things but filth and ashes, heaven for the good and hell for the bad; but in the new sense of the divinity of all things, of the equality of gods and men, of the brotherhood of the race, of the identity of the material and ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... let the house, or when the payment of the rent was in dispute, Mr. Craven advanced the lady various five and ten pound notes, which, it is to be hoped, were entered duly to his credit in the Eternal Books. In the mundane records kept in our offices, they always appeared as debits to William ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... his present mundane, matter-of-fact character, about the last man one would suspect of having been at any time of his life a victim to the "tender passion." A revelation he volunteered to two or three cronies at the club the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... continuing the argument, but I would say no more. The topic was too serious and sacred with me to allow it to be lightly discussed by persons whose attitude of mind was distinctly opposed and antipathetic to all things beyond the merely mundane. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... regarded as the immovable centre of the universe, and surrounding it were ten crystalline spheres, or heavens, arranged in concentric circles, the larger spheres enclosing the smaller ones; and within those was situated the cosmos, or mundane universe, usually described as 'the Heavens and the Earth.' To each of the first seven spheres there was attached a heavenly body, which was carried round the Earth by the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... of an unusual type of feminine beauty, not, it seems to me, peculiarly Norman, with dark, ardent, spiritual eyes, and a kind of proud hierarchical bearing. I have wondered how far the abbots and monks of this great and ancient abbey of Benedictines were occupied—in the intervals of more supra-mundane avocations—in perfecting, not only the ancient recipe of their liqueur, but also the physical type of the feminine population among which they laboured. The type I have in mind sometimes rather recalls the face of Baudelaire, who, by his mother's family from which he chiefly ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... were spoken words between them which no chronicles should report, and a certain calm happiness took up its settled place in his heart, defiant of that despair which could not be driven out. Then came that reawakening to mundane things which seems like a very great step indeed in such cases. She looked at the clock, and ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... south, south-east and north-west; while the Chatham and Dover distributes itself over most of the region south-east of London, closing its circuit by a line along the coast of the Channel that completes a triangle. We can go almost anywhere by any road. It is necessary, however, in this as in other mundane proceedings, to make a selection. We must have a will before we find a way. Let our way, then, be to Waterloo Station ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... brown study. After their recent experience—at once incredible and haunting—to all, and especially to Casanova, there was a certain comfort derivable from an extremely commonplace atmosphere of mundane life. When the carriage reached home, where an inviting odor of roast meat and cooking vegetables assailed their nostrils, Casanova was in the midst of an appetizing description of a Polish pasty, a description to which ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... by some one that all mundane things come to an end sooner or later, and, so far as my experience goes, it bears out that statement. The engines were successfully repaired, and the ship eventually came to anchor outside the harbor about eleven o'clock on the night of ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... all being We must needs go back, and bring the Last result of our researches In a concrete form together. Thus we comprehend the world well; For this purpose I am drinking Truly cosmogonically. Mundane space to me is nothing But a roomy vaulted cellar, Where as first and central wine-tun, Firmly stands the sun erected! Next to him the rank and file of Smaller casks, fixed stars and planets. As the divers casks are holding Wines of various sorts and flavours, So ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... material craft to the heavens is surely without justification from the simple narrative. We have here no prototype of Ra sailing the heavenly ocean. And the destructive flood itself is not only of an equally material and mundane character, but is in complete harmony with ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the dear creature has, for some thousands of years, been robbed of her birthright and relegated to an inferior position in matters mundane simply because her biceps are not so large as those of her big brother, and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... horse and a bull and the latter caricatures them with an ass and a buffalo,—evolution turned topsy turvy. After seeing nine angels and obtaining an explanation of the Seven Stages of Earth which is supported by the Gav-i-Zamin, the energy, symbolised by a bull, implanted by the Creator in the mundane sphere, Bulukiya meets the four Archangels, to wit Gabriel who is the Persian Rawanbakhsh or Life-giver; Michael or Beshter, Raphael or Israfil alias Ardibihisht, and Azazel or Azrail who is Duma or Mordad, the Death-giver; and the four are about to attack the Dragon, that is, the demons hostile ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... opinion of Goethe, that "it is just as absurd to deny the facts of spiritualism now as it was in the Middle Ages to ascribe them to the Devil." I think Mr. Owen attributes too much value to his facts. I do not think the things contributed from the ultra-mundane sphere are particularly valuable, apart from the evidence they give of continued existence ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... acquaintance with botany, a science of which Ellen Armitage is an enthusiastic student. They were foolishly permitted to botanize together, and the result was, that Alfred Bourdon, acting upon the principle that genius—whether sham or real—levels all merely mundane distinctions, had the impudence to aspire to the hand of Miss Armitage. His passion, sincere or simulated, has never been, I have reason to know, in the slightest degree reciprocated by its object; but so blind is vanity, that when, about six weeks ago, an eclaircissement took place, and the fellow's ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... hush of woods, where fairies sleep, Calm Nature soothes my senses, and I live In realms that only creatures can conceive, Who with their holy guardian spirits keep Firm faith, and into loving arms I creep, And mundane cares no ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... of Brahman (the conditioned), beyond which there lies one other stage only, represented by knowledge of, and identity with the unconditioned Brahman; the other leading to the world of the fathers, and from thence, after the reward of good works has been consumed, back to a new round of mundane existence. There is a third road for creatures which live and die, worms, insects, and creeping things, but they are of little consequence. Now it is quite clear that the knowledge which King Kitra possesses, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... he sat thus, amid a deep silence, broken only by an occasional giggle from the stateroom, or an idiotic sniggering from the direction of the mate's bunk, until, recalled to mundane affairs by the lamp burning itself out, he went, in befitting ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... with me, good, kindly man, for twenty minutes. There were tears in his eyes, and I valued that little sign of human fellowship more than all the commonplaces he courageously enunciated. He talked in a soft, low tone, as if I was ill. He made no allusions to mundane things; and I am grateful to him for coming. He had dreaded his call, I am sure, and he had done it from a mixture of affection ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the reign of the magnate who is said to supply under contract all the meals of the Southern railway-restaurants, and who, "if ever fondest prayer for others' woe avail on high," will certainly be booked, with the vote of some of his victims, for a post-mundane berth a good deal warmer than his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad, red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see if the silhouetted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... me some surprise to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under his arm; altogether equipped to such a high point of pedestrianism that a cynical person might ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... and colleges, and education generally. Active and intellectual, though not learned, they have infused new life into the fat indolence of the Spanish system. Men of this world rather than the next, they have adopted a purely mundane policy, abjured the gloomy cowl, raised gorgeous temples, and say, "He that cometh unto us shall in no wise lose heaven." Their chief merit, however, is the discovery ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... picture proved to be one of which Sadie could wholly approve, and she no longer required to be entertained. She became absorbed in its unrolling. The hard eyes softened a little; clearly she was lifted out of this mundane sphere of rooming-houses and attractive, fresh young men you had to be careful with, into ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... to have been caudle. Nowadays a caudle party is a very gay, dressy affair, and given about six weeks after young master or mistress is ready to be congratulated or condoled with on his or her entrance upon this mundane sphere. We find in English books of etiquette very formal directions as to these cards of compliment. "Cards to inquire after friends during illness must be left in person, and not sent by post. On a lady's visiting-card must be written ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... ever-resident in the questioning spirit of immortal man, attempts his first outbreak into the domain of unlimited inquiry, unless he take heed of the needfully-cautious prudentialities of mundane observance, there infallibly attends him a fatal Mephistophelean influence, of which the malign tendency, from every conclusion of eventuality, is to plunge him into perilous vast cloud-waves of the dream-inhabited ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... different and much less important matter. Well, how could there possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other stars or planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusively mundane. We are things of this world, and of this world only. Don't let's magnify our importance: we're not the whole universe. Our race is essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-like animal—the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda eocene. This monkey-like animal itself, again, ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... between the couple who were to wait together for death or the morning. Miss Franklin herself might be on the eve of dying—but so long as she lived and went through the mundane process of dressing, she must dress exceedingly well. She was a good, kind woman all the same, and this night she bore a sore heart under her carefully contrived ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... in deep abstraction, and only after the lapse of several minutes, when, alone with Nightspore, did he realise that they referred to such mundane matters as travelling routes and times ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... her accent of subtle irony, there was something like pity for the artist, removed from mundane things, whose conjugal virtue everyone knew. This seemed to offend him for he spoke to the countess very sharply as he picked up the palette and prepared the colors. There was no need of changing her dress; he would make use of what little daylight ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pleasant condition of existence, nevertheless, to perplexity mankind is more or less doomed in every period of life and in every mundane scene—particularly in the jungles of central Africa, as Harold and his friends found out many ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... western slopes is the "neighborhood," seems locked in completely by the hills, and an ascent towards heaven is apparently the only way of egress. Yet there's another way; for I am not writing this true story among celestial altitudes for you. I returned from Dalton by a mundane road. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... argy that a man Who does about the best he can Is plenty good enugh to suit This lower mundane institute— No matter ef his daily walk Is subject fer his neghbor's talk, And critic-minds of ev'ry whim Jest all git up and go ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... of an auctioneer having it—"Suppose that once in a billion of years a bird were to come from some far, distant clime and carry off in its bill a grain of sand, when the time came when the last animal matter of which this mundane sphere is composed would be carried away," said he, "boys, by that time in hell it would not be sun up." We had this sermon in the morning and the same one in the afternoon, only he commenced at the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in contrasting Asiatic mythology with Greek philosophy, remarks: "The Asiatic myths assumed the existence of beings beyond the world, not subject to mundane laws, who made and controlled the course of events. There was no reason why they should have made a world. They seemed to be living as divine a life without it as with it. The question was one which persisted in Asiatic thought, and when Christianity became dominant in Europe, much of its ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... gave to him an hour's more sleep than to the other monks, and now, although he had risen, he was quietly continuing his sleep in a large armchair as soft as eider down. The furniture of the room was more mundane than religious; a carved table, covered with a rich cloth, books of religious gallantry—that singular mixture of love and devotion, which we only meet with at that epoch of art—expensive vases, and curtains of rich damask, were ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... contemporaries his reputation went up with a bound, though there was not wanting a leaven of jealous ones even amidst those who crowded most closely round him. Among those a little older than himself, the best-natured commended him outspokenly and in honest generosity of heart. Others, with more mundane outlook, judged his achievement reflected lustre on the kennel, and therefore—this with a sniff and the chuck of the chin—also on themselves. A few more vowed, in true sporting spirit, that they would do their level best ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... sea, and cities beyond, which he cannot see, shut up in Rome. With us, the lowest amount of education that ever receives the name comprises at least the three R's, as they are termed,—Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic. But these are far too mundane matters for a Jesuit to occupy his time in expounding. The education of the Italian youth is a thoroughly religious one, taking the term in its Roman sense. The little catechisms I have spoken of ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... company is to be seen one who looks strikingly like Emile Zola, or the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan slightly gone to seed. All these charming folk make of looking at old-fashioned pictures a very busy occupation, and also in effect a rather mundane occupation, as though they were alertly considering the possibility of making a selection from among a variety of ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Friends, glad to be rid of that contemptible, mundane bevy, assailed the Professor with questions. Must he really not tell where the modern Catacombs were? How many people met there? Women also? What were the subjects of his discourses? What did the monks of Sant' Anselmo say? And was anything known concerning this man's previous career? ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... thrilling beauty of the covey of pink-lined dawn-clouds that made her eyes grow round, big and bright; that brought a faint flush to her cheeks; a quick intake of breath. It was something much more mundane that held her attention—the superb spectacle of Kurt Walters, mounted. The lean, brown horseman sat on his saddle as easily as though it were a cushion in a rocking chair. He was talking to three or four cattlemen and apparently ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... the man to the poet we have at once to change our key. A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid—he polished and pruned. His first draft never reached the printer—though he sometimes said it did. This ought, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... which afterwards rescues him from the waves and carries him to Pohjola. In several cosmogonic ballads, too, it is the eggs of this bird and not of the blue duck which contribute to the formation of the world: for the Mundane Egg plays a part here as well as in other cosmogonies. The passage in the Kalevipoeg, to which this note refers, corresponds almost exactly to one in the Kalevala (xxx. 1-10), which ushers in ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... the sublime to the ridiculous to follow so ideal a benefaction with a report of so mundane a thing as a soup kitchen, but soup is as necessary to humanity at the present period of life as some of the exalted things of the intellect, and, as pauperism in Norway and Sweden is so almost unobservable, it is difficult to search out with the keenest vision ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... Tryon. Miss Leary had no doubt that there was a woman at the bottom of it,—for about what else should youth worry but love? or if one's love affairs run smoothly, why should one worry about anything at all? Miss Leary, in the nineteen years of her mundane existence, had not been without mild experiences of the heart, and had hovered for some time on the verge of disappointment with respect to Tryon himself. A sensitive pride would have driven more than one woman away at the sight of ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... passionless planets for justice against mundane decrees, and when coincidences have been favourable the devout student of the skies has loudly proclaimed them as proof of supernatural interest in trivial, transient occurrences. In accordance with the degree of poetry in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... day, despite continued attacks from error—despite, too, the veiled slights and covert insinuations of her schoolmates, to whom the girl's odd views and utter refusal to share their accustomed conversation, their interest in mundane affairs, their social aspirations and worldly ambitions, at length made her quite unwelcome—Carmen steadily, and without heed of diverting gesture, brought into captivity every thought to the obedience of her Christ-principle, and threw off ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... found out that the stars are minding their own business instead of meddling with theirs." Now, while it is true that modern Astronomy has superseded the ancient system, and people have ceased to believe that the stars are intervening in mundane affairs, nothing could be further from the truth than the assertion that "Astronomy has shattered the fallacies of Astrology;" and those of our readers who will accord to this work an unprejudiced perusal can hardly fail to be convinced that a large majority of the people ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... Edward's only mundane passion was the chase; and a day rarely passed, but what after mass he went forth with hawk or hound. So that, though the regular season for hawking did not commence till October, he had ever on his wrist some young falcon to essay, or some old favourite to exercise. And now, just ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the teachings of this sect is subjective idealism. They embrace principles enjoining complete indifference to mundane affairs, and, in fact, thorough personal nullification and the ignoring of all actions by its disciples. In these teachings, thought only, is real. As we have already seen with the Ku-sha teaching, human beings are of three classes, divided according to intellect, into ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... yielded him their utmost. From this in part it came that the commonest sights of earth and sky—a fine spring day, a sunset, even a chance traveller met on a moor, any ordinary sorrow of man's life—yielded to him an amount of imaginative interest inconceivable to more mundane spirits. The simple healthiness and strict frugality of his household life suited well, and must have greatly assisted, that wholesome frugality of emotion which ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... superiority both of nature and function, as to the highest part of the nature common to both, I at the same time assert her inferiority in what may be called its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this asserted superiority? Because man, and the strength, amplitude, and stability of his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hand, a far more philosophic frame of mind belongs to him who, as he proceeds onwards through life's journey, gets a rational enjoyment out of his existence, so that his days pass pleasantly and his health receives the consideration it deserves. It will appear somewhat mundane in this connection to assert that the latter and, therefore, happiness are to a great extent dependent upon the mode of living, but nevertheless it is absolutely true, and thus it is that I come back to the quotation at ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... taking double-firsts in the schools of Christminster, or having anything but ordinary knowledge. The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of the bishopric had not been an ethical or theological enthusiasm at all, but a mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice. He feared that his whole scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... consigned here by an infamous travesty of justice. Madame Akimova, for instance, a plain but homely-looking person, seemed devoted to the care of her miserable little household to the exclusion of all mundane matters. I sometimes wondered, as I sat in her hut, and watched the pale, patient little woman clad in rusty black ceaselessly striving to make his home less wretched for her husband, whether this could really be Theisa Akimova, the famous ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Leopardi (1825), and by a host of lesser writers. In our own day, the French have returned to the original application of dialogue, and the inventions of "Gyp," of Henri Lavedan and of others, in which a mundane anecdote is wittily and maliciously told in conversation, would probably present a close analogy to the lost mimes of the early Sicilian poets, if we could meet with them. This kind of dialogue has been employed in English, and with conspicuous cleverness ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... yours, while care recoils, and envy flies, Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays, are mine, If by your looks my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big, Your fateful arms, the goose-quill, and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's somb'rous seal impress'd, Mysterious terrors, grim ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... brain before she was conscious of reading them, told a long history—a history over which, for the last four years, the friends of the writer had smiled and shrugged, viewing it merely as one among the countless "good situations" of the mundane comedy. Now the other side presented itself to Lily, the volcanic nether side of the surface over which conjecture and innuendo glide so lightly till the first fissure turns their whisper to a shriek. Lily knew that there ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... ask," admitted Gwen, brought down to the mundane side of the question. "Lesbia, do ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... of the Holy See, but for defence of the truth of the Gospel, and for the other causes afore rehearsed. And we do trust in God that it shall not be interpreted as a thing ill done on our part, if preferring the salvation of our soul and the relief of our conscience to any mundane respects or favours, we have in this cause regarded more the Divine law than the laws of man, and have thought it rather meet to obey God than ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... eternal life depends on the infallible element of conscience, while stupendous, yet only mundane, interests depend upon its fallible element. This is a mystery that perplexes a great many people. Is ignorance an excuse? Does it not matter what you believe, just so you are honest? The highest and best thing anybody can ever do, is to follow his conscience, or the voice of his ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... his comrades, seated on the tailboard of the wagon, had discerned a significance in the abrupt silence. As he turned, he, too, caught a fleeting glimpse of that weird image on the coffin-lid. But he was of a more mundane pulse. The apparition roused in him only a wonder whence could come this shadow in the midst of the moon-flooded road. He lifted his eyes to the verge of the bluff above, and there he descried an indistinct ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the party say about the disestablishment of the Church? Even a party must draw the line somewhere. It was bad to sacrifice things mundane; but this thing was the very Holy of Holies! Was nothing to be conserved by a Conservative party? What if Mr. Daubeny were to explain some day to the electors of East Barsetshire that an hereditary peerage was an absurdity? What if in some rural ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope |
