"Mutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... go to the village. Called to see Mrs. B., who seems to have a desire to be saved, but has to contend with great affliction. Another proof of the importance of seeking the Lord in health. Poor old Mrs. L. is much altered, and did not recollect me. So mutable and perishing is man. On reviewing the day, I think I have been aiming to please God; but my performances are so poor, that I have need to humble myself before God.—I got to see Mrs. R., most probably for the last time. She is apparently near the close of life, and ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... joyful I beheld As unto the brightness of that heaven she entered More luminous thereat the planet grew, And if the star itself was changed and smiled What became I who by my nature am Exceeding mutable in every guise?" ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... journal for publication, and then saw how many facts indicated the common descent of species, so that in July, 1837, I opened a note-book to record any facts which might bear on the question. But I did not become convinced that species were mutable until, I think, two ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... can be more adapted to stimulate and to feed curiosity than the aspect of the United States. Fortunes, opinions, and laws are there in ceaseless variation: it is as if immutable nature herself were mutable, such are the changes worked upon her by the hand of man. Yet in the end the sight of this excited community becomes monotonous, and after having watched the moving pageant for a time the spectator is tired of ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... transformed the situation from hour to hour. Not that her passion in any way abated, or her romantic resolution really altered: it was only that her conception of time and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... is superior to the understanding, and the understanding to sensibility, or he is related to thought as thought to life, and life to being. Nay, Nicolas makes even bolder statements than these, when he calls the universe a sensuous and mutable God, man a human God or a humanly contracted infinity, the creation a created God or a limited infinity; thus hinting that God and the world are at bottom essentially alike, differing only in the form of their existence, that it is one and the same being and action which manifests itself ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the pointers, the names of definite and famous cities far distant, and now perhaps basking in sunshine; but Christina remained all these hours, as it were, at the foot of the post itself, not moving, and enveloped in mutable and blinding ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... words which are not found in the vocabulary, to be lamented as omissions. Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people, the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable; many of their terms are formed for some temporary or local convenience, and though current at certain times and places, are in others utterly unknown. This fugitive cant, which is always in a state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... of my inheritance; to be judged by three or four committee-men, who are neither bound to law nor evidence,—who are, or may be, mutable in their apprehensions, doing one thing to-day, and soon again undoing what they did,—I conceive, to be judged in such an arbitrary way is repugnant to the fundamental law of England contained in Magna Charta, chap. 29, which says no ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... sensibilities, and placing the soul in relation with the visible world. The third is an intermediate essence, partaking of the natures of both, and constituting a medium between the eternal and the mutable—the conscious energy of the soul developed in the contingent world of time. Thus the soul is, on one side, linked to the unchangeable and the eternal, being formed of that ineffable element which constitutes the real ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... clearly, Theistical absurdities. The only dogma worth overturning, of the eight here noticed, is the first, for if that fall, the rest must fall with it. If, for example, the reader is convinced that it is more probable matter is mutable as regards form, but eternal as regards essence, than that it was willed into existence by a Being said to be eternal and immutable, he at once becomes an Atheist—for if matter always was, no Being could have been before ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... the variations produced by artificial and natural selections are mutable, while sudden mutations have a much more stable character. But we have just seen that these mutations themselves are evidently only the delayed ecphoria of a ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the past, were encased in dogmatism; and they one and all, as time passed, became hindrances to natural evolution. Where can we find a basis for faith and morals which shall be simultaneously absolute and mutable; shall be above man, and none the less human; shall be ideal, and none the less real?—We shall find what we want, says Nicolai, in humanity itself. For us, humanity is a reality which develops throughout the ages, but which at every moment represents ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... grossness. Time is the master of paradox. Who shall say what surprises are too fantastic for his contriving? Can the classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... thou lingering dream of grief, of pain, And every ill that Nature can sustain, Strange, mutable, and wild! Now flattering with Hope most fair, Depressing now with fell Despair, The nurse of Guilt, the slave of Pride, That, like a wayward child, Who, to himself a foe, Sees joy alone in what's denied, In what is granted, woe! O thou poor, feeble, fleeting, pow'r, By Vice seduc'd, by Folly ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... spores are colourless or coloured, and it is upon this fact that primary divisions in the genus Agaricus are based, inasmuch as colour in the spores appears to be a permanent feature. In white-spored species the spores are white in all the individuals, not mutable as the colour of the pileus, or the corolla in phanerogamic plants. So also with the pink spored, rusty spored, black spored, and others. This may serve to explain why colour, which is so little relied upon in classification amongst ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... were nothing but venal hirelings, and changed sides readily enough when their own private interests seemed to render it desirable. One of the most famous—or infamous, according to Anthony a Wood, who describes him as 'a most seditious, mutable, and railing writer, siding with the rout and scum of the people, making them weekly sport by railing at all that was noble,' etc.—was Marchmont Nedham. In 1643 he brought out the Mercurius Britannicus, one of the ablest periodicals ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... personal equation are caused by variants of three emotions; a mutable fondness for women, according to temperament and opportunity, a more uniform feeling toward money, and the universal, devastating desire—the old, ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... sense our text is true. Because He lives we live also. He is the same for ever, therefore we are not consumed. The foundation of our being lies beyond and beneath all the mutable things from which we are tempted to believe that we draw our lives, and is in God. The true lesson to be drawn from the mutable phenomena of earth is—heaven. The many links in the chain must have a staple. Reason ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... felt young, revivified, free. He had arrived. Surmounting indescribable hazards and hardships he walked the pavement of New York. In an hour the mutable quicksands of a great city would swallow him forever. Free! He wanted to stroll about, peer into shop windows, watch the amazing electric signs, dally; but he still had ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... mutable as usual, huzzaed, the pipe and tabor struck up, the hobby-horse pranced, the beasts roared, and even the repentant dragon began again to coil up his spires, and prepare himself for fresh gambols. But the Abbot might still have overcome, by his eloquence ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Reality must be one and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and corruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy, and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... of Truth! O sacred bond Unlovely grown! O faith so mutable! Shades of my fathers, not august but fond! How hollow were the darlings of my dream! But she, O Lotus-flower, my promised bride, Star of my youth, my pure unspotted dove! Again I see her in her gentle pride, Her starry eyes meet mine ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... of Noon retir'd, To respit his day-labour with repast, Or with repose; and such discourse bring on, As may advise him of his happie state, Happiness in his power left free to will, Left to his own free Will, his Will though free, Yet mutable; whence warne him to beware He swerve not too secure: tell him withall His danger, and from whom, what enemie Late falln himself from Heav'n, is plotting now 240 The fall of others from like state of bliss; By violence, no, for that shall be withstood, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... power outed them, whoe remained not long neither, nor his sonne after him.... And now my intelligence is not enough to tell me what incorporate, mixt, or individuall power there is.... Under all these mutable governments of divers natures and constitutions, I have lived most resigningly submissive: But, Mr. Speaker, it is one duty to live obedient to a government, and another of a very different nature to Command under it.... ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... political topics of the day I have also lightly touched upon; but, while craving the indulgence of the public in these interpolations, I may remark I have only treated them to a very cursory glance; considering that, in the present mutable state of legislation in Queensland, to enter more fully into detail would be inadvisable. The colony is young, but the government is infantine; though, notwithstanding that it is little more than two ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... doubt on the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... flight in which I leave earth behind and hasten through the wide ocean of air, know the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature—the immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... that change so often brings in England, they would be ready to make it once a month. Caprice is the characteristic vice of miscellaneous assemblies, and without some check their selection would be unceasingly mutable. This peculiar danger of the present Constitution of France has however been prevented by its peculiar circumstances. The Assembly have not been inclined to remove M. Thiers, because in their lamentable present position they could not replace ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... carry down his immortal thoughts in their pristine vigor, must have, every two hundred years, a Johnson to modernize a Shakspeare. To probe the causes of the change of language, to ascertain why even a WRITTEN language is mutable, to pick up this garment of thought and run its threads back through all their vagaries to their origin and points of divergence, is one of the grand tasks for the intellectual historian. He, indeed, must give us the history of ideas, of which all art, including language, ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased at ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... day-labour with repast, Or with repose; and such discourse bring on, As may advise him of his happy state, Happiness in his power left free to will, Left to his own free will, his will though free, Yet mutable; whence warn him to beware He swerve not, too secure: Tell him withal His danger, and from whom; what enemy, Late fallen himself from Heaven, is plotting now The fall of others from like state of bliss; By violence? no, for that shall ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... unspeakably, Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face - Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity - There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion and impudence and energy. Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... donors and their families in a Flemish picture. Among these you may wander for hours by little rambling paths, over white and red and golden flowers, and, continually, you spy little lakes, hidden away, each a shy, soft jewel of a new strange tint of green or blue, mutable and lovely.... And beyond all is the glacier and the vast fields and peaks of ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... must read into all those bald sentences and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century, darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... there raisings-up and layings-down Of other and of other life-abodes, Which the wise know, and fear not. This that irks— Thy sense-life, thrilling to the elements— Bringing thee heat and cold, sorrows and joys, 'Tis brief and mutable! Bear with it, Prince! As the wise bear. The soul which is not moved, The soul that with a strong and constant calm Takes sorrow and takes joy indifferently, Lives in the life undying! That which is Can never cease to be; that which is not Will not ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... was his only joy for years onward. In the streets he would observe a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to express to a hair's-breadth in mutable flesh what he was at that moment wishing to express in durable shape. He would dodge and follow the owner like a detective; in omnibus, in cab, in steam-boat, through crowds, into shops, churches, theatres, public-houses, and slums—mostly, when at close quarters, ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... Plume, pray what was the method of single combat in your time among the Cavaliers? I suppose, that as the use of clothes continues, though the fashion of them has been mutable; so duels, though still in use, have had in all times their particular modes ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... minute details, into which the too generally despised bibliographer enters, are valuable, because they present to us, in lists of editions of authors and books published from age to age, the astonishing evidence of mutable popularity or acceptability. There is a feature, which is almost amusing, in the ideas and estimates expressed of many works by our earlier antiquaries, when we look to-day at their position and rank. If we turn over the pages of Hearne's Diary, for instance, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... we shall always be liable to these fluctuations of feeling, it is possible for us to have, deep down below these, a central core of our personality, in which unchanging continuity may abide. The depths of the ocean know nothing of the tides on the surface that are due to the mutable moon. We can have in our inmost hearts steadfastness, immovableness, even though the surface may be ruffled. Make your spirits like one of those great cathedrals whose thick walls keep out the noises of the world, and in whose ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... stilled, And sobs or laughter answered as it willed. Then did I know what spells of infinite choice, To rouse or lull, hath the sweet human voice; Then did I seem to seize the sudden clue To that grand troublous Life Antique—to view, Under the rockstand of Demosthenes, Mutable ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... "was the hour that brought me to this country; yet not in search of you did I come, but of the mutable and ill-fated Belfield. Erring, yet ingenious young man! what a lesson to the vanity of talents, to the gaiety, the brilliancy of wit, is the sight of that green fallen plant! not sapless by age, nor withered by ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... were a man, and wished a wife, as many do, merely as an ornament, a silken toy, I would take —— as soon as any I know. Her fantastic, impassioned and mutable nature would yield an inexhaustible amusement. She is capable of the most romantic actions,—wild as the falcon, voluptuous as the tuberose; yet she has not in her the elements of romance, like a deeper or less susceptible nature. My cold and reasoning ——, with her one ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... children, my church, and my opinions. I cease to be proprietor, father, Christian and philosopher. The state is my substitute in all these functions. In place of my will, there is henceforth the public will, that is to say, in theory, the mutable absolutism of a majority counted by heads, while in fact, it is the rigid absolutism of the assembly, the faction, the individual who is custodian of the public authority.—On this principle an outburst of boundless conceit takes place. The very first year Gregoire states in the tribune of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... countrymen aver, those who even to-day are said to dwell in that rugged and inaccessible desert aforesaid, are, by the mutable nature of their bodies, vouchsafed the power of being now near, now far, and of appearing and vanishing in turn. The approach to this desert is beset with perils of a fearful kind, and has seldom granted to those who ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... to and fro, shift to and fro; change and change about; waffle, blow with the wind (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c. 314; vibrate between, two extremes, oscillate between, two extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c. 