"Protean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attacked her husband, and rushed about the town denouncing him. Raleigh, in deepest depression of mind and body, wrote to Cecil, who had now taken another upward step in the hierarchy of James's protean House of Lords, and who ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... with individual differences, which seems to me extremely perplexing: I refer to those genera which have sometimes been called "protean" or "polymorphic," in which the species present an inordinate amount of variation; and hardly two naturalists can agree which forms to rank as species and which as varieties. We may instance Rubus, Rosa, and Hieracium amongst plants, several genera of insects, and several genera of Brachiopod ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... light-winged Greek imagination,—imagination not involved and included in the religious sentiment, but playing in epic freedom and with various interpretation between religion and intellect; he has not the flowing, Protean, imaginative sympathy, the power of instant self-identification with all forms of character and life, which culminated in Shakspeare; but that imaginative vitality which lurks in faith and conscience, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... impressions brought back from it by the untrained seer. This is to be accounted for mainly by two remarkable characteristics of the astral world—first, that many of its inhabitants have a marvellous power of changing their forms with Protean rapidity, and also of casting practically unlimited glamour over those with whom they choose to sport; and secondly, that sight on that plane is a faculty very different from and much more extended than physical ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... 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 ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... in its character so elusive and protean, and the field over which it extends is so vast, that few have ever undertaken the task of examining it systematically. Many philosophers and literary men have made passing observations upon it, but most writers are content to set it down ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... and by combustion—I must first of all tell you that this water may exist in different 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 World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... is not many that do know him at all hours; however, he is here, sir." And he whipped off the red hair, and wiped off the black eye, and ho, Green ipse. He received their compliments on his Protean powers, and told them he had been just a minute too late. Mr. Hardie was gone, and so he had lost the chance of seeing who came to help him, and of hearing the first words that passed between the two. This, he said, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Templeman and her companion; but in fact it was rather that Elizabeth sat invisible in the room. Donald appeared not to see her at all, and answered her wise little remarks with curtly indifferent monosyllables, his looks and faculties hanging on the woman who could boast of a more Protean variety in her phases, moods, opinions, and also principles, than could Elizabeth. Lucetta had persisted in dragging her into the circle; but she had remained like an awkward third point which that ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... 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 Theologico-Politicus, the prophets' ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the plastic touch of genius, have given birth to so many and totally diverse forms, memorable for ages and endeared to humanity, is in itself an infinite marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary's art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are "a joy forever," even to retrospection,—haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... human beings are sufferers from the inharmonious and insubordinate action of these servitors. How many a human being suffers from chronic constipation and indigestion, the exciting causes of which are insidious, and the consequences a protean enemy to his happiness! Medical writers on the subject of chronic constipation have assigned numerous causes, and likewise prescribed multitudinous remedies to the patient; but as a general rule this patient, after suffering various woes, ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... would die almost at once, but ninety in the hundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth "cured," like missionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... maid believed in the story of the Drac, a sort of merman, that lived in the Rhone, and had power to fascinate the women who ventured into the water. There was once a very widespread superstition concerning this Protean creature; and the women washing in the river often had a figure of the Drac, in the form of a lizard, carved upon the piece of wood with which they beat the linen, as a sort of talisman against his seduction. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... nothing can be more important, in my opinion, than your evidence of the extremely slow and gradual manner in which specific forms change. I observe that M. A. De Candolle has lately quoted you on this head versus Heer. I hope that you may be able to throw light on the question whether such protean, or polymorphic forms, as those of Rubus, Hieracium, etc., at the present day, are those which generate new species; as for myself, I have always felt some doubt on this head. I trust that you may soon bring many ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... to shallow and very common causes, such as underlie all animate nature. Yet that of Stella—for undoubtedly she had power—suggested another interpretation to his mind. Or was it, after all, nothing but a variant, one of the Protean shapes of the ancient, life-compelling mystery? And her strange chant, the song of which her father made light, but feared so much; her quick insight into the workings of his own thought; her courage in the face of danger ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... reconcile this ideal of life, still more the hope of everlasting life, with the acknowledged vanity of desire? It is accomplished through the medium of an emotion which more than any I have touched upon reveals the character of the religious sentiment—Love. This mighty but protean feeling I shall attempt to define on broader principles than has hitherto been done. The vague and partial meanings assigned it have led to sad confusion in the studies of religions. In the language of feeling, love is a passion; but it does not spring from feeling ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... moralizing on the subject may find a theme presenting aspects both sad and comical. When, however, one reflects that amulets, in some one of their protean forms, have been invested with supernatural preventive and healing powers by the people of all lands and epochs, and that they have been worn not only by kings and princes, but by philosophers, prelates, and physicians of ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... be another name for your Protean cousin, I have to say it will be better for him he should not arrive ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... be given, exist and form the source of the energy in living things? Radium has only been known to us for a few years; can we say that there is no such thing as Bion? Of course we cannot; but this we can say, that, if there is such an element and if it is really responsible for all the protean manifestations of life, wonderful as radium and its doings are, they must sink into nothingness beside those of this new and unsuspected entity. The author evidently does not think that this path is a profitable one to pursue, and we agree with him; so he turns his attention ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... 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 no more curious ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... reasonless, 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 grave-yard beyond ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Shore Impersonality A Protean Glimpse Power Against Power Life's Priestess Love Now One And One The Violin Gertrude Unity In Space The Shell And The Word The Clock-Tower Bell Ours To Endure Broken Waves Why Sad To-Day? The Ghosts Of Revellers Life's Burying-Ground Beyond Utterance The Suicide For Others Zest The Unperfected God-Made ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... 'There was an old man of Tobago,' were suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse leading itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and Pictures." Dismissing the further question of the authorship of "There was an old man of Tobago," we propose to give a few specimens of Mr. Lear's Protean powers as exhibited in the variation of this simple type. Here, to begin with, is a favorite verse, which we are very glad to have an opportunity of giving, as it is often incorrectly quoted, "cocks" being substituted for "owls" in ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... a day, or in a week, possibly in a month. But persistence and a protean adaptability to meet his moods might accomplish something. I don't say will, I only say might. If Sweetwater had the job, with unlimited time in which to carry out any plan he may have, or even for a change of plans to suit a changed idea, success ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... distinguished a prevalent disease now about to come under our consideration, which was first observed on the continent. The rapidity with which it spread, the strange protean appearances which it assumed, and its too frequent fatal termination, surprised and puzzled the veterinary surgeons; and they called it "la maladie des chiens," the disease ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... stated, in 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 complain of a want of appetite, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... spirits and dissemble before them—the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein—it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!—COUNTER TO this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside—for every outside is a cloak—there operates the sublime tendency of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... becoming Japanese inversion, instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and the ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... surely.' Let us see. I bid you take a sum you won't return: You take it: is this madness, I would learn? Were it not greater madness to renounce The prey that Mercury puts within your pounce? Secure him with ten bonds; a hundred; nay, Clap on a thousand; still he'll slip away, This Protean scoundrel: drag him into court, You'll only find yourself the more his sport: He'll laugh till scarce you'd think his jaws his own, And turn to boar or bird, to tree or stone. If prudence in affairs denotes men sane And bungling ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... thought that they were animals of every tribe; for many of them are like lions and centaurs, and many more like satyrs and such weak and shifty creatures;—Protean shapes quickly changing into one another's forms and natures; and now, Socrates, I begin to ...
— Statesman • Plato
... investigators, servants of truth, and we leave the great names of demi-gods and heroes a little contemptuously to the men of bygone times. As student-artists we are no longer content with the outward presentment and form of men: we want to discover the protean vanities, greeds and aspirations of men, and to lay bare, as with a scalpel, the hidden motives and springs of action. We dream of an art that shall take into account the natural daily decay and up-building of cell-life; the wars that go on in the blood; the fevers of the brain; the creeping ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... good in prolonging the story of this wrestle; there was a certain sameness in every phase, though the dangers seemed to change with such protean swiftness. For three days it lasted, and on the third day Tom Lennard, Ferrier, the patients, and the crew, were far more interested in the steward's efforts to boil coffee than they were in the arrowy flight of the snow-masses ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... is, she had strong common-sense; yet through her sober personality there ran like a streak of light some hint of fairy lightness, derived probably from her Celtic origin. Now, as Rogers watched her, he caught a flash of that raciness and swift mobility, that fluid, protean elasticity of temperament which belonged to the fairy kingdom. The humour and pathos in her had been smothered by too much care. She accepted old age before her time. He saw her, under other conditions, dancing, singing, full of Ariel tricks and mischief—instead ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... some knowledge of the Great Enemy's plans not the least trifling object. And if the truth must be told, there was a certain decorum about the stranger that interested the Padre. Though well aware of the Protean shapes the Arch-Fiend could assume, and though free from the weaknesses of the flesh, Father Jose was not above the temptations of the spirit. Had the Devil appeared, as in the case of the pious St. Anthony, in the likeness of a comely damsel, the good Father, with his certain experience of ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... things on the face of the high Moor. Here they dispersed and scattered, here they approached and mingled together, here they stretched forth pearly fingers above the shining granite, and changed their shapes at the whim of every passing breeze; but the tendency of each shining, protean mass was to rise to the sun, and presently each valley and coomb lay clear, while the cool vapours wound in luminous and downy undulations along the highest points of the land before ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... whole day, is related with as much gravity as the loss of a battle, or the march of a desolating plague. Montaigne, in his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and highly wrought; but then his moods are Protean, and he is constantly alternating his stateliness with familiarity, anecdote, humour, coarseness. His Essays are like a mythological landscape—you hear the pipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, the satyr ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... sounded like laughter, and how the everlasting wind blew and drove about me with a purpose, and how the low bushes persistently took the shape of stooping people, moving stealthily past me, and how the mist more and more resembled huge protean figures escorting me across the desolate hills, silently, with immense footsteps. For the inanimate world now touched my awakened poetic sense in a manner hitherto unguided, and became fraught with the pregnant messages of a dimly ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... other incidents, just as a chance tag of association recalled them to his swift and picturesque memory. He would, indeed, make a show of fixing dates by reference to his temporary profession; but so Protean seem to have been his changes of fortune in their number and rapidity that I could never keep count of them or their order. Nor does it matter. The man's life was as disconnected ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... desired form. The process remains essentially the same as was worked out by the Hyatt brothers in the factory they set up in Newark in 1872 and some of their original machines are still in use. But this protean plastic takes innumerable forms and almost as many names. Each factory has its own secrets and lays claim to peculiar merits. The fundamental product itself is not patented, so trade names are copyrighted to protect the product. I have already ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... more favourable than antique story for the exhibition of this protean quality of woman, providing her with opportunities of still more startling contrasts of transformation. Will it not be a wonderful sight in that near future to watch that woman judge of the Supreme Court, in the midst of some learned tangle ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... gifts to us change their character; as the Rabbis fabled that the manna tasted to each man what each most desired. The same pure heavenly bread has the varying savour that commends it to varying palates. God's grace is Protean. It takes all the forms that man's necessities require. As water assumes the shape of any vessel into which it is put, so this great blessing comes to each of us, moulded according to the pressure and taking the form ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... part of the Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit from Christianity and the end of that series of transformations in which it took the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials. It now bids fair to apply itself instead to social life and natural science and to attempt to feed its Protean hunger directly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... which excitator may be either good or evil; but is more frequently Satan himself, by reason of some previous oppignoration or compact with witches. The power, indeed, is in the witch, and not conferred by him; but this versipellous or Protean impostor—these are his words—will not suffer her to know that it is of her own natural endowment, though for the present charmed into somnolent inactivity by the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... this autoplastic archetype of protean protein clay All the human's space has room for, for whom time makes a day, From the sage whose words of wisdom prince or parliament obey, To the parrots who but prattle, and the asses who but bray— So full was this Atom-Molecule, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... Gafsa, and afterwards there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to do. Cafes become tedious with their card-games, cowboy politics and persistent allusions to "la femme," that protean fetich which dominates and saturates the Gallic mind, oozing out, so to speak, at every pore of their social and national life. They never seem to grow out of the Ewig-weibliche stage. If only, like the Maltese, they would talk less and do more in certain respects, the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... and protean enemy, who had been fought down as Fascist, Nazi, Shintoist, Communist, Atomist, Americanist and God knew what else for a bloody century—had grown craftier with time. Now ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... 