"Protean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... sense. Without the shy, fugitive, often unobserved sensations and the certainties which taste, smell, and touch give me, I should be obliged to take my conception of the universe wholly from others. I should lack the alchemy by which I now infuse into my world light, colour, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered. The solid earth would melt from under my feet and disperse itself in space. The objects dear to my hands would become formless, dead things, and I should walk ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... But she 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 Pease, Edith Spenser-Churchhill, Marianne ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... A similar protean state, but little less remarkable, occurs in many of our British ferns, notably in Scolopendrium vulgare, of which Mr. Moore enumerates no fewer than 155 varieties,[366] many of the forms occurring on the same plant at the same time. Cultivators ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... first non-metallic element discovered in the sun. Messrs. Trowbridge and Hutchins of Harvard College concluded in 1887,[679] on the ground of certain spectral coincidences, that this protean substance is vaporised in the solar atmosphere at a temperature approximately that of the voltaic arc. Partial evidence to the same effect had earlier been alleged by Lockyer, as well as by Liveing and Dewar; and the case was rendered tolerably complete by photographs taken by Kayser and ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... connected 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, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... one has nailed him with sachet eggs. He has not been choked by quarts of confetti. His conscience is as pure as the brews of Munich. He is still in a beneficent state of primeval and exquisite prophylaxis, of benign chemical purity, of protean moral asepsis. He came prepared for deluges of wine and concerted onslaughts from ineffable freimaderln. But he might as well have attended a drama by Charles Klein for all the rakish romance he has unearthed. His evening has gone. His legs are weary. And nothing has happened to astound ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... feebleness and delicacy of man, without the power of shielding themselves from the accidents of nature. Their darling object appears to be, to enjoy practical personal liberty. They possess less, and they enjoy fewer, luxuries than others; but they escape slavery in all the Protean shapes by which it ensnares the rest of mankind. They do not act as menial servants, and obey the caprice of a master; nor do they work as labourers for a tythe of the advantages of their industry. They do not, as tenants of land, pay half the produce in rentals; ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... than her overstrung nerves could endure, and in a fit of temper she 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 was ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... temptation was great, and the prospect of acquiring 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... 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 anyhow? ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... fled upward 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 ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the king, that man with the Protean countenance, across which storm and sunshine, God and the devil traced each minute new lines; who could be now an inspired enthusiast, and now a bloodthirsty tyrant; now a sentimental wit, and anon a wanton reveler; the king, on whose ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... break into a gallop now and then; and whenever in this vicious mood, is pretty sure to take up with Puff, and the two are apt to make wild work of it when they scamper abroad together. The worst of it is, that nobody knows which is which of these two termagant tramplers: both are thoroughly protean creatures, changing shapes and characters, and assuming a thousand different forms every day; so that it is a task all but impossible to distinguish one from the other. Hence a man may got upon the back of either without well knowing whither he will ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various |