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform|; versatile. unstaid[obs3], inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c. v.; restless; agitated &c. 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... ye winds, these sweet words to her ears, Unto the ears of my loved nymph, and tell How many tears I shed, what bitter tears! Beg her to pity one who loves so well: Say that my life is frail and mutable, And melts like rime before the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mutable," answered the doctor, shaking his head. "She is right. You keep her too close. Let her run wild, like any other country girl. Let her rise early and go out into the barnyard, see the cows milked, inhale their odorous breathings, wander in the fields among the new-mown hay, let her ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... some are rational, others the reverse (for instance the animating spirits of beasts); but of rational substances there is one which is immutable and impassible by nature, namely God, another which in virtue of its creation is mutable and passible except in that case where the Grace of the impassible substance has transformed it to the unshaken impassibility which belongs to angels and to ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... chattering leaves high overhead in the sun. There was nothing gloomy about this cathedral; the sun found a thousand apertures through which to launch his rays against the white pillars; while the green and mutable roof was bathed in almost intolerable radiance—it was a temple in green and ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour! Not dull art Thou as undiscerning Night; But studious only to remove from sight Day's mutable distinctions.—Ancient Power! Thus did the waters gleam, the mountains lower, 5 To the rude Briton, when, in wolf-skin vest Here roving wild, he laid him down to rest On the bare rock, or through a leafy bower Looked ere his eyes were closed. By ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... temperament nevertheless, too enthusiastic, imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a sober scholar; an admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a fire-work. The girl resembled her. Why should she wish to run away from Patterne Hall for a single hour? Simply because she was of the sex born mutable and explosive. A husband was her proper custodian, justly relieving a father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at home, philosophy is needed for us to keep erect. Let the girl be Cicero's Tullia: well, she dies! The choicest of them will ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be in this state of unstable equilibrium are called mutable. They may be either latent or active, being in the former case derived from old active ones or produced as new ones (by the process, designated premutation). They may be inherited in this mutable condition during a long series of generations. I ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... on to taunt them with cowardice (Act 3, Sc. 3). They are the "mutable, rank-scented many" (Act 3, Sc. 1). His friend Menenius is equally complimentary to his fellow citizens. "You are ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... strapped up and buckled to the wagon, we left the negro settlement for the French settlement. They are all in "settlements," here, the people of this Province. Centuries are mutable, but prejudices never alter ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... the mark of man's excelling dignity in the inexhaustible depth of his nature and in his noble discontent with every finite and mutable thing. The soul of man is "too big for earthly designs and interests." There is forever a restless appetite within man for some infinite Good without which he can never be satisfied. Everything which he attains or achieves ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... rightfully attacked, except when the guardian of it has abused it to subvert one or more of the rest. The reason is, that the guardian, as a fluent, is less than the permanent which he is to guard. He is the temporary and mutable mean, and derives his whole value from the end. In short, as robbery is not high treason, so neither is every unjust act of a king the converse. All must be attacked and endangered. Why? Because the king, as a to A, is ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... itself is bound fast, and cannot be driven asunder; yet it floats in the most unstable of elements, in the sea and winds. Such is the physical environment, clearly mirroring the meaning. Something permanent in the midst of all that is mutable we may ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Pythagoras, with the Stoics, are of opinion that matter is changeable, mutable, convertible, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... wish to come at the probable meaning of this fable, we must have recourse to Egyptian antiquities. The Horus of the Egyptians was the most mutable figure on earth, for he assumed shapes suitable to all seasons, and to all ranks. To direct the husbandman he wore a rural dress; by a change of attributes he became the instructer of smiths and other ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... not only changes with the age, but appears different among different people. Manners and customs not only vary among European nations, but are alike mutable from one age to another, even in the same people. These vicissitudes are often fatal to comic writers; our old school of comedy has been swept off the stage: and our present uniformity of manners has deprived our modern writers of those rich sources of invention ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... waiting to be revealed—you and I may belong to-day. 'We have a strong city.' You may lay hold of life either by the side of it which is transient and trivial and contemptible, or by the side of it which goes down through all the mutable and is rooted in eternity. As in some seaweed, far out in the depths of the ocean, the tiny frond that floats upon the billow goes down and down and down, by filaments that bind it to the basal rock, so the most insignificant act of our fleeting days has ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories, Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale. Ah, she comes, she arises—impassive, emotionless, bloodless, Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl. Once she ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... published in February, 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, and not for a long time with any intention of publishing. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... considerations and observations in other departments), essentially aided in making the correctness of those views seem more and more palpable to me, I am chiefly influenced by an expression of Darwin's: "Whoever," says he ('Origin of Species' page 482), "is led to believe that species are mutable, will do a good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction." To the desire expressed in these words I respond, for my own part, with the more pleasure, as this furnishes me with an opportunity of publicly giving expression in words to the thanks ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... and cut all future communications! In the long three years, the girl might die, be estranged from you, or perhaps fall into the hands of some foreign fortune hunter. Human nature—woman nature—is a mutable quantity. But once we are in communication we can provide for future correspondence ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... and passion; eyes which looked out under brows black and heavy and between lashes, curled and long, giving a peculiar significance to the glance. The lips were scarlet, the upper one being noticeably short and full; lips mutable and inviting, lips that were made for mine—and all this I knew in the first minute that our eyes met, when, as it seemed to me, ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... in her appearance, whereby she seemed now so much older than himself, and he forthwith moralised upon the mutability of human affairs, with all the mental fluency of a very young man whose affairs are still extremely mutable. He fell to musing on the accident in the park, wondering how he would have acted in Mr. Juxon's place, wondering especially what object could have led the wretched tramp to attack the squire, wondering too at the very great ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... they pass away, and it is not much memory can save from the mutable, happy days of love. Still, when the hour of departure came they had garnered enough to sweeten all the after-straits and stress of time. September had then perceptibly begun to add to the nights and shorten the days, and her ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... favourite; and Frank stands now almost as high on her list as he was but a little while ago the reverse; for Edward is continually talking of him to her, and every word he says is orthodox. But opinions like these are too light, too full of prejudice, too mutable to ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... pallor which had about it something primitive, as if the colours were not yet created. There was only a kind of cold and wan blue in the level skies which contrasted with wild sky-line. Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrary condition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene; but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world about the quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape. But if it was between chaos and creation, it was creation by ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... become an irrepressible instinct among some modern nations. Conservatism is the converse of variation, and as it springs from mental inertia it is always a progressively salient characteristic of each group in the descending scale. The Spaniard is less mutable than the Englishman, the Hindoo than the Spaniard, the Hottentot than the Hindoo, and the ape than the Hottentot. Therefore, a power whose existence depends upon the fixity of custom must be inimical to progress, but the authority of a sacred caste is altogether based ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... our county at the next election, I wished to defeat them, and I have done so; and now I have commenced a course of travel. I had intended on starting to confine it to my native country. Intentions are mutable. I am going abroad. You shall hear of my whereabout. I write this from the house of Leopold Travers, who, I understand from his fair daughter, is a connection of yours; a man to be highly esteemed and ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all—as one proof how much more commanding is that part of a literature which speaks to the elementary affections of men, than that which is founded on the mutable aspects of manners—it is a fact that, even in our elaborate system of society, where an undue value is unavoidably given to the whole science of social intercourse, and a continual irritation applied to the sensibilities which point in that direction; ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... he ought to haue a place And so he shall for it is resonable Whiche thynketh hymselfe greatly in fortunes grace Bostynge that she to hym is fauorable As if hyr maner were nat to be mutable In this vayne hope suche theyr lyfe doth lede Tyll at the laste theyr hous borne oure ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... have, the future saint has at least the grace to accompany the return of the ring[11] with only a few words of renunciation of his spouse to Christ, and of declaration that in this world "love is imperfect, life frail, and joy mutable." A far more vivid touch is given by the mother who, when search for the fugitive has proved futile, ruins the nuptial chamber, destroys its decorations, and hangs it with rags and sackcloth,[12] and who, when the final ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury |
