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Fluctuating   /flˈəktʃəwˌeɪtɪŋ/   Listen
Fluctuating

adjective
1.
Having unpredictable ups and downs.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Fluctuating" Quotes from Famous Books



... powerful party; and though there certainly never was any authority for the belief, the country did believe that that powerful party were influenced by great principles; had in their view a definite and national policy; and would secure to England, instead of a feeble administration and fluctuating opinions, energy ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... own. Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils. Our boasted liberty sometimes trodden down, sometimes giddily set up, and ever precariously fluctuating and unsettled; it has only been kept alive by the blasts of continual feuds, wars, and conspiracies. In no country in Europe has the scaffold so often blushed with the blood of its nobility. Confiscations, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of Sumatra. At the time we write of, the only European residents of the place were connected with Government. The rest of the population was composed of a heterogeneous mass of natives mingled with a number of Chinese, a few Arabs, and a large fluctuating population of traders from Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea, Siam, and the other innumerable isles of the archipelago. These were more or less connected with prahus laden with the rich and varied merchandise ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne

... know that the beginning is GOD. [This was said in a low, fluctuating tone, and with every sign ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... four days in every week during the Session of Parliament, from half-past four in the afternoon to any hour however late after midnight at which the House may adjourn. It is his duty carefully to watch the proceedings of the House, and to observe and measure the fluctuating bearings of Party and of sectional associations on the present position of the Government, and on its chances for the future; and he is thus led to form conclusions as to persons and parties which may not equally strike, or with equal force, those who from without and from ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... complete control. To do this effectually it was necessary to abolish the culture and trade in all other places, which they succeeded in doing by treaty with the native rulers. These agreed to have all the spice trees in their possessions destroyed. They gave up large though fluctuating revenues, but they gained in return a fixed subsidy, freedom from the constant attacks and harsh oppressions of the Portuguese, and a continuance of their regal power and exclusive authority over their own subjects, which ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... generally, and by choice, slept upon the open field, although the autumn was now waning, and the nights began to be frosty. For a little space, while they were getting into order, there was exhibited a changing, fluctuating; and confused appearance of waving tartans and floating plumes, and of banners displaying the proud gathering word of Clanronald, GANION COHERIGA (Gainsay who dares); LOCH-SLOY, the watchword of the Mac-Farlanes; FORTH FORTUNE, AND FILL THE ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... avoided, and that it may gradually give way before some sounder and better regulated system of credit which the growing intelligence of the age may devise. That a better may be substituted I cannot doubt; but of what it shall consist, and how it shall finally supersede the present uncertain and fluctuating currency, time alone can determine. All that I can see is, that the present must, one day or another, come to an end or be greatly modified—if that indeed can save it from an entire overthrow. It has within itself the seeds of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... resemble, in fine, that pretty white spray which crests the stormy waves. They dress and dance, dine and take their pleasure, on the day of Waterloo, in the time of cholera or revolution. Finally, their expenses are all the same, but here the contrast comes in. Of this fluctuating fortune, so agreeably flung away, some possess the capital for which the others wait; they have the same tailors, but the bills of the latter are still to pay. Next, if the first, like sieves, take in ideas of all kinds without retaining any, the latter compare ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... now lowered, fluctuating with anxiety, "you weren't reckoning on paying off them Hatburns? You never?" She halted, gazing at him intently. "Why, they'd shoot you up in no time! You are nothing ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... sparkled, bathed in sunlight. The Sound stretched away to Elsinore, dotted with a few white sails, like sea-gulls' wings; and in the misty east and away to the north-east lay outstretched the faintly-shadowed shores of Sweden. All this immensity of space whirled and wavered, fluctuating beneath ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... they plane a deal board by pulling the tool toward them instead of pushing it, and that in building a house they first construct the roof and, having raised that into position, proceed to work downwards. In money the currency of the country consists of taels of fluctuating value. The tael became thinner and thinner until 2,000 of them piled together made less than three inches in height. The common cash consists of brass coins of varying thicknesses, with a round, square, or triangular hole in the centre, as in ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... shampooing lambency of oarweed, then the lavered boulders pouring gritty runnels back again, and every basined outlet wavering toward another inlet; these, and every phase of each innumerable to-and-fro, made or met their impress in her fluctuating misery. ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore

... Thomas himself was in a state of great misery. From hour to hour he was fluctuating between a desire to run away from the accursed borough, and the shame of taking such a step. The desire for the seat which had brought him to Percycross had almost died out amidst the misery of his position. Among all the men of his party with whom he was associating, there was not one ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... illumined, anxious not to set foot to the right or left. Save for an occasional glance upward, we saw only its reflected light upon the white expanse beneath. It was simply a streak of light right above our heads, holding steadily in position, though fluctuating a little in strength—a light to light us home, that is what it was to us. And it was the most surprising and opportune example of what has been referred to here as the local aurora that eight winters have afforded. ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... of property are made at the time when the means of purchasing are most reduced, and the worst calamities to individuals are only at last arrested by an open violation of their obligations by the banks—a refusal to pay specie for their notes and an imposition upon the community of a fluctuating and depreciated currency. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson

... triumphs, and the agitations of the human heart. "The heart," to use the old-fashioned phrase—there is Mrs. Inchbald's empire, there is the sphere of her glory and her command. Outside of it, her powers are weak and fluctuating. She has no firm grasp of the masculine elements in character: she wishes to draw a rough man, Sandford, and she draws a rude one; she tries her hand at a hero, Rushbrook, and she turns out a prig. ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... upon the size of the tumors. The large tumors are generally cystic. Examination of the vagina shows the pelvis filled by a tense, watery, fluctuating mass. Examining the abdomen, the abdomen is seen more or less distended by a regular swelling, and sometimes this is enormous. The abdomen is rounded and there is no bulging at the sides like there is in ascites (dropsy). The navel is not prominent. The tumor ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... is a complete antithesis between the imagination that has created the clear-cut and definite polytheism of the Greeks and that whence have issued those fluctuating divinities that allow the presentation of the future doctrine of Maya, of universal illusion—another more refined form of the diffluent imagination. Finally, let us note that the Hellenic imagination realized its gods through anthropomorphism—they ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... come without a struggle? Is the beautiful accomplished without strife? Recall the tales of primeval chaos, when, as sang the Ascraean singer, love first darted into the midst; imagine the heave and throe of joining elements; conjure up the first living shapes, born of the fluctuating slime and vapour. Surely they were things incomplete, deformed ghastly fragments of being, as are the dreams of a maniac. Had creative Love stopped there, and then, standing on the height of some fair completed world, had viewed the warring portents, wouldst thou not have said—But ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... Irvin Gregg's brigades on my right and left flanks met with some resistance, yet not enough to deter them from, executing their orders. In front of Merritt the enemy held on more stubbornly, however, and there ensued an exceedingly severe and, at times, fluctuating fight. Finally the Confederates gave way, and we pursued them almost to Spottsylvania Court House; but deeming it prudent to recall the pursuers about dark, I encamped Gregg's and Merritt's divisions in the open fields to the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... Archbishop, after having been in so miraculous a manner accepted into it, even as if Providence had made him a special instrument to achieve the discoveries which the Lords of the Congregation had then so much at heart. And while he was walking along in this fluctuating mood, he came suddenly upon a man who was sitting, as he had so shortly before been himself, sad and solitary, gazing on the sea. The stranger, on hearing him approach, rose hastily, and was moving quickly away; but my grandfather called ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... and with fluctuating color and a rapidly beating heart, she took hold of the knot of the silk, which had been used to mend it, and deliberately pulled it out, when the ragged edges fell apart, revealing a ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... comment on the Greek idea of the state. That idea, as we saw, was an ordered inequality, political as well as social; and in certain states, and notably in Sparta, it was successfully embodied in a stable form. But in the majority of the Greek states it never attained to more than a fluctuating and temporary realisation. The inherent contradiction was too extreme for the attempted reconciliation; the inequalities refused to blend in a harmony of divergent tones but asserted themselves in the dissonance of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... by the way, is very badly needed. For the upper classes of all countries, the people who travel, and have to stand the nuisance and loss of changing their money at every frontier, the bankers and international merchants who have to cumber their accounts with the fluctuating item of exchange between commercial centres will insist upon it. All the European nations, with the exception of Russia and Turkey, are ready for the change, and when these reach the stage of real constitutionalism in their progress ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... to Regina we saw abundant evidence that last year had been a "rabbit year," that is, a year in which the ever-fluctuating population of Northern Hares (Snowshoe-rabbits or White-rabbits) had reached its maximum, for nine-tenths of the bushes in sight from the train had been barked at the snow level. But the fact that we saw not one Rabbit shows that "the plague" had appeared, had run ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton

... the instinct of that capricious and fluctuating conscience which belongs to weak minds, which remains still, and drooping, and lifeless, as a flag on a masthead during the calm of prosperity, but flutters, and flaps, and tosses when the wind blows and the wave heaves, thought very acutely and remorsefully of the condition of the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of Manly action free, I dauntless trod ye fluctuating sea In Pompous War or happier Peace to bring Joy to my Sire and honour to my King. And much by favour of the God was done Ere half the term of human life was run. One fatal night, returning from the bay Where British ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent

... MISS WOOLER,—I have delayed answering your letter in the faint hope that I might be able to reply favourably to your inquiries after my sister's health. This, however, is not permitted me to do. Her decline is gradual and fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful. The symptoms of cough, pain in the side and chest, wasting of flesh, strength, and appetite, after the sad experience we have had, cannot but be regarded by ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... of enthusiasm, amidst the sublime and pathetic labouring in his whole mind, arose the terror of failure. The subject chosen was "The Tempest;" and, as Hayley truly observes, it created many a tempest in the fluctuating spirits of Romney. The vehement desire of that perfection which genius conceives, and cannot always execute, held a perpetual contest with that dejection of spirits which degrades the unhappy sufferer, and casts him, grovelling among the mean of his class. In a national work, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... united craft and penetration, perceiving he had to act with an ignorant king, and a fluctuating people, incapable of opposing much resistance, replied to Vortigern, "We are, indeed, few in number; but, if you will give us leave, we will send to our country for an additional number of forces, with whom we will fight for you and your subjects." Vortigern assenting ...
— History Of The Britons (Historia Brittonum) • Nennius

... are things eternal?—Powers depart, Possessions vanish, and opinions change, And passions hold a fluctuating seat; But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken, And subject neither to eclipse nor wane, Duty exists; immutably survive For our support, the measures and the forms Which an abstract intelligence supplies; Whose kingdom is where time ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... (no one read them younger than I, I think;) and how one gradually grew up into a different knowledge of them, and so forth—would it not be interesting to many people? I should like to know if you descry anything in this. It is one of the dim notions fluctuating within me.[144]. . . The profits, brave indeed, are four hundred pounds more than the utmost I expected. . . . The same yearnings have been mine, in reference to the Praslin business. It is pretty ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... move was to set down, in orderly fashion, the list of the gem's attributes. I grouped together the fluctuating nature of its pale blue colour, its power of reproducing those who had gone into the Blind Spot, its combination of perfect solidity with extreme lightness; its quality of coldness to the touch of a male, and warmth to that of a female; and finally its ability to induct—I think ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... nurse remarked that this patient had complained of pain in the back during the previous night, and that there seemed to be a soft spot on his rump. By examining, I found below the bandage which I had put around the patient, a fluctuating mass, immediately beneath the skin and superficial fascia, extending from the tenth dorsal vertebra above, to the coccyx below, and from the crest of the right ilium to that ...
— Report on Surgery to the Santa Clara County Medical Society • Joseph Bradford Cox

... beneficial of insects, as they prey on thousands of injurious caterpillars. Another fly of this Muscid group, the Idia Bigoti, according to Coquerel and Mondiere, produces in the natives of Senegal, hard, red, fluctuating tumors, in ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... we possess'd of your sacred Majestie, but you suddainly gave form to our confused Chaos: We presently saw when you had taken the reigns into your sacred hands, and began to sit at Sterne, our deviating and giddy course grow steady, and the fluctuating Republick at drift ready to ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn

... his services, and possibly his wealth, soon drove the recollection of these vague conjectures from mens minds. When the war ended, and the independence of the States was acknowledged, Mr. Temple turned his attention from the pursuit of commerce, which was then fluctuating and uncertain, to the settlement of those tracts of land which he had purchased. Aided by a good deal of money, and directed by the suggestions of a strong and practical reason, his enterprise throve to a degree that the climate and rugged face of the country which ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... to purpose becomes creative force: he who knows this is ready to become something higher and stronger than a mere bundle of wavering thoughts and fluctuating sensations; he who does this has become the conscious and intelligent wielder of ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen

... of young men and arms; but that, since the Samnites had been beaten out of the country, they were wavering between peace and war, not shutting their gates against the Romans, lest they should thereby invite an attack; yet determined to shut them if an army should approach; that in that fluctuating state they might easily be overpowered by surprise. By these men's advice the camp was moved nearer; and soldiers were sent, at the same time, to each of the three towns; some armed, who were to lie concealed in places near the walls; others, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius

... hot to cold, and back to a fluctuating temperature, he began the letter—first, to read what was written, and second, to read what might be concealed ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... slaves. The few are hurried off by their masters; the many escape to a land of freedom. How signally this process will be accellerated after the first of January, few will yet believe. Let the war simply go on, with fluctuating fortunes, for a year or two longer, and the new slave empire will be nearly denuded of slaves. The process is at once inevitable and irresistible. Whether the able-bodied slaves thus escaping to the loyal States shall or shall not be used in whatever ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... disadvantage, relatively speaking, to any man, and especially to a very careless, and a very sanguine man, to have possessed an uncertain and fluctuating income. That disadvantage is greatly increased, if the person so circumstanced has conceived himself to be in some degree entitled to presume that, by the exertion of his own talents, he may at pleasure increase that income—thereby becoming induced to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... an active business in positions, a group of professional standers having sprung up, each with an assistant to bring food and coffee and keep track of the ever fluctuating market in positions. ...
— Mr. Chipfellow's Jackpot • Dick Purcell

... several days. He held many consultations with his mother upon the financial condition of the family, and talked once with his father upon the same subject, but only once. He found a change in that quarter which was distressing; years of fluctuating fortune had done their work; each reverse had weakened the father's spirit and impaired his energies; his last misfortune seemed to have left hope and ambition dead within him; he had no projects, formed no plans—evidently he was a vanquished man. He looked worn and tired. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... Vitellius, by being a parasite of all the emperors from Tiberius to Nero inclusively, had risen to a high military rank, by which, with a spirit of enterprise, and large promises to the soldiery, it was not difficult to snatch the reins of government, while they were yet fluctuating in the hands of Otho. His ambition prompted to the attempt, and his boldness was crowned with success. In the service of the four preceding emperors, Vitellius had imbibed the principal vices of them all: but what chiefly distinguished ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... for this voyage, and vessels procured and fitted out, but it was eventually abandoned. There are memoranda existing concerning it, dated in 1506, 1507, and 1508, from which it appears that Amerigo Vespucci remained at Seville, attending to the fluctuating concerns of this squadron, until the destination of the vessels was changed, their equipments were sold, and the accounts settled. During this time he had a salary of 30,000 maravedis. On the 22d of ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... believed to be intimately dependent. It does not appear that the subjects or worshippers of such a spiritual potentate form to themselves any very clear notion of the exact relationship in which they stand to him; probably their ideas on the point are vague and fluctuating, and we should err if we attempted to define the relationship with logical precision. All that the people know, or rather imagine, is that somehow they themselves, their cattle, and their crops are mysteriously bound up with their divine king, so that according as he ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... something which he recognised as an interior voice chimed in, from time to time, with provoking interrogations, mostly unanswerable. A plaintive need of happiness, melancholy, obscure, but recurrent, mixed in his fluctuating thoughts. Finally, it pursued him, haunted him, and caught him with the strange tenacity of an incorporeal grasp. Sara, now dethroned from her place of power, loomed in all his dreams. Irresistibly, he was drawn toward the forbidden recollection ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... hope of beholding a sail, when my eye coming to the brig, I observed that she was sinking. She went down very slowly; there was a horrible gurgling sound of water rushing into her, and her main deck blew up with a loud clap or blast of noise. I could follow the line of her bulwarks fluctuating and waving in the clear dark blue when she was some feet under. A number of whirlpools spun round over her, but the slowness of her foundering was solemnly marked by the gradual descent of the ruins of masts and yards which were attached to the hull by their rigging, and which she dragged down with ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... of units, has also to be abandoned in social science. We cannot put Humanity into a museum or dry it for examination; our one single still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world with which to compare it. We have only the remotest ideas of its "life-cycle" and a few relics of its origin and dreams ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... Howitzer Battery. At the risk of tedium I have repeated the units of this force, because there are no operations during the war, with the exception perhaps of those of the Rhodesian Column, concerning which it is so difficult to get a clear impression. The fluctuating forces, the vast range of country covered, and the petty farms which give their names to positions, all tend to make the issue vague and the narrative obscure. The British still lay in a semicircle extending from Slingersfontein upon the right ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... disappointed in not hearing from you sooner. I was for a time in expectation that you would return into Jersey, as the scene of military operations was directed to your part of the world, and would unavoidably drive you from your study and repose. Military operations are so fluctuating and uncertain as to render it exceedingly difficult to fix upon a retreat which may not be broken in upon in the course of a campaign. New-Haven bid fair to be the seat of calmness and serenity, of course well suited for a studious and contemplative mind, and therefore made choice of as the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... years deep play went on at all these clubs, fluctuating both as to amount and locality, till by degrees it began to flag. It had got to a low ebb when Mr Crockford came to London and established the celebrated ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... wilderness, so big, so desolate, so empty to him, was full of memories to this brown old witch. To her the rushing stream sang long-forgotten songs of war and the chase. She could hear in its clamor the voices of friends and lovers. This pathway, so dim and fluctuating, so indefinite to the white man, led straight into the heroic past for her. Perhaps she was treading it now, not for the meat and flannel which Kelley had promised her, but for the pleasure of reliving the past. She was young ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... of labour is far lower than what we are used to, fluctuating from fifteen to twenty pence a-day. The salaries of office are, throughout France, not above one-third what they are in England. Of the want of trade and commerce I have already spoken. The public banks are very few in number, and only ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... deceived her, and off she went and prayed at the grave of his predecessor in the title. The man took ill and died. She confessed what she had done, but said she did not pray for death, but only pain to make him smart for his deceit. And so the custom was carried on, but with fluctuating belief in its efficacy. ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... past the affairs of Europe had been extensively influenced by personal feelings and individual interests and passions, greatly so on Palmerston's own part and very much during the embassy of the Lievens, Madame de Lieven having been so much influenced by partisanship and by her fluctuating friendships and connections. The Emperor told Esterhazy that it was impossible for him to leave Lieven there, that he was not represented by him as he ought to be, that they in some respects fell short of, and in others went beyond, the line which their ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... cutting off all access to the plains, except through the British territories. To the inhabitants (about 5000 souls) this was a matter of congratulation, for it only involved the payment of a small fixed tax in money to the treasury at Dorjiling, instead of a fluctuating one in kind, with service to the Rajah, besides exempting them from further annoyance by the Dewan. At the present time the revenues of the tract thus acquired have doubled, and will very soon be quadrupled: every expense of our detention ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... understood had he not been sleeping the sound sleep of a man whose temperature is fluctuating between 102 and 104 degrees. But whether he heard or not made no difference to ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc

... and in that examination, do not despise some very mean and trifling causes of the actions of great men; for so various and inconsistent is human nature, so strong and changeable are our passions, so fluctuating are our wills, and so much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies that every man is more the man of the day, than a regular consequential character. The best have something bad, and something little; the worst have something good, and sometimes ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... confident of his standing with her, encountered difficulties which put him very much out of temper. For the first time, there was an apparent rift in her constancy; never before had she shown such signs of fluctuating. He could not understand it—in fact, he dared not understand it. "She was a most annoying young person," said Mr. Rigby to himself wrathfully, more than once after he went to bed that night. Anyhow, he could not see what there was about ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... that the gentler elements predominated in her character, and her father knew what she needed, when he gave her the playful advice to "have more of Cato." Without Christian principle she might have been a victim of morbid sensitiveness, or even at the mercy of fluctuating impulses; but religion supplied the tonic she needed, and by the grace of God aiding her own efforts, we see her possessed of firmness of purpose and moral courage enough to rebuke many of us who are ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... destinations. Which would be the best choice? The most profitable from an energy standpoint, as far as the ship was concerned, considering the relative values of the cargoes? What about relative spoilage rates as compared with fluctuating markets? ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett

... appeared at infrequent intervals, though, if those that have ceased to exist were counted, they would not be so remote from each other in time.[9] From the first there was in the west a distinctive attitude of freedom, which was the result in large, measure of its fluctuating conditions, and the absence of fixed habits and traditions. In 1853 the missionaries of the conference were instructed that "in spirit and in aim the Conference would be Christian, not sectarian, and it does not, therefore, require of them subscription to any human creed, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... folly is made crime. But since sin must ever be arraigned for itself, and error is prone to plead for mercy, I leave no word here that can be misconstrued or misapplied. Certain it is that Elizabeth Whitman was marked as one of strangely fluctuating moods, as the truly gifted ever are, and of a wild, incomprehensible nature, little understood by those who should have known her best, and with whom she was most intimate. Over this, in tracing her history, ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster

... his hands to their proper dwelling-place—his pockets—he jerked his thumb toward a long white boat, which we had not seen through the blinding scud. Bereft of its brethren, or sisters—for all fluctuating things are feminine—that boat survived, in virtue of standing a few feet higher than the rest. But even so, and mounted on the last hump of the pebble ridge, it was rolling and reeling with stress of the wind and the wash of wild water ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... and the demands of the fur trade; but [Page 282] the table will serve at least to gauge the relative values, as between the two extremes of common and scarce furs. The fur market is a great deal like the stock market. It is constantly fluctuating, and a fur which is to-day among the novelties, may next year find itself on the low priced list. The demand for furs of any kind is nearly always governed by fashion, and of course the value is estimated on the demand. If the convention ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... increase of days: the few that remain to me must glide away like their predecessors; and whatever be the infirmities of my body, and the little harassments which, I am led to suspect, do occasionally molest the most fortunate, who link themselves unto the unstable and fluctuating part of creation, which we term women, more especially in an hymeneal capacity—whatever these may be, I have my refuge and my comforter in the golden-souled and dreaming Plato, and the sententious wisdom of the less imaginative Seneca. Nor, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... arrival in this country the ill effects of her steerage voyage had left her too miserable to work. She then obtained employment as a finisher in a skirt factory, where her best wage was $7. But her earnings in this place had been so fluctuating that she was uncertain what her total income had been before the last thirteen weeks. At the beginning of this time she had left the skirt factory and become a finisher in a waist factory, where she earned from $10 to $12 a week, working nine and a half hours ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt

... capital had no more influence on the agriculture of the adjoining provinces, than it had on that of Hindostan or China. Again, as in the days of Tacitus, the lives of the Roman people were exposed to the chances of the winds and the waves. As this proved a fluctuating and precarious source of supply, a special board, styled the Casa Annonaria, was constituted by government for the regular importation of foreign grain, and retailing of it at a fixed and low price to the people. This board has been in operation ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various

... themselves. If they feel good, it is evidence to them of the Spirit's testimony, but they frequently feel bad also; whose testimony is that? The testimony of the Spirit should be clear testimony, and not fluctuating; it should be in words, and not in feelings. Feelings, impressions and emotions come and go like the waves of the sea, but words remain forever the same. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away," saith the Lord. The idea of the conscious ...
— The Spirit and the Word - A Treatise on the Holy Spirit in the Light of a Rational - Interpretation of the Word of Truth • Zachary Taylor Sweeney

... for its exportation, which at present, unfortunately, does not exist. Only a sufficiency, therefore, is grown to meet the local demands, and to supply the contiguous Turkish provinces. Three qualities are produced, the prices of which have been for some time fluctuating. Previous to the Christian outbreak the best of these, grown in the district of Trebigne, sold for about 11d. per pound, while the cheapest was to be procured ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... suffer. And she caught at her admission that Jean Isbel was different; she resented it in amaze; she ridiculed it; she laughed at her naive confession. She could arrive at no conclusion other than that she was a weak-minded, fluctuating, inexplicable little fool. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... rendering of that which was given him by his contemporaries. They called him Louis the Pious. And so, indeed, he was, sincerely and even scrupulously pious; but he was still more weak than pious, as weak in heart and character as in mind; as destitute of ruling ideas as of strength of will, fluctuating at the mercy of transitory impressions or surrounding influences or positional embarrassments. The name of Debonnaire is suited to him; it expresses his moral worth and his political incapacity ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... view which it exhibits of the nature and history of Truth, considered as the object of human knowledge. It is a favorite opinion with him, that man can have no absolute knowledge; that truth is not fixed, but fluctuating; that what was believed in one age, and believed necessarily, according to the fundamental laws of thought, is as necessarily disbelieved in the next; and that there is no standard of truth at any time ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... and won—played and lost—played and won, and then lost again; thus I went on, fluctuating more and more, until I found I was getting money in my pocket. I had, at one moment more than three hundred pounds in my pocket, and I felt that then was my happy moment—then the tide of fortune was going in my favour. I ought to have left off with that—to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... other cities will develop similar results. In London, the whole number of churches and chapels of all denominations is estimated at 400. "If we calculate," says a late English writer, "that the average attendance is 500; which is certainly the greatest extent we can allow, and add 250 more for the fluctuating hearers, it will give a result of 300,000 persons. The population of this metropolis is estimated at 1,274,800. From which subtract the feeble minority above, and we find NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED persons neglecting the public worship of God! It appears that of the ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton

... Quirinal and the Vatican. The drama is not even Italian, for the scene might have been laid, with as much truth, at Venice, Florence, Nice, St. Moritz, even Paris or London, the various cities which are like quarters scattered over Europe of the fluctuating 'Cosmopolis,' christened by Beyle: 'Vengo adesso da Cosmopoli'. It is the contrast between the rather incoherent ways of the rovers of high life and the character of perennity impressed everywhere in the great city of the Caesars ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Aramaean blood among the Israelites (see JACOB); the origin of the sanctity of venerable sites,—-these and other considerations may readily be found to account .for the traditions. Noteworthy coincidences in the lives of Abraham and Isaac, noticed above, point to the fluctuating state of traditions in the oral stage, or suggest that Abraham's life has been built up by borrowing from the common stock of popular lore.7 More original is the parting of Lot and Abraham at Bethel. The district was the scene of contests between Moab and the Hebrews ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... however, was not asleep, and watching their movements, as Tom Bouldon observed, as keenly as a boa-constrictor, glided swiftly up to the spot where they had driven the ball, and sent it spinning back, till once more Frank and Ernest got it within their power. Thus the game continued fluctuating; but finally, after many a bandy here and there, and many a tussle between the opposing parties, not a few upsets and other catastrophes, it was sent up to Ernest, who struck it a blow which sent it flying ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... Far as the rude barbarian marks the bound. Philosophy, no idle pedant dream, Here holds her search by heaven-taught Reason's beam; Here History paints, with elegance and force, The tide of Empires' fluctuating course; Here Douglas forms wild Shakspeare into plan, And Harley[68] rouses all the god in man. When well-form'd taste and sparkling wit unite, With manly lore, or female beauty bright, (Beauty, where faultless ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... L'Isle was seated in his room, wrapped in his cloak, with a brasero filled with wood embers at his feet; for it was one of those windy, chilly days, not uncommon in this fluctuating climate, and he was still invalid enough to be keenly sensitive to these sudden changes of temperature. He was, too, so completely wrapped up in his meditations, that his servant had twice to announce that the adjutant ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... rode the great mare, and sat in the beech-tree, was at present their guest—as she often was, in a fluctuating or intermittent fashion. She lived in the neighbourhood, but was more at Mortgrange than at home; one consequence of which was, that, as would-be-clever Miss Malliver phrased it, the house was very much B. Wyldered. Nor was that the first house the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... but likewise to discover a spring of excellent water, which contributed much to recover me. After this I advanced farther into the island, and at last reached a fine plain, where at a great distance I perceived a horse feeding. I went towards it, fluctuating between hope and fear, for I knew not whether in advancing I was more likely to endanger or to preserve my life. As I approached, I perceived it to be a very fine mare, tied to a stake. Whilst I was admiring its beauty, I heard from beneath the voice of ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.

... then the distortion of the censor, and consequently the change of direction to regression, and so on. We were forced to form such a succession for the sake of description; in reality, however, it is much rather a matter of simultaneously trying this path and that, and of emotions fluctuating to and fro, until finally, owing to the most expedient distribution, one particular grouping is secured which remains. From certain personal experiences, I am myself inclined to believe that the dream-work often requires more than one day and one night to produce its result; if this ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... majority in the House. Harrison was sustained by continuous Republican successes in Senatorial elections; but in the House he had the barest majority from 1889 to 1891 and lost that altogether at the election held in the middle of his term. The opinion of the country was evidently unsettled and fluctuating. It was still distracted by memories of the dead past and uncertain as to the trend ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... lived by the chase and by the rude cultivation of their long, narrow farms; and it was held by a garrison of three or four hundred British regulars, with auxiliary bands of American loyalist and French Canadian rangers, and, above all, with a formidable but fluctuating reserve force of Indian allies. [Footnote: Haldimand Papers, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt

... is a special provision for depriving them of it if they get it. Some of the directors, as I have said, retire annually, but by courtesy it is always the young ones. Those who have passed the chair—that is, who have served the office of Governor—always remain. The young part of the board is the fluctuating part, and the old part is the permanent part; and therefore it is not surprising that the young part has little influence. The Bank directors may be blamed for many things, but they cannot be blamed for the changeableness and excitability of ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot

... condition at the earliest practicable moment. He controverted the suggestion which had been made to increase United-States notes to $1,000,000,000, on the ground that the value of that dollar would be constantly fluctuating. A minority of the commissioners appointed by the preceding Congress to inquire into the state of trade and commerce had presented a specious argument in favor of debasing the coinage, but Mr. Hooper dismissed the proposition summarily and argued strongly ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... world, in all its moods, is human, as those for whose abode and instruction it was made. No doubt, it would be void of both beauty and significance to our eyes, were it not that it is one crowd of pictures of the human mind, blended in one living fluctuating whole. But these meanings are there in solution as it were. The individual is a centre of crystallisation to this solution. Around him meanings gather, are separated from other meanings; and if he be an artist, by which I mean ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald

... a posture of defence, and encouraged them to resist the Normans [a]. But the terror of the late defeat, and the near neighbourhood of the invaders, increased the confusion inseparable from great revolutions: and every resolution proposed was hasty, fluctuating, tumultuary; disconcerted by fear or faction, ill-planned, and worse executed. [FN [a] Gul. Pictav. p. 205. Order. Vitalis, p. 502. Hoveden, p. 449. Knyghton, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... of different kinds it shows, And now with rage, and now religion glows: The frantic soul bright reason's path defies, Now creeps on earth, now triumphs in the skies; Swims in the seas of error, and explores, Through midnight mists, the fluctuating shores; From wave to wave in rocky channel glides, And sinks in woe, or on presumption slides; In pride exalted, or by shame deprest, An angel-devil, or a human-beast. Some rage in all the strength of folly mad; Some love stupidity, in silence ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe

... inhalation, or chloral hydrate (1 ounce) may be given in water by the mouth. Fomentations of warm water may be made over the loins and between the thighs, and the oiled hand inserted into the rectum may press moderately on the anterior part of the bladder, which can be felt as an elastic fluctuating bag of an oval shape ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... patience and long-suffering, and have said, "'Tis time to change our master!—'Tis time to part!"—And had he been an American born, would he not have shewed his wisdom by adopting the language of independency? Happy then for America in these fluctuating times, she is not without her Solomons, who see the necessity of heark'ning to reason, and listening to the ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock

... poor Mrs. Middleton, when, by accident, he met with Miss Hamilton. From this moment ended all his resentment against Mrs. Middleton, and all his attachment to Miss Warmestre: no longer was he inconstant: no longer were his wishes fluctuating: this object fixed them all; and, of all his former habits, none remained, except uneasiness ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... new standpoint may be suggestive and interesting. Assuredly it is only by some such general revision, if not on these lines then on others, that a practicable way of escape is to be found for any one, from that base and shifty opportunism in public and social matters, that predominance of fluctuating aims and spiritless conformities, in which so many of us, without any great positive happiness at all to reward us for the sacrifice we are making, bury the solitary talents of ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... thing you can do seems to me to work hard, and always take the highest line about things. The highest line, that is to say, not the line you may feel to be highest, but the line that you recognize to be so. Not what your fluctuating emotions may commend, but that which the best moral tact seems to pronounce best. You can't always expect to feel enthusiasm for the best, so be true not to your sensations, but your deliberate ideals—that is the highest sincerity; all ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... neither work is there the resistless overflow of this etude, which has been compared to the screaming of the winter blasts. Ah, how Chopin puts to flight those modern men who scheme out a big decorative pattern and then have nothing wherewith to fill it! He never relaxes his theme, and its fluctuating surprises are many. The end is notable for the fact that scales appear. Chopin very seldom uses scale figures in his studies. From Hummel to Thalberg and Herz the keyboard had glittered with spangled ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... carry the warrant to the lord keeper till further orders. Surprised and perplexed, he immediately waited upon her to receive her further directions; when she chid him for the haste he had used in this matter, and talked in a fluctuating and undetermined manner respecting it which greatly alarmed him. On leaving the queen, he immediately communicated the circumstances to Burleigh and Hatton; and thinking it safest for himself to rid his hands of the warrant, he delivered ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... not yet over. Two generations of civic strife were still to signalize the slow and painful growth of the love for "The Union"; that personification of national being, upon which can safely fasten the instinct of human nature to centre devotion upon a person and a name. But, through these years of fluctuating affections, the work of the War of 1812 was continuously felt. Men had been forced out of themselves. More and more of the people became more Americans; they felt and acted more as a nation; and when the moment came that the unity of the state was threatened from within, the passion ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... commercial means was ridiculous. The trade sometimes ceased, as during the late war. The demand was more or less according to circumstances. But how was it possible, that to a demand so exceedingly fluctuating the supply should always exactly accommodate itself? Alas! We made human beings the subject of commerce; we talked of them as such; and yet we would not allow them the common principle of commerce, that the supply ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson

... the pneumatic Christology partly made a definite distinction between the pre-existent Christ and the Holy Spirit (see, e.g., 1 Clem. 22. 1), and partly made use of formulae from which one could infer an identity of the two. The conceptions about the Holy Spirit were still quite fluctuating; whether he is a power of God, or personal, whether he is identical with the pre-existent Christ, or is to be distinguished from him, whether he is the servant of Christ (Tatian Orat. 13), whether he is only a gift ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... the true hero can dare to utter, what prayer the true hero can dare to pray, through this faltering, fluctuating, martial hero's lips, when, 'that whatsoever god who led him' is failing him, and the flaws of impulse are swaying him to and fro, and ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... later times ceremonies multiply, it still remains the main occupation of a monk. The Jains differ from the Buddhists chiefly in emphasizing the importance of self-mortification, which is put on a par with meditation. In Hinduism, as might be expected in a fluctuating compound of superstition and philosophy, the schools differ as to the relative efficacy of meditation and ceremonial, but there is a strong tendency to give meditation the higher place. In all ages a common characteristic ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was something more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first essay was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by FACES! that each ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells

... the way of Mr. Lincoln's success there stood still other opponents whose antagonism was mischievous, insidious, and unfair both in principle and in detail. Chief in this band appeared Horace Greeley, with a following and an influence fluctuating and difficult to estimate, but considerable. His present political creed was a strange jumble of Democratic and Republican doctrines. No Democrat abused the administration or cried for "peace on almost any terms" louder ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... your fluctuating thoughts and impulses is to be weak and powerless; to rightly control and direct those forces is to be strong and powerful. Men of strong animal passions have much of the ferocity of the beast, but this is not power. The elements of power are there; but it is only when this ferocity ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen

... a young girl dream at the dictation of her heart? And as she saw the sharp lines of her profile softening into loveliness, the color fluctuating in her cheeks even at her thoughts, her thin, feeble arms growing white and firm, and the rounded grace of womanhood appearing in all her form, she began to hope that she could endure comparison ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... suit, there went forth from the four walls of the bachelor's apartments an edict ruthlessly vowing vengeance upon the whole sex, and comforting himself with the thought that he loved a good horse better than anything in this fluctuating world. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... entirely ignore tribal boundaries. On the contrary, so far as the numerical basis of their scheme permitted, they took them into account. And here we find that the Synod was confronted with another difficulty. The territories of tribes were fluctuating quantities. Hence, even if a diocese was the district of a single tribe, with very definite boundaries, no one could be sure that in the course of years its limits would not change. Again I take an example from Ulster. The Synod selected the Carntougher ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

... and repeated to me this morning, without the least variation of any essential particular. I have already told you that he informed me before he was removed from the Inn, that he had a secret to disclose to me which lay heavy on his mind. But, fluctuating between sickness and health and between his desire to relieve himself of it, and his dread of involving himself by revealing it, he has, until yesterday, avoided the disclosure. I never pressed him for it (having no idea of its weight or import, or of my right to do so), until ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... was charming; for in those early days it had not been marred by breakwaters and docks. The little party strolled along the beach, with the sparkling waves dashing at their feet, and the lake spread out before them, vast, fluctuating, misty-gray, with here and there a white crest ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge

... to its communicants an assured security, the proof of which was not in the fluctuating states of their own souls but in the august authority of the Church to which they belonged. As long, therefore, as they remained in obedient communion with their Church their souls were secure. The Church offered them its confessional for their unburdening and its absolutions ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... from their vividness, into the habitual deep, but not oblivious, shade beneath which his commanding mind had formerly driven them to repose; and as they thus receded, Madeline's image grew more undisturbedly present, and his resolution to avoid its power more fluctuating and feeble. Fate seemed bent upon bringing together these two persons, already so attracted towards each other. After the conversation recorded in our last chapter, between Walter and the Student, the former, touched and softened as we have seen, in spite of himself, had cheerfully forborne (what ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... their golden mines. The company of merchants trading to the South Seas would be the richest the world ever saw, and every hundred pounds invested in it would produce hundreds per annum to the stockholder. At last the stock was raised by these means to near 400, but, after fluctuating a good deal, settled at 330, at which price it remained when the bill passed the Commons by a majority of 172 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... debt which the arts owe Leo X, there are certain reservations that we must make on this score. A man of letters, of amiable manners, astute, somewhat of a mischief-maker, ever fluctuating between France and the Emperor, ever on the watch to provide for his family, and, to redeem these defects, having neither heroism nor the undoubted though mistaken love that Julius II bore to Italy, his political career cannot, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... easy to persuade or compel petty chiefs to sign declarations and treaties. But it was not easy to kill the independence of the people, and France virtually abandoned and retook the islands several times, her rule fluctuating with political conditions ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... the European system was in a ferment, and rumours of peace and of war were succeeding each other with such rapidity and assurance that it was impossible to know which to trust. It was obvious that a fortune lay either way, for every rumour set the funds fluctuating; but without special information it was impossible to act, and no one dared to plunge heavily upon the strength of newspaper surmise and the gossip of the street. Warner knew that an hour's work might ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... on together into the dense woods, leaving the wind and the sunshine and the flying clouds fluctuating over the broad expanse of the mountains, and the witch-face silently mowing and grimacing at the world below, albeit seen by no human being except perchance some dweller at the little house on the spur, struck aghast by this unwelcome apparition ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... no means so intense as might be expected in a country occupying the middle of the torrid zone. It is more temperate than in many regions without the tropics, the thermometer, at the most sultry hour, which is about two in the afternoon, generally fluctuating between 82 and 85 degrees. I do not recollect to have ever seen it higher than 86 in the shade, at Fort Marlborough; although at Natal, in latitude 34 minutes north, it is not unfrequently at 87 and 88 degrees. At sunrise it is usually as low as 70; the sensation of cold however is much greater ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... stands at the edge of the desert at the head of a gulf of the same name and at the S. end of the Suez Canal, 75 m. E. of Cairo, with which it is connected by railway; as a trading place, dating back to the times of the Ptolemies, has had a fluctuating prosperity, but since the completion of the canal is growing steadily in importance; is still for the most part an ill-built and ill-kept town; has a large ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... without in the slightest degree affecting the stability or popularity of collecting as a whole. Precious stones and pearls minister to the pride of the individual, and stamps to his pleasure; and each has its own strong and unshakable hold upon the devotees of fashion and pleasure. There is a fluctuating market in the case of each of these favourites, but I venture to think that there is, and has been for the past forty years, a steadier rise in the value of stamps than in ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell

... promenaded the deck at sunset, her hand upon my arm, her lips forever turning up tenderly towards me, her eyes pouring their passion into me. Then those glorious nights, when the ocean was a vast, wild, fluctuating stream, flashing and sparkling about the ship, spanned with a quivering bridge of splendor on one side, and rolling off into awful darkness and mystery, on the other; when the moon seemed swinging among the shrouds like a ball of white ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... discordant elements arrests, Rejects the noxious, and the pure digests; Combines with Heat the fluctuating mass, And gives a while solidity to gas; 40 Organic forms with chemic changes strive, Live but to die, and die but to revive! Immortal matter braves the transient storm, Mounts from the wreck, unchanging ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... pot-wallopings of the boiler. Thus have perished multiform openings for public expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in great national tidings,—for revelations of faces and groups that could not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had one centre, and acknowledged one sole interest. But the crowds attending at a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres as there are separate carriages ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... The fluctuating fortunes of the elder Tasso caused Torquato to visit successively Bergamo, the abode of his paternal relatives, and Pesaro, where his manners and intelligence made so favorable an impression, that the Duke of Pesaro chose ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... it ventures to expropriate him for the public good. He wants a jus utendi et abutendi; the State says "agreed"—but adds that there are abuses and abuses. Then Stirner cries "stop thief!" "I am the enemy of the State," says he, "which is always fluctuating between the alternative: He or I.... With the State there is no property, i.e., no individual property, only State property. Only through the State have I what I have, as it is only through the State that I am what I am. My private property is only what the State leaves me of its ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... constructed, and, as such, distinguished from a real thing to which the image corresponds; at this point the categories and the forms of intuition, space and time, appear, which thus arise along with the object.[1] The fourth stadium is "understanding," which steadies the fluctuating intuition into a concept, realizes the object, and looks upon it as the cause of the intuition. Fifthly, "judgment" makes its appearance as the faculty of free reflection and abstraction, or the power to consider a definite content or to abstract from it. As judgment is itself the condition ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... popular government flourishes—the executive, though in the long run amenable to the voice of the people, and though in Switzerland actually appointed by the legislature, is not like an English Cabinet dependent on the fluctuating will of a legislative assembly. If it were necessary to choose between modifications in the relation of the executive to Parliament, and the repeal of the Act of Union, most Englishmen would think that to increase the independence of the executive—a change probably desirable in itself—was a ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... enemies to brand them as rebels. Constitutional authorities may, as Mr. Churchill says, "measure their censures according to their political opinions," but the generality of men, who are not constitutional authorities, whose political opinions, if they have any, are fluctuating, and who care little for "juridical niceties," will measure their censures according to their instinctive sympathies. And the sound instinct of Englishmen forbade them to blame men who, if rebels in ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... immediately." The message contained a further assurance that nine thousand Indians were ready to execute any orders they might receive from the British general in Canada. The arrival of this message made a great impression on the Indians, and occasioned in them "a fluctuating and unsteady conduct," but John Allan was able, with the help of Mon. de la Motte, a French priest, to ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond

... effect in Rome; for although Caesar was still alive, his condition left everyone in suspense: had the mighty Duke of Romagna, the powerful condottiere who had taken thirty towns and fifteen fortresses in five years, been seated, sword in hand, upon his charger, nothing would have been uncertain of fluctuating even for a moment; far, as Caesar afterwards told Macchiavelli, his ambitious soul had provided for all things that could occur on the day of the pope's death, except the one that he should be dying himself; but being nailed down to his bed, sweating off the effects the poison had wrought; ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the drawbacks to coffee-planting, to say nothing of bad seasons and fluctuating prices, which, if properly calculated, considerably lessen the average profits of an estate, as it must be remembered that while a crop is reduced in quantity, the expenses continue at the usual rate, and are severely felt when ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... clearness that distinguish the rest of the manuscript. The lines are as straight and equidistant as if ruled; and from beginning to end, there is no physical symptom—as how should there be?—of a varying mood, of jets of emotion, or any of those fluctuating feelings that pass from the hearts into the fingers of common men. The paper itself (like most of those Revolutionary letters, which are written on fabrics fit to endure the burden of ponderous and earnest thought) is stout, and of ...
— A Book of Autographs - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... not for wealth, with all the shocks That vex distracted millionaires, Plagued by their fluctuating ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley

... sides at once, placed at enormous disadvantage, completely outgeneraled, had given way in confusion, was retreating, breaking, and flying. There were lines yet of dirty gray or butternut; but they were few, meagre, fluctuating, and recoiling, and there were scattered and scurrying men in hundreds. Three veteran and gallant regiments had gone all to wreck under the shock of three similar regiments far more intelligently ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various

... truth must vary with the ever-varying sensations of the individual. "Man (the individual) is the measure of all things." Knowledge is a purely relative thing, and every man's opinion is truth for him.[500] The law of right, as exemplified in the dominion of a party, is the law of the strongest; fluctuating with the accidents of power, and never attaining a permanent being. "Whatever a city enacts as appearing just to itself, this also is just to the city that enacts it, so long as it continues in force."[501] "The just, then, is nothing else but ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... calendar marches coeval with the moons, which fact generally places their New Year some time in February, the exact date fluctuating from year to year to the extent of three ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... perceptible lack of virility, a fluctuating vagueness of outline about the characterisation of some of his men. In his treatment of crowds, in his description of a mob, personified as 'some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment,' he can have few rivals. In tracing the influence of women ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... for some time the fluctuating appearance of public affairs, and it was not until war was not only certain, but actually in progress, that he called ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... show; By every feature we the parent know. The expanded spheres, amazing to the sight! Magnificent with stars and globes of light, The glorious orbs which heaven's bright host compose, The imprisoned sea, that restless ebbs and flows, The fluctuating fields of liquid air, With all the curious meteors hovering there, And the wide regions of the land, proclaim The Power Divine, that raised the mighty frame. What things soe'er are to an end referred, And in their motions still that end regard, Always the fitness of the means respect, These as ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... enlargement varies. When the injury is superficial, the swelling feels firm, or pits on pressure. Later it may become more firm and feel like a loose, thickened, fibrous cap for the hock. Soft, fluctuating swellings are due to an inflammation of the ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... the animal out of the apartment. Wolf resisted every invitation to this purpose, until his mistress positively commanded him to be gone, in an angry tone; when, turning towards the bed on which the body still lay, half awake to sensation, half drowned in the meanders of fluctuating delirium, he uttered a deep and savage growl, curled up his nose and lips, showing his full range of white and sharpened teeth, which might have matched those of an actual wolf, and then, turning round, sullenly followed the domestic out of ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... machinery over a much greater fraction of the day. Used in parallel with the dynamo, they quickly yield current when the load increases, and immediately begin to charge when the load diminishes, thus largely reducing the fluctuating stress on dynamo and engine for sudden variations in load. Their use is advantageous if they can be charged and discharged at a time when the steam plant would otherwise be working at an uneconomical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... violent and fluctuating, hope that was nearly torture, and then came a dialogue, and with ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... gratifying, but the fact can not be denied that the instability of the value of our currency is prejudicial to our prosperity, and tends to keep up prices, to the detriment of trade. The evils of a depreciated and fluctuating currency are so great that now, when the premium on gold has fallen so much, it would seem that the time has arrived when by wise and prudent legislation Congress should look to a policy which would place our currency at par with gold at no ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson

... its fluctuating progress; and head-dresses, with their superstructures of gauze, flowers, and feathers, became so lofty that the women could not find carriages high enough to admit them; and they were often seen either stooping, or holding their heads out of the windows. Others knelt ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... relieve your anxiety in the meantime. Cotton is down twenty points, very strong and steady, and the Bears are making fortunes. 'Mauds' are fluctuating, but 'Louisa Christinas' are in great demand; everybody is rushing after them. The Bank rate is ten and a half, and Consols have gone up two per cent. General market firm, with ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... bearing on the present work. Kolreuter long ago described plants of Verbascum phoeniceum which during two years were sterile with their own pollen, but were easily fertilised by that of four other species; these plants however afterwards became more or less self-fertile in a strangely fluctuating manner. Mr. Scott also found that this species, as well as two of its varieties, were self-sterile, as did Gartner in the case of Verbascum nigrum. So it was, according to this latter author, with two plants of Lobelia fulgens, though the pollen and ovules of both were in an efficient state in ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin

... was not the uprising of an oppressed nation, which successful for a brief while was finally crushed by the brute force of reaction; it was a civil war between two sections of a small educated class, in which the sympathies of the nation after fluctuating for a time eventually came down heavily against the revolutionaries. There is in truth every excuse for misunderstanding amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress in English politics; for the obvious things about ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,



Words linked to "Fluctuating" :   unsteady



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