"Epoch-making" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... each culminating moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye forever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wrote was a minor work, which he did not know would ever be published. This was his manly Letter to Lord Chesterfield, a nobleman who had treated Johnson with discourtesy when the poor author was making a heroic struggle, but who offered his patronage when the Dictionary was announced as an epoch-making work. In his noble refusal of all extraneous help Johnson unconsciously voiced Literature's declaration of independence: that henceforth a book must stand or fall on its own merits, and that the day of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... ideals. But Von Vizin's ideal characters are almost hostile in their bearing towards his characters drawn from real life. Altogether, Von Vizin must be regarded as the first independent, artistic writer in Russia, and therefore epoch-making, just as Feofan Prokopovitch must be rated as the first Russian secular writer, and Sumarokoff as the first Russian literary man and publicist in the modern meaning of the words. It is worth noting (because of a tendency ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... Caldegard. "You and my daughter know now the importance of my two years' work, and you cannot fail to see the danger of a rumour that 'Professor Caldegard, we understand, has achieved an epoch-making discovery in the history of science. An anodyne with more than all the charms and few of the dangers of opium will bring comfort with a good conscience to thousands of sufferers in this nerve-racked world.' Every chemist in the country that knows my line of ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... have given him the idea of those agricultural tours which were to make his name famous throughout the world. His Southern tour was in 1767, his Northern in 1768, and his Eastern in 1770. The subject he specially illuminated in these epoch-making books was the rotation of crops, though he occasionally diverged upon deep-ploughing and kindred themes. The tours excited, for the first time, the agricultural spirit of Great Britain, and their author almost at ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... memories; hesitantly eager and yet with the infinite softness and ancient calm which come from that eternal race whose history is not the history of a day, but of endless ages. Here, surely, was fit meeting-place for these curiously intent forces, for these epoch-making and age-twisting forces, for these human feet ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... course of an investigation which my researches into the character of the Etruscan "Involuti" have necessitated, I frequently encounter the root Kad, k2ad, or Qad. Schnitzler's recent and epoch-making discovery that d in Etruscan b2, has led me to consider it a plausible hypothesis that we may convert Kad or Qad into Kab2, in which case it is by no means beyond the range of a cautious conjecture that the Involuti are identical with the Cab-iri (Cabiri). Though you will pardon me for confessing, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... epoch-making in the history of music-hall enterprise in the Five Towns, coincided with the annual venison feast of a society known as Ye Ancient Corporation of Hanbridge, which society had no connection whatever with the real rate-levying corporation, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... received five dollars, and set about the tremendous task of selecting her first dress of really, truly calico print; and Rolf realized that the joy he had found in his new rifle was a very small affair, compared with the epoch-making, soul-filling, life-absorbing, unspeakable, and cataclysmal bliss that a small girl can have in her first chance of unfettered action in choice ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... says: "This is one of the greatest little books of the age. If it is not epoch-making, it should be. It treats in charming style and convincing manner a theme of vital and universal interest. The thoughtful man who reads it will feel that a new classic has been added to the ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... one's own particular teetotum is confined to a very small space and range; and that the witty description of the Greek politician who was said to be well known throughout the whole civilised world and at Lampsacus, or of the philosopher who was announced as the author of many epoch-making volumes and as the second cousin of the Earl of Cork, represents a very real truth,—that reputation is not a thing which is worth bothering one's head about; that if it comes, it is apt to be quite as inconvenient ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... put upon the whole the label of the author's own choice, "Early Victorian." Everybody knows where and what Islington is and the sort of minor tragedy and comedy that would be likely to occur in the lives of its inhabitants in the last reign but one. No one would look there for epoch-making crises, but many will find a longed-for relief from the speeding-up tendencies of modern romance. Lastly, but for a tendency at times to affectation, the style of the writer is as graceful and elegant as her themes are homely and serene, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... The epoch-making work of the English Orientalists, and above all, of the illustrious Sir William Jones, at the end of the eighteenth century not only laid the foundation of Sanskrit scholarship in Europe, but also gave the first direct impulse to ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... defined his firm resolve to treat linear design from the point of view of sculpture rather than of painting proper. It settled his determination to work exclusively through and by the human figure, rejecting all subordinate elements of decoration. Had we possessed this epoch-making masterpiece, we should probably have known Michelangelo's genius in its flower-period of early ripeness, when anatomical learning was still combined with a sustained dependence upon Nature. The transition from the second to the third stage in this development of form-ideal remains imperfectly ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... conversion. This view, subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his "epoch-making" volume on "Christian Nurture" (1846), as a departure from the orthodoxy ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... she knew that his keen, fox-like eyes would terrify her at once, and incline the balance of her decision towards Armand. Whilst she did not see him, there still lingered in her heart of hearts a vague, undefined hope that "something" would occur, something big, enormous, epoch-making, which would shift from her young, weak shoulders this terrible burden of responsibility, of having to choose between two ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... 1846, just six months before the discovery of Neptune, of an obscure disease, eventually found to be occasioned by an extensive fungus-growth in the stomach. The place which he left vacant was not one easy to fill. His life's work might be truly described as "epoch-making." Rarely indeed shall we find one who reconciled with the same success the claims of theoretical and practical astronomy, or surveyed the science which he had made his own with a glance equally ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... is "a voice which complains—a heart which suffers and which tells us so." "It is not so much her own deep sentiment that is reflected, but her emotion, which is both intellectual and sympathetic, volitional and spontaneous." Her letters were epoch-making; nothing before her time nor after her (until Madame de Sevigne) can equal them in precision, purity of language, sincerity and frankness of expression, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... and your labours, and the endurance with which you have pressed on through manifold hindrances till success was near. The advantages of your system have given your ship the greatest attainable speed and dirigibility, and the important results you have obtained have produced an epoch-making step forward in the construction of airships and leave laid down a valuable ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... a fortnight later. In the afternoon Katrine had been reading by the fire an old Italian tale of love and death. It seemed hardly an epoch-making experience in her life, and yet there had come to her, like the letting in of sudden light, the knowledge that love was beyond and above reason, as religion is, as life itself, of which love is the ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... He might go to Paris and paint as much as he liked, but in Valenciennes painting was the privilege of the corporation of St. Luke. This has a pre-Adamite sound in modern ears. But even now no man may lawfully kill or cure the sick in London or Paris or New York without a diploma, despite the 'epoch-making' principles of 1879. And the new French Chamber of 1889 apparently intends to forbid all foreign physicians to attend upon patients in France! In Valenciennes, as a matter of fact, a liberal School of Art was established in 1782, by which time both ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Lavoisier, the discoverer of the permanence of matter and the founder of modern chemistry, will be remembered when everybody has forgotten that Judge Marshall and Daniel Webster ever lived. From these and other epoch-making discoveries in the domain of science, modern Socialism gets its point of departure from Utopianism, and without those ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... school, having attained the great age of seventeen and therefore able to look back over a past incredibly long and full, she still reckoned time not by years, but by certain important occurrences. Between these epoch-making events certain other happenings stood out in bold relief against the gray of dull daily life. There was the coming of the new minister, for though many were tried only one was chosen; and finally there ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... against it!—he was straightway adopted into our flabby culture. Compare Hauptmann and Brieux, the one a great artist, the other no more than a raucous journalist. Brieux's elaborate proofs that two and two are four have been hailed as epoch-making; one of his worst plays, indeed, has been presented with all the solemn hocus-pocus of a religious rite. But Hauptmann remains almost unknown; even the Nobel Prize did not give him a vogue. Run the roll: Maeterlinck ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed his poignant sense of something half-jeopardised and wholly recovered; it was that consciousness in the background of his mind, ignorant of it as Catherine was then and always, which gave the peculiar epoch-making force to this sacred and critical hour of their lives. But she would hear nothing of his self-blame—nothing. She put her hand ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Half Eagle and Key," was a still further acknowledgment of the protection which he enjoyed in Geneva. This was not his only Mark, but it is the only one to which we need refer. The name of Richard Tottell, 1553-97, is much better remembered in connection with the epoch-making little book, "Songes and Sonettes," 1557, the first miscellany of English verse, than either of the other seventy or eighty publications which bear his imprint. His shop was in Fleet Street at the ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... epoch-making time; God thunders through the universe A message glorious and sublime, At once a blessing and a curse. Blessings for those who seek His light, Curses for those ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... whose governor, when ordered in advance by the king to arrange for massacring the Huguenots in his city on that epoch-making night, dared to send back a prompt and spirited refusal. "Your Majesty," he reported, "I have examined those under my command touching your mandate; all are good citizens and brave soldiers, but I am unable to find for you among them a ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... of the human race, of the descent of man, is ranked by Huxley in his epoch-making book "Man's Place in Nature", as the deepest with which biology has to concern itself, "the question of questions,"—the problem which underlies all others. In the same brilliant and lucid exposition, which appeared in 1863, soon after the publication of Darwin's "Origin ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... in the growth of human ideas or the origins of human society can afford to neglect Maine's Ancient Law. Published some fifty-six years ago it immediately took rank as a classic, and its epoch-making influence may not unfitly be compared to that exercised by Darwin's Origin of Species. The revolution effected by the latter in the study of biology was hardly more remarkable than that effected by Maine's brilliant treatise in the study of early institutions. Well does one of ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... Klinger (1752-1831), who was responsible for Borrow's 'first book,' was responsible for much else of an epoch-making character. It was he who by one of his many plays, Sturm und Drang, gave a name to an important period of German Literature. In 1780 von Klinger entered the service of Russia, and in 1790 married a natural daughter of the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors had to be sown in ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... first rank of the philosophers of all time. He was elected Lucasian Prof. of Mathematics at Camb. in 1669, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672, over which body he presided for 25 years from 1703. In the same year his new theory of flight was pub. in a paper before the society. His epoch-making discovery of the law of universal gravitation was not promulgated until 1687, though the first glimpse of it had come to him so early as 1665. The discovery of fluxions, which he claimed, was contested by Leibnitz, and led to a long and bitter controversy between ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Diets, at last the capitalists were thoroughly successful. The Imperial Council of Regency passed an epoch-making ordinance, [Sidenote: 1525] kept secret for fear of the people, expressly allowing merchants to sell at the highest prices they could get and recognizing certain monopolies said to be in the national interest as against other countries, and justified for the wages they provided ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of Lithuania, and of Novogrodek. He went to a government school in Minsk, and later attended the University of Vilna, which city in his day was a place of Jesuit faith, gloomy convents and echoing bells. All about him epoch-making events for Slav lands were taking place. It was a resounding, inspired age for his race, and he grew up to take a fitting place in that age and to be called "the immortal hero of Polish poetry." Poland just then was ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... epoch-making discovery of Dr. Sethe, privat-docent at the University of Berlin, placed the whole matter at a single stroke on a comparatively sure foundation. He pointed out that the inscriptions on a few unassuming potsherds from Abydos contained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "Come now, my dear; don't make a scene—I insist on your not making a scene!" That was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less epoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had never heard—it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? It seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... slight modification of his rapture: "Whatever should come of this day's work, we should all drink deeply to the health, prosperity and fame of a future president of the United States—Napoleon Bingle! Come, Madame Bingle, you cannot refuse to join your humble servant and petitioner in one jolly, epoch-making—though absolutely respectable— celebration in honour of our little Napoleon. And you, M'sieur—Ah, you, sir! Have you not in prospect the alliance of your own honoured name with that of the most notable Frenchman of recent times? Napoleon! Bingle! ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... university was William Robertson, the {7} celebrated historian. Professor Dugald Stewart, who held the chair of philosophy, had gained a reputation extending to the continent of Europe. Adam Smith, the epoch-making economist, was spending the closing years of his life at his home near the Canongate churchyard. During his stay in Edinburgh, Thomas Douglas interested himself in the work of the literary societies, which were among the leading features of academic life. ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... led to dwell earnestly on these wider aspects, since that great epoch-making commemoration which marked the sixtieth year of the reign of our Queen, and which brought home to the consciousness of the nation, as nothing else has ever done, its vast world-wide responsibilities. That great national festival, with its ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... made the most magnificent and gigantic advances."[1] This fact is easily explained by the remarkable series of inventions that revolutionized this industry between 1738 and 1830, including Arkwright's, Watt's, Compton's, and Cartwright's epoch-making contrivances.[2] The effect which these inventions had on the manufacture of cotton goods is best illustrated by the fact that in England, the chief cotton market of the world, the consumption of raw cotton rose steadily from 13,000 ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... epoch-making work was his translation of the Pentateuch into German. With this work the present history finds a natural close. Mendelssohn's Pentateuch marks the modernization of the literature of Judaism. There was much opposition to the ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... interesting process of evolution in the mind of its author. When we are able to detect the germs of thought in which such a discovery has originated, and to trace the successive stages of the reasoning by which the crude idea has developed into an epoch-making book, we have the materials for reconstructing an important chapter of scientific history. Such a contribution to the story of the "making of science" may be furnished in respect to Darwin's famous theory ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... that Dominican commerce has more than trebled in twelve years demonstrates the epoch-making character of the fiscal convention with the United States. The trade figures since 1905 ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... match. And Braithwaite had kissed her before he marched away. Ridiculous to remember it now! It signified nothing. People in their station kissed when they felt kindly, and on that occasion they had had an epoch-making pretext. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... Napoleon did not forget Josephine in his Italian campaigns, and Grant, inflexible commander of a half-million men, never failed, even in the Wilderness, to remember the plain little woman whose fireside fortunes were so closely interwoven with his epoch-making wars. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... only a wonderful profession, with the activities of its followers of utmost importance, but also it is a profession the individual work of whose pioneers, from Watt to Westinghouse and from Eiffel to Edison, has been epoch-making. ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... father-in-law, God-fearing men were appointed to decide for the people on all matters of lesser moment, while the graver cases were still reserved for Moses (xviii.)[1]The arrival at Sinai marked a crisis; for it was there that the epoch-making covenant was made—Jehovah promising to continue His grace to the people, and they, on their part, pledging themselves to obedience. Thunder and lightning and dark storm-clouds accompanied the proclamation ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... antiquated conception of woman and contested it at every point. But all that I had planned and drawn up was cast aside when in 1869 John Stuart Mill's book on the subject fell into my hands. I felt Mill's superiority to be so immense and regarded his book as so epoch-making that I necessarily had to reject my own draft and restrict myself to the translation and introduction of what he had said. In November, 1869, I published Mill's book in Danish and in this manner introduced the modern woman's movement ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... revolutionary upheaval in warfare, with permanent results, came from chemistry. The flexible nature of organic chemistry must not be lost sight of. In the physical sciences, electricity, for example, years of co-ordinated world progress are required to produce an epoch-making discovery which might have critical and direct war significance. Radioactivity has shown us what undreamt-of energy is bound up in the atom, and many are the prophesies regarding the harnessing of these forces for constructive activities. At ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... epoch-making journey to a young man fresh from college, and Edward Stanley was deeply impressed by ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... the scientific, side (developed in his own volumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is marked with a simplicity, clarity, and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer such as doubt the sustaining influence of ancestral faith upon character and will to the eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained the opening and consummation ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling |
