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More "Instability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost independent vassals, remnants of that feudal system of the Middle Ages which in France and England had been absorbed by the rise of national monarchies. These small principalities explain the weakness of Germany in her relation with foreign powers, and the instability of her political constitution. Continental wars gave an excuse for keeping up large standing armies, and these standing armies stood between the nation and her sovereigns, and made any moral pressure of the one upon ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... neglect of the present hour is more shameful and criminal, as no man is betrayed to it by errour, but admits it by negligence. Of the instability of life, the weakest understanding never thinks wrong, though the strongest often omits to think justly: reason and experience are always ready to inform us of our real state; but we refuse to listen to their suggestions, because we feel our hearts unwilling to obey them: but, surely, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... daunting challenge. The population lacks education and productive skills, particularly in the poverty-ridden countryside, which suffers from an almost total lack of basic infrastructure. Fear of renewed political instability and corruption within the government discourage foreign investment and delay foreign aid. On the brighter side, the government is addressing these issues with assistance from bilateral and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... brahmins, who stood immovable in rows on each side of her throne, became impatient: they talked about the fickleness of the sex, the impossibility of inducing them to make up their minds; they whispered wise saws and sayings from Ferdistan and others, about the caprice of women, and the instability of their natures, and the more their legs ached from such perpetual demand upon their support, the more bitter did they become in their remarks. Poor, prosing old fools! the beauteous princess had long made up her mind, and had never swerved from it through the tedious ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... portrays a perfected type, such as Consuelo, or Imperia in Pierre qui roule, but always side by side with more earthly and faulty representatives such as Corilla and Anzoleto, or Julia and Albany, in Narcisse, incarnations of the vanity and instability that are the chief dangers of the profession, drawn with unsparing realism. In Le Chateau des Desertes we find further many admirable theories and suggestive ideas on the subject of the regeneration of the theatre. But it fared with her theatrical as ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Green Cormorant, and took up my post behind the window panes, which were dimmed by the hissing rain. There I waited, nervous, impatient, and in a state of growing irritation. Two hours wore away thus. Then, with the instability of the winds in the Kerguelens, the weather became calm before I did. I opened my window, and at the same moment a sailor stepped into one of the boats of the Halbrane and laid hold of a pair of oars, while a second ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... as Scotty entered manhood a wonderful thing happened in the Highlands, something that amazed the neighbours and convinced them of the instability of all things, particularly of a woman's resolution, for Kirsty John promised to marry the Weaver. All these weary years, as faithful as the sun and as untiring, Jimmie had been climbing the hills to the Oa to shed the beams of ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... nouveaux riches who are the pet laughing-stock of all our playwrights, and novelists, and comic papers. So the bourgeois who really knows he has something in him, like Harry Oswald, feels from the beginning painfully conscious of the instability of his position, and of the fact that men like you are cutting jokes behind his back about the smell of tea that still clings to him. That's a horrible drag to hold a man back—the sense that he must always be criticised as one ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... in so resolute a manner it was not difficult to see that something more was at stake than the arrest of a single man. This was so; the real issue was whether the king, with whose instability it was difficult to cope, should fall back into the hands of his old advisers or not. My arrest was a move in the game intended as a counterblast to the victory which M. de Rambouillet had gained when he persuaded the ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... remark that the ex-monarch has by his abdication renounced the conflict, into which perhaps he was engaged by bad advice, that he can no longer be an object of resentment to the brave, but remains, to all, the most striking example of the instability of human affairs which our unstable times have afforded. He may say, with our ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... opinion, and fellowship of study, should finally part in acrimonious opposition. Such a controversy was "bellum plusquam CIVILE," as Lucan expresses it. Why could not faction find other advocates? But among the uncertainties of the human state, we are doomed to number the instability of friendship. Of this dispute I have little knowledge but from the "Biographia Britannica." "The Old Whig" is not inserted in Addison's works: nor is it mentioned by Tickell in his Life; why it was omitted, the biographers doubtless give the true reason—the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... trouble, for they are easily explained as due to the direct action of the environment upon animals. One of the fundamental characters of the living protoplasm (using the word now in its widest sense) is its extreme instability. So unstable is it that any disturbing influence will affect it. If two similar unicellular organisms are placed under different conditions they become unlike, since their unstable protoplasm is directly affected by the surrounding conditions. With higher animals the process ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... Dante consists of nine heavens, each a revolving crystalline sphere, enclosed in another; without them, the boundless Empyrean. The first or innermost heaven, of the Moon, revolved by the angels, is the habitat of wills imperfect through instability. The second, of Mercury, revolved by the Archangels, is the abode of wills imperfect through love of fame. The third, of Venus, revolved by the Principalities, is the abode of wills imperfect through excess of human love. The fourth, of the Sun, revolved ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... repose, it is sloth: and of sorrow he says that it gives rise to "spite, faint-heartedness, bitterness, despair," whereas he states that from sloth seven things arise, viz. "idleness, drowsiness, uneasiness of the mind, restlessness of the body, instability, loquacity, curiosity." Therefore it seems that either Gregory or Isidore has wrongly assigned sloth as a capital sin together with ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... period, for we can readily understand why men of all races should flock to the mistress of the world; but the same phenomenon of a large population of foreigners and denizens meets us in the very earliest records of the Roman State. No doubt, the instability of society in ancient Italy, composed as it was in great measure of robber tribes, gave men considerable inducement to locate themselves in the territory of any community strong enough to protect itself and them from external attack, even though protection should be purchased at the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... illustrations from every region of nature and all departments of mental and social life; and, further, shown deducible from the ultimate principle of the persistence of force, through the mediation of several corollaries to it, viz., the instability of the homogeneous under the varied incidence of surrounding forces, the multiplication of effects by action and reaction, and segregation. Finally the principle of equilibration indicates the impassable limit at which evolution passes over into dissolution, until the eternal ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... conversation upon public matters before any stranger, and they were glad enough to get their tongues at liberty. Adam, the old traditions say, was made of eight pounds: a pound of earth, his flesh; a pound of fire, his blood; a pound of cloud, his instability; a pound of grace (how that was weighed the legend saith not); his stature; a pound of blossom, his eyes; a pound of dew, his sweat; a pound of salt, his tears; and, finally, a pound of wind, his breath. Now Governments ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... with such instability his moral nature should continue uncorrupted; but this I believe he owed chiefly to his love and admiration of his brother. For my part, I could not help liking him much. There was a half-plaintive playfulness about him, alternated ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... touch of satire in the closing line of the note in which she intercedes for him. "The great friendship you have for Mme. de Grignan," she writes, "makes it necessary to show some for her brother."—But we have glimpses of his weakness and instability in many of his mother's intimate letters. In the end, however, having exhausted the pleasures of life and felt the bitterness of its disappointments, he took refuge in devotion, and died in the odor of sanctity, after the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... state in their behalf, but he was put off with perpetual excuses. While the affair was in agitation he went to Capua, where the prisoners were confined. "There," he writes to the Cardinal Colonna, "I saw your friends; and, such is the instability of Fortune, that I found them in chains. They support their situation with fortitude. Their innocence is no plea in their behalf to those who have shared in the spoils of their fortune. Their only expectations rest upon you. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... It was known that the King of Austria, brother of Maria Antoinette, had promised to send an army of thirty-five thousand men to unite with the emigrants at Coblentz in their march upon Paris. Every monarch in Europe was alarmed, in view of the instability of his own throne, should the rebellion of the people against the throne in France prove triumphant; and Spain, Prussia, Sardinia, Naples, and Switzerland had guaranteed equal forces to assist in the re-establishment of the French monarchy. It is not strange that the exasperation of the people ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... at them as much as I do." And he feigned a smile. But it was late at night; he was high-strung and nervous himself, and the fact that Mr Sharnall should have been brought to such a pitiable state of mental instability depressed him. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... instability of character but versatility of mind which caused him to undertake many things that having commenced he afterwards abandoned, and the probability is that as soon as he saw exactly how he could solve any difficulty which presented itself, ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... I will not say that there are no witches; but ever since the difficulty of convicting them has been recognized in the island, they all seem to have disappeared, as though the evidence of the times gone by had been but an illusion. This shows the instability of all things ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... impossible to overlook the tremendous change for the worse, which has been effected by the lowering of the status of the High Court of Judicature and by the establishment of the principle embodied in the new draft Grondwet that any resolution of the Volksraad is equivalent to a law. The instability of the laws has always been one of the most serious grievances. The new Constitution provides for their permanent instability, the judges being bound by their oath to accept every Volksraad resolution as equally binding with a law passed in the regular form, and ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... his success in life, and afterwards over his misfortunes, would no doubt serve him again, and restore him to his lost situation: 'for,' said I, 'we both of us have seen enough of life in Persia to have ascertained its extreme instability. When events depend upon the will of one man, he may with as much consistency order you back from exile, as he did the plucking your beard and the thrusting you forth from the city. There is a reaction in misfortune which frequently produces ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... special liability to glaucoma among those residing at high altitudes, best explained by nerve influence. The frequency of glaucoma among Jews may be due to a small cornea, as suggested by Priestley Smith; but it is quite as reasonable to connect it with a racial excitability or nervous instability. More definite knowledge of the nervous mechanism concerned in the regulation of intra-ocular pressure and the production ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... Egypt better, and then changed its mind. It was but yesterday in the mood that this cartoon suggests; to-morrow its mood will have utterly changed again, probably to a whine, perhaps to a scream. Such instability is rare in the history of nations which purpose a conquest of others, and it is a very poor furniture ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... be put to. Ladies sent flowers to the condemned man's cell. After all, hanging him, poor fellow, would not bring Miss Johnson back to life. However, few spoke of Miss Johnson, she was forgotten by all but one man, who ground his teeth when he realised the instability of ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... moment, give the people an opportunity to reflect, and allow the good sense of the nation time for exertion. This uncertainty with respect to measures of great importance to every member of the community, this instability in principles which ought, if possible, to be rendered immutable, produced a long train of ills; and is seriously believed to have been among the operating causes of those pecuniary embarrassments, which, at that time, were ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... indeed, for Great Britain to be indifferent, for she had suffered almost as much as Ireland. The hostility of the Irish Party formed a perpetual source of danger to her Governments, both Liberal and Tory, and a chronic source of instability in her administration. The democratic movement in England was continually weakened by the necessity of keeping Ireland down. That necessity largely broke the strength of the great reform movement of the thirties. It destroyed Sir Robert ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... less than the continual repetition of that word. This alarmed me, and as I did not want to do that, I began to stand upright and back away from it, to return to my plane. But as I raised my knee from the ground in order to stand, my other knee slipped under the increased pressure, and in the ensuing instability, I completely lost my balance and fell ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... adorned with monograms and other devices, so perhaps it is atavism that makes us so fond of this form in building! As, however, no careful Hausfrau would have stood her iron on its edge, architects should hesitate before placing their buildings in that position, as the impression of instability is the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... influence which outside impressions have upon the disorder, the mode of genesis and the psychological evolution of the delusions, etc.,—may be attributed to the essential ear-marks of the degenerative character; that is, to the exaggerated auto-suggestibility, the great instability of the existing conditions and mental pictures, the disharmony between the perceptive and imaginative capacities and the preponderance of a lively fantastic coloring to the dry thinking of these individuals. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... tell whether she will marry or remain single. She is usually unable to know whether or not she will desire to marry. The great majority of girls have therefore no stable conditions upon which to build a choice. The work girls choose and their instability in the work they enter upon are direct results of these unstable conditions. Many girls feel the need of little or no training, and apply for any work obtainable, merely because they anticipate that their industrial career will ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... present state of the people, continual transference of an illegal despotism from one group of political adventurers to another, the pretence of popular representation serving merely to increase and perpetuate instability." ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... head drew backward. Death came and stamped the light upon the face. Before Stafford could get to his feet, the blue wave had plunged into the trough. He remembered using his pistol, and he remembered a dizziness of being borne backward. He remembered that a phrase had gone through his mind "the instability of all material things." Then came a blank. He did not assume that he had lost consciousness, but simply he could not remember. He had been wrecked in a turbulent, hostile ocean. It had made him and others captives, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... in the long run was, of course, confusion and instability. People laughed or cursed; but they also listened and reasoned. Gradually, throughout the city, dread was extending the blackness of its terror. A knowledge that would have caused a tremendous panic if it had been divulged suddenly now gave ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... its magnetism and that feeds back a counter-emf which increases the demagnetizing current until it's saturated with opposite polarity. You get an alternating magnet, which doesn't evolve heat because of its magnetic instability, but absorbs heat trying to maintain its stability. This thing will absorb heat from anywhere—the air, water, sunlight or what have you—and give ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... one form of design that he had totally neglected from the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisome iteration at the opening of his career. Now it had again returned to silence; indeed—such is the surprising instability of art 'principles' as they are facetiously called—it was just as likely as not to sink into the neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in Georgian times. This accident of being out of vogue lent English Gothic ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... money lying idle, I can put you on to a good thing—a very good thing indeed. I don't know, I'm sure, whether you keep an eye on the fluctuations of the share-market. If so, you'll no doubt have noticed the ... let me say the extreme instability of 'Porepunkahs.' After making an excellent start, they have dropped till they are now to be had at one-twentieth of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... very well for a man to resolve to tear an idol from his heart; it is quite another thing to do it. George Aspel had long ago given up all hope of winning May Maylands. He not only felt that one who had fallen so low as he, and shown such a character for instability, had no right to expect any girl to trust her happiness to him; but he also felt convinced that May had no real love for him, and that it would be unmanly to push his suit, even although he was now delivered from the power of his great enemy. He determined, therefore, ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... stability of the bullets. This is a matter of the greatest importance as regards the regularity or otherwise of the wounding power of the projectile, and, as far as my experience went, I believe the Mauser to far exceed the Lee-Metford in instability of structure. ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... Before the morning hour the presidency of the United States was impatiently waiting for the time when I would be old enough to be eligible. All this was soon forgotten. It is a common experience of the instability of promises and hopes which come from gratified and happy enthusiasts, and how soon they are dissipated like a dream! I have seen many such instances, and from this early experience deeply sympathize ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... urged (but most erroneously, in my opinion) that instability is just as apt to be produced by retaining the public lands as a source of revenue as from any other cause, and this is ascribed to a constant fluctuation, as it is said, in the amount of sales. If there were anything in this objection, it equally applies to every imposition ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... living matter, their activities and possible combinations enormously increase; they enter into new relations with one another and form compounds of great variety and complexity, characterized by the instability which life requires. The organic compounds are vastly more sensitive to light and heat and air than are the same elements in the inorganic world. What has happened to them? Chemistry cannot tell us. Oxidation, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... march on Paris. On September 4th, the march, which had been interrupted ten days before, was begun. Immediately afterwards news came which stopped all hopes of a speedy peace. How soon was his warning as to the instability of French Governments to be fulfilled! A revolution had broken out in Paris, the dethronement of the Emperor had been proclaimed, and a Provisional Government instituted. They at once declared that they were a government ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... greatly lessened by the exclusion of meat from their dietary. Dr. Clouston, of Edinburgh, an eminent medical authority, states that in his experience, those children who show the greatest tendencies to instability of the brain, insanity, and immoral habits are, as a rule, those who use animal food in excess; and that he has seen a change of diet to milk and farinaceous food produce a marked change in their ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him, and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing his hands ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... honest pride of virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors. A just but melancholy reflection imbittered, however, the noblest of human enjoyments. They must often have recollected the instability of a happiness which depended on the character of single man. The fatal moment was perhaps approaching, when some licentious youth, or some jealous tyrant, would abuse, to the destruction, that absolute power, which they had exerted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... but the controversies and bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and the first beginnings ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... one ... Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among thousands feel that your brow bears the mark and that it escapes no one, I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to struggle with morbid embarrassment and instability. His over-sensitive ego-feeling, together with a lack of parts to play, of histrionic activity, had that effect upon this perfect artist and impoverished human being ... An artist, a real one, not one whose official profession is art, but a ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes? Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... in his flesh and blood and muscle that suggested an inebriate father, yet in his profounder and obscurer being he was Fulleymore Ransome's son. The secret instability that made Fulleymore Ransome drink had had its effect on Ranny's nervous system. His nerves, though he was not aware of it, were finely woven and highly strung. He had a tendency to be carried away and to be excited, exalted, and upset. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... great consequence leading to the instability of civilizations has been the concentration of wealth, power, privilege, comfort and security in the hands of a minority, in sharp contrast with poverty and insecurity among the less well-placed majority. Generally, the privileged minority has been relatively small and ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... lineage seemed to point him out as the individual wanted. They took him to the king; but Merlin, young as he was, explained to the king the absurdity of attempting to rescue the fabric by such means, for he told him the true cause of the instability of the tower was its being placed over the den of two immense dragons, whose combats shook the earth above them. The king ordered his workmen to dig beneath the tower, and when they had done so they ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... all doubts concerning his title to them. He did not spare even the royal demesne, but secured himself a vast number of adherents by involving their guilt and interest in his own. He raised a considerable army of Flemings, in order to strengthen himself against another turn of the same instability which had raised him to the throne; and, in imitation of the measures of the late king, he concluded all by giving a charter of liberties as ample as the people at that time aspired to. This charter contained a renunciation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... deal of the child still remains in him, his instability, for instance. He might well say of himself, "my name is legion." In the remainder of his young life everything that is trifling and worthless all comes to the surface, just as it does in the fermenting liquor, the strong and sweet ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... have no fear for my dynasty. It is powerfully protected. God Himself is its guardian. He also looks to my succession and my family. You are not unaware that these are no other than the Church. I can speak without offence to the Prince of Wales of the instability of Royal Houses, that which he represents being firmly anchored in the affections of a wise people." "I am delighted," replied the Prince, smiling expressively, "to find that your Holiness has so good an opinion of our people." "Yes, indeed, I respect the English people," continued ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... not follow that either sought to bring about a renewal of the war. Whitworth constantly reported that no formidable armaments were being prepared, and clung for months to a belief that Napoleon, knowing the instability of his own power and the ruinous state of his finances, would ultimately give way. On the other hand, Talleyrand and Joseph Bonaparte never ceased to hope that Great Britain would make concessions ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... parable turns to this instability and says: "It is bad to be hard, but it is bad also to be thin." When tribulation or persecution arises, something more than impulsiveness is needed to give a root to life. How strongly and ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... turn out to be the other which I ought to have adopted. And I placed in the class of extremes especially all promises by which somewhat of our freedom is abridged; not that I disapproved of the laws which, to provide against the instability of men of feeble resolution, when what is sought to be accomplished is some good, permit engagements by vows and contracts binding the parties to persevere in it, or even, for the security of commerce, sanction similar engagements ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... that the defence of speculative and fraudulent commerce is undertaken boldly, while at the same time the attempt of a royal counterfeiter, who, after all, did but apply to gold and silver the fundamental principle of political economy, the arbitrary instability of values, is frowned down? If the administration should presume to give twelve ounces of tobacco for a pound,[9] the economists would cry robbery; but, if the same administration, using its privilege, should increase the price a few cents a pound, they would ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... only shows the discontent of the governed, but the insecurity and instability of the governors. This truth has not escaped Napoleon, who has, therefore, ordered an expeditious and secret justice to despatch instantly the conspirators, and to bury the conspiracy in oblivion, except when any grand coup d'etat is to be struck; or, to excite ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... growing more frequent. The "Socialistic" ministers were exhorting the masses to be patient. All decisions and measures, including the calling of the Constituent Assembly, were being postponed. The insolvency and the instability of the coalition regime ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... and cooeperative efforts; with the abrogation, on the part of the superior body of citizens, of all responsibility for, and direct interest in, the affairs and comfort of the lower orders, has come Pauperism, Social Instability, and a degree of misery and depravity among the poorest of the masses, never before known in the history of the world, all things being taken into consideration. It is a well-known saying of Political Economists, that the rich are daily growing richer, and the poor ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... be catchin'! Four in the same 'ouse! (He goes back to the hearth, quite lost before the instability of the human intellect in a ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... his bewildered senses; and endeavouring to assume a tranquil aspect, he bade her rise, and instantly quitted the cell, fearful of the instability of his purpose. His mind was not yet sufficiently hardened by guilt to repel the arrows of conscience, and his imagination responded to her power. As he passed through the long dreary passages from the prison, solemn and mysterious sounds seemed to speak in every murmur ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... Messa di Voce,[14] from a Singer that uses it sparingly, and only on the open Vowels, can never fail of having an exquisite Effect. Very few of the present Singers find it to their Taste, either from the Instability of their Voice, or in order to avoid all Manner of Resemblance of the odious Ancients. It is, however, a manifest Injury they do to the Nightingale, who was the Origin of it, and the only thing which the Voice ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... disappears by a sort of explosion more or less rapid. The bodies of the radium group offer an image of this phenomenon — a rather faint image, however, because the atoms of this body have only reached a period of instability when the dissociation is rather slow. It probably precedes another and more rapid period of dissociation capable of producing their final explosion. Bodies such as radium, thorium, etc., represent, no doubt, a state of old age at which ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... consistent with excellence of product and fairness alike to producer and consumer. But of the baser sort there are always enough to make rugged paths for those who walk uprightly, and to contribute to instability of values on the one hand, and on the other to flooding the country with publications which the home and the world would be better without. Every great city has more of the rightly made and rightly sold papers than of the other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... and pious arms. That you were the aggressors, both you yourselves confess, and the gods are witnesses, who determined the issue of the former war, and who are now determining and will determine the issue of the present according to right and justice. As to myself, I am not forgetful of the instability of human affairs, but consider the influence of fortune, and am well aware that all our measures are liable to a thousand casualties. But as I should acknowledge that my conduct would savour of insolence and oppression, if I rejected you on ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... am gratified by your impatience for the hour of meeting, I yet feel myself under the necessity of delaying that hour beyond the time originally fixed. Do not think me unkind for such an exercise of my power, nor accuse me of instability without first hearing my reasons. In the course of my journey from Churchhill I had ample leisure for reflection on the present state of our affairs, and every review has served to convince me that they require a delicacy and cautiousness of conduct to which we have hitherto been ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... feeling, while reading this product of the modern mind, that we are all a little mad, and that the cleverest of us know it, and indulge the vagaries and instability of insanity. In an advertisement to Mr. Aiken's poetry we are told that it is based on the Freudian psychology. We are not seldom reminded to-day of that base to the New Art. We are even beginning to look on each ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... she said, with a confidence that held more of contempt than tolerance. "None of the Wyndhams are fundamentally capable of taking anything seriously for long. You must have discovered their instability for yourself ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... Besides these three classes of acknowledged associations, all wearing colours, and recognised by the University, there are usually a number of subordinate ones, termed contemptuously 'Blasen,' which may be translated 'bubbles,' a designation given on account of their supposed instability. ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... temptations to evil is instability of temper and want of trust in God; for even as a ship without a helm is tossed about by the waves, so is a man who is careless and infirm of purpose tempted, now on this side, now on that. As fire testeth iron, so doth temptation the upright man. ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... by men. This view, once held by me in common with most women, I have been compelled to give up. Seduction cannot, I am sure, be accepted without very great caution as a common cause for illegitimate births. My experience has taught me that nervous instability, the result often of monotonous or too exhausting work, leading quickly to a desire for excitement and effort to escape dullness, as also love of finery and joy in receiving presents, are the principal motives that lead girls into illegal relations. And what ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... hardly ever had the chance to incorporate itself in the relatively small portion of linguistic history that lies open to inspection; or that there are certain favorable conditions that make for profound morphological disturbances from without, say a peculiar instability of linguistic type or an unusual degree of cultural contact, conditions that do not happen to be realized in our documentary material; or, finally, that we have not the right to assume that a language may easily ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... almost of famine and calling for intervention on the part of the government. However we interpret these figures (and I believe them to mean that wheat sold at from twelve cents to eighty cents a bushel) they certainly indicate a tremendous instability in prices, due to the poor communications and backward methods of agriculture, making years of plenty alternate with years of hunger. In the case of Wittenberg, the lower level was nearer the normal, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Petit-Claud was a double-dealer of the profoundly cautious stamp that is never caught by the bait of a present satisfaction, nor entangled by a personal attachment, after his first initiation into the strategy of self-seeking and the instability of the human heart. So, from the very first, he had put little trust in Cointet. He foresaw that his marriage negotiations might very easily be broken off, saw also that in that case he could not accuse Cointet of bad faith, and he had taken ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... hour, and shall not be surprized at any outrage which Montraville may commit, when he finds himself disappointed. Indeed I should not be astonished, was he to come immediately here, and reproach you for your instability in the hearing of the whole school: and what will be the consequence? you will bear the odium of having formed the resolution of eloping, and every girl of spirit will laugh at your want of fortitude to put it in execution, while prudes and fools will load you with reproach and contempt. ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... latter. If we would still believe that Mercury is a habitable globe we must depend entirely upon the imagination for pictures of creatures able to endure its extremes of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of instability, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... one side of his negative character; the other was his love of extravagance, vain display, and instability of purpose. Much of the time he drifted about like a ship without ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... crossing a gully by means of a somewhat slender fallen tree. It was then that Aladdin saw him show fear. Bullets tore up the bark of the tree, and pine needles, clipped from the trees overhead, fell in showers. But he did not mind that. It was the slenderness and instability of the fallen tree that froze the marrow in his bones: would it bear his one hundred and twenty-four pounds, or would it precipitate him, an awful drop of ten feet, into the softest of muds at the bottom of the ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... surprise and indignation. He had been in Gibraltar already two months without sailing for Oceanica. What sort of illness was this? If he did not care to assume his post, he ought to return to Madrid. The instability of his present position and the necessity of solving this passion which little by little had taken possession of him came to his thoughts ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... His instability of mind pressed him also to go out into the world, for it appeared to him a great evil that while all the rest of his companions were continually discoursing of their adventures, he should have none to mention of his own. ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... Egypt. Pitt declared that the French Revolution was the severest trial which Providence had ever yet inflicted on the nations of the earth; and, claiming that there was no security in negotiating with France, owing to her instability, he summed up his case in the Ciceronian phrase: Pacem nolo quia infida. Ministers carried the day by 260 votes to 64; but they ranged nearly the whole of France on the side of the First Consul. No triumph in the field was worth more to him than these ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... reappear; they mutually judge each other, and it often happens during this reaction of the character after passion, that natural antipathies leading to disunion (which superficial people seize upon to accuse the human heart of instability) come to the surface. This period now began with me. Less blinded by seductions, and dissecting, as it were, my pleasure, I undertook, without perhaps intending to do so, a critical examination of Lady Dudley which resulted to ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... compared with national currency, for the whole of the year 1869 was about 134, and for eleven months of 1870 the same relative value has been about 115. The approach to a specie basis is very gratifying, but the fact can not be denied that the instability of the value of our currency is prejudicial to our prosperity, and tends to keep up prices, to the detriment of trade. The evils of a depreciated and fluctuating currency are so great that now, when the premium on gold has fallen so much, it would seem that the time has arrived when by wise ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... as an emblem of the present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much increased by the death of his daughter—a charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... consider what is to be the subject of examination, and where it is that we are to observe those operations which must determine either the stability or the instability of this ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... discontented. The wise, however, are always content. The thirst of wealth can never be assuaged. Contentment is the highest happiness; therefore, it is, that the wise regard contentment as the highest object of pursuit. The wise knowing the instability of youth and beauty, of life and treasure-hoards, of prosperity and the company of the loved ones, never covet them. Therefore, one should refrain from the acquisition of wealth, bearing the pain incident to it. None that is rich is free from trouble, and it is for this ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... one of the chief industries of our time. One of his rules is to select at first not the plant which varies most in the direction he wishes, but the plant that varies most in any direction whatever. From it, from the instability of its very fibres, its utter forgetfulness of ancestral traditions, he finds it easiest in the long run to obtain and to establish the character he seeks of sweetness, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... of the new teaching—which, by the way, sheds clearer light over Froebel's warning against arbitrary interference—viz. that a great part of the nervous instability which affects our generation is due to the thwarting and checking of the natural impulses of early years. But this new school also gives us something positive, and reinforces older doctrines by telling us to integrate behaviour. "This matter of the unthwarted lifelong progress of behaviour ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Ali addressed a circular letter to his brothers the Christians, announcing that in future he would consider them as his most faithful subjects, and that henceforth he remitted the taxes paid to his own family. He wound up by asking for soldiers, but the Greeks having learnt the instability of his promises, remained deaf to his invitations. At the same time he sent messengers to the Montenegrins and the Servians, inciting them to revolt, and organised insurrections in Wallachia and Moldavia to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... if what was true anywhere were not true everywhere; and as if a man, go where he will, can find more beauty or worth than he carries. All this was said, as we shall see that much else was said by Emerson, by way of reaction and protest against instability of soul in the people around him. 'Here or nowhere,' said Goethe inversely to unstable Europeans yearning vaguely westwards, 'here or nowhere is thine America.' To the use of travel for its own ends, Emerson was of course as ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... Micawber, putting out his hand, 'this is indeed a meeting which is calculated to impress the mind with a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all human—in short, it is a most extraordinary meeting. Walking along the street, reflecting upon the probability of something turning up (of which I am at present rather sanguine), I find a young but valued friend turn ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... moonlit waves of Orta and Lugans. In a word, the conviction of weakness was the only alloying influence to the pleasure of his tour, the one absinthe-drop that lent bitterness to the honeyed wine. It was not only the consciousness of the wrong act and its possible results, but horror at the instability of moral principle which it showed, and a deep fear lest the same weakness should prove a snare and a ruin to him in the ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the city walls; from this grave he was taken, and with the halter in which he had been hanged, his body was dragged naked through the city, and, as if unfit for sepulture on earth, thrown by the populace into the Arno, whose waters were then very high. It was an awful instance of the instability of fortune, to see so wealthy a man, possessing the utmost earthly felicity, brought down to such a depth of misery, such utter ruin and extreme degradation. It is said he had vices, among which were ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... smooth bands under a very pretty black velvet bonnet, lined with yellow satin, Lisbeth made her way to the Rue Saint-Dominique by the Boulevard des Invalides, wondering whether sheer dejection would at last break down Hortense's brave spirit, and whether Sarmatian instability, taken at a moment when, with such a character, everything is possible, would be ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... clause on the original grafted tree. Nuts taken from such trees and planted produce the second generation trees. These may be equal, may be superior, or may be inferior to the original stock. It is this very variation and instability that makes the seedling to a more or less ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... that the Nirvans themselves refused to visit. They tried to dissuade us but, being of a much younger species, we were less plagued by caution and went anyway. The mountains of this little moon are up to fifteen miles high, causing a state of instability that is chronic. Walking down those alabaster valleys was a more awesome experience than any galactic vista I have ever encountered. Our aesthetic sense proved stronger than common sense alertness and seven of us were buried in ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... he considered, "left in the lurch," lasted but a few moments after his return to the hall. Darsie would rather have had it last a little longer. To see an unclouded face, to catch the echo of merry laughter within ten minutes of a humiliating confession, seemed but another instance of instability of character. It seemed literally impossible for Ralph to feel deeply on any subject for more than a few moments at a time; nevertheless, such was the charm of his personality that she felt both pleased and flattered when twelve o'clock approached and ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Adam's flesh was made of a pound of loam; his red and hot blood, of fire; his salt tears, of salt; his sweat, of dew; the colour of his eyes, of flowers; the instability of his thoughts, of cloud; his cold breath, of wind; ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... Monsieur l'Abbe—not one concession, not one surrender, not a single act of cowardice! Catholicism is such as it is, and cannot be otherwise. No modification of the divine certainty, the entire truth, is possible. The removal of the smallest stone from the edifice could only prove a cause of instability. Is this not evident? You cannot save old houses by attacking them with the pickaxe under pretence of decorating them. You only enlarge the fissures. Even if it were true that Rome were on the eve of falling ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... had a true sentiment in politics, and he was able also to see practical issues clearly; but his mind was analytical rather than constructive, and his restlessness of life was indicative of a certain instability of temper which kept him uneasily employed about many things rather than steadfast and single-minded. It would be too much to say that he failed as a political writer, and fell back on his philological and school-master ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... immigrant populations increases in direct ratio to its instability. This applies to the migratory population in the interior of a country, specially that which has no fixed destination, as peddlers, etc. Even those immigrants whom we should naturally assume to be of good disposition—religious ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... at the instability of his Conquest was nothing to his astonishment at the voice which ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... made quantitative studies in the optical illusion, especially in this particular illusion for open and filled spaces, have observed and commented on the instability of the illusion. Auerbach[11] says, in his investigation of the quantitative variations of the illusion, that concentration of attention diminishes the illusion. In the Zoellner figure, for instance, I have been able to notice the illusion ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... immutable! But what is it that occasions the continual instability in this world, which you claim as His empire? Is any state subject to more frequent and cruel revolutions than that of this unknown monarch? How can we attribute to an immutable God, powerful enough to give solidity to His works, the government ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... thither accordingly in my coach and with my grand livery, by which he made it appear that he reposed his confidence entirely in the people, whom there is a necessity of managing with a world of precaution because of their natural diffidence and instability. When we came to the House we were saluted upon the stairs with "God bless the Coadjutor!" but, except those posted there on purpose, not a soul cried, "God bless the Prince de Conti!" from which I concluded that the bulk of the people were not yet cured ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sting was, before that small, dark hole in the ground? And then my thoughts escaped me altogether—away into matters of life—and no very high matters at that—ships, freights, business. In the instability of his emotions man resembles deplorably a monkey. I was disgusted with my thoughts—and I thought: Shall I be able to get a charter soon? Time's money. . . . Will that Jacobus really put good business in my way? I must go and see him in a day ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the essential instability of the arrangement led to sharp friction. The miners claimed that many operators violated the unwritten agreement. The operators, on their part, charged that the union was using every means for practically ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... came here to hunt sometimes, and it was upon one of these parties of pleasure, when his son Henry and Diane de Poitiers were with him, that she fell in love with this castle on the Cher, and longed to make it her own. Having a lively sense of the instability of all things mortal, kings in particular, she took good care to make friends with the rising star, and when Francis was gathered to his fathers and his uncles and his cousins,—you may remember that his predecessor was an uncle or a cousin,—Henry promptly ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... those about them. Some things are perfectly patent in the Czar's desire for peace. Russian autocracy as a system was still unshakable, but the authority of his house was not: in sixty years there had been no fewer than four revolutionary upheavals, either by the soldiery or by a palace cabal. The instability of the throne had sadly diminished the prestige of the country, and after Austerlitz the nation had been treated with contempt in the person of the Czar, both in his political and his military character, the rest of Europe being profoundly ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... say that the Themis of Westminster Hall is the best fitted to preside over the administration of the larger, and more fertile country of beef and pudding; while she of the tee-totum (placed in that precarious position, we presume, to express her instability, since these new lights were struck out) claims a more limited but equally respectful homage, within her ancient jurisdiction—sua paupera regna—the Land of Cakes. If this compromise does not appease the ardour of our brethren for converting ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... apprehension of his legal difficulties, and spoke of them as topics already adjusted. Nay, for that matter, he seemed to have no serious sense of any subject, whatever might be its personal or general interest; but, passing from point to point, exhibited that instability of mental vision which may not inaptly be compared to that wandering glance which is usually supposed to distinguish and denote, in the physical eye, the presence of insanity. It was not often now that he indulged, while speaking to me, in that manner ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... a fight between two sects of Hindu devotees, the Jogis and the Suniasis, for the possession of the rich harvest of gold, jewels, and stuffs, brought to the shrine of the saint by pious pilgrims. Another sign of the instability of his rule awaited him at Delhi, for he found that a state prisoner had eluded the vigilance of the governor, and that the governor, apprehensive of the imperial displeasure, had quitted the ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... admirable firmness and enterprise shown by Hood and Nelson. As a question of Bastia only, their attempt might be charged with rashness; but having regard to the political and military conditions, to the instability of the Corsican character, and to the value of the island as a naval station, it was amply justified, for the risks run were out of all proportion less than the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... of course, with a real earnest strenuous endeavour to recover the lost tone of spirit) is, that you think and feel you can do. I do not in the least regard your change of course in going to Havre as any evidence of instability. But I rather hope it is likely that through such restlessness you will come to a far quieter frame of mind. The disturbed mind and affections, like the tossed sea, seldom calm without an intervening time of ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... to the ordinary aspect of polar seas was very remarkable. There, the ice-fields are an agglomeration of hummocks and icebergs, massed in wild confusion, often towering higher than the masts of the largest whalers, and from the instability of their foundations liable to an instantaneous loss of equilibrium; a breath of wind, a slight modification of the temperature, not unfrequently serving to bring about a series of changes outrivaling the most elaborate transformation ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... saintly, perhaps, he was more likely to influence others. Firmness showed in his forcible chin, energy in the large lines of his mouth, decision in his clear-cut features. Yet there was something contradictory in his face. And the flitting melancholy, already remarked, surely hinted at some secret instability, perhaps known only to Harding himself, perhaps known to ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... from the point of view of tariff history have already been noted.[3] The extremely high rates levied under that legislation caused a slight reduction in customs revenue in 1891 and a sharp decline in 1892. Moreover the coincidence of instability in the currency system, business depression and the relatively high Wilson-Gorman tariff schedules of 1894 continued the decline of income from customs during ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... God is immutable! But what is it that occasions the continual instability in this world, which you claim as His empire? Is any state subject to more frequent and cruel revolutions than that of this unknown monarch? How can we attribute to an immutable God, powerful enough to give solidity to His works, the government of a world where everything is in ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... determinability and influence which outside impressions have upon the disorder, the mode of genesis and the psychological evolution of the delusions, etc.,—may be attributed to the essential ear-marks of the degenerative character; that is, to the exaggerated auto-suggestibility, the great instability of the existing conditions and mental pictures, the disharmony between the perceptive and imaginative capacities and the preponderance of a lively fantastic coloring to the dry thinking of these individuals. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... deserving of grateful acknowledgment, especially at a time when there was so much reason to complain of the plunder practised by the Prussians. My visit to Blucher presented to observation a striking instance of the instability of human greatness. I found Blucher residing like a sovereign in the Palace of St. Cloud, where I had lived so long in the intimacy of Napoleon, at a period when he dictated laws to the Kings of Europe before he ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... concession, not one surrender, not a single act of cowardice! Catholicism is such as it is, and cannot be otherwise. No modification of the divine certainty, the entire truth, is possible. The removal of the smallest stone from the edifice could only prove a cause of instability. Is this not evident? You cannot save old houses by attacking them with the pickaxe under pretence of decorating them. You only enlarge the fissures. Even if it were true that Rome were on the eve of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... is to be the subject of examination, and where it is that we are to observe those operations which must determine either the stability or the instability of this land on ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... circumstances? I will not say that there are no witches; but ever since the difficulty of convicting them has been recognized in the island, they all seem to have disappeared, as though the evidence of the times gone by had been but an illusion. This shows the instability of all ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... distinctness of species is, that varieties produced in a state of domesticity are more or less unstable, and often have a tendency, if left to themselves, to return to the normal form of the parent species; and this instability is considered to be a distinctive peculiarity of all varieties, even of those occurring among wild animals in a state of nature, and to constitute a provision for preserving unchanged the originally ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... warriors dwindled away to the mere puny strength of mortals. Sapped by the wind and rain, the planks lay in a sorely decayed and rotten state, looking in their mossiness like a sign-post of desolation, a memento of terrestrial instability. Traces of the knife were still here and there visible upon the trunks of the supporting trees; and with little difficulty I could decipher ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... unfolding of typical phases of the spiritual life of mankind. Logical categories, scientific laws, historical epochs, literary tendencies, religious processes, social, moral, and artistic institutions, all exemplify the same onward movement through a union of opposites. There is eternal and total instability everywhere. But this unrest and instability is of a necessary and uniform nature, according to the one eternally fixed principle which renders the universe as a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... and its pathological twin brother, the neuropathic diathesis, roams at large unrestrained from without or that self-restraint which, bred of adequate self-knowledge, might come from within, and contaminates with neurotic and mental instability the innocent unborn, furnishing histogenic factors which the future will formulate in minds dethroned to become helpless wards of the state ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... of the mere understanding from that evidence? Exactly the reverse: he disdained to argue even against Transubstantiation on such a ground, well knowing and loudly proclaiming its utter weakness and instability. But it was a leading principle in all his moral and intellectual views to assert the existence in all men equally of a power or faculty superior to, and independent of, the external senses: in this ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... than that which comprised the fortunes of Wolsey. The eventful life of the Cardinal, checkered as it was by the vicissitudes of fortune, his sudden elevation, and finally his more sudden fall and death, display an appalling picture of "the instability of human affairs." This prelate and statesman, who even aspired to the Papal throne itself, "was an honest poore man's sonne in the towne of Ipswiche,"[1] who having received a good education, and being endowed with great ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... be exchanged for gold at any sacrifice. The ultimate result would be, when the supply for customs shall have been coined and the first effervescence has passed away, the emission of silver far below the standard of gold; and when the people become tired of it, disgusted or ruined by its instability, as they soon would be, a fresh clamor may be expected for the remonetization of gold, and another clipping or debasing of gold coins may follow to bring them again into circulation on the basis of silver equivalency. In this slippery descent there can be no ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... loveliness, the character of Ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the event," united to immense intellectual power, render ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... office under native Governments; those on whose efficiency the well-being of village communities depends. The greatest evil of Governments of the kind is the feeling of insecurity which pervades all the higher officers of Government, and the instability of all engagements made by the Government with them, and by them with the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... not invariably placid. The geologist had an irritable temper, and in certain states of the atmosphere his rheumatic twinges made it advisable to shun argument with him. Godwin, moreover, was distinguished by an instability of mood peculiarly trying to an old man's testy humour. Of a sudden, to Mr Gunnery's surprise and annoyance, he would lose all interest in this or that science. Thus, one day the lad declared himself unable to name two stones ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Barlow, "what is the general malady of human nature but this very instability which now appears in your son? Do you imagine that half the vices of men arise from real depravity of heart? On the contrary, I am convinced that human nature is infinitely more weak than wicked, and that the greater part ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... noticed among all nations; facts which are woven into popular proverbs, legends, folk-lore fables, mythologies and theologies, the world over. Now, if thought is matter and soul is matter, then Buddha, in recognising the impermanence of sensual enjoyment or experience of any kind, and the instability of every material form, the human soul included, uttered a profound and scientific truth, And since the very idea of gratification or suffering is inseparable from that of material being—absolute SPIRIT alone being regarded by common consent as perfect, changeless and Eternal—therefore, ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... to this instability and says: "It is bad to be hard, but it is bad also to be thin." When tribulation or persecution arises, something more than impulsiveness is needed to give a root to life. How strongly and ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... all lay it continually and with uttermost humiliation to heart that we all have Captain Anything's opportunism, his self-interest, his insincerity, his instability, and his secret deceitfulness in ourselves. That man knows little of himself who does not despise and hate himself for his secret self-seeking even in the service of God. For, how the love of praise will seduce and corrupt this man, and the love of gain that man! How easy ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... part of the subject, let it be remembered that there is one other characteristic of the French revolution, as striking as its dreadful and destructive principles; I mean the instability of its Government, which has been of itself sufficient to destroy all reliance, if any such reliance could, at any time, have been placed on the good faith of any of its rulers. Such has been the incredible rapidity ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... grimace and hysterical giggle led the retreat across the poop and down the poop-ladder. Never had I seen a finer exemplification of mob psychology. Shorty, the most unstable-minded of the individuals who composed this mob, by his own instability precipitated the retreat in which the mob joined. When he broke before the steady discharge of the automatic in the hand of the mate, on the instant the rest broke with him. Least-balanced, his balance was the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... drawn also is that those people who advocate sexual promiscuity in present society, or free love, as they please to style it, are advocating a condition which would result in the elimination of any group that practiced it. Promiscuity, or even great instability in the family life, as we have already seen, would lead to the undermining of everything upon which a higher civilization rests. The people in modern society who advocate such theories as free love, therefore, are more dangerous than the worst anarchist or the most revolutionary socialist. In other ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... am not sure of that. If everybody is to have independent thought, would there not be a fearful instability and want of compactness? Another thing, too—conformity often saves so much ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... demoralization of the community. It generates excessive competition, which of necessity generates fraud. Trade is turned to gambling; and a spirit of mad speculation exposes public and private interests to a disastrous instability. It is, then, no part of the philanthropy which would elevate the laboring body, to exempt them from manual toil. In truth, a wise philanthropy would, if possible, persuade all men of all conditions ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... "Even her personal attendants whom I have questioned are ignorant of the direction she hath taken. They declare that she escaped within ten minutes of the blowing up of the palace-gate. The catastrophe alarmed her, and she saw in the fall of these defences the instability of her throne." ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Joe Harris, as Tom Leslie was leading her over the line of plank, when they were about half way across, and when, from the instability of a part of the structure, there seemed a fair prospect of taking a ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... of detecting the position of a metallic mass is by the use of the magnetometer. This device operates on the principle of magnetic attraction, and in laboratories on stable foundations it is extremely sensitive. But the instability of the ship on which it would be necessary to carry this instrument would render it impossible to obtain a sufficient degree of sensitiveness in the apparatus to give it any value. The fact that the submersible is propelled under water by powerful electric motors ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... whilst the slow public were determining whether it should be patronized, or waiting to discover whether it is likely to become permanently established. Mr. Kelly's wanderings in early life seem to have tinctured his later career with the hue of instability. Ever, it would seem, ready to enlist in any new enterprise, he was led to abandon those occupations, which, if persevered in, would probably have been triumphant. His life was a constant series of changes, in which ill-luck seems to have ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... [Footnote: Mrs. McKenna, the daughter of Lady Jekyll, and niece of Lady Horner.] took in my son Anthony. No one has had such wonderful friends as I have had, but no one has suffered more at discovering the instability of human beings and how little power to love many ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... well to all; everything good in life seems as if it came from themselves. They have favourable gales in life—it was so with Eva. Even her weakness, a desire to please, which easily went too far, and an instability of character which was very dangerous to her, exhibited themselves only on their pleasing side, within the circle of her family and of her acquaintance, and helped to make ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... influence exerted by them upon the slaves. It is notable in this connection that the Northern dislike of negro newcomers from the South on the ground of their prevalent ignorance, thriftlessness and instability[90] was more than matched by the Southern dread of free negroes from the North. A citizen of New Orleans wrote characteristically as early as 1819:[91] "It is a melancholy but incontrovertible fact that in the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... chimera, are rather to be envied. The ages called by the name of Louis XIV. or of Queen Anne are, in the dispassionate sense of the word, the only true classical ages, those which offer protection and a favourable climate to real talent. We know only to well how in our untrammelled times, through the instability and storminess of the age, talents are lost and dissipated. Nevertheless, let us acknowledge our age's part and superiority in greatness. True and sovereign genius triumphs over the very difficulties that cause others ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... to remain in one place for any length of time together. He is now going to sell the property he only bought last year. There is an instability about him; ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... negro is his instability, his superficiality. It is superlative. His emotions are as easily aroused and as evanescent as those of children, flowing in a noisy and tumultuous current, but utterly without depth and volatile as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... terrible proportions, causing her intelligence, nay, her heart itself, to reach out, as never before, in search of some sure rock and house of defense against the disintegrating apprehension of universal instability and illusion. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes? Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in part simply to write poetry, and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Reached Its Limits.—One views with wonder and astonishment the brilliant achievements of the Arabian civilization, extending from the Tagus to the Indus. But brilliant as it was, one is impressed at every turn with the instability of the civilization and with its peculiar limitations. It reached its culmination long before the Christian conquest. What the Arabians have given to the European world was formulated rapidly and given quickly, and the results were left to be used by a more slowly developing people, who rested ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... was probably designed or conceived by him as affording an explanation also of the community of Knowledge. He emphasised the fluent instability of the sensible impression, and as we have already pointed out, sensation in itself labours also under this drawback that it contains and affords no common nexus whereby the conceptions or perceptions of one man can be compared or related ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... must be catchin'! Four in the same 'ouse! (He goes back to the hearth, quite lost before the instability of the human intellect in a ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... decrees for the embellishment of their city, being dated from Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, he sought to astonish the multitude, by attempting to accomplish in a few years, what it would in general require an age to effect. Perhaps, calculating on the instability of his power, he hastened the construction of whatever might render it famous. A French writer observes, "Il vouloit courir a cheval ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... with one's name in it: it saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future, each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability, with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure. And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth, take heed and imprint my urgent wishes ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... perhaps it is atavism that makes us so fond of this form in building! As, however, no careful Hausfrau would have stood her iron on its edge, architects should hesitate before placing their buildings in that position, as the impression of instability is ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... rage in war-time, and Italy was then almost constantly involved in war. Intellectually, men are active, but the great poems are not written in war-time, nor the highest effects of civilization produced. There is a taint of insanity and of instability in everything, a mark of feverishness and haste and transition. The revolution gave Italy a chance for new life, but this was the most the revolution could do. It was a great gift, not a perfect one; and as it remained for the Italians ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... he makes a great mistake: that of confusing nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put gold as well as silver into Fifine's tambourine. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Midsummer day had robbed the schoolmaster of his assurance. They taught him that all foresight, all precautions, all the clever calculations in the world availed nothing. He felt a certain instability in his surroundings. Even the public house, his home, was not to be counted on. It might be closed any day. Moreover, a certain reserve on the part of Gustav troubled him. The waiter was as civil as before, more attentive ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... to regal government is its instability, proceeding from a variety of causes. Where monarchy is found in its greatest intensity, as in Morocco and Turkey, this observation is illustrated in a very pointed manner, and indeed is more or less striking as governments are more or less despotic. The reason is obvious: as the monarch ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... examine these two letters of the Apostle Peter, in order to construct from them a picture of what he became, and to contrast it with his own earlier self when full of self-confidence, rashness, and instability. It took a lifetime for Simon, the son of Jonas, to grow into Peter; but it was done. And the very faults of the character became strength. What he had proved possible in his own case he commands and commends to us, and from the height to which he has reached, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... subject to this condition"; a right unknown to the mining codes of England, France or Prussia, and not sanctioned by those of Spain or Mexico. Subject to this novel principle the crudely extemporized rules of the miners were to be recognized as law, and this system of instability and uncertainty made the basis of title and the arbiter of all disputes, instead of sweeping it away and ushering in a system of permanence and peace through the well-appointed agency of the Land Department. It was easy to see that this was an ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... immovable in rows on each side of her throne, became impatient: they talked about the fickleness of the sex, the impossibility of inducing them to make up their minds; they whispered wise saws and sayings from Ferdistan and others, about the caprice of women, and the instability of their natures, and the more their legs ached from such perpetual demand upon their support, the more bitter did they become in their remarks. Poor, prosing old fools! the beauteous princess had long made up her mind, and had never swerved from it ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... troubles is greatly lessened by the exclusion of meat from their dietary. Dr. Clouston, of Edinburgh, an eminent medical authority, states that in his experience, those children who show the greatest tendencies to instability of the brain, insanity, and immoral habits are, as a rule, those who use animal food in excess; and that he has seen a change of diet to milk and farinaceous food produce a marked change ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... or in a thirst for pleasure and personal success,—in short, an organic impoverishment of all faculties of cohesion, leading to the destruction of the natural centers of grouping and, consequently, to political instability.[5102] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... author contends that the existence of evil is best explained by assuming that God is confronted with Satan, who in the process of evolution interferes with the divine designs, an interference which the instability of such an evolving process makes not incredible. Satan is, however, held to be a creature who has by abuse of his freedom been estranged from, and opposed to his Creator, and who at last will be conquered by moral means. W. M. Alexander in his book on demonic possession maintains ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... about life. In some ways so incomprehensively great and superb, and yet so easy to be overthrown. Great purposes seemed very great, but was a thing really great when it was so easily undermined? Was there not a dizzying instability about ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... sense of a duty arising out of the possession of wealth—the feeling that it should do some good in the world, or at least be in part applied to some useful purpose. Lastly, the exciting pursuit of wealth helps to produce a curious restlessness and instability of character, of which we have many examples in the age we are studying. "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," are words that might be applied to many a young man among Cicero's acquaintance, and to ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... are, in the physiological sphere, the formation of an organism and a fully developed brain; in the psychologic order, the antagonism between the pure subjectivity of the imagination and the objectivity of ratiocinative processes; in other words, between mental instability and stability. As for the results, they appear only in the third period, the resultant ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... dwelling after a fire would have been restored in a few weeks or months; but the nominal palace of the four preceding sovereigns of England, the last of the Stuarts and three first of the Guelphs, and the scene of their chief grandeur, presents even to the contemporary generation a monument of the instability of every human work. The door at which Margaret Nicholson made her attempt on the life of George the Third, and at which the people were used to see that monarch enter and depart for many years past, is now a chaos of ruins; as is that entire suite of apartments ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... happiness Subject to instability In a moment falls to the ground, And as it has the brilliancy of glass It ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... recent evidence seems to point to the cause of the disruption of radio-active atoms as lying in the atoms themselves. This view is quite in accord with modern ideas of the instability of certain atoms. It has been suggested that some atoms may undergo a slower disintegration without necessarily throwing off part of their systems with great velocity. It is even possible that all matter may ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... him from behind, of crossing a gully by means of a somewhat slender fallen tree. It was then that Aladdin saw him show fear. Bullets tore up the bark of the tree, and pine needles, clipped from the trees overhead, fell in showers. But he did not mind that. It was the slenderness and instability of the fallen tree that froze the marrow in his bones: would it bear his one hundred and twenty-four pounds, or would it precipitate him, an awful drop of ten feet, into the softest of muds at the bottom of the gully, where a sickeningly ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of society, will not advocate ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... The latter is called the Lighthouse of Salvador, because it explodes regularly every twenty minutes. The lesser living vents are called infernillos—little hells. Altogether it looks like Central America, as a whole, with its revolutions and its physical and political instability, must be a very ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... of having been completely overreached did not soften the minister's feelings toward the new custodian of his tin box, and an utter revulsion of sentiment ensued, wherein sympathy for General Rene Laurance reigned supreme. Oh instability of human compassion! To-day at the tumultuous flood, we weep for Caesar slain; To-morrow in the ebb, we vote ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... becoming more and more disorganized. Local clashes were growing more frequent. The "Socialistic" ministers were exhorting the masses to be patient. All decisions and measures, including the calling of the Constituent Assembly, were being postponed. The insolvency and the instability of the coalition regime ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... however, prevent him from dying the same day, without waiting for the district doctor, who (on seeing the hardly cold body) found nothing left for him to do, but with a melancholy recognition of the instability of all things mortal, to ask for 'a drop of vodka and a snack of fish.' As might have been anticipated, Tihon Ivanitch had bequeathed his property to his revered patron and generous protector, Panteley Eremyitch Tchertop-hanov; but it was of no great benefit to the revered patron, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... country is to be found in the camp of negation rather than in that of affirmation; among Broad Churchmen, Nonconformists, Unitarians, and Positivists, rather than among those who seek rest in the unstable position of a modified Catholicism. The very instability and difficulty of that position elicits much ingenuity from its theological defenders, though it also divides their counsels not a little; nor do we quarrel with them for affirming instead of denying, but for not affirming enough. But this attempt at compromise, this ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... government bills of exchange on London, they were secure against any fluctuations in the price of bullion. A special comparison well worth making is that between their own remarkable stability and the equally remarkable instability of similar instruments of finance in the United States, where, after vainly trying to help the government through its difficulties, every bank outside of New England was forced to suspend specie payments in 1814, the year of ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... physiological characters, that they inhabit slightly different stations and range differently. Hence those botanists who rank these plants as varieties ought to be able to prove that they are not as well fixed in character as are most species; and the evidence in favour of such instability of character appears at first sight very strong. It rests, first, on statements made by several competent observers that they have raised cowslips, primroses, and oxlips from seeds of the same plant; and, secondly, on the ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... a lowness, a lassitude, a debility. My lord, if Sir Tumley Snuffim was to see that delicate creature at this moment, he would not give a—a—THIS for her life.' In illustration of which remark, Mr Wititterly took a pinch of snuff from his box, and jerked it lightly into the air as an emblem of instability. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... desire for peace. Russian autocracy as a system was still unshakable, but the authority of his house was not: in sixty years there had been no fewer than four revolutionary upheavals, either by the soldiery or by a palace cabal. The instability of the throne had sadly diminished the prestige of the country, and after Austerlitz the nation had been treated with contempt in the person of the Czar, both in his political and his military character, the rest of Europe being profoundly indifferent to Russian chagrin. His situation ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... become sufficient to guard them from external injury. There was some reason, however, to doubt the efficacy of this protection; for, as the spring-tides approached, the numerous grounded masses around the shores of the bay began to evince symptoms of instability, one or two having fallen over, and others turned round; so that these masses might be looked upon rather as dangerous neighbours, likely to create a premature disruption of the ice, than as the means of security, which, in seas not subject to any considerable rise of tide, they had so often proved ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... correspond with the outside truth; that a man shall he fundamentally true, so that his thought corresponds to fact; unless there is truth in a man, Yoga is for him impossible. Missing the point, illogical, stupid, making the important, unimportant and vice versa. Lastly, instability: which makes Yoga impossible, and even a small amount of which makes Yoga futile; the unstable ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... governed by prudential considerations, and is always asking, Will it pay? is the incarnation of fickleness, instability, and feebleness. The apparent strength of the selfish will is usually a hollow sham. But truth, right, and love are motives stronger than death. And the will, dominated by these, gives the body to be burned. The man of the future ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... chief normal and primitive characteristic of the menstrual state is the more predominant presence of the sexual impulse. There are other mental and emotional signs of irritability and instability which tend to slightly impair complete mental integrity, and to render, in some unbalanced individuals explosions of anger or depression, in rarer cases crime, more common;[107] but the heightening of the sexual impulse, languor, shyness, and caprice are the more ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sudden, seeing her so tormented and so piteous, his indignation ebbed, and with it all his doubts of her were dissipated; dimly he divined that something behind this dark fabric of mystery and inconsistency, no matter how inexplicable to him, excused all her apparent faithlessness and instability of character and purpose. He could not look upon this girl and hear her voice and believe that she was not at heart as sound and sweet, tender and loyal, as any that ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... of nine heavens, each a revolving crystalline sphere, enclosed in another; without them, the boundless Empyrean. The first or innermost heaven, of the Moon, revolved by the angels, is the habitat of wills imperfect through instability. The second, of Mercury, revolved by the Archangels, is the abode of wills imperfect through love of fame. The third, of Venus, revolved by the Principalities, is the abode of wills imperfect through excess of human love. The fourth, of the Sun, revolved by the Powers, is the abode of the ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... lasted but a few moments after his return to the hall. Darsie would rather have had it last a little longer. To see an unclouded face, to catch the echo of merry laughter within ten minutes of a humiliating confession, seemed but another instance of instability of character. It seemed literally impossible for Ralph to feel deeply on any subject for more than a few moments at a time; nevertheless, such was the charm of his personality that she felt both pleased and flattered when twelve o'clock approached and he came smilingly ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... newly reorganized concern, permitting him to buy back a portion of the stock he had sold. The boom in the market having sent our shares up to an abnormal 1/2, we flooded our brokers with selling offers, at the same time spreading rumors—by no means exaggerated—of the firm's instability, buying back control when Consolidated Pemmican reached its norm of 1/16. We made no fortunes on this transaction, but I was enabled to look ahead to a year on a more comfortable economic ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... inclined for the greater part to turn it to their own account, which a consul ought by no means to do. Frequent election of representatives and of civil officers in the subordinate employments would remove most causes of discontent in the people, and of instability in kingly power. Here is a lottery in which every one is sure of a prize, if not for himself, at least for somebody in his family or among his friends; and the ticket would be fairly paid for out ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... is a life of peace. Emotional instability and wretchedness have been displaced by habitual right feeling. Stabilizing her emotions has not impoverished, but enriched her nature. She has mastered the art of enjoying, for self-interests have expanded into love for service. To-day she is a capable, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... and a heavenly climate, colonists are always dissatisfied with their position; because, in a pecuniary point of view, they are always poor. And why are they so? The answer is a startling one. The excess of their abundance is the first cause of their poverty; the instability of their government, the second. They possess more than they can dispose of, and are borne down by the weight of their possessions. Place the markets of England and the labour of Ireland within their reach, and they would become millionaires were they to cease to be colonists; but ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... declared he didn't believe him. So the fines were remitted, and Mr. Jinks found a couple of bail in no time. And all these solemn proceedings having been satisfactorily concluded, Mr. Grummer was ignominiously ordered out—an awful instance of the instability of human greatness, and the uncertain tenure of ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Art return from the Forte to the Piano. A beautiful Messa di Voce,[14] from a Singer that uses it sparingly, and only on the open Vowels, can never fail of having an exquisite Effect. Very few of the present Singers find it to their Taste, either from the Instability of their Voice, or in order to avoid all Manner of Resemblance of the odious Ancients. It is, however, a manifest Injury they do to the Nightingale, who was the Origin of it, and the only thing which the Voice can well imitate. But perhaps they ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... on the heath. Edgar, still attired as a lunatic, soliloquizes in stilted terms about the instability of fortune and the advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester, led by an old man. In that characteristic ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... enriched the world with the product of his solitary hours. After he had recovered a very dangerous fit of sickness, he wrote his Cypress Grove, a piece of excellent prose, both for the fineness of the stile, and the sublimity and piety of the sentiments: In which he represents the vanity and instability of human affairs; teaches a due contempt of the world; proposes consolations against the fear of death, and gives us a view of eternal happiness. Much about this time he wrote the Flowers of Sion ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... to establish guidelines for exports of nuclear materials, processing equipment for uranium enrichment, and technical information to countries of proliferation concern and regions of conflict and instability ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... pioneer volume one should bear continually in mind the many handicaps under which authorship labors in Portuguese and Spanish America: a small reading public, lack of publishers, widespread prevalence of illiteracy, instability of politics. Under the circumstances it is not so much to be wondered at that the best work is of such a high average as that it was done at all. For in nations where education is so limited and illiteracy so prevalent the manifold ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... sought by the Southern Confederacy and so laboriously built up, soon revealed itself to be most unstable. Direct and unmistakable signs of its instability appeared in connection with the first real military test to which it was subjected, the Battle of Pea Ridge or Elkhorn, as it is better known in the South, the battle that stands out in the history of the War of Secession as being the most decisive victory to date of the Union forces in the West ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... match may start a fire which consumes a whole town. And qualitatively as well as quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the cause. We find this condition of things in ail organic matter. Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of albuminoid compounds opposes to their study. Two specimens, treated in what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite different ways. You know about the invisible factors of fermentation, and how the fate of a jar of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... ancient authorities were decaying, there was no accepted standard of moral and political right to make the framework of society fast in the midst of change. The instability that had seized on the forms threatened the very principles of government. The national beliefs were yielding to doubt, and doubt was not yet making way for knowledge. There had been a time when the obligations of public as well as private life were identified with ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... stable, the other half was the dwelling of the owner. Though this hut owed to the neighborhood of the town a few improvements which were wholly absent from such buildings that were five or six miles further off, it showed plainly enough the instability of domestic life and habits to which the wars and customs of feudality had reduced the serf; even to this day many of the peasants of those parts call a seignorial chateau, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
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