"Mundane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Material substances or mundane formations, astro- nomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of specu- 209:27 lative theories, based on the hypothesis of material law or life and intelligence resident in matter, will ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... gray mystery of the stars, and passed back through the quiet, lamp-lit room and down the slippery stairs that led to the mundane world; and with each step he took, each breath he drew, the words from Louise repeated themselves, justifying all things, glorifying all things: 'C'est la ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... feet, or listening to him while he whispered sweet praises of her beauty, had never occurred to her; had she dreamed it possible that he could do so, half her admiration of him would have vanished. No, there was nothing earthly, nothing mundane in Agatha's love, for though she did love the fallen hero of La Vendee, the patriot postillion of St. Florent, she did not shed a tear when she heard that he was dragging his wounded body to St. Laurent, that he might have the comfort of her tender care ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... much more worth while in the ears of the mundane have followed, but those first days of free lancing seem to me to be among the choicest in a journalistic adventurer's experience. Encounters with a variety of celebrities since then have proved no whit ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... times could, after his death, when probably his successor had enough to do to sustain his new authority, command such labour merely to provide for himself a tomb. If this tomb were raised to the hero whose name it bears immediately after his death, and in his mundane character, he must have been such a king as never existed in Ireland, even in the late Christian times. Even Brian of the Tributes himself, could not have commanded such a sepulture, or anything like it, living though he did, probably, two thousand years later than that Eocaidh Mac ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... rows of intricate calculations, showing that men and women alike have had during their supposed hours of prayer and praise no thoughts but of business or of pleasure, of the desires or the anxieties of the lower form of mundane existence. ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... foot first appeared when the backboned creatures came out of the waters to live upon the dry land. But all mundane things (not excepting politics) tend to move in circles, ending where they began; and so the foot, if we follow it far enough, will take us back into water. See how the rat—I mean our common, omnivorous, scavenging, thieving, poaching ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... impression is singularly vivid and quieting for days, and can never be wholly lost. A startling nearness to the gigantic forces of Nature and their inconceivable operation seems to have been established. Personalities and towns and cities, and hates and jealousies, and even mundane hopes, grow very small and very ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks, as if they had died of toothache."[112] Venice excelled in this rotund and sweltering sculpture. Yet it cannot be wholly condemned. Though artificial, theatrical and mundane, its technical supremacy cannot be denied. The amazing ease with which these huge monuments are contrived, and the absolute sense of mastery shown by the sculptor over the material are qualities too rare to be lightly overlooked. ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... imitation of older heathen altars—a theory supported by reference to the stones called Petroma, near the temple of Eleusinian Damater in Arcadia: The Philistines pointed to the Deluge in their hieroglyphics of the serpent and mundane egg, the history which the serpent is supposed to designate being that of Noah, and the egg being reckoned an emblem of the ark, from the circumstance of it containing the rudiments of future life. The serpent is not unfrequently represented when reference ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... and popular, but I like better the first famous English translator than the original Latin author. Boethius wrote in the sixth century as a fallen man, as one to whom philosophy came in lieu of the mundane glory which he had once possessed, and had now lost. But Alfred the Great turned the "Consolations" into English at the moment of his greatest power. He translated it in the year 886, when king on a secure throne; in his brightest days, when the ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... hostess. "What can Nature be about when she turns off the things they christen beauties from her pottery-wheel? Why, they are hardly worth the trouble of setting to work at them. But such cabinet pieces as you and I! there the creative power, or the principle of nature, or the soul of the world, or the mundane animal, or whatever title one chooses to give the thing, can look at its product with a certain degree of complacency and satisfaction. For it has your curved lines: it starts off into noticeable angles; it is jagged like corals; ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... one and the same time to sin and to receive the penalty of sin. Here culminates repeated violence to the moral law. When one is sated with ordinary lusts and is bent on sweeping the whole gamut of mundane experiences and excitations, that one invariably descends to the unnatural and extraordinary, and lives a life ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... art, and abandon themselves to pleasure and money-making. The Roman grandees divide among themselves the lands and riches of the world, and this dwelling-place of princes looms up the proud centre of mundane glory and power. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... and envy flies, Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays, are mine, If by your looks my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big, Your fateful arms, the goose-quill, and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's somb'rous seal impress'd, Mysterious terrors, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... all that sort of thing. I must admit there have been times when I have almost imagined that the shades of three generations of more or less distinguished Smiths were holding an indignation meeting to protest against this golf invasion of their mundane haunts. ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... soever. There is, moreover, a truth of fiction more veracious than the truth of fact, as that of the Poet, which represents to us things and events as they ought to be, rather than servilely copies them as they are imperfectly imaged in the crooked and smoky glass of our mundane affairs. It is this which makes the speech of Antonius, though originally spoken in no wider a forum than the brain of Shakspeare, more historically valuable than that other which Appian has reported, by as much as the understanding of the Englishman was more comprehensive than ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... superstitious, being implicit believers in signs, charms, apparitions, etc.; and most of them, also, entertain the opinion that the moon exerts an occult influence over many things of vital importance to the residents of this mundane sphere; and no power that could be brought to bear could induce some of them to plant corn, make soap, kill pigs, or perform many other important duties in certain phases of the moon, for they would be positive if they did it would result in ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... have all been the victims of an unfortunate chain of misunderstandings. Had the organizers of this great charity consulted a few paper-makers before inaugurating the works at Scheveningen, much unpleasantness might have been averted, many lives might, alas, have been spared. But—well—such mundane persons as ourselves were probably unknown to you and unthought-of; the milk is spilt, is it not so? Let us ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... one side all to himself, and upon it there were no china plates, silver spoons, knives, forks, and dishes of fruit, but pads, pens, and ink in great quantity. It was evident that Boswell's reportorial duties did not end with his labors in the mundane sphere. ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... smile at this little pleasantry which Planchet had aimed at him, in order to try his strength in mundane facetiousness. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... ego was the sole ego in the universe—in fact, composed the universe? He wished to be informed whether he could possibly be nothing but an impression or somebody else's ego; and said finally, in a despondent tone, that it was hopeless to regard this mundane scheme as anything but a subjective phenomenon, mere Schein or maya, and that he ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... to know Andrew Henderson and not to feel that some strange peculiarity set him apart from other men. In his ascetic face, in his large, light-blue eyes, in his extraordinary air of abstraction and aloofness from mundane things, there was something that fascinated and repelled; and with a wondering interest the boy studied these things, trying in his unformed way to reconcile them with his narrow experience ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... not the thrilling beauty of the covey of pink-lined dawn-clouds that made her eyes grow round, big and bright; that brought a faint flush to her cheeks; a quick intake of breath. It was something much more mundane that held her attention—the superb spectacle of Kurt Walters, mounted. The lean, brown horseman sat on his saddle as easily as though it were a cushion in a rocking chair. He was talking to three or four cattlemen ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... her until she had disappeared, and then, like a man waking from a trance, he turned to the mundane ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... mundane eye, have been an element of the ridiculous in the spectacle of the rector of St. John's counting his gains, since he had chosen—with every indication of insanity—to bring the pillars of his career crashing down on his own head. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was of mundane things. Roy vividly described his sensations, riding through the City; the culminating incident, and his recognition ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... thought still dallied with the subject of the monastic life, as lived by those same pious Benedictines here in England long ago. Its reasoned rejection of mundane agitations, its calm, its leisure, its profound and ardent scholarship were vastly to his taste,—A man touching middle-age might do worse, surely, than spend his days between worship and learning, thus?—He saw, and approved, its social office in offering sanctuary to the fugitive, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... what dramas, what joys, have had this parlour for a setting! It is there that the life of the cloister touches mundane existence; it is there the nuns receive their future companions in the religious life and their weeping families; it is there the parents of those in the convent infirmary come to hear from the doctor's lips the decrees of life or death; for the convent is not only a retreat, it is an asylum ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... his field-glass to his eye in search of the unregenerated aborigines. The swell tourists are much swollen with travel; they loosen the belts of their Norfolks, and at intervals affect a languid interest in this mundane sphere. There are delightful people on board—many of them—and not a few others. There are bevies of girls—all young, all pretty; and all, or nearly all, bubbling over ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Muleteer mulisto. Mulish obstina. Multiple multoblo. Multiplicand multigato. Multiplication multigado. Multiplied multigita. Multiplier multiganto. Multiply (trans.) multigi. Multiply (intrans.) multigxi. Mumble murmuri. Mummy mumo. Munch macxi. Mundane monda. Municipal urba. Munificence malavareco. Munificent malavara. Murder mortigi. Murder mortigo. Murderer mortiganto. Murky malhela, malluma. Murmur murmuri. Muscat wine muskatvino. Muscle ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... into application purely mundane utilitarian standards, and may account conduct as immoral or moral according as it seeks only the happiness of the agent, or the happiness of the narrow circle of humanity which includes along with him also his relatives and intimate friends, or again, the ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... to clap her hands regardless of the piece of luncheon roll she held, thus promptly launching it over her shoulder, where it went merrily bounding across the polished floor to be gravely rescued by the irreproachable John. But Rosalie was in the realms of the gods and far above such mundane matters ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... didn't know," she said, implying that there was every reason why a man of his mundane ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... when I am inspired by anger; when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well; for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... philosophies which see reality as one luminously transparent conscious whole, in which every experience is delicately reticulated with every other, where discord and division are obliterated, and the multiple variety of mundane facts are gathered up into the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... great pains in collecting the insects, but excepting Tierra del Fuego, I never saw in this respect so poor a country. Even in the upper and damp region I procured very few, excepting some minute Diptera and Hymenoptera, mostly of common mundane forms. As before remarked, the insects, for a tropical region, are of very small size and dull colours. Of beetles I collected twenty-five species (excluding a Dermestes and Corynetes imported wherever a ship touches); of these, two belong to the Harpalidae, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... was removed from this mundane world, and he entered the life everlasting. But his death did not occur in the Holy Land. It overtook him at Khuzistan, in Persia, on his journey to King ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... For the Ethics was condemned with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as an atheistic and immoral work. Only when the romantic philosophers of Germany, following the lead of Lessing and Jacobi, found in Spinoza a man who was, as they thought, after their own heart, did Spinoza's mundane fortune change. As a result of their efforts, Spinoza ceased to be a philosopher to be execrated in public (though furtively read in private), and became a philosopher to be eulogized on all occasions in ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... frankly and cordially, and there was a note of mundane cheerfulness in the voice which did not quite correspond with the sacerdotal elegance of this young man. Then he added quickly, as if to save himself from asking the reason of ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... against a secular romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... religion being the embodiment of religious ideas. The chief critical difficulty felt by this school is in identifying any concrete historic fact with the unchanging idea, that is, in making Jesus of Nazareth the incarnation of God. God is reinterpreted, and in place of an extra-mundane creator is an omnipresent life and power. The Christian attainment is nothing else than the thorough intellectual grasp of the absolute idea and the identification of our essential selves with God. With a less thorough-going intellectualism other scholars reinterpret Christianity in terms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... attainment of it implies a humility, seven times refined in the fires of self-contempt, in which there remains no smallest touch of superiority or aloofness. How utterly depressing is the feigned interest of the imperfect human saint in matters of mundane concern! How it takes at once both the joy out of holiness and the spirit out of human effort! It is as dreary as the professional sympathy of the secluded student for the news of athletic contests, ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... way, but especially the heat of the days and the dank mists of the night, should have to be told as of a real journey in this very repetitive and sui-similar world. How much rather I wish that being free from mundane and wide-awake (that is to say from perilously dusty) considerations and droughty boredoms, I might wander forth at leisure through the air and visit the regions where everything is as the soul chooses: to be dropped at last in the ancient and famous town of Siena, whence comes that ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... religions. Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, Up at a Villa—Down in the City, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an Italian person of quality; the other, "De Gustibus—," which contrasts the happy quietudes of English landscape with the passionate landscape of the South, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of sentiment underlying its ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... regard to the American guest. Bates, the butler, was elderly, and severely Church of England; his knowledge of widows was confined to the type ably represented by his mistress and he regarded young Mrs. Loring as inclined to be "flighty." The footman, who was entirely under the butler's thumb in mundane matters, had fallen into the habit of sharing his opinions, and while agreeing in the general feeling of flightiness, declared boldly that the lady in question gave a certain "style" to the dinner-table that it ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... recorded by all the mythologists. Phurnutus, or Cornutus, the author of a little Greek treatise on the nature of the gods, informs us that by Jupiter was meant the vegetable soul of the world, which restrained and prevented those uncertain alterations which Saturn, or Time, used formerly to cause in the mundane system.] ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... believe, soon became tired of her. He liked her flattery, and at first declared that she was clever and nice, but her niceness was too purely celestial to satisfy his mundane tastes. Mackinnon himself can revel among the clouds in his own writings, and can leave us sometimes in doubt whether he ever means to come back to earth, but when his foot is on terra firma he loves to feel the earthy substratum which supports his weight. With women he likes ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... magnetic currents of his seductiveness, while around them the rising murmur of the fete, the soft laughter, the rustle of satins and the rattling of pearls formed the accompaniment to this duet of mundane passion and juvenile irony. He resumed ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... aristocratic sons who conceal the humble origin of their parents. But it is more than that; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where there is nothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith in the efficiency of the biologic laws, or any mundane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasm that separates man from even the highest of the lower orders. His radical unlikeness to all the forms below him, as if he moved in a world apart, into which they could never enter, as in a sense he does, is where the difficulty lies. Moreover, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... I place the 'Adoration of the Magi,' full of fine mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the 'Sposalizio' (whose marriage, I am not certain), the only grandly composed picture of the series, and marked by noble heads; then the 'Adoration of the Shepherds,' ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to West, how joy's high seas expand, Reflecting, not a foolish, mundane pride That, thinking it does all, sets God aside— But Virtue which, with heart and head and hand, Works out God's purpose, with dear Christ for guide, And holy spirits ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... more than those who are afraid to venture and who remain in the valley of mediocrity. This is true, not only of those who seek to climb the steep path of spiritual attainment, but also of those who are successful in mundane affairs. In each case, they have placed in their keeping great powers and influence such as the ordinary man little dreams of. This is a grave responsibility, for if these powers are used for self-aggrandisement the results are disastrous. Thus, those who climb, are beset on all sides by ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... overturned. Thorpe's dry-eyed, burning, almost mad insistence on the importance of the day's task had not its ordinary force. They looked upon him from a standpoint apart, calmly, dispassionately, as one looks on a petulant child. The grim call of tragedy had lifted them above little mundane things. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... and mundane countenance passed us, holding in leash a wheezing, vicious, waddling, brute of a yellow pug. The dog entangled himself with Bridger's legs and mumbled his ankles in a snarling, peevish, sulky bite. Bridger, with a ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read the paragraph. "Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely..." Yes; she was lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the papers—seen her represented in every conceivable attitude of the mundane game: fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her thoroughbred, dancing a gavotte, all patches and plumes, or fingering a guitar, all tulle and lilies; and once he had caught a glimpse of her at the theatre. Hearing that ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... appalling,—these were the missionaries' alternatives. Their maligners may taunt them, if they will, with credulity, superstition, or a blind enthusiasm; but slander itself cannot accuse them of hypocrisy or ambition. Doubtless, in their propagandism, they were acting in concurrence with a mundane policy; but, for the present at least, this policy was rational and humane. They were promoting the ends of commerce and national expansion. The foundations of French dominion were to be laid deep in the heart and conscience of the savage. His stubborn neck was to be subdued to the "yoke of the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... nineteen hundred years later. This erroneous belief in the imminent end of the world had an important bearing upon his entire philosophy; for if the end of the world was so near it was far more important to prepare for life hereafter than to be concerned over mundane affairs. May we not view with doubt any of Jesus' teachings that depended upon his mistaken conception of the duration of ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... had come to Mary a vision of peace: like a green island in the sea it was, like a white cloud on a broiling day; the sheltered life where all mundane preoccupations were far away, where ambition and hope and struggle were incredibly distant foolishness. Lowly and peaceful and unjaded was that life: she could see the nuns pacing quietly in their enclosed gardens, fingering their beads as they went to and fro ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... sowed. If it is to be disaster, it is as immediate as it is ignominious; but if success is to be his portion, then he is destined to rest, wholly relaxed, upon a couch encushioned and resilient beyond belief. He finds himself exalted and supreme above all mundane disturbances, with the treetops and the stars for his canopy, and the earth a shadowy floor far beneath. This gentle aerial support is distributed throughout hundreds of fine meshes, and the sole contact with the earth is through ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... be rife among us and calamity betide from our division and how it behoved us therefore to be instant in prayer to Allah the Most High, so haply He might vouchsafe the King a happy son to inherit the kingship after him. But, after all, the issue of that which man desireth of mundane goods and wherefor he lusteth is unknown to him and consequently it behoveth a mortal to ask not of his Lord a thing whose end he wotteth not; for that haply the hurt of that thing is nearer to him than its gain and his destruction may be in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... of the work he was trying to do in his school. A clergyman has social licence to be serious which is not accorded to other men. Wherefore he spoke as a clergyman might speak to a friend, saying, in general terms, how steep is the ascent when, among mundane affairs, human beings try to tread only where the angels of the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the attraction across the room once more exercised its spell. His lordship concentrated himself on it to the exclusion of all other mundane matters. Presently he came out of his ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... spiritual; the swans which flew aloft, far above the topmost peak of the Himalaya, were no ordinary swans, but were divine and heavenly. The wolf which howled so wildly in the long winter night, the hounds, whose bay sounded so. dismally through the shaking black forest, were no mundane wolves and hounds, but issued from the home of a divine hunter, and were themselves wondrous, supernatural beings of ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... in its simple directness, closes wistfully: "He who has not seen that whole generation, Saul Wahl amid his sons, sons-in-law, and grandsons, has failed to see the union of the Law with mundane glory, of wealth with honor and princely rectitude. May the Lord God bless us by permitting us to rejoice thus in our children ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... Thus a poet names it, though I, the architect thereof, insist that it is wholly and beautifully mundane. To make it, pare eight firm apples, the higher-flavored the better, core, drop into cold water, as pared, let stand till you make the syrup. Take a cup of sugar to each two apples and a cup of water to each two cups of sugar. Bring ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... not a pleasant condition of existence, nevertheless, to perplexity mankind is more or less doomed in every period of life and in every mundane scene—particularly in the jungles of central Africa, as Harold and his friends found out many ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... south-east of London, closing its circuit by a line along the coast of the Channel that completes a triangle. We can go almost anywhere by any road. It is necessary, however, in this as in other mundane proceedings, to make a selection. We must have a will before we find a way. Let our way, then, be to Waterloo Station ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... away, fringed with cocoanut trees. Small wisps or corkscrews of smoke defiled the blue of the sky; a wharf, with a steamer at the end, obtruded abruptly upon the curve of the shore. Mr. Heatherbloom regarded the boat—a link from Arcadia to the mundane world. He should have been glad but he didn't seem overwhelmed at the sight; he stood very still. He hardly felt her hand on his sleeve; the girl's eyes ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... am a man apart: A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world; A soulless life that angels may possess Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things May loll at ease beside the loveliest; A martyr for all mundane moods to tear; The slave of every passion; and the slave Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light; A trembling lyre for every wind to sound. * * * * * Within my heart I'll gather all the universe, and sing ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he entirely joined issue with me in such an opinion, and that he was often affected to sickishness by the snobbery of mundane society, adding that he hoped I would give him the look up at his paternal mansion in Prince's Square, Bayswater, shortly, since his people would be overjoyed at making my acquaintance, which both enraptured and surprised me, for hitherto he had ridden the high and rough-shoed horse, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... abrupt transition from darkness to light; only the most mundane facts of the old troughs and ash-hoppers, relics of the industry that had served the hideous carnage of battle; only the yellow head of the ranger's brat, who had climbed into one of them, from which the mare ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... embarrassed laugh, held forth her left hand and displayed a beautiful solitaire. "Ahhs!" and "Ohs" and other exclamations of admiration pleased John and Anne mightly, and both felt that this mundane ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... be worth while (I should be very curious to hear the result) to make a short list of the generally considered variable or polymorphous genera, as Rosa, Salix, Rubus, etc., etc., and reflect whether such genera are generally mundane, and more especially whether they have distinct or identical (or closely allied) species in their different and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... consider the matter. A multitude of men, possibly the then whole human family, once more a fallen race, emigrate towards the East, and come to a vast plain in the region of Shinar, afterwards Chaldaea. Fertile, well-watered, apt for every mundane purpose, it yet wanted one great requisite. The degenerate race "put not their trust in God:" they did not believe but that the world might some day be again destroyed by water: and they required a point of refuge in the possible event of a second deluge from the broken bounds of ocean and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... were extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles believed would perish without him. Our connection with the Times and with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made at this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes—Mrs. Jeune's drawing-room—opened ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... soar aloft and join the noble fraternity of the ether-folk. Bad men and young children, on dying, must undergo renewed probation here below, but ultimately all pass away into the interplanetary ether. The dweller in ether is chiefly distinguished from the mundane mortal by his acute senses and his ability to subsist without food. He can see as if through a telescope and microscope combined. His intelligence is so great that in comparison an Aristotle would seem idiotic. It should ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Copas's face. It was a fine face; it even resembled the conventional portrait of Dante, but—I am asking the reader to tax his imagination—with humorous wrinkles set about the eyes, their high austerity clean taken away and replaced by a look of very mundane shrewdness, and lastly a grosser chin and mouth with a touch of the laughing faun in their folds and corners. "You are concealing your real reasons," ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not go into camp on the price-list. Having purchased my bacon and eggs, I like to move along to where my friend is sitting, and hear him tell of his experiences with glaciers and icebergs, and so become inoculated with the world-enlarging virus. Or, if he comes in to share my bacon and eggs, these mundane delights lose none of their flavor by being garnished with conversation on Andean themes. I'm glad to have my friend push that greatest of monuments, "The Christ of the Andes," over into my world. I arise from the table feeling that ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness"; meaning thereby that we look for a new invisible power of control, Messiah's kingdom, and a new earth, society organized along new lines, to take the place of the old. The words here have no reference to the mundane sphere or globe upon which the ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... not be understood that I put St. Paul in the same category with these mundane persons. Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often reasonably mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker rather than take money from his clients, and one could imagine him as preaching while he worked. He frankly ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... collegia at Rome before the imperial times; though some of them had been religious bodies, some were decidedly not so. They were societies which held property, pursued certain avocations, and acted in a corporate capacity for very mundane objects. Why should not there be a collegium of scholars? Why should students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by his statutes ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... Since all things mundane must have an end, the old butler with the white-fringed head came at last to show him the way to his luxurious lodgings on the second floor of the mansion. With a touch of hospitality which carried Blount back to his one ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... and his commendable consolations, that I entertain a very solid conviction that to them I owe it that I am not dead. But, as it pleased Him, who, being infinite, has assigned by immutable law an end to all things mundane, my love, beyond all other fervent, and neither to be broken nor bent by any force of determination, or counsel of prudence, or fear of manifest shame or ensuing danger, did nevertheless in course of time me abate of its own accord, in such wise that it has now left nought ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... spirits may, Our mundane revel on the height, Shall watch each flashing 'rickshaw-light Sweep on ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that Divine Being, so much the better. When you go one step beyond the mundane system you only excite an inquisitive humour, which it is ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... heard of an auctioneer having it—"Suppose that once in a billion of years a bird were to come from some far, distant clime and carry off in its bill a grain of sand, when the time came when the last animal matter of which this mundane sphere is composed would be carried away," said he, "boys, by that time in hell it would not be sun up." We had this sermon in the morning and the same one in the afternoon, only he commenced at the other end. Then we started home full of doctrine—we ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... powers of earth, and other plans were to propitiate the powers under the earth, and certain distempered groanings wrenched from him at intervals he addressed (after they were out of him, reflectively) to the powers above, so that nothing of him should be lost which might get aid of anything mundane, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Willard, Waddington, Essex. Deal with her whenever you possibly can. When you want to purchase, ask her for anything under the canopy of heaven, from jewels, bijouterie, and curios to rare books and high-class articles of utility. When you want to sell, consign only to her, from choice gems to mundane objects. All transactions embodying the germs of small profits are welcome. As a sample of her stock please note: A superlatively exquisite, essentially beautiful, and important lace flounce for sale, at a reasonable price. Also a bargain of peerlessly choice ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... began to jerk one way and another. That was because, as the general thought, the next letter was to be l, that is to say, Jeanne D'Arc, according to his idea, intended to say that souls would recognize each other only after they had been purged of everything mundane, or something to that effect, and that therefore the next letter ought to be l (posl, i. e., after); the artist, on the other hand, thought that the next letter would be v; that the soul intended to say that souls would recognize each other by the light—posv (ietu) ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... Goethe, that "it is just as absurd to deny the facts of spiritualism now as it was in the Middle Ages to ascribe them to the Devil." I think Mr. Owen attributes too much value to his facts. I do not think the things contributed from the ultra-mundane sphere are particularly valuable, apart from the evidence they give of continued ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... remarks in deep abstraction, and only after the lapse of several minutes, when, alone with Nightspore, did he realise that they referred to such mundane matters as travelling routes and times ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... been deep and dreamless, when the day is ushered in by smiling skies, a laughing earth, and a forest of joyous songsters. More especially beautiful is the face of nature after a storm-swept night, for then, indeed, the blinking dawn itself reflects the gratitude of mundane things for their deliverance. In the forest one hears a water-drip—aftermath of rains; a gentle, almost noiseless fall of crystal drop on crystal drop tapping the loamy soil, and imagination sings in whatsoever