"Protean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... velocity, to that of Mars's rotation, it shifts very slowly through the sky toward the west, and for two or three successive days and nights it remains above the horizon, the sun overtaking and passing it again and again, while, in the meantime, its protean face swiftly changes from full circle to half-moon, from half-moon to crescent, from crescent back to half, and from half to full, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... All three were vehement in abuse of things and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... this work, that dyspepsia is Protean in its symptoms, but single and uniform in its nature; the very reverse is the fact; its symptoms are of a single character, and of an uniform attack, while its nature is variable and inconstant. A dyspeptic will ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more—it began rather ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... distant mountains. It looks inviting, and possible, by moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window, Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... been rife here; but to-day they were manifest in an acuter form—hatred had added its taint and lent virulence to every emotion. The heathen were oppressed and angered, their rights abridged and defied; they saw the Christians triumphant at every point, and hatred is a protean monster which rages most fiercely and most venomously when it has lurked in the foul ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... conditions; and although you may now be acquainted with all its forms, they still require us to give a little attention to them for the present, so that we may perceive how the water, whilst it goes through its protean changes, is entirely and absolutely the same thing, whether it is produced from a candle, by combustion, or from the rivers ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... seemed most responsible for my alienation.... That demon I had fed so mightily still lived. By what right—he seemed to ask—had I nourished him all these years if now I meant to starve him? Thus sometimes he defied me, took on Protean guises, blustered, insinuated, cajoled, managed to make me believe that to starve him would be to starve myself, to sap all there was of power in me. Let me try and see if I could do it! Again he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... from incomprehensible nervous attacks. At one time the doctors think she has an attack of heart disease, at another time they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another they declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day this protean malady, that assumes a thousand forms and a thousand modes of attack, is attributed to the stomach, which is the great caldron and regulator of the body. This is why we have come here. For my part, I am rather ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... "that you may labor under no mistake, I think it fair to tell you that Browbeater and I know everything about you, and all the Protean shapes you have gone through for the last three years, in different parts of the kingdom Now listen to me, you d——d impostor; listen to me, I say—you have it in your power to become a useful man to the present ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... field of metaphysical poetry it has recently been identified by Santayana as "normal madness." In its milder forms, the fallacy is now known by every one as the "personal equation"; in its pronounced, abnormal manifestations it is known by the psychoanalysts as "transference." It is a Protean fallacy woven into the emotional texture of the human mind. Nothing, for it, is sacred enough to be inviolate. For Spinoza discovered it sanctimoniously enshrined even in the Sacred Scriptures. As he brilliantly shows us in the Tractatus ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... lines: it is mechanical, psychical and social. Our power to make and use things is essentially human; we alone have extra-physical tools. We have added to our teeth the knife, sword, scissors, mowing machine; to our claws the spade, harrow, plough, drill, dredge. We are a protean creature, using the larger brain power through a wide variety of changing weapons. This is one of our main and vital distinctions. Ancient animal races are traced and known by mere bones and shells, ancient human races by their buildings, tools ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... ballads may scarce be so multitudinous and protean a host as this. But the search for them, and the choice of them when discovered, have given infinite exercise to the industry, the judgment, and the patience of successive editors; and literature has ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... protean expressions of endocrine determination may now begin to be looked upon with the hopeful and optimistic attitude of him who understands cause and effect and can control. The advances made in the last ten years in the practical manipulation of the ductless glands from without, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it lives on nothing." He does not admit that Christianity itself is immune from the ravages of this essential cankerworm, which adopts all disguises and slips from one Protean shape into another. "The refinements of self-love surpass those of chemistry," and the purpose of La Rochefoucauld is to resolve all our virtues in a crucible and to show that nothing remains but a poisonous ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... and seemed intently watching the sea, of whose protean face she never wearied; and, puzzled and tantalized, Dr. Grey turned to ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... it is also Protean, and this sea voice coming through the night turned the fear of La Touche to the fear of Bompard. What if he were to return, cold and wet, from that terrible ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... They have lived and loved and fallen and died. But he, indestructible, lives on to flash fire in the cups of beings yet unborn, and lurk with unholy intent in hearts which have not yet learned to beat. There is only one Mephistopheles; but he is protean in shape. The little gentleman in black, the hero of so many strange stories, is but the Teutonic incarnation of a spirit which takes many forms in many lands. Out of the brain of the great German poet he steps, in a guise which is known and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... remarkable genera in the family. The Pompilidae are species of great beauty, some closely resembling those of Australia in the banding and maculation of their wings; amongst the Vespidae will be found some of the most elegant and beautiful forms in the whole of that protean family of Hymenoptera. ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... reason for not pursuing the Protean phantom of Holbein's Augsburg period is that,—apart from my own disagreement with many accepted views about the works it includes, and the utter lack of data or determining any position irrefutably,—it is comparatively unimportant to the purpose ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... very ancient form of Buddhism in Ceylon[32] is truly remarkable, for if in many countries Buddhism has shown itself fluid and protean, it here manifests a stability which can hardly be paralleled except in Judaism. The Sinhalese, unlike the Hindus, had no native propensity to speculation. They were content to classify, summarize and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of love, so hedged about with curious and unreal conventions, is a strangely protean thing. The dear old proverb, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," is far truer than those who believe its many cynical counterparts would have us think, and especially is this true of an impulsive and ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... undeserving, flung open for him the portals of beyond, and in contemplating there the certitude immaterial and precious he forgot all the meaningless accidents of existence: the bliss of getting, the delight of enjoying; all the protean and enticing forms of the cupidity that rules a material world of foolish joys, of contemptible sorrows. Faith!—Love!—the undoubting, clear faith in the truth of a soul—the great tenderness, deep as the ocean, serene and eternal, like ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... few (and I confess that I am not one of these select few) who can accept Goethe in all his many-sidedness. We ordinary mortals are incapable of such Protean versatility and are sure to find points, often many and important points, where we are strongly repelled by his teachings and his personality. The idealist is scandalized by his vigorous realism, ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... sea. It was becoming a crawling horror to him in its every protean phase, whether flecked with ghastly lights in storms or haunted by pallid shapes in colour—always, always it remained repugnant to him under its eternal curse of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... be another name for your Protean cousin, I have to say it will be better for him he ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid |
