"Vacillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... de Roannez was not a happy one. After vacillating for some time between the cloister and the world—obeying the guidance of Pascal, either directly or through Madame Périer, and even passing through her novitiate at Port Royal with “extraordinary fervour”—she was persuaded ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... him. It is a plot of all the Swedish wellwishers, all the anti-imperialists of this court, believe me. They wish to place the Electoral Prince at their head, and hope by this means to bring it about that the weak and vacillating Elector shall secede from the Emperor and ally himself with the Swedes. They teased and goaded the Elector, until he even sent his Chamberlain von Schlieben to The Hague in order to fetch the Prince, and the latter has but to-day returned ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... from Barrow. It flooded Tracy's demoralized soul with waters of refreshment. These were the darlingest words the poor vacillating young apostate had ever heard—for they whitewashed his shame for him, and that is a good service to have when you can't get the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... arises with regard to the range of vision which, in his capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists mar the effect of their work—and among these Thackeray is notable—by adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating. Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through everything. At another time he will startle the reader with some ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... long there, undecided, vacillating. Then he shuddered, wheeled his horse, and sent him scampering over ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... there has been none in Irish demands. The Liberalism of Non-conformist Wales, and to a lesser degree of Presbyterian Scotland, are traditional, but their adherence to one side or the other in politics appears vacillating if one studies the election figures, compared with the unwavering permanence of the Irish returns. When Lord Dudley declared that his aim as Viceroy would be to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas a shout of protest arose from the Times ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... loopholes sunk in the walls, admitted a light which must be that of evening, for crimson bars at intervals rested on the flags of the pavement. What a terrible silence! Yet, yonder, at the far end of that passage there might be a doorway of escape! The Jew's vacillating hope was tenacious, for it ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... disdains herself for hesitating to prefer him to Clermont. Her life is the tragedy of a soul too indolent to swim against the current of events. Mrs. Haywood managed to give extraordinary vividness and consistency to the character of the vacillating Henrietta by making the plot depend almost entirely upon the indecision of the heroine. Consequently none of the author's women are as sharply defined as this weak, pleasure-loving French girl. The character drawing, though too ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... weak, vacillating creature is man before a pretty woman like Alice Johnson. Twenty-four hours ago, and the doctor would have scoffed at the idea that he should tarry longer than a week or two at the farthest in that ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... lady who wrote much for a former generation, under the name of "Mrs. Bridget Blue Mantle." She had a small needle in her left hand, and a very thick piece of thread in her right; occasionally she applied the end of the said thread to her lips, and then—her eyes fixed on the novel—made a blind, vacillating attack at the eye of the needle. But a camel would have gone through it with quite as much ease. Nor did the novel alone engage Mrs. Leslie's attention, for ever and anon she interrupted herself to scold the children, to inquire "what o'clock ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vigorous and shown itself fit to support an effort of which I should never have thought it capable, and my soul has been below everything, vacillating and dry, so ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... his weapons. For a critical antagonist, Edwards is admirable, his use of language being far from precise and consistent, and his definitions and statements, through his extreme wariness, being vague and vacillating enough to allow abundant material for comment. Of these advantages Mr. Hazard knows how to avail himself, and shows not a little acuteness in exposing the untenable positions and the inconsequent reasoning of the New-England ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... conjecture might prove correct, as in that case we should be compelled to touch somewhere to renew our stock; and I felt that if in such a case I failed to secure the arrest of the whole party for piracy I should richly deserve to remain their tool, exposed to the countless vacillating and dangerous humours of a gang of ruffians who had deliberately thrown off every ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... were, some from sincere conviction and some from policy, adherents of Calvinism. Thus the Protestants in France became a political party, as well as a religious body, and a party with anti-monarchical tendencies. Anthony of Bourbon, a weak and vacillating person, had married Jeanne d'Albret, the heiress of Bearn and Navarre, a heroic woman and an earnest Protestant, the mother of Henry IV. His brother Louis, Prince of Conde, a brave, impetuous soldier, whose wife, the niece of the Grand Constable Montmorency, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the secession of the States by the administration of Buchanan and the Thirty-Sixth Congress can only here have a brief notice. There was a pretty general disposition to make further concessions and compromises to appease the disunion sentiment of the South. His administration was weak and vacillating. Two serious attempts at conciliation were made. President Buchanan, in his last Annual Message (December 4, 1860), while declaring that the election of any one to the office of President was not a just cause for dissolving the Union, and ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... "a wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same—that is the Chopin rubato." Elsewhere, "a tempo agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing, and vacillating as the fluctuating breath by which it is agitated." Chopin was more commonplace in his definition: "Supposing," he explained, "that a piece lasts a given number of minutes; it may take just so long to perform the whole, but in detail deviations ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... hospital." Mr Harding still made no reply, but looked meekly into his son-in-law's face. The archdeacon thought he knew his father-in-law, but he was mistaken; he thought that he had already talked over a vacillating man to resign his promise. "Come," said he, "promise Susan to give up this ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... Entwickelung". Stuttgart, 1889. Chapter entitled "Bestandigkeit oder Veranderlichkeit der Naturwesen".), went the length of admitting (in 1762) that new species might arise by intercrossing. Buffon's position among the pioneers of the evolution-doctrine is weakened by his habit of vacillating between his own conclusions and the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne, but there is no doubt that he had a firm grasp of the general idea ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... of ice-water as he studied the menu card, and motioned for more. Two other glassfuls went the way of the first, and the negro refilled the carafe. The man pulled angrily at his limp collar and discussed his order. Vacillating for a time between broiled lobster and porterhouse steak with mushrooms, he cut the matter short by taking both, and buttressed the main structure of the meal with side dishes of banana fritters and griddle-cakes. He decided that ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... satisfactory answer from Aranjuez, where the vacillating, terrified, and disunited court now was. One day followed another, and the streets of that town swarmed with angry men whose pride and scorn found expression in calls for Godoy's death. On the evening of the seventeenth they ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... that it was no mean honor to have been among the first fruits of the revival of truth in France. He urged him to put an end to his inordinate hesitation, by the consideration of the number of those who were still vacillating, but who would forthwith imitate his example if he forsook the enemy's camp for the fold of Christ. Letter of Calvin to Salignac, Nov. 19, 1561, Calvini Opera, ix. 163; Calvin's Letters (Bonnet), iv. 239-241. Salignac's reply, from which the extract given above is taken, is characteristic ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... was, of course, a failure. Her vacillating nature was such that she could not be absolutely true to the man to whom she had given her life, and, after several bitter experiences, she had the horror of seeing him kill himself in front of her. There was a momentary ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... passage of the Dardanelles by our fleet, which more than any overt act made war inevitable, was ordered by the Government at home against Lord Stratford's counsel. Between panic-stricken statesmen and vacillating ambassadors, Lord Clarendon on one side, M. de la Cour on the other, the Eltchi stands like ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... the license obtained, but "Pea Green Hayne" took a solemn vow that nothing should separate him from the object of his affections. Believing that all was safe, Miss Foote now threw up her engagement and disposed of her theatrical wardrobe, but the weak-minded, vacillating creature, who could not summon up resolution either to have or to leave her, let matters go on to the very day, and again failed to put in an appearance. Some preliminary letters having passed between ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... that the battle of Amstetten was the only one in which a line actually waited for the shock of another line charging with the bayonets. Even then the Russians gave way before the moral and not before the physical impulse. They were already disconcerted, wavering, worried, hesitant, vacillating, when the blow fell. They waited long enough to receive bayonet thrusts, even blows with the rifle (in the back, ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... home, flakes of snow, the first of the season, were whirling through the gray dusk noiselessly, ceaselessly, always falling, yet never seeming to fall, rather to restlessly pervade the air with a vacillating alienation from all the laws of gravitation. Elusive fascinations of thought were liberated with the shining crystalline aerial pulsation; some mysterious attraction dwelt down long vistas amongst the bare trees; their fine fibrous grace of branch and twig was ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of Wilhelm II had magnetized the vacillating, timorous Nicholas. Count Buelow had courted the Russian Foreign Office with the assiduous arts of a lover, and his wooing had been crowned by complete success. Through Petrovitch the grand dukes had been indirectly bribed, and the smaller fry like ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... had loved with all that tenacity of devotion which every Northern heart has for the flag and the country, was covered with ignominy by these late events. She blushed with shame as she thought of the weak, vacillating nation which had given the promise of freedom to the ears of four millions of weak but trustful allies, and broken it to their hearts. She knew that the country had appealed to them in its hour of mortal agony, and they had answered ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Bouthillier opposed the match, and told La Grange that he might do better for his daughter than to marry her to a man who, say what he might, had but twenty thousand francs a year. La Grange was weak and vacillating: sometimes he listened to his prudent kinswoman, and sometimes to the eager suitor; treated him as a son-in-law, carried love messages from him to his daughter, and ended by refusing him her hand, and ordering her to renounce him on pain of being immured ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... Trevison's eyes, but his age, his vacillating will, his guilt, could not combat the overpowering force and virility of this volcanic youth, and his gaze ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and prevented the printing and circulation of seditious pamphlets. The Government should have allied itself with the people, granted their requests, and marched to victory under the name of patriotism. But Louis XVI. was weak, irresolute, vacillating, and uncertain. He was a worthy sort of man, with good intentions, and without the vices of his predecessors. But he was surrounded with incompetent ministers and bad advisers, who distrusted the people and had no sympathy with their wrongs. He would have made ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... authority. The fact that he was "noan Lancashire" worked against him too, though even if he had been a Lancashire man, he would not have been likely to find over-much favor. It was enough that he was "one o' th' mesters." To have been weak of will, or vacillating of purpose, would have been death to every vestige of the authority vested in him; but he was as strong mentally as physically—strong-willed to the verge of stubbornness. But if they could not frighten or subdue him, they could still oppose and irritate him, and the contention ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... become an obsession—their weakness. They are thorough Frenchmen and their critical sense must be unbridled. They love their ideas and their systems. They would doubtless not hesitate to advise Foch. Personally, if I were Foch, I should turn a deaf ear. But if I were a timid, vacillating, pessimistic spirit, still in doubt as to the final outcome, I should most certainly seat myself at a neighbouring table and listen to their conversation that I might come away imbued with a little of their patience, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... enabled to maintain themselves in the hostile country till the end of the war, notwithstanding the inefficiency of their generals, the great reverses they sustained in the field, the skill and perseverance of the enemy they were contending with, and the weak and vacillating character of the ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... eloquence was the most perfect fruit of his talents. Nor can we here speak of Cicero as a man. He has his admirers and detractors. He had great faults and weaknesses as well as virtues. He was egotistical, vain, and vacillating. But he was industrious, amiable, witty, and public spirited. In his official position he was incorruptible. He was no soldier, but he had a greater than a warrior's excellence. In spite of his faults, his ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... was in these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon, being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for the first time, he could not affect ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return. His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December, 1817, he had written from Marlow to ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... a little way on that course, and then paid off again, and seemed inclined to range along the coast. But presently she was up in the wind again, and made a greater offing. She was sailed in a strange, vacillating way; but Hazel ascribed this to her people's fear of the reefs he had indicated to all comers. The better to watch her maneuvers, and signal her if necessary, they both went up to Telegraph Point. They could not go out to her, being low water. Seen from this height, the working ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... restricted his thoughts, his aims and aspirations, to a narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing prosaic or utilitarian objects—the favor of princes, place at Courts, the recovery of his inheritance—in a romantic and unpractical spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy could give, exhausting friendship, changing from place to place, from lord to lord. Yet how touching was the destiny of this laureled exile, this brilliant wayfarer on the highroads of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... had been a weak, amiable woman, and her last conscious request was to be buried in the sunlight, but her sister-in-law remarked that "her mind must have been wandering, for though Sarah was vacillating, she was never sacrilegious." So they buried her in the shadiest corner of the cloisters, and put up a memorial brass setting forth all the virtues for which she was not particularly noted, and entirely omitting to mention her saving grace of ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... Eskimos it is necessary to make a psychological study of them, and to consider their peculiar temperament. They are keenly appreciative of kindness, but, like children, they will impose upon a weak or vacillating person. A blending of gentleness and firmness is the only effective method. The fundamental point in all my dealings with them has been always to mean just what I say and to have things done exactly as ordered. For instance, if I tell an Eskimo that if he does a certain thing properly ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... There was a good deal of strength about him, but it wanted concentration and arrangement. His features were rather exaggerated and coarse in outline, with the high cheek-bones common on the north side of the Tweed; his hair of an unhappy vacillating color that could not make its mind up to be red; and his eyes, that rarely met you fairly, of a light cold gray. About the mouth, in particular, there was a very unpleasant ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... that is just what the Lord said to Eve, she must have had the capacity to understand it. But all speculations as to what Eve thought in that eventful hour are vain. Clarke asserts that Cain and Abel were twins. Eve must have been too much occupied with her vacillating joys and sorrows to have indulged in any connected train of thought. Her grief in the fratricidal tragedy that followed can be more easily understood. The dreary environments of the mother, and the hopeless ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Thus vacillating between virtue and vice; to neither constant, and upbraided by both; his mind, like his person in the glen, was continually passing and ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... radiant young creature in flowing muslin, with the narrowest sash in the room, and no ornament but a necklace of large pearls and her own vivid beauty. She had altered her mind about coming, with apologies for her vacillating disposition so penitent and disproportionate that her indulgent and unsuspecting mother was really quite amused. Alfred was not so happy as to know that she had changed her mind with his note. Perhaps even this knowledge could have added little to ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... administration, he may have the satisfaction, within the period specified of two years, of checking and eradicating the worst abuses, and, at the same time, of maintaining his own sovereignty and the native institutions of his kingdom unimpaired; but if he does not, if he takes a vacillating course, and fail by refusing to act on the Governor-General's advice, he is aware of the other alternative and of the consequences. It must, then, be manifest to the whole world that, whatever may happen, the King has received ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... took quick advantage of his success. Rushing wildly to a corner cupboard, he produced from it a plate of cold crisp fried fish, which he placed with all imaginable speed exactly under the nose of the still vacillating Aby. He vacillated no longer. The spell was complete. The old gentleman, with a perfect reliance upon the charm, proceeded to prepare a cup ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Russia was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in the class of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second rank. Its monarch, Alexander II., humane and well-meaning, was irresolute and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid of all administrative and organising faculty himself, but so infirm of purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pass out of their sight, lest in the course of a single journey ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... more than a coincidence. It would have been corroborative of this idea of motive. But, under the real circumstances of the case, if we are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... some element in the Austrian councils of war which we don't understand, but which gives to their operations in this present phase of the campaign just as uncertain and as vacillating a character as it possessed during the campaign of 1859. On Friday they are still beyond the Mincio, and on Saturday their small fleet on the Lake of Garda steams up to Desenzano, and opens fire against this defenceless city ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... little designing, even a little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad work of nature, mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleams of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smouldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... excited by a letter from Mr. Bartholomew Szemere, one of Kossuth's former friends, and even a minister in the Hungarian revolutionary cabinet, charging him with cowardice, weakness, and a fatally irresolute and vacillating policy in the administration of affairs. Szemere also denies that Kossuth has any just right to call himself the Governor of Hungary, or even the leader of the Hungarian people. On the other hand, Mr. Vukovitch, who was also a minister in the same cabinet, who is now in Paris, has published a letter ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... your affections and make them vigorous to lay hold upon the holy things that are above their natural inclination, and will make it certain that their reach shall not be beyond their grasp, as, alas! it so often is in the sadness and disappointments of human love. He will come into that feeble, vacillating, wayward will of yours, that is only obstinate in its adherence to the low and the evil, as some foul creature, that one may try to wrench away, digs its claws into corruption and holds on by that. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... dear, that you won't have a row with Owen's dear little vacillating, weak-minded ma," ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... ever the excuse of a weak, vacillating mind. Opportunities! Every life is full of them. Every lesson in school or college is an opportunity. Every examination is a chance in life. Every patient is an opportunity. Every newspaper article is an opportunity. Every client is an opportunity. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... was evidence sufficient to justify a trial. But all that arose from my lord's ignorance of the administration of the laws of his country. He was very ignorant,—puzzle-pated, as you may call it,—led by the nose by his wife, weak as water, timid and vacillating. But he did not wish, I think, to be insolent. It was Mrs Proudie who told me to my face that I ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... that was to jostle the Indian from the face of the New World. Something more than a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak, vacillating Hearne, weeping ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... disturbance, threw in a counterweight, sometimes on one side and sometimes on another, as he, according to his philosophical opinions, thought they deserved either censure or praise. [11] For this 'apparent' fluctuation he was termed, by those men who never understood his principles, vacillating and inconsistent: but he cast his "bread upon the waters," and in due time ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... and reasonable prudence, a people with a low, vacillating, and uncertain moral ideal may, for a time, be able to stem the tide of outraged virtue, but this is merely transitory. Ultimate destruction and ruin follow absolutely in the wake of moral degeneracy; this, all history shows;—this, experience ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... Such shortsighted, vacillating, and futile methods are accompanied by decreasing water-borne commerce and increasing traffic congestion on land, by increasing floods, and by the waste of public money. The remedy lies in abandoning the methods which have so signally failed and adopting new ones in keeping with the needs ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... or two past he had been swept almost unresistingly down the darkening and deepening current of his sin. Whenever he made some feeble, vacillating effort to reduce his allowance of the drug, he became so wretched, irritable, and unnatural in manner that his family were full of perplexed wonder and solicitude. To hide his weakness from his wife was his supreme desire; and yet, if he stopped—were ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of death, the rulers brought him to Pilate, the Roman governor, that he might confirm their sentence and execute the cruel penalty of crucifixion. The trial before Pilate developed into a disgraceful contest between the murderous and determined Jewish rulers and the weak and vacillating Roman governor, who was at last compelled to act contrary to his conscience and his desire and to submit his will to that of the subjects whom ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... thought of that were common in my country. There were those we love. Some who are woven into our lives and affections by the kinship of blood; who grow up weak and vacillating, and are won away, sometimes through vice, to estrangement. Our hearts ache not the less painfully that they have ceased to be worthy of a throb; or that they have been weak enough to become estranged, ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... insisted that a State had no right to secede, but that the United States had no power to coerce a State which should secede. A majority of his cabinet were southern men, three of them zealous secessionists. His most intimate friends in Congress were southerners. These surrounded the vacillating Chief Magistrate, and paralyzed what little energy was in him, meanwhile taking advantage of his inaction to launch the Confederacy. Now and then, spurred on by loyal old General Scott and by the Union members of his cabinet, the President tried to break away from the toils which ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the arrival of Mr. Dunmore, a young man of talents, named Tomas, who had long been vacillating, boldly declared himself a Protestant, and though his bishop offered him the monthly reward of two hundred piastres for two years, paid in advance, if he would leave the Protestants, his reply was: ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... in his beliefs—he would not keep them secret—he did not care for unpopularity in the least. His great aim was to fight—at whatever odds— for whatever he felt by dogged conviction. He was often wrong; but never cowardly, never philandering, never vacillating. "I am anti-everything," as he said humorously of himself. And so he was. He was, in a sense, "anti-everything," and though, sometimes through the training of previous environments, sometimes ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... might understand this somewhat vacillating position on the whole to favor democracy, but only a few pages further on Kautsky explains his reasons for opposing the initiative and referendum, and we see that when the point of action arrives, his democratic ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... bulging, bleary eyes, on which the glaze of continuous dissipation had once settled as if to stay, were not as she remembered them. Instead, they were bright and clear, and lay deep in their sockets. The lips, now beardless, were no longer thick and repulsive. She marveled. This was not the vacillating, whiskey-willed man she had known for so long; here was a determined character, swelling with force, fierce in the resources of a belated integrity of purpose. No longer the careless, handsome youth, nor the honorless man, but a power! Whether that power stood for good or evil, it mattered not; ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... that no incident of those tumultuous hours surprised her more than the way in which Lady Hermione received her unbidden and unwelcome visitors. The instant before their arrival she was an irresponsible and doubting and vacillating girl, torn by emotion, and swayed hither and thither by gusts of perplexity which ranged from half-formed hope to blank despair, but now she came from her bedroom without a second's hesitancy, and faced her father and the lawyer with a proud serenity which ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... downfall of Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only begins to shape ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... shuffle, palter, blink; trim. Adj. irresolute, infirm of purpose, double-minded, half-hearted; undecided, unresolved, undetermined; shilly-shally; fidgety, tremulous; hesitating &c. v.; off one's balance; at a loss &c. (uncertain) 475. vacillating &c. v.; unsteady &c. (changeable) 149; unsteadfast[obs3], fickle, without ballast; capricious &c. 608; volatile, frothy; light, lightsome, light-minded; giddy; fast and loose. weak, feeble-minded, frail; timid, wimpish, wimpy &c. 860; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... our honeymoon at Baiae. I have a villa at Baiae. It is there that I keep my grandfather's collection of majolica. The sun shines there always. A long olive-grove secretes the garden from the sea. When you walk in the garden, you know the sea only in blue glimpses through the vacillating leaves. White-gleaming from the bosky shade of this grove are several goddesses. Do you care for Canova? I don't myself. If you do, these figures will appeal to you: they are in his best manner. Do you love the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... and without control, by bill or speech, to utter any of the griefs of the Commonwealth," brought on him a fresh imprisonment at the hands of the Council, which lasted till the dissolution of the Parliament and with which the Commons declined to interfere. But while vacillating in its assertion of the rights of individual members, the House steadily claimed for itself a right to discuss even the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the succession, the Church, and the regulation of trade, had been regarded by every ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... eaten little. In the evening he returned to his cell in a state of exhaustion:[539] the same night, or the next day, he sent in his first submission,[540] which was forwarded on the instant to the queen. It was no sooner gone than he recalled it, and then vacillating again, he drew a second, in slightly altered words, which he signed and did not recall. There had been a struggle in which the weaker nature had prevailed, and the orthodox leaders made haste to improve their triumph. The first step being over, confessions far more ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... should be done to-day he leaves to be shirked to-morrow; he is easily discouraged, timid, and vacillating. Extremely self-conscious, he thinks himself the observed of all observers. If others are indifferent toward him, he is depressed; if interested, they have some deep motive; if grave, he has annoyed them; if gay, they are laughing at him; the truth, that they are minding their ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... piece of courage for Joseph to go to Pilate and avow his sympathy with a condemned criminal. The love must have been very true which was forced to speak by disaster and death. And to us the strongest motive for stiffening our vacillating timidity into an iron fortitude, and fortifying us strongly against the fear of what man can do to us, is to be found in gazing upon His dying love who met and conquered all evils ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... immediately levied an army to maintain his rights, and a civil war ensued between the brother and sister, which lasted for twelve or fourteen years. Bertha, whose reputation was not much fairer than that of her mother Matilda, was succeeded by her son Conan IV.; he was young, and of a feeble, vacillating temper, and after struggling for a few years against the increasing power of his uncle Hoel, and his own rebellious barons, he called in the aid of that politic and ambitious monarch, Henry II. of England. This fatal step decided the fate ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... course of a war in 1881 is a matter of speculation, what we all know for certain is, first, that the conditions which led to war were produced by seventy years of vacillating policy, and, second, that war itself would have been a useless waste of life and treasure, unless success in it had been followed, as in 1906, by the grant of that responsible Government which all along had been the key to the whole difficulty, the condition ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... along. Then Hughes came and he took American Spirit as his text, and he made it quite evident what his campaign is going to be; that it is going to be a charge, veiled and very poorly supported by facts, that we have not known where we were going, that we were vacillating, that we did not have any enthusiasm, that we did not arouse the people and make them feel proud that they were Americans. How in the mischief he is going to get away with this, I do not understand. Whom were we to be mad at—England, or Germany, or everybody in the world? Were ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... "This vacillating policy," he swept on, "annoys me. For my part, I should like to see so firm a stand taken on all questions that in any part of the world, whenever a man, and wherever a man, said 'I am an Englishman? everybody ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... unbounded. The frontiersman was always ready for a fight, and just now he especially wanted a fight with England. He resented the insults that his country had suffered at the hands of the English authorities and had little patience with the vacillating policy so long pursued by Congress and the Madison Administration. Other grievances came closer home. For two years the West had been disturbed by Indian wars and intrigues for which the English officers and agents in Canada were held largely responsible. ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... free. But it was not in this girl's nature to be concerned only with herself. If she possessed a single womanly virtue, it was supreme unselfishness. There was some one beside herself to take into consideration—a poor, vacillating, weak, miserable woman who wished to do what was right and had agreed to do so, but who, in the privacy of her own apartments, had gone down on her knees and begged Annie to protect her from the consequences of her own folly. Her husband must not know. Annie had promised that ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... reasoning served to steady his nerves a little. And when the moon went down and the day was slowly breaking, he took his way, with a vacillating intention and many a chilling doubt, along the winding road to the scene ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... have said, gentlemen, the dawn is not far distant. Spain is now breaking the eastern sky for her beloved Philippines, and the times are changing, as I positively know, faster than we imagine. This government, which, according to you, is vacillating and weak, should be strengthened by our confidence, that we may make it see that it is the custodian of our hopes. Let us remind it by our conduct (should it ever forget itself, which I do not believe can happen) that we have faith in its ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... good report, and to whom it was justly valuable, who were most strongly tempted, by shame and fear of the world's censure, to the crime of infanticide: That the child was murdered, he professed to entertain no doubt. The vacillating and inconsistent declaration of the prisoner herself, marked as it was by numerous refusals to speak the truth on subjects, when, according to her own story, it would have been natural, as well as advantageous, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad sketch made by nature and mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleam of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smoldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes and we called ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... weak, headless combination of inconsistencies,—through a tricky and vacillating Ministry and a bitter, factional Parliament, greatly encouraged the idea of any sort ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... mother took to the notion of our going to Crayshaw's only set seals to our fate, and the manner of her protests was not more fortunate than the matter. She was timid and vacillating from wifely habit, whilst motherly anxiety goaded her to be persistent and almost irritable on the subject. Habitually regarding her own wishes and views as worthless, she quoted the Woods at every turn of her arguments, which was a mistake, for my father was sufficiently ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... arrived from England, and Richard announced that he could not remain a moment longer. The barons broke out in a general cry of indignation that he who had plunged them into danger should forsake them in the midst of it, and once more the vacillating King allowed himself to be diverted from his purpose. Again the Christians remained long inactive at Baitnuba, not daring to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... Candia, decided that for political reasons, the coffee houses should be closed. His argument was much the same as that advanced more than a hundred years later by Charles II of England, namely, that they were hotbeds of sedition. Kuprili was a military dictator, with nothing of Charles's vacillating nature; and although, like Charles, he later rescinded his edict, he enforced it, while it was effective, in no uncertain fashion. Kuprili was no petty tyrant. For a first violation of the order, cudgeling was the punishment; for a second offense, the victim was sewn in a leather ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... fool!" The words leaped from the lips of Ralph Bastin, in a tone of command that literally awed the interrupter. The effect, too, upon the hesitating, vacillating mass of people was, for the moment at least, to arouse their sympathy with Ralph, and a ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... man of perhaps threescore years, benign of aspect save for the eyes, which were neither clear nor steady, but had the trick of looking past one. Glenister thought the mouth, too, rather weak and vacillating; but the clean-shaven face was dignified by learning a acumen and was ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... perfect peace made up of reminiscences of a high-porticoed house, the grass-grown wheel-tracks and the sandy beach of the village on the Connecticut coast where his early home had been. His fancies were rich and full, but slightly chaotic. So also his will was strong and imperious at times, but vacillating. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... Massachusetts Bay, that he was collecting information which would be useful to a Spanish fleet operating on that coast. Whether this charge was true or not, at any rate he wrote a letter to a friend, a Madrid editor visiting Havana, in which he characterized McKinley as a vacillating and timeserving politician. Alert American newspaper men, who practically constituted a secret service of some efficiency, managed to obtain the letter. On February 9, 1898, De Lome saw a facsimile of this letter printed in a newspaper and at once cabled his resignation. In immediately ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... a satire upon George II., ,the balancing Captain," and upon that in his vacillating and doubtful conduct, which his fears for the electorate of Hanover made him pursue, whenever Germany was the seat of war. His Sister, whom he is accused of deserting, was Maria Theresa, Queen ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... to retreat, why had he not retreated when a proposition to that effect was made to him at his own chambers? Of all the weak, vacillating, ill-conditioned men that Mr. Griffenbottom had ever been concerned with, Sir Thomas Underwood was the weakest, most vacillating, and most ill-conditioned. To have to sit in the same boat with such a man was the greatest misfortune that had ever befallen ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... we were. It may be all very well for the fantastic love of novels to be free, but that strange need of each other, which we call "love" in real life, for want of a better term—that must be forged into a bond, or what help is it to us poor vacillating mortals? Love must be an Anchor in real life—nothing else ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... Nicholas, rousing himself, when I stated my difficulty, "don't you see that the vacillating policy of England has driven us to war in spite of ourselves? She would not join the rest of Europe in compelling Turkey to effect reforms which she—Turkey—had promised to make, so that nothing else was left for us but to ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... the throat when his whole strength is given to a struggle with Nature. Besides, in our science results are perceivable; we can measure effects and predict them; whereas all things are uncertain and vacillating in the struggles of men and their selfish interests. We decompose the diamond in our crucibles, and we shall make diamonds, we shall make gold! We shall impel vessels (as they have at Barcelona) with fire and a little water! We test the wind, and we shall make ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... counties still refused to believe that the Mormons were sincere in their intention to depart, and the county meetings of the year before were reassembled to warn the Mormons that the citizens stood ready to enforce their order. The vacillating course of Governor Ford did not help the situation. He issued an order disbanding Major Warren's force on May 1, and on the following day instructed him to muster it into service again. Warren was very outspoken in his determination to protect the departing Mormons, and in a proclamation which ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... follow his friend Tartarin to the summit of Mont Blanc. Since two in the morning—it was now four by the president's repeater—the hapless courier had groped along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed, vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations extorted from him by his mishaps, for an avalanche was on the watch, and the slightest concussion, a mere vibration of the crystalline air, might send down its masses of snow ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... avoid—the flag of Great Britain. The Boers had occupied Natal from within, but England had previously done the same by sea, and a small colony of Englishmen had settled at Port Natal, now known as Durban. The home Government, however, had acted in a vacillating way, and it was only the conquest of Natal by the Boers which caused them to claim it as a British colony. At the same time they asserted the unwelcome doctrine that a British subject could not at will throw off his allegiance, and that, go where they ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to turn. He suspects every adviser of treachery, of self-interest, of veniality, and he has reason to do so. The wisest, in his desperate position, would scarce know how to bear himself, and what can we expect of so narrow an intellect, so vacillating and timid a nature? I pity him profoundly, but I also despise him, for there is a want of metal in him which will ever prevent him from ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... to dethrone the legitimate Ts'i house. The wily Marquess of Ts'i thereupon—of course at the instigation of the intriguing "great families"—tried another tack, and succeeded at last in corrupting the vacillating Lu prince with presents of horses, racing chariots, and dancing women. Then it was (497) that Confucius set out disheartened on his travels. Recalled thirteen years later, he soon afterwards began to devote his remaining powers ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... Syracuse, Alcibiades, the most skilful of the three, was soon deposed from his command by a factious and fanatic vote of his fellow-countrymen, and the other competent one, Lamachus, fell early in a skirmish: while, more fortunately still for her, the feeble and vacillating Nicias remained unrecalled and unhurt, to assume the undivided leadership of the Athenian army and fleet, and to mar, by alternate over-caution and over-carelessness, every chance of success which the early part of the operations offered. ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... The vacillating court of Berlin heard with much apprehension of the formation of the Rhenish confederacy;[53] and with deep resentment of its immediate consequence, the dissolution of the Germanic Empire. The house of Brandenburg ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... And yet Francis Bernard was hardly a faithful representative of the proud imperial power for which he acted. He was a bad Governor, but he was not so bad as the cause he was obliged to uphold. He was arbitrary, but he was not so arbitrary as his instructions. He was vacillating, but he was not so vacillating as the Ministers. When he gave the conciliatory reply to the June town-meeting, it was judged that he lowered the national standard, and it seriously damaged him at Court; when he spoke in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... were popular just before and during the war attest the vacillating temper of the people. Joyous airs were at first heard, these growing contemptuous and defiant as the struggle approached, then stirring war songs and hymns of encouragement. But as sorrow followed sorrow until ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... opportunity for Louis to complete the conquest of his vacillating cousin whose allegiance was so vital to his plans of aggrandisement. Louise should go to Whitehall to play the part of beautiful spy on Charles, and, by her favours, to make him a pliant tool in the hand of "le ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... him, almost as though his own brain tricked him. Of Anna's sudden passion for him he had no doubt whatever. She was ready and willing to yield her whole self to him and would, it might be, make him a devoted wife. None the less, the temptation found him vacillating and incapable even of a clear decision. Some voice of the past called to him and would not be silenced. Maladroitly, he gave no direct reply, but ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... muscle, bone and brain grow in symmetry and power, and there is cunning to devise and the strong right arm to execute. But if it be thin and poor, and its circulation feeble and uncertain, the will flags, the mind is weak and vacillating, the muscles grow puny, and the man becomes an unresisting prey to disease and circumstance. If it escape through a wound, strength ebbs with it, until at length life itself flows out with the unchecked crimson stream. Thus, then, by acting upon the blood, climate has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... happiness that was in question, her own conduct, her own greatness, she would not have dreamed of having an opinion of her own. She would have consulted the Doctor, and simply have done as he directed. But all this was for her child, and in a vague, vacillating way she felt that for her child she ought to be ready with ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... years will scarcely people our present domain! Now, Smooth, I'll cut out a small job for the Young American party:—let them, just to give a specimen of their principles, step across to Europe and help Louis and Uncle John (I hate John, though) whip Nicholas, and turn vacillating, faithless Austria into a republic, with principle and spirit equal to her position as a nation.' The General looked serious as he concluded—so far as whipping Austria was concerned we would be only too glad ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... ostentatiously prodigal, filthily intemperate and affectedly refined. Disgustingly licentious and extravagantly superstitious, a brute in appetite, vigorous though vacillating in action. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... cataract, Bearing all down in thy precipitancy— And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows And mine is living blood: thou dost His will, The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know, Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall Linger with vacillating obedience, Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to— Since the good mother holds me still a child! Good mother is bad mother unto me! A worse were better; yet no worse would I. Heaven yield her for ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson |
