"Immutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... convention at Linz, May 30, 1898, passed a resolution proposed by Pernerstorfer to the effect that "Socialism is directly contradictory to Roman clericalism, which is enslaved to unyielding authority, immutable dogmas, and absolute intellectual thralldom. We doubt all authority, we know of no immutable dogma, we are the champions of right, liberty and conscience." [Reported in "Vorwaerts," 1898, no. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... could change the divinely established order whereby the territorial lord took tithes from his peasantry and pastured his game on their crops. The hierarchy which rested on the bowed back of the toiling serf and culminated in the figure of the heaven-sent King seemed to him as immutable as the everlasting hills. The men of his generation had not learned that it was built on a human foundation and that a sudden movement of the underlying mass might shake the structure to its pinnacle. The Marquess, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... is myself is very imperfect, prejudiced, liable to error, changeable, headstrong, ignorant, and limited; in short, it possesses nothing but what is borrowed. The other is common to all men, and superior to them. It is perfect, eternal, immutable, ever ready to communicate itself in all places, and to rectify all minds that err and mistake; in short, incapable of ever being either exhausted or divided, although it communicates itself to all ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... time when this mental and moral advance commenced, and man's physical character became fixed and almost immutable, a new series of causes would come into action, and take part in his mental growth. The diverse aspects of nature would now make themselves felt, and profoundly influence the character ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the hands of Madame Manzoni all my papers, and all the forbidden books I possessed. The good woman, who was twenty years older than I, and who, believing in an immutable destiny, took pleasure in turning the leaves of the great book of fate, told me that she was certain of restoring to me all I left with her, before the end of the following year, at the latest. Her prediction ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... At that period of his existence he was inclined to regard girls as a necessary evil. For some immutable reason they existed, and perforce must be borne with, and it was his hope that he would get through life and see as little as possible of the exasperating sex. Nevertheless, as Bryce surveyed this winsome miss through the palings, he was sensible of a sneaking desire to find favour ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... circuit, was nevertheless immense, surrounded by a thin veneer of universe—the Stream of Ocean. But how it has shrunk! To-day, precisely charted, weighed, and measured, a thousand times larger than the world of Homer, it is become a tiny speck, gyrating to immutable law through a universe the bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back. The light of Algol shines upon it—a light which travels at one hundred and ninety thousand miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years to reach its destination. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... religious violences. But if it had had this law, how would it have become Christian? The Pentateuch has thus been in the world the first code of religious terrorism. Judaism has given the example of an immutable dogma armed with the sword. If, instead of pursuing the Jews with a blind hatred, Christianity had abolished the regime which killed its founder, how much more consistent would it have been!—how much better would it have deserved ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... house of Abraham, or rescued from those who may have stolen her from her home, or given by her parents to the wealthy and childless Sarai. She was Sarah's handmaid—a relation, according to the customs of the East (almost immutable) nearly as dear as that of a child. She was the personal attendant, the constant companion of her mistress; and by her was doubtless instructed in the principles of the true religion, while she was thus accustomed to the accomplishments ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... things, and to those men likewise who have obtained immortality. He maintains the sky to be what men call Jupiter; the air, which pervades the sea, to be Neptune; and the earth, Ceres. In like manner he goes through the names of the other Deities. He says that Jupiter is that immutable and eternal law which guides and directs us in our manners; and this he calls fatal necessity, the everlasting verity of future events. But none of these are of such a nature as to seem to carry any indication of divine virtue in them. These are the doctrines contained in his first book of ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... have talent," he would say to him; "it will be a sin to ruin it by carelessness and by pursuing erroneous ideas and principles. You are too impatient; too apt to be fascinated by novelty, and to neglect rules hallowed by time and experience, laws immutable as those of the Medes. Beware, lest you become a mere fashionable painter. Your colours, I observe, are not unfrequently selected in defiance of good taste; your drawing is often feeble, sometimes positively incorrect; your outlines want clearness. You run ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... and stately in the splendour of its glory; there is no report abroad but that which tells of its riches, its industry, its valour, the good government of its princes and the irresistible might of its gods, and the world, filled with envy or with fear, deeming its good fortune immutable, never once applies to it, even in thought, the usual commonplaces on the instability of human things. Suddenly an ill wind, blowing up from the distant horizon, bursts upon it in destructive squalls, and it is overthrown in the twinkling of an eye, amid the glare of lightning, the resounding ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and the cumpany which he conducted; and that because the one had Goddis promisse that thei should multiplie, and the other had his commandiment to enter into such dangeris. I wold your Wisedomes should considder, that our God remaneth one, and is immutable; and that the Church of Christ Jesus hath the same promeis of protectioun and defence that Israell had of multiplicatioun; and farther, that no less caus have ye to enter in your formar interprise, then Moses had to go to the presence of Pharao; for your ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... merely the theocratic mode of representing their own good success in that region of circumstances which was not in human power.(349) His explanation of miracles has been already stated: the course of nature seems to him to be fixed and immutable; and he argues that interference with its course is not a greater proof of Providence than a ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... it cannot consent to abate any essential or fundamental right of its people because of a mere alteration of circumstance. The rights of neutrals in time of war are based upon principle, not upon expediency, and the principles are immutable. It is the duty and obligation of belligerents to find a way to adapt the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... have seen, had, in common with his brethren, given his best powers to "monumental painting." For this noble and "architectonic art" he was not without qualifications. He moved in an exalted sphere, his mind ranged among immutable truths, his forms were high in type, his compositions had symmetry and concentration, he knew how to adapt lines and masses to structural spaces. An occasion calculated to call forth his powers came with the commission to paint in fresco The Vision ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... admiration of martial achievements, and of indignation at foreign influence, or domestic perfidy, (under which head the conduct of Talleyrand and of Marmont was included); and more especially, when the success, and glory, and eternal, immutable, untarnished honour of France, were the theme of declamation. The applause at passages of this last description seemed sometimes ludicrous enough, when the theatres were guarded by Russian grenadiers, and nearly half filled ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... effect; and the integrity of this law cannot be destroyed, nor even impaired, by any conceivable rebellion of yours. Yet this material world of law is but the shadow of the reality, and that reality is God—the moral law if you please, as relentless, as inexorable, as immutable in its succession of cause and effect as the physical laws more apparent to us; and as little to be overthrown as physical law by any rebellion of disordered sentiment. The word of this God and this Law is contained in the Scriptures of the ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again,—its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Reed himself, that was the most tragic phase of the whole tragic situation: that his hours of restless longing seemed to have come to a final end. Always too sane to waste regrets upon futilities, he had come now to a point of passive acceptance of the immutable bad in his surroundings, an active effort only to snatch at whatever good remained. It did not affect his attitude in the very least that, nine days out of every ten, he had to take a spiritual microscope to hunt the good. One of the ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base; the air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are written FOR EVER all that man has ever said or whispered. There, in their immutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled; perpetuating, in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man's changeful will. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... above you, because I do not believe in leaving the world better than I found it; and you, exquisitely hypocritical reader, think that you are a cut above me because you say you would leave the world better than you found it. The one eternal and immutable delight of life is to think, for one reason or another, that we are better than our neighbours. This is why I wrote this book, and this is why it is affording you so much pleasure, O exquisitely hypocritical reader, my friend, my brother, because ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... there is the pyramid of Cheops, whose immutable base we had to skirt on our way hither. In the moonlight we could see the separate blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even in their layers, which lie one above the other to infinity, getting ever smaller and smaller, and mounting, mounting in diminishing perspective, until ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... valour coulde not commit a more dishonourable part then for feare of danger to auoyde and shunne great attempts, was nothing at all changed or discouraged with the speeches and words of the Scots, remaining stedfast and immutable in his first resolution: determining either to bring that to passe which was intended, or ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... of thy heart.—But no, rise above them. Suffer thy desires to wander into a larger and more dangerous field. Run with open eyes into the mouth of that destruction that gapes to devour thee! Why shouldst thou attend to the voice of destiny, to the immutable laws of the Gods, and the curse that is suspended over thee? Be a man. Bravely defy all that is most venerable, and all that is most unchangeable. Oh how I long for thy ruin! How my heart pants for the illustrious hour in which thy palaces shall be crumbled ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... death mercifully came. It was abolished even while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and life may be probation for a better life—who knows? But if she could have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband loved her. ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated, without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is the matter with the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life and immutable ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... with the greatest of all generals, often matching his troops victoriously against forces of twice and even thrice their number. In Thomas Carlyle he found an enthusiastic biographer, somewhat prone, however, to find for actions of questionable public morality a justification in "immutable laws" and "veracities," which to other eyes is a little akin to Wordsworth's apology for Rob Roy. But whether we accept Carlyle's estimate of him or no, the amazing skill, tenacity, and success with which he stood at bay virtually against all Europe, while Great ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... mathematical science not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, ... but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world ... those who ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... government. It is the first principle upon which all true republican government rests. It is the basis upon which the liberties of America will be preserved, if they are preserved at all. The Democratic party must return from its driftings, and stand again upon the immutable rock of principles." ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... Concerning the first, here are no Laws, but the Will of the King, and whatsoever proceeds out of his mouth is an immutable Law. Nevertheless they have certain antient usages and Customes that do prevail and are observed as Laws; and Pleading them in their Courts and before their Governors will go ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... increased as the same tension was obtained each time it was screwed up for use. This, of course, made a minute difference in the balance of the bow. He apparently considered this a serious defect and set about inventing a nut that should render the balance and the length of the hair immutable. This was his patent "hausse fixe." As the name implies the nut was a fixture externally but contained a smaller metal nut that travelled inside it. These nuts were very unsightly as they were much more bulky than ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... perfervid Scotsman. If we may indulge our conceit we would paraphrase it thus. His eloquence was like a flooded Scottish river,—it had its origin in some exalted region—in some mountain-truth—some high, immutable reality; it did not rise in a plain, and quietly drain its waters to the sea,—it came sheer down from above. He laid hold of some simple truth—the love of God, the Divine method of justification, the unchangeableness of human ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... again. "I would feel it to be that—oh, God! I would!" The tortured spirit in his eyes had given place to another spirit, whose emotion Christian could neither mistake nor respond to, yet its kinship with the immutable fidelity that was in her heart made an appeal that ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... unnoticed by him: I frequently saw him smiling to himself at her artful manoeuvres: but, to his praise be it spoken, her shafts fell powerless by his side. Her most bewitching smiles, her haughtiest frowns were ever received with the same immutable, careless good-humour; till, finding he was indeed impenetrable, she suddenly remitted her efforts, and became, to all appearance, as perfectly indifferent as himself. Nor have I since witnessed any symptom of pique ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... and recognitions of necessities have known a change not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we know to be the truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability. The storm has been raging around us, and doing ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... evil presence whose name was Fire-Tongue might have paused, might have hesitated, might even have changed his plans, which, in a certain part of the world, were counted immutable, had he known the manner of man whom he had summoned to him ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... a pension, a very handsome pension, undoubtedly, but still a fixed, immutable, regular pension, by which he would be obliged to ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... how is this? he bears Nothing that warrants him invulnerable: Shall I then shrink to smite him? shall my fears Be greatest at the blow that ends them all? Fears? no! 'tis justice—fair, immutable, Whose measured step, at times, advancing nigh, Appalls the majesty of kings themselves. Oh, were he dead! though ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... for from the moment he could give his good old friend no conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs. Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square thick house, where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows and tinkle in the quieter bells, all these things represented best the kind of supreme solace to which the master ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... of three, men of remarkable ability and spotless character were elected without much respect of age whenever a vacancy occurred. They worked quietly, with one immutable political purpose, with which they allowed no prejudiced party view to interfere. Always having under their immediate control some of the best talent in the country, and frequently commanding vast financial resources, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Van Astrachans were obtuse; and so, to a certain degree, they were. In social matters they had a kind of confiding simplicity. They were so much accustomed to regard positive morals in the light of immutable laws of Nature, that it would not have been easy to have made them understand that sliding scale of estimates which is in use nowadays. They would probably have had but one word, and that a very disagreeable one, to designate a married woman who was in love with anybody ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... been hidden behind the mountains, Mont Blanc suddenly appeared in its gleaming splendour, positively tiring and paining the eye. It was a new and strange feeling to be altogether hemmed in by mountains. It was oppressive to a plain- dweller to be shut in thus, and not to be able to get away from the immutable sheet of snow, with its jagged summits. Along the valley of the stream, the road ran between marvellously fresh walnut-trees, plane- trees, and avenues of apple trees; but sometimes we drove through valleys so narrow that the sun only shone on ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and rock, dwelling above the wish of the world; that the sweep of prairie, knowing no resentment, was fruitful to the weakest touch; that the forests fell without complaint; that the desert, hopeless, aged, contemptuous of the aspirations of this day, was of immutable bitterness, seeking some love long lost to it nor ever to be found again; but that the sea was as it had been when God poured it forth—young and lusty and passionate—the only thing in all the fleeting world immune from age ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... by magic two long rows of immutable boulders wabbled for a second and then thundered down the hillside, while ten score of wild, naked human beings sent up yells of horrid glee to ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the conservation of energy—are but counters of mind exchanged in default of elusive realities. They know that the pressure of research has reduced many of the lesser generalizations and theories to a fluid and amorphous state. "Immutable" laws have been turned into faulty conclusions, hastily drawn and readily abandoned before the advance of new facts. The fixity of the elements in chemistry, the undulatory movement of light, the stability of the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... things, wert undefilable and unalterable, and in no degree mutable; yet understood I not, clearly and without difficulty, the cause of evil. And yet whatever it were, I perceived it was in such wise to be sought out, as should not constrain me to believe the immutable God to be mutable, lest I should become that evil I was seeking out. I sought it out then, thus far free from anxiety, certain of the untruth of what these held, from whom I shrunk with my whole heart: for I saw, that through enquiring the origin ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... which we behold may each have their variety of intelligent 'being,' as links in nature's beautiful chain, connecting the smallest insect with the incomprehensible and immutable God. The beautiful variety we see in his works portrays His will, and we are justified in following this variety up to His throne. His attributes of love and joy beam forth from the heavens, and are reflected from every species of sensitive being. All have different capacities for enjoyment, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... planet offers an ideal field in seeking an understanding of the reign of immutable law through the Infinite Universe of God, and owing to the clear rarified atmosphere of Mars, unusual opportunity is presented to students in ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... a Saviour, thou wilt be a sinner; because his grace abounds, therefore thou wilt abound in sin! O wicked wretch, let me tell thee before I leave thee, as God's covenant with Christ for his children stands sure, immutable, and unchangeable, so also hath God taken such a course with thee, that unless he deny himself, it is impossible that thou shouldst go to heaven, dying in that condition. They tempted God, proved him, and turned his grace into lasciviousness; ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... gentle dames We glide along a floor of wax. However, the mazurka lacks Nought of its charms original In country towns, where still it keeps Its stamping, capers and high leaps. Fashion is there immutable, Who tyrannizes us with ease, Of modern ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... along I am overtaken by a sensation of being all alone in the company of an overshadowing and awe-inspiring presence. One's attention seems irresistibly attracted toward the mighty snow-crowrned monarch, as though,the immutable law of attraction were sensibly exerting itself to draw lesser bodies to it, and all other objects around seemed dwarfed into insignificant proportions. One obtains a most comprehensive idea of Ararat's 17,325 feet when viewing it from the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... The sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose reign, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders. Spain in her provinces submits to this immutable condition, the eternal law of extensive and detached empire." Still Burke did not conceive the idea of proclaiming the independence of America. On the contrary, like Chatham, he contended for the general supremacy of parliament, and the rights of the crown, expressing at the same ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... who not only refuse to do justice, but encourage the greatest of all crimes. I am therefore in a state of nature: for, so far as there is no law, it is a state of nature: and consequently, upon the eternal and immutable law of justice, which requires that he who sheds man's blood should have his blood shed[273], I will stab the murderer of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... conviction, but Polunin grew angry, confused, and agitated. Arkhipov declared that Faith was unnecessary and injurious, like instinct and every other sentiment; that there was only one thing immutable—Intellect. Only that was moral ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... is a perpetual preacher, evermore proclaiming to us the twofold lesson, our own mortality and God's immutable glory and power. "Thy years shall not fail." What strange language applied to the Divine Being—perfectly natural as applied to us—"years!" Our life is finite, our life is measured, our life is dealt out to us in parcels. For us to speak of our "years" is ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... the thrill and interchange of its energies resembling those of an organism. The parts of the stupendous whole shift and change, augment and diminish, appear and disappear; while the total of which they are the parts remains quantitatively immutable, plus accompanies minus, gain accompanies loss, no item varying in the slightest degree without an absolutely equal change of some other item in the opposite direction.' So do the forces in the social world ebb and flow, rise and fall, carrying ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages and children,—are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. By those declarations, kings, priests, popes, aristocrats, were all alike dethroned, and placed on a common level, politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... long distances and placed them one upon another, so that these buildings oppress while they inspire, for there is in them no freedom, no spontaneity, no individuality, but everywhere the felt presence of an iron conventionality, of a stern immutable law. ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... among the living and posterity may be clearly and firmly taught and informed what that godly Confession is which we and the churches and schools of our realms at all times professed and embraced, we emphatically testify that next to the pure and immutable truth of God's Word we wish to embrace the first Augsburg Confession alone which was presented to the Emperor Charles V, in the year 1530, at the famous Diet of Augsburg, this alone (we say), and no other." (15.) At ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... our unconnected dream-images, has frequently been referred to as a mysterious spiritual faculty, under the name of "creative fancy." Thus Cudworth remarks, in his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality: "That dreams are many times begotten by the phantastical power of the soul itself ... is evident from the orderly connection and coherence of imaginations which many times are continued in ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... more time in combating this immutable resolution. He gave all his attention to preparing, during the two days the duke had granted him, the proper appointments for Raoul. This labor chiefly concerned Grimaud, who immediately applied himself to it with the good-will and intelligence we ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... you the right to determine what that sphere should be? If nature prescribes it, nature will carry out her own ordinances without your prohibitory legislation. I have the greatest contempt for the sort of legislation which seeks to enable nature to carry out her own immutable laws. I would have very little respect for any decree, enacted with whatever solemnity, which should prescribe that an object shall fall towards the earth and not from it; and I have just as little respect for any statute of man which enacts that ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... feel the pleasant infection. I recognize the might of bravery, and it seems as if my small army had doubled its numbers. This veteran, who in his person unites the history of six of my predecessors, has taught me that individuals are nothing in the sight of God. Six emperors have succumbed to the immutable laws of Nature, but the house of Hapsburg is still erect. What, then, if I meet with reverses? The Lord has given me a son, who, if I should be unfortunate, will prop up our dynasty, and ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... notwithstanding the singular fascination it evidently possesses for some minds, the moral sense of a much larger number indignantly revolts, rightly apprehending that its establishment would be subversive of all morality. For, if the actions of men are governed by 'eternal and immutable laws,' men cannot be free agents; and where there is not free agency there cannot be moral responsibility. Nor are the apprehensions entertained on this score to be allayed by the answer, ingenious as it is, which has been given ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... growing old, and of change and chance breaking up the wonted calm of her little household circle. That the march of Time should be so irresistible, that his flight could not be stayed or slackened by pope or kaiser, that his decrees should be so immutable, his destiny so inexorable, and that the youngest must soon cease to be young, and the middle-aged become old—or die! this was the thought that preyed on her very soul. She could not endure the conviction that her own father must one day walk with a less elastic step, and smile on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... obstinately adhered to the ceremonies of their ancestors, and were desirous of imposing them on the Gentiles, who continually augmented the number of believers. These Judaizing Christians seem to have argued with some degree of plausibility from the divine origin of the Mosaic law, and from the immutable perfections of its great Author. They affirmed, that if the Being, who is the same through all eternity, had designed to abolish those sacred rites which had served to distinguish his chosen people, the repeal of them would have been no less clear and solemn than their first promulgation: ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... same in great things and in small. It is not extended by dimensions; it does not enter into succession, or pass with passing things; it is not altered by motions. It abstracts therefore from place, time, and motion; and for this reason it is immutable, uncircumscribable, interminable, and altogether spiritual. Discernment, then, is an action which, by purifying and abstracting, makes the sensible species, sensibly received through the senses, enter into the intellective power. And thus ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of the constellation figures is not without keen interest for the meditative observer. It is another reminder of the swift mutability of terrestial affairs. To the passing glance, which is all that we can bestow upon these figures, they appear so immutable that they have been called into service to form the most lasting records of ancient thought and imagination that we possess. In the forms of the constellations, the most beautiful, and, in imaginative quality, the finest, mythology that the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... may be allow'd the Expression, of his own Being, and even of Babylon itself. His capacious Soul now soar'd into Infinity, and he contemplated, with the same Freedom, as if she was disencumber'd from her earthly Partner, on the immutable Order of the Universe. But as soon as she cower'd her Wings, and resumed her native Seat, he began to consider that Astarte might possibly have lost her Life for his Sake; upon which, his Thoughts of the Universe vanish'd all at once, and no other Objects appear'd before his distemper'd ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... so blocked up with quotations, authorities, and masses of recondite lore, that it is hardly possible to trace the windings of the river for the debris of auriferous rocks that obstruct its flow. The treatise with which we are concerned is that on "Eternal and Immutable Morality." In this he maintains that the right exists, independently of all authority, by the very nature of things, in co-eternity with the Supreme Being. So far is he from admitting the possibility of any dissiliency between the Divine ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... advanced be true, that besides this beauty or truth which is formed on the uniform eternal and immutable laws of nature, and which of necessity can be but one; that besides this one immutable verity there are likewise what we have called apparent or secondary truths proceeding from local and temporary prejudices, fancies, fashions, or accidental ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... exists on grand supreme ruler who guides the entire machinery of the universe; the Deity who created the principle of life, and one who does not deviate from His eternal and immutable laws; an all-wise, everlasting and unchangeable being far beyond the faintest conception the brain of man has ever been able to formulate. His power unlimited; His laws supreme; His ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... "expression" in singing? No great artist—no matter what the vehicle or medium through which his art finds manifestation—does anything at random. "The wind bloweth where it listeth" only in appearance; in reality, it is governed by immutable law. Similarly, the outward form of an art is only apparently dictated by caprice and freedom from rule. The effective presentation of every art is based on well-defined and accepted principles. And it is ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... very early in the morning. The hills all about seemed still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent, immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of the oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted itself unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the sky-line, very far away, it rippled into a cloud. The flimsy town ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... idea which he calls Tyche. The word is untranslatable when used in this way. It is something between chance, fortune and fate. It is more comprehensive and more personal than chance; it has not the immutable, the "lawbound" character of fate; rather it denotes the incalculability, the capriciousness associated, especially in earlier usage, with the word fortune, but without the tendency of this word to be used in ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... men and women, is bound to fight for existence,—therefore those who cry: 'Peace, peace!' only clamour for a vain thing. The very stones and rocks and mountains maintain a perpetual war with destroying elements,—they appear immutable things to our short lives, but they change in their turn even as we do—they die to live again in other forms, even as we do. And what is it all for? What is the sum and substance of so much striving—if ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... soup-pot was seized as contraband, unless it bore the government stamp, and, if they dared say a word of resistance, there were the manacles and the prison under Vittorio and Umberto as under Bourbon or Bonaparte; for there are some things which are immutable as fate. At long intervals, during the passing of ages, the poor stir, like trodden worms, under this inexorable monotony of their treatment by their rulers; and then baleful fires redden the sky, and blood runs in the conduits, and the rich ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... trail and argument in which he had expended the finest flowers of his contradictory faculties, the stanch immobility of his obstinacy, his unswerving singleness of purpose in seeing only one side of a question, this afternoon, a few short hours since! The mutability of the affairs of the most immutable ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Rome. A triumph obtained at the expense of truth, is but poor compensation for the heavy retribution which shall assuredly be demanded of those who have thus borne false witness against their neighbour. Men forget too often, in the headlong eagerness of controversy, that truth is eternal and immutable, and that no amount of self-deceit or successful deception of others can alter its purity and integrity in the eyes of the ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... the rodeo-ground, but, escorted by her father, had gone home. I followed immediately, and when I reached Casa Grande I found her sitting in her library. I never saw a statue look more like marble. Her face was locked: only the eyes betrayed the soul in torment. But she looked as immutable as ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... illuminating numbers of planets that revolve around them. Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable necessity. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the inertial force of matter; the sublime facts of organic co-ordination and adaptation,—all these are recognized, analyzed, recorded, taught. We have learned that the true meaning of the word law, as applied to Nature, is not decree, but formula of invariable order, immutable as the constitution of ultimate units of matter. Order is not imposed upon Nature. Order is result. Physical science does not confuse these; it never mistakes nor denies specific function, organic progression, cyclical growth. It knows that there is no such ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... was deepening in Karen. She saw guile on Mrs. Talcott's storm-beaten and immutable face; and she heard specious reassurance in her voice. Mrs. Talcott was dangerous. She had set her heart on this last desire of her passionless, impersonal life and had determined that she and Gregory should come together again. It was this desire ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... naught is changed, but all things so abide That ever the variegated birds reveal The spots or stripes peculiar to their kind, Spring after spring: thus surely all that is Must be composed of matter immutable. For if the primal germs in any wise Were open to conquest and to change, 'twould be Uncertain also what could come to birth And what could not, and by what law to each Its scope prescribed, its boundary stone that clings So deep in Time. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... should have been destined to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may prosper ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... teacher was but a man like himself, erring and weak, who made himself perfect, and that even as his teacher has done, so, too, may he if he do but observe the everlasting laws of life which the Buddha has shown to the world. These laws are as immutable as Newton's laws, and come, like his, from ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... he thought but little. He had put even the memory of her by—tenderly, like a sprig of lavender pressed between the faded leaves of his own happiness. His hand was no longer fit to hold that of any pure woman—his hand had on it a deep stain, immutable, like the brand ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... and all the conditions of life be modified, but certain ambitions and needs of man remain immutable. Climates, customs, centuries, have in no way diminished the craving for consideration, the desire to be somebody, to bear some mark indicating to the world that one is not as ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... since then, and he puts such a frightful look in his eyes—and he was so violent, and headstrong, and so terribly angry,—that time. He accused me of leading him on, and playing with him; and he said something about an immutable law of chance, and a governing balance of events—that I couldn't understand, only where he said that for all the suffering we inflict on others, we receive an equal amount ourselves. Then he went away—in such a passion. I've imagined ever ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... one would, to this it must logically come. Call the three Godheads by what names one liked, still they must remain One; must administer one justice; must admit only one law. In that law, no human weakness or error could exist; by its essence it was infinite, eternal, immutable. There was no crack and no cranny in the system, through which human frailty could hope for escape. One was forced from corner to corner by a remorseless logic until one fell helpless at ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... you view across the carved and silver-gilt work of the iconostas, where they are ranged symmetrically upon the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced works of art. These figures, seen amid the golden reflections and twinkling light of the lamps, easily assume a phantasmagorical life, capable of impressing sensitive ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the ingredients of positive truth. They are immutable, as may be seen by comparing the first principles of the eighteenth century with the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... and persons that are one and the same, are of one and the same number. The number of Johns who trust, is the same as the number of Johns who come. Both these elements of concord are immutable. ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... discontented States of this Union have demanded nothing but clear, distinct, unequivocal, well-acknowledged constitutional rights; rights affirmed by the highest judicial tribunals of their country; rights older than the Constitution; rights which are planted upon the immutable principles of natural justice; rights which have been affirmed by the good and the wise of all countries, and of all centuries. We demand no power to injure any man. We demand no right to injure our confederate States. We demand no ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the memory of their grievance held sacred by the descendants of their adversaries after the lapse of a century, and the local self- government for which they pleaded has become the immutable policy of the empire. The principles they laid down have been equally enduring, for they proclaimed the equality of men before the law, the corner-stone of modern civilization, and the Constitution they wrote still remains the fundamental charter of the liberties of the republic ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... analytical. But he holds out the fetter of authority, and he decides as a judge who expounds laws; not the best decision, when new laws are required to abrogate obsolete ones. And what laws invented by man can be immutable? D'Avenant was thus tried by the laws of a country, that of Greece or Rome, of which, it is said, he was not ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... sound of the ripples, a fair, solitary vessel, gliding across the surface of the water like a woman stealing out to a tryst—it was a picture full of harmony. That mere speck full of movement was a starting-point whence the soul of man could descry the immutable vast of space. Solitude and bustling life, silence and sound, were all brought together in strange abrupt contrast; you could not tell where life, or sound, or silence, and nothingness lay, and no human voice broke the ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... truth,—looking though it may like a shadow and the phantom of itself,—is the only substance that we possess, the one immutable fact. To-day is but the asymptote of to-morrow, that curve perpetually drawing near, but never reaching the straight line flying into infinity. To-morrow, the great future, belongs to the heaven where it tends. Were it otherwise, seeing the indestructible elements, and the two great central ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... because it was a complete system for the management of all the affairs of a country. It regulated estates, punished all crimes, and, in short, went to all things for which laws were necessary. But how was this law adopted? Was it by the Constitution? If so, it is immutable and incapable of amendment. In what part of the Constitution is it declared to be adopted? Was it adopted by the courts? From whom do they derive their authority? The Constitution, in the clause first cited, relies on Congress to pass all laws necessary ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... bound to react on human conceptions of scientific procedure. The enormous number of new facts brought to light by manipulating hypotheses could not but modify our view of scientific law. Laws no longer seem to scientists the immutable foundations of an eternal order, but are inevitably treated as man-made formulae for grouping and predicting the events which verify them. The labours of physicists like Mach, Duhem, and Ostwald, point to alternative formulations of new hypotheses for the best established laws. ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... Municipal Elections Act of 1872, the Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894, and the Parliament Act of 1911. In the fourth place there is the Common Law, a vast body of legal precept and usage which through the centuries has acquired fundamental and immutable character. The first three elements mentioned, i.e., treaties, solemn political engagements, and statutes, exist solely, or almost so, in written form. The rules of the Common Law, however, have not been reduced to writing, save in so far as they are contained in reports, legal opinions, and, more ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Theory of Nature; founded on the immutable basis of Meteoric Action. By P. Murphy,[817] Esq. London, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... establish, stablish[obs3], ascertain, fix, set, stabilitate[obs3]; retain, keep hold; make good, make sure; fasten &c. (join) 43; set on its legs, float; perpetuate. settle down; strike roots, put down roots, take root; take up one's abode &c. 184; build one's house on a rock. Adj. unchangeable, immutable; unaltered, unalterable; not to be changed, constant; permanent &c. 141; invariable, undeviating; stable, durable; perennial &c. (diuturnal) 110[obs3]. fixed, steadfast, firm, fast, steady, balanced; confirmed, valid; fiducial[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of being! Source of good! Immutable thou dost remain! Nor can the shadow of a change Obscure ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... soundless, touchless, formless, undecaying; also tasteless, odorless, and eternal; beginningless, endless and immutable; beyond the Unmanifested: (knowing That) man escapes from the mouth ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... till they have been accepted by popular assemblies in the provinces which they concern. And such revisions are infrequent. The royal prerogative in legislation is limited by a popular prejudice, which regards the customary law as sacred and immutable. The Capitularies are chiefly administrative ordinances; the "law of the land," which is the same everywhere and for all persons, is an ideal to be realised in England alone of medieval states. Elsewhere ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained, namely, that each species has been independently created, is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... confines too narrow for Nature? Be it so! The Desert replaces the garden, but where ends the Desert? Reft from my senses are the laws which gave order and place to their old questionless realm. I stand lost and appalled amidst Chaos. Did my Mind misconstrue the laws it deemed fixed and immutable? Be it so! But still Nature cannot be lawless; Creation is not a Chaos. If my senses deceive me in some things, they are still unerring in others; if thus, in some things, fallacious, still, in other things, truthful. Are there ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mind; or happiness consisted in nourishing the intellect with its appropriate food and surrounding the imagination with ideal beauty, a literary life would be the most enviable which the lot of this world affords. But the truth is far otherwise. The Man of Letters has no immutable, all-conquering volition, more than other men; to understand and to perform are two very different things with him as with every one. His fame rarely exerts a favourable influence on his dignity of character, and never on his peace of mind: its glitter is external, for the eyes of others; ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... although, in a theological sense, the ten commandments are said to embrace and constitute the moral law, because they are its best exponent, yet jurists have given to the term a more general latitude, in defining the moral laws to be "the eternal, immutable laws of good and evil, to which the Creator himself, in all dispensations, conforms, and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions."[96] Perhaps the well known summary of Justinian will give the best idea of what this law is, namely, ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... soon become depressed and despairing. Who can battle against the ten thousand million trees? Who can hope to make headway against the innumerable adverse conditions which doom the dweller in Darkest England to eternal and immutable misery? What wonder is it that many of the warmest hearts and enthusiastic workers feel disposed to repeat the lament of the old English chronicler, who, speaking of the evil days which fell upon our forefathers in the reign of Stephen, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... not that this bright jewel is destined to fall from your country's crown. It is an obedience to the same law of Providence which sends the full-fledged bird from the nest, and the man from his father's house. Man shall not be able to sever what the immutable laws of Providence have joined together. The chafing chains of colonial dependence shall be exchanged for ties light as air, yet strong as steel. The peaceful and profitable interchange of commerce—the same language—a common ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of death. They have no notion of more than one Divine Being, who is only grasped by the mind. They deem it profane to fashion images of gods out of perishable matter, and teach that their Being is supreme and eternal, immutable and imperishable. Accordingly, they erect no images in their cities, much less in their temples, and they refuse to grant this kind of ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... equal and impartial liberty" in matters spiritual and temporal, is a thing that all Men are clearly entitled to, by the eternal and immutable laws Of God and nature, as well as by the law of Nations, & all well grounded municipal laws, which must have their foundation ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... Out of the endless space, out of silence and desolation and mystery and age, came slow-changing colored shadows, phantoms of peace, and they whispered to Madeline. They whispered that it was a great, grim, immutable earth; that time was eternity; that life was fleeting. They whispered for her to be a woman; to love some one before it was too late; to love any one, every one; to realize the need of work, and in doing it ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... March, 1834, leaving George Sand with Pagello in Venice. The sentimental exaggeration continued, as we see from the letters exchanged between Musset and George Sand. When crossing the Simplon the immutable grandeur of the Alps struck Alusset with admiration, and he thought of his two "great friends." His head was evidently turned by the heights from which he looked at things. George Sand wrote to him: "I am not giving you any message from Pagello, except that he is ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... is firm enough to rest our all upon because in it, by 'two immutable things in which it is impossible that God should lie,' His counsel and His oath, He has given strong encouragement to them who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before them. Well may the hope for which God's own eternal character ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... bees, "with coppery skin and fleece of ruddy velvet," which establish their progeny in the hollow of a bramble stump, the cavity of a reed, or the winding staircase of an empty snail-shell, know the fixed and immutable genetic laws which we can only guess at, and ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... practical religion for precise definitions of truth." (Ibid.) "The mature mind of our race is beginning to modify and soften the hardness and severity of the principles which its early manhood had elevated into immutable statements of truth. Men are beginning to take a wider view than they did. Physical science, researches into history, a more thorough knowledge of the world they inhabit, have enlarged our philosophy beyond the limits which bounded that of the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... from such long centuries ago that it seemed to me to be so identified with them that they were hardly capable of analysis of people such as myself. As I looked pityingly upon them and the involved simplicity of their immutable natures, I realized an unconquerable feeling of inborn rank and natural elevation in respect to nationality. This is, however, against my personal general conception of Eastern peoples, but I must admit I felt it this afternoon. And so perhaps it is with ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... embrace, evade our touch And vanish into nothingness; while still We vain pursuit ever persistent make. Euclid from chaos order did evolve And on the scroll of Fame hath writ those laws Which Time, relentless, ne'er can thence efface. For Truth, immutable, is there entombed. But he, in flawless mental armor robed, Did crusade make where Science hath her home, And from her vaults where Truth was close entombed He raped their locks and brought the treasure forth. Long mankind groped in darkness, nor did dream That laws harmonious could ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... to atone for the offenses of the past. The feeling of dependence is the instinct which urges us to pray. It is the feeling that our existence and welfare are in the hands of a superior power; not an inexorable fate, not an immutable law; but a Being having at least so far the attribute of personality that he can show favor or severity to those who are dependent upon Him, and can be regarded by them with feelings of hope and fear, and reverence and gratitude."[58] The feeling ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... authority of men and councils. He quotes Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, the different Popes, the Canons, and the Scriptures; but it is astonishing to find how democratic they all are to the enthusiastic Bishop, or rather, how the best minds of all ages have admitted the immutable principles of human nature into their theology and metaphysics. When will the Catholic Church, which has nourished and protected so many noble spirits, express in her average sentiment and policy their generous interpretations of her religion, and their imputations to her of being an embodiment of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... decrees of Heaven are not immutable, for though a throne may be gained by virtue, it may be ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... not only a free-born man beyond the peradventure of a doubt, but also the scion of a noble family.[181] However, the princes of Pharaoh were not silenced, they continued to give utterance to their opposition to Joseph, saying: "Dost thou not remember the immutable law of the Egyptians, that none may serve as king or as viceroy unless he speaks all the languages of men? And this Hebrew knows none but his own tongue, and how were it possible that a man should rule ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... Nature proceeds through practice to strengthen and augment the remaining senses. For this reason the blind often hear with greater ease and distinctness than other people. The sense of smell becomes almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and vagueness of things. Thus, according to an immutable law, the senses assist and reinforce ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... one steady, uniform, unchangeable result of infinite Wisdom and Benevolence, extending to, and including All his Works. So that Sin, or disobedience to our Maker is manifestly the greatest Nonsense, Folly and contradiction conceivable, with regard purely to the immutable perfection of the Divine Nature; and to the Natural constitution of things, independently upon any positive command of God to us, or ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... the elements mingle long in formless solution; some sudden jar causes them to spring at once to the definite crystal. There had, hitherto, been a kind of impersonality about Balder, having its ultimate ground in his blindness to the immutable unity of God. But so soon as his eye became single, he stood pronounced in his individuality, less broadly indifferent than of yore, but organized ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions, or seeds unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty, without a divine marshal. The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... begun a four days' gakt[n]ta which, among other provisions, excluded all visitors. It was of no use to argue that we had come by the express request of Tsiskwa. The laws of the gakt[n]ta were as immutable as those of the Medes and Persians, and neither doctor nor patient could hope for favorable results from the treatment unless the regulations were enforced to the letter. But although we might not enter the house, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an attempt, more or less successful, was made to bring the production and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right or wrong; and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught to regard as immutable ordinances of nature, were absorbed or superseded by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am not holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth might safely follow. The population has become too large, and employment too complicated and fluctuating, to admit ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... the knives and spoon at the right hand, the forks at the left, the oyster fork diagonally, with the prongs crossing the handles of the others, the law of their arrangement being nowise immutable ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... master. There were riots—fierce conflicts extending over days—then dreary sentences of lengthy imprisonments, with gaol tragedies; but still this strange, dry, inarticulate, obstinate figure remained immutable, always invisible, unapproachable, obdurate, spectral. Even the Tory leaders were disgusted and wearied, and Mr. Balfour was careful, in the very crisis and agony of his fight with the National League, to disavow all sympathy with the strange being that was bringing to his ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... idyll; the Villa Albani, cold and silent as a church, with its avenues of sculptured marble and centenarian trees; where in the vestibules, under the porticos and between the granite pillars, Caryatides and Hermes, symbols of immobility, gaze at the immutable symmetry of the verdant lawns; and the Villa Medici—like a forest of emerald green spreading away in a fairy tale, and the Villa Ludovici—a little wild—redolent of violets, consecrated by the presence of that Juno adored by ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission[14] in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... courage and strength of the Notes which President Wilson (speaking with a voice that is no unworthy echo of the great one that spoke at Gettysburg) has lately sent to Germany on the sinking of the Lusitania, and the outrage thereby committed on the laws of justice and humanity, which are immutable, the whole civilized world (outside the countries of our enemies) now salutes the United States ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... published by Mr. Palmer. It was of the general character of Butler's Analogy, and was intended to prove that the morality enjoined by Jesus Christ, was founded in the very nature of man; and that the principles of that morality were immutable, even though deists should succeed in destroying the public faith in the divine authority of Christianity. It was eminently an amiable book, written with great charity and candor, and without ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... and Porphyro. It was daring enough, when Beckendorf mimicked Prince Metternich; but to undertake and to contrast Louis Napoleon and Beethoven, without belittling either, pales every other performance. They tower before us grand and immutable as if cast in bronze, and so veritable that they throw shadows; the prison-gloom is sealed on Porphyro's face,—power and purpose indomitable; just as the "gruesome Emperor" is to-day, we find him in that book,—dark in the midst of his glory, as enduring as a Ninevite sculpture, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... in the sign of his year, when the ages were ripe, once more he would come from the east, surrounded by his fair-faced retinue, and resume the sway of his people and their descendants. Tezcatlipoca had conquered, but not for aye. The immutable laws which had fixed the destruction of Tollan assigned likewise its restoration. Such was the universal belief among the ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... side, had, as it were, shut off his sympathy and left her groping and alone. It was not like him to treat her thus. It hurt her subtly, wounding her as she had never expected to be wounded, shaking her faith in what she had ever believed to be immutable. And then she remembered the physical weakness with which he had wrestled so long, and a great pity flooded her heart. She would not let herself be hurt any longer. Was he not reserving his strength for her sake? And could ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... time are not as immutable as they appear: that our universe may suffer distortion, that time may lag or hasten without our being in the least aware, may be made interestingly clear by an illustration first suggested by Helmholtz, of which the following is in ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... help thinking that there is much weight in the opinion of those who have held, that Truth, as an eternal and immutable principle, ought, upon no account whatever, to be violated, from supposed previous or superiour obligations, of which every man being to judge for himself, there is great danger that we too often, from partial motives, persuade ourselves ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... of the man, who had loved completely and supremely, as Bettina never had, there was a feeling which made him say to himself, with a conviction which he knew to be immutable, that marriage was not for him. The present Lord Hurdly had said the same, and had changed his mind. For himself he knew that he should not, for all of love that he was capable of feeling had been given to the woman ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... whilst he was thus employed, he would not have succeeded in persuading his conscience that the sin and the calamity were unconnected. His wife had never admitted a doubt of its being required by the immutable law of God that she should be sad and severe on Sunday, that Reuben should be sternly punished for whistling on that day, that little Miriam should be rewarded when she went through the long services with unnatural stillness and ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... tell you why he doesn't. Just because he isn't aware that he is on a machine at all. He has never examined what he is on. And at the back of his consciousness is a dim idea that he is perched on a piece of solid, immutable rock that runs ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... average man is to obey. Was it not Napoleon who said that men are meant either to lead or to obey, and those who can do neither should be killed off? Ethics is the conscience of the best regulating the conduct of the worst. Hence there are no immutable rules ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... was it because that the apostle thoght no woman to haue any knowledge? no he geueth an other reason, saying; let her be subiect as the lawe saith[34]. In which wordes is first to be noted, that the apostle calleth this former sentence pronounced against woman a lawe, that is, the immutable decree of God, who by his owne voice hath subiected her to one membre of the congregation[35], that is to her husband, wherupon the holie ghost concludeth, that she may neuer rule nor bear empire ahoue man. For she that is made subiect to one, may neuer be preferred ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... of Caucasus. His feelings had certainly undergone some change since then, inasmuch as he was no longer disposed to ridicule or condemn religious sentiment, though he was nearly as far from actually believing in Religion itself as ever. The attitude of his mind was still distinctly skeptical—the immutable pride of what he considered his own firmly rooted convictions was only very slightly shaken—and he now even viewed the prospect of his journey to the "field of Ardath" as a mere fantastic whim—a caprice of his ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... even more distinct; just as when we rise through the gradations of the moral world, the idea of order becomes more difficult to grasp. It was the last task of the astronomer to show eternal change even in the grand order of our Solar System. It is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law even in the complex action of human life. In the latter, indeed, it is but the first germs which are clear. No rational thinker hopes to discover more than some few primary actions of law, and some approximative theory ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... made practicable for any intelligent observer to handle, weigh and test every quality of the air, it became evident that wind and storm, even the terrible cyclone, were not irresponsible forces, carrying health or death to and fro where they listed, but the result of plain, immutable; laws. It was an American in this our Quaker City who reduced the wind to a commonplace effect of a most ordinary cause. Franklin, one winter's day passing with a lighted candle out of a warm room into a cold one, saw that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... lay a petition before the Legislature asking for enfranchisement and all rights granted to others of the commonwealth. The grant was tardy, but it came with the cannon's boom and musketry's iron hail, when the imperiled status of the nation made it imperative. Thus, as ever, with the immutable decrees of God, while battling for the freedom of the slave, we broadened our consciousness, not only as to the inalienable rights of human nature, but received larger conceptions of civil liberty, coupled with a spirit of determination to defend our homes and churches from infuriated ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years—a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... orally transmitted through the intervening ages from Adam in Paradise. According to the teaching of the Cabala, the original Godhead, called En-Soph, the Infinite, is in essence {135} incomprehensible and immutable, and capable of description only in negations. God, the En-Soph, is above and beyond contact with anything finite, material, or imperfect. It would be blasphemous to suppose that God the infinitely perfect, God the absolutely immutable One, by direct act made a world of matter or ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... an exact, definite statement of principles, absolute and apparently immutable. When a man on the street walks up to another and wantonly insults him, the law is, that the insulted party must turn and walk away. If the matter came before a jury they would never convict him for knocking the other down ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... promise. (16)For men indeed swear by the greater; and the oath is to them an end of all gainsaying, for a confirmation. (17)Wherein God, wishing more abundantly to show to the heirs of the promise the immutability of his counsel, interposed with an oath; (18)that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible that God should lie, we may have strong encouragement, who fled for refuge to lay hold on the hope set before us, (19)which we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, and entering within the vail; (20)where as forerunner ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... sudden transient thought The unchangeable irrevocable deed. Was there necessity for such an eager 20 Despatch? Could'st thou not grant the merciful A time for mercy? Time is man's good Angel. To leave no interval between the sentence, And the fulfilment of it, doth beseem God only, the immutable! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... serves the Devil. Doubtless, Slavery, though opposed to God's laws, is included in the plan of God's providence, but, in the long run, the providence most terribly confirms the laws. The stream of events, having its fountains in iniquity, has its end in retribution. It is because God's laws are immutable that God's providence can be foreseen as well as seen. The mere fact that a thing exists, and persists in existing, is of little importance in determining its right to exist, or its eventual destiny. These must be found in an inspection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... foot thick, a feat that would give a spirit pause. The ether of space, which science is coming more and more to look upon as the mother-stuff of all things, has many of the attributes of Deity. It is omnipresent and all-powerful. Neither time nor space has dominion over it. It is the one immutable and immeasurable thing in the universe. From it all things arise and to it they return. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has none of the finite properties of matter—neither parts, form, nor dimension; neither density nor tenuity; it cannot be compressed nor expanded nor moved; it has ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... producing a stater of the Eretrian Republic. 'See! I place the coin in the glass, and now can I tell you by its means what you will of the future. There is no magic in it, only a little knowledge of the secrets, mutable yet immutable, of Nature. And this is an old secret. I did not find it. It was known of yore in Atlantis and in Chichimec, in Ur and in Lycosura. Even now the rude Boshmen keep up the tradition among their medicine-men. Vill any lady ask the coin a qvestion?' he continued, in a hoarse Semitic whisper, for ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... wide rushing down the valley: we knew where the trees had been, by the swirling waves. A flood is like those serpents which fascinate before they strike. The monotonous rain failing ohne Hast, ohne Rast, the dead immutable murk of the sky, the rush of gray wave after wave, induced a state of dull lethargic wonder: the feet—the foot more, would it accomplish that? Already the floor of the ranch-house was under water. But there was soon a sufficient dashing about of riders in long yellow oil-skin coats, and all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various |
