"Mundane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deep bow, "let me suggest to you that the finest thing in this mundane state of ours is—reason. Suppose, now, that you complete your toilet, tell us what it is you have lost; leave us—your devoted servants—to begin the task of finding it, and while we are so engaged, hasten with Mr. Weiss to the hall to fulfil ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... that in this age of magic and the belief in spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being alive, the gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed (1)—that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being—though there might be orders and degrees of spirits ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... prig,—at least not much of a one. For almost all her waking hours her mind was occupied with totally mundane affairs, and she was never much concerned about her own salvation. It seemed so far off—in the hazy distances of stupid middle age or beyond. So, like thousands upon thousands of other young women of ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... the house, or when the payment of the rent was in dispute, Mr. Craven advanced the lady various five and ten pound notes, which, it is to be hoped, were entered duly to his credit in the Eternal Books. In the mundane records kept in our offices, they always appeared as debits to William Craven's ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... enters the higher evolution, this body comes into independent activity on this side of death, and he gradually becomes conscious of his heavenly life, even amid the whirl of mundane existence. Then he becomes "the Son of man which is in heaven,"[249] who can speak with the authority of knowledge on heavenly things. When the man begins to live the life of the Son, having passed on to the Path of Holiness, he lives in heaven ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... this collection is in the engravings. The text is often mundane, is full of conundrums and puns popular in the early 1800's—and is mercifully short. No author is given credit for the text though the section titled, "The Autobiography of Andrew Mullins" may give us at ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... task, Ezra was removed from this mundane world, and he entered the life everlasting. But his death did not occur in the Holy Land. It overtook him at Khuzistan, in Persia, on his journey ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... the cavern that was his home, went for the first time over the little stream, and going round the corner of the crags saw glittering beneath him the mundane plain. And the wind of the autumn that was gilding the world, rushing up the slopes of the mountain, beat cold on his naked flanks. He raised his ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... Villeneuve I parted from my companions, who went to lunch with the cure, together with several other ecclesiastics. These occasional meetings and junketings at one another's houses are the chief mundane consolation of the rural priests, who are as weak as other mortals in the presence of a savoury dish, and, when they can afford to do so, they enter into the pleasures of hospitality with Horatian zest. Poor as they often ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... spoken words between them which no chronicles should report, and a certain calm happiness took up its settled place in his heart, defiant of that despair which could not be driven out. Then came that reawakening to mundane things which seems like a very great step indeed in such cases. She looked at the clock, and gave a ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... believe, soon became tired of her. He liked her flattery, and at first declared that she was clever and nice, but her niceness was too purely celestial to satisfy his mundane tastes. Mackinnon himself can revel among the clouds in his own writings, and can leave us sometimes in doubt whether he ever means to come back to earth, but when his foot is on terra firma he loves to feel the earthy substratum ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... spiritual; the swans which flew aloft, far above the topmost peak of the Himalaya, were no ordinary swans, but were divine and heavenly. The wolf which howled so wildly in the long winter night, the hounds, whose bay sounded so. dismally through the shaking black forest, were no mundane wolves and hounds, but issued from the home of a divine hunter, and were themselves wondrous, supernatural ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... that after the destruction of that ignorance, and of its effects, all is merged again in Brahman, the true source of being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies to all the other philosophical systems of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... but because he did not see them. He saw foolishness, lying, stealing, worldliness—the very mammon of unrighteousness rioting in the world and bearing sway—and he ran full tilt against the monster, hating it with a very mortal and mundane hatred, and anxious to see it bite the dust that his own horn might be exalted. It was in truth only another horn of the old dilemma, tossing and goring grace and beauty, and all the loveliness of life, as if they were the enemies instead ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... argy that a man Who does about the best he can Is plenty good enugh to suit This lower mundane institute— No matter ef his daily walk Is subject fer his neghbor's talk, And critic-minds of ev'ry whim Jest all git up and ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... believes, and tries to live by them. I shall have to refer back to this when I speak of Cicero's philosophy more at length; but his common-sense crops up continually in the expressions which he uses for defending the ordinary conditions of a man's life, in opposition to that impossible superiority to mundane things which the philosophers professed to teach their pupils. He turns to Cato and asks him questions, which he answers himself with his own philosophy: "Would you pardon nothing? Well, yes; but not all things. Would you do nothing for friendship? Sometimes, unless duty should stand ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... ardent vot'ry glows with genuine fire, 'Tis yours, while care recoils, and envy flies Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays are mine, If by your looks, my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big Your fateful arms, the goosequill and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's somb'rous seal impress'd, Mysterious terrors, grim portents, invest; And ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... Griffin, the real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and mundane. England, my desire, what have you ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... things. In 1782 he married a young woman of equally humble derivation, who could not even sign the marriage register. He developed her character, educated her mind, and made her a devoted and companionable wife, full of faith in him. Their curious and retired menage was as happy in a practical and mundane aspect as could be hoped from even a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... no doubt that there was a woman at the bottom of it,—for about what else should youth worry but love? or if one's love affairs run smoothly, why should one worry about anything at all? Miss Leary, in the nineteen years of her mundane existence, had not been without mild experiences of the heart, and had hovered for some time on the verge of disappointment with respect to Tryon himself. A sensitive pride would have driven more than one woman away at the sight of the man of her preference sighing ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... sufficient minds in existence to retain the material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension was fighting to supersede man's control and take his universe into its ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... never been called upon to experience. Granted that the spirit of the crusader had inspired many a free-soiler to venture into the trans-Missouri region after the Kansas-Nebraska bill had become law and that real exaltation of soul had transformed some very mercenary and altogether mundane characters unexpectedly into martyrs; granted, also, that the pro-slavery man honestly felt that his cause was just and that his sacred rights of property, under the constitution, were being violated, his preserves encroached upon, it yet remains true that great crimes were committed in the name ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... deities are, 1. the greater parts of the visible mundane system animated by intelligent souls, and called "sensible gods"—the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the earth itself, and known by the names Helios, Selena, Kronos, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the sake of mirth only that the Fairies entered human abodes, but for the performance of more mundane duties, such as making oatmeal cakes. The Rev. R. Jones, Rector of Llanycil, told me a story, current in his native parish, Llanfrothen, Merionethshire, to the effect that a Fairy woman who had spent ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... next sixty miles of way, but especially the heat of the days and the dank mists of the night, should have to be told as of a real journey in this very repetitive and sui-similar world. How much rather I wish that being free from mundane and wide-awake (that is to say from perilously dusty) considerations and droughty boredoms, I might wander forth at leisure through the air and visit the regions where everything is as the soul chooses: to be dropped at last in the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... She then lends her string of five hundred jewels to Susanoo and, he, in turn, crunches them in his mouth and blows out the fragments which are transformed into five male Kami. The beings thus strangely produced have comparatively close connexions with the mundane scheme, for the three female Kami—euphoniously designated Kami of the torrent mist, Kami of the beautiful island, and Kami of the cascade—become tutelary goddesses of the shrines in Chikuzen province (or the sacred ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... presented no greater difficulties than in No. 1. An attempt had been made to start two of the seals, but meeting with unexpected resistance in the silk stitches, and finding that further effort would end in tearing the envelope in a very palpable and mundane fashion, the Spirits ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... name of the creator of the world. Elohim is the name of the ruler of all. The third name is the name unutterable which means the All. Talks with Brother V. strengthen, refresh, and support me in the path of virtue. In his presence doubt has no place. The distinction between the poor teachings of mundane science and our sacred all-embracing teaching is clear to me. Human sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill everything to examine it. In the holy science of our order all is one, all is known in its entirety and life. The ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... tone—you never heard of an auctioneer having it—"Suppose that once in a billion of years a bird were to come from some far, distant clime and carry off in its bill a grain of sand, when the time came when the last animal matter of which this mundane sphere is composed would be carried away," said he, "boys, by that time in hell it would not be sun up." We had this sermon in the morning and the same one in the afternoon, only he commenced at the other end. Then we started home full of doctrine—we went sadly and sole solemnly back. If it ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of saying: "Or perhaps with some other man," but he checked himself. He was sufficiently mundane to refrain from attempting to reason Haddon out of his affection for the fugitive, or to advise him as to what to do. He knew that in merely letting Haddon unburden on him the cause of anxiety, he had done all that Haddon ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... she had fared. The issue had been so satisfactory on the whole that it was considered advisable to tell James, who never failed to say day after day that he didn't know about Winifred's affair, he couldn't tell. As his sands ran out; the importance of mundane matters became increasingly grave to him, as if he were feeling: 'I must make the most of it, and worry well; I shall soon ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... went off, like "Mrs. Gamp," in a sort of walking swoon, apparently deaf and blind to all mundane matters, except the refreshments awaiting him ten miles away; and the benign old pastor disappeared, humming "Hebron" to the creaking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, on the eve of ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness"; meaning thereby that we look for a new invisible power of control, Messiah's kingdom, and a new earth, society organized along new lines, to take the place of the old. The words here have no reference to the mundane sphere or globe upon which the ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... have always with us. Spectres cannot afright him, nor mundane terrors deflect him from his path. He takes nothing either in earth or heaven seriously, as is his God-given right. Some of the best examples of what he has done in the general field of mystery are presented here for the first ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... If such could only struggle against that strong temptation of our fallen nature—the delight of hearing one's own sweet voice—so as to concentrate now and then! The best orators, spiritual and mundane, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the Idiot. "Because her life is an eternal sacrifice to Saphead's needs, and if there is a luxury in this mundane sphere that woman essentially craves it is the luxury of sacrifice. There is something fanatic about it. Sallie Wiggins voluntarily turned her back on seven men that I know of, one of whom is a Governor of his state; two of whom are now in Congress; one of whom is a judge of a state court; ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... third heaven may signify a supra-mundane vision. Such a vision may be called the third heaven in three ways. First, according to the order of the cognitive powers. In this way the first heaven would indicate a supramundane bodily vision, conveyed through the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... bicycle, and I was at that age when all human beings think themselves immortal. I had desired to get off the main high road into the hills upon the left, to the east of it, and I was at an age when the cessation of mundane experience is not a conceivable thing. Moreover, this innkeeper had been pointed out to me as a man who could give very useful information upon the nature of the roads I had to travel, and it had never occurred to me that he would switch me off after dinner upon a hobby of his own. To-day, after ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... But, given the will to live, however powerful, we have seen that, in the ordinary course of mundane life, the throes of dissolution cannot be checked. The desperate, and again and again renewed struggle of the Kosmic elements to proceed with a career of change despite the will that is checking them, like a pair of runaway ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... simplicity, and loving-kindness, free from all formalism (which He seems to have detested above everything), and free, too, from all elaborate and metaphysical dogma. Instead of this, He would find that men had seized upon the letter, not the spirit, of His teaching, and had devised a huge mundane organisation, full of pomp and policy, elaborate, severe, hard, unloving. Now if I apply my intellectual tests to the central truths of Christianity, such as the law of Love, the power of self-sacrifice, the brotherhood of men, they stand the test; they seem to contain a true apprehension ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been collegia at Rome before the imperial times; though some of them had been religious bodies, some were decidedly not so. They were societies which held property, pursued certain avocations, and acted in a corporate capacity for very mundane objects. Why should not there be a collegium of scholars? Why should students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by his statutes that he did ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... believe in presentiments. They attribute that curious feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen to such mundane causes as liver or a chill or the weather. For my own part, I think there is more in the matter than the casual ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... distant solitary spot, where the shadows deepened, and they were beyond the reach of mundane noises and malicious eyes of men, they shouted with delight like God's little birds to their companions to come and enjoy the delightful quiet where they could display their charms and enjoy themselves without fear of being surprised. Then one proposed to play ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... in the history of the Manse and in all reminiscences of Concord—partook sufficiently of mundane weaknesses to betray his mortality. Hawthorne describes him watching the battle of Concord from his study window. But when the uncertainty of that dark moment had so happily resulted, and the first battle-ground of the Revolution ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... It is a feeling of satisfaction and relief at having rid ourselves of the memento of mortality, the silent evidence of the futility of our pursuits and anticipations. We know that we must one day die, but we always wish to forget it. The continual remembrance would be too great a check upon our mundane desires and wishes; and although we are told that we ever should have futurity in our thoughts, we find that life is not to be enjoyed if we are not permitted occasional forgetfulness. For who would plan what rarely he is permitted to execute, if each moment of ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... is thy wisdom? Hath thy toil O'er books consumed the midnight oil, Communed o'er Greek and Roman pages, With Plato, Socrates—those sages— Or fathomed Tully,—or hast travelled With wise Ulysses, and unravelled Of customs half a mundane sphere?" ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... many a time he would fain have awakened her, that he might see them. But so much fairer seemed she to him than any other woman that he had seen, that he doubted she must be a goddess; and as he was not so devoid of sense but that he deemed things divine more worthy of reverence than things mundane, he forbore, and waited until she should awake of her own accord; and though he found the delay overlong, yet, enthralled by so unwonted a delight, he knew not how to be going. However, after he had tarried a long while, it so befell that Iphigenia—such was the ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... sole accredited agent of the Eternal God, relaxes its hold upon the ever-expanding life of Humanity, all those developments of human nature which cease to be amenable to its control come to be regarded as mundane, as unspiritual, as carnal, as matters with which God has ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... may just as well be done right as not. Get yourself into the habit of washing dishes so well that instinctively you are thorough over the job, and you won't have to think about it while you do it. But the self-consciousness put into mundane affairs by the average religious beats the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... stairways of those palaces; and ushered with eclat into drawing-rooms of splendour, I sun myself in the painted smiles of the Mayfair Jezebels, and glitter in that world of wigs and rouge and diamonds like a star. There I quaff the elixir and sweet essence of mundane triumph, eating truffles to the sound of trumpets, and feasting at sunrise ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... notice such orderly successions, we must not at once assign them to a direct intervention, the issue of wise predeterminations of a voluntary agent; we must first satisfy ourselves how far they are dependent upon mundane or material conditions, occurring in a definite and necessary series, ever bearing in mind the important principle that an orderly sequence of inorganic events necessarily involves an orderly and corresponding progression of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... organization of its denizens. Ghosts gradually lost their importance as a factor in everyday life; sights and sounds that had been referred to wandering souls came to be explained by natural laws. Wider geographical knowledge made it difficult to assign the ghosts a mundane home, and led to their relegation to the sub-mundane region. Further, the establishment of great nations familiarized men with the idea that every large community should have its own domain. The gods were gradually massed, first in the sky, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... are, in the regions of space, bodies moving in every possible direction, and with excessive rapidity. The author applied to these the name of ultra-mundane corpuscles. Their totality constituted the gravitative fluid, if indeed, the designation of a fluid be applicable to an assemblage of particles having no ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... with me. It 's no use talking. My mind is made up. You may tell M. so. It will be hardest for her to believe it. She has partaken with me in that infirmity of noble minds,—a desire to look through the haze of this mundane atmospheric environment, and predict the future. But, alas I there is an infirmity of vision; we see through a glass darkly. We can't see through a millstone. The firmament has been very like that, for some days,—all compact with clouds. We thought ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... canopy of space, Bewildering, and boundless to the eyes, Knowest thou the unborn spirits' dwelling place? Knowest thou the distant regions of the skies Where rest the spirits freed from mundane strife, From mortal grief and care? Knowest thou the secret of the future life? Canst thou tell where? From Space infinite echoed the reply: Child of a transient day, thou too, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... my humble opinion a panacea for all evils mundane and extra-mundane. We can never overdo it. Just at present we are not doing it at all. Ahimsa does not displace the practice of other virtues, but renders their practice imperatively necessary before it can be practised even in its rudiments. Mahavira and ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... Material substances or mundane formations, astro- nomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of specu- 209:27 lative theories, based on the hypothesis of material law or life and intelligence resident in matter, will ulti- mately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... necessary psychic precautions, he had met his fate, I cannot tell. But the evidence was only too clear, that Annerly had been engulfed into the astral world, carrying with him the money for the transfer of which he had risked his mundane existence. ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... my affliction the pleasant discourse of a certain friend of mine and his admirable consolations afforded me such refreshment that I firmly believe of these it came that I died not. But, as it pleased Him who, being Himself infinite, hath for immutable law appointed unto all things mundane that they shall have an end, my love,—beyond every other fervent and which nor stress of reasoning nor counsel, no, nor yet manifest shame nor peril that might ensue thereof, had availed either to break or to bend,—of its own motion, in process of time, on ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... so much relief was afforded me by the delectable discourse of a friend and his commendable consolations, that I entertain a very solid conviction that to them I owe it that I am not dead. But, as it pleased Him, who, being infinite, has assigned by immutable law an end to all things mundane, my love, beyond all other fervent, and neither to be broken nor bent by any force of determination, or counsel of prudence, or fear of manifest shame or ensuing danger, did nevertheless in course of time me abate of its own accord, in such wise ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... instance, with far more pleasure than through the dewy and moonlit groves which were the scenes of his youthful wooings. Then he was all sentiment and poetry. Now he finds the gratification of the mouth and stomach a chief source of mundane delight. It is said that all the ships on the sea are sailing in the direction of the human mouth. The stomach, with its fierce assimilative power, is a great stimulator of commercial activity. The table of the civilized man, loaded with the products of so many climes, bears witness to this. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... intuition, a touch of insularity, a sign of narrowness, that he should find himself so utterly repelled by this foreign note in their temperaments? Was his disapproval, after all, but a mark of snobbishness, the snobbishness which, to use a mundane parallel, takes objection to the shape of an unfashionable collar, or the cut of a country-made coat? There were other races upon the world beside the race of aristocrats. There was an aristocracy of brains, of genius, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life that their sense of hearing—which had gradually come to understand its own futility when the tone of the conversation, at the dinner-table, became frivolous or merely mundane, without the two old ladies' being able to guide it back to the topic dear to themselves—would leave its receptive channels unemployed, so effectively that they were actually becoming atrophied. So that if my grandfather wished ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... one so young and inexperienced, it was impossible to know Andrew Henderson and not to feel that some strange peculiarity set him apart from other men. In his ascetic face, in his large, light-blue eyes, in his extraordinary air of abstraction and aloofness from mundane things, there was something that fascinated and repelled; and with a wondering interest the boy studied these things, trying in his unformed way to reconcile them with his narrow ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... precincts, and retired there about 1655 to prepare for that unpleasant event which she put off as long as possible by the most assiduous care of her health. "If she was not devoted, she had the idea of becoming so," said Mademoiselle. But her devotion was in quite a mundane fashion. Her pleasant rooms were separate and independent, thus enabling her to give herself not only to the care of her health and her soul, but to a select society, to literature, and to conversation. She never practiced the severe asceticism of her friend, Mme. de Longueville. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... efficient, and to permit others, without interference, to do the same. Thus may a man be a good Presbyterian in Scotland, and also a good Episcopalian in England, or possibly a Nonconformist in both, unless he believes in the Divine origin and authority of some one ecclesiastical system, and the mundane origin of all others. With perfect consistency and sincerity he may dearly love his Church, but yet love Christians more, because he loves Christ ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... acceptance of Evolution, we may fairly call upon Evolution to be true to itself. We may call upon it to recognise the possibility of development in the future as well as the fact of development in the past, and not to shut up the hopes and aspirations of our race in a mundane egg because the mundane egg happens to be the special province of the physiologist. The series of developments has proceeded from the inorganic to the organic, from the organic upwards to moral and intellectual life. Why should it be arrested there? Why should it not continue ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... measure in his rhapsody. He might have stood leaning over the sill a day or a second, when a sound, persistent and murmuring, haled him back to mundane things. Intermittently, but with growing volume, from somewhere beyond the wall of black, came the echoes of an army in passage. He could separate the different noises. That, he recognized by its deep grumbling noise, was cannon; the rattling sound, like an empty hay ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... coquettes you are raving and tearing your hair about. Oh! yes, she is very handsome, and she dresses with exquisite taste (the result of devoting the whole of her heart, mind and soul to the subject, and never allowing her thoughts to be distracted from it by any other mundane or celestial object whatsoever); and she is very agreeable and entertaining and fascinating; and she will go on looking handsome, and dressing exquisitely, and being agreeable and entertaining and fascinating just as much after you have married her ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... womankind together, with a love as azure, as deep, as boundless as the sky itself. Where could he ever find so delightful a mistress? What earthly caress could be compared to the air in which he moved, the breath of Mary? What mundane union or enjoyment could be weighed against that everlasting flower of desire which grew unceasingly, and yet was never over-blown? At this thought the Magnificat would exhale from his mouth, like a cloud of incense. He sang the joyful song of Mary, her thrill of joy at the approach of ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... history of religions. Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, Up at a Villa—Down in the City, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an Italian person of quality; the other, "De Gustibus—," which contrasts the happy quietudes of English landscape with the passionate landscape of the South, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of sentiment underlying its pictorial vividness. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... for a sermon. But hear the reverend gentleman once more, in the same discourse, and observe the characteristic coolness with which he touches, only to drop, what may be called the "professional" moral of the parable, and glides off into a train of interesting, but thoroughly mundane, reflections, suggested—or rather, supposed in courtesy to have been suggested—by the text. "I know not," he says, "whether it would be a subject of much edification to convince you here that our Saviour, by the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... but we are living now upon this mundane sphere, and naturally our interests center here. A belief in heaven does not straighten out affairs on earth, nor make the burdens any the lighter ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... statute, and in spite of the common law which disabled an alien from inheriting English land. His only claim was by heredity, which had never been legally recognized to the exclusion of other principles of succession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to such mundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and the obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... rides aloof on god-like wings, Taking no thought of wire or mud, Saps, smells or bugs—the mundane things That sour our lives and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... his undertaking compelled Mr. Buckle, on the contrary, to stretch his mental antennae into every department of mundane activity, to hold the Facts there discovered, so far as he might, collectively within his grasp, and to draw them by an irresistible strain into gradually decreasing circles of generalization, until they were brought ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the instant. I had feared to question Sola relative to the beautiful captive, as I could not but recall the strange expression I had noted upon her face after my first encounter with the prisoner. That it denoted jealousy I could not say, and yet, judging all things by mundane standards as I still did, I felt it safer to affect indifference in the matter until I learned more surely Sola's attitude toward the ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "The Gestes are mundane stories, the History is a cosmic affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... the house, affected not to hear. 'A fragrant smell of coffee, delicately blended with odour of grilled bacon, came from the open door and turned his thoughts to more mundane things. Mr. Hartley joined them just as the figure of Rosa appeared at the door. "Breakfast is quite ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... some time, and looked very composed, awaiting the commands of the knight. His mind was clearly in such a state of devotion that peradventure he might not have descended for a while longer to his mundane duties, had not Master Silas told him that, under the shadow of his wing, their courage had returned and they were quite ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... evil and outwardly good are deprived of the good and left to their evil. The reverse occurs with the inwardly good who outwardly like other men have acquired wealth, sought distinction, delighted in the mundane, and indulged some lusts. Good and evil have not been commingled by them, however, but are separate, like internal and external; they have resembled the evil in many ways outwardly but not inwardly. Evil is separate from good in the evil, too, who have appeared outwardly ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... applied by Lyell and his school to the outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is growing cold, as every one ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... thought—not, of course, as to the suitability of your union, but the—I may say, the manner of it! A ceremony without a social function, without the customary observances which, although worldly and filled with pomp and vanity, nevertheless are befitted by usage, in these mundane days, to those of your station in life, seems ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... journey thither, there was not a flower, adds the chronicler, which did not greet her by opening a bud—not a mountain pigeon which remained in silence, whilst the breezes and the rivulets poured forth their silent murmurings of ecstasy. Saintly guardian of the soul, dispersing mundane evils!—no colours, the chronicler tells us, can paint the animation of the faithful; no discourse can describe the consolation of the pilgrims in their adoration at the Shrine of the Holy Virgin ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... he tells his catechumens that the Church herself participated in the illumination, since in several dioceses, including his own diocese of Meaux, a number of parishes kindled what were called ecclesiastical fires for the purpose of banishing the superstitions practised at the purely mundane bonfires. These superstitions, he goes on to say, consisted in dancing round the fire, playing, feasting, singing ribald songs, throwing herbs across the fire, gathering herbs at noon or while fasting, carrying them on the person, preserving ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... is the devil's stronghold, and hereabouts his will is paramount; and, as I have had the honor to add, the devil is a gentleman. Sure, and as such, he cannot be expected to countenance your present behavior? Nay, never fear! Lucifer, already up to the ears in the affairs of this mundane sphere, lacks leisure to express his disapproval in sulphuric person. He tenders his apologies, sir, and sends in his stead your servant, with whose capabilities he is ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... creation is a process renewed after each kalpa, or vast mundane period. Brahma awakes from his slumber, and finds the world a waste of water. Then, just as in the American myths of the coyote, and the Slavonic myths of the devil and the doves, a boar or a fish or ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... been caudle. Nowadays a caudle party is a very gay, dressy affair, and given about six weeks after young master or mistress is ready to be congratulated or condoled with on his or her entrance upon this mundane sphere. We find in English books of etiquette very formal directions as to these cards of compliment. "Cards to inquire after friends during illness must be left in person, and not sent by post. On a lady's visiting-card must ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... buffalo,—evolution turned topsy turvy. After seeing nine angels and obtaining an explanation of the Seven Stages of Earth which is supported by the Gav-i-Zamin, the energy, symbolised by a bull, implanted by the Creator in the mundane sphere, Bulukiya meets the four Archangels, to wit Gabriel who is the Persian Rawanbakhsh or Life-giver; Michael or Beshter, Raphael or Israfil alias Ardibihisht, and Azazel or Azrail who is Duma or Mordad, the Death-giver; and the four are about to attack the Dragon, that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... with the subject of the monastic life, as lived by those same pious Benedictines here in England long ago. Its reasoned rejection of mundane agitations, its calm, its leisure, its profound and ardent scholarship were vastly to his taste,—A man touching middle-age might do worse, surely, than spend his days between worship and learning, thus?—He saw, and approved, its social office in offering sanctuary to the fugitive, alms to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Disgust with the politicians drove the noblest into their ranks. In Stephens they found an organizing chief, in Boyle O'Reilly a poet, and in John O'Leary a political thinker, men who under other conditions had achieved mundane success. The Fenians were defended by Isaac Butt, a big-hearted, broad-minded lawyer, who afterwards organized a party to convince Englishmen that Repeal was innocuous, when called "Home Rule." The people stood his patient ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... passion's widest range, Far regions of eternal change. Nay, and since death, which wipes out man, Finds him with many an unsolved plan, With much unknown, and much untried, Wonder not dead, and thirst not dried, Still gazing on the ever full Eternal mundane spectacle— This world in which we draw our breath, In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death. Blame thou not, therefore, him who dares Judge vain beforehand human cares; Whose natural insight can discern What through experience ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... with a truthfulness which she felt to be almost brazen, that her uppermost yearnings were of a wholly mundane character. ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... his face, and there was a singing in his ears. He turned right round and stared down the aisle at her retreating form, and was only roused to a sense of mundane things by a violent poke in the small of his back, and his aunt's voice buzzing in an irritated whisper: "Go on, my boy, do you want ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... rife among us and calamity betide from our division and how it behoved us therefore to be instant in prayer to Allah the Most High, so haply He might vouchsafe the King a happy son to inherit the kingship after him. But, after all, the issue of that which man desireth of mundane goods and wherefor he lusteth is unknown to him and consequently it behoveth a mortal to ask not of his Lord a thing whose end he wotteth not; for that haply the hurt of that thing is nearer to him than its gain and his destruction may be ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... who thought with him. The hope of Raynham had lent a careless half-compelled attention to the foregoing dialogue, wherein a common labourer and a travelling tinker had propounded and discussed one of the most ancient theories of transmundane dominion and influence on mundane affairs. He now started to his feet, and came tearing through the briar hedge, calling out for one of them to direct them the nearest road to Bursley. The tinker was kindling preparations for his tea, under the tawny umbrella. A loaf was set forth, oh which Ripton's eyes, stuck in the edge, fastened ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pleasant condition of existence, nevertheless, to perplexity mankind is more or less doomed in every period of life and in every mundane scene—particularly in the jungles of central Africa, as Harold and his friends found out many a time ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... straight lines. How stumbling and heavy is the flight of the "burly, dozing bumblebee," beside this quick intelligence! Our knight of the ruby throat, with lance in rest, makes wild and rapid sallies on this "little mundane bird,"—this bumblebee,—this rolling sailor, never off his sea-legs, always spinning his long homespun yarns. This rich bed of golden and crimson flowers is a handsome field of tournament. What invisible circle sits round to adjudge ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... thought is turned towards pure, beautiful, and helpful ideals, we shall feel no loss at all, for we shall carry our own ideals with us, and, I hope, see them more clearly by reason of their disentanglement from mundane considerations. In what precise way we may then be able to work out our ideals I will not now stop to discuss. What we want first is a reasonable theory, based upon the principle of that universal Law which is only varied in its actions by the conditions under which it works; so, instead of speculating ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... shook her—anger with her benefactors, that they could not have introduced her to this mundane paradise as her simple self, Miss Manvers—Sarah with the vulgar h—by her own merits and defects to stand or fall. . ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... poles; by wayside shrines with offerings of rags and flowers; by stone effigies of Buddha and his disciples, mostly defaced or overthrown, all wearing the same expression of beatified rest and indifference to mundane affairs; and by temples of lacquered wood falling to decay, whose bells sent their surpassingly sweet tones far ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... There is, moreover, a truth of fiction more veracious than the truth of fact, as that of the Poet, which represents to us things and events as they ought to be, rather than servilely copies them as they are imperfectly imaged in the crooked and smoky glass of our mundane affairs. It is this which makes the speech of Antonius, though originally spoken in no wider a forum than the brain of Shakspeare, more historically valuable than that other which Appian has reported, by as much as the understanding of the Englishman was more ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... yet standing; groans that ancient tree, and the Jotun Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the ways of Hel, until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the mundane snake is coiled in jotun-rage. The worm heats the water, and the eagle screams; the pale of beak tears carcases; the ship Naglfar is loosed. Surt from the south comes with flickering flame; shines from his sword the ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... my heart elate With ardent notions warm, I thirsted to inaugurate A spirit of reform; The universe was all awry, Philosophy despite, And mundane things disjointed I Was bound ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... simply this. If a boy failed in a lesson from any mundane cause whatever, he had to write it out; if he failed to bring it written out, he had to write it twice; if he was turned in a second lesson he was sent to detention, i.e., he was kept in during play hours; if this process ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... the 'Adoration of the Magi,' full of fine mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the 'Sposalizio' (whose marriage, I am not certain), the only grandly composed picture of the series, and marked by noble heads; then the 'Adoration of the Shepherds,' with two lovely angels holding the bambino. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... winter at Saint-Sulpice, but, like Boufflers a little later, far from singing the Canticles, he employed his time in the more mundane occupation of scribbling love-songs. At the end of the winter he was appointed vicar in a little town of his native department. "Vicar!" said Joachim; "I'll not disturb myself for such a trifle." Shortly ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various |