key the ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... lessons suffered sometimes while they indulged in day-dreams, for it was hard to recall such mundane matters as the capital of Mexico, or the date of Magna Charta, when their thoughts were far away in the lantern room, busy with ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... All mundane events are the results of the operation of law. Every movement in the skies or upon the earth proclaims to us that ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the higher evolution, this body comes into independent activity on this side of death, and he gradually becomes conscious of his heavenly life, even amid the whirl of mundane existence. Then he becomes "the Son of man which is in heaven,"[249] who can speak with the authority of knowledge on heavenly things. When the man begins to live the life of the Son, having passed on to the Path of Holiness, he lives in heaven while remaining on earth, coming into conscious possession ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... the time when Rome first rose into mundane brilliancy—that Rome which was fated to last as long as mankind shall endure, and to be increased with a sublime progress and growth—virtue and fortune, though commonly at variance, agreed upon a treaty ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... juncture, Solon suddenly went off, like "Mrs. Gamp," in a sort of walking swoon, apparently deaf and blind to all mundane matters, except the refreshments awaiting him ten miles away; and the benign old pastor disappeared, humming "Hebron" to the creaking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rise up from Hegel's fatal blow? He rises like Antaeus from touching the earth, and triumphantly shows that syllogisms are the most necessary of all things to humanity in its mundane existence; that, in fact, we have all been syllogizing ever since we left the maternal bosom to look at the cradle, the cat, and the dog. In fact we never could have grown up to manhood, much less to be Concordian philosophers, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... we might know that these people are still covetous, and that almost all of them are attached to the world and to themselves—that is, they are worldly people, which shows the holiness of the spirit by which they are actuated! As regards Anna Salters, it was said she was mundane, carnal, covetous, and artful, although she appeared to be the most pious. Her sayings and discussions were continually mixed up with protestations of the presence and omniscience of God, and upon the salvation of her soul, so truly gross ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... somebody, away up above all mundane affairs—not responsible for them, perhaps, but capable, at all events, of thoroughly taking them in—smiling at them all with a sort of ferocious cynicism. In the foreground of this impression were the good friends—the really good friends she had just been telling Portia about, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... world in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love..... Nay, and since death, which wipes out man, Finds him with many an unsolved plan,.... Still gazing on the ever full Eternal mundane spectacle, This world in which we draw our breath In some ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... nonentities of all kinds Adela Branston set her face, and had a polite way of dropping people from whom she derived no amusement, pleading in her pretty childish way that it was so much more pleasant for all parties. That this mundane existence of ours was not intended to be all pleasure, was an idea that never yet troubled Adela Branston's mind. She had been petted and spoiled by everyone about her from the beginning of her brief ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the third heaven may signify a supra-mundane vision. Such a vision may be called the third heaven in three ways. First, according to the order of the cognitive powers. In this way the first heaven would indicate a supramundane bodily vision, conveyed through the senses; thus was seen the hand of one writing on the wall (Dan. 5:5); ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the body. When the bodily life is too far invigorated and awakened, and draws the intellect, the flower and summity of the soul, into a conspiration with it, then are we subject and obnoxious to magical assaults. For magic or sorcery, being founded only in this lower or mundane spirit, he that makes it his business to be freed and released from all its blandishments and flattering devocations, and endeavors wholly to withdraw himself from the love of corporeity and too near a sympathy ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... not see the hurried and brief meeting between Bartlett and Gertie Higgins, but he had seen enough to cause forgetfulness of mundane things. For an instant he stared after the vanished vision. Then he stepped blindly forward, tripped over something—"his off hind leg," so Captain Sol afterwards vowed—and fell sprawling, the express ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Anne feeling altogether at ease and natural with congenial playmates. Even Sedley's tortures were preferable to Peregrine's attentions, since the first were only the tyranny of a graceless boy, the other gave her an indescribable sense of strangeness from which these ordinary mundane comrades were a ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... eclat into drawing-rooms of splendour, I sun myself in the painted smiles of the Mayfair Jezebels, and glitter in that world of wigs and rouge and diamonds like a star. There I quaff the elixir and sweet essence of mundane triumph, eating truffles to the sound of trumpets, and feasting at ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his "Mundane Mutations," where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother), was accidentally ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... is in the engravings. The text is often mundane, is full of conundrums and puns popular in the early 1800's—and is mercifully short. No author is given credit for the text though the section titled, "The Autobiography of Andrew Mullins" may give us ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour |
