"Fragility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers. Nay, so far from our admiration of the jewel shaft being dependent on its doing work for us, it is very possible that a chief part of its preciousness may consist in a delicacy, fragility, and tenderness of material, which must render it utterly unfit for hard work; and therefore that we shall admire it the more, because we perceive that if we were to put much weight upon it, it would be crushed. But, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... pressing orders. In the gaslight those pale-faced Parisians, sorting pearls as white as themselves, of a dead, unwholesome whiteness, were a painful spectacle. There was the same fictitious glitter, the same fragility of spurious jewels. They talked of nothing but ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... as when they affect those qualities and accomplishments, from the want of which they derive their highest merit. "The porcelain clay of human kind," says an admired writer, speaking of the sex. Greater delicacy evidently implies greater fragility; and this weakness, natural and moral, clearly points out the necessity of a superior degree ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes vast inquiries, begins interminable labours, joins himself into federations and populous cities, spends his days to deliver the ends of the earth or to benefit unborn posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a few days. His sight, which conducts him, which takes notice of the farthest stars, which is miraculous in every way and a thing defying explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly, and can be extinguished with a touch. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a Parisian spring night filled the room, touching the white walls—the white bed—a bowl of flowers upon the dressing-table and its fairy-like reflection in the mirror—to a subtly insidious fragility that verged upon the unreal; and the boy, quivering to his tangled sensations, felt this unreality quicken his self-distrust, touch and goad him as ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... changed into a faint metallic blue, which gave a ghostlike effect to the slim form; again, she was all white—a dazzling, unbroken white, in which the little oval face assumed an air of childlike fragility and pathos. As she sat with her hands folded on her knee, and her head resting against the dark cushions of her chair, more than one of the company watched her with admiration: but Darsie was too much occupied with her own thoughts to be conscious ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... some fear that it would fall apart of its own fragility, but the chief croquemort explained politely that such accidents ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... of an illustration made especially to show how dainty little maidens may be. Eight years she might have been, and, possibly, a trifle more, or less. Her little waist and little black-stockinged calves showed how delicately fragile she was; but the fragility was of mould only. There was no hint of anaemia in the clear, healthy complexion nor in the quick, tripping step. She was a little, delicious blond, with hair spun of gossamer gold and wide blue eyes ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... conscious, as he climbed the stairs of the house in Downing Street an hour or so later, of a certain fragility of appearance in Mr. Foley, markedly apparent during these last few weeks. He was standing talking to Lord Armley, who was one of the late arrivals, as Maraton entered, talking in a low tone and with an obviously ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