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 ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... Paganism, unchanged except in the appellation of its idol, which has remained among these lineal descendants of the Armorican Druids for more than a thousand years after Christianity has become the professed religion of the country! Altars, professedly Christian, were raised under the protection of the Protean Virgin, to the demon Hatred; and have continued to the present day to receive an unholy worship from blinded bigots, who hope to obtain Heaven's patronage and assistance for thoughts and wishes which they would be ashamed to breathe to man. Three Aves repeated with devotion ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... to the heaven or was turned into stone, and it was by their aid and counsel that the savages who possessed the land renounced their barbarous habits and commenced to till the soil. There can be no doubt but that this in turn is but another transformation of the Protean myth we have ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Of all the protean forms of misery that meet us in the bosom of that "stony-hearted stepmother, London," there is none that appeals so directly to our sympathies as the spectacle of a destitute child. In the case of the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Ten-dai sect has followed out its logic. Being realistic in pantheism, it reverences not only Gautama the historic Buddha, but also, large numbers of the Hindu deities, the group of idols called Jiz[o], the god Fudo, and Kuannon the god or goddess of mercy, under his or her protean forms. In its early history this sect welcomed to its pantheon the Shint[o] gods, who, according to the scheme of Riy[o]bu Shint[o], were declared to be avatars or manifestations of Buddha. The three sub-sects ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another time they declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day, her condition is attributed to the stomach, which is the great caldron and regulator of the body, that Protean source of diseases with a thousand forms and a thousand susceptibilities to attack. This is why we have come here. For my part, I am rather inclined to think it is the nerves. In any case it is ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... interrupted quickly, pitching his protean accents to a key of cajolery—"sit down and have another. What's ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... legend and law, in manuscript and marble, in folk-lore and chronicle, right from history's dawn, is still a puzzle of personality, and only equalled by syphilis in the protean ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... said Val, "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
... should have been in good trim and well equipped, physically as well as intellectually, for life's work, there commenced, without obvious cause, a long period of invalidism. It would be tedious to the reader, and useless for our present purpose, to detail the history and describe the protean shapes of her sufferings. With the exception of small breasts, the reproductive system was well developed. Repeated and careful examinations failed to detect any derangement of the uterine mechanism. ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... recollections came into my mind of those characteristics in her that had 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 whispered, to what purpose had I gained my liberty, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... take place in our Protean city! Already we have seen a palace in Blackfriars turn into a prison, and the old courts of Fleet Street, once mansions of the rich and great, now filled with struggling poor. The great synagogue in the Old Jewry became a tavern; the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... and the stranger, peering into its deeps, finds himself, as in the tale of Undine, contemplating a flood in whose every surge rises and vanishes a Face—weird or beautiful or terrible—a most ancient shoreless sea of forms incomprehensibly interchanging and intermingling, but symbolising the protean magic of that infinite Unknown that shapes and re-shapes for ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... rings of pipe smoke. He smiled, the twisted smile which was the sole indication that one side of his face was the master work of a great surgeon-sculptor. A marvelous piece of work, that, but no less marvelous than the protean changes that Bolton himself could make in his appearance. It was this genius at impersonation that had won Bolton his commission in the Intelligence Service, when, in 1992, the world ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... under its Protean forms, styled "Vital Forces," and "The Physical Forces," works in the atmosphere and is the source of nearly all its phenomena. It causes and directs movements in every province of nature. Nothing else has so intimate relations with animal and vegetable life and growth. It may be considered as constituting ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... Turenne, who had entered the service of Spain and fired upon the fleur-de-lis. But with this momentary success of Mazarin's cause rose his pretensions and demands; and the Fronde, alarmed at his recovered authority, changed its tactics as its Protean genius De Retz frequently did his clothes—his cassock for a plumed hat and military cloak. It demanded the trial or liberation of the prisoners it had helped to send to Vincennes, without delay, and Mazarin removed them for ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... a writ in his pocket. These fellows have some protean qualities about them, and, as occasion requires, assume all shapes for the purpose of taking care of their customers; they are however a sort of necessary evil. The old one in brown is a well-known dealer, a deep old file, and knows every one around him—he is up ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... hopelessly dowdy and "out of it," so none of them had been invited. With Laurence Vanderlyn alone had the young mistress of the house had any link of mutual interests or sympathies; but of flirtation, as that protean word was understood by those about them, there ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Herd's stanza xiv. of the English Otterburn (lxviii.), made soon after the battle. We see that the ORIGINAL ballad has protean variants; in time all is mixed ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... was Protean. Much of her work, the lawless part of it, was organized in the shape and dress of Mr. Michaelis. Some of her letters to the Press were signed Edgar McKenna, Albert Birrell, Andrew Asquith, Edgmont Harcourt, Felicia Ward, Millicent Curzon, Judith ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... divine standard of human intelligence and goodness. No sacrifice of right, no conservation of wrong, should be the rally-call of mothers whose sons must vindicate the one and expiate the other in blood! Negro slavery is but one of the protean forms of disfranchised humanity. Class legislation is the one great fountain of national and domestic antagonisms. Every ignoring of inherent rights, every transfer of inherent interest, from the first organization of communities, has been the license of power to robbery and murder, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... we make mention of the "aeons"—the world's age histories—we are met with that Protean problem that always seems to lurk at the bottom of every religious question: Why was evil permitted? Mr. J.S. Mill, many readers will recollect, concluded that if there was a God, that God was not perfectly good, or else was not omnipotent. Now of course ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... help once in life is the privilege of the most 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 ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... own brief span I have seen men's faces pass through every hirsute change under the Protean influence of "good taste." I remember when, to be really a student of good form, a man wore long side-whiskers of the Dundreary type. Then "mutton chops" and a moustache were the thing; then only a moustache; now we have got back to ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... the mystery was now plain. Chesterton said that it was not himself, but Grimes, who had been successful as an amateur actor. Grimes had often disguised himself so well as different people that he might have made something by the art in a "protean ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... uniformity by no means excludes any amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, though no one doubts that, under all these Protean changes, it is one and ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... among us. Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly pitfalls, and of slavery, misery, meanness, the craft of tyrants and the credulity of the populace, in some of their protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are not. The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out—but soon and certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last forever. Yet is there an immortal courage and prophecy in every ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... us to get familiar with some of the protean metamorphoses of matter. Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great deal of mercury. How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless minute globules by hand. ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... Although recognized by the Virginia Companies and Council for New England, as the representative of the Adventurers, he has only been recently generally reckoned a chief man of the Adventurers. A Protean friend of the Pilgrims, never reliable, ever pretentious, always self-seeking, and of no help. He was finally ruined by the disasters to his ship, the PARAGON, which cost him all his interests. Having attempted treacherously to secure ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... Protean artists! Vaudeville clamor for me some day—you'll see! I'll be five characters in twenty-five minutes, and no one of ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... life. The wife having no position in society, being nothing, indeed, but a sort of household utensil, how greatly was life simplified! What a door for expenditure was there, as yet securely closed, and which no one had thought of opening! No milliner's or dressmaker's bills, no evening parties, no Protean fashions, no elegant furniture, no imperious necessity for Kleanthes to outshine Kleon, no coaches, no Chateau Margaux, no journeys to Arkadia in the summer! In such a state of society, as one may easily see, the labour of one man would support half a dozen. It cost the Athenian ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... but simply affords man an opportunity to produce it; you forgot to add—provided the landlord doesn't prevent him. You say in another place, "Figure it as you will, adjust it as you may, a tax is a fine on industry and will so remain until you get blood from turnips," etc. This very objection in protean form is continually being raised by a class of shallow-thinking men with whom the editor of the ICONOCLAST should not be proud to herd. "What difference docs it make," they say, "whether I pay rent to the government or to a landlord when I've got to pay it ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of his time and class, was a man of protean employment—joiner, barber, and what not. No doubt he had much pithy and fluent conversation, all of which escapes us. He certainly impressed the Hon. Theodore Atkinson as a person of uncommon parts, for the Honorable ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... down as one of the four great historical explanations, under the heading of the unfolding principle, a conception that has taken protean forms. At one extreme it is little more than a mystic sentiment to the effect that evolution is the result of an inner driving force or principle which goes under many names such as Bildungstrieb, nisus formativus, vital force, and orthogenesis. Evolutionary ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... naiads fair. Swifter than lightning went these wonders rare; And then the water, into stubborn streams Collecting, mimick'd the wrought oaken beams, Pillars, and frieze, and high fantastic roof, Of those dusk places in times far aloof Cathedrals call'd. He bade a loth farewel To these founts Protean, passing gulph, and dell, And torrent, and ten thousand jutting shapes, Half seen through deepest gloom, and griesly gapes, 630 Blackening on every side, and overhead A vaulted dome like Heaven's, far bespread With starlight ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... came between Egypt and Israel, and kept the foe off the timid crowd of slaves. Whatever forms our enemies take, fellowship with God will invest us with a defence as protean as our perils. The same cloud is represented in the context as being 'a pavilion for a shadow in the heat, and for a refuge and for a covert from storm and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... observance. Suppose for a moment that this law did not hold—then what would become of all our reasoning? Where would be the use of establishing conclusions about things, if they were liable to evade us by a Protean change of identity? ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... grim greed. The Saint's long spear, That once transfixed it, can no longer touch. No land is safe from its sting, blood-drain, or clutch— For it takes Protean shapes; 'tis, therefore, clear, Since good Saint George has failed to re-appear To mortal sight, save in the King's escutch— Worn off at edge and blurred with Tudor smudge— Freedom must drive the Dragon ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle |
