"Transitory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon such respect unto Almighty God as to a Christian and catholic prince doth appertain, knowing the fragility and uncertainty of all earthly things, and how displeasant unto God, how much dangerous to the soul, how dishonourable and damageable to the world it were to prefer vain and transitory things unto those that be perfect and certain, hath in this cause, doubt, and matter of matrimony, whereupon depend so high and manifold consequences of greatest importance, always cast from his conceit the darkness and blundering confusion of ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... objects as far as possible; that it places the sense of the individual part, in opposition to the sense of the whole,—to the analogia fidei or spiritus which alone gives unity to the book of nature, while it dilutes and renders as transitory as possible the sense of the universal in the whole.... And as it laid great stress upon the letter in the book of nature, it fell into polytheism. The particular symbol of the divine, or of the Godhead, became a myth of some special ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... disqualify a work of art for museum purposes. But—broadly—dramatic and didactic art should be universally national, the luster of our streets, the treasure of our palaces, the pleasure of our homes. Much art that is weak, transitory, and rude may thus become helpful to us. But the museum is only for what is eternally right, and well done, according to divine law and human skill. The least things are to be there—and the greatest—but all good with the goodness that makes a child ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... to a fashionable New York family of wealth, and he had been a young lion at Pasadena during the winter just past. He owned automobiles and a yacht and—an extensive wardrobe. These notable assets had much to do with the conquest of Mrs. Rodney: she looked with favour upon the transitory Mr. Ulstervelt, and believed in her heart that he had something to do with the location of the shining sun. But of this affair more anon, as the ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... built yesterday, and we move on rapidly—they'll be pulled down again to-morrow. I'll own that our ideas and manners are in the same unfinished, transitory stage. We haven't been able to sit down and learn how ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... not trouble your self with transitory Parts, 'Dshartlikins thou'rt as handsom as needs be ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird flew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight, and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christian priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the soul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the darkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious world. Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the life of a man comes to the ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... without a sire; Whose mortal life and transitory fire Light to the grave his chance-created form, As ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... of view in which we regard the dogma of the soul's immortality, we are compelled to consider it as a chimera invented by men who have realized their wishes, or who have not been able to justify Providence from the transitory injustices of this world. This dogma was received with avidity, because it flattered the desires, and especially the vanity of man, who arrogated to himself a superiority above all the beings that enjoy existence, and which he ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... his head for "Fathers and Children;" and I suspect she incited him to strike and spare not. The smoke in this novel is meant to represent the idle vapour of Russian political jargon; all the heated discussions on both sides are smoke, purposeless, obscure, and transitory as a cloud. But the smoke really rose from the flames of anger in his own heart, fanned by a woman's breath, who delighted to see her mild giant for once smite his enemies with all his force. If "Fathers and Children" had been received in Russia with more intelligence ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the martyr Babylas, whose ruined chapel you see just beyond us. I have had something to do with most of them in my time. They—are transitory. They give employment to care-takers for a while. But the thing that lasts, and the thing that interests me, is the human life that plays around them. The game has been going on for centuries. It still disports itself ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former; yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power;—its depth and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's Poems ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Dialogues merely as literary compositions. Any ancient work which is worth reading has a practical and speculative as well as a literary interest. And in Plato, more than in any other Greek writer, the local and transitory is inextricably blended with what is spiritual and eternal. Socrates is necessarily ironical; for he has to withdraw from the received opinions and beliefs of mankind. We cannot separate the transitory from the permanent; nor can we translate ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... of the true goods which all mortal men desire to obtain, tho they by various ways think to arrive at them. For every man has natural good in himself, because every man desires to obtain the true good; but it is hindered by the transitory goods, because it is more prone thereto. For some men think that it is the best happiness that a man be so rich that he have need of nothing more; and they choose life accordingly. Some men think that this is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart people, loafers. They distracted ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the Importance and Value of Human Life.—How could man know that he was more than an atom in a whirlpool of atoms, his life of sense but a transitory thing, if it had not been for the Scriptures which seek to impress upon him the value of his life in the sight of God (John 3:16,17; Matthew 16:26)? Without the pale of the Christian faith men hold life but cheaply, they squander it and waste it in sin; they too often ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... church building. It came to me abruptly that the old order was gone,—had slipped away during my absence. The church I had known in boyhood had been torn down to make room for a business building on Boyne Street; the edifice in which I sat was expensive, gave forth no distinctive note; seemingly transitory with its hybrid interior, its shiny oak and blue and red organ-pipes, betokening a compromised and weakened faith. Nondescript, likewise, seemed the new minister, Mr. Randlett, as he prayed unctuously in front of the flowers massed on the platform. I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... transitory opulence enlivened the studio. Julio had increased his expenses, considering himself rich. But the letters from his uncle in America soon dissipated these illusions. At first the remittances exceeded very slightly the monthly allowance that his father had made him. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... no reputation that can be achieved amongst men that is so transitory, so evanescent, as that of a great advocate. The very wand that enchants us is magical. Its effects can be felt; it influences our actions; it controls and possesses us; but to define it, or tell what it is, or how it produces these effects, is as far beyond our power as to imprison ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... which thunder-word, indeed, and the flash of the clear iron, the Rascal-flood recoils, through all avenues, fast enough. (Montgaillard, i. 369. Besenval, &c.) New features these. Indeed, as good M. de Malesherbes pertinently remarks, "it is a quite new kind of contest this with the Parlement:" no transitory sputter, as from collision of hard bodies; but more like "the first sparks of what, if not quenched, may become a great ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... same kind; but while South Australia, in a short time, emerged to a career of brilliant prosperity through sturdy determination to make the land productive, West Australia for forty years never enjoyed more than a transitory gleam of success. ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... a man is transitory.— What do you know of his past? the years He gave to another his manhood's glory?— The love of a man is transitory. Listen to ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... him what that they would have of him, riches or anything else, and they should have it, with good will. And they answered, that he was rich enough that had meat and drink to sustain the body with, for the riches of this world, that is transitory, is not worth; but if it were in his power to make them immortal, thereof would they pray him, and thank him. And Alexander answered them that it was not in his power to do it, because he was mortal, as they were. And then they asked him why he ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... shunn'd the Fray, He'd swill'd a little too much Tea. Chastity melts like sun-kiss'd snow, When Lust's hot wind begins to blow. Let but that horrid Creature, Man, Breathe on a lady thro' her fan, Her Virtue thaws, and by and bye Will of the falling Sickness die. Lo! Beauty, still more transitory, Fades in the mid-day of its glory! For Nature in her kindness swore, That she who kills, shall kill no more; And in pure mercy does erase Each killing feature in the face; Plucks from the cheek the damask rose, E'en at the moment that ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... constant gain in knowledge and education; there has been continuous advance in science and invention; there has been distinct gain in public health. Business depressions have been recurrent in the life of our country and are but transitory. The Nation has emerged from each of them with increased strength and virility because of the enlightenment they have brought, the readjustments and the larger understanding of the realities and obligations of life and work which ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover
... desire it was to make the heart better by the sorrows of the countenance, and to save the soul from hell by the punishment of the body. Vegetables were allowed to rot in the cellars, and to make everybody sick with their noxious odors so that we might not be too much wedded to this transitory existence. Pork, beans, and cabbage must be devoured in enormous quantities just before going to bed for the purpose of inspiring midnight groans and prayers to be delivered from the pangs of the civil war in the ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... which a competition of interests might justly render it suspected. In the first case he united with them in the same flock, or at most by some kind of free association which obliged none of its members, and lasted no longer than the transitory necessity that had given birth to it. In the second case every one aimed at his own private advantage, either by open force if he found himself strong enough, or by cunning and address if he thought himself too weak to ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... the wounds of the body, over which it holds its empire; but those of the soul, like the soul itself, spurn his transitory sway. ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... it was,—the one irresistible poetry there had ever been, with the magic word spoken in due time, transforming his own age and the world about him, presenting its everyday touch, the very trick one knew it by, as an additional grace, asserting the latent poetic rights of the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent. Poetry need no longer mask itself in the habit of a bygone day: Gaston could but pity the people of bygone days for not being above-ground to read. Here, was a discovery, a new faculty, a ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... infant head. The scene is one which recurred again and again in the history of his race, yet nothing can take from it its touching features. At six years old even the intimation of a father's death, especially when taking place at a distance, would make but a transitory impression upon the mind; yet we may well imagine the child taken from his toys, wrapped from head to foot in some royal mantle, with a man's crown held over his baby head, receiving with large eyes of wonder and fright easily translated into tears, the sacred oil, the sceptre which his little ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... a human being alive, and I do not believe that a human being ever lived, who had the sense of independent individuality which I have. Let a man have the very smallest doubt concerning his own independence—let that doubt be ever so transitory and produced by any accident whatsoever—and he ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... me to speak of the elusiveness of soap, the knottiness of strings, the transitory nature of buttons, the inclination of suspenders to twist, and of hooks to forsake their lawful eyes, and cleave only unto the hairs of their hapless owner's head. (It occurs to me as barely possible, that, in the last ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... who make much ado about the transitory nature of all things and are lost in the contemplation of earthly vanity: are we not here to make the transitory permanent? This we can do only if we know ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the Friar; "I told her the sad news, and offered her spiritual comfort. I reminded her of the transitory condition of mortality, and advised her to take the veil: I quoted the example of the holy ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... indeed, that this was a life which could not with impunity be lived too long; else, it might have made me permanently other than I had been without transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lions; would not let go, death or no-death:—and here it lies, shot down in ranks; whole swaths of dead men, and their muskets by them,—as if they had got the word to take that posture, and had done it hurriedly! A small transitory gleam of proud rage is visible, deep down, in the soul of Friedrich as he records this fact. Shock ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... land than an acre of poor, unproductive land; and the pleasure and profit of harvesting a crop that abundantly rewards the husbandman for his care and labor are so overwhelmingly in favor of rich land as to need no comment. Besides, manuring with green crops is not transitory in its effects; the land remembers the generous treatment for many years, and if at times lime or ashes be added to assist decomposition, will continue to yield remunerative crops long after land but once treated with stable manure or guano fails to produce any thing ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... returned after a long absence. He made all the apologies in the world for being called away suddenly, and consequently, unable to render that attention to his business which his feelings had prompted. Like all secessionists, George was very fiery and transitory in his feelings. He expressed unmeasurable surprise when the Captain told him the condition of his man in the old jail. "You don't say that men are restricted like that in Charleston? Well, now, I never was in that jail, but it's unsuited to the ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... has been extended to new relations by analogy, /1/ It exists where the principal does not stand in the relation of paterfamilias to the actual wrong-doer. /2/ A man may be held for another where the relation was of such a transitory nature as to exclude the conception of status, as for the negligence of another person's servant momentarily acting for the defendant, or of a neighbor helping him as a volunteer; /3/ and, so far as known, no principal has ever escaped on the ground of the dignity of his agent's employment. /4/ ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... mere transitory one. That same night she made a discovery which increased her apprehension almost to terror. This was nothing less than the fact that Eleanore had been keeping a diary of the last few weeks. "Oh," she ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... frightened dreams she reached out to something that she felt must be beyond the pleasant sound of falling water, so small and transitory; beyond the drip and patter of human destinies—something vast, solitary, and silent. How should she find that which none has ever named or known? Men only stammer of it in such words as Eternity, Fate, God. All the outcries of all creatures, living and dying, sink in its depth as in ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... polypes, it must be understood that such comparisons are warranted only by a similarity of outward form, and of the instruments of locomotion and prehension. The essential internal organization of the persistent lower forms of the zooephyta is entirely wanting in the transitory states of the higher ones. A progress through the inferior groups is sketched out, but no actual transmutation of species is effected. The young medusa, before it attains its destined condition of maturity, successively resembles, but never becomes, a polygastrian, a rotifer, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... arm"—"redeemed His people from their enemies; for His mercy endureth for ever!" Nations and generations may rise and pass away; phases of dominion and civilisation may vary under Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic, and Roman forms, or under our modern modifications; yet all this is transitory. The God of creation, providence, and grace, He lives and abides for ever. His power is still great as in the days of old, His wisdom unsearchable, and His goodness infinite. Ay, and this dispenser of kingdoms is also ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... something, as he expressed it, "very unlike the Church of England;" something new and unpleasant to him, and withal something which had a body in it, which had a momentum, which could not be passed over as a vague, sudden sound or transitory cloud, but which had much behind it, which made ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... found. For, my lord, if the days of our old age are more numerous than those of our youth, of them must we think. From those who brought me up I learned to properly estimate this life, and I know that everything therein is transitory, except the security of the natural affections. Thus I wish for the esteem of everyone, and above all that of my husband, who is all the world to me. Therefore do I desire to appear honest in his sight. I have finished, and I entreat you to allow me unmolested to attend to my household ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... addition to the ordinary shows, the more popular he became for the time being. In the Roman world you must pay for your ambitions, and this was the most approved way of paying. We might moralise over the enormous frivolity which could waste day after day thousands and thousands of pounds upon such transitory pleasures, instead of conferring lasting benefits in the way of hospitals or schools. But it is not the object of this book to moralise. We may feel confident that the Roman populace, if offered the choice, would have voted for the chariot-races or the gladiators, not for ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the sixth century then beginning. An apostate from the Catholic faith has said of them that they built up France as bees build a hive; but he omitted to say that they were able and willing to do this because they had a queen-bee at Rome, who, scattered as they were in various transitory kingdoms under heretical sovereigns, gave unity to all their efforts, and planted in their hearts the assurance of one undying kingdom. We shall have presently to quote other words of St. Avitus, speaking, as he says, in the name of all his brethren to the senators of Rome: "If ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... rapidly growing light she caught a transitory gleam in the American's eyes, though his face was as impassive as usual. And the worst of it was that it suggested humor, not resentment. Even in the tumult of wounded pride that took her heart by storm, she realized that ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... in those early, transitory days when the influence of the past was still upon us, though we foresaw and caught glimpses of the new. We were simple souls. I believe that Josephine's wagon was hitched to a star; else I could not have loved her. And she believed ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... employ force even in the defence of their religion, they should be still more criminal if they were tempted to shed the blood of their fellow-creatures in disputing the vain privileges, or the sordid possessions, of this transitory life. Faithful to the doctrine of the apostle, who in the reign of Nero had preached the duty of unconditional submission, the Christians of the three first centuries preserved their conscience pure and innocent of the guilt of secret conspiracy, or open rebellion. While they experienced the rigor ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, an elaborate review of Pope's writings seriatim, doing him certainly full justice, but ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire," wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal. . . . He stuck to {201} describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical enthusiasm ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... rough matrons, clergy; this will serve, for such was Hawthorne's fine economy, knowing that this story was one in which every materialistic element must be used at its lowest tone. Though the scene lay in this world, it was but transitory scaffolding; the drama was ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... and permanent result, viz. immortality, he applies himself to the study of the Srraka-Mmms, which consists in a systematic discussion of the Vednta-texts, and has for its result the accurate determination of their sense. That the fruit of mere works is transitory, while the result of the knowledge of Brahman is something permanent, the Vedanta-texts declare in many places—'And as here the world acquired by work perishes, so there the world acquired by merit perishes' ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... country became more settled, much of their main food supply, the acorns, was consumed by the domestic animals of the ranchers, and their mode of living became more precarious and transitory, and many of them were, at times, in a condition near to starvation. In these straitened and desperate circumstances, many of their young women were used as commercial property, and peddled out to the mining camps and gambling saloons for ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... prepared for all this gloom by parting with Mr. Conway yesterday morning; moral reflections or commonplaces are the livery one likes to wear, when one has just had a real misfortune. He is going to Germany: I was glad to dress myself up in transitory Houghton, in lieu of very sensible concern. To-morrow I shall be distracted with thoughts, at least images of very different complexion. I go to Lynn, and am to be elected on Friday. I shall return hither on Saturday, again alone, to expect Burleighides on Sunday, whom ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... suddenness &c. 113; changeableness &c. 149. transient, transient boarder, transient guest [U.S.]. V. be transient &c. adj.; flit, pass away, fly, gallop, vanish, fade, evaporate; pass away like a cloud, pass away like a summer cloud, pass away like a shadow, pass away like a dream. Adj. transient, transitory, transitive; passing, evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c. v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous[obs3]. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his divan, his whole spirit absorbed in rumination on the transitory nature of human glory, when his kinsman and brother-in-law, the prince Cid Hiaya, was announced. That illustrious convert to the true faith and the interests of the conquerors of his country had hastened to ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... keep within the law he has done nothing wrong. A banker, when heavily involved, seldom scruples to become a bankrupt and to keep back money enough to enable him to start afresh, even if he does nothing worse. This, however, is probably a transitory phase, and the same thing has happened in England and America at one stage of commercial development. In time it may be expected that the loss of the old religious and caste feeling will be made good by a new ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... for a few moments preparatory to our final descent, did we obtain a transitory glimpse of the world beneath us. Upon approaching the upper surface of the vapoury strata, which we have described as extending in every direction around, a partial opening in the clouds discovered to us for an instant a portion of the earth, appearing as if dimly seen through ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... they were not there on their own account, but stood in witness to some superior reality. Through them you were somehow assured of Reality with a most singular and overpowering certainty. You were aware of the possibility of an ensuing agony and horror as of something unreal and transitory that would break through the peace of it in a merely episodical manner. Whatever happened to come round the turn of the road would ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... the King drinks a full glass silently. It is my libation on a friendship's grave. Perhaps it would support an interpretation more subtle. For when I stood between Owen and Hammerfeldt, torn this way and that, uncertain whom I should follow through life, was not I the humble transitory theatre of a great and secular struggle? It seems to me that then the Ideal and the Actual joined in battle over me; Hector and Achilles, and I the body of Patroclus! Alas, poor body! Greatly the combatants desire ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... suspicions. Fortunately, as regarded this circumstance at least, his painful past gave to his countenance an indelible sadness, and the glimmerings of gayety seen beneath this cloud were indeed but transitory. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... colonies had but a precarious and transitory existence; fisheries alone succeeded, and French commerce continued insignificant, circumscribed, and domestic, notwithstanding the increasing requirements of luxury at court. This luxury contented itself with the use of the merchandise ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... to the dwellers in the land, though they are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who showed me all the notable ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... joyous ceremonials and commemorations, to those who are advanced in years bring with them some sorrow blended with their joy. In such sorrow however, where it is a simple tribute of natural regrets to the images of vanished things, and the fleeting records of poor transitory man, there is often an overbalance of pleasure. But the merest stranger, who read the features of Sir Morgan Walladmor with a discerning eye, might see a history written there of a sorrow that went deeper than that—a sorrow not tempered by any pleasure. ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... the Pantechnicon) continued to look sideways with one eye down pieces of wood, as if they were absorbed in the contemplation of the perspective of the Thames Tunnel, and had entirely relinquished the vanities of this transitory world; but still there was an improvement, and it is confirmed to-day. White lime is to be seen in kitchens, the bath-room is gradually resolving itself from an abstract idea into a fact—youthful, extremely youthful, but a fact. The drawing-room encourages no hope whatever, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... on to his bridge over Baiae bay; and when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man. Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us over ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the quiet village of Addlebrains, that the fashion in this respect, which has prevailed, certainly, since the time of St. Luke, who commences his Gospel with a preface to Theophilus, has come down to the present day, differing therein from other fashions, which, for the most part, are as transitory as the flowers of the field, and commending itself thereby to the thoughtful consideration of the judicious; for it cannot be deemed there is no value in that which has received the sanction of centuries. Influenced by reflections of this description and the like, I sat down one day in the little ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... noblest mind, when I ventured to doubt his sincerity. He takes truth more seriously than you do. He regards it not only as beautiful and right to be truthful, he says, but as prudent too; for lies can only procure us a small short-lived advantage, as transitory as the mists of night which vanish as soon as the sun appears, while truth is like the sunlight itself, which as often as it is dimmed by clouds reappears again and again. And, he says, what makes a liar so particularly contemptible in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... proper Stature, and killed with a good Air and Mein. These are the gay Phantoms that dance before my waking Eyes and compose my Day-Dreams. I should be the most contented happy Man alive, were the Chimerical Happiness which springs from the Paintings of the Fancy less fleeting and transitory. But alas! it is with Grief of Mind I tell you, the least Breath of Wind has often demolished my magnificent Edifices, swept away my Groves, and left no more Trace of them than if they had never been. My Exchequer has sunk and vanished by a Rap on my Door, the Salutation of a Friend has cost ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... twenty-two years is a great space in the scale of the life of man; it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation. A business which has so long occupied the councils and the tribunals of Great Britain cannot possibly be huddled over in the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events. Nothing but some of those great revolutions that break the traditionary chain of human memory, and alter the very face of Nature itself, can possibly obscure it. My Lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it; the meanest of us will, by means of it, more ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... a transitory gleam of common sense flickered across me, and, turning on Charlotte, I sternly ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... the premise. As God the invisible is the changeless, what is the variable, fleeting, visible unreality? The real is everlasting, the unreal is transitory. The real is called ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... escape from this dilemma—'will seem as real as the chairs and tables round us; and remember that above all things, to the profound philosophy of occultism, are the chairs and tables, and the whole objective scenery of the world, unreal and merely transitory delusions of sense.' If, as he admits, they are material, why should they be more unreal than the chairs and tables in devachan, which are also material, since occult science contemplates no principle in nature as wholly immaterial? The fact is, that there is no more unreal and transitory ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... the Democritean philosophy. He believed the universe to be composed of atoms, infinite in number, and variable, to a finite extent, in form, which drift slantingly through an infinite void. Their combinations under the conditions of what we call space and time are transitory, while they remain themselves imperishable. Consequently, as the soul itself is corporeally constituted, and as thought and sensation depend on mere material idola, men may divest themselves of any fear of the hereafter. There is no such thing as providence, nor ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... memory which, by constant and close observation, extracts and stores up the essential serviceable kind of facts for the designer: facts of form, of structure, of movement of figures, expressive lines, momentary or transitory effects of colour—all those rare and precious visual moments which will not wait, and which happen unexpectedly. They should be captured like rare butterflies and carefully stored in the mind's museum of suggestions, as well as, as far as is possible, ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... gained wisdom from the experience of her sister. Quite convinced of the transitory nature of a king's favor, she formed the bold design of capturing the hand as well as the heart of his majesty of France. Perhaps Louis fathomed her intentions, and resolved to punish her ambition, for he suddenly manifested ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... soon fast asleep after his night of exertion: his dreams were confused and wild; but I seldom trouble people about dreams, which are as nought. When Reason descends from her throne, and seeks a transitory respite from her labour, Fancy usurps the vacant seat, and in pretended majesty, would fain exert her sister's various powers. These she enacts to the best of her ability, and with about the same success as attends a monkey ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... precious Blood, with desire to see you in true light. For without light we shall not be able to walk in the way of truth, but shall walk in shadows. Two lights are necessary. First, we must be illumined to know the transitory things of the world, which all pass like the wind. But these are not rightly known if we do not know our own frailty, how inclined it is, from the perverse law which is bound up with our members, to rebel ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... transitory consolation. I knew that, wandering at random, I might never reach the outlet of this cavern, or might be disabled, by hunger and fatigue, from going farther than the outlet. The cravings which had lately been satiated ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... that although it was but momentary I recoiled in something that, if it was not fear, was very closely akin to it. Yet I was glad that I had caught that fleeting expression, for it reassured me; it afforded me a transitory glimpse of the woman's true character, and taught me more thoroughly, perhaps, than anything else could that Anuti and his friends were right and justified in their denunciation of her character. And ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... renounce the honours and comforts of this transitory life in order to gain eternal glory in the next, by denying themselves, and taking up the cross? Was it fanatical to preach salvation to innumerable wild hordes of Americans? to clothe the naked? to encourage the repenting ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... sensibilities; but I assert that the real work of creative genius is accomplished in the intervals of this purturbation of the nerves which by some is deemed so essential to intellectual labour. When the nerves are excited to the highest pitch, they occasionally suffer, the transitory cessation from which is the divine moment of human creation. It seems to me, however, that this ought to be left to nature, and that every attempt to produce artificial excitement, for the purpose of producing creations of a higher class, is futile ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... and confidence, alienation and conjunction, yea, dispute and compromise, thus reconciliation; and also that apparent friendships promote reconciliation, is well known in the world. There are also reconciliations which take place after partings, which are not so alternate and transitory. ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... rushed," she returned, and composed her features to fitting solemnity. As the lawyer slowly read the instrument, which he could have rattled off from memory, Mrs. Weatherwax punctuated the pious phrases of its exordium with approving wags. "'Frail and transitory,'" she interpolated; "that's jest what life is. I might be took any minute." At the reference to the payment of her lawful debts she recovered her spirits sufficiently to put in that she did not owe a "red cent," as everybody knew. Finally ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... she said, looking solemnly upwards, "that even in the case which you suppose, I would not sorrow so much for myself, as I would for the poor-spirited thoughts of the lover who could leave me because those transitory charms (which must in any case erelong take their departure) had fled ere yet the bridal day. It is, however, concealed by the decrees of Providence, in what manner, or to what extent, other persons, with whose ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... with immense leathern boots on, inside which their trousers were pushed, and with their petticoats tucked round their waists, all laughing, gesticulating, and splashing each other as they stood in the water. These thaws, however, were but transitory; the frost returned, harder and more obstinate than ever, and recourse was had to sledges, pushed along by skaters, or drawn by roughshod horses along the causeways, which were like polished mirrors. ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... who had hitherto concealed their indulgence in pleasure, now grew bolder. For, seeing the sudden change,—how the rich died in a moment, and those who had nothing, immediately inherited their property,—they reflected that life and riches were alike transitory, and they resolved to enjoy themselves while they could, and to think only of pleasure. Who would be willing to sacrifice himself to the law of honor when he knew not whether he would ever live to be held in honor? The pleasure ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... For, after all, the world about us is but a shadow, a transitory and flickering shadow, of the actual and greater world within us. Yes, the incomparably greater world within us; for what is a world of grass and granite compared with a world of blood and tears? What is ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... rested on Mr. Gilmore, who had just taken up his position at Marshall Langham's elbow. The gambler frowned and the handy-man instantly shifted his gaze. But the prosecuting attorney's first questions served to give Joe a measure of ease; this was transitory, however, as he seemed to stand alone in the presence of some imminent personal danger when ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... synchronous and successive associations. How does the logical terminology express these 'clusters' and 'trains'? Mill answers by a theory of 'naming.' Language fulfils two purposes; it is required in order to make our ideas known to others; and in order to fix our own ideas. Ideas are fluctuating, transitory, and 'come into the mind unbidden.' We must catch and make a note of these shifting crowds of impalpable entities. We therefore put marks upon the simple sensations or upon the 'clusters.' We ticket them as a tradesman tickets bundles of goods in his warehouse, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... is preeminently the home fruit. It is not transitory. It spans every season. In an indifferent cellar I keep apples till apples come again. The apple stands up, keeps well on the table. Children may handle it. In color and form it satisfies any taste. Its rondure is perfect. The cavity is deep, graceful and well moulded, ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... herein, ye be at your liberty: but all is written for our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to exercise and follow virtue by the which we may come and attain to good fame and renown in this life, and after this short and transitory life to come unto everlasting bliss in heaven" (Preface of William Caxton to "The Book of ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar
... presently in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the existence of anything else; my impressions and ideas are the only existences of which I can have any knowledge or conception; and they are such fleeting and transitory beings, that they can have no existence at all, any longer than I am conscious of them. So that, upon this hypothesis, the whole universe about me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon, stars, and earth, friends and relations, all things without exception, which I imagined ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... created, and waking into 1835-40 at Venice, asks himself—What am I writing, and why? What is my aim in being a poet? Is it worth my while to go on with Sordello's story, and why is it worth the telling? In fact, he allows us to think that he has been describing in Sordello's story a transitory phase of his own career. And then, having done this, he tells how he got out of confusion into ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... work does not displease me. We are men of the day, people in love with the passing moment, with all that is fugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of our work preoccupies us little, so little that it can hardly be said to ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... no discipline, no reverence; where those who know the least make the most noise; where those who stand for public order are alarmed by every chance comer whose power lies in his making a great outcry and respecting nothing. It insures the reign of transitory passion, the triumph of the inferior will. I compare these two educations—one, the exaltation of the environment, the other of the individual; one the absolutism of tradition, the other the tyranny of ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... institutions through spontaneous action on individual minds; but an institution, the perpetual source of doctrine for individual obedience and trust. Revelation is not a mere communication of truth, not a transitory visit from heaven to earth, ascertained by human testimony, and fixed in historical records; but a continuous incarnation of Deity, a permanent real presence of the Infinite in certain selected persons ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... me not of transitory Wealth, for I'm resolv'd not to survive thee. Eight thousand Pound say you?—Oh, I cannot ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... with an industrial capitalist?" But it was a little harder to give an affirmative reply to the proposition that the social relation thus established proceeds to create principles, ideas and categories as merely historical and transitory products. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... given to the masses is, in its nature, spasmodic and transitory. No systematic enterprise to enlighten the masses ever can be carried out. Campaigns of education contain a fallacy. Education takes time. It cannot be treated as subsidiary for a lifetime and then be made the chief business for six months ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... promise, shall we not still be exposed to the hatred of the Queen, to the resentment of the Prince de Conde, and to all the evil consequences that may be expected from an enraged Court for such an action? There is no true glory but what is durable; transitory honour is mere smoke. Of this sort is that which we shall acquire by this peace, if we do not support it by such alliances as will gain us the reputation of wisdom as well as of honesty. I admire ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... that such had always been his conduct, one single and singular moment excepted, when, as he gave to her his letter for Mr Belfield, he seemed struck as she was herself by the extraordinary co-incidence of their ideas and proceedings: that emotion, however, she now regarded as casual and transitory, and seeing him so much happier than herself, she felt ashamed of her delusion, and angry at ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... attention on herself, detaching it from all that was merely external and transitory, withdrawing it inwards ... inwards, until she found that secret spark which, beneath all frailties and activities, made her a substantial member of the divine race ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... what it parts with. Nor is it well for ever so civilized a people to be selling its Specie and mortgaging its Lands and Houses for Silks, Liquors, Laces, Wines, Spices, &c.—trading off the essential and imperishable for the factitious and transitory—and so eating itself out of house and home. The farmer who drinks up his farm at the cross-roads tavern may have obtained "more for his exports" (of produce from his farm), than they were worth in the market—at ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... the neckcloth. Even his reform has passed away; such is the transitory nature of all human achievements. But the art of neckcloths was once more than a dubious title to renown in the world of Bond Street. The politics of the time were disorderly; and the dress of politicians ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... He came for the first time under the great enchantment which paralyzes the spirit and energy of the Celt. He knew himself to be, as his people were, capable of spasms of enthusiasm, the victim of transitory burnings of soul. But the curse was upon him—the inevitable curse of feeling too keenly and seeing too clearly to be strenuous and constant. The flame would die down, the enthusiasm would vanish—it ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... I think the distinction has arisen entirely from confusing a transitory imperfection with an essential character. So long as our information concerning them is imperfect, we class all objects together according to resemblances which we feel, but cannot define; we group them round ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners often practise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious of those moods and events which are permanent and human, as compared with those other moods and events which are transitory and unimportant. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... whose dissecting rooms I was privileged to work held that species were not permanent as a fact established inductively on a wide basis of observation, by which comparative osteology had been created. Camper and Hunter suspected the species might be transitory; but Cuvier, in defining the characters of his anaplotherium and palaeotherium, etc., proved the fact. Of the relation of past to present species, Cuvier had not an adequate basis for a decided opinion. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... worldly desires, and so were enabled to cling with their whole heart to God, and be free and at leisure for the thought of Him. We are too much occupied with our own affections, and too anxious about transitory things. Seldom, too, do we entirely conquer even a single fault, nor are we zealous for daily growth in grace. And so ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... history for you to read at leisure in any good library. You will find that the anti-English complex has its influence sometimes in the pages of our historians, but Professor Dunning is free from it. You will find, whatever transitory gusts of anger, jealousy, hostility, or petulance may have swept over the English people in their relations with us, these gusts end in a calm; and this calm is due to the common-sense of the race. It revealed itself in the treaty at the close ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... could out of Mr Fraser's sight, to whom he did not wish to give explanations to the prejudice of any of his fellow-students. Mr Fraser, however, saw his black eye well enough, but was too discreet to ask questions, and appeared quite unaware of the transitory blemish. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the skin, due to hyperaemia of its blood vessels, and result from scorching by flame, from contact with solids or fluids below 212 F., or from exposure to the sun's rays. They are characterised clinically by acute pain, redness, transitory swelling from oedema, and subsequent desquamation of the surface layers of the epidermis. A special form of pigmentation of the skin is seen on the front of the legs of women from exposure to ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... my lot to listen. Mrs. Auld evidently felt the force of his remarks; and, like an obedient wife, began to shape her course in the direction indicated by her husband. The effect of his words, on me, was neither slight nor transitory. His iron sentences—cold and harsh—sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... when Rose came out of her own nightmare, got her breath and found leisure to look around, she found some one else whose troubles weren't so transitory. The little scene in the first act, between Sylvia and the sextette, was held up again and again, endlessly, it seemed to Rose,—and what must it have seemed to the poor victim?—while Galbraith bellowed Larson's lines after her, sometimes in grotesque imitation of her own ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... see tolerably well with them and they were not bleared. I felt my arms and thighs and teeth—they were strong and sound enough; so now was the time to labour, to marry, eat strong flesh, and beget strong children—the power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly transitory. I bethought me that a time would come when my eyes would be bleared and perhaps sightless; my arms and thighs strengthless and sapless; when my teeth would shake in my jaws, even supposing they did not drop out. No going a-wooing then, no labouring, no eating strong flesh and begetting ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... man's life was his steadfast and brave opposition to the witchcraft mania of 1692. This deplorable madness was in New England a mere transitory panic, from which the people quickly recovered; but while it lasted it almost silenced opposition, and it required genuine heroism to lift a voice against it. No country of Europe was free from the ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... is at its lowest ebb among the Sakais and especially representative art, although it is curious to notice how much more they prefer (I speak of the male sex) this latter to that of sounds. Music may procure some moments of bliss to those who yield themselves to its charms but it is transitory and, with them, leaves no reminiscence for the performer or the listener; on the contrary representative art remains and can also give satisfaction to the self love of the artist. It is limited to some rough designs and still more rough incisions on the blowpipes, quivers and the women's combs ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... can tell. In it Turner seized and rolled together in one triumphant moment the emotional effect of noble shipping and a sentiment as ancient and profound as the sea itself—human regret for transitory human glory. The great warship, glimmering in her Mediterranean fighting-paint, moving like a queen to execution; the pert and ignoble tug, itself an emblem of the new order, eager, pushing, ugly, and impatient of the slow loveliness it supersedes; the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... attended him when he sate in council could not refrain from sneering at his frivolous remarks, and at his childish impatience. Neither gratitude nor revenge had any share in determining his course; for never was there a mind on which both services and injuries left such faint and transitory impressions. He wished merely to be a King such as Lewis the Fifteenth of France afterwards was; a King who could draw without limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private tastes, who could hire with wealth and honours persons capable of assisting ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... became the Little Sunbeam of the Home, or if Cabinet Ministers struck for a decrease of wages. I feel no security in facts, precedent seems no protection to me. The wisdom you can find in an Encyclopedia, or in Selfridge's Information Bureau, seems to me just a transitory adaptation to quicksand circumstances. ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... without any intrinsic value. His mind was still engrossed with other things than the real poesy of music. Notwithstanding this, under cover of such performances as these, he believed he could announce himself to the family as a musician. They regarded such efforts at composition however as a mere transitory passion, which would disappear like others especially so as he was not proficient on even one instrument, and could not therefore assume to do the work of a practical musician with any degree of assurance. At this time a strange and confused impression was made upon ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... review of its character, the Myth will be seen to be one of the transitory expressions of the religious sentiment, which in enlightened lands it has already outgrown and should lay aside. So far as it relates to events, real or alleged, historic or geologic, it deals with that which is indifferent to pure religion; and so far as ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... objected; "I can imagine wanting another woman under certain transitory circumstances, but I can't ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... construction blending with the background of the mountains, from which probably it had been quarried; but nearer it is imposing in appearance, there being several minarets, and some massive buildings, among which the ruins of a Portuguese cathedral bear their mute testimony to a transitory era in the long history of the East. During our stay there was some disturbance in the place. Our information was that the reigning sovereign had killed his father two years before; and that in consequence, either through revenge or jealousy, his father's ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... famous performers from the four quarters of the globe. Looked at from a point of criticism, tiny puppets they seem all, as the editor sets up his booth upon my desk and officiates as showman. Now I can truly see how little and transitory is life. The earth appears almost as a drop of vinegar, on which the solar microscope of the imagination must be brought to bear in order to make out any thing distinctly. That animalcule there, in the pea-jacket, is Louis ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... thousand dollars, holding at one time fifty thousand dollars in Delaware and Hudson Canal stock, subsequently got involved and lost all. Instances like these might be multiplied to volumes, but they are sufficient to illustrate the transitory nature ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... silliest of them will make you think that her glove is more precious than fortune, and that nothing is so glorious as to be her slave. They will all tell you that they bestow happiness, and thus lull you to forget your nobler destiny. Believe me, the happiness they give is transitory; your great career will endure. You know not with what perfidious cleverness they contrive to satisfy their caprices, nor the art with which they will convert your passing fancy into a love which ought to be eternal. The day when they abandon you they will tell you that the words, "I no longer love ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors, great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Thy Altar remember Monnica Thy handmaid, with Patricius, her sometimes husband, by whose bodies Thou broughtest me into this life, how I know not. May they with devout affection remember my parents in this transitory light, my brethren under Thee our Father in our Catholic Mother, and my fellow-citizens in that eternal Jerusalem which Thy pilgrim people sigheth after from their Exodus, even unto their return thither. That so my mother's last request of me, may through my confessions, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... suggestion. Had I been confronted with an Eve, I should have run like hell. To him, though, she was cloaked in mystery; hence, more desirable. What better choice for him ultimately than Ria? That Ria had to die to achieve her happiness is of no real importance. Life is a transitory thing anyway. ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... the tendency toward an elevated and platonic conception of friendship. Shakespeare sought in both of these a compensation for his own disastrous love affair and marriage. But the healing that either could give was at best transitory. There remained to him as a poet of genius one resource. He could gratify his own burning desire for a pure and unselfish love by living in his mighty imagination the lives of his characters. "He who in his yearning for the highest joys of love had been compelled to abandon hope, found a ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... gardens and shrubberies Nature, however, reserves the evergreen pride of firs and pines; and even flowers are left to gladden the eye of the winter observer; and the rose, that sweet emblem of our fragile and transitory state, will live and prosper during this month. In the forest, the oak, beech, and hornbeam in part retain their leaves; there, too, is the endless variety of mosses, and lichens, and ivy, spreading and clinging round ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... excepting that of Algiers, our affairs remain on the ordinary footing. The consul-general residing with that Regency has suddenly and without cause been banished, together with all the American citizens found there. Whether this was the transitory effect of capricious despotism or the first act of predetermined hostility is not ascertained. Precautions were taken by the consul on the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... of importations and of machinery are misled by allowing themselves to form too hasty a judgment from immediate and transitory effects, instead of following these up to their general ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... There are (though this may to some seem strange) people who consider the Church at least as important as the State, and even more so, inasmuch as its concernments relate to an eternal instead of a transitory order. What are the prospects of the Church? Here the mists are thicker than ever. Is the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State any nearer realization than it was three years ago? All sorts of discordant voices reach me through the layers of cloud. Some cry, "Our one hope for national ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... that of "short period" comets, of which four[304] were known in 1850. These, by the character of their movements, serve as a link between the planetary and cometary worlds, and by the nature of their construction, seem to mark a stage in cometary decay. For that comets are rather transitory agglomerations, than permanent products of cosmical manufacture, appeared to be demonstrated by the division and disappearance of one amongst their number, as well as by the singular and rapid changes in appearance ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... suddenly into our lives tempting us with colour, fugitive as that of a flower, luring us with light as rapid as the light shed from the wings of a dove. Why, I asked myself, as I lay under the larches, are we to mourn transitory delight so intensely, why should it possess us more entirely than the sorrow that we experience for her who endured the labour of child-bearing, who nourished us perchance at her breast, whose devotion to us was unceasing, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... I a sleepe? What transitory dreame Deceivd my sense? did I not here my love Protest affection? no, it was some feind Vested in his mortallity, whome hell Sent ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... for the first time became aware of the startling rapidity with which the night seemed to have fallen; for with the extinguishment of the lantern we found ourselves enwrapped in darkness so thick that it could almost be felt. This, however, proved to be only transitory, for with the lapse of a few minutes our eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and we were then able not only to discern the shapes of the vast pile of clouds that threateningly overhung us, but also their reflections in the oil-smooth water, the latter made visible by the dull, ruddy ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... imperishable Anglo-Saxon thumb print on the map; a thumb print that no future changes can obliterate, a thumb print that shall be less transitory than the pyramids because it will be a part of the fundamental needs of a people as long as ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and born painters. But they are not orderly. They are not organizers of form and colour. No: they are not. On the contrary, these good fellows had the most elementary notions of composition. They seem hardly to have guessed that what one sees is but a transitory and incoherent fragment out of which it is the business of art to draw permanence and unity. They set down what they saw, and it is a bit of good luck if what they saw turns out to have somewhat the air of a whole. Yet M. Lhote, preaching his crusade against ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... I ventured to say, in a pleading tone, "these momentary ebullitions of a transitory rage will give the bystanders ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... frankly a sensualist; but she was patient, she was crafty. She knew that he was honourably in love with another, but she was not deterred by that nor by the conviction that her conquest, if she prevailed, would be transitory. She had a code of her own. It included an uncertain element of honour, fixed rather rigidly upon what she would have called constancy. Singleness of purpose was her notion of morality. She would ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... made the damsel see, That save in God there was no true content, And proved all other hope was transitory, Fleeting, of little worth, and quickly spent; And urged withal so earnestly his plea, He changed her ill and obstinate intent; And made her, for the rest of life, desire To live devoted to her ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... determine; for although I remained aloft there in the top for a good half-hour, with my eye glued to the telescope all the while, only once did I detect what had the appearance of something moving on board her; but the sight was so transitory and unsatisfactory that I might easily have been mistaken. However, we had by this time neared her to within some five miles; so, as another hour would decide the question, I determined to possess my soul in patience until then, and accordingly closed the telescope, slung it over my shoulder, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... first disciples at first did, scarcely seem to us fit to be turned into subjects of petition, partly because we have wrong notions as to the sphere and limits of prayer, and partly because they seem to be such transitory things that it is a shame to trouble Him about such insignificant matters. Well, go and tell Him, at any rate. I do not think that Christians ought to have anything in their heads or hearts that they do not take to Jesus Christ, and it is an uncommonly good test—and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... see blood flowing through these quiet fields, and gallows and guillotines erected in these squares, which never yet have seen an execution." "But is it not true also," I reflected later, "that this present happiness may be transitory up to a certain point, and that a changing of the captain-general or of the alcalde can cause great evils, and change the aspect of so pleasing a picture? Yes, it is a lamentable truth; and I shall do what is in my power so that your lot may be less ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... holding a torch, should one day, by common consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of urging her afresh to go with them to church; but something in her eyes brought a thought across his mind, as transitory as a breath passes over a looking-glass, and he desisted from his entreaty, and put away his thought as a piece of vain coxcombry, insulting to Hester. He passed rapidly on to all the careful directions rendered necessary by her compliance with the latter part of his request, coupling Sylvia's ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell |
