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Epoch-making   /ˈɛpək-mˈeɪkɪŋ/   Listen
Epoch-making

adjective
1.
Highly significant or important especially bringing about or marking the beginning of a new development or era.  Synonym: epochal.  "An epoch-making discovery"






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"Epoch-making" Quotes from Famous Books



... a few paces from his wife and daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different social perspective that there could be any doubt as to the importance of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making; and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines's frock-coat and the comprehensive cordiality of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... Nevertheless the intrinsic scientific worth of these more or less popular writings is vouched for by the consensus of leading historians and other specially competent judges who, regarding Riehl's work as epoch-making and in some essential aspects fundamental, recognize him as one of the organizers of modern historical science and in particular as the foremost pioneer in the exploration of the widest area within the territory of human knowledge; in fine, as the most efficient representative ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... current a large body of misinformation about English witchcraft. It would be ungrateful of the author not to acknowledge that some very good work has been done on the theme. The Reverend Francis Hutchinson, as already mentioned, wrote in 1718 an epoch-making history of the subject, a book which is still useful and can never be wholly displaced. In 1851 Thomas Wright brought out his Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, a work at once entertaining and learned. Wright wrote largely from original sources and wrote with a good deal of care. Such ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... feast was indeed an epoch-making event in the county. It resembled a barbecue and was quite as inclusive. Distinctions of the social sort were few in Arapahoe County. Cattle-rustlers and sheepmen were debarred, of course, but aside from these unfortunates practically the whole population of men, women, children, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... printed on the mind's eye for ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... After Aristotle, no epoch-making zooelogist arose until Linne was born. In England Linne was preceded by Ray, but binomial nomenclature and the first genuine attempt at the classification of animals dates back to the Systema Naturae of Linne, the tenth edition of which ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... courtesy of Professor Prawling, F. R. S., who has supplied us with the MS. of his recent lecture before the Psycho-Economical Society, we are in a position to give our readers a full account of that masterly and epoch-making address, of which, strange to say, no adequate notice has so ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various

... those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... attempts which have been made in the course of the last twenty years to reform religion in a monistic direction on the basis of advanced knowledge of nature, by far the most important is the epoch-making work of David Friedrich Strauss, entitled The Old Faith and the New: A Confession (11th ed., Bonn, 1881: Collected Writings, 1878). Compare M. J. Savage, Religion in the Light of the Darwinian Doctrine; John William ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... ailments, announced with his customary pomp that he was dying. In this case, however, it was not the dog that died. (He had tried to bite his mother's ankles.) I have written a long and peculiarly solemn paper on the technical elements of style. It is path-breaking and epoch-making; but I do not think the public will be readily convoked to its perusal. Did I tell you that S. C. had risen to the paper on James? At last! O but I was pleased; he's (like Johnnie) been lang, lang o' comin', but here he is. He will ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... scientific aspect of the discovery. But, unlike most epoch-making results from laboratories, this discovery is one which, to a very unusual degree, is within the grasp of the popular and non-technical imagination. Among the other kinds of matter which these rays penetrate ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... It was an epoch-making afternoon for Jacqueline, and not the least part of the enchantment was her first experience of automobiling. The wheezing, coughing little equipage known to Professor Thorpe's friends as the Ark had ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... lived in this poor little cottage that he produced "Osorio," "Fears in Solitude," "Ode to France," the first part of "Christabel," "Frost at Midnight," "The Nightingale," "Kubla Khan," and "The Ancient Mariner," and planned with his friend Wordsworth "Lyrical Ballads," the most epoch-making book of modern English poetry. Truly this year, from April, 1797, to April, 1798, was the annus mirabilis of his life. Never again was he so happy, never again did he do such good work, as when he harboured in ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... Mr. Ellsworth saying that he would certainly communicate Roy's generous and self-sacrificing offer to National Headquarters as a conspicuous instance of a memorable and epoch-making good turn. ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... an appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear; don't make a scene—I insist on your not making a scene!" That was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less epoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had never heard—it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... in any way, this is a companion volume to the author's "epoch-making" story The Leopard's Spots. It is a novel with a great deal to it, and which very properly is going to interest many thousands of readers. * * * It is, first of all, a forceful, dramatic, absorbing love story, with a sequence of events so surprising that one is prepared for the fact that much ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... epoch-making work was his translation of the Pentateuch into German. With this work the present history finds a natural close. Mendelssohn's Pentateuch marks the modernization of the literature of Judaism. There was much opposition to the book, but on the other ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... ago, I chronicled in the Daily Gazette our epoch-making journey in South America, I little thought that it should ever fall to my lot to tell an even stranger personal experience, one which is unique in all human annals and must stand out in the records of ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... described by Julius Wellhausen as "the epoch-making opener of the historical criticism of the Pentateuch." He prepared the way for the Supplement-theory. But he also made valuable contributions to other branches of theology. He had, moreover, considerable poetic faculty, and wrote a drama in three acts, entitled Die Entsagung ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... first four, would require more than the compass of several volumes the size of the present, whereas the attempt made herein is merely to lead with as little digression as possible up to the chief glories for which they are revered, and to suggest some of the many important and epoch-making events intimately associated therewith. More would be impossible, manifestly, unless the present work were to transcend the limitations which were originally planned for it, hence it is with no halting assertion that we enter boldly ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... make this invention a Kennedy House sinecure. I still combat it—but I yield. If they wish to give away their profits they can. Gentlemen, in a few moments I shall have the pleasure of placing before you an opportunity to become shareholders in one of the most epoch-making inventions the world ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... performance. The subjects were commonly suggested by the happenings of the time—an especially outrageous lynching, the trial of a clergyman for heresy, a new attack upon the Monroe Doctrine, the discovery of a new substance such as radium, the publication of an epoch-making book. Page would then fix upon the inevitable men who could write most readably and most authoritatively upon these topics, and "go after" them. Sometimes he would write one of his matchless editorial letters; at other times he would make a personal visit; if necessary, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... and acquired a permanently theological bent; professed the Protestant faith; proceeded to Paris; became the centre of a dangerous religious excitement; had to flee for his life from France; retired to Basel, where he studied Hebrew and wrote his great epoch-making book, the "Institutes of the Christian Religion"; making after this for Strassburg, he chanced to pass through Geneva, was arrested as by the hand of God to stay and help on God's work in the place, but proceeded with such rigour that he was expelled, though recalled after three years; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... simple Greek poetry, with its objectivity, serenity, and moral grace, with the musical poetry of the romantic period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking hours, the other as the moonlight that gleams fitfully on our dreaming ones. Schiller's epoch-making essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, with its rough division into the classic-naive depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... gigantic advances."[1] This fact is easily explained by the remarkable series of inventions that revolutionized this industry between 1738 and 1830, including Arkwright's, Watt's, Compton's, and Cartwright's epoch-making contrivances.[2] The effect which these inventions had on the manufacture of cotton goods is best illustrated by the fact that in England, the chief cotton market of the world, the consumption of raw cotton rose steadily from 13,000 bales in 1781, ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... book was expected to be epoch-making, and it fully justifies such expectation.... A MOST ADMIRABLE account of the mode of occurrence of practically ALL KNOWN MINERALS. Probably stands unrivalled for ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer

... logic, or a blend of both—use their thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with the creative intuition which culminates in poetry. To define the scope and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce's epoch-making Aesthetics, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in Critica, as a literary critic. Bergson is the dominant figure in a line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... But Carlyle's epoch-making book was Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored), published in Fraser's {287} Magazine for 1833-1834, and first reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams, conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities of the soul. It purported to be the life and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... group of singing girls not yet completed, was standing on a heavy scaffolding. It showed the same noble qualities that Frederick had observed in the relief of the singing boys. Had these works been displayed in Germany, they would undoubtedly have been epoch-making. A bust of an old woman had some of the traits of Donatello. Everything in the room testified to the facility with which the youthful master created. There was a long decorative frieze in clay, putti with goats, dancing fauns, maenads, Silenus on ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... Reformers of Religions: and, since {143} moral and spiritual insight are very closely connected with character, for the moral hero, the leader of men, the Saint. Especially to the new departures, the turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in ethical and religious progress connected with the appearance of such men, we may apply the term Revelation in ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... arguments with the skill of a great advocate, and the combination of these qualities—qualities, highly appreciated everywhere, but nowhere more than in this Hall and among a Gray's Inn audience—has given an epoch-making character to his work. To-day he comes before us in a different character. He is neither judge nor advocate, but historian: and he offers to guide us through one of the most interesting and important enterprises in which our common race has ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... London or the provinces, renowned For prowess with the lob-worm or the grub, Should land a roach of more than half a pound, Then in the leading papers of the hub Full space for that achievement will be found, And clearest type and unaffected rapture Will signalize the epoch-making capture! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various

... more led to dwell earnestly on these wider aspects, since that great epoch-making commemoration which marked the sixtieth year of the reign of our Queen, and which brought home to the consciousness of the nation, as nothing else has ever done, its vast world-wide responsibilities. That great national festival, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... a great success from the day it came from the press. It was an epoch-making novel because it dragged into the fierce light of publicity many questions which the English public of that day had decided to leave out of print. To us of today it contains nothing unusual, for modern women writers have gone ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... let men judge him from his three revolutions, let the unknown dead in the ditches beyond the enceinte judge him, let the spectres of the murdered from Pere Lachaise to the bullet-pitted terrace of the Luxembourg judge this meddler, this potterer in epoch-making cataclysms. Bismarck, gray, imbittered, without honour in an unenlightened court, can still smile when he remembers Jules Favre and his prayer for ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers

... and the contrast begins. With John, it was the tragic close of a great and epoch-making career. When he died men said—Alas! a prophet's voice is silenced. What a pity that in a moment of passion the tyrant took his life! Let him sleep! Rest will be sweet to one who expended his young strength with such spendthrift ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... of modern literature have proved as epoch-making as the modest little volume called "Synnoeve Solbakken," which appeared in the book shops of Christiania and Copenhagen in 1857. It was a simple tale of peasant life, an idyl of the love of a boy and a girl, but it ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... Victorian." Everybody knows where and what Islington is and the sort of minor tragedy and comedy that would be likely to occur in the lives of its inhabitants in the last reign but one. No one would look there for epoch-making crises, but many will find a longed-for relief from the speeding-up tendencies of modern romance. Lastly, but for a tendency at times to affectation, the style of the writer is as graceful and elegant as her themes are homely and serene, and that, I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various

... in the growth of human ideas or the origins of human society can afford to neglect Maine's Ancient Law. Published some fifty-six years ago it immediately took rank as a classic, and its epoch-making influence may not unfitly be compared to that exercised by Darwin's Origin of Species. The revolution effected by the latter in the study of biology was hardly more remarkable than that effected by Maine's brilliant treatise in the study of early institutions. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... ideal characters are almost hostile in their bearing towards his characters drawn from real life. Altogether, Von Vizin must be regarded as the first independent, artistic writer in Russia, and therefore epoch-making, just as Feofan Prokopovitch must be rated as the first Russian secular writer, and Sumarokoff as the first Russian literary man and publicist in the modern meaning of the words. It is worth noting (because of a tendency to that ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... manifold hindrances till success was near. The advantages of your system have given your ship the greatest attainable speed and dirigibility, and the important results you have obtained have produced an epoch-making step forward in the construction of airships and leave laid down a valuable ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... temper, rendered more terrible and blasting from its very infrequency. And this was the man upon whom was laid the burden of the war of the Revolution, and to whom, under God, were due the mighty results of that epoch-making contest. Seldom, if ever, do we see men of such rare qualities that when they leave their appointed places no other can be found to fill them; but if such a one ever did ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... scattered over all-out-of-doors—when we add to these the revolutions in many other departments of life and industry, we must regard the nineteenth as the century par excellence of expansion, and in various directions an epoch-making era. ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... historical proportion is in no time the heritage of the many, and is least of all attainable while the memory of a campaign is fresh. On Englishmen who welcomed home their army in 1855, the strife from which shattered but victorious it had returned, loomed as epoch-making and colossal, as claiming therefore permanent record from some eloquent artist of attested descriptive power. Soon the report gained ground that the destined chronicler was Kinglake, and all men hailed the selection; yet the sceptic who in ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... two hundred years from the day that La Salle so miserably perished on the plains of Texas, in exactly one hundred years from the time when, under the epoch-making "Ordinance of the Northwest" (as it has been called), the parcelling of the land began, and in less than half a century from the year when Andrew Johnson's seven-hundred-year prophecy began to run, practically the entire domain had been surveyed and sold or given ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... THE FAITH.—It was early in the reign of Henry VIII. that Martin Luther tacked upon the door of the Wittenberg church his epoch-making theses. England was stirred with the rest of Western Christendom. Henry wrote a Latin treatise replying to the articles of the audacious monk. The Pope, Leo X., rewarded Henry's Catholic zeal by conferring upon him the title of "Defender ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... leagues of it; in 1802 she was left a widow, and soon after she went first to Weimar, where she met Goethe and Schiller, and then to Berlin; by-and-by she returned to France, but on the publication of her "Corinne," was ordered out of the country; after this appeared her great epoch-making work on Germany, "L'Allemagne," which was seized by the French censors; after this she quitted for good the soil of France, to which she had returned; settled in Switzerland, at Coppet, where ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Bengal showed also their tardy appreciation by calling on him to preside over the deliberations of the Mymensing meeting of the Bengal Literary Conference, held on the 14th April 1911, when he delivered a unique Address,[26] in the Bengali language, on the results of his epoch-making researches. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... place he is a great and an attractive figure—not least in the history of the novel. But I can see nothing in him that makes me think him likely, and much that makes me think him utterly unlikely, to be the author of what I conceive to be the greatest, the most epoch-making, and almost the originating conception of the novel-romance itself. Who it was that did conceive this great thing I do not positively know. All external evidence points to Walter Map; no internal evidence, that I have seen, seems to me really to point away from him. But if ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... has more than trebled in twelve years demonstrates the epoch-making character of the fiscal convention with the United States. The trade figures ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... that the witty description of the Greek politician who was said to be well known throughout the whole civilised world and at Lampsacus, or of the philosopher who was announced as the author of many epoch-making volumes and as the second cousin of the Earl of Cork, represents a very real truth,—that reputation is not a thing which is worth bothering one's head about; that if it comes, it is apt to be quite as inconvenient as it is pleasant, while if one grows to depend upon it, it is ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... profession. These may be workers, they may and do advance knowledge, but they are never pioneers. Not to them is it given to open out great tracts of unexplored territory, or to view the promised land as from a mountain-top. Of them we shall not speak; we will concern ourselves only with the greatest, the epoch-making men, to whose life and work we and all who come after them owe so much. Such a man was Thales. Such was Archimedes, Hipparchus, Copernicus. Such ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... the Constitution.—Before making a study of this epoch-making document, let us inquire briefly as to its origin. An analysis of the Constitution shows that there are some provisions which are new and that English precedent had an influence. The main features, however, were derived from the constitutions of the States with whose practical ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James

... was written in 1918 before the United States took sufficient interest in the republic to bring about certain epoch-making changes. The United States has since offered the country a loan of five million dollars and with the approval of Great Britain and France and with the request of the Liberian Government has consented ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... epoch-making events certain other happenings stood out in bold relief against the gray of dull ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... progress is concerned, it may be doubtful whether anything so epoch-making as the steam-engine or the telegraph is held in store for us by the future. But in the field of purely scientific discovery we are finding a crowd of things of which our philosophy did not dream even ten ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... followers in the sixteenth century shouted epigrams and affected being greater poets than they really were. It was a good sign, and it left its impress on French literature. Following in the footsteps of Francis I and the two Marguerites nobles vied with each other in their efforts to produce some epoch-making work of poesy or prose, and while they did not often publish for profit they were glad enough to see themselves in print. Then there were also the professional men of letters, as distinct from the courtiers with literary ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... Wallace,—a wonderful group of men whose works, though they hardly belong to our present study, have exercised an incalculable influence on our life and literature. Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), which apparently established the theory of evolution, was an epoch-making book. It revolutionized not only our conceptions of natural history, but also our methods of thinking on all the problems of human society. Those who would read a summary of the greatest scientific discovery of the age will find it ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... instance, is not merely the century of the Hundred Years' War and of the Black Prince and Edward III; more significantly it is for him the era of the slow decay of villeinage in England, a fact more epoch-making, in the long run, than the struggle over our French provinces. We still praise famous men, for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history; but we praise them with due recognition ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... of the old wooden ships of that day after a weary journey of many weeks—as yet comparatively unknown to fame—that at the time of his death, on March 8, 1889, in the city of New York, almost twenty-seven years to a day after the epoch-making battle of his "Monitor" with the "Merrimac," his name would be on every tongue in every land, and that the Government of the United States would deem it an honor to place the magnificent protected cruiser "Baltimore" of the United States Navy ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro

... the scientific, side (developed in his own volumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is marked with a simplicity, clarity, and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer such as doubt the sustaining influence of ancestral faith upon character and will to the eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained the opening and consummation of ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... unprofitable, were made alive; facts formerly without meaning now found their interpretation. Under this new influence an army of young men took up every promising line of scientific investigation in every land. Epoch-making books appeared in all the great nations. Spencer, Wallace, Huxley, Galton, Tyndall, Tylor, Lubbock, Bagehot, Lewes, in England, and a phalanx of strong men in Germany, Italy, France, and America gave forth ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... was, in no small measure, due to the historic associations with which in design they were so happily linked, the subjects depicted in the several denominations of the series being in variety and appropriateness admirably adapted to the end in view,—popular recognition of an epoch-making event. ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole

... changing the conceptions that we had all followed since Einstein. I had long ago mastered the last detail of Einstein's theory, as had, in time, the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately into the study of this new, epoch-making conception. ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker

... score years and ten Since the epoch-making day When a foreign fleet, through the summer heat, Came sailing up our bay; Still ring in my ears my father's words, As we watched it breast the waves,— "If strangers land on Nippon's strand, We may one ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... deprived of the agremens to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled—no, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... His supremacy as a Man, and respect the epoch-making significance of His birth. Christ was born in the meridian of time;[2] and His life on earth marked at once the culmination of the past and the inauguration of an era distinctive in human hope, endeavor, and achievement. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks and talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the first edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... they had a lengthy conversation. The Surveyor-General mentioned the names of Pestalozzi and Froebel with profound respect, although he displayed no intimacy with their epoch-making works. Graham learnt that University Extension still existed in a modified form. "There is a certain type of girl, for example," said the Surveyor-General, dilating with a sense of his usefulness, "with a ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... epoch-making treatise announcing and demonstrating the ejaculation of the blood is here printed, was born at Folkestone, Kent, England, April 1, 1578. He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and at ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... at the great, hive-like mansion and in the lift, which took them almost to the top, Karen, standing near him, again put her hand in his and smiled at him. She was not feeling his tremor, but she was limpidly happy and as conscious as he of an epoch-making moment. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... in all her fervor, had put forth first the facts in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which so buttressed her romance, the book would have had no more effect than had followed the like compilations and arraignments. What was needed? If we can discover this, we shall have the secret of this epoch-making novel. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... cutting out a few pages each day, and reading them during the idle minute here and there, note how soon you can make yourself familiar with the world's best speeches. If you do not wish to mutilate your book, take it with you—most of the epoch-making books are now printed in small volumes. The daily waste of natural gas in the Oklahoma fields is equal to ten thousand tons of coal. Only about three per cent of the power of the coal that enters the furnace ever diffuses itself from your electric bulb as light—the other ninety-seven per ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... give the rapt pedestrian a mouthful of exhilarating ether. One who is really a poet and not merely a casual sonneteer, should try to get a site for his tent on this particular shore, and retire to compose an epoch-making epic. The mediaeval saints knew what they were doing when they retired to little nooks and isles along this coast to pray and meditate undisturbed: it is much easier to feel devout in a fresh atmosphere, than in ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... epics herein collected in scenario were epoch-making, so will the gathering of these side by side prove to be. Literary judgments must be comparative, and now we may place each epic in direct comparison with any other, with a resultant light, both diffused ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... all the rest was in mourning, the blinds down as for a funeral) a faint stir of curiosity; and while I waited the next course, wondering the while what I had ordered, I opened and began to read the epoch-making document. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... was not from an English university at all, but from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This university, the smallest although the oldest of the Scottish universities, has therefore the honor of being the Alma Mater to the epoch-making Englishman. I have seen the entry of the name in the list of graduates for the year 1792; it has evidently been misspelled, for the name is corrected. The first foreign university to recognize Jenner's eminence was Gottingen. In 1794 Jenner had an attack ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... Genevan magistrates, his drafts for civil law and municipal administration, his correspondence with reformers and statesmen, his epoch-making defense of interest taking, his growing tendency toward civil, religious, and economic liberty, his development of primary and university education, his intimate knowledge of the dialect and ways of thought of the common people of Geneva, and his broad understanding of European ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... the year 1856, natural dyestuffs alone, with but one or two exceptions, were employed by dyers; but in that year a present distinguished member of this Society, Dr. Perkin, astonished the scientific and industrial world by his epoch-making discovery of the coal tar color mauve. From that time down to the present, the textile colorist has had placed before him an ever increasing number of coloring matters ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... China. The consequence of this was that the distance from Spain to China westward was correspondingly diminished by sixty degrees (or nearly 4000 miles), and it was this error that ultimately encouraged Columbus to attempt his epoch-making voyage. ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs

... of the supply ship, for I'm supposed to meet her here, and it's already twenty-four hours since yesterday's epoch-making battle and I expect the English ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... of the origin of the human race, of the descent of man, is ranked by Huxley in his epoch-making book "Man's Place in Nature", as the deepest with which biology has to concern itself, "the question of questions,"—the problem which underlies all others. In the same brilliant and lucid exposition, which appeared in 1863, soon after the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... was epoch-making in several meanings of the term. It was a reaction against the bold and defiant attitude of the party in power. It was a revolution of the people. Yet it was neither a dissolution of all government, as it appeared to the defeated, nor ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... Calypso, the nymph of wild untrained nature, but the clear sunlit prospect of home and country, the anticipation of sunny Ithaca and prudent Penelope to the hapless sufferer. Ulysses sees his own land in the image of Phaeacia, sees what he is to make out of his own island. Verily it is a great and epoch-making experience for him just before his return; he finds the ideal here which he ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... pretty hot. Trial gallops had shown that Gussie had his own way of doing things. Those interruptions had been enough to prove to the perspicacious that here, seated on the platform at the big binge of the season, was one who, if pushed forward to make a speech, might let himself go in a rather epoch-making manner. ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment I have just referred to has its own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era. Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the question. ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche

... fortnight later. In the afternoon Katrine had been reading by the fire an old Italian tale of love and death. It seemed hardly an epoch-making experience in her life, and yet there had come to her, like the letting in of sudden light, the knowledge that love was beyond and above reason, as religion is, as life itself, of which love is the cause. She had worked to forget, had been taught how to forget, yet she knew she had not forgotten, ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane

... of the best men in Europe on nervous disease. You must have read his little book on sclerosis of the posterior columns. It's as interesting as a novel, and epoch-making in its way. He worked like a horse, did Walker—huge consulting practice—hours a day in the clinical wards—constant original investigations. And then he enjoyed himself also. 'De mortuis,' of course, but still it's an open secret among all who knew him. If he died at forty-five, ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Moses' father-in-law, God-fearing men were appointed to decide for the people on all matters of lesser moment, while the graver cases were still reserved for Moses (xviii.)[1]The arrival at Sinai marked a crisis; for it was there that the epoch-making covenant was made—Jehovah promising to continue His grace to the people, and they, on their part, pledging themselves to obedience. Thunder and lightning and dark storm-clouds accompanied the proclamation of the ten commandments,[2] which ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke's remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first published at ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... much like those which thrilled Newton when he solved one of the riddles of the universe. Indeed, they must have been more intense, for Newton, knowing, had his doubts; I, not knowing, had no doubts at all. So epoch-making did this discovery appear to me that I noted the exact position of the bed so that a wondering posterity might ever afterward view and revere the exact spot on the earth's surface whence one of man's greatest thoughts had winged its way ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... trumpeters came next, splitting the ear with vehement outcries, and then several big brains, special correspondents one might well call them, or historiographers, charged with the task of observing and remembering every detail of this epoch-making interview. A company of attendants, bearing and dragging banners and masses of scented fungus and curious symbols, vanished in the darkness behind. The way was lined by ushers and officers in caparisons that gleamed like steel, and beyond ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... investigated by Mr. F. W. Lanchester, an authority on the theory of flight, and by Professor G. H. Bryan, a great pioneer, who in 1911 produced his book on Stability in Aviation. He had long been interested in the subject; his work, which is recognized as epoch-making, laid a sound mathematical basis for the theory of flight, and directed the work of others along the lines of fruitful experiment. The theoretical conclusions of Professor Bryan were reduced to a practical form by Mr. Leonard Bairstow and the members of the ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... In this epoch-making speech Booker Washington had presented a solution of an apparently insoluble problem. He had offered a platform upon which, as Clark Howell said in the Atlanta Constitution, "both races, blacks and whites, could stand with full justice to each." In the course of the speech he told this story: ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe

... Burgon's is to the point. He had preached in St. Mary's what he regarded as an epoch-making sermon, and afterwards he walked home to Oriel with Hawkins, the famous Provost. He looked for comment and hoped for praise, but the Provost's only remark was, 'Why do you say Emm[a]us?' 'I don't know; isn't it Emm[a]us?' ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt

... Ezra's Proclamation 444 B.C. to the completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra, about A.D. 95, is (upon the whole) derivative. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities of their own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance of the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations ...
— Progress and History • Various

... perhaps would be more correct to speak of it as the first army Greater Britain had ever fashioned; and in my presence Lord Roberts openly gloried in being the first general the empire had entrusted with the command of a really Imperial host. In this epoch-making conflict neither the commander nor the commanded had any cause to be ashamed one of ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... away, drank my tea at a gulp, and settled down to read in luxurious enjoyment. It was a longer letter than I had yet received, and I had a premonition that it would clear the way. But I did not realise how epoch-making it was ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... school of thought in matters literary, held that the poet had never excelled this early work and gave it as his deliberate opinion that if Pope had written nothing else, the 'Essay' would have placed him among the first poets and the first critics. The 'Essay on Criticism' is hardly an epoch-making poem, but ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... earnest a worker for God? As a matter of fact, William Booth was nothing less than a genius, and towards the end of the nineteenth century the world at large gave very generous recognition, not only to the spirit and temper, but to the results of an extraordinarily effective, and, indeed, epoch-making Movement. At the instance of King Edward VII The General was officially invited to be present at the Coronation ceremony in 1902. Nothing could have marked more significantly than this single fact the completeness of the change of public feeling; and when, in 1905, William ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton



Words linked to "Epoch-making" :   epochal, important, significant



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