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More "Instability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have much to gain by keeping up the illusion through which we make our conscious states share in the reciprocal externality of outer things, because this distinctness and solidification enables us to give them fixed names in spite of their instability, and distinct names in spite of their interpenetration. Above all it enables us to objectify them, to throw them out into the current of social life. But just for this very reason we are in danger of living our lives superficially and of covering up our real self. We are generally content with what ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Mr. Nupkins at once declared he didn't believe him. So the fines were remitted, and Mr. Jinks found a couple of bail in no time. And all these solemn proceedings having been satisfactorily concluded, Mr. Grummer was ignominiously ordered out—an awful instance of the instability of human greatness, and the uncertain tenure of ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... with Gambetta on October 19th he said to me that it was his intention, "whether I liked Duclerc or not," to keep him in power, whether he does what he ought, does nothing, or does what is ridiculous. The curse of France is instability. Duclerc is an honest man.' Gambetta was 'aged and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... in the arrangement of things; one would have a right to accuse him of an oversight in the choice of the agents and instruments, which he makes, prepares, and puts in action. In short, if the order of nature proves the power and intelligence of the Deity, disorder must prove his weakness, instability, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... objects. High powers in all cases increase the difficulty of observation, since they diminish the field of view and the illumination of the object, increase the motion with which (owing to the earth's motion) the image moves across the field, and magnify all defects due to instability of the stand, imperfection of the object-glass, or undulation of the atmosphere. A good object-glass of three inches aperture will in very favourable weather bear a power of about 300, when applied to the observation of close ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... Cromwell, with his usual zeal against every thing that adorned the country. Many Roman medals of Vespasian, Adrian, &c. have been found about it. I hardly know a more interesting place to visit than Melrose and its neighbourhood; while the abbey affords a fine moral lesson on the instability and perishableness of even the most magnificent works raised ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... of criminal character; some of them are normal and not morbid; their inheritance as in the Jukes family; epileptics and their nervous instability; insanity; religious rapture; strange views of the insane on individuality; their moody segregation; the religious discipline of celibacy, fasting and solitude (see also 125); large field of study among the ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much increased by the death of his daughter—a charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, the darling of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Recommendation of a new Paper called The Historian. [1] I have read it carefully, and find it written with Skill, good Sense, Modesty, and Fire. You must allow the Town is kinder to you than you deserve; and I doubt not but you have so much Sense of the World, Change of Humour, and instability of all humane Things, as to understand, that the only Way to preserve Favour, is to communicate it to others with Good-Nature and Judgment. You are so generally read, that what you speak of will be read. This with Men of Sense and Taste is all that ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... acute fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... served as a stable, the other half was the dwelling of the owner. Though this hut owed to the neighborhood of the town a few improvements which were wholly absent from such buildings that were five or six miles further off, it showed plainly enough the instability of domestic life and habits to which the wars and customs of feudality had reduced the serf; even to this day many of the peasants of those parts call a seignorial chateau, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... produced while they were still in an unformed, perhaps a nebular condition. In a system giving room for considerable modification through disturbance, the recurrence of conjunctions with a dominating mass at the same orbital point need not involve instability.[1026] On the whole, the correspondence of facts with Kirkwood's hypothesis has not been impaired by their more copious collection.[1027] Some chasms of secondary importance have indeed been bridged; but the principal stand out more conspicuously through the denser scattering ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... well, and they wish so well to all; everything good in life seems as if it came from themselves. They have favourable gales in life—it was so with Eva. Even her weakness, a desire to please, which easily went too far, and an instability of character which was very dangerous to her, exhibited themselves only on their pleasing side, within the circle of her family and of her acquaintance, and helped to make ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... very stable body, and although it can be decomposed, yet it requires some considerable power to effect it. Now the extra quantity of oxygen which may be considered to have been introduced into water to convert it into peroxide has also introduced an element of instability, the extra quantity of oxygen being ever ready to combine with some other body for which it has a greater affinity than for the water. This property can be utilised in the bleaching industry with great advantage, true bleaching ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... murmuring one must try to find out the way by which he can secure exemption from (spiritual) misery; and the means of salvation found, he must then free himself from sensuality. The man who has attained a high state of spiritual knowledge is always conscious of the great deficiency (instability) of all matter. Such a person keeping in view the final doom (of all), never grieves. I too, O learned man, do not grieve; I stay here (in this life) biding my time. For this reason, O best of men, I am not perplexed (with doubts)". The Brahmana said, "Thou art ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... thou with me, O thriving one!" Then, turning to his wife, he should say, "To me Brihaspati has given thee; obtaining offspring through me, thy husband, live with me a hundred autumns." The intention of the ceremony is plainly to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It is the wish expressed ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... with such instability his moral nature should continue uncorrupted; but this I believe he owed chiefly to his love and admiration of his brother. For my part, I could not help liking him much. There was a half-plaintive playfulness about ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... in all the universe to lay hold of to prop herself up; for when the pillars of the world are thus unrooted the heaving of the earthquake and the falling of the ruins impart a certain vertigo and giddy instability even to heaven. ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... revised three times; the statute relating to the agregation in history has been reformed or amended five times. And this is not the end. New simplifications are imperative. But what is the importance of this instability—of which, however, complaints begin to be heard[247]—if it is established, as we believe it is, that progress towards a better state of things has been continuous through all these changes, without any ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... beyond a doubt. She got out of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the discomfort of standing ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... these and the authors represented in this little pioneer volume one should bear continually in mind the many handicaps under which authorship labors in Portuguese and Spanish America: a small reading public, lack of publishers, widespread prevalence of illiteracy, instability of politics. Under the circumstances it is not so much to be wondered at that the best work is of such a high average as that it was done at all. For in nations where education is so limited and illiteracy ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... quality. Indeed when a man possesses it, it is common to speak of him as possessing "almost a woman's intuition." Such emotional susceptibility is manifested in the higher frequency of emotional instability and emotional outbreaks among women than among men, and the decreased power of inhibition which women have over instinctive and emotional reactions. Further than this, women more than men may be said ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... commanding thought of a statesman. He had a true sentiment in politics, and he was able also to see practical issues clearly; but his mind was analytical rather than constructive, and his restlessness of life was indicative of a certain instability of temper which kept him uneasily employed about many things rather than steadfast and single-minded. It would be too much to say that he failed as a political writer, and fell back on his philological and school-master studies; yet it is very likely that, in the various ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... passage, "can only mean, in the present state of the people, continual transference of an illegal despotism from one group of political adventurers to another, the pretence of popular representation serving merely to increase and perpetuate instability." ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... leading to the instability of civilizations has been the concentration of wealth, power, privilege, comfort and security in the hands of a minority, in sharp contrast with poverty and insecurity among the less well-placed majority. Generally, the privileged minority has been relatively small and ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... the unpromising task of moderating desire, exert all the power of their eloquence, to shew that happiness is not the lot of man, and have, by many arguments and examples, proved the instability of every condition by which envy or ambition are excited. They have set before our eyes all the calamities to which we are exposed from the frailty of nature, the influence of accident, or the stratagems of malice; they have terrified greatness with conspiracies, and riches with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... happiness Subject to instability In a moment falls to the ground, And as it has the brilliancy of glass ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Consuelo, or Imperia in Pierre qui roule, but always side by side with more earthly and faulty representatives such as Corilla and Anzoleto, or Julia and Albany, in Narcisse, incarnations of the vanity and instability that are the chief dangers of the profession, drawn with unsparing realism. In Le Chateau des Desertes we find further many admirable theories and suggestive ideas on the subject of the regeneration of the theatre. But it fared with her theatrical as with her political philosophy: she failed ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... a good idea," said the sculptor, falling into his companion's vein, and helping him out with an illustration which Donatello himself could not have put into shape, "to convert this saloon into a chapel; and when the priest tells his hearers of the instability of earthly joys, and would show how drearily they vanish, he may point to these pictures, that were so joyous and are so dismal. He could not illustrate his theme so ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... point, that of the relative stability of the bullets. This is a matter of the greatest importance as regards the regularity or otherwise of the wounding power of the projectile, and, as far as my experience went, I believe the Mauser to far exceed the Lee-Metford in instability of structure. ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... those residing at high altitudes, best explained by nerve influence. The frequency of glaucoma among Jews may be due to a small cornea, as suggested by Priestley Smith; but it is quite as reasonable to connect it with a racial excitability or nervous instability. More definite knowledge of the nervous mechanism concerned in the regulation of intra-ocular pressure and the production ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... these parties of pleasure, when his son Henry and Diane de Poitiers were with him, that she fell in love with this castle on the Cher, and longed to make it her own. Having a lively sense of the instability of all things mortal, kings in particular, she took good care to make friends with the rising star, and when Francis was gathered to his fathers and his uncles and his cousins,—you may remember that his predecessor was an uncle or a cousin,—Henry promptly turned over ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... the election is made. Not every generation in a nation is free to choose its polity: but the choice and institution of the fathers binds the children. Up to a certain point ancestral settlements must be respected, or instability ensues, and anarchy is not far off. Thus the spirit of freedom should always act as Burke says, "as if in ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... as the sun rises high in the heavens—is noticed in one of the most tender and pathetic passages in all the prophetic Scriptures. The Lord, by the mouth of Hosea, is mourning over the instability of His people. "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? For your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... day of the month Ivan received a letter from Kashkine, explaining these things, giving a minute plan of the arrangements, and eagerly congratulating Ivan on his assured triumph. For, well as he knew his friend's instability, Constantine never for an instant doubted that Ivan would consent to appear at a reunion for which, as Kashkine knew, he had been longing, bitterly, ever since the sudden accession to his father's wealth and title had barred him from the old-time ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... thought, the free baron left his apartments the next morning and traversed the tapestry-hung corridor leading toward the servants' and soldiers' quarters. He congratulated himself that the incident of the past night had precipitated a favorable climax in one source of possible instability, and that the fool who had opposed him had been summarily removed from the field of action. Confined within the four walls of the castle dungeon, there was scant likelihood he would cause further trouble and annoyance. Francis' strong prison house would effectively ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... matters before any stranger, and they were glad enough to get their tongues at liberty. Adam, the old traditions say, was made of eight pounds: a pound of earth, his flesh; a pound of fire, his blood; a pound of cloud, his instability; a pound of grace (how that was weighed the legend saith not); his stature; a pound of blossom, his eyes; a pound of dew, his sweat; a pound of salt, his tears; and, finally, a pound of wind, his breath. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... of the country is to be found in the camp of negation rather than in that of affirmation; among Broad Churchmen, Nonconformists, Unitarians, and Positivists, rather than among those who seek rest in the unstable position of a modified Catholicism. The very instability and difficulty of that position elicits much ingenuity from its theological defenders, though it also divides their counsels not a little; nor do we quarrel with them for affirming instead of denying, but for not affirming enough. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... of tons of solid matter seemed to be raised. The shrowk in its ascent was caught by the uplifted debris. Beast and riders experienced in that moment all the horrors of an earthquake—they were rolled violently over, and thrown among the rocks and dirt. All was thunder, instability, motion, confusion. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... by sheer strength in the monastery of Praglia to the moment when their lips had met near the basin of the Acqua Barbarena. He had shown himself incapable of loving, incapable of decisive action, irresolute, effeminate in the instability of his mind. Yes, he had been effeminate until the last; effeminate, unfit to form any virile judgment of his own hysterical mysticism. In this judgment there was perhaps an imperfect sincerity, an excess of bitterness, a futile act of rebellion ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... of the species and still come true; they do not need isolation, at least in Wagner's geographical sense. These forms DeVries calls mutations. It is his thought that a species may run along uniformly for a long time when, from some cause which he has not determined as yet, instability comes into the species and it varies in quite a number of directions. Each of these variations may be the starting point of a new species. DeVries believes that he has at least half a dozen mutants of his ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... presided over his success in life, and afterwards over his misfortunes, would no doubt serve him again, and restore him to his lost situation: 'for,' said I, 'we both of us have seen enough of life in Persia to have ascertained its extreme instability. When events depend upon the will of one man, he may with as much consistency order you back from exile, as he did the plucking your beard and the thrusting you forth from the city. There is a reaction in ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... called the Lighthouse of Salvador, because it explodes regularly every twenty minutes. The lesser living vents are called infernillos—little hells. Altogether it looks like Central America, as a whole, with its revolutions and its physical and political instability, must be ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... valuable worker, and the probability that, after she has acquired it, she may not need to use it, diminishes both directly and indirectly the net value of her industrial life; the element of uncertainty and instability prevents the advancement of competent women to posts where fixity of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... bands under a very pretty black velvet bonnet, lined with yellow satin, Lisbeth made her way to the Rue Saint-Dominique by the Boulevard des Invalides, wondering whether sheer dejection would at last break down Hortense's brave spirit, and whether Sarmatian instability, taken at a moment when, with such a character, everything is possible, would be too much for ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... existent under the surface evil. Guy had been generous and frank in the old days, a lover of fair play, an impetuous follower of anything that appealed to him as great. She was sure that these characteristics had been an essential part of his nature. He had failed through instability, through self-indulgence and weakness of purpose. But he was not fundamentally wicked. She was sure that she could appeal to those good impulses within him, and that she would not appeal in vain. She was ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... happened to Miguel. There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent. Perhaps, worn out by exposure, starvation, disease, he had found an end in some hospital, or in an access of despair had sought death in the turbid Seine; but perhaps with his Southern instability he had given up the struggle of his own accord, and now, a clerk in some office in Madrid, turned his fervent rhetoric to politics ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... distance. And all this is empty, silent, and dead. It is the splendour of an invariable region, from which is absent the ephemeral beauty of forest, verdure, or herbage; the splendour of eternal matter, affranchised from all the instability of life; the geological splendour of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Christians, announcing that in future he would consider them as his most faithful subjects, and that henceforth he remitted the taxes paid to his own family. He wound up by asking for soldiers, but the Greeks having learnt the instability of his promises, remained deaf to his invitations. At the same time he sent messengers to the Montenegrins and the Servians, inciting them to revolt, and organised insurrections in Wallachia and Moldavia to the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Louis' conquests showed their instability. "I am sure," wrote one of Henry's officers, "that you can easily recover all that you have lost, if you send speedy succour to these regions." After the capture of Bedford, Hubert undertook the recovery ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... responsibility lay heavy upon him; but that, without inquiry into the alleged disaster, without the smallest attempt to retrieve it, he should have left his comrades in the lurch and taken the easiest way of escape, is surely a proof of almost criminal instability. The Republic lost in him an ardent patriot, but scarcely ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Omar's Rubaiyat warn us of the danger of Greatness, the instability of Fortune, and while advocating Charity to all Men, recommending us to be too intimate with none. Attar makes Nizam-ul-Mulk use the very words of his friend Omar [Rub. xxviii.], "When Nizam-ul- Mulk was in the Agony (of Death) ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... more—and that the boats are now in view from the site of the Barracks lying in the bushes and falling gradually to pieces.—If he is an old settler, this must have past within his memory, and may teach him the instability of all human affairs. Eight miles below the Presqu-Isle a stream called the Pekagomique falls into the Saint John on the eastern side. The land on this stream is very good, and a settlement is begun a few miles from ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... the law of our nature and of our life is that a new generation is for ever springing up, the most desirable thing is that along with your contemporaries, with whom you started in the race, you may also teach what is to us the goal. But in view of the instability and perishableness of mortal things, we should be continually on the look-out for some to love and by whom to be loved; for if we lose affection and kindliness from our life, we lose all that gives it charm. For me, indeed, though ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... had given him the chance of striking the final blow. Petit-Claud was a double-dealer of the profoundly cautious stamp that is never caught by the bait of a present satisfaction, nor entangled by a personal attachment, after his first initiation into the strategy of self-seeking and the instability of the human heart. So, from the very first, he had put little trust in Cointet. He foresaw that his marriage negotiations might very easily be broken off, saw also that in that case he could not accuse Cointet of bad faith, and he had ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... the appointment without any element of instability in it, And it is (now) held by ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... Initiate was taught the Unity of the Godhead, the happiness of the patriarchs, the destruction by the Deluge, the depravity of the heart, and the necessity of a mediator, the instability of life, the final destruction of all created things, and the restoration of the world in a more perfect form. They inculcated the Eternity of the Soul, explained the meaning of the doctrine of the Metempsychosis, and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... that God is immutable! But what is it that occasions the continual instability in this world, which you claim as His empire? Is any state subject to more frequent and cruel revolutions than that of this unknown monarch? How can we attribute to an immutable God, powerful enough to give solidity to His works, the government of a world where everything ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... species is, that varieties produced in a state of domesticity are more or less unstable, and often have a tendency, if left to themselves, to return to the normal form of the parent species; and this instability is considered to be a distinctive peculiarity of all varieties, even of those occurring among wild animals in a state of nature, and to constitute a provision for preserving unchanged the ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... The instability thus variously illustrated becomes still more manifest if we consider its rationale. It is consequent on the fact that the several parts of any homogeneous mass are necessarily exposed to different forces—forces which differ either in their kinds ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... impressions have upon the disorder, the mode of genesis and the psychological evolution of the delusions, etc.,—may be attributed to the essential ear-marks of the degenerative character; that is, to the exaggerated auto-suggestibility, the great instability of the existing conditions and mental pictures, the disharmony between the perceptive and imaginative capacities and the preponderance of a lively fantastic coloring to the dry thinking of these individuals. They do not form disease ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... indeed, a better knowledge of the laws of health, or perhaps only a keener sense of its value and its instability, begins to supersede these rash inculcations; and paragraphs due to some discreet Dr. Hall make the rounds of the press, in which we are reminded that early rising, in order to prove a benefit, rather than a source of mischief, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... lit cigarettes, which glowed for a moment and went out, unsmoked. The feeling of depression that had cloaked him during the few days past changed imperceptibly to one of callous indifference toward existence in general. The seeds of revolt, of instability, which Clare and a measure of worldly position, of pressure, had held in abeyance, germinated in his disorganized mind, his bitter sense of injustice and injury. He hardened, grew defiant ... the strain of lawlessness brought so many years before from warring Scotch highlands ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... his instability? Had her father not seen it from the first? Was his desire to settle down in the country but one of the whims of which his life seemed made up? Perhaps she herself had only been a passing fancy, ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... by some vivid likeness or poetic suggestion, but reveal with every additional day their complete insignificance as movement, their utter empathic nullity. Indeed, if we analyse the censure ostensibly based upon engineering considerations of material instability, or on wrong perspective or anatomical "out of drawing" we shall find that much of this hostile criticism is really that of empathic un-satisfactoriness, which escapes verbal detection but is revealed by the finger following, as we say (and that is itself an instance ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... sense of a duty arising out of the possession of wealth—the feeling that it should do some good in the world, or at least be in part applied to some useful purpose. Lastly, the exciting pursuit of wealth helps to produce a curious restlessness and instability of character, of which we have many examples in the age we are studying. "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," are words that might be applied to many a young man among Cicero's acquaintance, and to ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... own account, which a consul ought by no means to do. Frequent election of representatives and of civil officers in the subordinate employments would remove most causes of discontent in the people, and of instability in kingly power. Here is a lottery in which every one is sure of a prize, if not for himself, at least for somebody in his family or among his friends; and the ticket would be fairly paid for out of ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... now, these paroxysms of agony. Do what she would, look where she might, she saw no relief. She was afraid to trust herself. She was afraid to accept her own suggestions of comfort, if ever a ray of it came to her, lest it should be but another form of self-deception, another proof of moral instability. In her eternal tossing to and fro, in mental anguish, the despairing idea often assailed her: that after all, it did not matter what she did or thought. She was but an atom of the vast whole, a drop in ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Personally, I want the sea always—some not populous edge of it for choice; and with it sunshine, and wine, and a little music. My friend on the mountain yonder is of tougher fibre and sterner outlook, disapproves of the sea's laxity and instability, has no ear for music and no palate for the grape, and regards the sun as a rather enervating institution, like central heating in a house. What he likes is a grey day and the wind in his face; crags at a great altitude; and a flask ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... heir king Charles the first should be told by those infamous judges, who pronounced his unparalleled sentence, that he was an elective prince; elected by his people, and therefore accountable to them, in his own proper person, for his conduct. The confusion, instability, and madness, which followed the fatal catastrophe of that pious and unfortunate prince, will be a standing argument in favour of hereditary monarchy to all future ages; as they proved at last to the ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... to passion; in any other sense it would be socially wrong. Nothing more clearly proves the necessity for indissoluble marriage than the instability of passion. The two sexes must be chained up, like wild beasts as they are, by inevitable law, deaf and mute. Eliminate revenge, and infidelity in love is nothing. Those who believe that for them there is but one woman in the world must be in favor of vengeance, ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... mentioned, to read and write English and induced him to join the Government House Press as a compositor. She writes a well-expressed and correctly-spelt letter in English, and has a shrewd notion of the value of money. Such women, when the instability of youth is past, make good 'ayas,' as their menkind make good waiters ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... feeling, while reading this product of the modern mind, that we are all a little mad, and that the cleverest of us know it, and indulge the vagaries and instability of insanity. In an advertisement to Mr. Aiken's poetry we are told that it is based on the Freudian psychology. We are not seldom reminded to-day of that base to the New Art. We are even beginning to look on each other's simplest acts with a new and grave suspicion. It causes ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... cause that he was restless and disturbed; within the last three days he had by his own instability of purpose, and vacillating tastes and temper brought himself down from as enviable a position as well can be imagined, to one as ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... and universal concernment. For no rank, no elevation in life, and, let me add, no conduct, how circumspect soever, ought to tempt a reasonable man to conclude that these enquiries do not, nor possibly can, concern him. A moment's cool reflection on the utter instability of human affairs, and the numberless unforeseen events which a day may bring forth, will be sufficient to guard any man, conscious of his own infirmities, against a delusion of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... and pious arms. That you were the aggressors, both you yourselves confess and the gods are witnesses, who determined the issue of the former war, and who are now determining, and will determine, the issue of the present according to right and justice. As to myself, I am not forgetful of the instability of human affairs, but consider the influence of fortune, and am well aware that all our measures are liable to a thousand casualties. But as I should acknowledge that my conduct would savor of insolence and oppression if I rejected you on your coming in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... own soul, even while it took short flights to the troubled waters. Of her firm footing she was exultingly proud. She stood high, close to danger, without giddiness. If at intervals her soul flew out like lightning from the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it seemed to her), the suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of impressions of the mornings at Lugano—her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these reinforced her. She did not ask herself why she should have to seek them for aid. In other respects her mind was alert and held no sly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a brunette, tall, petite, svelte, straight-featured, full, curvilinear. Only one quality remained unalterable: her instability of tenure. In Borne's phrase, nothing was ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... faced growing challenges over its reliance on public funds. Doubts about whether the program is adequate underlie forecasts of continued—although much less severe—GDP contraction for 1999. Signs of spreading unrest and sectarian violence and concern that social instability will increase as the 7 June 1999 national election approaches also contribute to pessimism about the economy, particularly because foreign investors remain reluctant to begin to increase capital inflows again. The next government ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... happen to him. Only two theories remained. One was that Joe had gone crazy under his long exile from civilized life and had madly put an end to himself by jumping into the river; and the other that, persisting in his belief in the instability of the drift-pile, he had gone to the upper bank for safety and had fallen asleep there. In that event he must be found, lest an Indian should discover him in the morning and put him to death. Tom went ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... 'It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... so resolute a manner it was not difficult to see that something more was at stake than the arrest of a single man. This was so; the real issue was whether the king, with whose instability it was difficult to cope, should fall back into the hands of his old advisers or not. My arrest was a move in the game intended as a counterblast to the victory which M. de Rambouillet had gained when he persuaded the king to move to Tours; a city in the neighbourhood of the Huguenots, and a place ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... fashion of court favourites, not by his adherents, now numbering many hundred thousands, threatened a revolution. A secret compromise was effected. He was banished, with every outward mark of disgrace, to a monastery in the remote and inhospitable region of Viatka, there to meditate upon the instability of human affairs. The illumined period was drawing nigh. The Capital, on the whole, was glad to see the last of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... before," the former reached in a time almost of famine and calling for intervention on the part of the government. However we interpret these figures (and I believe them to mean that wheat sold at from twelve cents to eighty cents a bushel) they certainly indicate a tremendous instability in prices, due to the poor communications and backward methods of agriculture, making years of plenty alternate with years of hunger. In the case of Wittenberg, the lower level was nearer the normal, for in 1527 wheat was there sold at ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... be catchin'! Four in the same 'ouse! (He goes back to the hearth, quite lost before the instability of the human intellect in a ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... the council of state in their behalf, but he was put off with perpetual excuses. While the affair was in agitation he went to Capua, where the prisoners were confined. "There," he writes to the Cardinal Colonna, "I saw your friends; and, such is the instability of Fortune, that I found them in chains. They support their situation with fortitude. Their innocence is no plea in their behalf to those who have shared in the spoils of their fortune. Their only expectations rest upon you. I have no ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... guaranteed in terms "by the faith of the Spanish nation," and with another guaranty pledging Spanish sovereignty and control over certain colonial revenues. Spain failed to maintain her title to the security she had pledged, but the lenders knew the instability of that security when they risked their money on it. All the later lenders and many of the early ones knew, also, that it was pledged for money to continue Spain's efforts to subdue a people struggling ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... moment, then, arrives when this stability is so weak that the matter disappears by a sort of explosion more or less rapid. The bodies of the radium group offer an image of this phenomenon — a rather faint image, however, because the atoms of this body have only reached a period of instability when the dissociation is rather slow. It probably precedes another and more rapid period of dissociation capable of producing their final explosion. Bodies such as radium, thorium, etc., represent, no doubt, a state of old age at which all ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... suddenness of his coming; she half started to rise before she remembered the instability of her perch, and then crouched even lower than before when she saw that he was not yet aware of her nearness. It was not at all like the encounter which she had so ably managed in her imagination an instant before, and somehow that graciously kind greeting ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... rococo toy of Italy.' As if what was true anywhere were not true everywhere; and as if a man, go where he will, can find more beauty or worth than he carries. All this was said, as we shall see that much else was said by Emerson, by way of reaction and protest against instability of soul in the people around him. 'Here or nowhere,' said Goethe inversely to unstable Europeans yearning vaguely westwards, 'here or nowhere is thine America.' To the use of travel for its own ends, Emerson was of course ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... not his own considered views but the reactions of public opinion. As Mr. Britling he saw the war through, and even called it "a war to end war." As Mr. Clissold he asked of what use it had all been. Chesterton speaks of him as a "rather unstable genius," and the genius and instability alike can be seen in his meteor appearances in the New Witness and in his books. Several of these he sent to Gilbert, who wrote (Sept. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... wealth and income distribution, of industrial inter-relations and of the relation between the state and industry are pressing for solution in every important centre of modern economic life. Each constitutes a disturbing element and contributes its mite to the aggregate of social instability and unrest that ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... principal vices of the elective system is that it always introduces a certain degree of instability into the internal and external policy of the State. But this disadvantage is less sensibly felt if the share of power vested in the elected magistrate is small. In Rome the principles of the Government underwent no variation, although the Consuls were changed every year, because the Senate, which ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and favorable agricultural conditions, Cameroon has one of the best-endowed, most diversified primary commodity economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Still, it faces many of the serious problems facing other underdeveloped countries, such as political instability, a top-heavy civil service, and a generally unfavorable climate for business enterprise. The development of the oil sector led rapid economic growth between 1970 and 1985. Growth came to an abrupt halt in 1986, precipitated by steep declines in the prices ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... taken place before one generation, and the judgment was pronounced by another. The spectator could not look at the woolsack, or at the red benches of the Peers, or at the green benches of the Commons, without seeing something that reminded him of the instability of all human things, of the instability of power and fame and life, of the more lamentable instability of friendship. The Great Seal was borne before Lord Loughborough who, when the trial commenced, was a fierce opponent of Mr. Pitt's government, and who was now a member of that government, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... our hearts and hopes with more earnestness on the life to come. Nothing else I am well assured, could have supported me, though I have no ordinary share of fortitude. But I know where to look for consolation, and am finding it where only it can be found. My dear Cottle, the instability of human prospects and enjoyments! You have read my proem to the 'Pilgrimage,' and before the book was published, the child of whom I had thus spoken, with such heartfelt delight, was in his grave! But of this enough. We have many blessings left, abundant all, and of this, which ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... a time of universal defection from the Jewish standard, that calls for admiration, accorded by none so readily as by his companions in arms. Casting up his own spiritual accounts, Heinrich Heine in the latter part of his life wrote of his friend Zunz:[89] "In the instability of a transition period he was characterized by incorruptible constancy, remaining true, despite his acumen, his scepticism, and his scholarship, to self-imposed promises, to the exalted hobby of his soul. A man of thought and action, he created and worked when others hesitated, and sank discouraged," ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... interest, conformity of opinion, and fellowship of study, should finally part in acrimonious opposition. Such a controversy was "bellum plusquam CIVILE," as Lucan expresses it. Why could not faction find other advocates? But among the uncertainties of the human state, we are doomed to number the instability of friendship. Of this dispute I have little knowledge but from the "Biographia Britannica." "The Old Whig" is not inserted in Addison's works: nor is it mentioned by Tickell in his Life; why it was omitted, the biographers doubtless give the true reason—the fact was too ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... treacherous, unreliable, even the best of them. They had not the continuity which belonged to men. Even elderly women—he was thinking of women of the world—even they were not to be trusted. Life was warfare even when war was over. One had to fight always against the instability of those around you. And yet there was planted in a man—at any rate there was planted in him—a deep longing for stability, a need to trust, a desire to attach himself to someone with whom he could be quite unreserved, to whom he could "open out" without ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... for the prosperity of that people who had abjur'd him. Young as Horatio was, and gay by nature, he sometimes loved to indulge the most serious meditations; and this place, as well as the condition of those he served, remonstrating to him the instability of all human greatness, he made this general reflection, that there was nothing truly valuable but virtue, because the owner could be deprived of that only by himself, and not by either the fraud or ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... she maintains this idea, both in her own mind and in that of others. Woe to the woman who, through false modesty, or something still worse, has lost self-respect, for she has deprived herself of her most powerful safeguard against instability of character and seductions of ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... not stay the hand of Death. Slowly but surely the Destroyer came and claimed the young life. It was a sweet, calm evening when the summons came. The sea was like glass, with only that long, gentle swell which tells even in the profoundest calm of Ocean's instability. The sky was intensely blue, save on the western horizon, where the sun turned it into gold. It seemed as if all Nature were quietly indifferent to the sufferings of the shipwrecked men, some of whom had reached that terrible condition of starvation when all the softer feelings ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... which first gives the critic the opportunity of denying the validity of the end as well as the efficiency of the means. If the new agriculturist was meant to be an element of strength to the Roman State, to save it from the selfishness of a narrow oligarchy, the instability of a city mob and the corruption of both, to defend the conquests which the city had won or to push her empire further, it was necessary to prove that he could be of utility both as a voting unit and as a soldier in the legions. His capacity for performing the first function ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... was only that of a great danger happily averted, broke in on the flush of all that was best worth having and doing in existence, and seemed to utter a warning against the instability of life at its brightest and fairest. There was stag-hunting on Ascot Heath, at which the Queen and the Prince were to be present. He was to join in the hunt and she was to follow with Prince Ernest in a pony phaeton. As she stood by ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of that gratitude which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but which lies always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability of human sentiments to end in negation. Polish loyalty will be rooted in something much more solid and enduring, in something that could never be called eternal, but which is, in fact, life-enduring. It will be rooted in the national temperament, which is about ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... mind the strange events in which he had been concerned in the course of his life, and regarding him as a curiosity, and probably as the most extraordinary living instance of the freaks of fortune and instability ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... most fertile, and the best cultivated in the kingdom, as well as the principal seat of foreign commerce. Here the Roman power in Britain shone in its greatest splendour; many good ports were constructed and fortified, large remains of which exist to the present time, melancholy indications of the instability of all mundane things. The prosperity and importance of this district, the chief, or indeed the only, seat of maritime power, at that period, cannot be better illustrated than by the fact of Carausius and Allectus holding the title ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... caused to be printed, appeared to be in grave peril, but a graver one overhung his life. He deemed that he would quit the tribunal condemned by the empty scandal of the crowd, suffering no slight loss, and worsted chiefly through putting faith in false friends, and through his own instability. On the whole, the loss would prove inconsiderable; the danger moderate, but the vexation exceedingly heavy. These results might have sprung from causes other than natural ones; but, on the other hand, such things often come about ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... from a dark golden brown to a bright yellow, has a specific gravity ranging from 1018 to 1036, and a slightly alkaline reaction. When agitated, it has a frothy appearance. Physiologists have experienced much difficulty in studying the character of this secretion from the instability of its constituents ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... discredit assertions. The Dr. could not be influenced by views of interest to give this, or any other account of his lordship; and could certainly have no other incentive, but that of serving his country, by shewing the instability of vice, and, by drawing into light an illustrious penitent, adding one wreath more ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... the ancient Assyrians. Sometimes we cut through the accidental accumulations of centuries, where the clay, far from having been carefully put in place, had rather lost many of its original qualities. Even there, however, the roof of our galleries remained suspended without any signs of instability, as if to bear witness that the Assyrian architect knew what he was about when he trusted so much to the virtues of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... decreased, he found that his authority grew more and more powerful. Did a question arise as to the qualities of a strange plant, it was Rufus Dawes who could pronounce upon it. Were fish to be caught, it was Rufus Dawes who caught them. Did Mrs. Vickers complain of the instability of her brushwood hut, it was Rufus Dawes who worked a wicker shield, and plastering it with clay, produced a wall that defied the keenest wind. He made cups out of pine-knots, and plates out of bark-strips. He worked harder than any three men. Nothing daunted ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of mental and moral fiber at the present day," states Dr. Tredgold.(2) Such populations, this distinguished authority might have added, form the veritable "cultures" not only for contagious physical diseases but for mental instability and irresponsibility also. They are susceptible, exploitable, hysterical, non-resistant to external suggestion. Devoid of stamina, such folk become mere units in a mob. "The habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization," ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Great Britain, under the abnormal conditions which prevailed during the war, and subsequently, these variations were so huge as to constitute a most formidable embarrassment and to contribute, more perhaps than any other single factor, to the unrest and instability by which the industry has been afflicted. But they are always with us, if usually upon a ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... laboratory, and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand and touched the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass swayed like a bough shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... was martial supremacy, and this attained, the State fell into a hasty decline because of the instability ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... and the wine which frothed in their glasses. The music of the violins on the balcony blended with the soft, gay voices of the women. Ernestine was by his side, every one was good-humoured and enjoying his hospitality. Only one face at the table was a reminder of the instability of his fortunes—a face he had grown to hate during the last few hours with a passionate, concentrated hatred. Yet the man was of the same race as these people, his connections were known to many of them, he was making ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... visionary—is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do—tell him I said so. He is a good lawyer—a, very good lawyer—and a fine speaker—is very popular and much respected, and makes many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their confidence by displaying his instability of character..... The land he has now will be ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... being tried, the people took arms, and, proceeding to his house, offered to defend him against the Signory and his enemies. Giano, however, did not wish to put this burst of popular favor to the proof, or trust his life to the magistrates, for he feared the malignity of the latter and the instability of the former; so, in order to remove an occasion for his enemies to injure him, or his friends to offend the laws, he determined to withdraw, deliver his countrymen from the fear they had of him, and, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... hostile invasion of their fair domain. But the Good Duke, despite his popularity, was frequently heard to quote with approval that wise old adage which runs "In peace, prepare for war." Convinced of the instability of all mundane affairs and being, moreover, a man of original notions as well as something of an artist in costumery, he was led to create that picturesque body of men, the local Militia, which survives to this day ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... contrasts, with its strong predilection for theology and metaphysics on one side, and for poetry and romance on the other. Hard, dry and practical in its attitude to the ordinary affairs of life, it is apt to catch fire from a sudden enthusiasm, as if volatility were its dominant note and instability its only fixed attribute. And so it has come about that side by side with tomes of Calvinistic divinity, there has been transmitted to Scotsmen an equally characteristic product of the mind of their race—a body of folksong, of ballad poetry, of legend and of story in that ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... the embellishment of their city, being dated from Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, he sought to astonish the multitude, by attempting to accomplish in a few years, what it would in general require an age to effect. Perhaps, calculating on the instability of his power, he hastened the construction of whatever might render it famous. A French writer observes, "Il vouloit courir a cheval a ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... up on his divan in the elm, was thinking over the extraordinary good fortune that had befallen him. Yet such was his sagacity that even when thus about to attain almost the topmost pinnacle of his ambition, he did not forget the instability of affairs, but sought to confirm his position, or even to advance it. He reflected that Kapchack was not only cunning beyond everything ever known, but he was just now a prey to anxieties, and consumed ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... noble. A kitten jumping on to the table moves him, not because he sees in that gesture a symbol of human aspiration or of feminine instability, the spirit of youth or the pathos of the brute creation, nor yet because it reminds him of pretty things, but because the sight is charming. He will never be appreciated by people who want something ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... temples breathing with oracles no more believed, or arches of triumph which have forgotten the heroic name they were piled up to celebrate, that fill the mind with half so mournful an expression of the instability of human fortunes, as these sad spectacles of exhausted affections, and, as it were, traditionary ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... this defect may be traced the entanglements in which he was prone to land both himself and his party. His resignation from the coalition in 1865 was a mistake. It could not be explained. In leaving the ship before it reached the haven of safety he laid himself open to charges of spleen and instability. Impulsive he was, but not unstable, and his jealousy was not greater than other men's. He was always embarrassed by the fact that the criticisms of his newspaper the Globe, in the exercise of ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... according to their supposed harmony or discrepancy with the evidence of the senses, or the deductions of the mere understanding from that evidence? Exactly the reverse: he disdained to argue even against Transubstantiation on such a ground, well knowing and loudly proclaiming its utter weakness and instability. But it was a leading principle in all his moral and intellectual views to assert the existence in all men equally of a power or faculty superior to, and independent of, the external senses: in this power or faculty he recognized ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... only the life of man is ever hastening to its end, swifter than time itself, without hopes to be renewed, unless in the next, that is unlimited and infinite. For even by the light of nature and without that of faith, many have discovered the swiftness and instability of this present being, and the duration of the eternal ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... what has become of the dream of the mathematical physicist? Is the whole system of Newton, that brilliant triumph of the mechanical method, unfounded and dogmatic? It is the logical instability of this body of knowledge, made manifest in the well-founded scepticism of Hume, that rouses Kant to a re-examination of the whole foundation of natural science. The general outline of his analysis has been developed above. It is of importance here to understand ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... adequate medical care, or sufficient food. Few social assistance programs exist, and the lack of employment opportunities remains one of the most critical problems facing the economy, along with soil erosion and political instability. ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or indeed, of all things, which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... accusation against the kind Pope, who loved men of letters—that the destruction of St. Peter's, afterward ruthlessly carried out by succeeding popes, was in his plan, on the pretext, so constantly employed, and possibly believed in, of the instability of the ancient building. But there is no absolute certainty of evidence, and at all events he might have repented, for he certainly did not do that deed. He began the tribune, however, in the ancient church, which may have been a preparation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... is that at the height of the American crisis in the 1760's, when the real seeds of the Revolution were being sown, the instability of the British parliamentary government precluded a consistent and rational approach to American problems. Lacking internal cohesion, the English government could not meet the threat of external division. It also means that the colonists, ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... debility. My lord, if Sir Tumley Snuffim was to see that delicate creature at this moment, he would not give a—a—THIS for her life.' In illustration of which remark, Mr Wititterly took a pinch of snuff from his box, and jerked it lightly into the air as an emblem of instability. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Wade, was a brilliant but neurotic chemist who had discovered, among other things, the secret of invisibility. Cured of his instability by modern psychomedical techniques, he was hired by Arcot to help build an interplanetary vessel ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... still swinging and swaying and developing when King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... factors of personal goodness II. Unconsciousness III. Reflex action IV. Conscious experience V. Self-consciousness VI. Its degrees VII. Its acquisition VIII. Its instability ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... with low passions and deep-seated rancor. They saw respect disappearing, the church as well as the kingly power losing prestige every day, religious faith all darkened and dimmed in some corner of men's souls, and, amidst all this general instability, they asked themselves with awe, "What are the guiding-reins of the society which is about to be? What will be the props of the new fabric? The foundations are overturned; what will the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of war remains a daunting challenge. The population lacks education and productive skills, particularly in the poverty-ridden countryside, which suffers from an almost total lack of basic infrastructure. Fear of renewed political instability and corruption within the government discourage foreign investment and delay foreign aid. On the brighter side, the government is addressing these issues with assistance from bilateral ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... night was shut close over all. Christopher, about eight o'clock, was standing at the end of the pier with his back towards the open sea, whence the waves were pushing to the shore in frills and coils that were just rendered visible in all their bleak instability by the row of lights along the sides of the jetty, the rapid motion landward of the wavetips producing upon his eye an apparent progress of the pier out to sea. This pier-head was a spot which Christopher enjoyed visiting on such moaning and sighing nights ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... even were it sufficient to account for similar conditions better known. No matter what the condition of the medium's nerve centres may be, this would not account for the supernormal information given during the trance state. No matter how much nervous or mental "instability" or "disintegration" were postulated, it would not at all explain or elucidate the primary question: How is ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... every region of nature and all departments of mental and social life; and, further, shown deducible from the ultimate principle of the persistence of force, through the mediation of several corollaries to it, viz., the instability of the homogeneous under the varied incidence of surrounding forces, the multiplication of effects by action and reaction, and segregation. Finally the principle of equilibration indicates the impassable limit at which evolution passes over into dissolution, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Switzerland to Malta and Egypt. Pitt declared that the French Revolution was the severest trial which Providence had ever yet inflicted on the nations of the earth; and, claiming that there was no security in negotiating with France, owing to her instability, he summed up his case in the Ciceronian phrase: Pacem nolo quia infida. Ministers carried the day by 260 votes to 64; but they ranged nearly the whole of France on the side of the First Consul. No triumph in the field was worth more to him than these Philippics, which seemed to challenge ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... fifty pounds in the divinest form that money can wear—that of necessary food for man and beast: should the risk be run of deteriorating this bulk of corn to less than half its value, because of the instability of a woman? "Never, if I ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... such circumstances it must appear equally rash and gratuitous to suppose, even if it be a delusion, that an institute, which has thus enlisted the sympathies of so many of the greatest minds of all races and of all ages—which is alone stable and progressive amidst instability and fluctuation,—will soon come to an end. Still more absurdly premature is it to raise a paean over its fall, upon every new attack upon it, when it has already survived so many. This, in fact, is a tone ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... matron, who understood men, and was the more disposed to credit them the more distinctly she perceived traces of discontent and instability in Hermon's manner ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seem like cruel reproach; but let it suffice for me to say, that my sentiments have been so much altered by a year's experience, that it is impossible for me ever to become your wife. My love was founded on esteem. I had, indeed, always fears of the instability of your character; therefore, I put your resolution to the proof: the event has proved to me that my fears were but too just. I speak with difficulty; for I cannot easily give you so much pain as I know that I am inflicting at this moment. But," resumed she, in a more ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... said to have been displayed as a standard "to admonish the East of the instability of ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... urged (but most erroneously, in my opinion) that instability is just as apt to be produced by retaining the public lands as a source of revenue as from any other cause, and this is ascribed to a constant fluctuation, as it is said, in the amount of sales. If there were anything in this objection, it equally applies ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the death rate among children from gastro-intestinal troubles is greatly lessened by the exclusion of meat from their dietary. Dr. Clouston, of Edinburgh, an eminent medical authority, states that in his experience, those children who show the greatest tendencies to instability of the brain, insanity, and immoral habits are, as a rule, those who use animal food in excess; and that he has seen a change of diet to milk and farinaceous food produce a marked change in their ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... alliance, so assiduously sought by the Southern Confederacy and so laboriously built up, soon revealed itself to be most unstable. Direct and unmistakable signs of its instability appeared in connection with the first real military test to which it was subjected, the Battle of Pea Ridge or Elkhorn, as it is better known in the South, the battle that stands out in the history of the War of Secession as being the most decisive victory to date of the Union forces in the West ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... we owe not only the neglect of agriculture, but, what is far worse, the demoralization of the community. It generates excessive competition, which of necessity generates fraud. Trade is turned to gambling; and a spirit of mad speculation exposes public and private interests to a disastrous instability. It is, then, no part of the philanthropy which would elevate the laboring body, to exempt them from manual toil. In truth, a wise philanthropy would, if possible, persuade all men of all conditions to mix up a measure of this toil with their other pursuits. The body as well as the mind needs ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... work at an age when it is often impossible to tell whether she will marry or remain single. She is usually unable to know whether or not she will desire to marry. The great majority of girls have therefore no stable conditions upon which to build a choice. The work girls choose and their instability in the work they enter upon are direct results of these unstable conditions. Many girls feel the need of little or no training, and apply for any work obtainable, merely because they anticipate that their industrial career will soon ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... when the supply for customs shall have been coined and the first effervescence has passed away, the emission of silver far below the standard of gold; and when the people become tired of it, disgusted or ruined by its instability, as they soon would be, a fresh clamor may be expected for the remonetization of gold, and another clipping or debasing of gold coins may follow to bring them again into circulation on the basis of silver equivalency. In this slippery descent ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... part of the subject, let it be remembered that there is one other characteristic of the French revolution, as striking as its dreadful and destructive principles; I mean the instability of its Government, which has been of itself sufficient to destroy all reliance, if any such reliance could, at any time, have been placed on the good faith of any of its rulers. Such has been the incredible rapidity with which the revolutions in France have succeeded ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... lay it continually and with uttermost humiliation to heart that we all have Captain Anything's opportunism, his self-interest, his insincerity, his instability, and his secret deceitfulness in ourselves. That man knows little of himself who does not despise and hate himself for his secret self-seeking even in the service of God. For, how the love of praise will seduce and corrupt this man, and the love of gain that man! How easy it is to flatter ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... interesting study to examine these two letters of the Apostle Peter, in order to construct from them a picture of what he became, and to contrast it with his own earlier self when full of self-confidence, rashness, and instability. It took a lifetime for Simon, the son of Jonas, to grow into Peter; but it was done. And the very faults of the character became strength. What he had proved possible in his own case he commands and commends to us, and from the height to which he ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... frequent. The "Socialistic" ministers were exhorting the masses to be patient. All decisions and measures, including the calling of the Constituent Assembly, were being postponed. The insolvency and the instability of the coalition regime ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... phrase about the worst use a man can be put to. Ladies sent flowers to the condemned man's cell. After all, hanging him, poor fellow, would not bring Miss Johnson back to life. However, few spoke of Miss Johnson, she was forgotten by all but one man, who ground his teeth when he realised the instability of public opinion. ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... the corrective measure for temperamental instability and with the advent of many new players in French tennis I would not be surprised to see a marked decrease of unexpected ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... Miguel and Izalco. The latter is called the Lighthouse of Salvador, because it explodes regularly every twenty minutes. The lesser living vents are called infernillos—little hells. Altogether it looks like Central America, as a whole, with its revolutions and its physical and political instability, must be ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... inter-relations and of the relation between the state and industry are pressing for solution in every important centre of modern economic life. Each constitutes a disturbing element and contributes its mite to the aggregate of social instability and unrest that ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... were over. He, too, was being drawn into the whirlpool. No more dreaming among his books; no more waking to the ordinary duties and cares of a reasonable life. As a natural consequence of the feeling of unsettlement, of instability, he had recourse more often than he wished to the old convivial habits, gathering about him once again, at club or restaurant, the kind of society in which he always felt at ease—good, careless, jovial, and often impecunious ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... scarcely more delighted when I first entered this peaceful demesne, than I now was—such is the instability and inconsistency of human nature!—when I escaped from it to the open downs, which had formerly seemed so waste and dreary, The air I breathed felt purer and more bracing. The clouds, riding high upon a summer breeze, drove, in gay succession, over my head, now obscuring the sun, now letting ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... makes them faint at the sight of a naked sword, though in the hands of their best friend, makes them pity extremely those, whom they find in any grief or affliction. Those philosophers, who derive this passion from I know not what subtile reflections on the instability of fortune, and our being liable to the same miseries we behold, will find this observation contrary to them among a great many others, which ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... this stability is so weak that the matter disappears by a sort of explosion more or less rapid. The bodies of the radium group offer an image of this phenomenon — a rather faint image, however, because the atoms of this body have only reached a period of instability when the dissociation is rather slow. It probably precedes another and more rapid period of dissociation capable of producing their final explosion. Bodies such as radium, thorium, etc., represent, no doubt, a state of old age at which all bodies must some day arrive, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... to suppose, even if it be a delusion, that an institute, which has thus enlisted the sympathies of so many of the greatest minds of all races and of all ages—which is alone stable and progressive amidst instability and fluctuation,—will soon come to an end. Still more absurdly premature is it to raise a paean over its fall, upon every new attack upon it, when it has already survived so many. This, in fact, is a tone which, though every age renews it, should ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... placid. The geologist had an irritable temper, and in certain states of the atmosphere his rheumatic twinges made it advisable to shun argument with him. Godwin, moreover, was distinguished by an instability of mood peculiarly trying to an old man's testy humour. Of a sudden, to Mr Gunnery's surprise and annoyance, he would lose all interest in this or that science. Thus, one day the lad declared himself unable to name two stones set before him, felspar and quartz, and when his instructor ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... combine with fluorine. No more than two atoms of oxygen can be made to unite with one carbon atom, nor more than one hydrogen with one chlorine atom. There is thus an apparent choice for the kind and number of associates in molecular structure, and the instability of a molecule depends altogether upon the presence in its neighbourhood of other atoms for which some of the elements in the molecule have a stronger attraction or affinity than they have for the atoms they are now combined with. Thus iron is not stable in the ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... death of a good man be esteemed a punishment by those who believe in the immortality of the soul? They betray the instability of their faith. Yet as a mere philosopher, I cannot agree with the Greeks, on oi Jeoi jilousin apoqnhskei neoV, (Brunck, Poetae Gnomici, p. 231.) See in Herodotus (l. i. c. 31) the moral and pleasing ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... and, after carrying it to an apex, normally goes back and adds to the foundation to carry up the apex still higher and, if prevented from so doing, expends her energy in building the apex up at a sharper angle till instability results. School and kindergarten often lay a disproportionate strain on the tiny accessory muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, that wag the tongue, move the pen, and do fine work requiring accuracy. But still at this stage prolonged work requiring great accuracy ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... six-and-twenty in Paris is not the happiness of six-and-twenty at—say Blois," continued Blondet, taking no notice of the interruption. "And those that proceed from this text to rail at the instability of opinion are either knaves or fools for their pains. Modern medicine, which passed (it is its fairest title to glory) from a hypothetical to a positive science, through the influence of the great analytical school of Paris, has proved beyond a doubt that ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... unreliable, even the best of them. They had not the continuity which belonged to men. Even elderly women—he was thinking of women of the world—even they were not to be trusted. Life was warfare even when war was over. One had to fight always against the instability of those around you. And yet there was planted in a man—at any rate there was planted in him—a deep longing for stability, a need to trust, a desire to attach himself to someone with whom he could be quite unreserved, to whom he could "open out" without ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... cloud fact—their dissipation as the sun rises high in the heavens—is noticed in one of the most tender and pathetic passages in all the prophetic Scriptures. The Lord, by the mouth of Hosea, is mourning over the instability of His people. "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? For your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... projects of the moment, give the people an opportunity to reflect, and allow the good sense of the nation time for exertion. This uncertainty with respect to measures of great importance to every member of the community, this instability in principles which ought, if possible, to be rendered immutable, produced a long train of ills; and is seriously believed to have been among the operating causes of those pecuniary embarrassments, which, at that time, were so general ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... a loyal friend of his true friends; impulsive, erratic, impressionable to an alarming degree." Furthermore, the boy is maturing, traversing the path from boyhood to manhood, is unstable, not only in his growth, but also in his thought, is restless because of his natural instability, and sometimes suffers from headiness and independence. Between boyhood and manhood he travels swiftly, the scenery changes quickly as he travels—but he is traveling to manhood. No railway train or vehicle can keep pace with his speed. Morning sees him a million miles farther ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... second Degree, the Initiate was taught the Unity of the Godhead, the happiness of the patriarchs, the destruction by the Deluge, the depravity of the heart, and the necessity of a mediator, the instability of life, the final destruction of all created things, and the restoration of the world in a more perfect form. They inculcated the Eternity of the Soul, explained the meaning of the doctrine of the Metempsychosis, and held the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... cruel to discredit assertions. The Dr. could not be influenced by views of interest to give this, or any other account of his lordship; and could certainly have no other incentive, but that of serving his country, by shewing the instability of vice, and, by drawing into light an illustrious penitent, adding one wreath more ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all jumbled together in one unnatural and discordant mass. Every ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of the struggle, with a final grimace and hysterical giggle led the retreat across the poop and down the poop-ladder. Never had I seen a finer exemplification of mob psychology. Shorty, the most unstable-minded of the individuals who composed this mob, by his own instability precipitated the retreat in which the mob joined. When he broke before the steady discharge of the automatic in the hand of the mate, on the instant the rest broke with him. Least-balanced, his balance was the balance ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... its own ideal; his philosophy was a disallowance of all other reality; and his negations only defined and brightened his faith. Doubt, question and speculation, mystery and anomaly, the illusions of sense, the instability of natures, all that was irrational in life, with its certainties of logic and hazards of chance, all that was unproven in religion, dubious in received opinion, obscure in the destiny of man, were but glimpses of a larger unity, vistas ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... changes suggest is that at the height of the American crisis in the 1760's, when the real seeds of the Revolution were being sown, the instability of the British parliamentary government precluded a consistent and rational approach to American problems. Lacking internal cohesion, the English government could not meet the threat of external division. It also means that the colonists, especially the Virginians, saw parliament as ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... entertain now no sort of apprehension of his legal difficulties, and spoke of them as topics already adjusted. Nay, for that matter, he seemed to have no serious sense of any subject, whatever might be its personal or general interest; but, passing from point to point, exhibited that instability of mental vision which may not inaptly be compared to that wandering glance which is usually supposed to distinguish and denote, in the physical eye, the presence of insanity. It was not often now that he indulged, while speaking to me, in that manner ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... foot of the stairs, talking with the clergyman, a stout and unctuous figure. Bobby noticed that the great stolid form of the doctor was ill at ease. From his thickly bearded face his reddish eyes gleamed forth with a fresh instability. ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... all the levity and instability of the Negro character; light- minded as the Abyssinians,—described by Gobat as constant in nothing but inconstancy,—soft, merry, and affectionate souls, they pass without any apparent transition into a state of fury, when they are capable of ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... one is apt to lose it, is a stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future, each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability, with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure. And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth, take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... town. And qualitatively as well as quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the cause. We find this condition of things in ail organic matter. Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of albuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two specimens, treated in what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite different ways. You know about the invisible factors of fermentation, and how the fate of a jar of milk—whether ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... to the spring of 1849, passed in a many-sided development of my position and temper, as I have described them, that is to say, in a sort of dull agitation. My latest artistic occupation had been the five-act drama, Jesus of Nazareth, just mentioned. Henceforth I lingered on in a state of brooding instability, full of expectation, yet without any definite wish. I felt fully convinced that my activity in Dresden, as an artist, had come to an end, and I was only waiting for the pressure of circumstances to shake ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... soul, even while it took short flights to the troubled waters. Of her firm footing she was exultingly proud. She stood high, close to danger, without giddiness. If at intervals her soul flew out like lightning from the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it seemed to her), the suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of impressions of the mornings at Lugano—her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these reinforced her. She did not ask herself why she should have to seek them for aid. In other respects her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of intermixture. Even when flowing in a regular channel there is a continued interchange of position of the different parts of a stream; the retardation of the bed causes variations in the velocity, which produce whirls and eddies and a general instability in the movement of the water in different parts of the section—the result being that the water at the bottom soon finds its way to the surface, and the reverse. I found by experiments on straight canals in earth and masonry that colored ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... Ashamed of her instability, and feeling herself unworthy and no longer pure as absolution had made her, she went that afternoon to St. Joseph's, and in confession laid the matter before Monsignor Mostyn. Regarding the money question, he approved of what she had written ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... adventurer who chases the chain of necessity to the sources of this grand instability, is merged at once in a haze of speculations, beautiful as sunlight through morning mists, but uncertain as the veriest chimeras. While beyond the idea of comprehensive motion the colossal symmetry of Truth expands in ultimate ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... cried. 'You rave! I have no cause for anger. In every way I have been taught my weakness, my instability, and my unfitness for the world. I am a plexus of weaknesses, an impotent Prince, a doubtful gentleman; and you yourself, indulgent as you are, have twice reproved my levity. And shall I be angry? I may feel the unkindness, but I have ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with fame, and what the world calls success, his mind goaded by bitter and repentant recollection, his best hope was to find a retirement in which he might nurse the melancholy that was to accompany him to his grave. "Yet why should an individual mourn over the instability of his hopes, and the vanity of his prospects? The ancient chiefs, who erected these enormous and massive towers 'to be the fortress of their race and the seat of their power', could they have dreamed the day was to come, when the last of their descendants should be expelled, a ruined wanderer, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... which was only that of a great danger happily averted, broke in on the flush of all that was best worth having and doing in existence, and seemed to utter a warning against the instability of life at its brightest and fairest. There was stag-hunting on Ascot Heath, at which the Queen and the Prince were to be present. He was to join in the hunt and she was to follow with Prince Ernest in a pony phaeton. As she stood by a window in ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... 'doldrums,' where it is nearly always calm, and very hot. There is also a belt of air running from Southern Europe to the West Indies where the north-east trade winds blow all the year round. Between this perpetual calm of the doldrums and the perpetual wind of the trades is a region of atmospheric instability. ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... attempt to conceal that I am gratified by your impatience for the hour of meeting, I yet feel myself under the necessity of delaying that hour beyond the time originally fixed. Do not think me unkind for such an exercise of my power, nor accuse me of instability without first hearing my reasons. In the course of my journey from Churchhill I had ample leisure for reflection on the present state of our affairs, and every review has served to convince me that they ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... on each side of her throne, became impatient: they talked about the fickleness of the sex, the impossibility of inducing them to make up their minds; they whispered wise saws and sayings from Ferdistan and others, about the caprice of women, and the instability of their natures, and the more their legs ached from such perpetual demand upon their support, the more bitter did they become in their remarks. Poor, prosing old fools! the beauteous princess had long made up her mind, and ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... never bear to remain in one place for any length of time together. He is now going to sell the property he only bought last year. There is an instability about him; ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... my own instability of character. I feel myself the victim of a thousand plans and purposes, which change as soon and as often as they are made. I am afraid, sir, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... that did no harm—is, in the first place, identical. Next, it does not lie in the fact that the ships were insufficiently armored to keep out big shell. Next, the fatal explosion was not caused by a mine or by a torpedo. Lastly, it is in no sense due to any instability or any other dangerous characteristic of the propellants or explosives carried on board. I am free to confess that when I first heard of these ships going down as rapidly as they did, one of two conclusions seemed to be irresistible—either a shell had penetrated the lightly armored ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which Mr. Belloc ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... answered. Yet on Sunday he must answer again. How he wished Mrs. Shiffney had not called upon him a second time! In her persistence he read her worldly cleverness. She divined the instability which he now felt within him. It must be so. It was so. The first time he had met her he had had a feeling as if to her almost impertinent eyes he were transparent. And she had evidently seen ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... precipitately to a heap of broken stone and sand. The cliff had been shattered in some convulsion of nature, or loosened and disintegrated by the elements, and enormous masses of it had fallen into the gulch. These masses appeared to be in a state of instability, and it was not clear to Haig, from where he lay, how a trail could ever have been picked out among those jutting rocks and slides of debris, or how, once found, it could have remained intact on that shifting foundation. Was it possible that any living thing had ever made its ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... the point of view of tariff history have already been noted.[3] The extremely high rates levied under that legislation caused a slight reduction in customs revenue in 1891 and a sharp decline in 1892. Moreover the coincidence of instability in the currency system, business depression and the relatively high Wilson-Gorman tariff schedules of 1894 continued the decline of income from customs during ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... foreign Powers. The notice would put an end to one kind of intrigue, one kind of rumor and suspicion, which is holding industry and education back and which is keeping China in a state of unrest and instability. It would establish a period of comparative quiet in which whatever constructive forces exist may come to the front. The second measure would be more extreme. The diplomacy of the United States should take the lead in making it clear that unless the promises about the disbanding of the army, ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... better part, will seem for a while as it were annihilated by the quiet in which their virtue and moderation incline them to enjoy the blessings of government. Besides that the opinion of the mere vulgar is a miserable rule even with regard to themselves, on account of their violence and instability. So that if you were to gratify them in their humor to-day, that very gratification would be a ground of their dissatisfaction on the next. Now as all these rules of public opinion are to be collected with great difficulty, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in 2006. The government has embraced an expansionary fiscal policy to reduce poverty by improving education, infrastructure, and foreign and domestic investment and pursuing market-oriented reforms, although energy shortages, instability in neighboring states, and lack of adequate transportation linkages to other countries continue to ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Good lack, good lack, to think of the instability of human affairs! Nothing certain in this world—most deceived when most confident—fools of ...
— St. Patrick's Day • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... the instability of my mind, that my "Beloved is unto me as a fountain sealed." But, he adds, I feel a little tendered this evening, on reading over a few comfortable expressions in a letter ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... an organism and a fully developed brain; in the psychologic order, the antagonism between the pure subjectivity of the imagination and the objectivity of ratiocinative processes; in other words, between mental instability and stability. As for the results, they appear only in the third period, the resultant ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... unfortunate to the nation than the preceding designs upon Rochefort; less disgraceful to the commanders, but equally the occasion of ridicule and triumph to our enemies. Indeed, the unhappy consequences of the political disputes at home, the instability of the administration, and the frequent revolutions in our councils, were strongly manifested by that langour infused into all our military operations, and general unsteadiness in our pursuits. Faction, in the mother-country, produced divisions and misconduct in the colonies. No ambition to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... against the kind Pope, who loved men of letters—that the destruction of St. Peter's, afterward ruthlessly carried out by succeeding popes, was in his plan, on the pretext, so constantly employed, and possibly believed in, of the instability of the ancient building. But there is no absolute certainty of evidence, and at all events he might have repented, for he certainly did not do that deed. He began the tribune, however, in the ancient church, which may have been a preparation for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... had one excuse for his instability, which Richard had not; for Clarence, having married the Earl of Warwick's daughter, was, of course, brought into very close connection with the earl, and was subjected greatly to his influence. Accordingly, whatever course Warwick decided to take, it ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... so far violates the conventions as to start with a mother whose moral instability is a worry to her children, and a hero who longs to be a practical builder despite a parental command to follow art—such a tale can at least claim the merit of originality. Mr. J. D. BERESFORD would be fully justified in claiming this and much more for An Imperfect Mother (COLLINS). Here is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... controversies and bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of the ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... book. The question of charm may be taken into consideration, for any Chinaman will bear witness to the seductive effect of a gaily-dressed girl picking her way on tiny feet some three inches in length, her swaying movements and delightful appearance of instability conveying a general sense of delicate grace quite ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... the character of Ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the event," united to immense intellectual power, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... may partly correct the Tendencies of the Democracy Influence which the American Democracy has exercised on the Laws relating to Elections Public Officers under the control of the Democracy in America Arbitrary Power of Magistrates under the Rule of the American Democracy Instability of the Administration in the United States Charges levied by the State under the rule of the American Democracy Tendencies of the American Democracy as regards the Salaries of public Officers Difficulties of distinguishing ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... expeditionary force to the 38th moon that the Nirvans themselves refused to visit. They tried to dissuade us but, being of a much younger species, we were less plagued by caution and went anyway. The mountains of this little moon are up to fifteen miles high, causing a state of instability that is chronic. Walking down those alabaster valleys was a more awesome experience than any galactic vista I have ever encountered. Our aesthetic sense proved stronger than common sense alertness and seven of us were ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... in his forcible chin, energy in the large lines of his mouth, decision in his clear-cut features. Yet there was something contradictory in his face. And the flitting melancholy, already remarked, surely hinted at some secret instability, perhaps known only to Harding himself, perhaps known ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... general reader, than that which comprised the fortunes of Wolsey. The eventful life of the Cardinal, checkered as it was by the vicissitudes of fortune, his sudden elevation, and finally his more sudden fall and death, display an appalling picture of "the instability of human affairs." This prelate and statesman, who even aspired to the Papal throne itself, "was an honest poore man's sonne in the towne of Ipswiche,"[1] who having received a good education, and being endowed with great capacity, soon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... of thrilling and dreadful interest that occurred in that small South American town on the occasion of the earthquake. Yet, awful though these were, they were as nothing compared with the more stupendous calamities that have been caused by earthquakes in that land of instability, not only in times long past, but in times so very recent that the moss cannot yet have begun to cover, nor the weather to stain, the tombstones and monuments of those ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... amazing," Omar observed. "Even her personal attendants whom I have questioned are ignorant of the direction she hath taken. They declare that she escaped within ten minutes of the blowing up of the palace-gate. The catastrophe alarmed her, and she saw in the fall of these defences the instability of her throne." ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... better; but he was never a mere slavish translator. So in the "Knight's Tale" he may be held in some points to have deviated disadvantageously from his original; but, on the other hand, in the "Clerk's Tale," he inserts a passage on the fidelity of women, and another on the instability of the multitude, besides adding a touch of nature irresistibly pathetic in the exclamation of the faithful wife, tried beyond her power of concealing the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Forte to the Piano. A beautiful Messa di Voce,[14] from a Singer that uses it sparingly, and only on the open Vowels, can never fail of having an exquisite Effect. Very few of the present Singers find it to their Taste, either from the Instability of their Voice, or in order to avoid all Manner of Resemblance of the odious Ancients. It is, however, a manifest Injury they do to the Nightingale, who was the Origin of it, and the only thing which the Voice can well ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... touched with compassion towards the unfortunate queen; and all her fears and jealousies being now laid asleep, by the consideration of that ruin and infamy in which Mary's conduct had involved her, she began to reflect on the instability of human affairs, the precarious state of royal grandeur, the danger of encouraging rebellious subjects; and she resolved to employ her authority for alleviating the calamities of her unhappy kinswoman. She sent Sir Nicholas Throgmorton ambassador to Scotland, in order to remonstrate both with Mary ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... somewhat slender fallen tree. It was then that Aladdin saw him show fear. Bullets tore up the bark of the tree, and pine needles, clipped from the trees overhead, fell in showers. But he did not mind that. It was the slenderness and instability of the fallen tree that froze the marrow in his bones: would it bear his one hundred and twenty-four pounds, or would it precipitate him, an awful drop of ten feet, into the softest of muds at the bottom of the gully, where a sickeningly striped but in reality harmless ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... in a great political structure were of the noblest, rarest, most enduring and beneficent; the faults that marred the beauty and consistency of their own character, were the exaggerations of their virtues, and arose from the frailty and instability of the human heart, even when most governed and inspired by the highest motives. The principles remain steadfast, immovable, immortal; the defects we can but grieve over and forgive for the sake of the grandeur they only marred but could ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... desire on the part of either government to retreat from its main position, though it does not follow that either sought to bring about a renewal of the war. Whitworth constantly reported that no formidable armaments were being prepared, and clung for months to a belief that Napoleon, knowing the instability of his own power and the ruinous state of his finances, would ultimately give way. On the other hand, Talleyrand and Joseph Bonaparte never ceased to hope that Great Britain would make ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... what is to be the subject of examination, and where it is that we are to observe those operations which must determine either the stability or the instability of this land on which ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... after decades of war remains a daunting challenge. The population lacks education and productive skills, particularly in the poverty-ridden countryside, which suffers from an almost total lack of basic infrastructure. Fear of renewed political instability and corruption within the government discourage foreign investment and delay foreign aid. On the brighter side, the government is addressing these issues with assistance from ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... hope—the triumph of youthful love, there is yet something irresistibly affecting in the earnestness with which he expresses that passion; something which adds most deeply to the interest which its expression is calculated to excite, by reminding one of the instability of human enjoyment, and of the many misfortunes which the course of life may bring with it to destroy the visions of inexperienced affection. We have already mentioned, that in the expression of profound emotion and deep suffering, the countenance of Talma is altogether ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... he does we can descry the school-master who arrived at the front rather late in life. One needs only to go over the record and mark how often he has reversed himself to detect a certain mental and temperamental instability clearly indicating a lack of fixed or resolute intellectual purpose. This is characteristic of an excess in education; of the half baked mind overtrained. The overeducated mind fancies himself a doctrinaire when he is in point ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... wearily into the little grave. What was the use of asking Death where her sting was, before that small, dark hole in the ground? And then my thoughts escaped me altogether—away into matters of life—and no very high matters at that—ships, freights, business. In the instability of his emotions man resembles deplorably a monkey. I was disgusted with my thoughts—and I thought: Shall I be able to get a charter soon? Time's money. . . . Will that Jacobus really put good business in my way? I must go and see him in a day ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... which requires a succession of rebellions to secure reforms afterwards admitted to be reasonable cannot be a good form of government. These agitations have inflicted grave material and moral injury on Ireland. The instability of the political system has prejudiced natural economic development. Capital will not be invested in industries where no one is certain about the future. And because the will of the people was so passionately set on political freedom ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... first day of the month Ivan received a letter from Kashkine, explaining these things, giving a minute plan of the arrangements, and eagerly congratulating Ivan on his assured triumph. For, well as he knew his friend's instability, Constantine never for an instant doubted that Ivan would consent to appear at a reunion for which, as Kashkine knew, he had been longing, bitterly, ever since the sudden accession to his father's wealth and title had barred him from the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the carriage jars the windows. Rattling refers directly to the sound produced by shaking. To joggle is to shake slightly; as, a passing touch joggles the desk on which one is writing. A thing trembles that shakes perceptibly and with an appearance of uncertainty and instability, as a person under the influence of fear; a thing shivers when all its particles are stirred with a slight but pervading tremulous motion, as a human body under the influence of cold; shuddering is a more pronounced movement of a similar kind, in human beings often the effect of emotional ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... it is urged (but most erroneously, in my opinion) that instability is just as apt to be produced by retaining the public lands as a source of revenue as from any other cause, and this is ascribed to a constant fluctuation, as it is said, in the amount of sales. If there were anything in this objection, it equally applies ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... and soke of Horncastre, with all rights, appurtenances, &c., to hold to himself, his heirs and assigns for ever," and that he, the said Edward, "can give and grant to the said Robert, bishop, an annual rent of 28 pounds 6s. 8d." We have, however, in this case an illustration of the instability even of royal decrees, in that on the demise of that worthy prince, to whom the realm and Church of England owe so much, his successor, Queen Mary, in the very next year, A.D. 1553, cancelled this sale, and a document ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or indeed, of all things, which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... Parthenia Instability of Human Greatness Happiness of the Shepherd's Life Marriage of Christ and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the King of Bavaria to speak to von Doenniges? Would not the Catholic Bishop Ketteler help him?—he would become a Catholic. And ever present an insane belief in the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it certain. The "No"—her first word to him at their first meeting—resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise, hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in the relatively small portion of linguistic history that lies open to inspection; or that there are certain favorable conditions that make for profound morphological disturbances from without, say a peculiar instability of linguistic type or an unusual degree of cultural contact, conditions that do not happen to be realized in our documentary material; or, finally, that we have not the right to assume that a language may easily exert a remolding morphological ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... it should be patronized, or waiting to discover whether it is likely to become permanently established. Mr. Kelly's wanderings in early life seem to have tinctured his later career with the hue of instability. Ever, it would seem, ready to enlist in any new enterprise, he was led to abandon those occupations, which, if persevered in, would probably have been triumphant. His life was a constant series of changes, in which ill-luck seems to have continually triumphed, because ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... untitled gentleman from a new, almost unknown, country, was easily and quickly one of the most brilliant members. Utterly unawed by the splendid company in which he found himself, he valued it at its true worth and was keenly and amusingly observant of its pretensions, its shams, its flippancy, its instability, its charm. Soon he had become as great a favorite as Mr. Jefferson himself, though winning his enviable position by qualities the very opposite of that gentleman's. Mr. Morris rivalled the Parisians themselves in caustic wit, perfect manners, and the thousand and one social ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... fire-making. It seemed to him afterwards that his judgment was strangely at fault; he perceived naught of import in the shallow brightness of the young man's eyes, like the polished surface of jet; in the instability of his jealousy, his anger; in his hap-hazard, mercurial temperament. Once he might have noted how flat were the spaces beneath the eyes, how few were the lines that defined the lid, the socket, the curve of ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... H{2}O{2}. Water, as is well known, is a very stable body, and although it can be decomposed, yet it requires some considerable power to effect it. Now the extra quantity of oxygen which may be considered to have been introduced into water to convert it into peroxide has also introduced an element of instability, the extra quantity of oxygen being ever ready to combine with some other body for which it has a greater affinity than for the water. This property can be utilised in the bleaching industry with great advantage, true bleaching ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... attempts on the part of rivals in France to shake his hold, but also the active enmity of the Bourbon king of Spain, Philip V.,—an enmity which seems to have dated from an intrigue of Orleans, during the late war, to supplant Philip on the Spanish throne. There was therefore a feeling of instability, of apprehension, in the governments of England and France, which influenced the policy of both. As regards the relations of France and Spain, the mutual hatred of the actual rulers stood for a while in the way of the friendly accord Louis XIV. had hoped ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... to instability In a moment falls to the ground, And as it has the brilliancy of glass It also ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... thriving one!" Then, turning to his wife, he should say, "To me Brihaspati has given thee; obtaining offspring through me, thy husband, live with me a hundred autumns." The intention of the ceremony is plainly to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It is the wish expressed in Keats's ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... their true relation to the terrestrial phenomena accurately established; so that his very proofs were monumental, and became themselves the advertisements of his profound misjudgment. But meanwhile he is the Admiral of the Ocean Seas, and can "make it so"; and accordingly, in a state of mental instability, he makes the Gulf of Paria to be a slope of earth immediately below the Garden of Eden, although fortunately he does not this time provide a sworn affidavit of trembling ships' boys to confirm ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... them from external injury. There was some reason, however, to doubt the efficacy of this protection; for, as the spring-tides approached, the numerous grounded masses around the shores of the bay began to evince symptoms of instability, one or two having fallen over, and others turned round; so that these masses might be looked upon rather as dangerous neighbours, likely to create a premature disruption of the ice, than as the means of security, which, in seas not subject to any considerable rise of tide, they had so often ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... remarkable that with such instability his moral nature should continue uncorrupted; but this I believe he owed chiefly to his love and admiration of his brother. For my part, I could not help liking him much. There was a half-plaintive playfulness about him, alternated with gloom, and occasionally with wild merriment, which ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... children from gastro-intestinal troubles is greatly lessened by the exclusion of meat from their dietary. Dr. Clouston, of Edinburgh, an eminent medical authority, states that in his experience, those children who show the greatest tendencies to instability of the brain, insanity, and immoral habits are, as a rule, those who use animal food in excess; and that he has seen a change of diet to milk and farinaceous food produce a marked change ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... "inspiration," the late Mr. Stevenson "Brownies," and the scientist "unconscious cerebration." A man of talent has a good Working Consciousness, a man of genius a good Working Sub-Consciousness. Hence the frequent mental instability of genius. The Infant Prodigy's feats are done by his Sub-Consciousness. Instinct is Racial Genius, Genius is Individual Instinct. The highest Genius is sane. A Shakespeare or a Goethe has both a good ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the highest merit; his scanty other works are forgotten. The Coplas por la muerte de su padre, beautifully translated by Longfellow, contain some laments for the writer's personal loss, but more general reflections upon the instability of worldly glory. It is not to be thought that this famous poem is in any way original in idea; the theme had already been exploited to satiety, but Manrique gave it a superlative perfection of form and a contemporary application which left ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... first school, and only 9.6 per cent had taught as many as four schools. Few teachers, the report showed, have taught more than one or two years in a school, while the average teaching life of a rural teacher is three and three quarters school years. The instability of the profession is so great that it is necessary for the state of South Dakota to recruit annually about one third of its ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... see the truth, once again, in the acknowledged instability of the passional element in human nature—particularly in man. It is nothing short of amazing to see this very instability urged as a reason why the marriage tie should be still further weakened, as though man should deliberately ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... of the severity of fate. Would any modern audience be found, which would be prepared to sit for a whole summer day listening eagerly to the grand expression by such poets as Aeschylus and Sophocles of the power of Nemesis, the instability of all prosperity, the misfortunes which hunt those who have the ill luck to displease the gods? Surely not. And not in Greek tragedy only, but in elegiac poetry and in epigram, we find perfect reflections of our most gloomy moods. But for such expressions of sorrow and ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... are assured that he "would go nowhere unless the Evangelical Christians of the place united in an invitation and the ministers were ready to cooperate." But the whole affair was of course intensely distasteful to unemotional people; the very fact that a man could be converted argued his instability; and it is unquestionably true that Boston's attitude toward Mr. Durant was reflected for many years in her attitude toward the college ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... especially girls, were killed by their parents either before or after birth. The result was a decay of the maternal instinct and the custom of farming out children to strangers. This contributed to the excess of infant mortality, the degeneration of morals and the instability of the family.[1011] So in Japan the pressure of population led to infanticide and the sale of daughters to a life of ignominy, which took them out of the child-bearing class.[1012] Nor was ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... no new attack of my disease, or fresh doubt that I have as to my recovery, has led me to take this step of communicating to you my intentions, for, thank God, I feel very well and hopeful; but taught by observation and experience the instability of all human things, and even of the life to which we are so much attached, and which is, nevertheless, a mere bubble; and knowing, moreover, that my state of health brings me more within the danger of death, I have thought ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... doctor, if you happen to have a little money lying idle, I can put you on to a good thing—a very good thing indeed. I don't know, I'm sure, whether you keep an eye on the fluctuations of the share-market. If so, you'll no doubt have noticed the ... let me say the extreme instability of 'Porepunkahs.' After making an excellent start, they have dropped till they are now to be had at one-twentieth ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... stay the New England persecutors was effectual in preventing further martyrdoms, but the colonial authorities, trusting in the remoteness of their situation, and perhaps in the supposed instability of the royal government, shortly renewed their severities in all other respects. Catharine's fanaticism had become wilder by the sundering of all human ties; and wherever a scourge was lifted, there was she to receive the blow; and whenever a dungeon was unbarred, thither she came ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the organization of the diamond trust Rhodes gave another evidence of his business acumen. He saw that the disorganized marketing of the output would lead to instability of price. He therefore formed the Diamond Syndicate in London, composed of a small group of middlemen who distribute the whole Kimberley output. In this way the available supply is ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... thorough-going conservative we are likely to picture him as a stay-at-home person, a barnacle fastened to one spot. We take for granted that aversion to locomotion and aversion to change are the same thing. But in thinking thus we leave out of account the inherent instability of human nature. Everybody likes a little change now and then. If a person cannot get it in one way, he gets it in another. The stay-at-home gratifies his wandering fancy by making little alterations in his too-familiar surroundings. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
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