"Unstable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... didst thou doubt?" (Matt. xiv. 31.) He had God's eternal word, which was sure footing, and better than either marble, granite or iron; but the moment he took his eyes off Christ down he went. Those who look around cannot see how unstable and dishonoring is their walk. We want to look straight at the "Author ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... McDonough's theory (a good one concerning horses that work on pavements), the chief error in shoeing lies in that the foot is deprived of its normal base or support on the sides—the three-calked shoe being an unstable support—and that this manner of shoeing city horses working on pavements is an "inhumane" ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... position. The more we consider this arrangement, which seems modelled by a blind caprice so long as the grub drags itself laboriously over a smooth surface, the more do we marvel at the means, as effective as they are varied, which are lavished upon this fragile creature to help it to preserve its unstable equilibrium. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... stood on a narrow crest about three feet in width, with an inclination of about 20 degrees N. 51 degrees E. As soon as I had gratified the first feelings of curiosity I descended, and each man ascended in turn, for I would only allow one at a time to mount the unstable and precarious slab, which it seemed a breath would hurl into the abyss below. We mounted the barometer in the snow of the summit, and, fixing a ramrod in a crevice, unfurled the national flag, to wave in the breeze, where never flag waved before. During our morning's ascent, we met no sign of ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... and celestial was Leonardo, the son of Ser Piero da Vinci; and in learning and in the rudiments of letters he would have made great proficience, if he had not been so variable and unstable, for he set himself to learn many things, and then, after having begun them, abandoned them. Thus, in arithmetic, during the few months that he studied it, he made so much progress, that, by continually suggesting doubts and difficulties to the master who was teaching him, he would very ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... necessary to endeavour to secure the free development of these centres and their unimpeded functional activity, because otherwise the development of the higher centres is hindered, and the whole nervous system rendered unstable ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... terrible second day and night at sea, the Harrises and others tossed back and forth in their unstable berths, some suffering with chills and others with burning heat. Some, Mrs. Harris and daughter among them, lay for hours more dead than alive, their wills and muscles utterly powerless to reach needed and ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... look back upon it and see what a fool I was. I settled down at home and began writing. Lots of things came back from periodicals to which I sent them; but I had been told that this was the common lot of all writers, and I plodded on. A few things sold, just enough to keep my hopes in a state of unstable equilibrium. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... felicity? That of teaching him not to trust in his prosperity; of removing that vain confidence he has in his power and greatness, as if they were to endure for ever; of making him understand, that every thing which belongs to and depends upon fortune, is as unstable as herself; and that there is often but the space of a moment between the highest elevation and the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... should the warning of S. Peter be borne in mind: "Our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given unto him, hath written unto you—as also in all his epistles—speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto own destruction."[213] For the texts that tell of the identity of the Christ with His brother-men have been wrested into a legal substitution of Himself for them, and have thus been used as ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... has been impressed upon women as a result of ages of thinking in harmony with taboo standards, thus is able to prevent the normal biological response to a situation which should call out the emotions of love. In women who have an unstable nervous system this shameful feeling often results in a definite physiological shrinking from the physical manifestations of sexuality and renders the individual insensitive to ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... great; but he himself had scarcely formed a sufficient estimate of it. Determined to maintain a thorough equality and freedom with the noble bard in their social relations, he shrank from any position which might raise in Byron's jealous and unstable mind the idea that he was under pressure; yet he was anxious to prevent disappointment for Leigh Hunt. He dreaded failure, and resolved that he would do his best to prevent it; and yet again ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... farming of marginal areas, overgrazing, destruction of vegetation); water supplies contaminated by raw sewage; siltation of reservoirs; oil pollution of coastal waters natural hazards: northern mountains geologically unstable and subject to earthquakes; periodic droughts international agreements: party to - Endangered Species, Marine Dumping, Nuclear Test Ban, Ship Pollution, Wetlands; signed, but not ratified - Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of dazzling unstable confluent scenes. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... been and is, in respect to the calamities, wars, and revolutions that have befallen nations, and those weaknesses and wickednesses of individuals and peoples, the accounts of which are so great a stumbling-block to the "unstable and the unlearned." These very accounts, it is possible, may be intended to tell us, if rightly inquired into, why these things are so, why there is evil in the world, and what shall be the end of it. The world has existed, it is believed, nearly six thousand ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... the lips of the Princess of Wales. But that strong-minded woman, Caroline Dorothea Wilhelmina, steadily looked away from the mayor's consort. She would not do what Queen Anne had not thought worth the doing; and Lady Humphreys, we are sorry to say, stood upon her unstable rights, and displayed a considerable amount of bad temper and worse behaviour. She wore a train of black velvet, then considered one of the privileges of City royalty, and being wronged of one, she resolved to make the best of that which she possessed—bawling, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... obscurity, sudden fallings back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... which in the oncoming years was to arise between them; and of how she would die without his knowing of her death for two whole months; and of how his life thereafter would be changed, somehow, and the world would become an unstable place in which you could no longer put cordial faith. And he foreknew all the remorse he was to shrug away, after the squandering of so much pride and love. But these things were not yet: and besides, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... unstable or inglorious it might appear to those few who understood the interests, and felt for the honour of their country, was nevertheless not unwelcome to the nation in general. The British ministry will always find it more difficult to satisfy the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... resistance is often small in the case of precisely those reactions in which the affinity is also small; to this circumstance is to be traced the fact that in many chemical changes the most stable condition is not at once reached, but is preceded by the formation of more or less unstable intermediate products. Thus the unstable ozone is very often first formed on the evolution of oxygen, whilst in the reaction between oxygen and hydrogen water is often not at once formed, but first the unstable hydrogen peroxide ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... and tumbling in every direction. She had been afraid of them at first and they were still rather fearful to her imagination. This evening as her musing eye watched them rise and fall her childish fancy likened them to the up-springing chances of life,—uncertain, unstable, alike too much for her skill and her strength to manage. She was not more helpless before the attacks of the one than of the other. But then—that calm blue Heaven that hung over the sea. It was like the heaven of power and love above her destinies; only this ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... races and the piece de resistance of their comic papers. And I, at your service, the typical Frenchman; all shrugs and gesticulations and mustache—of politeness that is so insincere—of a heart that is so unstable. Ah! these national characteristics of comic journalism—how the stupid world trips over them on to ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... Unfortunately the latter was immediately taken with an illness which kept him out of public life for two years; and Grafton, the nominal Prime Minister, was utterly unable to hold his own against the influence and intrigues of the King. From the start, accordingly, the Ministry proved weak and unstable, and it allowed a new set of colonial ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... loves. She recognised me at once, and I her, but not as she ought to have recognised me, or I her. But who is there in the world that can boast of having fathomed or understood the wavering mind and unstable nature of a woman? Of a truth no one. To proceed: as soon as Luscinda saw me she said, 'Cardenio, I am in my bridal dress, and the treacherous Don Fernando and my covetous father are waiting for me in the hall with the other witnesses, who shall ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... after reaching San Francisco, the Hobarts sailed for Australia. They urged Grace to accompany them, but she declined, saying, with a smile, that she believed for the present she preferred the solid earth to the unstable sea. She saw her friends aboard the steamer; then returning to the hotel, sent for the manager, Major H.; explained that she expected her husband by the first steamer from Australia; that he did not expect to find her; so she wished to surprise him, and desired ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... continue our conversations on Timbuctoo. Most of the old respectable merchants have been to Timbuctoo. One of them, Haj Mansour, resided there fourteen years, carrying on a prosperous trade. But so perverse and unstable are human affairs, that, on returning home after so long an exile, with thirty camels laden with the riches of the interior, and with much fine gold, and whilst within a few days of Touat, the banditti of The Desert fell upon him and carried off everything, not leaving a water-skin to ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... sorts of marital woes. But, the situation once mastered, by the most loving and accurate of scientific methods of procedure, a happy married life is certain to result. Otherwise, the "married state" will always be in a condition of "unstable equilibrium." So let every bride and bridegroom begin, from the first, to try to establish the greatly to be desired accomplishment. If anything further on this point should be desired, consult a ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... to them! Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and other fictions; so let them pass current. Don't steal their chips; don't puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come down on their pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their brittle and unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names will be household words ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Razumov, her mind tried to get at the heart of that outburst. It had some meaning. No one is born an active revolutionist. The change comes disturbingly, with the force of a sudden vocation, bringing in its train agonizing doubts, assertive violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the final appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She had seen—often had only divined—scores of these young men and young women going through an emotional crisis. This young man looked like a moody ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... sufficiently aware that he should prosper better without his shallow-minded and unstable aide; but he meant to retain him about his person, on business in his service, till Aimee should have opportunity, in his absence, to explore her own mind, and determine her course, while far from the ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him. It was too late—everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water. The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... rolling, the groaning of penitent travelers, and the laboring of the vessel as she climbed those dark unstable mountains, my mind reverted feebly to Huxley's statement, that the bottom of this sea, for over a thousand miles, presents to the eye of science a vast chalk plain, over which one might drive as over a floor, and I tried to solace myself by dwelling upon ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... transitional and inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to a man left stranded in every country in Europe, during the period of his poetic activity. A transitional and unstable movement of society inevitably fails to supply a propulsion powerful enough to make its poetic expression eternal. There is no better proof of the enormous force of Byron's genius than that it was able to produce so fine ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... and myself. Paddling to the nearest and driest-looking part of the moraine flat, we stepped ashore, but gladly wallowed back into the canoe; for the gray mineral mud, a paste made of fine-ground mountain meal kept unstable by the tides, at once began to take us in, swallowing us feet foremost with becoming glacial deliberation. Our next attempt, made nearer the middle of the valley, was successful, and we soon found ourselves on firm gravelly ground, and made haste to the huge ice wall, which seemed to recede as we ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... analysis of heredity: Besides direct transmission of unstable Nervous systems, there remains the law Hereditary of sanguinity. Then here's another matter: Parents may Have normal nervous systems, yet produce Children of abnormal nerves and minds, Caused by unsuitable sexual germs. Let me repeat before I leave the matter The factors in a perfect organization: ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Captain Tremain, pausing, "I am not so sure about that. You see, their Government is so very unstable. The country itself is rich enough in mineral wealth, if that is what you mean." All the while Howard stood there with his mouth agape, and I felt like shoving my fist ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... outline, an imperfect embryo of a concrete, to the individuation of which the mind gives no conscious attention; just as when I say—"any thing," I may imagine a poker or a plate; but I pay no attention to its being this rather than that; and the very image itself is so wandering and unstable that at this moment it may be a dim shadow of the one, and in the next of some other thing. In this sense, idea is opposed to image in degree instead of kind; yet still contra-distinguished, as is evident by the sequel, "much ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns free citizens; ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... succeeded by a deputy-governor, Lieutenant-Colonel Armstrong,—a person of ardent impulses and unstable disposition. He applied himself with great zeal and apparent confidence to accomplishing the task in which his principal had failed. In fact, he succeeded in 1726 in persuading the inhabitants about Annapolis ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... he hated were the ones who had conceived and fostered that fear—the psychologically unstable megalomaniac Controllers. There were only a handful of them—probably not more than a few hundred or a thousand. But because of them, every telepath on Earth found his life in danger, and every Normal found his life a ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... further south, he besought me to come over and help them. In no counties in this State have there been more churches than in Doniphan county, but in no county in the State have the churches been more evanescent and unstable, and yet it is not because these brethren have apostatized, but it is that the men that have settled in Doniphan county are men that keep on the borders of civilization, and the opening of a great empire for settlement to the west of them tempted them ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... any one but you could have drawn me to Germany at all?" he said, softly. "Forgive me, Egon. I am an unstable nature and have always been a rover ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... jewels flashed in the sunlight. With a soft crashing sound some tree would let fall its priceless burden in a dazzling rain of diamonds. Crash! and the silver roof of the barn slid down into the yard, collapsing in a flood of opals. The whole world seemed unreal and unstable, toppling to pieces and vanishing ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... described in this book will agree that it is an established fact) cannot be overlooked. It alters our interpretation of the results of training, memory, heredity, and discrimination experiments, and it leads us to suspect that the dancing race is exceedingly unstable. I do not venture to make comparison of my own observations of the dancer's sense equipment with those of Cyon, Rawitz, Zoth, and Kishi, for the differences are too great in many instances to be thought of as other than species or variety peculiarities. It ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... owe much to the Teuton, and its lighter portions, especially its poetry and romance, can be definitely traced in great measure to known Celtic elements. While the Teutonic blood differentiates our somewhat slow and steady character from the more logical but volatile and unstable Gaul, the Celtic blood differentiates it from the far slower, heavier, and less quick or less imaginative ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... of leisure; with these, therefore, our problem has no concern. The larger class, the immense majority, either do their work themselves, or attend personally to its being done by others; "others" signifying that inefficient, untrustworthy, unstable horde who come fresh from their training in peat-bog and meadow, to cook our dinners, take care of our china dishes, and adjust the nice little internal arrangements ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... thou comest." "From Egypt." "Art thou from Cairo?" "Why askest thou?" said the boy? "Because," replied Hyjauje, "her sands are of gold, and her river Nile miraculously fruitful; but her women are wanton, free to every conqueror, and her men unstable." "I am not from thence, but from Damascus," cried the youth. "Then," said Hyjauje, "thou art from a most rebellious place, filled with wretched inhabitants, a wavering race, neither Jews nor Christians." "But I am not from thence," replied the youth, "but from Khorassan." "That ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... consequently the impressions received realise themselves with greater power. These impressions are the material from which the child's growing life is constructed, and if we supply faulty material the resultant structure will be unstable. Yet the most attentive and well-meaning mothers are engaged daily in sowing the seeds of weakness in their children's minds. The little ones are constantly told they will take cold, will be sick, will fall down, or will suffer some other misfortune. The ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... definite and generally predictable but unlearned responses of lower and higher organisms to stimuli." Many of these reflex responses are not fixed, as they were formerly supposed to be, but "highly unstable and indefinite." This fact makes possible the formation of habits, by combination and fixation ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... arms that they please: let them exert themselves ever so energetically to train Chinese soldiers: let them even supply leaders: the Chinese Army will, nevertheless, even under the most favorable conditions, never be more than an artificially created, mechanically united, unstable organism. Subject it but once to the serious test of war, speedy dissolution will overtake such an army, which could never hope for victory over a foe animated with any real spirit." On the other ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... securing a predominant position among their neighbours; and although the ideal of Panhellenic unity had been put before Greece by Gorgias and Isocrates, its realization did not go further than the formation of leagues of an unstable character, each subject, as a rule, to the more or less tyrannical ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... have the title, he had practically no advantage over any private citizen whomsoever. But all claimed the right to sit with him and eat with him, and whoever wished insulted him without restraint; for no men in the world are less bound by convention or more unstable than the Eruli. Now when the evil deed had been accomplished, they were immediately repentant. For they said that they were not able to live without a ruler and without a general; so after much deliberation it seemed to them best in every way to summon ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... habituated ourselves to them. As a youth I abominated the taste of tobacco. It was only by an industrious apprenticeship to the herb that I overcame my natural dislike and got to be its obedient servant. And even my taste here is unstable. I needed a certain tobacco to be happy and thought there was no other tobacco like it. But I discovered that was all nonsense. When the war tax sent the price up, I determined that my expenditure should ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least touch upsets, and fell to crying. It took her some time to get down the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them. At last it ventured out,—showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the billow, sinking into ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... striking blue and purple wild flowers we have," says John Burroughs, "are of European origin. These colors, except with the fall asters and gentians, seem rather unstable in our flora." This theory is certainly borne out in the case of the RAMPION, EUROPEAN, or CREEPING BELLFLOWER (C. rapunculoides), now detected in the act of escaping from gardens from New Brunswick to Ontario, Southern New York, Pennsylvania, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... and women, Maria Dmitrievna. There are, unfortunately, some who are—of an unstable character; and then there is a certain time of life—and, besides, good principles have not been instilled into ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, A deep rolling bass. Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM, With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, Boomlay, boomlay, ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... melancholy; ambitious and discontented; full of thought, and with powers of patience and perseverance that alone amounted to genius. Mick was as brilliant as his complexion; gay, irritable, evanescent, and unstable. Mick enjoyed life; his friend only endured it; yet Mick was always complaining of the lowness of his wages and the greatness of his toil; while Devilsdust never murmured, but read and pondered on the rights of labour, and sighed ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... over-banking, and the tariff of the same year was really passed to help avert the panic threatening. It had the contrary effect, it is believed, for it still further, of course, unsettled rates for goods, when prices were already unstable. But the point is to be noted that in reality tariff change followed practical panic in this instance rather than practical panic tariff change. The high protective war tariffs, beginning in 1860, and increased for war purposes and granted largely as an offset for those ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... he rose to his knees. There was another grapple with the whirling peg-top, and again he mastered the dizzying confusion. Made bold by success, he got his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments had once ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... How far this unstable religious position was subject to the influence of the oriental mysticism at which we have glanced already, is, at any rate, so far as concerns the classical age of Greek philosophy, a matter of conjecture. But the resurrection ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... gives to all liberally, and upbraids not, and it will be given him. (6)But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering; for he that wavers is like a wave of the sea driven by the wind and tossed. (7)For let not that man suppose that he shall receive anything from the Lord; (8)a double-minded man, unstable ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... of two fine mullet. Soon after this incident, a herd of brown deer were seen to rush out of the jungle and dash down an open glade, with noses up and antlers resting back on their necks. A shot from Bunco's gun alarmed but did not hit them, for Bunco had been taken by surprise, and was in an unstable canoe. Before the deer had disappeared, two or three ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... where State Socialism is strong, the radical press is at times turbulent and the government journals reflect the despotism they uphold; in France, on the west and southwest, the public writers are ever busy over the successive unstable central administrations at Paris, which exercise a bureaucratic direction of every commune in the land. In all these countries, men rather than measures are the objects of discussion, an immediate important campaign question inevitably being ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... a fool, anything! I want to tell you that nothing but unhappiness awaits you if you encourage him. I know him, I tell you. I know what sort of a man he is. Unstable as ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta. Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced preference of the more unstable one:—or rather, the man adventurous out of the world's highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness. Mademoiselle's occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... an accidental cause and a casual consequence in things which proceed from the election and counsel of men. Aristotle, that it is an accidental cause in those things done by an impulse for a certain end; and this cause is uncertain and unstable: there is a great deal of difference betwixt that which flows from chance and that which falls out by Fortune; for that which is fortuitous allows also chance, and belongs to things practical; but what is by chance cannot be also by Fortune, for it belongs to things without action: Fortune, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... feeble digestions or unstable nervous systems are especially harmed by these poisons. A family history of nervously inclined people calls for rigid care in ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... disappointment of Cressida, which is just like that of a spoilt child which has lost its sugar-plum, without tenderness, passions, or poetry: and, in short, perfectly characteristic of that vain, fickle, dissolute, heartless woman,—"unstable ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Kent, who killed him in a garden in which he had taken shelter. A reward of 1000 marks followed this deed of bravery. Some of the insurgents were afterwards executed as traitors; but the majority even of the ringleaders escaped unpunished, for Henry's seat upon the throne was so unstable, that it was deemed better to win the people by a manifestation of clemency, rather than to provoke them by ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... greater and lesser density in all organised—that is, crystalline—matter; for instance, in even such an apparently uniform block as a lump of metallic gold or copper or iron. This arrangement, of course, may be disturbed by artificial means; but if it is, the matter seems to be in an unstable condition, as is proved, for instance, by the sudden, unexpected breaking of apparently perfectly sound steel rails. There seems to be a condition of matter which so far we have largely failed to take into account or ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... irritable. The mental and moral character is unstable. His affairs are in confusion. He uses bad language, neglects his family, goes with drunkards and bad women, makes indecent proposals to respectable women of his acquaintance without realizing that it is improper. He cannot keep his mind ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... civilized peoples is based almost universally on the union of one man and one woman. There is good reason to believe that this practice of monogamy was in vogue among primitive human beings, but marriage was unstable and it was only through long experimentation that monogamy proved itself best fitted to survive. At first conjugal affection, which has become intelligent and moral, was merely a sexual desire that led the man to seek a mate and the maid to choose among her suitors. Unbound by long-continued ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the materialist holds, protoplasm appeared in very simple forms, just such as can still be found within the sea, and in ponds. But the lower organized forms of life are extremely unstable, and a different environment will always tend to evoke continuous small changes, so that there may be advance in forms of all kinds. For if by chance[1] some creature exhibits a variation which is favourable to it in the circumstances ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... he was mixed up in a crooked deal if ever there was one. The worst of it was he wasn't out of it yet. He wished he knew whose car this was and where they were bound for. How about the license tag? Gripping his unstable seat he swayed forward and tried to see it just below him. In the dim light it looked like a New York license. It must be the guy they were after all right,—they had telephoned about a New York man—yet—Cart had a New York ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... black belonging to some coast tribe, and educated by my poor predecessor, was the helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen. He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... and whitish zones. Although we do not know the steps by which these wonderfully beautiful and complex ornaments have been developed, the process has probably been a simple one, at least with insects; for, as Mr. Trimen writes to me, "no characters of mere marking or coloration are so unstable in the Lepidoptera as the ocelli, both in number and size." Mr. Wallace, who first called my attention to this subject, shewed me a series of specimens of our common meadow-brown butterfly (Hipparchia janira) ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the highest order of mind results from a fortunate mixture of incongruous constituents, and not of such as naturally harmonize. Those constituents are negatively correlated, and therefore the compound is unstable in heredity. This is eminently the case in the typical artistic temperament, which certainly harmonizes with Bohemianism and passion, and is opposed to the useful qualities of regularity, foresight, and level common sense. Where these and certain other incongruous faculties go together in well-adjusted ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... night and an enervating country," Kenwardine remarked. "I wonder why we stay here as we do, since we're apt to leave it as poor as when we came. The people are an unstable lot, and when you've spent your time and energy developing what you hope is a profitable scheme, some change of policy or ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... moment the Kaffir becomes efficient and picks up a smattering of education he begins to think about his position and unrest is fomented. It makes him unstable as an employee, as the constant desertions from work show. The only way that the gold and diamond mines keep their thousands of recruited native workers is to confine them in compounds. The ordinary labourer has no such restrictions and he is here ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... as in others the simplest explanation is the pertinent truth; theory raised on other than scriptural foundation is unstable. Christ unequivocally associated demons with Satan, specifically in His comment on the report of the Seventy whom He authorized and sent forth, and who testified with joy on their return that even the devils had been subject ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... broken fragments of a many-sided polygon, but at last as a simple curve which encloses all we know, or can know, of nature. To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights of iron for ounces of gold. Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable, a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an atmosphere of uncombined gases. One spark of genius shoots through it, and its elements rush together and glitter before us in a single translucent drop. It would hardly be extravagant to call Science ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... governors—although certainly but few of them pushed their conscientiousness, like Cato, to the verge of being niggardly and ridiculous—made in many cases a powerful impression on the subjects, more especially on the frivolous and unstable Greeks, by their old- fashioned piety, by the reverential stillness prevailing at their repasts, by their comparatively upright administration of office and of justice, especially by their proper severity towards the worst bloodsuckers of the provincials—the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... moment's hesitation. His bluff had to be carried through with absolute decisiveness. He could not gauge how far his threat of the divorce court had intimidated Matheson. Beyond that, he was not at all sure that Olive would side with him in the matter. She was unstable, unreliable. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Brabazon Lodge, which was a suburban establishment, in a chilly aristocratic quarter. An imposing edifice, Brabazon Lodge, built of stone, and most uncompromisingly devoid of superfluous ornament. No mock minarets or unstable towers at Brabazon Lodge,—a substantial mansion in a substantial garden behind substantial iron gates, and so solid in its appointments that it was quite a task for Dolly to raise the substantial lion's head ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sufficient to indicate that the social customs have changed and are changing very materially. Under such conditions, it would not be natural for young people to be unduly impressed by them. Such standards are so unstable and they differ so much to-day from what they were yesterday, and they differ so much in different circles and even in different families, that their force and importance are not very compelling. The authority ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... qualified by nature to perform the task which Babar had been obliged to neglect. His character, flighty and unstable, and his abilities, wanting in the constructive faculty, alike unfitted him for the duty. He ruled eight years in India without contributing a single stone to the foundation of an empire that was to remain. When, at the end of that period, his empire fell, as had ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... us for another decade, it will be the death of total abstinence. But now they had bad times, without Free-trade—that Goddess being still in the goose-egg—and when two friends met, without a river between them, they were bound to drink one another's health, and did it, without the unstable and cold-blooded element. The sense of this duty was paramount among the "Free and Frisky," and without it their final cause would have vanished long ago, and therewith their ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... safety gate at the top of each shaft, an adequate brake to control the drum used for lowering or hoisting persons in shafts or slopes, and an indicator on all machines used for such purpose, to show the location of cages in shaft or slope. No cage having an unstable or self-dumping platform shall be used for the carriage of persons unless such platform is securely locked. (Sec. 916, 927; Penalty, ...
— Mining Laws of Ohio, 1921 • Anonymous
... Norman blood. He could not stay long at any one job; there was a restlessness in his temperament which would not down. He would leave his fields unploughed in order to go hunting or to turn a few sous in some small trading adventure. Unstable as water, he did not excel in tasks that required patience. But he could do a great many things after a fashion, and some that could be done ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... mount again, or we shall not be home by dinner-time.' And they returned to where Pansy stood tethered. 'Instead of entrusting my weight to a young man's unstable palm,' she continued gaily, 'I prefer a surer "upping-stock" (as the villagers call it), in the form of a gate. There—now ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... say that Mira would take the prize. It's a red giant, and it's an irregular variable. The sunlight there would be as unstable as the weather in New England. It's almost as big as Antares, and it won't hold still. Now that would ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... along a corridor and opened a door. Then he set his unstable candle down on a toilet-table and asked at what hour they were to be called in ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods was a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal evolution ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... all his disappointment, even contempt, there yet lurked in his soul an odd liking for the young man. Guy was most strangely likable, however deep he sank. Unstable, unreliable, wholly outside the pale as he was, yet there ever hung about him a nameless, indescribable fascination which redeemed him from utter degradation, a charm which very curiously kept him from being classed with the swine. There ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... is that in the human mind there are two strata. One superficial, of which men are conscious, the other deep down, of which they are unconscious.[3112] The former unstable and vacillating like shifting sand, the latter stable and fixed like a solid rock, to which their caprices and agitation never descend. The latter alone determines the general inclination of the soil, the main current of human activity necessarily ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... instant death. Each arrow was smeared with a dark red substance, and their deadly effect was sufficiently proved by the manner in which the ranks of Samory's men were soon decimated. Dozens of Arabs, touched by the poisonous darts, staggered unevenly, and falling to earth sank into the unstable sand, while the red flash of their ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... one of the multitude of other worlds on which I have set my feet, worlds which all pay tribute to Malfero of Lodore. It is safer and swifter to ride the magnetic currents than it is to ride the unstable currents of the air." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... grace 1900, to excite more than passing notice. At the bottom of the column a paragraph of a more unusual character attracted Iglesias' attention. It announced it had authority for stating that Alarmist rumours, current regarding the unstable financial position of a certain well-known and highly respected London bank, were grossly exaggerated. No doubt the losses suffered by the bank in question had been severe, owing to its extensive connection with land and mining property ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... with the beginning of your letter than with that you used to send me, for I do not love distance or ceremony; there is more of love and tenderness in the name of mother than in all the complimentary titles in the world... You complain that you are unstable and inconstant in the ways of virtue. Alas! what Christian is not so too? I am sure that I, above all others, am most unfit to advise in such a case: yet since I love you as my own soul, I will endeavour to do as well as ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... This rock disintegrated rapidly under the action of the sun when exposed to it. Comparatively solid in the morning, it would crack to pieces and slide down the mountain side before night. A sixty-foot cut had already been made into the precipitous mountain side, and the result was an unstable road-bed, hardly four feet in width, which threatened to go out ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... how the traitor doth presage his harm, See how he glories at his own decay, See how he triumphs at his proper loss; O fortune wild, unstable, ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... General," and who many feared could not live out his term, or the solemn-visaged Vice-President, who had been filling half the cabinet positions with his own partisans, saw dimly what was to follow these joyous opening days of a new regime, for he knew how unstable was the base upon which the new ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... opposite poles of an electric pile destroy each other; that they are the procreative cause of motion, life, and progress; that the problem is to discover, not their fusion, which would be death, but their equilibrium,—an equilibrium for ever unstable, varying ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Roy, "which passeth from the mountains to the ocean, kisseth every meadow on its way, yet tarries not in any place, so Fortune visits the sons of men; she is unstable as the wind; who shall hold her? Let not adversity tear ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... lodged itself in her memory, acquiring a sort of symbolic significance, as of a turning-point in her relations with her husband. Not that these were less happy, but that she now beheld them, as she had always formerly beheld such joys, as an unstable islet in a sea of storms. Her present bliss was as complete as ever, but it was ringed by the perpetual menace of all she knew she was hiding from Nick, and of all she suspected him of ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... his character by and by, when the work of grace in him was finished. The new name was a prophecy of the man that was to be, the man that Jesus would make of him. Now he was only Simon—rash, impulsive, self-confident, vain, and therefore weak and unstable. ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... years in the service of the Empire (and even of Russia) from no uncertain temper and from no imaginary quarrel. It is so common or so necessary for men and women to misjudge each other that I believe you thought me wayward, or at least unstable. If you did so you did me a wrong. Those two good seasons when we met again, and this last of but a month ago, were not accidents or fitful recoveries. They were all I possessed in my life and all that will perish with me ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... mere chaos, without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their impulses would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable.... Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they are formed by our judgments ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... competing activities, one is variable, since it depends on the constantly changing nature of the objects which come into relation with us; the other, on the contrary, is a constant, since it expresses the contribution of our nerve substance, and, though this last is of very unstable composition, it necessarily varies much less than the series of excitants. We consequently see faintly that these two elements differ sufficiently in character for us to be able to suppose that ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... forgive me. Perhaps in after years I will try to forgive myself. I could not bear to see my father suffer. Weak and unstable as water as I am in some things, my duty and affection for him conquered my ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... the slavery policy had achieved a new triumph; if the North had not elected its President, the first that has belonged to it in full since the existence of the Confederation; if supremacy had not ranged itself in fine on the side with force and justice, this unstable balance would have had its hour of downfall: and what a downfall! Of so much true liberty, of so much progress, of so many noble examples, what would have been left standing? The secession of the South is not the secession of the North; affranchisement with four millions of ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... Background: Unstable Comoros has endured 19 coups or attempted coups since gaining independence from France in 1975. In 1997, the islands of Anjouan and Moheli declared their independence from Comoros. A subsequent attempt by the government to reestablish ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Czar's disposition was at that period restless and unstable, free from the passionate caprices of his ill-fated father, and attuned by the fond efforts of the Swiss democrat Laharpe, to the loftiest aspirations of the France of 1789. Yet the son of Paul I. could hardly free himself from the instincts of a line of conquering ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... blacks moved uneasily, like a herd of cattle, at the sound of his voice. But not one spoke. All eyes, however, were staring at him in certitude of expectancy. Something was about to happen, and they were waiting for it, waiting with the unanimous, unstable mob-mind for the one of them who would make the first action that would precipitate all of them into a common action. Sheldon looked for this one, for such was the one to fear. Directly beneath ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... nor your kindred; you have given what you had to your parents, and disappointed the poor; you do not deserve to be received into the company of those who make profession of holy poverty. You commenced by the flesh, which is an unstable foundation for a spiritual edifice." This carnal and animal man returned to his parents, resumed his property, and rather than give it to the poor, he gave up the ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... the word Nihilism, and the mystic Tolstoy, who was the principal apostle of the doctrine. All these, with the possible exception of Tourguenef, had one characteristic in common. Their intellects were in a state of unstable equilibrium. As poets, they could excite the enthusiasm of the masses, but as political guides they were mere Jack-o'-Lanterns, leading to the deadly swamp of despair. Dostoievsky was in some respects the most interesting and also the most typical of the group. De Voguee met him in his old ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... folds I saw at the sons of Fitjung, Now they carry beggars' staffs; Wealth is Like the twinkling of an eye, The most unstable of friends. Ha'vama'l. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... passed so stately by, they all walked so gracefully, Balancing their bodies on lithe unstable hips, As if music moved them that swelled in their bosoms And was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... things, charity, fasting, and truth, and have been great murderers. But sinful as Sir Lancelot was, since he went into the quest he never slew man, nor shall, till he come into Camelot again. For he has taken upon him to forsake sin. And were he not so unstable, he should be the next to achieve it, after Galahad his son. Yet shall he die an holy man, and in earthly sinful ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... Utopia before that time, any more than it has been accomplished on earth. Just as on earth, Utopian history was a succession of powers rising and falling in an alternation of efficient conservative with unstable liberal States. Just as on earth, so in Utopia, the kinetic type of men had displayed a more or less unintentional antagonism to the poietic. The general life-history of a State had been the same on either planet. First, through poietic activities, the idea of a community has developed, and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... ask to whom she was referring. "Can't be done. Good qualities bulge out all over him, but they don't count for anything. 'Unstable as water.' That's what's the matter with him. He is the slave of his own whims. Hence he is only the splendid wreck of a man, full of all kinds of rich outcropping pay-ore that pinch out when you try to work them. They don't raise men gamer, but that only makes him a more dangerous foe to society. ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... no longer, and left the room. She went into the schoolroom, where the shutters were not closed, as it only looked into the garden. She opened the window, to let the cool night air blow in on her hot cheeks. The clouds were hurrying over the moon's face in a tempestuous and unstable manner, making all things seem unreal; now clear out in its bright light, now trembling and quivering in shadow. The pain at her heart seemed to make Jemima's brain grow dull; she laid her head on her arms, which rested on the window-sill, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... reject us, yet their house is unstable. The slayers' hands are warm—the sound of their riding Reached us ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... the great mass of inks on the market are not suitable for records, because of their lack of body and because of the quantity of unstable color which they contain, and because the few whose coloring matters are not objectionable are deficient in galls and iron, or both, we would strongly recommend that the State set its own standard for the composition of ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... the work. It is a plea for a cause that does not need it, for a cause that is quite as apt to lose as to gain by the defence. The difficulty with this method of meeting the hypothesis of science is that the scientific views are themselves in a state of unstable equilibrium. They may topple at any moment, and then the correspondence that eager devotees have found between them and the Bible is a slur that falls altogether on the religion and not on the science. This is a great ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... of finding the practice of them in their highest perfection pleasant to him, even as the brightness of the sun remains constant in the sun. But I call him non-essential, in whom the brightness of the virtues shines in an unstable and imperfect way like the brightness of the moon. That full delight of grace which I described is so sweet to the spirit of the non-essential man, that he would be glad always to have it. When ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... sunsets were often impressive, but we are all of us unstable, and what pleases us at one time may well prove tiresome at another. If that experience were repeated I should very possibly grow sadly discontented at ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... its lines which includes these words: 'Taking one drink of intoxicating liquor is like running passed the red light. It is unsafe. The possible line between safety and danger in the use of alcoholic drink is dangerously unstable. Safety lies back of total abstinence. The normal man has no legitimate use for alcohol as a beverage, and he has no right to render himself abnormal by its use when lives are dependent upon his ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life. Specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has isolated him from others, and confined him within ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Delano, even though this chanced to be the only boat at that point, and she was no oarswoman; but the poor little old lady, thus suddenly roused from the strange hallucinations (as she called them) which were the most marked feature of her complaint, and finding herself afloat upon the unstable deep, instantly supposed that her last hour was come. She sprang up, too terrified to scream, with a look of deadly horror in her face, and then sank again all in a heap in the bottom of the boat. Olly gave a fiendish laugh, but before any one else ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... spires, all were swimming in a sea of golden light; nothing seemed quite real or solid, so vast was the prospect and so ethereal was the medium through which we saw it. Perhaps it was the great contrast between that shimmering, unstable city below, that reeked and balanced itself like some human creature whose dazzled vision had made its footing insecure—it may be that it was this note of contrast which invested this vast structure bestriding the hill, with such astonishing grandeur. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... was on the point of turning away, when he remembered it was an ill-judged impetuosity he could not afford. It was more important, in this world of persecution and unstable defense, to keep your antagonist busy, cutting ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... composition, Cyprus or Asia Minor, the learned are no less divided than about the date. Many of the grounds on which their opinions rest appear unstable. The relations of Aphrodite to the wild beasts under her wondrous spell, for instance, need not be borrowed from Circe with her attendant beasts. If not of Homer's age, the Hymn is markedly successful as a continuation of the ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... twenty-five emperors fully acknowledged, besides a far larger number of claimants who were overthrown before Rome had time to hear of and salute them. The Imperial city was no longer mistress of the world; she was only its capital, as feeble and helpless as the other cities, which these unstable emperors began at times ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... have honored humanity to beds which are solidly constructed; and the turbulent population which caused the French Revolution were conceived perhaps upon a multitude of tottering couches, with twisted and unstable legs; while the Orientals, who are such a beautiful race, have a unique method of making their beds. I vote ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... individual creditors, but it is a wrong to the whole community, from whose liberality they hold most valuable privileges, whose rights they violate, whose business they derange, and the value of whose property they render unstable and insecure. It must be evident that this new ground for bank suspensions, in reference to which their action is not only disconnected with, but wholly independent of, that of the public, gives a character to their suspensions more alarming than any which they exhibited before, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... and he had been the central figure, with his story of the letter he had found in the Honorable Freddie's coat pocket. Now the importance of his story had been engulfed in that of this later and greater sensation, Mr. Judson was learning, for the first time, on what unstable foundations popularity stands. ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... for those who buy pictures to look out for the man who arbitrarily and suddenly changes his manner or method; he is as a cork tossed about on the surface of the waters, drifting with every breeze, submerged by every ripple, fickle and unstable; if his work possess any merit, it will be only the cheap merit of cleverness; its brilliancy will be simply the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Mivart remarks, "As, according to Mr. Darwin's theory, there is a constant tendency to indefinite variation, and as the minute incipient variations will be in ALL DIRECTIONS, they must tend to neutralize each other, and at first to form such unstable modifications that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how such indefinite oscillations of infinitesimal beginnings can ever build up a sufficiently appreciable resemblance to a leaf, bamboo, or other object, for natural selection to ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... reasons given by the Spirit of God, in such sort, that he must give some other more sufficient proof for that which he teacheth? Then the whole Scriptures of God must yet be better proved, because the unstable do wrest them, as Peter ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... to this effect, it has been shown, that, the act of discharge having once commenced, the whole operation, like a case of unstable equilibrium, is hastened to a conclusion (1370. 1418.), the rest of the act being facilitated in its occurrence, and other electricity than that which caused the first necessary tension hurrying to the spot. When, therefore, disruptive ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... in a condition of unstable equilibrium so far as its insides are concerned. The outer crust is solid, but after you get down sixty or seventy miles the rocks are nearly in a fluid condition owing to great pressure upon them. They flow ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... apparently in the hands of the boys. Should this not be the case, or should the teacher, from any cause, lose his personal influence in the school, so that the institution should really be surrendered into the hands of the pupils, things must be on a very unstable footing. And, accordingly, where such a plan has been adopted, it has, I believe, in every instance, ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... little blue flame issuing from it, lightly dancing, like a flame wandering over the surface of a vessel of lighted alcohol. It was as yet scarcely higher than the flame of a night light, pale and soft, and so unstable that the slightest breath of air caused it to change its place. But it increased and spread rapidly, and the skin cracked and the fat began ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... of their illumination was perceived to fade through violet to white as the light returned, the same changes in a reversed order having accompanied their first appearance. Their forms, however, during about three minutes of visibility, showed no change, although of so apparently unstable a character as to suggest to Arago "mountains on the point of crumbling into ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... in the air, and became a globe, a globe of brown. But it changed, and disappeared. Morey recognized the signal. "He will now make the artificial matter into all the elements, and many nonexistent elements, unstable, atomic figures." There followed a long ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... men of every age in this city "have found no better way of immortalizing their memories than by the shifting, indestructible, ever-new, ever-changing upgush and downfall of water. They have written their names in that unstable element, and proved it a more durable record than brass ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... that were tossing and tumbling in every direction. She had been afraid of them at first, and they were still rather fearful to her imagination. This evening, as heir musing eye watched them rise and fall, her childish fancy likened them to the up-springing chances of life, uncertain, unstable, alike too much for her skill and her strength to manage. She was not more helpless before the attacks of the one than of the other. But then that calm blue heaven that hung over the sea. It was like the heaven of power and love above her destinies; only this was far higher, ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... to the Bridge. It looks like a motionless mass of masonry and metal; but, as a matter of fact, it is instinct with motion. There is not a particle of matter in it which is at rest even for the minutest portion of time. It is an aggregation of unstable elements, changing with every change in the temperature, and every movement of the heavenly bodies. The problem was, out of these unstable elements, to produce absolute stability; and it was this problem which the engineers, ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... fatal failure was due in all probability, to a mental collapse to which his unstable and unbalanced nature would ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... could not bear the idea that Donald's marriage might result in Donald's being estranged from her, or cause a break in their wonderful friendship. Now her thoughts railed against the woman who had been so unstable, at a time when keeping faith with those who went, perhaps to die, had become a nation's watchword. This thought completely superseded the one that had sometimes been hers—that the woman was not worthy the love of the man whom she, herself, worshipped. It was like a mother, suffering ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... the men who exiled you are flourishing. In general the successes of men are vain and ephemeral, and the higher a man climbs as a result of them the more easily, like a breath, does he fall, especially in partisan conflicts. Borne along in a tumultuous and unstable medium they differ little, or rather not at all, from ships in a storm, but are carried up and then down, now hither, now yon; and if they make the slightest error, they sink altogether. Not to mention Drusus or Scipio or the Gracchi or some others, remember how Camillus ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... its practical value was still great; she could not think of herself as not loved by Franklin. Her world would have rocked without that foundation beneath it; and the fear that Franklin might, reading her perplexed, unstable heart, feel her a person no longer to be loved, was now an ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... He realized the significance of what his visitor was saying. Ever Since Zoe had gone, Jean Jacques had been for ever on the move, for ever making hay on which the sun did not shine. Jean Jacques' face these days was lined and changeful. It looked unstable and tired—as though disturbing forces were working up to the surface out of control. The brown eyes, too, were far more restless than they had ever been since the Antoine was wrecked, and their owner returned with Carmen to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 16. As also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom that has been given unto him has written, as he also in all his letters speaks thereof, in which are some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they also do other Scriptures, to their own destruction. There St. Peter bears testimony for the Apostle Paul in respect to his doctrine, which shows plainly enough that this Epistle was written long after St. Paul's Epistles. And this is one of the passages ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ironic display ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... shoulders and shook himself impatiently. "I don't know." he answered, in a testy sort of voice. "I don't like the cliff top... It's so dangerous, don't you know? So unsafe. So unstable. The rocks go off so sheer, and stones topple ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... fatal consequence any sort of assuming may be. However, it is my advice that while we are sober we pitch upon a man of courage and skilled in navigation, one who by his council and bravery seems best able to defend this commonwealth, and ward us from the dangers and tempests of an unstable element, and the fatal consequences of anarchy; and such a one I take Roberts to be—a fellow, I think, in all respects worthy ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... parties idle. The Homoean coalition was even more unstable than the Eusebian. Already before the death of Constantius there had been quarrels over the appointment of Meletius by one section of the party, of Eunomius by another. The deposition of Aetius was another bone of contention. Hence ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... the Sienese mannerism into a region of masculine imaginative art. We feel Simone's charm mostly in single heads and detached figures, some of which at Assisi have incomparable sweetness. "Molles Senae," the delicate and femininely variable, fond of all things brilliant, and unstable through defect of sternness, was the fit mother of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... the twelve thousand of the tribe of Judah refers to the praising ones of CHRIST'S fold; the sealed of Asher to the happy ones, who bless the LORD at all times; those of Naphtali, to those satisfied with favour, full with the blessing of the LORD; those of Reuben, to the once unstable as water, but now fully ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... had trouble with an unstable hassock, and drew the slip of carpet under the pewseat. Sophie pushed her end back also, and shut her eyes against a burning that felt like tears. When she opened them she was looking at her mother's maiden name, fairly carved ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... Chances of Peace will be a reckoning of forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace, 78. ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Jeffs the American Colonel in the Hondurean Army is getting our outfit. It has been very pleasant and we are in no hurry which is a good thing for us. It is a most exciting country and as despotic as all uncivilized and unstable governments must be. But we have called on the Governor of the district with Jeffs and he gave us a very fine letter to all civil and unmilitary authorities in the district calling on them to aid and protect us in every way. I am getting awfully good material for my novel and for half a ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... way out, seriously thought of suicide, but incapacity for any physical effort whatever happily saved him. In short, Junkie was the innocent cause of many dreadful thoughts and much improper language on the unstable scene of ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne |
