"Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that party in Kentucky; but the vital change in the political faith of Kentucky, was wrought by Henry Clay. All previous interruptions to the opinions which she had acquired as her birthright from Virginia, were but partial, and would have been ephemeral, but the spell which the great magician cast over his people was like the glamour of mediaeval enchantment. It bound them in helpless but delighted acquiescence in the will of the master. Their vision informed them, not ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... advantage of being thoroughly familiar with the scenes and types of character depicted; the charm of an almost unequaled simplicity and directness. He possessed the rare gift of being able to envelop every topic that he touched with an atmosphere of elegance and distinction. His productions are not ephemeral, but are of ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... of fighting Godfrey of Bouillon, ephemeral king of Jerusalem, took his homeward road back to France, accompanied by three cavaliers, in all, 'then, four horses, one more than Rashi had predicted. Godfrey remembered the rabbi's prophecy, and determined to ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... Herculaneum, and others innumerable. Add to the reckoning all whom thou hast known, one after another. One man after burying another has been laid out dead, and another buries him; and all this in a short time. To conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... is a fantastic little vision of bygone Venice, evoked by the music of an old Venetian master, and filling us with the sense of a joyous ephemeral existence, in which the glow of life is already struck by the shuddering chill of annihilation. This sense is created by the sounds, as Mr. Browning describes them: and their directly expressive power must stand ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... nature. They are the living, free expression of man's place in creation. The most elaborate schemes and powerful organizations are soulless without these basic principles of morality and have but an ephemeral existence. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... financial condition of France, and, in biting and scornful words, in the language of sadness and despair, developed the need and the misfortune of the land. The king gave the chief minister of police strict injunctions to send him all these ephemeral publications. He wanted to read them all, wanted to find the kernel of wheat which each contained, and, from his enemies, who assuredly would not flatter, he wanted to learn how to be a good king. And the first of his cares he saw to be a frugal king, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... either for his loans or for his reforms, as the case might be, and so carry both. But the France of 1789 was not the France of 1614. As soon as the call for the meeting was issued, and the decisive steps were taken, the whole country was flooded with pamphlets. Most of them were ephemeral; one was epochal. In it the Abbe Sieyes asked the question, "What is the third estate?" and answered so as to strengthen the already spreading conviction that the people of France were really the nation. The ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... virtuous"? It is from England that we obtain the precedent which husbands should adopt in their houses. Those who have eyes ought to see that when the government is running smoothly the Whigs are rarely in power. A long Tory ministry has always succeeded an ephemeral Liberal cabinet. The orators of a national party resemble the rats which wear their teeth away in gnawing the rotten panel; they close up the hole as soon as they smell the nuts and the lard locked up in the royal cupboard. The woman is the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... friend, is a specimen of the true mob-literature! ... written to-day, forgotten to-morrow! 'Tis a droll thing to meditate upon, the ephemeral nature of all this pouring-out of unnecessary words and stale stock-phrases!—and, wouldst thou believe it, Theos! each little paid scribe that adds his poor quota to this ill-assorted trash deems ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... bird, the eyes of a child, and a wild-flower come upon unexpectedly in a scene of desolation. For in all three, we agreed, shines that wonder which holds adoration, that joy which is spontaneous and uncalculated, and that surprise which pertains to Eternity looking out triumphantly upon ephemeral things. ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... is a law of psychical essence which makes necessary all these ephemeral entanglements which to you seem so severe, and you will yet see from your own standpoint of reason why such hardships must be endured by questioning souls on ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... life-like characters. Phinuit, George Pelham and Rector are as unlike each other as possible. What, on the telepathic hypothesis, has had the power to create them? Mrs Piper's secondary personalities should have incarnated the communicator without intermediary. In order to understand this ephemeral reconstitution of a consciousness which has for ever vanished, we should have to allow that the scattered elements of this consciousness had temporarily grouped themselves around the point de repere formed by the secondary personality of Mrs Piper. We should ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... pleasure of being confined, everything is arranged in accordance with a most purposeful plan and is most strictly subjected to laws and rules. And the very strict order, on account of which the existence of your creations is so short lived, and, I may say, ephemeral, is full of the profoundest wisdom. Allowing you to perfect yourself in your art, it wisely guards other people against the perhaps injurious influence of your productions, and in any case it completes logically, finishes, enforces, and makes clear the meaning ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... These matters were all ephemeral, and freaks; they produced, however, somewhat of the same effect on me as on my father, in persuading me that he was born for the sphere he occupied, and rendering me rather callous as to the sources of ways and means. I put my name to a bond for several thousand pounds, in conjunction with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... corrupting influence in the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have profited its ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... written more such lyrics as "Unseen Spirits," his fame could hardly have proved so ephemeral. Poe considered this poem Willis's best, and I see no ground for calling the ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... supreme wisdom, are a supreme force. For all the faithful who sang there came from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but soft resignation to coming destruction. Living of the present hour, they lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting entireties, of almost infinite duration, which is called ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... Wide," to which in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as "An Irish Folk Song." Like "O Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... shall prevail at last! Surely ye shall prevail! Your silence and austerity shall win at last: Desire and mirth, the world's ephemeral lights shall fail, The sweet star of your queen is ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... secluded life which Agnes had led with the specious and fatal brilliancy which had been the lot of her mother,—her simple peasant garb with those remembered visions of jewelry and silk and embroideries with which the partial patronage of the Duchess or the ephemeral passion of her son had decked out the poor Isella; and then came swelling at her heart a tumultuous thought, one which she had repressed and kept down for years with all the force of pride and hatred. Agnes, peasant-girl though ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... Future eloquent and clear, And sees the tide of Life roll calm along, Where glittering phantoms rise, a luring throng; And voiceful Fame holds out the laurel bough: Where rapturous applause is loud and long, Frail guerdon for the heart!—which lights the brow With the ephemeral ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... being, and then, having reached them, there to abide as an indigenous principle, you must imbue the womanhood of that people with all its elements and qualities. Any movement which passes by the female sex is an ephemeral thing. Without them, no true nationality, patriotism, religion, cultivation, family life, or true social status, is a possibility. In this matter it takes two to make one—mankind is a duality. The male may bring, as an exotic, a foreign graft, say, of civilization, to a new ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... to the celebrated Council of Five Hundred. During their ephemeral reign, these very rooms were designed for their halls of audience, and levees, the rich mouldings, and cornices of which were half gilt, and covered with silver paper to preserve them: the poor council were never ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... by poem, has passed under | | the educated criticism and scholarly eye of WILLIAM CULLEN | | BRYANT, a man reverenced among men, a poet great among | | poets. | | | | This is a Library of over 500 Volumes in one book, whose | | contents, of no ephemeral nature or interest, will never | | grow old or stale. It can be, and will be, read and re-read | | with pleasure as long as its leaves hold together. Over 800 | | pages beautifully printed, choicely illustrated, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... complimentary, no doubt, but which it is by no means easy for the surviving bard to satisfy. It is sixty years since most of these verses were written with the light heart and fluent pen of youth, and with no thought of their surviving beyond the natural life of ephemeral magazine pieces of humour. After a long and very crowded life, of which literature has occupied the smallest part, it is difficult for me to live back into the circumstances and conditions under which they were written, or to mark, ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... round a second or two later that ephemeral fit of remorse did its final vanishing; he had once more encountered the pleasant smile, the laughing if ashen-pale face of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of the little chapel or the walls of the fields below. It is incredible that no vestige ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... was written, of Hard Times in the light of the most modern crises of economics, and of The Child's History of England in the light of the most matured authority of history. In short, these criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation upon work that will delight many more. Dickens was a very great man, and there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible way is to say this, that he was an ignorant man, ill-read in the past, and ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... when she had told him everything to prevent his continuing to desire her. However much she might adore him, he would be nothing after all but a successor to a Russian count, and a German musician; the latest, simply among those countless ephemeral lovers, whom she had barely mentioned but who must none the less have left some trace in her memory. The last item in a long inventory! The most recent arrival, coming several years late, and content to nibble at the soggy over-ripe fruit which they had known when it was ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... invariably and appropriately punished by the manner adopted towards him by his own associates, and the feeling of the school in general. Let flogging, then, still be tolerated as a mere physical and convenient inconvenience—its effect, too, is but ephemeral, and soon becomes lost among the things ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... the pumping of the ether or rhigolene ceases, the tissue operated on ceases to be frozen, so ephemeral is the degree of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... uncompromising. There was summer and winter, by Divine ordinance, but there was nothing said about summer-time and winter-time. There was but one Time, and even as Life only stained the white radiance of eternity, as the gifted but, alas! infidel poet remarked, so, too, did Time. But ephemeral as Time was, noon in the Bible clearly meant twelve o'clock, and not one o'clock: towards even, meant towards even, and not the middle of a broiling afternoon. The sixth hour similarly was the Roman way of saying twelve. Winter-time, in fact, was God's time, and ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Representatives, and in similar speeches in the Senate, defined as they had not been defined before, the views of that body of Conservatives whose refusal to accept the defeat of 1800 as anything more than an ephemeral incident, led to the far-reaching results achieved by other parties which their ideas brought into existence. It was said of Bayard, as their representative and leader, that "he was distinguished for the depth of his knowledge, the solidity of his reasoning, and the perspicuity of his illustration." ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... range of our vision, and teaches us in judging the true interests of nations to look beyond the immediate future. Few good judges will deny that this habit is now much wanted. The immensely increased prominence in political life of ephemeral influences, and especially of the influence of a daily press; the immense multiplication of elections, which intensifies party conflicts, all tend to concentrate our thoughts more and more upon an immediate issue. They narrow the range ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... on the other hand, because God is not confined to any one method, the preaching of the late D. L. Moody was specially steeped in the love of God. It is for want of a vision of the inevitable fate of the godless and disobedient, that much of our present-day preaching is so powerless and ephemeral. You cannot get crops out of the land merely by summer showers and sunshine; there must be the subsoil ploughing, the pulverizing frost, the wild March wind. And only when we modern preachers have seen sin as God sees it, and begin to apply the divine ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... Hon. R. J. Walker' herewith offered to our readers, is no ephemeral production, to perish with the passing hour. The views therein offered, the vital principles discussed, the details given, the facts handled, have a wide bearing on the future policy and destiny of our country. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... once said to me, "I think more of my poems and 'The Lady of Lyons' and 'Richelieu' than of all my novels, from 'Pelham' to 'What will he do with it?'" (which was the last he had then written). "A poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's; and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists, from Dickens, the head and front of them, down to that milk-and-water ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... was said to be promised, played a leading part. In all provincial towns a man who rises a trifle above others becomes, for a period more or less protracted, the object of a liking which resembles enthusiasm, and which usually deceives the object of this ephemeral worship. It is to this social caprice that we owe so many local geniuses, soon ignored and their false reputations mortified. The men whom women make the fashion in this way are oftener ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... in 1790, brought about the formal division of France into departments, no doubt thereby facilitated the ephemeral transformation, in September 1792, of the ancient French monarchy into a French republic, 'one and indivisible.' But they also put their improvised republic thereby at the mercy of the marvellous Italian who blew its flimsy framework ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... perfect knowledge. If the student is to be trained to independent thought and action, he must have a sounder basis of knowledge than the teachings of those whose ideas and opinions are shaped by current, ephemeral literature. The majority of men act on too imperfect knowledge, because they will not take the time and exercise the patience to study the facts and principles relating to any given subject, and to do their own thinking. Goethe says: "To act is ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... still live, it is doubtless because Heaven tempers the sense of affliction to the strength of those who have to bear it. Only a woman can know what it is to lose a love which sprang from the heart and was genuine throughout, a passion which was not ephemeral, and satisfied at once the spirit and the flesh. How rare it is to find a man so gifted that to worship him brings no sense of degradation! If such supreme fortune befall us once, we cannot hope for it a second time. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... were a library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without mischief—they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning sand, and leave depression ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the use of the poor papers were restricted to newspapers and other ephemeral literature, but when, as is often the case, paper of very poor quality is used for books of permanent literary interest, the ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... friend of advanced female life. Dr. Johnson was as noted for his fondness for tea as for his other excesses at the table. Many sober minds make coffee and tea the pis a tergo of their daily intellectual labor; just as a few of greater imagination or genius seek in opium the spur of their ephemeral efforts. In the United States, the young imbibe them from their youth up; and it is quite as possible that a part of the nation's nervousness may arise from this cause, as it is probable that our wide-spread dyspepsia begins in the use of badly-cooked solid food, immediately ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... great truth beneath this fiction, which appears too far-fetched because we perceive only material and ephemeral realities. The dead live and move in our midst far more really and effectually than the most venturesome imagination could depict. It is very doubtful whether they remain in their graves. It even seems increasingly ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the fashionable opprobrious epithets of the day; and well do I remember, the man who had earned by his politics the prefix of jacobin to his name, was completely shunned in society, whatever might be his moral character: but, as might be expected, this was merely ephemeral, when parties ran high, and were guided and governed more by impulses and passion than ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... accompany a bunch of North Carolina grapes sent to an editor; and there are many other newspaper cuttings of a similar character. The editor seems to have thought nothing too trivial, nothing too ephemeral, for his purpose, provided the passage contained the ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is, indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be justified, by the correctness of his judgment. The only great man ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... materially enfeebles the entire plant. It is wise to secure as much beauty as is possible just now from your gardens, as a single and unexpected frosty night will destroy almost everything; nothing is more ephemeral than floral beauty. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... as he passed through Preston, Jenny Cameron is said to have administered cordials. By the same writer the Jacobite army are described as looking like "hunted hares." Such is a specimen of one of the ephemeral slanders of the day; and the circumstance of the coach and six tends to disprove the whole letter. The Prince, it is evident from every isolated account, marched on foot until he entered Derby.[110] It was, however, perfectly true that Mrs. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... flowers of the morning glory. They bloom and smile every morning, fade and die in a few hours. How fleeting and ephemeral their lives are! But it is that short life itself that makes them frail, delicate, and lovely. They come forth all at once as bright and beautiful as a rainbow or as the Northern light, and disappear like dreams. This is the best condition ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... an ephemeral glory about life's vanishing points, Wherein you burn... You of unknown voltage Whirling on your axis... Scrawling vermillion signatures Over the night's velvet hoarding... Insolent, towering spherical ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... Theology made the mistake of degrading sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only, we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret of eternal ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... our patron's hobby," said the curate, mincingly, as he indicated the treasures of cloisonne and of porcelain; "he does not frivol away his money as so many do, on idle dissipations and ephemeral pleasures. On the contrary, he devotes it to the ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... we are lost in the contemplation of things outside us, an idea suddenly flies forth, and rushes with the swiftness of lightning across the infinite space which our inner vision allows us to perceive. This radiant idea, springing into existence like a will-o'-the-wisp, dies out never to return; an ephemeral life, like that of babes who give their parents such infinite joy and sorrow; a sort of still-born blossom in the fields of the mind. Sometimes an idea, instead of springing forcibly into life and dying unembodied, dawns gradually, hovers ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... of permanence and uniformity, or at least of consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group solidarity; in which the ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... purport of life, else they would combine together to live long, instead of throwing away the lives of thousands as they do. And what matters a little tyranny in so short a life? What matters a form of government for such ephemeral creatures?" ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mind would have shaken itself unhampered; but because he was going away and on such an errand, perhaps never to return, the matter of what her friends might think or what the world would say, simply did not enter into the question at all. The war had lifted them both above such ephemeral barriers into the place of vision where a soul was a soul no matter what he possessed or who he was. So, as she sat in her big white room with all its dainty accessories to a luxurious life, fit setting for a girl so lovely, she smiled ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... (Doubleday, Page & Company). I record this volume for the sake of one admirable story, "Referred to the Author," which almost any contemporary of Mr. Morley would have been glad to sign. Apart from this, the volume is ephemeral. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... stung almost to madness by the poisonous though ephemeral libels which buzzed so perpetually about him, had at last resolved to retire from the public service. He had been so steadily denounced as being burthensome to his superiors in birth by the power which he had acquired, and to have shot up so far ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... modification once produced long after the causes for it cease to act. The mesas of Arizona, the earth sculpture of the Grand Canyon remain as monuments to the erosive forces which produced them. So a habitat leaves upon man no ephemeral impress; it affects him in one way at a low stage of his development, and differently at a later or higher stage, because the man himself and his relation to his environment have been modified in the earlier period; but traces of that earlier adaptation survive in his maturer life. Hence man's relation ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... and branches of trees and cling on to rocks, there emerge these peerless aristocrats of the flower-world, finished, polished, immaculate, and reigning supreme through sheer distinction and excellence at every point—and also because theirs is clearly no ephemeral convolvulus-like beauty which will fade and vanish away in a twinkling, but is a beauty intensely matured, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... little volume of ephemeral essays to you in recognition of your worth as a man and a scientist, and as ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 1790. In particular Bruce's description of the Abyssinian custom of feeding upon "live bulls and kava" provoked a chorus of incredulity. The traveller was ridiculed upon the stage as Macfable, and in a cloud of ephemeral productions; nor is the following allusion in ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... has recently succeeded in causing a few queens to be artificially impregnated; but this has been the result of a veritable surgical operation, of the most delicate and complicated nature. Moreover, the fertility of the queens was restricted and ephemeral. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Robespierre; and in resentment, because, after he had participated in the French Revolution, President Washington seemed not to have thought him so very important a character in the world, as officially to interpose for his relief from the fangs of the French ephemeral Rulers. In a word, no man, however well informed, was willing to hazard his own popularity by exhibiting the real intellectual character ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... tender words. His voice thrilled me. It was grave and clear as a bronze and silver bell. It rang true, for the most ephemeral desire is not false. I knew, by the sense of his words, that Rose had ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... connected with the now quiet old Chateau, looking in its peaceful old age as out of keeping with its modern surroundings as would an ancient vellum missal, mellowed for centuries in a monkish cell, appear among some of the ephemeral literature of to-day. ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... air was at this season filled with what is called the Green Bay fly, a species of dragon-fly, with which the outer walls of the houses are at times so covered that their color is hardly distinguishable. Their existence is very ephemeral, scarcely lasting more than a day. Their dead bodies are seen adhering to the walls and windows within, and they fall without in such numbers that after a high wind has gathered them into rows along the sides of the quarters, one may walk through them and toss them up with their ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... an officer. It was the first and last instance in my sea life when I served ship-owners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the well-known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian Transport Company. A death leaves something behind, but there was never anything tangible left from the F. C. T. C. It flourished no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead of winter, emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure, and died before ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... not my faith, sir. The history of the ephemeral insect is the history of a day,—that of a man means a whole life; the history of nations means centuries, that of the world eternity; and in eternity justice comes to each one in ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... birth seem predestined to misfortune, and who, by a kind of second-sight, made aware of the fate which awaits them, attach themselves with fear and trembling to a world in which they anticipate only an ephemeral existence and cruel deception. Their sadness is reflected on those who approach them. There is as it were a fatal circle around them, in which all feel themselves seized with indescribable fear, and with ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... west spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness of ephemeral growths into which ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... authority. New England has studied the Constitution in other schools, and under other teachers. She looks upon it with other regards, and deems more highly and reverently both of its just authority and its utility and excellence. The history of her legislative proceedings may be traced. The ephemeral effusions of temporary bodies, called together by the excitement of the occasion, may be hunted up; they have been hunted up. The opinions and votes of her public men, in and out of Congress, may be explored. It will all be in vain. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... than to the sincere and fervid eloquence of the speakers—to place upon our pages an authentic record of the whole proceedings of the day. This "great national gathering," as it was aptly denominated, must be of enduring and not ephemeral interest, and will be remembered, and spoken of, and quoted, long after events of greater apparent importance have passed away into oblivion. The outpourings of a nation's heart are immortal. The tributes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Nelson's squadron hung like a thunder-cloud round the coast, and for some time an expeditionary force of British troops held possession of the island. Our George the Third accepted the Corsican crown, but his reign was as ephemeral as that of King Theodore, the aspiring adventurer, who ended his days ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... neutral tint—no effect. Quite a failure, one cannot even stare, and you know, Granville, the object of all these strange speeches is merely to make fools stare. To be the wonder of the London world for a single day, is the great ambition of these ephemeral fame- hunters 'insects that shine, buzz, and fly-blow in ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... Abode of Fancy. Latterly the various tea-masters substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tea-room, and the term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical. It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an Abode of the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... stage for half a century or more, and still have power to attract and move great audiences, wherever is spoken the language in which he wrote. The dramatization of the novel is universally and justly regarded as the most ephemeral and worthless of dramatic production; and the novels of Dickens, on account of their length, of the great number of figures he introduces, of the variety and occasional exaggeration of his dialogues and his situations, have been peculiarly difficult of adaptation to theatrical ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... days' intimacy with Yates had shown him how far apart they had managed to get by following paths that diverged more and more widely the farther they were trodden. The friendship of their youth had turned out to be merely ephemeral. Neither would now choose the other as an intimate associate. ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... the life and death of us, in action or in sleep. Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all! Thou that in all and over all, and through and under all, incessant! Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm, Holding Humanity as in the open hand, as some ephemeral toy, How ill to ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... talent and learned professional pride have been overbalanced by a democratic press. The whole nation writes, and the individual writer is either swallowed up in the mass or gains but ephemeral fame. Every writer, almost without exception, affects a popular style. But, in this rich literary field, all springs up freely without connection or guidance. No party is concentrated or represented by any reigning journal, but each individual ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Ann Howard's intervention that decided the point. She vehemently disapproved; a gift of techniques should be withheld until she had examined their cultural traditions. But Martin Lord was a trade agent, and he had no intention of allowing his mission to be wrecked by the ephemeral doubts of a teacher. Here at the onset was the time to make it clear that he was in command. He ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... genius, like Swift, who wrote one, or even of a lively observer, who lived amidst the scenes he describes, as Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, which form a regular diary, only show that they are better acquainted with the more ephemeral and equivocal labours. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Lamentable crimes, 'Tis true, had gone before this hour, dire work Of massacre, [E] in which the senseless sword Was prayed to as a judge; but these were past, Earth free from them for ever, as was thought,—45 Ephemeral monsters, to be seen but once! Things that could ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... answered Dr. Price, and to Burke in turn replied Tom Paine with the brilliant, confident, hard-hitting logic of a pamphlet (The Rights of Man) which for all the efforts of Pitt to suppress it, is still read and circulated to-day. Two notable answers were ephemeral, one from Mary Wollstonecraft, and another (Vindiciae Gallicae) from Mackintosh, who afterwards recanted his own opinions and lived to ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... with him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the question beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a life eternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to produce a merely ephemeral result. But since then another argument has occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race was beginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality were coming in with the family, when society was taking its first start, there came into the human mind—how one can hardly ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... amphitheater (Latin ambi) both *Ana up, again anatomy, Anabaptist *Anti against, opposite antidote, antiphonal, antagonist *Cata down catalepsy, cataclysm *Dia through, across diameter, dialogue *Epi upon epidemic, epithet, epode, ephemeral *Hyper over, extremely hypercritical, hyperbola *Hypo under, in smaller hypodermic, hypophosphate measure *Meta after, over metaphysics, metaphor *Para beside paraphrase, paraphernalia *Peri around, about periscope, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... subjects, restrained as a rule by his dislike to unveiling his heart too freely and yet making itself perceptible in some forcible phrase and in the general temper of mind implied. The great mass of such work is necessarily of ephemeral interest; and it is painful to turn over the old pages and observe what a mould of antiquity seems to have spread over controversies so exciting only thirty years ago. We have gone far in the interval; though it is well to remember that we too shall soon be out of date, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... continual Improvement. Mental culture is one invaluable part of female education. The social graces are a chain of pearls about her neck. But her permanent being consists of a spiritual principle. Unless that be called into action she lives but an ephemeral life. Let her pious capabilities be awakened, let the love of God become her ruling motive, let submission to his high behest, be the joy of her heart, and she enters that path, which conducts, eternally, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... perlections of the Koran and gave alms on his behalf, till the forty days[FN488] were past; when I called together the merchants and nobles of the folk and made them a sumptuous entertainment. As soon as they had eaten, I said to them, 'O merchants, verily this world is ephemeral, but the next world is eternal, and extolled be the perfection of Him who endureth always after His creatures have passed away! Know ye why I have called you together this blessed day?' And they answered, 'Extolled be Allah sole Scient of the hidden things.[FN489]' Quoth I, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... month T. J. Serle struck up an ephemeral connection. He had been Macready's secretary, and acting manager of Drury Lane, and had written "The Shadow on the Wall," and other successful plays; and Jerrold's eldest son was named Thomas Serle, after him. His first paper was "A Fine Lady," on ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... but which man can, up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... therefore, the Purpose was a proven fact; and, though in its completeness inscrutable, it could at least in part be divined from the fact that all these varied and eternal splendours had for their centre our Earth and its ephemeral master. The Purpose, though it is not our Purpose, is especially concerned with us and circles round us. It is the purpose of a God who ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... excite us by example; and of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right. And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so if the writers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... put the Review in his hands. After all, the Review was the first literary power in America, even though it paid almost as little in gold as the United States Treasury. The degree of Harvard College might bear a value as ephemeral as the commission of a President of the United States; but the government of the college, measured by money alone, and patronage, was a matter of more importance than that of some branches of the national service. In social position, the college was the superior of ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... eloquence with which they are enforced. If WORDSWORTH had never written a single verse, this Essay alone would be sufficient to place him in the highest rank of English poets.... Enough has been quoted to show that the Essay on the Convention of Cintra was not an ephemeral production, destined to vanish with the occasion which gave it birth. If this were the case, the labour bestowed upon it was almost abortive. The author composed the work in the discharge of what he regarded a sacred duty, and for the permanent benefit of society, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... manifold, and of ephemeral duration; the work which combats it does not carry within itself a principle of greatness or ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... publishers treat the writers of books as badly as the worst Hebrew sweating shops do their employees. An author in one instance worked for years upon a book which had every prospect of not being ephemeral. He signed a contract with a firm of publishers to receive a ten-percent. royalty only after the first thousand copies were sold. The work had much free advertising and sold well, as many booksellers testified. More than two years have elapsed since it appeared, and though clerks in book stores ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... it, and inhale its brief perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself." ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a cafe-concert in Montmartre, which, like many of its kind, had an ephemeral existence—the nearest, incidentally, to the real Paris to which Andrew Lackaday had attained. It tried to appeal to a catholicity of tastes; to outdo its rivals inscabrousness—did not Farandol and Lizette Blandy make their names there?—and at the same time ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke |
