"Unstable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for those who buy pictures to look out for the man who arbitrarily and suddenly changes his manner or method; he is as a cork tossed about on the surface of the waters, drifting with every breeze, submerged by every ripple, fickle and unstable; if his work possess any merit, it will be only the cheap merit of cleverness; its brilliancy will be ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... seek cannot be born of fear alone: it must be rooted in the lives of nations. There must be justice, sensed and shared by all peoples, for, without justice the world can know only a tense and unstable truce. There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak. But the law of which we speak, comprehending the values of freedom, affirms the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... part, By knowledge true, then social intercourse, And faith, and hope, and charity Will a far different foundation have From that which silly fables give, By which supported, public truth and good Must still proceed with an unstable foot, As all things that in error have their root. Oft, on these hills, so desolate, Which by the hardened flood, That seems in waves to rise, Are clad in mourning, do I sit at night, And o'er the dreary plain behold The stars above in purest azure shine, And in the ocean mirrored from ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... tottered round the table, as with supernatural energy, and seizing the Laird's right hand, she drew it close to her unstable eyes, and then perceiving the emerald ring chased in blood, she threw up her arms with a jerk, opened her skinny jaws with a fearful gape, and uttering a shriek that made all the house yell, and every one within it to tremble, she fell back lifeless and rigid on the floor. The gentlemen both fled, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... unprofitable railroad in the entire 9000 miles under operation. In recent years large soft coal deposits have been discovered and developed on many of the branch lines, and today the coal tonnage of the Southern Railway is exceeding the relatively unstable lumber tonnage of two or three ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... and all sorts of marital woes. But, the situation once mastered, by the most loving and accurate of scientific methods of procedure, a happy married life is certain to result. Otherwise, the "married state" will always be in a condition of "unstable equilibrium." So let every bride and bridegroom begin, from the first, to try to establish the greatly to be desired accomplishment. If anything further on this point should be desired, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... government in her always troublesome colony—a land which had first claimed consideration as the gateway to Cathay, and presently appeared to be nothing better than a "thousand leagues of snow and ice." This decline from the equator of enthusiasm to the north pole of neglect indicated the unstable fortunes of the colony. National spirit was left to fill up the ranks of her army when danger threatened the frontiers; and to the simple habitant, who had no interest to keep alive the memory of France, Quebec and Louisbourg ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... to show that a majority of men will not submit to a minority, no matter how many non-combatants are joined with that minority. To give women a position of apparent power, without its reality, would be to make our Government forever unstable. ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... father said, "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel;" and of Dan, "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... suspended girder types are as economical and free from uncertainty as to the stresses. In long-span bridges the cantilever system permits erection by building out, which is economical and sometimes necessary. It is, however, unstable unless rigidly fixed at the piers. In the Forth bridge stability is obtained partly by the great excess of dead over live load, partly by the great width of the river piers. The majority of bridges not of great ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... or in seeking out retired nooks beneath the cliffs, where there was no sound in her ears but that of the waves. She would sit for hours with no companion save her thoughts, which were unconsciously led from phase to phase by the moving lights and shadows upon the sea, and the soft beauty of unstable clouds. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... its seeming freedom is but slavery to passion, and this, too, the poet proclaims in Manru's confession that faithfulness is impossible to one to whom each new beauty offers irresistible allurement, and whose heart must remain unstable ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... obscurity, sudden fallings back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most stirred ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... gathering strength for its devastating career. The water vapor has risen higher and higher. Dense cumulus clouds have formed, the upper surfaces of which have caught all the sun's heat, intensifying the unstable equilibrium of the air. The powers of the tempest have grown steadily in all evil majesty of destructiveness. Day by day, then hour by hour, then minute by minute, the awful force has been generated, as steam is generated by fierce furnace fires ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the fact remains that humour is one of the most delicate, the most evasive, and the most unstable of human qualities. I am myself inclined to hold that sheer outrageous ribaldry, especially if graced with an undertone of philosophic irony, is the only kind of humour which is really permanent. To give permanence to any human quality in literature, there must be an appeal ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... stay at rest. This will not do. A ring composed of materials almost infinitely rigid might possibly, under such circumstances, be for a moment at rest; but it could not remain permanently at rest any more than can a needle balanced vertically on its point. In each case the equilibrium is unstable. If the slightest cause of disturbance arise, the equilibrium is destroyed, and the ring would inevitably fall in upon the planet. Such causes of derangement are incessantly present, so that unstable equilibrium cannot be an ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... a succession of bewildering images he beheld the irruption into Judaea of the headlong and indignant prophets, hurling imprecations against the crimes of the kings and the atrocities of that unstable race perpetually tempted by the voluptuous worships of Asia, always rebelling and complaining, and ready to break the iron bit with which ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... one wavers and cannot make up his mind. Now he will do this and now he will do that, uncertain and unstable, putting his hand to the plough and removing it again, my Californian at home would call him "wivel-minded." "Wivelly" means undecided, wavering, not to be depended on. It sounds like it. If the labourer gets his clothes soaked, he says they are "sobbled." The sound of ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Jefferson's influence became uppermost, and Madison swung over to the extreme of the state rights view, and drew the resolutions of the Virginia legislature declaring the Alien and Sedition laws "utterly null and void and of no effect," so that he has also been called the "Father of Nullification." However unstable his opinions may have been, there is no questioning his patriotism or the purity ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... The unstable and perishable nature of stock and credit, however, renders them unfit to be trusted to as the principal funds of that sure, steady, and permanent revenue, which can alone give security and dignity to government. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... leaving only some 2,000,000 actual agricultural wage-earners, or employable agricultural laborers. Five-eighths of these were under twenty-five years of age, and of the white regular workers only one-tenth were over thirty-five years of age. This shows how unstable is the foundation of our agricultural prosperity, the chief asset of plenty and contentment of our country. Mr. Get-Rich-Quick has moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the cities, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... were the love. Lord, I would have me love thee from the deeps— Of troubled thought, of pain, of weariness. Through seething wastes below, billows above, My soul should rise in eager, hungering leaps; Through thorny thicks, through sands unstable press— Out of my dream to him who slumbers ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... identical with the case among the most obscure of mankind, viz.: That a degenerated nerve condition has been inherited which renders the sufferer specially susceptible to this and allied neuroses, such as epilepsy, idiocy and suicide. The inheritance of an unstable nervous system makes the individual easily affected by what I must call 'alcoholic surroundings.' In other words, the provocation to drink which would have no influence upon an ordinary, stable nervous organization, is sufficient to turn the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... flowers, fragrant, but quickly languishing. The rough German musician was a simple person, unstable, fickle, ready to be amused at any new plaything. Leonora admitted to Rafael that she could have lived to old age submissively at Keller's side, pampering his whims and selfish caprices. But one day Keller deserted her, as she had deserted others, to take up ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... doubt is because she cannot bear to be unstable, and to desert the work to which she was almost pledged; but she says she is ashamed to perceive how much the sacrifice would cost her. She adds, that decide as she may, he concurs with her in devoting everything to the restoration of ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... proceed to Rome was granted by the consul. In the mean time a truce was asked, a request to which assent was readily expressed by Sylla and the majority; the few, who advocated harsher measures, were men inexperienced in human affairs, which, unstable and fluctuating, are ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... behavior to the standards of society and will be incapable of giving proper parental care to children. So a considerable percentage of our petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, and dependent are found to be feeble-minded. They are unstable, suggestible, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... conscription of old treaties. But the Allies give her no credit for this. The French, since the war began, have recovered all their old 'blague.' They talk incessantly of what they have done, and despise everyone else. But look how unstable they are politically! They change their ministries, as often as some men change their mistresses. The Pope, too, is an enemy of Italy and a friend of Austria. He aims at the restoration of his temporal power. ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... something ludicrous as well as pathetic in this cry. It did more for him than the most eloquent pleading could have done. Man, in a crowd, is an unstable being. At any moment he will veer right round and run in an opposite direction. The idea that the condemned man had a Susan who would mourn over his untimely end, touched a cord in the hearts of many among the crowd. The ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... whether any land was near. Oliver Farwell was clinging on next to me. The other men had secured themselves round the mast, others to the top. No one spoke; indeed it seemed to all of us that our last moments had arrived. Every instant we expected to be hurled off from our unstable resting-place, as the seas dashed with redoubled fury against the wreck. We could hear the vessel breaking up below us, and we all well knew that in a short time the mast itself must go for want ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Patagonia lived, there must have been there a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... which institution he found a great number of degenerative psychoses. In a recent work on the subject of psychogenesis he upholds his former views, and believes he has been able to separate his cases into three distinct groups. The first group comprises certain unstable individuals who show a tendency to the development of simple paranoid psychoses. It concerns patients of a very labile make-up with increased affective reactions, with marked tendencies to impulsions and antisocial acts. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Nations, its rulers entered upon a course of policy in accordance with the wants and demands of the age, and that policy is still adhered to, though meantime the general aspect of affairs is sadly changed, and Sardinia herself has experienced the sorest reverses. The weak, unstable King whose ambition first conspired to throw her into the current of the movement for the liberation of Italy, has died defeated and broken-hearted, but his wiser son and heir has taken his stand deliberately and firmly on the liberal side, and cannot be driven from ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... children, mankind." They afterwards led men into the second cavern, then into the third, and finally into the fourth, whence they made their way, guided by the two children, to the world of earth, which, having been covered with water, was damp and unstable and filled with huge monsters and beasts of prey. The two children continued to lead men "Eastward, toward the Home of the Sun-Father," and by their magic power, acting under the directions of their creator, the Sun-Father, they caused the surface of the earth to harden ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... tightly together, so tightly that she reduces the feathers on the fan she is holding to their last gasp. Because she is now disappointed in him; because he has proved himself, perhaps, unstable, deceptive to the heart's core, is she to vilify, him? A thousand times no! That would be, indeed, to be ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... despatches came from Clinton, who had received later news, and who was always trying to humor this spoiled child. He told him to keep all his men in Virginia, where he would take command himself as soon as the hot season was over. The "solid operations" were to begin. Very unstable they proved, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... erected was crude and unstable, and fell rapidly into decay. Scarcely a dozen years had passed, when it became necessary to build a new one. This was constructed of adobe and roofed with tile. It was completed in 1802, but although well built, it was totally destroyed by an earthquake, as we ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... also feels strongly in regard to foreign financial interests seeking to control those unstable governments through concessions and otherwise. This, too, he is determined to discourage as far as it is possible ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... by night, attended by three slaves, with a promise that if he should receive a reward for it, he would engage to betray Arpi to them. Fabius having laid the matter before a council, some were of opinion that "he ought to be scourged and put to death as a deserter, as a man of unstable mind, and a common enemy to both sides; who, after the defeat at Cannae, had gone over to Hannibal and drawn Arpi into revolt, as if it were right that a man's fidelity should vary according to the fluctuations of fortune; and who now, when the Roman cause, contrary to his hopes and wishes, was ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... and ran and slept and woke And ran in beauty when each morning broke, Love yet was boylike, fervid and unstable, Teased with romance, ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... lose balance, but the professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself, knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did know — what the idiot could hardly do — that his normal condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was unstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream, inconsequence; the simultaneous action of different thought-centres without central control. His artificial balance was acquired habit. He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back, crossing ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... in the water and difficult to capsize. This is true of model boats just as much as it is true of large boats. The model boat builder must keep the weight of his boat as near the bottom as possible. For instance, if a heavy cabin were built on a frail little hull, the boat would be very unstable ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... policy, though adventurous and unstable, was somewhat more successful. His only principle was to grasp whatever opportunity seemed to offer. Thus at one time he seriously proposed to have himself elected pope. His marriage with Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, added to the estates of his house ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... breeding, is possible only when plants are bred pure, and it is the experience of grape-breeders that in pure breeding this fruit loses in vigor and productiveness and that the variations are exceedingly slight and unstable. Many pure-bred grapes have been raised on the grounds of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station under the eyes of the writer, of which very few have surpassed the parent or have shown promise for the ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... that the cheeks of each separately, and of all when brought together, will be bathed in tears, because of those ills which are alone the occasion of my never-ending misery. Do not, I beseech you, refuse me these tears, reflecting that your estate is unstable as well as mine, and that, should it ever come to resemble mine (the which may God forfend!), the tears that others shed for you will be pleasing to you in return. And that the time may pass more rapidly in speaking than in, weeping, I will do my best to fulfil my promise briefly, ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... heard that, Sir Galahad went to Sir Percival and Sir Bors and kissed them and commended them to God, saying, "Salute for me Sir Lancelot, my father, and bid him remember this unstable world." ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... The gods abetted, Cato lik'd the other.[591] Both differ'd much. Pompey was struck in years, 130 And by long rest forgot to manage arms, And, being popular, sought by liberal gifts To gain the light unstable commons' love, And joy'd to hear his theatre's applause: He lived secure, boasting his former deeds, And thought his name sufficient to uphold him: Like to a tall oak in a fruitful field, Bearing old spoils and conquerors' monuments, Who, though his root be weak, and ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... mention of Cicero as the greatest of authorities with regard to this subject, because he was himself the greatest of letter writers. The epistle was the shape in which his versatile and beautiful mind most gracefully ran and moulded itself. His fluctuating and unstable character no less than his vanity and love of distinction, seemed to minister occasion to those varied forms of diction and expression in which the genius of animated letter writing may be said to delight. Read his 'Familiar Letters,' if not in Latin, yet ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... functional activity. Moreover, it is necessary to endeavour to secure the free development of these centres and their unimpeded functional activity, because otherwise the development of the higher centres is hindered, and the whole nervous system rendered unstable ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... that I found Luscinda at the grating that was the witness of our loves. She recognised me at once, and I her, but not as she ought to have recognised me, or I her. But who is there in the world that can boast of having fathomed or understood the wavering mind and unstable nature of a woman? Of a truth no one. To proceed: as soon as Luscinda saw me she said, 'Cardenio, I am in my bridal dress, and the treacherous Don Fernando and my covetous father are waiting for me in the hall with the other witnesses, who shall be the witnesses of my death before ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... adolescents should be unstable is what we ought to expect from the general instability of the organism due to the rapidity of growth and the remarkable developmental changes that are crowded into these few years. Rapidity of growth and increase of ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... to advance. And if ever they met, the encounter was so weakened by the hands of the men, the rearing of the horses, the swinging of heads, that it was a face to face stop. Some blows were exchanged with the sword or the lance, but the equilibrium was too unstable, mutual support too uncertain for real sword play. Man felt himself too isolated. The moral pressure was too strong. Although not deadly, the combat lasted but a second, precisely because man felt himself, saw himself, alone and surrounded. The first ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... to shift, with the shifting calendar, from summer through spring to winter, and so backward through autumn to summer. The rites of the husbandman were stable because they rested on direct observation of nature: the rites of the priest were unstable because they were based on a false calculation. Yet many of the priestly festivals may have been nothing but the old rural festivals disguised in the course of ages by the pomp of sacerdotalism and severed, by the error of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... along a corridor and opened a door. Then he set his unstable candle down on a toilet-table and asked at what hour they were to be called in ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Captain Tremain, pausing, "I am not so sure about that. You see, their Government is so very unstable. The country itself is rich enough in mineral wealth, if that is what you mean." All the while Howard stood there with his mouth agape, and I felt like ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... by, they all walked so gracefully, Balancing their bodies on lithe unstable hips, As if music moved them that swelled in their bosoms And ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... brother, go thy ways, you have neither left your country nor your kindred; you have given what you had to your parents, and disappointed the poor; you do not deserve to be received into the company of those who make profession of holy poverty. You commenced by the flesh, which is an unstable foundation for a spiritual edifice." This carnal and animal man returned to his parents, resumed his property, and rather than give it to the poor, he gave up the good purpose ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... carry them far. We all know that they have a marked genius: great gifts of their own. In a civilization of super-ants or bees, there would have been no problem of the hungry unemployed, no poverty, no unstable government, no riots, no strikes for short hours, no derision of eugenics, no thieves, perhaps ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... side begin high up; higher yet, the more melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is deserted, the superstructure—pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical timber—speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity. We must have passed from six to eight of these now houseless platforms. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disposition brought to Goethe's noble soul heavy sorrows, transitory relations, many disappointments, and a solitary old age. It becomes doubly momentous for a king, before whom others rarely stand with assurance and on equal terms; for his most sincere friends may yet turn into admiring flatterers, unstable in their bearing, now constrained under the moral spell of his majesty, now, under the conviction of their ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... an old maid; and when I was a young one I had, I dare say, more than was good for me. If I were still young, perhaps I should not make this confession; but so many women are fond of government, I suppose, because they are not fit for it. To be unstable and capricious, I really think, is but too characteristic of our sex; and there is, perhaps, no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behavior as woman. I have soberly and uniformly maintained ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... am here to say. The time is come to give up the shifts and unstable expedients that we needed, or thought we needed, in our early beginnings. Let us pull down all these scaffoldings and stages that have helped us to build, and let us see whether our fabric will stand upon its base, erect, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... collection of our own selves from time to time, no great purpose is carried out, and no great work can be done; and that it is the bustle and hurry of our modern life which causes shallow thought, unstable purpose, and wasted energy, in too many who would be better and wiser, stronger and happier, if they would devote more time to silence and meditation; if they would commune with their own heart in their ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... unfortunate man, and learning that I had taken the field in the counties further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement to the west of them tempted them to move ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious and essentially unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish for a time great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads, empires, literatures, and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In India even more than about the Mediterranean all this is spectacular. There the peasant ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, received their supplementary daily meals of specially fit and specially prepared food, could not be suddenly dropped by the American workers. There could be no confidence that the still unstable and struggling governments would be able to carry it on successfully. But with the abolition of the blockade and the incoming of the year's harvest, and with the growing possibility of adequate financial help through government and bank loans, the various new ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... dub as criminal. Consistent and portentous selfishness, combined with dullness of imagination is probably just as transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons of unstable mind." ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new; that self-interest, well understood, will produce social concord; that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits; that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is, not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... then, direct contemporary testimony, that, at the period of Shakespeare's entrance upon London life, it was a common practice for those lawyers whom want of success or an unstable disposition impelled to a change in their avocation to devote themselves to writing or translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... not whether I can escape you, but whether you can escape me. Since you have lost your boat and your rifle and we're in such a treacherous and unstable element as water, I occupy the superior position. The young may indeed over-estimate their powers, but in swimming at least I'm a competent critic. For instance, you're holding your shoulders too high, and you kick too much. You're splashing water, a useless ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... difficulty in recognizing her cherished First-Reader Class. Isidore Belchatosky's face was so wreathed in smiles and foreign matter as to be beyond identification; Nathan Spiderwitz had placed all his trust in a solitary suspender and two unstable buttons; Eva Kidansky had entirely freed herself from restraining hooks and eyes; Isidore Applebaum had discarded shoe-laces; and Abie Ashnewsky had bartered his only necktie for ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... was a good swimmer, and was not afraid of the water, the current was so swift, and her own footing so unstable, it was doubtful if Ruth Fielding could save both the miller and herself from ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... mortal mother who gave birth to an immortal son; or, contrarily, he is like Achilles in regard to Thetis. What a contrast there is between what is fleeting and what is permanent! The short span of a man's life, his necessitous, afflicted, unstable existence, will seldom allow of his seeing even the beginning of his immortal child's brilliant career; nor will the father himself be taken for that which he really is. It may be said, indeed, that a man whose fame comes after him is the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... stroke was therefore suddenly levelled against the Council in full session. On the 5th of September, the Seigneur de Heze, a young gentleman of a bold, but unstable character, then entertaining close but secret relations with the Prince of Orange, appeared before the doors of the palace. He was attended by about five hundred troops, under the immediate command of the Seigneur de Glimes, bailiff of Walloon Brabant. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... but I possess it in abundance, and it does not feed me, nor make music for me, nor fan me when the sun is hot, nor cause me to sleep when I am weary; therefore when my slaves have told me how merchants go out and brave the perilous wind and sea, and live in the unstable ships, and run risks from shipwreck and pirates, and when, having asked them why they have done this, they have answered, 'For gold,' I have found it hard to believe them; and when they have told me how men have lied, and robbed, and deceived; how they have murdered ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... despise, that can not satisfy my heart? If my piety is founded upon this feeling, then there are in it two great defects: the first, that it is not based upon a pure love of God, full of humility and charity, but on pride; and the second, that this piety, because it is thus without foundation, is unstable and inefficacious. For who can be certain that the soul will not forget the love of its Creator, when it does not love him infinitely, but only because there is no other being whom it deems worthy of endowing ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... was irrevocably dedicated to youth and the beauty of youth, which is like no other beauty. The wildness of her which did not die, which probably would never die, was capable of trampling over Sir Seymour's fidelity to get to unstable, selfish and careless youth, was capable of casting away his fidelity for the infidelity of youth. As she met her host's grave eyes, she sentenced him in her heart to eternal watching at her gate. She could not, she never would be able to, let him into the secret room ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Rousseau still maintains his influence, and boasts his imitators. Rousseau was the worse man of the two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer. But his reputation is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and the danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away. In Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive; their uses cease with the evils they denounce. But Rousseau sought to construct as well as to destroy; and though nothing could well be more absurd than his ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... corroborate. Dr. Clouston's observation, and assert that children fed largely on flesh foods have capricious appetites, suffer more commonly from indigestion in its various forms, possess an unstable nervous system, and have less resisting power ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... after a great deal of ineffectual wriggling and struggling—which occasioned serious inconvenience and anxiety to the human supports who were with the utmost difficulty maintaining a state of very unstable equilibrium beneath his feet—his patience completely failed him, and, in a fit of childish anger and spite, he sent a series of truly blood- curdling yells echoing into the interior of the pilot-house. These cries were of course distinctly heard ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... leaders who had attempted in vain to overcome by skill and patriotism the thousand difficulties placed in their way by successive unstable, insincere Ministers of War, General Vincente occupied an honoured place. This mild-mannered tactician enjoyed the enviable reputation of being alike unconquerable and incorruptible. His smiling presence ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... give any idea to one who has not seen it what a snow slide really is; how it sweeps away every vestige of trees, grass, and roots, and leaves a surface of shirting, unstable earth ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... from which I write to-day. I spent all those years in the service of the Empire (and even of Russia) from no uncertain temper and from no imaginary quarrel. It is so common or so necessary for men and women to misjudge each other that I believe you thought me wayward, or at least unstable. If you did so you did me a wrong. Those two good seasons when we met again, and this last of but a month ago, were not accidents or fitful recoveries. They were all I possessed in my life and all that will perish with me when ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Second Epistle of Peter, is favourable to the supposition that the Apostle of the Gentiles was now dead; as, had he been still living to correct such misinterpretations, it would scarcely have been said that in all his epistles were things "hard to be understood" which "the unlearned and unstable" wrested "unto their own destruction." [159:4] It would seem, too, that Peter here alludes particularly to the Epistle to the Hebrews—a letter, as we have seen, addressed to Jewish Christians, and written after Paul's liberation from his first Roman imprisonment. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... South, to which Grant was prompted both by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,—just or unjust, benignant or cruel,—would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large would not ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... said Louis, "that your friend the Chevalier is placed under arrest at once, and as much for his attempt upon your life as for the unstable quality of his political opinions, the law shall deal with him—conclusively." He sighed. "It always pains me to proceed to extremes against a man of his stamp. To deprive a fool of his head seems a work ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... with a dialectic demonstration of what is best for us—to do only what is in reason best for us—we must simply cease to live, though we do continue to breathe. Even in physics, of what use are logical demonstrations, when the premises are only a foundation more unstable than ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... from the Reverend Dr. Price and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? For this plain reason—because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... a low monotone, as if pursuing aloud a train of thought that had its beginning in the silent contemplation of the unstable nature of earthly greatness—"yes. He has been rich and strong, and now he lives on alms: old, feeble, blind, and without companions, but for his daughter. The Rajah Patalolo gives him rice, and the pale woman—his daughter—cooks it for him, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... forenoon when the sergeant had been sent for to come to headquarters. Half an hour later he had started, the letter tightly wrapped in a bit of rubber blanket before he had placed it inside his jacket, for he had already had enough experience with the native boats to know how unstable they would be in the current ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... of the brain-cells for adrenalin which was manifested in our experiments we may strongly suspect that the Nissl substance is a volatile, extremely unstable combination of certain elements of the brain-cells and adrenalin, because the adrenals alone do not take the Nissl stain and the brain deprived of adrenalin also does not take Nissl stain. The consumption of the Nissl substance in the brain-cells is lessened ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... offer to James the Second, which, had it been acted on, Mr. Laing acknowledges, might have produced another change! What then had become of our "glorious Revolution," which from its earliest step, throughout the reign of William, was still vacillating amidst the unstable opinions and contending interests of so many ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... they were ready to violate it without scruple when they saw their way to securing a predominant position among their neighbours; and although the ideal of Panhellenic unity had been put before Greece by Gorgias and Isocrates, its realization did not go further than the formation of leagues of an unstable character, each subject, as a rule, to the more or less tyrannical domination ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... is beginning to contain speculations on using the principle of the missile engine to save unstable intermediate products of the chemical processes. The high heats achieved in the rocket engine can, perhaps, be utilized to produce desired products that would be lost by slow cooling. But the high rate of cooling accomplished by expanding gases through ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... the talents of the best thinkers and the most eloquent writers and speakers that the world ever saw. But in the present case a system declared to be far better, and which certainly is much newer, (to restless and unstable minds no small recommendation,) was held out to the admiration of the good people of England. In that case it was surely proper for those who had far other thoughts of the French Constitution to scrutinize that plan which has been recommended to our imitation by active and zealous factions at ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... remarked that Byron's popularity made it difficult for him to indulge sentiments of envy. But without referring to the unstable character of popularity, was not his own attacked by the jealousy of those who wished to pull him down from the pedestal of fame, to which they hoped themselves to rise? Did he not think, some years before his death, that his popularity was wavering, and that ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... light-spot shivering and spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain another picture ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... desperately set to check their descent, to be steadied and encouraged by the booming voice, deep as a bell, of the man nearest them. Sometimes in dangerous spots where shale slides threatened to prove unstable, his lean, grim face and blue-gray eyes appeared apprehensive, and he braced his great shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating, straining animal. After one of these perilous tracts he stopped beside the burros, pushed the stained white Stetson to the back of ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Nor the deep wounds of victours raging blade, Nor ruthlesse spoyle of souldiers blood-desiring, The which so oft thee, Rome, their conquest made, Ne stroke on stroke of fortune variable, Ne rust of age hating continuance, Nor wrath of gods, nor spight of men unstable, Nor thou oppos'd against thine owne puissance, Nor th'horrible uprore of windes high blowing, Nor swelling streames of that god snakie-paced* Which hath so often with his overflowing Thee drenched, have thy pride so much abaced, But that this nothing, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... candour with which they greeted me, and although by long usage I am reasonably unconcerned at the proximity of any of our own recognised genii, it is not to be denied that my organs of ferocity grew small and unstable at the revelations. ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... heard him thus argue, adroitly stole an arrow out of his own quiver, and addressed him as he had frequently heard him address others. And there was just enough truth mixed with the sophistry of his argument to carry conviction to the mind of one as unstable as Ashton; for he did feel all unnerved. He had broken off suddenly from a long-continued drunken spree, and was beginning to have premonitions of something which he dreaded only second to death. He had already twice suffered ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... snapped at him, poor Jurgen thought of that very real dissension and severance which in the oncoming years was to arise between them; and of how she would die without his knowing of her death for two whole months; and of how his life thereafter would be changed, somehow, and the world would become an unstable place in which you could no longer put cordial faith. And he foreknew all the remorse he was to shrug away, after the squandering of so much pride and love. But these things were not yet: and besides, these ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... not exactly tubercular, he remarked, but he 'feared tuberculosis'—excuse the long words; the phrase was his, not mine; I repeat verbatim. He vetoed her exposing herself to a winter in London in her present unstable condition. Davos? Well, no. Not Davos: with deliberative thumb and finger on close-shaven chin. He judged her too delicate for such drastic remedies. Those high mountain stations suited best the robust invalid, who had dropped ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability. If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure and function—of what is called the traditional with what is called the ideal—that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps make even the crown of the French Empire unstable. He did not deny that Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy and Italy. Might not circumstances turn out ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... clutched the tap root a foot higher and tried his weight upon it. It held like a rope. He pulled himself a foot higher from the waters. Once more, and then he found that he had command of his legs and could dig his feet into the unstable clay. Then, inch by inch, scarce daring to hope, he pulled himself up, up until he was free of the flood and between him and the ground above only a scant yard remained. Below him the rushing torrents roared, as though angry at ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... disposition was at that period restless and unstable, free from the passionate caprices of his ill-fated father, and attuned by the fond efforts of the Swiss democrat Laharpe, to the loftiest aspirations of the France of 1789. Yet the son of Paul I. could hardly free himself from the instincts ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... you, Withers," replied Shefford, with his hand on the trader's shoulder. "You are right to caution me. I seem to be wild—thirsting for adventure—chasing a gleam. In these unstable days I can't answer for my heart. But I can for my honor. These unfortunate women are as safe with me as—as they are with ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... them to remain wholly or partially unemployed, until they have "adjusted" themselves to the new economic conditions. (2) Miscalculation and temporary over-production, to which machine industries with a wide unstable market are particularly prone, bring about periodic deep depressions of "trade," temporarily throwing out of work large bodies of skilled and unskilled labour. (3) Economies of machine-production in the staple industries drive an increasing ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the length, depth and breadth of his perception of true, just, safe financial principles and his unconquerable loyalty to them. At a time when the enemies of an honest, stable currency are seeking to destroy it and to set up in its place a debased, unstable, dishonest currency, the country would accept this exponent of sound, wise finance and a reliable, steadfast currency with extraordinary satisfaction."—Philadelphia "Ledger and Transcript," ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... who had been at her feet it was said that but one was so fortunate as to engage her fancy. To President Miraflores, the brilliant but unstable ruler of Anchuria, she yielded the key to her resolute heart. How, then, do we find her (as the Coralians would have told you) the wife of Frank Goodwin, and happily living a life ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... and unstable minds of men! How quickly our intentions fluctuate! All thoughts we lightly change, but mostly when These from some lover's quarrel take their date. But now, so wroth I saw that Saracen With woman, so outrageous in his hate, I weened not only he would ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... looking at her with those odd, unstable eyes of his that ever barred the way to his inner being. "It depends a little on the condition of your heart—that. When it comes to this in an obstacle race, there are three courses open to you. Either ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... and unstable—and no matter how good and sweet the partner may be, they break away. These cases are misfortunes, but in analysing the facts the actual responsibility cannot be laid at the doors of such people, since they could not by will have ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... that the real habit of our characteristic walk, gesture, or speech resides in the brain, rather than in the muscles which it controls. So delicate is the organization of the brain structure and so unstable its molecules, that even the perfume of the flower, which assails the nose of a child, the song of a bird, which strikes his ear, or the fleeting dream, which lingers but for a second in his sleep, has so modified his ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... only about one-tenth now become completely insane,[1] and this percentage might be greatly diminished by general sanitary improvements. Our alienists now claim that, by checking the reproduction of the obviously unstable, and careful hygienic treatment and training of the predisposed two per cent, insanity is almost as ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... didn't want me to come, why in the world didn't you have the courage to say so at the start? I must say I don't admire people whose tempers—and manners—are so unstable. I'm sorry I forced my presence upon you, and I promise you it won't occur again." She hesitated, and then fired a parting shot which certainly was spiteful in the extreme. "There's one good thing about it," she smiled, tartly, "I shall have something ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... deceive us and nowhere more than in our ideas about the physical body. It is an unstable mass of matter, in constant motion, with great gulfs of space between its atoms. Emerson was very far ahead of his time and it took science a half century to catch up with him and learn that he had recorded a fact ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... create incurable confusion again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable polity of Europe heeled over like a ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... in a small way, and while Joe turned banker and recklessly loaned the attractive but unstable Johnny Nelson a hundred dollars to help him to his feet, Sylvane and Merrifield bought a few horses and a few head of cattle, took on shares a hundred and fifty more, belonging to an old reprobate of a ranchman named Wadsworth and a partner of his named ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... be said for even so stringent a policy as this. An unstable home, with a worthless father an intermittent member of the household, is as bad an environment as children can have—its very fluctuations making for nervous instability and a wrong point of view later on. There is ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... seek to use this principle for the purpose of reaching a permanent settlement. When with the assistance of the South he effected the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he honestly thought that he was replacing an arbitrary and unstable territorial division of the country into slave and free states, by a settlement which would be stable, because it was the logical product of the American democratic idea. The interpretation of democracy which dictated the proposed ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... hereditary dominions of the House of Austria, Hungary and Transylvania were the most unstable, and the most difficult to retain. The impossibility of holding these two countries against the neighbouring and overwhelming power of the Turks, had already driven Ferdinand to the inglorious expedient ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... but a special development of the instinct of workmanship, a variant, relatively late and ephemeral in spite of its great absolute antiquity. The emulative predatory impulse—or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well be called—is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory emulation, and therefore the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... he argues, in which all are free but in which the means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or withhold ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... course, two kinds of equilibrium—stable and unstable—according as the social and political system is in a healthy or unhealthy state. If a body is in stable equilibrium, and any slight motion takes place, the body will return immediately to its former position; but if in unstable, it will decline further and further away from its original position, and be entirely upset. So a healthy and sound conservative equilibrium is not disturbed by outside forces, and the State will resume its former position of stability and rest ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... little affect daily conduct; I reply that it is no part of my business to inquire whether this or that makes for my pet theories or against them; my concern is to inquire whether or no it is borne out by facts, and I find the opinion that protoplasm is the one living substance unstable, inasmuch as it is an attempt to make a halt where no halt can be made. This is enough; but, furthermore, the fact that the protoplasmic parts of the body are MORE living than the non- protoplasmic—which I cannot deny, without denying that it is any longer ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... speaks hastily and heedlessly, for the earth can show itself as unstable as the air, and our solid footing become as insecure as the deck of a ship laboring in a storm at sea. The powers of the atmosphere, great as they are and mighty for destruction as they may become, are at times surpassed by those which abide ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Democratic Republic of the Congo is a source and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; much of this trafficking occurs within the country's unstable eastern provinces and is perpetrated by armed groups outside government control tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - Democratic Republic of the Congo is on the Tier 2 Watch List for its failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat trafficking in persons in 2007; while ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... reality is temporarily abandoned. In so far as sleep is psychologically determined, it is a regressive phenomenon. It is interesting that the most frequent euphemism or metaphor for death is sleep. Sleep is a normal regression. It does not always give the unstable individual sufficient relaxation from the demands of adaptation and so pathological regressions take place, one of which we believe stupor to be. It is important to note that objectively the resemblance between sleep and stupor is striking. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... astrology; and here I stand, all London roaring by at the street's end, as impotent as any baby. I have a prodigious contempt for my maternal uncle; but without him, it is idle to deny it, I should simply resolve into my elements like an unstable mixture. I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some one thing to the bottom—were it only literature. And yet, sir, the man of the world is a great feature of this age; he is possessed of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the dynamic relations of life in the face of its evident advance upon the Earth. The law of the unconstrained cell is growth on an ever increasing scale; and although we assume the organic configuration, whether somatic or reproductive, to be essentially unstable, so that continual inflow of energy is required merely to keep it in existence, this does not vitiate the fact that, when free of all external constraint, growth gains on waste. Indeed, even in the case of old age, the ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... He realized the significance of what his visitor was saying. Ever Since Zoe had gone, Jean Jacques had been for ever on the move, for ever making hay on which the sun did not shine. Jean Jacques' face these days was lined and changeful. It looked unstable and tired—as though disturbing forces were working up to the surface out of control. The brown eyes, too, were far more restless than they had ever been since the Antoine was wrecked, and their owner returned with Carmen to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... characters have the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music: for example, neither the Valhalla nor the spear themes could, without the most ludicrous incongruity, be used for the forest bird or the unstable, delusive Loki; but for all that the musical characterization must be regarded as independent of the specific themes, since the entire elimination of the thematic system from the score would ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... soi-disant superiors; and I assert that, if our people have no consciousness of their great destiny, nor sense of their true power and mission,—if, while twenty-four millions of Italians are at the present day grouped around, I will not say the conception of unity, but the mere unstable fact of union, the great soul of Italy still lies prostrate in the tomb dug for her three centuries ago by the Papacy and the Empire,—the cause is to be found in the immorality and corruption ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Utrecht called them British subjects. What the word "subjects" meant, they themselves hardly knew. The English told them that it meant children; the French that it meant dogs and slaves. Events had tamed the fierce confederates; and now, though, like all savages, unstable as children, they leaned in their soberer moments to a position of neutrality between their European neighbors, watching with jealous eyes against the encroachments of both. The French would gladly have enlisted them ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... because of the more watery character of woman's blood and great extent of subcortical centers in woman in comparison with cerebrum, the physical equilibrium of woman is more unstable than of man. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... thrust by the praise of the people, and the tale that no ending hath, And the love and the heart of the godlike, and the heavenward-leading path, For the rose and the stem of the lily, and the smooth-lipped youngling's kiss, And the eyes' desire that passeth, and the frail unstable bliss? Now shalt thou tell King Sigmund, that I deem it the crown of my life To dwell in the house of his fathers amidst all peace and strife, And to bear the sons of his body: and indeed full well I know That fair from the loins of Sigmund shall such a stem outgrow That all folk of the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... think, more wise,— Some doubloons from the window threw, And render'd thus the count untrue. The padlock'd room permitted Its owner, when he quitted, To leave his money on the table. One day, bethought this monkey wise To make the whole a sacrifice To Neptune on his throne unstable. I could not well award the prize Between the monkey's and the miser's pleasure Derived from that devoted treasure. One day, then, left alone, That animal, to mischief prone, Coin after coin detach'd, A gold jacobus snatch'd, Or Portuguese doubloon, Or silver ducatoon, Or noble, of the ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine |
