"Unstable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... commander of the 20th Corps, to be a guest at his headquarters. There were many arguments to tempt him to proceed with Sherman's army. Nevertheless, from the war correspondent's point of view, it seemed wiser not to go overland, but to choose the more unstable element, water. For nearly a month, perhaps more, the army would have no communication with any telegraph office, and for long ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... close network of grass, with much decayed matter mixed up with it. In the centre of this, and underneath it, ran a broad, deep, and rapid stream. As the guides proceeded across, the men stole after them with cautious footsteps. As they arrived near the centre we began to see this unstable grassy bridge, so curiously provided by nature for us, move up and down in heavy languid undulations, like the swell of the sea after a storm. Where the two asses of the Expedition moved, the grassy waves rose a foot high; but ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... that Bonbright and herself were embarked on one of these unstable, experimental craft. She saw, as he did not, that it was unseaworthy and must founder at the first touch of storm. She pinned no false hopes to it; recognized it as a makeshift, welcome to her only as a reprieve—and that it must soon be discarded for a vessel whose ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... stately by, they all walked so gracefully, Balancing their bodies on lithe unstable hips, As if music moved them that swelled in their bosoms And was pizzicatti ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... present a faithful transcript of {6} the world as it has been and is, in respect to the calamities, wars, and revolutions that have befallen nations, and those weaknesses and wickednesses of individuals and peoples, the accounts of which are so great a stumbling-block to the "unstable and the unlearned." These very accounts, it is possible, may be intended to tell us, if rightly inquired into, why these things are so, why there is evil in the world, and what shall be the end of it. The world has ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... mockery that prevails in fashionable circles—mockery of religion, mockery of sentiment, mockery of all that is best and noblest in the human heart—add to it the general spread of "free-thought," and THEREFORE of conflicting and unstable opinions—let all these things together go on for a few years longer and England will stare at her sister nations like a bold woman in a domino—her features partly concealed from a pretense at shame, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... industrial cities, the best cultivated regions of the ancient world, the most famous seats of arts, letters, science, therefore their annexation, made rapidly in few years, could but trouble the already unstable equilibrium of the Empire. Italy was then, compared with these provinces, a poor and barbarous land; because southern Italy was ruined by the wars of preceding epochs, and northern Italy, naturally the wealthier part, was still crude and in the beginning of its development. ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... through the ether, and that they differed only in their wave lengths, they laid the foundations for wireless telegraphy. Ether is a substance which is millions and millions of times lighter than air, and it pervades all space. It is so unstable that it is constantly in motion, and this phase led some one to suggest that if a proper electrical apparatus could be made, the ether would thereby be disturbed sufficiently so that its impulses would extend out ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... privilege, we achieve, if we achieve it at all, by virtue of great spiritual discipline. We are, to be sure, brought into union with God through the sacraments, but the union so achieved is, if one may so express it, an unstable union; it is union that we have to maintain by daily spiritual action and which suffers many a weakening through our infidelity, even if it escape the disaster of mortal sin. We sway to and fro in our struggle to attain the equilibrium of perfection which belonged ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... sheaf of columns, wreathed in robes of vapor, sprang into the air, and in a succession of jerking leaps, each higher than the last, flung their silver crests against the sky. For a few minutes the fountain held its own, then all at once appeared to lose its ascending energy. The unstable waters faltered—drooped—fell, 'like a broken purpose,' back upon themselves, and were immediately sucked down into the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... them to send for him. It was left to his general, the Earl of Feversham, to do what he thought best. So he went for him with his coaches and guards. And, as he came back through the city, he was welcomed with expressions of joy by great numbers; so slight and unstable a thing is a multitude, and so soon altered. At his coming to Whitehall, he had a great court about him. Even the papists crept out of their lurking-holes, and appeared at court with much assurance. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... not be the case, or should the teacher, from any cause, lose his personal influence in the school, so that the institution should really be surrendered into the hands of the pupils, things must be on a very unstable footing. And, accordingly, where such a plan has been adopted, it has, I believe, in every instance, ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... and tide unstable, * We can do kindly acts and charitable: When thou art able hasten thee to act, * Lest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... primarily to Your Electoral Grace and the other estates; and from it [the alterations made] Your Electoral Grace and the other related estates might be charged that they are not certain of their doctrine and are also unstable. Besides, it is giving an offense to the people." (C. R. 3, 365.) Luther, too, is said to have remonstrated with Melanchthon for having altered the Confession. In his Introduction to the Augsburg Confession (Koenigsberg, 1577) Wigand reports: ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... and celestial was Leonardo, the son of Ser Piero da Vinci; and in learning and in the rudiments of letters he would have made great proficience, if he had not been so variable and unstable, for he set himself to learn many things, and then, after having begun them, abandoned them. Thus, in arithmetic, during the few months that he studied it, he made so much progress, that, by continually suggesting doubts and difficulties ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... to say of a woman. Doctor McKenzie wondered if it could be said of his own daughter. Set side by side with Drusilla, Jean seemed a childish creature, unstable, swayed by the emotion of the moment. Yet her fire matched Drusilla's, her dreams ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... he felt as if something was weighing him down. Of course this was the spirit, which had to be removed before a cure could be effected. The Manga-anito danced around the patient and bad him dance and turn somersaults. This was to make the spirit sorry he had chosen such an unstable abiding place. Finally she took hold of his hands, gave a mighty tug and then dropped back stiff. The spirit had passed from the body of the patient into ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... God's counsel, darken counsel by words without knowledge? The apostle speaks of some that did more than darken counsel; for they wrested the counsel of God; 2 Pet. iii. 16. In Paul's epistles, saith he, "are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction." Some things in the Scriptures are hard to be known, and they are made harder by such unlearned teachers as utter their own ...
— An Exhortation to Peace and Unity • Attributed (incorrectly) to John Bunyan
... experience of the past to show, that of all national governments a democratic one was the most unstable, fluctuating, and short-lived; and that despotism, arising from a centralization of power in the national government on one hand, and anarchy, incident to the instability of democracy—"the levelling spirit of democracy" denounced by Gerry ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... carpentering, in the city of Philadelphia, about that time, a very tall, slim man, named Houp; Peter Houp, that was his name. He was a very steady, upright, and honest man, married, had a small, comfortable family, and to all intents and purposes, settled down for life. How deceptive, how unstable, how uncertain is man, to say nothing of the more frail portion of the creation—woman! Peter Houp one fair morning took his basket on his arm, and off he went to get a leg of mutton and trimmings for his next Sunday's dinner. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... unstable existence, came Ivan; and over him brother and sister had their first dispute: Irina her first victory. True, Sergius knew, and was to know, nothing of his sister's past acquaintance with the composer, or what a debt he, as a ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Aviation. Machine Types. Shape or Form not Essential. A Stone as a Flying Machine. Power the Great Element. Gravity as Power. Mass and Element in Flying. Momentum a Factor. Resistance. How Resistance Affects Shape. Mass and Resistance. The Early Tendency to Eliminate Momentum. Light Machines Unstable. The Application of Power. The Supporting Surfaces. Area not the Essential Thing. The Law of Gravity. Gravity. Indestructibility of Gravitation. Distance Reduces Gravitational Pull. How Motion Antagonizes Gravity. A Tangent. ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... is a work of time. The majority of the people are unstable, thriftless improvident and ignorant. Slavery left its blight of impotency and profligacy upon them. They come and go as did their fathers a hundred years ago. Their tools and utensils are the same their great-grandparents used, and they ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... and, keeping his feet with difficulty, ran hugging the bluff. Rocks, slipping beneath the bay's incautious hoofs, rattled down the steep slope. Finally mastered by that tugging weight, he settled to an unstable pace and so passed ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual uses? It ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... less shameful in themselves than significant of the deeper shame beneath and prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: "Behold the outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people! Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words! We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted to the good ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... been nothing more than the accidental discharge of a revolver somewhere down in the depths of the ship. Whatever it may have been, it was enough to turn the scale—to upset the state of delicate, unstable equilibrium prevailing, and after a momentary glance around them, the foreigners, nearly three-hundred in number, set up a yell of terror and hurled themselves in a body upon those who were at ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... was in the days of the patriarch—the storehouse of the world. Egypt and England both put their agriculturists to pain, and the rural population to serfdom; but they only exchange the stable basis of well-being for an unstable one, for commerce is proverbially of a ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... with the consent of Napoleon, there was preparing at this time an event which was soon to assure to the fifth European coalition one of its most useful supports. The King of Sweden, Gustavus IV., unstable, violent, and eccentric enough to warrant doubts as to the soundness of his reason, had been deposed on the 10th of May, 1809, by the assembled States, as the result of a military conspiracy. His uncle, the Duke of Sudermania, elevated to the throne ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... is, both dangerous and unstable. Not only is it sensitive to flame or spark, but it absorbs moisture from the air. In other words, it was no easy matter to "keep your powder dry." During the middle 1700's, Spaniards on a Florida river outpost kept powder ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... Christianlike to strive cheerfully to conform to actual circumstances; and, after remedying all that we can control, patiently to submit to what is beyond our power. If domestics are found to be incompetent, unstable, and unconformed to their station, it is Perfect Wisdom which appoints these trials, to teach us patience, fortitude, and self-control; and, if the discipline is met, in a proper spirit, it will prove a blessing, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... much of a favourite with the preachers; he was so thoroughly unstable, unideal. But the people have always had a tender feeling for him, partly because he was a fisherman, partly because he was so much like the rest of us. Nothing is more striking in the life of Jesus than His affection for ordinary men. The ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... nitrate is dependent on the fact that the sodium chloride (the same substance as common table salt) present in the perspiration which forms the ridges in most latent impressions reacts with the silver nitrate solution to form silver chloride. Silver chloride is white but is unstable on exposure to light and breaks down into its components, silver and chlorine. The ridges of the fingerprints developed in this manner appear reddish-brown against the background. Immersion in the silver nitrate solution will wash traces ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... in the peninsula of Lower California, the tribes were "probably the lowest in culture of any Indians in North America, for their inhospitable environment which made them wanderers, was unfavorable to the foundation of government even of the rude and unstable kind found elsewhere." The Yuman tribes of the mountains east of Santiago wore sandals of maguey fiber and descended from their own territory among the mountains "to eat calabash and other fruits" that grew beside the Colorado River. They ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... more wise,— Some doubloons from the window threw, And render'd thus the count untrue. The padlock'd room permitted Its owner, when he quitted, To leave his money on the table. One day, bethought this monkey wise To make the whole a sacrifice To Neptune on his throne unstable. I could not well award the prize Between the monkey's and the miser's pleasure Derived from that devoted treasure. One day, then, left alone, That animal, to mischief prone, Coin after coin detach'd, A gold jacobus snatch'd, Or Portuguese doubloon, Or silver ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... on his honour!" observed Peterkin. "I'm afraid that you'll put his majesty on an extremely unstable foundation. However, I see nothing better ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... edited Child's last part (X.), says in his excellent abridged edition of Child (1905), "It was no doubt the feeling that the popular ballad is a fluid and unstable thing that has prompted so many editors—among them Sir Walter Scott, whom it is impossible to assail, however much the scholarly conscience may disapprove—to deal freely with the versions that came into ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... a peculiar arrangement of the knee-joint, it is rendered little liable to wear, and all lateral or rotary motion is avoided. It is hardly necessary to remark that any such motion is undesirable in an artificial leg, as it renders its support unstable." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... it had happened, and they did not very much care. Kettle had his theories. Anyway it stopped. To go on with, although they were buffeted with every kind of evil weather, all their mischances were speedily rectified. In a heavy sea, all their unstable cargo surged about as though it had been liquid, but it always shifted back again before she quite capsized. The mizzen-mast went bodily overboard in one black rain-squall because they were too short-handed to get sail off it in time, but they found that the vessel sailed almost as well ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... rightly represented by the metaphor of the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world. Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of something as solid as land, and sometimes as patient and inert as land, against something as unstable as water, as weak as water; but also as strong as water, as strong as water is in a cataract or a flood. It was the resistance of form to formlessness; that version or vision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on. It was the defence of that same ancient enclosure ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... impulses, diffused, My weary frame with sweet emotion filled! What myriad thoughts, unstable and confused, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... statesmanship that establishes a nation's majesty and dignity on the common welfare of its free people. When Swift, at the beginning of the November of 1710, was called in to assist the Tory party by undertaking the work of "The Examiner," he found a condition of things so involved and so unstable, that it required the very nicest appreciation, the most delicate handling, and the boldest of hearts to readjust and re-establish, without fearful consequences. Harley and St. John were safely housed, and, apparently, amply protected by a substantial majority. But ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... southward from the frozen North, is gradually undermined by warmer seas, and, become at last unstable, churns the sea to yeast for miles around by the mighty rockings that portend its overturn, so the barbaric industrial and social system, which has come down to us from savage antiquity, undermined by the modern humane spirit, riddled by the criticism of economic science, is shaking the world ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... be bereft of even the Heaven-sent consolation for the sake of the beloved, in whom may she find not only the earthly mate-fellow, but the kindred soul. For, all-pitying Mother of Mercy! should she, too, be doomed to stake all upon a wavering, unstable, headlong Richard, what will ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... green sights and its wonderful sounds, of the drowsy insects in the sunshine, of the sheep-bells, and of the pines whose voices hold within them all the eternal secrets, increased the intensity of his misery. He realized how unstable are the foundations of human happiness, and his house of life seemed crumbling ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Germany than in the countries where Sterne's own tongue is spoken.[1] His place among the English classics has, from the foreign point of view, never been a dubious question, amatter of capricious taste and unstable ideals. His peculiar message, whether interpreted and insisted upon with clearness of insight, or blindness of misunderstanding, played its not unimportant part in certain developments of continental literatures, and his station in English literature, as viewed from ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... without contemplation, without habitual collection and re- collection of our own selves from time to time, no great purpose is carried out, and no great work can be done; and that it is the bustle and hurry of our modern life which causes shallow thought, unstable purpose, and wasted energy, in too many who would be better and wiser, stronger and happier, if they would devote more time to silence and meditation; if they would commune with their own heart in their chamber, and be still. Even in art and in mechanical science, those who have done great work ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... societies have contained a certain number of restless spirits, unstable and discontented, ready to rebel against any established order of affairs. They are actuated by the mere love of revolt, and if some magic power could realise all their desires ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... is that in the human mind there are two strata. One superficial, of which men are conscious, the other deep down, of which they are unconscious.[3112] The former unstable and vacillating like shifting sand, the latter stable and fixed like a solid rock, to which their caprices and agitation never descend. The latter alone determines the general inclination of the soil, the main current of human activity necessarily following the bent thus prepared ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... against the children of those who once fought for liberty at Fort Moultrie! It is a sad thought that there are truths which can be got out of life only by the destructive analysis of war. Statesmen deal in proximate principles,—unstable compounds; but war reduces facts to their simple elements in its red-hot crucible, with its black flux of carbon and sulphur and nitre. Let us turn our back on this miserable, even though inevitable, fraternal strife, and, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... France, but Rousseau still maintains his influence, and boasts his imitators. Rousseau was the worse man of the two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer. But his reputation is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and the danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away. In Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive; their uses cease with the evils they denounce. But Rousseau sought to construct as well as to destroy; ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is't you read— Romance or fairy fable? Or is it some historic page, Of kings and crowns unstable?" The young boy gave an upward glance,— "It is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... a noble friend, Miss Carson, and a generous enemy; but he is spoiled irretrievably by good fortune and good living and good health." The priest looked at the young man with a certain sad severity. "'Unstable as water, thou shalt ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... we seek cannot be born of fear alone: it must be rooted in the lives of nations. There must be justice, sensed and shared by all peoples, for, without justice the world can know only a tense and unstable truce. There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak. But the law of which we speak, comprehending the values of freedom, ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... for it must be explained that although giant-powder, as dynamite is generally called in the west, as a rule merely burns more or less violently when ignited by a flame, it is still a somewhat unstable product, and now and then explodes with appalling results on apparently quite insufficient provocation. In use it is fired with a detonator, a big copper cap charged with a fulminate of the highest power, and when lighted in this ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... momentous conversation, of a name—he could not tell what name—that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of dazzling unstable confluent scenes.... ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Captain Tremain, pausing, "I am not so sure about that. You see, their Government is so very unstable. The country itself is rich enough in mineral wealth, if that is what you mean." All the while Howard stood there with his mouth agape, and I felt like shoving my fist ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... Laplace required a rotating mass of fluid which at successive epochs became unstable from excess of motion, and left behind rings, or more probably, perhaps, lumps, of matter from the equatorial regions. To some thinkers was suggested a different view of things, according to which it was not necessary ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... always happens when human needs come into conflict with laws, all these manifestations are made in hidden and subterranean ways. Walls, drinking-vessels, planks of the prisoners' beds, margins of books, medicine wrappers, and even the unstable sands of the exercise-grounds, and the uniform in which the prisoner is garbed, supply him with a surface on which to imprint his ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... come to headquarters. Half an hour later he had started, the letter tightly wrapped in a bit of rubber blanket before he had placed it inside his jacket, for he had already had enough experience with the native boats to know how unstable they would be in the current of ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... Mr. Spencer's definition of "life" encouraged Professor Bastian to try his hand at it, with this definitional result: "Life," he says, "is an unstable collocation of Matter (with a big M), capable of growing by selection and interstitial appropriation of new matter (what new matter?) which then assumes similar qualities, of continually varying in composition in response to variations of its Medium (another big M), and which ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Caribbean Sea, have for centuries grown cacao of excellent quality. The criollo (creole) bean is generally used as seed, and for it high prices are obtained. Owing, however, to the unsettled state of the republics and their unstable governments, its cultivation has gone back rather than forward during the past decade. With better administration and settled peace, great developments might easily be achieved. The British Royal Mail Steam Packet Company provides a ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... think one may be dissolved and the other may be preserved. Why should the destruction of the one imply the destruction of the other? On the contrary, so unlike in their nature, they were during their union in a highly unstable condition, and when this union comes to an end they both return to their natural state; the active vital substance regains all the force which it expended to set in motion the passive dead substance. Alas! my vices make me only too well ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... sentiments in early life, approaching to, though not identified with, those of Unitarians; on his return to Bristol, in the year 1807, a complete reverse had taken place in his theological tenets. Reflection and reading, particularly the bible, had taught him, as he said, the unstable foundation on which Unitarians grounded their faith; and in proportion as orthodox sentiments acquired an ascendancy in his mind, a love of truth compelled him to oppose his former errors, and stimulated him, by an explicit declaration of his religious views, to ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... total does not, of course, represent the number of men in the field at any one time. It is an estimate of the numbers of all who bore arms against the British troops at any time whatever during the campaign. The Boer army numerically was the most unstable known to history,[78] varying in strength as it varied in fortune in the field, varying even with the weather, or with that mercurial mental condition of which, in irregular forces, the numbers present at the front ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... but he himself had scarcely formed a sufficient estimate of it. Determined to maintain a thorough equality and freedom with the noble bard in their social relations, he shrank from any position which might raise in Byron's jealous and unstable mind the idea that he was under pressure; yet he was anxious to prevent disappointment for Leigh Hunt. He dreaded failure, and resolved that he would do his best to prevent it; and yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... may not be superfluous to mention here certain analogous fields where the human mind gives a series of unstable forms to objects in themselves indeterminate.[9] History, philosophy, natural as well as moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All theory is a subjective form given to an indeterminate material. The material is experience; and although each part of experience is, of ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... determined—Those whose swords come to help the cutting down of the harvest, must be welcome—When their work is wrought, they will be converted or scattered.—Have you been at York Place, brother, with that unstable epicure? We must have his last resolution, and that within ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Columbus's brief season of glory ended. Neither home-comings nor departures would ever be the same for him again; for behind him he left a few jealous enemies, potent to do him harm, and with him he took men of such unstable character that more enmity was sure to spring up. These last he held with a firm hand as long as the voyage lasted; Christopher could always control men at sea, but on land it was another matter. Even though he might have clear notions of the difficulty ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... through her. What can be done for this sister, however, will depend upon what she becomes. If she be a wall, built upon the true foundation, strong and stable, she shall be adorned and beautified with battlements of silver; but if unstable and easily moved to and fro like a door, such treatment will be as impossible as unsuitable; she will need to be inclosed with boards of cedar, hedged in with restraints, ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... problem. There is another class, almost equally distressing. They are the people who are brilliant, who learn easily, and who are so adaptable that they can turn their hands to almost anything. They are usually so unstable in temperament that it is difficult for them to persist in any one kind of endeavor long ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home. It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness, habituated to frivolous pleasures, and ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... well-constructed basis in order to be effective. In the Manchurian War at the critical moment, when the Japanese attacking strength seemed spent, the Russian military system broke down, because its foundation was unstable; the State had fallen into political and moral ruin, and the very army ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... now I am an old maid; and when I was a young one I had, I dare say, more than was good for me. If I were still young, perhaps I should not make this confession; but so many women are fond of government, I suppose, because they are not fit for it. To be unstable and capricious, I really think, is but too characteristic of our sex; and there is, perhaps, no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behavior as woman. I have soberly and uniformly maintained ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... independent of those which were our first movers in this business, strongly urge us at present to pursue with all zeal and perseverance the great cause we have now in hand. And we feel this to be the more necessary, because we cannot but be sensible that light, unstable, variable, capricious, inconstant, fastidious minds soon tire in any pursuit that requires strength, steadiness, and perseverance. Such persons, who we trust are but few, and who certainly do not resemble your Lordships nor us, begin already to say, How long is this business to continue? ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Treatment.—In view of the unstable quality of the chondroma, especially of its liability to become malignant, it should be removed as soon as it is recognised. In those projecting from the surface of a bone, both the tumour and its capsule should be removed. If in the interior, a sufficient amount of the cortex should be ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... difficult and profoundly interesting investigation, here sketched in barest outline, is that the solar system is stable: that is to say, that if disturbed a little it will oscillate and return to its old state; whereas if it were unstable the slightest disturbance would tend to accumulate, and would sooner or later bring about a catastrophe. A hanging pendulum is stable, and oscillates about a mean position; its motion is periodic. A top-heavy load balanced on a point is unstable. All the changes of the solar system ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... unsubstantial as thou art like froth, unstable like a fruit (falling when ripe), dependent on time, and mortal, having entered into an agreement in respect of time, which is infinite and immeasurable, quick like a shaft or flowing like a stream, and carrying ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... power of Rome, which had long been unstable, utterly fell to the ground for want of capable support. Such were the fortunes of Belisarius in the Gothic war. After this, despairing of success, he begged the Emperor to allow him to leave Italy with all speed. When ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... 'for,' said he, 'you have failed in three things, charity, fasting, and truth, and have been great murderers. But sinful as Sir Lancelot was, since he went into the quest he never slew man, nor shall, till he come into Camelot again. For he has taken upon him to forsake sin. And were he not so unstable, he should be the next to achieve it, after Galahad his son. Yet shall he die an holy man, and in earthly sinful men he ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... along with a swollen, smooth rapidity, that almost deceives the eye. Amphibious creatures, alligators, serpents, and wild fowl, haunt these yet but half-formed regions, where land and water are of the consistency of hasty-pudding—the one seeming too unstable to walk on, the other almost too thick to float in. But then, the sky, if no human chisel ever yet cut breath, neither did any human pen ever write light; if it did, mine should spread out before you the unspeakable glories of these southern heavens, the saffron brightness of morning, the blue ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the emblem. It meant that this should be his character by and by, when the work of grace in him was finished. The new name was a prophecy of the man that was to be, the man that Jesus would make of him. Now he was only Simon—rash, impulsive, self-confident, vain, and therefore weak and unstable. ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... stain hands in grafting the graft usually fails. In outdoor grafting if the sap stands in pockets the sugar will ferment, killing the graft. There is a new Jersey (3) bulletin which shows black walnut sap as unstable, quickly forming sugar ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... led them along a corridor and opened a door. Then he set his unstable candle down on a toilet-table and asked at what hour they were to be called ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... as though they had not the firm judgment of reason, although the contrary happens in some women. Hence he states that "we do not describe women as being continent, because they are vacillating" through being unstable of reason, and "are easily led" so that ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... influences, and pass on to become species; and that species become, in like manner, differentiated into genera, is abundantly indicated by the facts of geographical distribution, and the obvious relation of local forms to the conditions of environment. The present more or less unstable condition of the circumstances surrounding organic beings, together with the known mutations of climate our planet has undergone in past geological ages, point clearly to the agency of physical conditions as one of the chief factors in the evolution of new forms of life. So long as the environing ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Cressida, which is just like that of a spoilt child which has lost its sugar-plum, without tenderness, passions, or poetry: and, in short, perfectly characteristic of that vain, fickle, dissolute, heartless woman,—"unstable as water." ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... slaked-lime. The dioxide was obtained as the hydrate, CaO2.8H2O, by P. Thenard (Ann. Chim. Phys., 1818, 8, p. 213), who precipitated lime-water with hydrogen peroxide. It is permanent when dry; on heating to 130 deg. C. it loses water and gives the anhydrous dioxide as an unstable, pale buff-coloured powder, very sparingly soluble in water. It is used as an ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... all the way out, seriously thought of suicide, but incapacity for any physical effort whatever happily saved him. In short, Junkie was the innocent cause of many dreadful thoughts and much improper language on the unstable scene of ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... socialist and non-socialist, revolutionary and pre-revolutionary institutions, the opportunity to express views. The speeches did perhaps help the Coalition Government to sense the situation with which it had to deal, though the Conference showed that the Coalition Government was unstable, and that the extreme ideas of the Bolsheviki had penetrated deeply in the broader masses. Again the Bolsheviki attacked the principle of coalition, and demanded that revolutionary democracy take ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... multiform life and the moving grace of all life's elements. He is an ego insatiably hungry for the non-ego, every moment rendering it and expressing it in images more vital than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. "Any man," said Mr. G—— one day, in one of those conversations which he lights up with intense look and vivid gesture, "any man, not overcome by a sorrow so heavy that it absorbs all the faculties, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... were clambering a trifle laboriously over the broken rocks at the foot of the dike, swearing a little at their unstable footing, but all apparently much in earnest in their conversation. Even as Bennington looked they came to a halt, and then sank down each on a convenient rock, talking interestedly. One was Old Mizzou, one was the man ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices. Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... another grapple with the whirling peg-top, and again he mastered the dizzying confusion. Made bold by success, he got his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments had once more ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... half-querulous lamentations over his losses; and he would essay, with all the consummate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him from his recklessness, and warn him of the consequences. But little Berk, though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, selfish, and unstable as water. He would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant, and would promise anything under the sun; but five minutes afterward he would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably resentful of interference as a proud, spoiled, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... inflation holds the threat of another depression, just as we had a depression after the unstable boom ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... called the wise, Shall I thrust by the praise of the people, and the tale that no ending hath, And the love and the heart of the godlike, and the heavenward-leading path, For the rose and the stem of the lily, and the smooth-lipped youngling's kiss, And the eyes' desire that passeth, and the frail unstable bliss? Now shalt thou tell King Sigmund, that I deem it the crown of my life To dwell in the house of his fathers amidst all peace and strife, And to bear the sons of his body: and indeed full well I know That fair from the loins of Sigmund shall ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... around the charge of the usurpation of government by an "aristocracy." Incontrovertible proof of this charge was found in special legislation chartering banks and other corporations. The banks were indicted upon two counts. First, the unstable bank paper money defrauded the wage earner of a considerable portion of the purchasing power of his wages. Second, banks restricted competition and shut off avenues for the "man on the make." The latter accusation may be understood ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... realise the movement of this game, in which you have played so long a languid and involuntary part, and find your own place in it. It is flowing, growing, changing, making perpetual unexpected patterns within the evolving melody of the Divine Thought. In all things it is incomplete, unstable; and so are you. Your fellow-men, enduring on the battlefield, living and breeding in the slum, adventurous and studious, sensuous and pure—more, your great comrades, the hills, the trees, the rivers, the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... crucial change which the Christian socialists would accomplish is identical with that contemplated by their secular allies or rivals. But the more completely it is invested with a definitely religious quality, the more lopsided, unstable, and self-stultifying is this change seen to be; the more obvious becomes the absurdity of proposing to reorganise the entire business of the world on the basis of a conversion de luxe which is to be the privilege of ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... reawakening of his people to a richer Christian and national life appeared fruitless. Most of the intellectual and spiritual leaders of his time looked upon the very idea of sharing the richer cultural and spiritual values of life with the common man as a visionary conception of an unstable and erratic mind. One ought naturally, they admitted, to be interested in improving the social and economic conditions of the lower classes, but the higher treasures of mind and spirit belonged in the very nature ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... Stephen also declined, for another reason, namely that the result might prove to be different, which, he held, would be depressing. The other Zulus oscillated between belief and scepticism, as do the unstable who set to work to study the evidences of Christianity. But Sammy did not oscillate, he literally howled, and prepared the food which poured in upon us so badly that I had to turn on Hans to do the cooking, for however little appetite we might have, it was necessary that ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... of the majority and the rapid as well as absolute manner in which its decisions are executed in the United States, have not only the effect of rendering the law unstable, but they exercise the same influence upon the execution of the law and the conduct of the public administration. As the majority is the only power which it is important to court, all its projects ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... not impose upon you one needless burden; He will not exact more than He knows your strength will bear; He will ask no Peter to come to Him on the water, unless He impart at the same time strength and support on the unstable wave; He will not demand of you the endurance of providences, and trials, and temptations you are unable to cope with; He will not ask you to draw water if the well is too deep, or withdraw the stone if too ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... thus as one-sided, and negates its other, which, being equally one-sided, negates it; and, since this situation remains unstable, the two contradictory terms have together, according to Hegel, to engender a higher truth of which they both appear as indispensable members, mutually mediating aspects of that higher concept of situation ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Politicians unstable and vague May well take example from HAIG, Who talks to the Huns In the voice of his guns Till they dread him far ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... skated awkwardly with tiny hoofs desperately set to check their descent, to be steadied and encouraged by the booming voice, deep as a bell, of the man nearest them. Sometimes in dangerous spots where shale slides threatened to prove unstable, his lean, grim face and blue-gray eyes appeared apprehensive, and he braced his great shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating, straining animal. After one of these perilous tracts he stopped beside the burros, pushed the stained white Stetson to the back of his head, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... carboxylic acids, C6H5.N2.COOH, may also be considered as mixed azo derivatives. Diazobenzenecyanide, C6H5N2.CN, is an unstable oil, formed when potassium cyanide is added to a solution of a diazonium salt. Phenyl-azo-carboxylic acid, C6H5.N2.COOH, is obtained in the form of its potassium salt when phenylsemicarbazide is oxidized with potassium permanganate in alkaline ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... misfortune that he prided himself more if possible on his civil and political knowledge and his administrative ability than on his military skill and capacity. As a politician his opinions were often chimerical, unstable, and of little moment; but his military knowledge and experience were valuable. With headquarters at Washington, and for thirty years consulted and trusted by successive administrations of different parties in important emergencies, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... moment the Kaffir becomes efficient and picks up a smattering of education he begins to think about his position and unrest is fomented. It makes him unstable as an employee, as the constant desertions from work show. The only way that the gold and diamond mines keep their thousands of recruited native workers is to confine them in compounds. The ordinary labourer has no such restrictions ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... upon the sea. But what mattered rain or storm? In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial ill-temper expressed by the permanent, underlying fine weather; a very different thing from the fluid and unstable 'fine weather' of winter, its very opposite, in fact; for has it not (firmly established in the soil, on which it has taken solid form in dense masses of foliage over which the rain may pour in torrents without weakening the resistance offered ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... spire of stone which charms more than a picture, and fascinates the eye as music does the ear. It still keeps its strong fortifications drawn around it, to which the broad and deep Scheldt is like a string to a bow, mindful of the unstable state of Europe. While Berlin is only a vast camp of soldiers, every less city must daily beat its drums, and call its muster-roll. From the tower here one looks upon the cockpit of Europe. And yet Antwerp ought to have rest: she ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... lately of the progress of the negotiations between the courts of Petersburg, Vienna and Versailles. The distance of the former, and the cautious, unassuming character of its minister here, is one cause of delays: a greater one is, the greediness and unstable character of the Emperor. Nor do I think that the Principal here will be easily induced to lend himself to any connection, which shall threaten a war within a considerable number of years. His own reign will be that of peace only, in ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... Cairo?" "Why askest thou?" said the boy? "Because," replied Hyjauje, "her sands are of gold, and her river Nile miraculously fruitful; but her women are wanton, free to every conqueror, and her men unstable." "I am not from thence, but from Damascus," cried the youth. "Then," said Hyjauje, "thou art from a most rebellious place, filled with wretched inhabitants, a wavering race, neither Jews nor Christians." "But I am ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... worship, Where one part does disdain with cause, the other Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom Cannot conclude but by the yea and no Of general ignorance,—it must omit Real necessities—and give way the while To unstable slightness; purpose so barred, It follows, nothing is ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... in the pentoses 4 OH, in the hexoses 5 OH groups reacting. The pentose nitrates are comparatively stable at 50 deg.; the hexose nitrates on the other hand are extremely unstable, showing a loss of weight of 30-40 p.ct. when kept ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... Black, as he made a half turn to start after the cub engineer anew, brushed a corner of the unstable drawing table hard enough to tip it over. A bottle of drawing ink fell, too, splashing ugly black blotches over Tom's carefully ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... woo and win: The steadfast will that guides the state, Wise favour to the good and great; And for all time are kings renowned Who blend these arts and ne'er confound. But thou art weak and swift to ire, Unstable, slave of each desire. Thou tramplest duty in the dust, And in thy bow is all thy trust. Thou carest naught for noble gain, And treatest virtue with disdain, While every sense its captive draws To follow ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? For this plain reason—because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... over me! I was beginning to believe that I was really living a feeble and fluttering, but real Christian life, and finding some satisfaction in it. But that is all over now. I am doomed to be a victim of my own unstable, passionate, wayward nature, and the sooner I settle down into that conviction, the better. And yet how my very soul craves the highest happiness, and refuses to be comforted while that ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... doubt is because she cannot bear to be unstable, and to desert the work to which she was almost pledged; but she says she is ashamed to perceive how much the sacrifice would cost her. She adds, that decide as she may, he concurs with her in devoting everything to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stability had never been accomplished in Utopia before that time, any more than it has been accomplished on earth. Just as on earth, Utopian history was a succession of powers rising and falling in an alternation of efficient conservative with unstable liberal States. Just as on earth, so in Utopia, the kinetic type of men had displayed a more or less unintentional antagonism to the poietic. The general life-history of a State had been the same on either planet. First, through poietic activities, the idea of a ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... you my friend, but find, when it is almost too late to profit by the discovery, that you are a tempter. Ay! and worse than a tempter. Pure air and the bright sunshine! Is this your health for mind and body? Oh! weak, weak, unstable one that I am! Poor Mary!" This was said in a low, mournful, and scarcely audible voice. "Thus has my promise to you ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... unstable or inglorious it might appear to those few who understood the interests, and felt for the honour of their country, was nevertheless not unwelcome to the nation in general. The British ministry will always ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... accept the aid which was offered to him. It is astonishing how strong a man may be to those around him,—how impregnable may be his exterior, while within he feels himself to be as weak as water, and as unstable as chaff. ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... some places the general dark color of the skin blended with the areola surrounding the roots of the hair, so that one uniform black surface resulted. In many places the dark color changed into black. The irides were brown. The man was of very unstable character, extremely undecided in all his undertakings, and had a lively but silly expression of countenance. A distinct smell, as of mice, with a mixture of a garlicky odor, was emitted from those parts where ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... most unfortunate shot; for nothing could have been less complimentary to the jealous and quick-tempered captain of the house than to be mistaken for his self-conceited and unstable inferior, with whom, he was in the habit of congratulating himself, he had little or nothing ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... salts of silver is that, being very unstable, i. e., ready to undergo a molecular change, the undulations produced in the ether, which pervades all space, and the potential action or moving power of light is sufficient to disturb their normal chemical composition; it liberates some of the chlorine, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... The unstable craft lurched and dipped dangerously, and, realizing the futility of her mad impulse, she sank back ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... total uncertainty of what is left behind, are just like the mouldering schemes of human greatness. It is finer than Cleopatra's passionate lamentation over his fallen grandeur, because it is more dim, unstable, unsubstantial."[91] ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... can'st thou e'er hope to find In that unstable, and soon conquered mind? What piety can'st thou expect from her, Who could forgive a brother's murderer? Or, what obedience hop'st thou to be paid, From one who ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... use," he heard Teuxical say. "I have seen them in only one of the multitude of other worlds on which I have set my feet, worlds which all pay tribute to Malfero of Lodore. It is safer and swifter to ride the magnetic currents than it is to ride the unstable currents of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... with insidious stab, Snatched from Zenobia's side her gallant lord, And threw into her hand the exigencies Of an unstable and capricious throne. Yet was her genius not inadequate. The precepts of experience, intertwined With intellectual power of lofty grade, Combined to raise Palmyra's beauteous queen High in the golden scale of moral greatness. Under the teachings of the good Longinus The streams ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... again," but the Seigneur Groothuse, who had already tried to check Charles's anger and to curb the popular turbulence, exclaimed, "For the love of God do not strike again!" The wiser burgher at once understood the unstable temper of the mob, which had been fairly civil to the duke up to this moment. There were ugly murmurs to be heard that the blow would ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... comradeship which I have for my brother. I do not love my brother, and it is because I do not love him, and because I do have affection and comradeship for him, that I do not turn away when he commits even a lurid act. Love, you will remember, takes its rise in the emotions, and is unstable and wanton and capricious. But affection takes its rise in the intellect, is based upon judgment of the brain. Love is unyielding tyranny; affection is compromise. Love never compromises, no more than does the mad little mating ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... cast about, Umberere, the part of the helmet which shaded the eyes, Umbre, shade, Unavised, thoughtlessly, Uncouth, strange, Underne, - A.M., Ungoodly, rudely, Unhappy, unlucky, Unhilled, uncovered, Unr the, scarcely, Unsicker, unstable, Unwimpled, uncovered, Unwrast, untwisted, unbound, Upright, flat on the back, Up-so-down, upside down, Ure, usage, Utas, octave of ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... Campeggio embarked at Corneto,[603] and proceeded by slow stages through France towards England. Henry congratulated himself that his hopes were on the eve of fulfilment. But, unfortunately for him, the basis, on which they were built, was as unstable as water. The decision of his case still depended upon Clement, and Clement wavered with every fluctuation in the success or the failure of (p. 216) the Spanish arms in Italy. Campeggio had scarcely set out, when Doria, the famous Genoese admiral, deserted Francis for Charles;[604] on the 17th ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... doubteth is like the surge of the sea driven by the wind and tossed.... A double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... talent, and to moral sense. The leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a whole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individual worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no one is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and improves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at the inception of the human Charter, take the place ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... best they could give me; for I thought that if it was fair for them to take, it was fair for me to take too. But nothing that I took mattered longer than a week or a day or an hour, neither laughter nor courage nor beauty nor wisdom—all, all were unstable till the winds blew me you. And as I looked at you lying there unconscious, something, I knew not what, seemed different from anything I had ever known, but when you opened your eyes I knew what it was, and my heart ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... not gamble. The only purpose she could find for cards was to build castles; and here she was building one with the assistance of her gallants, and under the superintendence of his Grace of Buckingham, who was as skilled in this as in other equally unstable forms ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... An unstable government and an onerous system of export taxes hamper trade. Coffee, a leading product, goes mainly to Europe. Cattle products, and balsam of tolu are purchased mainly in the United States. Great Britain purchases the gold and silver ores. The chief imports—textiles, flour, ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... not lightened by the existence of any such genuine, warm and living feeling for any of Mr. Asquith's Ministry, perhaps Ireland is not to blame. There was no intense grip of any fact in the Government's attitude, and on one cardinal point they were unstable as water. Sir Edward Carson, in opposing the introduction of the Bill, had used the words: "What argument is there that you can raise for giving Home Rule to Ireland that you do not equally raise for giving Home Rule to ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... with a demonstration of what Arizona horses can do. Our way led first through a canon-bed filled with rounded boulders and rocks, slippery and unstable. Big cottonwoods and oaks grew so thick as partially to conceal the cliffs on either side of us. The rim-rock was mysterious with caves; beautiful with hanging gardens of tree ferns and grasses growing thick in long transverse crevices; wonderful in colour and shape. We ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... nooks beneath the cliffs, where there was no sound in her ears but that of the waves. She would sit for hours with no companion save her thoughts, which were unconsciously led from phase to phase by the moving lights and shadows upon the sea, and the soft beauty of unstable clouds. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... you? I built too high on too unstable a soil. I loved one object too well. Yours from ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ludicrous as well as pathetic in this cry. It did more for him than the most eloquent pleading could have done. Man, in a crowd, is an unstable being. At any moment he will veer right round and run in an opposite direction. The idea that the condemned man had a Susan who would mourn over his untimely end, touched a cord in the hearts of many among the crowd. The reference to her sweet blue eyes at such a moment raised a smile, and an extremely ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Dayspring had to call at Tanna. By stress of weather we lay several days in Port Resolution. And there many memories were again revived—wounds that after five-and-twenty years, when I now write, still bleed afresh! Nowar, the old Chief, unstable but friendly, was determined to keep us there by force or by fraud. The Captain told him that the council of the Missionaries had forbidden him to land our boxes ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... for the steady dissipation of energy, it follows that an exothermic substance is stable, for it tends to remain as it is unless heat is supplied to it, or work is done upon it; whereas, according to its degree of endothermicity, an endothermic substance is more or less unstable, for it is always ready to emit heat, or to do work, as soon as an opportunity is given to it to decompose. The theoretical and practical results of this circumstance will be elaborated in Chapter VI., when the endothermic nature of acetylene ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... Secretary of State and the Viceroy were primarily concerned to study. India is, and probably must always remain, essentially an agricultural country, and its economics must always suffer from the exceptionally unstable conditions to which, except within the relatively small areas available for irrigation, dependence upon a precarious rainfall condemns even the most industrious agricultural population. Many circumstances had combined to retard the development ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... 98-101. So unstable is the hold of the "snow-beds" on the mountain sides that travellers passing beneath them are forbidden by the guides to speak, lest their voices precipitate an avalanche. See ll. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... meanwhile I could not help making anticipations. Fancy revelled in the wild and dreamy regions of the moon. Imagination, feeling herself for once unshackled, roamed at will among the ever-changing wonders of a shadowy and unstable land. Now there were hoary and time-honored forests, and craggy precipices, and waterfalls tumbling with a loud noise into abysses without a bottom. Then I came suddenly into still noonday solitudes, where no wind of heaven ever intruded, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cannot observe thy dethroning Or watch thy effulgence depart Without unaffectedly owning A pang of regret in my heart. I know thou wast stuffy, non-porous, Unstable, top-heavy and hot; But O! thou wast grimly decorous; The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... Assyria, the kings of Israel had become powerful and haughty. Jehoash, the grandson of Jehu, had achieved successes in conflict with Damascus. In Judah the unstable Amaziah, son of Joash, was strong enough to lay a heavy hand on Edom, and flushed with triumph then resolved to readjust his relations with his overlord, the king of Israel. Accordingly he sent a communication to Jehoash which contained some proposal ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Amadis de Jocelyn came into his head and stayed there. What was he that he should creep into the unspoiled sphere of a woman's opening life? A painter, something of a genius in his line, but erratic and unstable in his character,—known more or less for several "affairs of gallantry" which had slipped off his easy conscience like water off a duck's back,—not a highly cultured man by any means, because ignorant of many of the finer things in art and letters, and without any positively assured position. ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... penetrating, seeing things very clearly in her mind, and expressing herself well and in few but careful words; easily finding a way out of a difficulty, and choosing her line of conduct in the most embarrassing circumstances; light-minded and fickle; unstable, paying no attention if the same thing were said several times over. For this reason," continued the doctor, "I was obliged to alter what I had to say from time to time, keeping her but a short time to one subject, to which, however, I would return later, giving the matter a new appearance and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... necessary in your office, since discords easily arise between two nationalities. Therefore you must use skill to soothe those [the Greek merchants and sailors from the Levant] whose characters are unstable as the winds, and who, unless you bring their minds into a state of calm, will, with their natural quickness of temper, fly out into ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... further brightened by the arrival of a letter of atrociously jellygraphed advices from Messrs. Danks and Wimborne. They all referred to resident vacancies for which Lewisham was manifestly unsuitable, nevertheless their arrival brought an encouraging assurance of things going on, of shifting and unstable places in the defences of the beleaguered world. Afterwards, with occasional endearments for Ethel, he set himself to a revision of his last year's note-books, for now the botany was finished, the advanced zoological course—the last lap, as it were, ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... feelings which ladies are wont to have, sure I am that the cheeks of each separately, and of all when brought together, will be bathed in tears, because of those ills which are alone the occasion of my never-ending misery. Do not, I beseech you, refuse me these tears, reflecting that your estate is unstable as well as mine, and that, should it ever come to resemble mine (the which may God forfend!), the tears that others shed for you will be pleasing to you in return. And that the time may pass more rapidly in speaking than in, weeping, I will do my best ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... soil which has no depth of earth, and so with joy it receives the word; but the seed has no depth of earth and quickly withers away. This sort of soil receives quickly and as quickly lets go. It is like that unstable man of whom St. James writes and who is like the wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. We see the wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine as it leaps and crowned with its spray, and ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... king, and ready to desert him at any time." The more reckless eagerly joined the rebellion; the more prudent took refuge in France, that they might watch how events would go; there was a timid and unstable party who held outwardly to the king in vigilant uncertainty, haunted by fears that they should be swept away by the possible victory of his son. Such descendants of the Normans of the Conquest as had survived ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... that is little known, except in the dwellings of princes. Colonnades, medallions, and massive cornices overhung the canal, as if the art of man had taken pride in loading the superstructure in a manner to mock the unstable element which concealed its base. A flight of steps, on which each gentle undulation produced by the passage of the barge washed a wave, conducted to a vast vestibule, that answered many of the purposes of a court. Two or three gondolas were ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the weakness, O the folly, That my heart did e'er entwine Round a joy, or hope, or promise, Vain, unstable World, of thine! Thou with all thy proffered treasure Shalt ere long from me remove:— Turn, fond heart, with holy rapture, Unto God thy trust ...
— Favourite Welsh Hymns - Translated into English • Joseph Morris
... child restless by excess of heat or by excess of cold, we too-civilised people have made our own difficulties. We have exaggerated the completeness of the sudden separation of mother and child which nature decrees. It is the function of all mother animals to approximate the unstable temperature of the newly born to their own by the close contact of their bodies, which provide just the proper heat. Labour is nowadays so complicated and exhausting a process for mothers that, all things considered, we are wise in completing the separation of mother and child and in ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... the areas mentioned above, the precipitation is much less than 30 inches per year and its effect as an agent of erosion is of greatest significance, although in restricted areas there may be short periods when the soil is made unstable ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... have previously observed, Greeley was intensely loyal to the country, yet he was so nervous and unstable in his mind that he could not resist the effort to bring about a condition of peace. I think he would have consented to almost anything in order to secure it. He was very anxious for the issuance of a proclamation ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... beginning to contain speculations on using the principle of the missile engine to save unstable intermediate products of the chemical processes. The high heats achieved in the rocket engine can, perhaps, be utilized to produce desired products that would be lost by slow cooling. But the high rate of cooling accomplished by expanding gases through ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics |
