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More "Mundane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with apparent musical talent, but whose nature has not been developed to appreciate the beautiful and romantic in this wonderful world of ours, he will find it quite impossible to alter the pupil's individuality in this respect by work at the keyboard alone. The mundane, prosaic individual who believes that the sole aim of musical study is the acquisition of technic, or the magic of digital speed, must be brought to realize that this is a fault of individuality which will mar his entire career unless it is intelligently corrected. ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... give to understand, If e'er this coffin drive a-land, I, King Pericles, have lost This queen, worth all our mundane cost. Who her, give her burying; She was the daughter of a king: Besides this treasure for a fee, The gods requite his charity!' If thou livest, Pericles, thou hast a heart That even cracks for woe! ...
— Pericles Prince of Tyre • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... same time. The dog was howling more piteously than ever. Someone complained of the disturbance that had been caused by the creature's cries, during worship. The congregation continued to pour out, dividing into little groups to discuss the sermon or something of more mundane interest. An appearance of superhuman respectability pervaded the whole body. The important people, some of whom had their carriages waiting to drive them home, lingered a few moments, to exchange greetings, and to discuss sporting prospects ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... gust of anger shook her—anger with her benefactors, that they could not have introduced her to this mundane paradise as her simple self, Miss Manvers—Sarah with the vulgar h—by her own merits and defects to stand or ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... cars haint a-goin' to kill you Ef you don't drive 'crost the track; Crediters never'll jerk you up Ef you go and pay 'em back; You kin stand all moral and mundane storms Ef you'll on'y jist behave— But a' EARTHQUAKE:—well, ef it wanted you It 'ud husk ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... with intense delight one of Townsend's most characteristic sayings. In the course of a conversation which began on some mundane theme and drifted on to spiritual lines, I remember his suddenly throwing the noble horse of dialectic on to his haunches with the catastrophic remark: "Strachey, remember this. If there are angels, they ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the third heaven may signify a supra-mundane vision. Such a vision may be called the third heaven in three ways. First, according to the order of the cognitive powers. In this way the first heaven would indicate a supramundane bodily vision, conveyed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read the paragraph. "Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely..." Yes; she was lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the papers—seen her represented in every conceivable attitude of the mundane game: fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her thoroughbred, dancing a gavotte, all patches and plumes, or fingering a guitar, all tulle and lilies; and once he had caught a glimpse of her at the theatre. Hearing that Ronald was going to a fashionable first-night ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... he made one—about me. He said that my name was Hilaritas, signifying joy. He said, among other flattering things, that I was no common mundane contraption, though such I might seem to the untutored eye. In their studies of the Greek drama they had read of gods from the machine. I was a machine from the gods. In my cylinders I consumed nectar vapour, in my goo-cups ambrosia, in my radiator ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... lifted up, in the sheet of Paul the Apostle, to meet his God. There had been the most wonderful sense of elevation, a clearing of light, a gentler freshness in the air, a sudden sinking to remoteness of human voices and mundane sounds. From that moment in the Chapel life had been changed for him. He never seemed to come down again from that mysterious elevation. Human voices sounded far away from him; he could be urged, only with the greatest difficulty, to take his food, and he frequently ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... he sat out waltzes with her, in conservatories, and on staircases; for Horace Smithson was much too shrewd a man too enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped by his forty years and his fourteen stone. He contrived to amuse Lesbia by his conversation, which was essentially mundane, depreciating people whom all the rest of the world admired, or pretended to admire, telling her of the secret springs by which the society she saw around her was moved. He was judicious in his revelations of hidden evil, and careful to ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... cousin then. She was already the Phryne of Athens for me, but when suddenly a light knock came on the door outside my heart seemed to stand still and I could hardly find voice to say, "Come in." When she entered, dressed in her modern clothes and hat, and held out her hand, all the modern, mundane atmosphere came back and brought ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... deep bow, "let me suggest to you that the finest thing in this mundane state of ours is—reason. Suppose, now, that you complete your toilet, tell us what it is you have lost; leave us—your devoted servants—to begin the task of finding it, and while we are so engaged, hasten with Mr. Weiss to the hall to fulfil your engagement? ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... the greater parts of the visible mundane system animated by intelligent souls, and called "sensible gods"—the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the earth itself, and known by the names ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... certain that the ten tribes worshipped the Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar symbols:—secondly, that the cow, or Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the worship of nature, or the [Greek (transliterated): to pan], as God. In after times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only one portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A man's religious faith (whatever more special items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. In the more developed religions ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... ditches, draining the stagnant pools of life. Each human being has a special goal toward which he or she strains, with nineteen chances out of twenty against reaching it in time; and if it be won, is it worth the race? With some of us it is love, ambition, mundane prosperity; with others, intellectual supremacy, moral perfection, exalted spirituality, sublimated altruism; but after all, in the final analysis, it is only hedonism! Each struggles with teeth and claws for that which gives the largest promise of pleasure ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... evidence of genius in these first-fruits. None of them are meant to be thrilling or profound, but they all have some characteristic grace, some unexpected stroke of wit, some fascinating melody. I do not know any poems of a similar class which afford such unfailing delight. It is true they are mundane and their wit has often a satiric, "knowing" air; but the pleasantry is never mocking or malevolent; and the exuberance of spirit is contagious. Such a poem as "Terpsichore" (1843) is inimitable in its suggestions. The lines have ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the jurisdiction of mundane mandamuses,' says I, 'by the unearthly statutes of female partiality. Let us praise the Lord and be thankful for whatever small mercies—' I begins; but I see Luke don't listen to me. Tired as he was, he calls for a fresh horse ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... receptions are unconsciously a work of art, a kind of poetry, by which cultivated society reconstructs an idyll that is age-long dead. They are confused memories of the golden age, or aspirations after a harmony which mundane reality has not in it ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... devil's stronghold, and hereabouts his will is paramount; and, as I have had the honor to add, the devil is a gentleman. Sure, and as such, he cannot be expected to countenance your present behavior? Nay, never fear! Lucifer, already up to the ears in the affairs of this mundane sphere, lacks leisure to express his disapproval in sulphuric person. He tenders his apologies, sir, and sends in his stead your servant, with whose capabilities ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the unbroken circle of the earth and above the blue desert of sky, solitary, soundless. And the union of earth and heaven, like a mundane and spiritual collusion, lay between him and ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... new conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the society which was ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... had a host of enemies: he was a poet, a sage, a moralist and even a grammarian; brave as a lion, strong as a bull, a successful and experienced captain, yet a complete failure as a King. A mere child in mundane matters, he ever acted in a worldly sense as he should have avoided acting, and hence, after a short and disastrous reign, he also was killed. His two sons, Hasan and Husayn, inherited all the defects and few ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... prior to Mahometanism. It lasts for six days, and is supposed to be kept in commemoration of the Creation and the Deluge—events constantly synchronised and confounded in pagan cosmogonies. At this feast eggs are presented to friends, in obvious allusion to the Mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... we might know that these people are still covetous, and that almost all of them are attached to the world and to themselves—that is, they are worldly people, which shows the holiness of the spirit by which they are actuated! As regards Anna Salters, it was said she was mundane, carnal, covetous, and artful, although she appeared to be the most pious. Her sayings and discussions were continually mixed up with protestations of the presence and omniscience of God, and upon the salvation of ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... the case of Europeans by the use of chandu. Loosely, this is true. But this type of European never becomes an habitue; the habitue always sleeps. That dream-world to which opium alone holds the key becomes the real world "for the delights of which the smoker gladly resigns all mundane interests." The exiled Chinaman returns again to the sampan of his boyhood, floating joyously on the waters of some willow-lined canal; the Malay hears once more the mystic whispering in the mangrove swamps, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... the mill work or the procreative activity. The wheels are, on the one hand, the organs that grind out the child (producing the child like meal), and on the other hand they are the ten commandments whose mundane administration is the duty of the father, by means of strict education and punishment. In passing over the plank, the wanderer places himself above the ten commandments and above the privileges of the father. The wanderer always extricates ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... marriage register. He developed her character, educated her mind, and made her a devoted and companionable wife, full of faith in him. Their curious and retired menage was as happy in a practical and mundane aspect as could be hoped ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... colures^, equator, ecliptic, orbit. [Science of heavenly bodies] astronomy; uranography, uranology^; cosmology, cosmography^, cosmogony; eidouranion^, orrery; geodesy &c (measurement) 466; star gazing, star gazer^; astronomer; observatory; planetarium. Adj. cosmic, cosmical^; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious^, terraqueous^, terrene, terreous^, telluric, earthly, geotic^, under the sun; sublunary^, subastral^. solar, heliacal^; lunar; celestial, heavenly, sphery^; starry, stellar; sidereal, sideral^; astral; nebular; uranic. Adv. in all creation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mundane formations, astro- nomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of specu- 209:27 lative theories, based on the hypothesis of material law or life and intelligence resident in matter, will ulti- mately vanish, swallowed up in the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Christendom, in his three hats and heavy trailing gowns, blessing the air of heaven; the priest, in his alb and chasuble, dispensing of the blessings of the Pope; the judge, in his wig and bombazine, endeavouring to reconcile divine justice with the law's mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... builded many pretty villages, faire houses and chapels which are growne good benefices of 120 pounds a yeare besides their own mundall [mundane] industry. ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... same who had taken the war-path with his iconoclastic hatchet, delivered a tremendous philippic from the text, 'Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power.' Luckily for his congregation he had the voice of a Stentor, as there were several mundane competitors in an adjoining field, each bawling the word of command at the full pitch of his lungs. A conscientious diarist, though full of sabbatarian zeal, was fain to admit that 'Severall sorts of Busnesses was a-Going on: Sum a-Exercising, ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... woman feels this reluctance at first toward a suitor for her hand, but a sensitive young lady might well have a sense of awe on finding that she had attracted to herself such a mundane force as Hawthorne, and it is no wonder that this first impression was recollected throughout her life. There are many who would have refused Hawthorne's suit, because they felt that he was too great and strong for them, and it is to the honor of Sophia Peabody that she was ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... remains than these are still to be found in great numbers throughout Hindostan and Cashmere. Their form was sometimes that of a cross, emblematic of the four elements of which the earth is composed,—fire, water, air, and earth,—but more generally an oval, as a representation of the mundane egg, which, in the ancient systems, was ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... will certainly suppress vanity. He who having acquired great wealth performeth meritorious sacrifices, who having acquired all kinds of learning remaineth humble, and who having studied the entire Vedas devoteth himself to asceticism with a heart withdrawn from all mundane enjoyments, goeth to heaven. None should exult in having acquired great wealth. None should be vain of having studied the entire Vedas. In the world men are of different dispositions. Destiny is supreme. Both power and exertion are all fruitless. Knowing Destiny to be ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Deity. An equality in a plurality of Deities might be objectionable. But that is not at all necessary, rather the contrary; and so was the Pagan theory, which is not so absurd as the modern one. This universe or mundane system may be the work of one hand, another of another, and so on. Where is the absurdity of that? If the universe is applied to the solar system, there is an appearance of its being formed by one ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... some time, and looked very composed, awaiting the commands of the knight. His mind was clearly in such a state of devotion that peradventure he might not have descended for a while longer to his mundane duties, had not Master Silas told him that, under the shadow of his wing, their courage had returned and they were ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... this latter aspect blotted out the first triumphant joy of his discovery. Mundane things, such as Renata Aston's wishes, Caesar's consent, and even the person of Geoffry Leverson interposed between Patricia and him. This mood had its sway and in turn succumbed to an awakening of his dormant will ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... him to realize the mundane again immediately after these undreamed of and supernormal experiences. Holding Pearl, who still clung to him frantically, cowering and trembling against him, he leaned upon the rough, projecting walls of his cabin and gazed with awed and still unbelieving eyes into ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Idiot. "Because her life is an eternal sacrifice to Saphead's needs, and if there is a luxury in this mundane sphere that woman essentially craves it is the luxury of sacrifice. There is something fanatic about it. Sallie Wiggins voluntarily turned her back on seven men that I know of, one of whom is a Governor of his state; two of whom are now in ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... with love! Oh, Love, Love! And in my time, you know——" He made a sweeping, comprehensive gesture, and came back abruptly to mundane affairs. ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... person. His peruke was strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch his head; so that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a witness to an enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every other strong passion, so withdraws us from mundane considerations, that we lose all consciousness of the "I" within us. Raphael, the student and man of science, looked respectfully at the naturalist, who devoted his nights to enlarging the limits of human ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the nations they have conquered, adorn their capital with the wonders of Grecian art, and abandon themselves to pleasure and money-making. The Roman grandees divide among themselves the lands and riches of the world, and this dwelling-place of princes looms up the proud centre of mundane glory and power. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... that nothing exists but Brahman; that all phenomena are merely the result of ignorance; that after the destruction of that ignorance, and of its effects, all is merged again in Brahman, the true source of being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies to all the other ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... canopy of space, Bewildering, and boundless to the eyes, Knowest thou the unborn spirits' dwelling place? Knowest thou the distant regions of the skies Where rest the spirits freed from mundane strife, From mortal grief and care? Knowest thou the secret of the future life? Canst thou tell where? From Space infinite echoed the reply: Child of a transient day, thou too, to ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... have him here often, not lose a day of this precious time. Then we can leave Nevis without anxiety, or perhaps induce him to go with us." She reflected that were she mistress of Hunsdon Towers she should be quite willing to give the famous poet a turret and pass as his mundane redeemer. ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... divers and swimmers, the deep blue of the ocean and the silvery white of the cliff, had that striking air of indifference to the fact that his mind had been absent from them which we are apt to find in mundane things on emerging from a nap. The same people were sitting near him on the beach—the same, and yet not quite the same. He found himself noticing a person whom he had not noticed before—a young lady, who was seated in a low portable ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... observed Mr Stokes, whom the death of poor Jackson and his own narrow escape from a like fate had led to think of other matters besides those connected with his mundane profession. "It's Providence!" ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... a system rather cosmogonical than chronological, divide the present mundane period into four ages or yugas as they call them: the Krita, the Treta, the Dwapara, and the Kali. The Krita, called also the Deva-yuga or that of the Gods, is the age of truth, the perfect age, the Treta is the age of the three sacred fires, domestic ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... after her until she had disappeared, and then, like a man waking from a trance, he turned to the mundane business ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... end of the service she approached the crucifix, and kissed both it and the large red hand of the priest. Maria Dmitrievna invited him to take tea. He threw off his stole, assumed a sort of mundane air, and went into the drawing-room with the ladies. A conversation began, not of a very lively nature. The priest drank four cups of tea, wiping the bald part of his head the while with his handkerchief, stated ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... in several dioceses, including his own diocese of Meaux, a number of parishes kindled what were called ecclesiastical fires for the purpose of banishing the superstitions practised at the purely mundane bonfires. These superstitions, he goes on to say, consisted in dancing round the fire, playing, feasting, singing ribald songs, throwing herbs across the fire, gathering herbs at noon or while fasting, carrying them ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... is a process renewed after each kalpa, or vast mundane period. Brahma awakes from his slumber, and finds the world a waste of water. Then, just as in the American myths of the coyote, and the Slavonic myths of the devil and the doves, a boar or a fish or a tortoise fishes up the world out of the waters. That boar, fish, tortoise, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... consists of the exterior and earthly portion of the Soul, that portion which, being weighted with cares, attachments, and memories merely mundane, is detached by the Soul and remains in the astral sphere, an existence more or less definite and personal, and capable of holding, through a sensitive, converse with the living. It is, however, but as a cast-off vestment of the Soul, and is incapable ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... his place at the organ. Arthur's thoughts, too, were wandering; and—you know it is of no use to make people out to be better than they are—wandering to things especially mundane. Arthur had not ceased to look out for something to do, to replace the weekly funds lost when he left Mr. Galloway's. He had not yet been successful: employment is more easily sought than found, especially by one lying ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and dozed off into a dream about an establishment of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment, with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long procession all the scrofulous youths of the clubs and fraternities, mystic and mundane, in such numbers that she was compelled to install a ticket-office at ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... silent evidence of the futility of our pursuits and anticipations. We know that we must one day die, but we always wish to forget it. The continual remembrance would be too great a check upon our mundane desires and wishes; and although we are told that we ever should have futurity in our thoughts, we find that life is not to be enjoyed if we are not permitted occasional forgetfulness. For who would plan what rarely ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... besides their own were adroitly stuffed into them; nor were letters, arts, and sciences neglected, nor the mundane and social patter, accomplishments, and refinements, including poise, ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the Second Book by itself, we note that it falls into two portions: the Assembly of the People, which has been called together by Telemachus, and the communion of the youth with Pallas, who again appears to him at his call. The first is a mundane matter, and shows the Lower World in conflict with the divine order—the sides being the Suitors on the one hand and the House of Ulysses on the other. The second portion lifts the young hero into a vision of divinity, and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... dwelleth righteousness"; meaning thereby that we look for a new invisible power of control, Messiah's kingdom, and a new earth, society organized along new lines, to take the place of the old. The words here have no reference to the mundane sphere or globe upon ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... is a fact which official records go to substantiate. Although the "Reports of the Territories" take no cognizance of ghosts and spirits and other occult influence, dealing rather with such mundane facts as the condition of crops and the discipline of the races, yet the reports of that particular year in this one district made gloomy reading both for Hamilton and for the Administrator in his far-off ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... undoubtedly felt; and there it would be pleasant to leave the matter. But in the commanding interest of truth it must be added that this genuine disapproval was, unconsciously perhaps to herself, strengthened by more mundane feelings, which would, if analyzed, have been resolved into a sense of resentment against Stafford. He had come to her, as it were, under false pretenses. Relying on his peculiar position, she had allowed herself, without scruple, a freedom and expansion in her relations toward ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... both sides, but, in opposition to the overbold procedure of the constructive thinkers, who had fallen into a revived dogmatism, more in the spirit of caution and resignation. The second great work aroused glowing enthusiasm: "Kant is no mundane luminary," writes Jean Paul in regard to the Critique of Practical Reason, "but a whole solar system shining at once." The third, because of its subject and by its purpose of synthetic reconciliation between fields heretofore sharply separated, gained ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... regret the Griffin, the real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and mundane. England, my desire, what ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... as impregnating this virgin matrix with the seeds of cosmic life—quite an accurate conception from the modern point of view. Later on this idea became spiritualised in a much higher degree. The religious mind came to regard the physical, mundane, or distinctively human principle as the matrix upon which the spirit of God brooded, bringing to the birth a divine idea. And this is perfectly true too, as anyone can see. Nothing great and noble in human experience can be accounted ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... Rousseau in a letter, "makes knowledge unnecessary." And Kant defines genius as "the talent to discover that which cannot be taught or learned."[8] This appears to be more of an evasion than a definition! But the intent here is to refer all that seems to transcend mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his sublimest intuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own source of light ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... European, and the only person in the first class, but the second and especially the third were crowded full, although the passengers did not seem about to flow out of the windows, feet foremost, as so often on an Indian railway. The Chinese is beset by many fears, superstitious fears or real mundane ones, but he has the wit to know a good thing when he sees it, and it does not take him long to overcome any pet fear that stands in the way of possessing it. In 1870 the first Chinese railway was built by the great shipowners of ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... that please the high gods so immensely. They have an elementary sense of humour—like that of the funny fellow who pulls your chair from under you and shrieks with laughter when you go wallop on to the floor. Well, I don't grudge them their amusement. They must have a dull time settling mundane affairs, and a little joke goes a long way with them, as it does in the House of Commons. Fancy sitting on those green benches legislating for all eternity, with never a recess and never even a dinner hour! Poor high gods! Let ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... adjunct. But the advent of the electric fan also in the latter end of the nineties of course did away with the necessity for any further essays in this direction. And so at last after innumerable years of abuse but useful and indispensable work, the old punkah went the way of all things mundane. ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... which the successor is chosen by a select ecclesiastical synod, under a variety of foreign as well as of national influences; in which the chief usually ascends the throne at an age that ill adapts his mind to the idea of human progress, and the active direction of mundane affairs;—a principality in which the peculiar sanctity that wraps the person of the Sovereign exonerates him from the healthful liabilities of a power purely temporal, and directly accountable ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 'power' abstractions of India; to recognize Brahm[a] in El; and in Nu, sky, and expanse of waters, to see Varuna; especially when one compares the boat-journey of the Vedic seer with R[a]'s boat in Egypt. Or, again, in the twin children of R[a] to see the Acvins; and to associate the mundane egg of the Egyptians with that of the Brahmans.[18] Certainly, had the Egyptians been one of the Aryan families, all these conceptions had been referred long ago to the category of 'primitive Aryan ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... know, but we are living now upon this mundane sphere, and naturally our interests center here. A belief in heaven does not straighten out affairs on earth, nor make the burdens any the lighter ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... how was he to know whether or not his own ego was the sole ego in the universe—in fact, composed the universe? He wished to be informed whether he could possibly be nothing but an impression or somebody else's ego; and said finally, in a despondent tone, that it was hopeless to regard this mundane scheme as anything but a subjective phenomenon, mere Schein or maya, and that ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... together the gorgeous outline of river, valley, lake, and savannah that gives the earth all its varied beauty. Beautiful and grand as they are, they are as useful as ornamental, and serve a momentous necessity in mundane affairs. They are grand landmarks of the Almighty's power and mercy and goodness, and historically occupy a high position in the lives ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... in the estimation of the people, they are by no means exempt from the instability of mundane conditions, and the higher a man rises the less secure is his position. The power to see everything, to guard against evil, and to cure illness issues from the light of his heart, which was given him by Tata Dios. It enables him to see Tata Dios himself, to talk to him, to travel through ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... people fundamentally at peace with the world, wanting only instruction as to how to live, not encouragement to live at all. And its ethical instruction is not based upon any metaphysical or religious dogma; it is purely mundane. The result of the co-existence of these two religions in China has been that the more religious and contemplative natures turned to Buddhism, while the active administrative type was content with Confucianism, which was always ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... reflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by the emancipation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They are enfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the military machine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundane influences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternally rational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is the work of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... obeyed her, and we enjoyed an exhilarating drive together. The rest of the day passed with us all very pleasantly and our conversation had principally to do with the progress of art and literature in many lands, and maintained itself equably on the level of mundane affairs. Among other things, we spoke of the Spanish violinist Sarasate, and I amused Heliobas by quoting to him some of the criticisms of the London daily papers on this great artist, such as, "He plays pieces which, though adapted to show his wonderful skill, are the veriest clap-trap;" "He ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... be saying to him sternly: 'If you think you can occupy this place all night on a ninepenny drink, you are mistaken. Either you ought to order another or hook it.' He braved it for several more ages, then paid, and went; and still it was only ten minutes to nine. All mundane phenomena were inexplicably contorted that night. As he was passing the end of the short street which contains the stage-door of Prince's Theatre, a man, standing at the door on the lookout, hailed him loudly. He hesitated, and the man—it was the doorkeeper—flew forward ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... fidelity. She loved him tenderly, more than the whole of womankind together, with a love as azure, as deep, as boundless as the sky itself. Where could he ever find so delightful a mistress? What earthly caress could be compared to the air in which he moved, the breath of Mary? What mundane union or enjoyment could be weighed against that everlasting flower of desire which grew unceasingly, and yet was never over-blown? At this thought the Magnificat would exhale from his mouth, like a cloud of incense. He sang the joyful song of Mary, her ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... Harris rise up from Hegel's fatal blow? He rises like Antaeus from touching the earth, and triumphantly shows that syllogisms are the most necessary of all things to humanity in its mundane existence; that, in fact, we have all been syllogizing ever since we left the maternal bosom to look at the cradle, the cat, and the dog. In fact we never could have grown up to manhood, much less to be Concordian philosophers, if ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... God, the psychometric rhapsode, Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars that blink; All eternities hang round him like an old man's clothes collapsed, While he makes his mundane music—AND HE WILL ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... learn something about Easter eggs one has to turn to some such work as The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which tells us that "the practice of presenting eggs to our friends at Easter is Magian or Persian, and bears allusion to the mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of all things." The advantage of reading Tit-Bits is that one gets to know hundreds of things like that. The advantage of not reading Tit-Bits is that one is so ignorant of them that a piece of information of this ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... call him Monsieur George to the end—shared with Dona Rita her perfect detachment from all mundane affairs; but he had to make two short visits to Marseilles. The first was prompted by his loyal affection for Dominic. He wanted to discover what had happened or was happening to Dominic and to find out whether he could do something for that man. But ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... curtains, TV soap opera, and a corral full of little Mekstrom kids. I grinned. Funny how the proponents of the stratified society always have their comeuppance by the need of women whose minds are bent on mundane things ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune occurs. Are you in mourning, he avoids you. Are you confined, he awaits your churching before he visits you. He possesses a mundane frankness and a social intrepidity ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... string of five hundred jewels to Susanoo and, he, in turn, crunches them in his mouth and blows out the fragments which are transformed into five male Kami. The beings thus strangely produced have comparatively close connexions with the mundane scheme, for the three female Kami—euphoniously designated Kami of the torrent mist, Kami of the beautiful island, and Kami of the cascade—become tutelary goddesses of the shrines in Chikuzen province (or the sacred island ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... instant. I had feared to question Sola relative to the beautiful captive, as I could not but recall the strange expression I had noted upon her face after my first encounter with the prisoner. That it denoted jealousy I could not say, and yet, judging all things by mundane standards as I still did, I felt it safer to affect indifference in the matter until I learned more surely Sola's attitude toward the ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of a little Greek treatise on the nature of the gods, informs us that by Jupiter was meant the vegetable soul of the world, which restrained and prevented those uncertain alterations which Saturn, or Time, used formerly to cause in the mundane system.] ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Nero, and, with very limited powers, gradually substituting order and humanity for oppression and rapine. This fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a conceivable relation to the whole mundane process. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... sacred to him; Churchyards, where the flowers bloom; Gardens, drives, in fact the world is Just one mighty smoking room, And when once he quits this mundane sphere, And takes his outward flight, From the world he made a hades, Day he's turned ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... veneration, but joy and triumph; not fear, but love; not self-abasement, but self-exaltation; not sacrifice, but service: in fact, not religion at all in the old sense of the spiritual at war with the natural, the divine with the human, this world a vale of tears, and mundane things but filth and ashes, heaven for the good and hell for the bad; but in the new sense of the divinity of all things, of the equality of gods and men, of the brotherhood of the race, of the identity of the material and ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... let the house, or when the payment of the rent was in dispute, Mr. Craven advanced the lady various five and ten pound notes, which, it is to be hoped, were entered duly to his credit in the Eternal Books. In the mundane records kept in our offices, they always appeared as debits to William ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... his present mundane, matter-of-fact character, about the last man one would suspect of having been at any time of his life a victim to the "tender passion." A revelation he volunteered to two or three cronies at the club the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... continuing the argument, but I would say no more. The topic was too serious and sacred with me to allow it to be lightly discussed by persons whose attitude of mind was distinctly opposed and antipathetic to all things beyond the merely mundane. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... regarded as the immovable centre of the universe, and surrounding it were ten crystalline spheres, or heavens, arranged in concentric circles, the larger spheres enclosing the smaller ones; and within those was situated the cosmos, or mundane universe, usually described as 'the Heavens and the Earth.' To each of the first seven spheres there was attached a heavenly body, which was carried round the Earth by the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... of an unusual type of feminine beauty, not, it seems to me, peculiarly Norman, with dark, ardent, spiritual eyes, and a kind of proud hierarchical bearing. I have wondered how far the abbots and monks of this great and ancient abbey of Benedictines were occupied—in the intervals of more supra-mundane avocations—in perfecting, not only the ancient recipe of their liqueur, but also the physical type of the feminine population among which they laboured. The type I have in mind sometimes rather recalls the face of Baudelaire, who, by his mother's family from which he chiefly ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... were spoken words between them which no chronicles should report, and a certain calm happiness took up its settled place in his heart, defiant of that despair which could not be driven out. Then came that reawakening to mundane things which seems like a very great step indeed in such cases. She looked at the clock, and ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... south, south-east and north-west; while the Chatham and Dover distributes itself over most of the region south-east of London, closing its circuit by a line along the coast of the Channel that completes a triangle. We can go almost anywhere by any road. It is necessary, however, in this as in other mundane proceedings, to make a selection. We must have a will before we find a way. Let our way, then, be to Waterloo Station ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... brown study. After their recent experience—at once incredible and haunting—to all, and especially to Casanova, there was a certain comfort derivable from an extremely commonplace atmosphere of mundane life. When the carriage reached home, where an inviting odor of roast meat and cooking vegetables assailed their nostrils, Casanova was in the midst of an appetizing description of a Polish pasty, a description to which ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... by some one that all mundane things come to an end sooner or later, and, so far as my experience goes, it bears out that statement. The engines were successfully repaired, and the ship eventually came to anchor outside the harbor about eleven o'clock on the night of ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... all being We must needs go back, and bring the Last result of our researches In a concrete form together. Thus we comprehend the world well; For this purpose I am drinking Truly cosmogonically. Mundane space to me is nothing But a roomy vaulted cellar, Where as first and central wine-tun, Firmly stands the sun erected! Next to him the rank and file of Smaller casks, fixed stars and planets. As the divers casks are holding Wines of various sorts and flavours, So ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... material craft to the heavens is surely without justification from the simple narrative. We have here no prototype of Ra sailing the heavenly ocean. And the destructive flood itself is not only of an equally material and mundane character, but is in complete harmony with ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the dear creature has, for some thousands of years, been robbed of her birthright and relegated to an inferior position in matters mundane simply because her biceps are not so large as those of her big brother, and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... horse and a bull and the latter caricatures them with an ass and a buffalo,—evolution turned topsy turvy. After seeing nine angels and obtaining an explanation of the Seven Stages of Earth which is supported by the Gav-i-Zamin, the energy, symbolised by a bull, implanted by the Creator in the mundane sphere, Bulukiya meets the four Archangels, to wit Gabriel who is the Persian Rawanbakhsh or Life-giver; Michael or Beshter, Raphael or Israfil alias Ardibihisht, and Azazel or Azrail who is Duma or Mordad, the Death-giver; and the four are about to attack the Dragon, that is, the demons hostile ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... opinion of Goethe, that "it is just as absurd to deny the facts of spiritualism now as it was in the Middle Ages to ascribe them to the Devil." I think Mr. Owen attributes too much value to his facts. I do not think the things contributed from the ultra-mundane sphere are particularly valuable, apart from the evidence they give of continued existence ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... acquaintance with botany, a science of which Ellen Armitage is an enthusiastic student. They were foolishly permitted to botanize together, and the result was, that Alfred Bourdon, acting upon the principle that genius—whether sham or real—levels all merely mundane distinctions, had the impudence to aspire to the hand of Miss Armitage. His passion, sincere or simulated, has never been, I have reason to know, in the slightest degree reciprocated by its object; but so blind is vanity, that when, about six weeks ago, an eclaircissement took place, and the fellow's ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... hush of woods, where fairies sleep, Calm Nature soothes my senses, and I live In realms that only creatures can conceive, Who with their holy guardian spirits keep Firm faith, and into loving arms I creep, And mundane cares no ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... of Brahman (the conditioned), beyond which there lies one other stage only, represented by knowledge of, and identity with the unconditioned Brahman; the other leading to the world of the fathers, and from thence, after the reward of good works has been consumed, back to a new round of mundane existence. There is a third road for creatures which live and die, worms, insects, and creeping things, but they are of little consequence. Now it is quite clear that the knowledge which King Kitra possesses, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... he sat thus, amid a deep silence, broken only by an occasional giggle from the stateroom, or an idiotic sniggering from the direction of the mate's bunk, until, recalled to mundane affairs by the lamp burning itself out, he went, in befitting ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... with me, good, kindly man, for twenty minutes. There were tears in his eyes, and I valued that little sign of human fellowship more than all the commonplaces he courageously enunciated. He talked in a soft, low tone, as if I was ill. He made no allusions to mundane things; and I am grateful to him for coming. He had dreaded his call, I am sure, and he had done it from a mixture of affection ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the reign of the magnate who is said to supply under contract all the meals of the Southern railway-restaurants, and who, "if ever fondest prayer for others' woe avail on high," will certainly be booked, with the vote of some of his victims, for a post-mundane berth a good deal warmer than his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad, red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see if the silhouetted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... me some surprise to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under his arm; altogether equipped to such a high point of pedestrianism that a cynical person might ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... and colleges, and education generally. Active and intellectual, though not learned, they have infused new life into the fat indolence of the Spanish system. Men of this world rather than the next, they have adopted a purely mundane policy, abjured the gloomy cowl, raised gorgeous temples, and say, "He that cometh unto us shall in no wise lose heaven." Their chief merit, however, is the discovery ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... picture proved to be one of which Sadie could wholly approve, and she no longer required to be entertained. She became absorbed in its unrolling. The hard eyes softened a little; clearly she was lifted out of this mundane sphere of rooming-houses and attractive, fresh young men you had to be careful with, into ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... to have been caudle. Nowadays a caudle party is a very gay, dressy affair, and given about six weeks after young master or mistress is ready to be congratulated or condoled with on his or her entrance upon this mundane sphere. We find in English books of etiquette very formal directions as to these cards of compliment. "Cards to inquire after friends during illness must be left in person, and not sent by post. On a lady's visiting-card must be written ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... ever-resident in the questioning spirit of immortal man, attempts his first outbreak into the domain of unlimited inquiry, unless he take heed of the needfully-cautious prudentialities of mundane observance, there infallibly attends him a fatal Mephistophelean influence, of which the malign tendency, from every conclusion of eventuality, is to plunge him into perilous vast cloud-waves of the dream-inhabited ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... different and much less important matter. Well, how could there possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other stars or planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusively mundane. We are things of this world, and of this world only. Don't let's magnify our importance: we're not the whole universe. Our race is essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-like animal—the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda eocene. This monkey-like animal itself, again, ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... between the couple who were to wait together for death or the morning. Miss Franklin herself might be on the eve of dying—but so long as she lived and went through the mundane process of dressing, she must dress exceedingly well. She was a good, kind woman all the same, and this night she bore a sore heart under her carefully contrived ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... in deep abstraction, and only after the lapse of several minutes, when, alone with Nightspore, did he realise that they referred to such mundane matters as travelling routes and times ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... her accent of subtle irony, there was something like pity for the artist, removed from mundane things, whose conjugal virtue everyone knew. This seemed to offend him for he spoke to the countess very sharply as he picked up the palette and prepared the colors. There was no need of changing her dress; he would make use of what little daylight ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pleasant condition of existence, nevertheless, to perplexity mankind is more or less doomed in every period of life and in every mundane scene—particularly in the jungles of central Africa, as Harold and his friends found out many ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... western slopes is the "neighborhood," seems locked in completely by the hills, and an ascent towards heaven is apparently the only way of egress. Yet there's another way; for I am not writing this true story among celestial altitudes for you. I returned from Dalton by a mundane road. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... argy that a man Who does about the best he can Is plenty good enugh to suit This lower mundane institute— No matter ef his daily walk Is subject fer his neghbor's talk, And critic-minds of ev'ry whim Jest all git up and go ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... of an auctioneer having it—"Suppose that once in a billion of years a bird were to come from some far, distant clime and carry off in its bill a grain of sand, when the time came when the last animal matter of which this mundane sphere is composed would be carried away," said he, "boys, by that time in hell it would not be sun up." We had this sermon in the morning and the same one in the afternoon, only he commenced at the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in contrasting Asiatic mythology with Greek philosophy, remarks: "The Asiatic myths assumed the existence of beings beyond the world, not subject to mundane laws, who made and controlled the course of events. There was no reason why they should have made a world. They seemed to be living as divine a life without it as with it. The question was one which persisted in Asiatic thought, and when Christianity became dominant in Europe, much of its ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... gave to him an hour's more sleep than to the other monks, and now, although he had risen, he was quietly continuing his sleep in a large armchair as soft as eider down. The furniture of the room was more mundane than religious; a carved table, covered with a rich cloth, books of religious gallantry—that singular mixture of love and devotion, which we only meet with at that epoch of art—expensive vases, and curtains of rich damask, were ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... contemporaries his reputation went up with a bound, though there was not wanting a leaven of jealous ones even amidst those who crowded most closely round him. Among those a little older than himself, the best-natured commended him outspokenly and in honest generosity of heart. Others, with more mundane outlook, judged his achievement reflected lustre on the kennel, and therefore—this with a sniff and the chuck of the chin—also on themselves. A few more vowed, in true sporting spirit, that they would do their level best ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... sea, and cities beyond, which he cannot see, shut up in Rome. With us, the lowest amount of education that ever receives the name comprises at least the three R's, as they are termed,—Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic. But these are far too mundane matters for a Jesuit to occupy his time in expounding. The education of the Italian youth is a thoroughly religious one, taking the term in its Roman sense. The little catechisms I have spoken of ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... company is to be seen one who looks strikingly like Emile Zola, or the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan slightly gone to seed. All these charming folk make of looking at old-fashioned pictures a very busy occupation, and also in effect a rather mundane occupation, as though they were alertly considering the possibility of making a selection from among a variety of ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Friends, glad to be rid of that contemptible, mundane bevy, assailed the Professor with questions. Must he really not tell where the modern Catacombs were? How many people met there? Women also? What were the subjects of his discourses? What did the monks of Sant' Anselmo say? And was anything known concerning this man's previous career? ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... thrilling beauty of the covey of pink-lined dawn-clouds that made her eyes grow round, big and bright; that brought a faint flush to her cheeks; a quick intake of breath. It was something much more mundane that held her attention—the superb spectacle of Kurt Walters, mounted. The lean, brown horseman sat on his saddle as easily as though it were a cushion in a rocking chair. He was talking to three or four cattlemen and apparently ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... the man to the poet we have at once to change our key. A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid—he polished and pruned. His first draft never reached the printer—though he sometimes said it did. This ought, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... which afterwards rescues him from the waves and carries him to Pohjola. In several cosmogonic ballads, too, it is the eggs of this bird and not of the blue duck which contribute to the formation of the world: for the Mundane Egg plays a part here as well as in other cosmogonies. The passage in the Kalevipoeg, to which this note refers, corresponds almost exactly to one in the Kalevala (xxx. 1-10), which ushers in ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... the sublime to the ridiculous to follow so ideal a benefaction with a report of so mundane a thing as a soup kitchen, but soup is as necessary to humanity at the present period of life as some of the exalted things of the intellect, and, as pauperism in Norway and Sweden is so almost unobservable, it is difficult to search out with the keenest vision ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... Tryon. Miss Leary had no doubt that there was a woman at the bottom of it,—for about what else should youth worry but love? or if one's love affairs run smoothly, why should one worry about anything at all? Miss Leary, in the nineteen years of her mundane existence, had not been without mild experiences of the heart, and had hovered for some time on the verge of disappointment with respect to Tryon himself. A sensitive pride would have driven more than one woman away at the sight of ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... passionless planets for justice against mundane decrees, and when coincidences have been favourable the devout student of the skies has loudly proclaimed them as proof of supernatural interest in trivial, transient occurrences. In accordance with the degree of poetry in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... day, despite continued attacks from error—despite, too, the veiled slights and covert insinuations of her schoolmates, to whom the girl's odd views and utter refusal to share their accustomed conversation, their interest in mundane affairs, their social aspirations and worldly ambitions, at length made her quite unwelcome—Carmen steadily, and without heed of diverting gesture, brought into captivity every thought to the obedience of her Christ-principle, and threw off ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... found out that the stars are minding their own business instead of meddling with theirs." Now, while it is true that modern Astronomy has superseded the ancient system, and people have ceased to believe that the stars are intervening in mundane affairs, nothing could be further from the truth than the assertion that "Astronomy has shattered the fallacies of Astrology;" and those of our readers who will accord to this work an unprejudiced perusal can hardly fail to be convinced that a large majority of the people ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... Edward's only mundane passion was the chase; and a day rarely passed, but what after mass he went forth with hawk or hound. So that, though the regular season for hawking did not commence till October, he had ever on his wrist some young falcon to essay, or some old favourite to exercise. And now, just ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the teachings of this sect is subjective idealism. They embrace principles enjoining complete indifference to mundane affairs, and, in fact, thorough personal nullification and the ignoring of all actions by its disciples. In these teachings, thought only, is real. As we have already seen with the Ku-sha teaching, human beings are of three classes, divided according to intellect, into ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... yielded him their utmost. From this in part it came that the commonest sights of earth and sky—a fine spring day, a sunset, even a chance traveller met on a moor, any ordinary sorrow of man's life—yielded to him an amount of imaginative interest inconceivable to more mundane spirits. The simple healthiness and strict frugality of his household life suited well, and must have greatly assisted, that wholesome frugality of emotion which ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... superiority both of nature and function, as to the highest part of the nature common to both, I at the same time assert her inferiority in what may be called its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this asserted superiority? Because man, and the strength, amplitude, and stability of his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hand, a far more philosophic frame of mind belongs to him who, as he proceeds onwards through life's journey, gets a rational enjoyment out of his existence, so that his days pass pleasantly and his health receives the consideration it deserves. It will appear somewhat mundane in this connection to assert that the latter and, therefore, happiness are to a great extent dependent upon the mode of living, but nevertheless it is absolutely true, and thus it is that I come back to the quotation at ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... taking double-firsts in the schools of Christminster, or having anything but ordinary knowledge. The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of the bishopric had not been an ethical or theological enthusiasm at all, but a mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice. He feared that his whole scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... consigned here by an infamous travesty of justice. Madame Akimova, for instance, a plain but homely-looking person, seemed devoted to the care of her miserable little household to the exclusion of all mundane matters. I sometimes wondered, as I sat in her hut, and watched the pale, patient little woman clad in rusty black ceaselessly striving to make his home less wretched for her husband, whether this could really be Theisa Akimova, the famous ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Leopardi (1825), and by a host of lesser writers. In our own day, the French have returned to the original application of dialogue, and the inventions of "Gyp," of Henri Lavedan and of others, in which a mundane anecdote is wittily and maliciously told in conversation, would probably present a close analogy to the lost mimes of the early Sicilian poets, if we could meet with them. This kind of dialogue has been employed in English, and with conspicuous cleverness ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... yours, while care recoils, and envy flies, Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays, are mine, If by your looks my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big, Your fateful arms, the goose-quill, and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's somb'rous seal impress'd, Mysterious terrors, grim ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... brain before she was conscious of reading them, told a long history—a history over which, for the last four years, the friends of the writer had smiled and shrugged, viewing it merely as one among the countless "good situations" of the mundane comedy. Now the other side presented itself to Lily, the volcanic nether side of the surface over which conjecture and innuendo glide so lightly till the first fissure turns their whisper to a shriek. Lily knew that there ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... ask," admitted Gwen, brought down to the mundane side of the question. "Lesbia, do ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... of the Holy See, but for defence of the truth of the Gospel, and for the other causes afore rehearsed. And we do trust in God that it shall not be interpreted as a thing ill done on our part, if preferring the salvation of our soul and the relief of our conscience to any mundane respects or favours, we have in this cause regarded more the Divine law than the laws of man, and have thought it rather meet to obey God than ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... eternal life depends on the infallible element of conscience, while stupendous, yet only mundane, interests depend upon its fallible element. This is a mystery that perplexes a great many people. Is ignorance an excuse? Does it not matter what you believe, just so you are honest? The highest and best thing anybody can ever do, is to follow his conscience, or the voice of his ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... his comrades, seated on the tailboard of the wagon, had discerned a significance in the abrupt silence. As he turned, he, too, caught a fleeting glimpse of that weird image on the coffin-lid. But he was of a more mundane pulse. The apparition roused in him only a wonder whence could come this shadow in the midst of the moon-flooded road. He lifted his eyes to the verge of the bluff above, and there he descried an indistinct ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the party say about the disestablishment of the Church? Even a party must draw the line somewhere. It was bad to sacrifice things mundane; but this thing was the very Holy of Holies! Was nothing to be conserved by a Conservative party? What if Mr. Daubeny were to explain some day to the electors of East Barsetshire that an hereditary peerage was an absurdity? What if in some rural ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... was born. He was the younger son of a noble family of Genoa, and in youth was sent into a cloister as a genteel means of existence rather than from regard to his own wishes or fitness. He was, in fact, of a very gay and mundane temper, and escaped from his monastery as soon as ever he could, and spent his long life thereafter at the comfortable court of Parma, where he sang with great constancy the fortunes of varying dynasties and celebrated in his verse all the polite events of society. Of course, even a life ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... in later ages, at a time when every religious conception was closely veiled beneath a mixture of astrology and mythology. After the planets came to be regarded as active agencies in reproduction, and powerful in directing all mundane affairs, the Virgin of the Sphere while she represented Nature was also the constellation which appeared above the horizon at the winter solstice, or at the time when the sun had reached its lowest point and had begun to return. At this time, ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... "lessons" and supposititious "problems" of this merry and mundane drama, we may recognize among its irregularities and audacities two main qualities of merit. Above everything else which we see in Peer Gynt we see its fun and its picturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods, there is an incoherency ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the gray mystery of the stars, and passed back through the quiet, lamp-lit room and down the slippery stairs that led to the mundane world; and with each step he took, each breath he drew, the words from Louise repeated themselves, justifying all things, glorifying all things: 'C'est la vie! ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... difference what a man's habitual interests may be, whether they be sordid or lofty, he needs ever and anon to get away from them. In reality, nothing wherewith a man occupies himself need be sordid. The spiritual attitude does not consist in turning one's back on things mundane and fixing one's gaze on some supernal blaze of glory, but rather in seeing things mundane in their ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... recalled her to earth and prosaic mundane affairs: her supply of money was rapidly getting dangerously low. Barring accident, she would have enough to get her to Dyer, where Eddie was to meet her. But suppose they should be snowed up for a day or two? Only an hour before ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... lively tale about it for an afternoon paper, and Round Sergeant Norman, as he left the station-house that evening, was instructed to "lay the Ghost." You know the police don't believe in the supernatural. Too often etherealized ghosts turn out to be most mundane burglars and housebreakers. ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... stricken with scurvy not a man could hoist anchor or reef sails. Heceta thought he saw the entrance to a river; but was unable to come within twenty miles of the opening to verify his supposition. And now Gray's crew were on the watch for that supposed river; but more mundane things than glory had become pressing needs. Water was needed for drinking. The ship was out of firewood. The live stock must have hay; and in the crew of twelve, three-quarters were ill of the scurvy. ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... fabric of spiritual poetry that they weave about each other. And nature lets 'em. But men who have seen life, and have lived, as I shouldn't be at all surprised if you had, for instance, are able to see the ugly mundane facts through the rosy mist. My boy, you and Lucy Fulton are being talked about. You don't have to tell me it's none of my business, I know that. But I can't help wanting you to steer clear of rows, and I don't want to see any woman get mud thrown on her because ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... craft to the heavens is surely without justification from the simple narrative. We have here no prototype of Ra sailing the heavenly ocean. And the destructive flood itself is not only of an equally material and mundane character, but is in complete ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... let her mother know how she had fared. The issue had been so satisfactory on the whole that it was considered advisable to tell James, who never failed to say day after day that he didn't know about Winifred's affair, he couldn't tell. As his sands ran out; the importance of mundane matters became increasingly grave to him, as if he were feeling: 'I must make the most of it, and worry well; I shall soon ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... glance again at Hood's domestic affairs. His first child had no mundane existence worth calling such; but has nevertheless lived longer than most human beings in the lines which Lamb wrote for the occasion, On an Infant dying as soon as born. A daughter followed, and in 1830 was ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... and envy flies, Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays, are mine, If by your looks my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big, Your fateful arms, the goose-quill, and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's somb'rous seal ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... lovers, Mother," said Kent. "They look as though they had left this mundane sphere for good and all. I believe they talk in blank verse ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... from the building, at the same time. The dog was howling more piteously than ever. Someone complained of the disturbance that had been caused by the creature's cries, during worship. The congregation continued to pour out, dividing into little groups to discuss the sermon or something of more mundane interest. An appearance of superhuman respectability pervaded the whole body. The important people, some of whom had their carriages waiting to drive them home, lingered a few moments, to exchange greetings, and to discuss sporting prospects ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... had learned from other sources. He still wanted to fight to a finish, and, as Deputy European Providence, he had a very real objection to the interference of apparently irresponsible celestial bodies with his carefully-thought-out plans for the ordering of mundane civilisation on German commercial lines. Whether they liked it or not, it must be the best thing in the end for them: otherwise how could He have come ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... is not however, confined to languages and to mundane matters. As a 'man of business' no one can surpass him; though it is never clear to anybody what kind of occupation he follows. He is, besides, conversant with most of the arts and sciences. As for painting—well; he says ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... least not much of a one. For almost all her waking hours her mind was occupied with totally mundane affairs, and she was never much concerned about her own salvation. It seemed so far off—in the hazy distances of stupid middle age or beyond. So, like thousands upon thousands of other young women of her day, she appeared at ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... one place and deposited in another. But these changes follow rules, which we may investigate; and, by reasoning according to those rules or general laws, upon the present state of things, we may see the operation of those active principles or physical causes in very remote periods of this mundane system, and foresee future changes in the endless progress of time, by which there is, for every particular part, a succession of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... poked a long rubber tube down and converted me into a patent pump, until the tartar-emetic, and the coffee, and the pumpkin-pie I had eaten for dinner had all revisited this mundane sphere. ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... Aladdin's ring, for then I could have found myself and party on the opposite side without further trouble; but not having either of these gifts I issued orders for an immediate crossing, for it was ill wishing sublime things before this most mundane prospect. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... extreme. A man must not come to China for pleasure unless he love his mistress Nature when she is most rudely clad. Some of her lovers are fascinated most in by-places, in the cool of forests, on the summit of lofty mountains, high up from the mundane, in the cleft of canons, everywhere that the careless lover is not admitted to her contemplation. It is for such that China holds out an inviting hand, but she offers little else to the Westerner—the student of Nature and of man can alone be happy in the interior. Forgetting time and ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... without straining his gaze, distinguish the Pantheon at the end of that triumphal avenue which spanned the Seine and had once evoked for him visions of antique splendour. But Brother Hyzlo no longer cared for mundane delights. His doubting soul was the battle-field over which he ranged day and night searching for diabolic opponents. Exterior existence had become for him a shadow; the only life worth living was ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Ellen Armitage is an enthusiastic student. They were foolishly permitted to botanize together, and the result was, that Alfred Bourdon, acting upon the principle that genius—whether sham or real—levels all merely mundane distinctions, had the impudence to aspire to the hand of Miss Armitage. His passion, sincere or simulated, has never been, I have reason to know, in the slightest degree reciprocated by its object; but so blind is vanity, that when, about six weeks ago, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... did not interpret the Jewish formula of belief in the same spirit as the herd,—the religion inculcated in the breast of Leila was different from that which Inez had ever before encountered amongst her proselytes. It was less mundane and material—a kind of passionate rather than metaphysical theism, which invested the great ONE, indeed, with many human sympathies and attributes, but still left Him the August and awful God of the Genesis, the Father of a Universe though the individual Protector of a ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... become almost superhuman; and had she been of another temperament, the men and women about her might have instinctively shrunk from her, as too perfect—now—for human nature's daily food. But from that she was saved by a score of most womanish, most mundane qualities. Nobody knew her, luckily, for the saint she was; she herself least of all. As her strength renewed itself, her soft fun, too, came back, her gentle, inexhaustible delight in the absurdities of men and things, which gave to her talk and her personality a kind of crackling ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... see the hurried and brief meeting between Bartlett and Gertie Higgins, but he had seen enough to cause forgetfulness of mundane things. For an instant he stared after the vanished vision. Then he stepped blindly forward, tripped over something—"his off hind leg," so Captain Sol afterwards vowed—and fell sprawling, ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the large sea-presence, the plash of the divers and swimmers, the deep blue of the ocean and the silvery white of the cliff, had that striking air of indifference to the fact that his mind had been absent from them which we are apt to find in mundane things on emerging from a nap. The same people were sitting near him on the beach—the same, and yet not quite the same. He found himself noticing a person whom he had not noticed before—a young lady, who was seated in a low portable chair, some dozen yards off, with ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... long person over her private devotions. Perhaps it was her own habit, with the cares of a household sometimes conflicting, which made her recite to me so often her pet legend of a saintly person who, constantly interrupted over her prayers by mundane matters, became a pattern in patience out of these snippings of her godly desires. So, one day, angels in the disguise of cross people with selfish demands on her time came seeking to know where in her composition or composure exasperation began: and finding none, they let her return in peace ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... heavenly bodies] astronomy; uranography, uranology^; cosmology, cosmography^, cosmogony; eidouranion^, orrery; geodesy &c (measurement) 466; star gazing, star gazer^; astronomer; observatory; planetarium. Adj. cosmic, cosmical^; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious^, terraqueous^, terrene, terreous^, telluric, earthly, geotic^, under the sun; sublunary^, subastral^. solar, heliacal^; lunar; celestial, heavenly, sphery^; starry, stellar; sidereal, sideral^; astral; nebular; uranic. Adv. in all creation, on the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tired of her. He liked her flattery, and at first declared that she was clever and nice, but her niceness was too purely celestial to satisfy his mundane tastes. Mackinnon himself can revel among the clouds in his own writings, and can leave us sometimes in doubt whether he ever means to come back to earth, but when his foot is on terra firma he loves to feel the earthy substratum which supports ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... the result is, above all else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein Mr. Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a society wherein Vautrin becomes chief of police, are upon the face of it extra-mundane. It suffices that, as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artist finds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper functions of the preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the photographer, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... as a man. In very truth, if Jacinto had not had a little, and even a great deal of liking for pretty girls, his uncle would have thought him perfect. The worthy man preached to him unceasingly on this point, hastening to clip the wings of every audacious fancy. But not even this mundane inclination of the young man could cool the great affection which our worthy canon bore the charming offspring of his dear niece, Maria Remedios. Where the young lawyer was concerned, every thing else must give way. Even the grave and methodical ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... Gestes are mundane stories, the History is a cosmic affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as Jurgen is ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... Along the bright flow of eternity. Then swift in flight as saint and seraph there, She passes back through those vast gates of fire, And slowly drops upon some flowery peak, Or ocean isle, upon this mundane sphere; Then sleeps soft in the folds of some fair flower, Or, in the crystal bosom of ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... destinies of men and kings, and, in ruling that of kings, to determine the fortune of empires? Their earliest astronomers, by their assiduous contemplation of the nightly heavens, had come to the conclusion that the vicissitudes of the heavenly bodies were in fixed relations with mundane phenomena and events. If Mercury, for instance, displayed an unusual brilliancy at his rising, and his disk appeared as a two-edged sword, riches and abundance, due to the position of the luminous halo which surrounded him, would ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... is not this dull and drowsy life, Far from all mundane tumult, that affrights me. If only for a moment I could shine, And blaze in splendor like a shooting star,— If only by a glorious deed I could Immortalize the name of Catiline With everlasting ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the society which was most indifferent ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... guest. He had a table off to one side all to himself, and upon it there were no china plates, silver spoons, knives, forks, and dishes of fruit, but pads, pens, and ink in great quantity. It was evident that Boswell's reportorial duties did not end with his labors in the mundane sphere. ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... the soul in the mundane sphere; it works its way on through the adverse matter. We see its work half completed; we cry, Lo, this is misery, this is hate—because the chaos is not yet a perfected world, and the stone block is not yet a statue of Apollo. But for that ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Zodiac, and the thirty-six Decans. He is the Invisible Sun of Righteousness behind the visible flame which measures time. In other words, he is the symbol of the AEon of AEons, the AEon par excellence. What time is to the ordinary mundane mind that Setheus is to the Alone-begotten and the Monad, whose ineffable union he encompasses. For he is the manifested Sun of Eternity, (sun symbol). The Monad is the Indivisible Point within the circle or sphere, and the Light-Spark ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... far above the topmost peak of the Himalaya, were no ordinary swans, but were divine and heavenly. The wolf which howled so wildly in the long winter night, the hounds, whose bay sounded so. dismally through the shaking black forest, were no mundane wolves and hounds, but issued from the home of a divine hunter, and were themselves wondrous, supernatural beings of ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... left her and returned to his weary round of the constituency, feeling of stouter heart, with a greater faith in the decent ordering of mundane things. A world containing such women as Jane and Ursula Winwood possessed elements of sanity. Outside one of the polling stations he found Barney Bill holding forth excitedly to a knot of working-men. He ceased as the car drove ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... for a reply to this. Mr. Lorimer's mouth was drawn down at the corners, but he looked into the fire with the aloofness of a mind not occupied with mundane things. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... joy and triumph; not fear, but love; not self-abasement, but self-exaltation; not sacrifice, but service: in fact, not religion at all in the old sense of the spiritual at war with the natural, the divine with the human, this world a vale of tears, and mundane things but filth and ashes, heaven for the good and hell for the bad; but in the new sense of the divinity of all things, of the equality of gods and men, of the brotherhood of the race, of the identity of the material and the spiritual, of the beneficence of death and the ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... listening with closed eyes to this mysterious, soul-stirring concert, I was affected to tears, and almost feared that I had been snatched away into some supra-mundane region inhabited by beings of an angelic or half-angelic order—feared, I say, for, with this new love in my heart, no elysium or starry abode could compare with this green earth for a dwellingplace. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... to say, "Why not, sir?" Old pro mercenaries seldom concerned themselves as to the issues or principles involved in a fracas. They chose their side by more mundane considerations. ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... and the maid, the one bearing heaping dishes of ice cream, and the other, as he had unwittingly prophesied, a luscious, heavily-frosted chocolate cake, brought him down to more mundane thoughts with alacrity. Indeed, he devoted himself to his portion with such earnestness that he was able to finish and place his empty plate innocently under his chair, and wait until his plight caught the ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... dat chile up wid deir wings," chanted Aunt Dolcey. Then, descending to more mundane matters, she added a delighted chuckle: "I knowed she'd rise en shine one dese days. Holler at Marse Wes she did, name him names, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... by smiling skies, a laughing earth, and a forest of joyous songsters. More especially beautiful is the face of nature after a storm-swept night, for then, indeed, the blinking dawn itself reflects the gratitude of mundane things for their deliverance. In the forest one hears a water-drip—aftermath of rains; a gentle, almost noiseless fall of crystal drop on crystal drop tapping the loamy soil, and imagination sings in whatsoever key the soul ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... and is supposed to be kept in commemoration of the Creation and the Deluge—events constantly synchronised and confounded in pagan cosmogonies. At this feast eggs are presented to friends, in obvious allusion to the Mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... molecules—which is essentially Professor Loeb's view; or whether to look upon the living body as the result of a "specific something" that organizes, that is, of "dominating organic agencies," be they psychic or super-mundane, which dominate and determine the organization of the different parts of the body into a whole. Yet he is troubled with the idea that this specific something may be "nothing more than accidental chemical peculiarities ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Birdie Soames, the physiognomy lady from the Common. Immediately around these celebrities were grouped a very pale gentleman in a short jacket, who looked as if he made his money by eating nothing and drinking a great deal, a plethoric female with a mundane face, in which was set a large and delicately distracted grey eye; and a gentleman with a jowl, a pug nose, and a large quantity of brass-coloured hair about as curly as hay, which fell down over a low collar, round which was negligently knotted ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... importance as a factor in everyday life; sights and sounds that had been referred to wandering souls came to be explained by natural laws. Wider geographical knowledge made it difficult to assign the ghosts a mundane home, and led to their relegation to the sub-mundane region. Further, the establishment of great nations familiarized men with the idea that every large community should have its own domain. The gods were gradually massed, first in the sky, the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... being a polite child, he said nothing, only put out a small hand sadly. Tims, however, unconscious of the slight chill cast by her appearance, kissed him in a perfunctory, patronizing way, as ladies do who are afraid of disarranging their veils. She greeted Mildred also with a parade of mundane elegance, and sat down deliberately on the sofa, spreading out her ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... is told, in Buddhi-theosophic Schools There are rules By observing which when mundane matter irks, Or the world has gone amiss, you Can incontinently issue From the circumscribing ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... statues of dead personages that I have discovered in Chichen, where they are still, to be symbolical of their belief in reincarnation. They, in common with the Egyptians, the Hindoos, and other nations of antiquity, held that the spirit of man after being made to suffer for its shortcomings during its mundane life, would enjoy happiness for a time proportionate to its good deeds, then return to earth, animate the body and live again a material existence. The Mayas, however, destroying the body by fire, made statues in the semblance of the deceased, so that, being indestructible the spirit might ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... Jonathan Edwards turned his attention to the next world; Franklin, to this world. The gulf is as vast between these two men as if they had lived on different planets. To the end of his life, Franklin's energies were bent toward improving the conditions of this mundane existence. He advises honesty, not because an eternal spiritual law commands it, but because it is the best policy. He needs to be supplemented by the great spiritual teachers. He must not be despised for this reason, for the great spiritual forces fail when they neglect the material foundations ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of the service she approached the crucifix, and kissed both it and the large red hand of the priest. Maria Dmitrievna invited him to take tea. He threw off his stole, assumed a sort of mundane air, and went into the drawing-room with the ladies. A conversation began, not of a very lively nature. The priest drank four cups of tea, wiping the bald part of his head the while with his handkerchief, stated among ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... may bring into application purely mundane utilitarian standards, and may account conduct as immoral or moral according as it seeks only the happiness of the agent, or the happiness of the narrow circle of humanity which includes along with him also his relatives and intimate friends, or ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... bowed as they came in; and being more or less abashed, put on an air of extreme self-assurance. In short, their attitude was not that which one would have expected in men who professed to despise all trivialities, all foolish mundane conventions, and indeed everything, except their ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... waiting patiently two yards away, now coughed plaintively. The sound recalled Mr. Downing to mundane matters. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... caricatures them with an ass and a buffalo,—evolution turned topsy turvy. After seeing nine angels and obtaining an explanation of the Seven Stages of Earth which is supported by the Gav-i-Zamin, the energy, symbolised by a bull, implanted by the Creator in the mundane sphere, Bulukiya meets the four Archangels, to wit Gabriel who is the Persian Rawanbakhsh or Life-giver; Michael or Beshter, Raphael or Israfil alias Ardibihisht, and Azazel or Azrail who is Duma ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the Idiot. "Because her life is an eternal sacrifice to Saphead's needs, and if there is a luxury in this mundane sphere that woman essentially craves it is the luxury of sacrifice. There is something fanatic about it. Sallie Wiggins voluntarily turned her back on seven men that I know of, one of whom is a Governor of his state; two of whom are now in Congress; one of whom is a judge of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... that "it is just as absurd to deny the facts of spiritualism now as it was in the Middle Ages to ascribe them to the Devil." I think Mr. Owen attributes too much value to his facts. I do not think the things contributed from the ultra-mundane sphere are particularly valuable, apart from the evidence they give ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... same was in the beginning with God." Upon the supposition that the Logos is strictly identical with God, the verses make utter nonsense. "In the beginning was God, and God was with God, and God was God. God was in the beginning with God." But suppose the Logos to mean an ante mundane but subordinate being, who was a perfect image or likeness of God, and the sense is both clear and satisfactory, and no violence is done either to historical data or to grammatical demands. "And the Logos was God," that is, was the mirror or facsimile ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the world rises to mortals through different passages, but from that which joins four circles with three crosses it issues with better course and conjoined with a better star, and it tempers and seals the mundane wax more after its own fashion[1] Almost such a passage had made morning there and evening here;[2] and there all that hemisphere was white, and the other part black, when I saw Beatrice turned upon the left ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... still dallied with the subject of the monastic life, as lived by those same pious Benedictines here in England long ago. Its reasoned rejection of mundane agitations, its calm, its leisure, its profound and ardent scholarship were vastly to his taste,—A man touching middle-age might do worse, surely, than spend his days between worship and learning, thus?—He saw, and approved, its social office in offering sanctuary ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... age of magic and the belief in spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being alive, the gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed (1)—that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being—though there might be orders and degrees of spirits (and of gods)—every such being was only conceived ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... face so mundane, so intellectually mundane, I see why a young man of refined mind—a bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on his pleasures, and in whose library are found some few volumes of modern poetry—seeks his ideal ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... or Fenrisulven, a giant wolf, son of Loke, which the gods bound securely to a solid rock. There he lies howling until the end of mundane things, when he breaks his fetters and devours Oden. Oden's son, Vidar, avenges his death ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... no unmixed good, it is said, on this mundane sphere, and the evil that has accompanied the extensive settlement of Gipps Land during recent years is to be found in the widespread destruction of the forests, resulting in a disturbance of the atmospheric conditions and the banishment of an ever-active agent in the preservation of health, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... character!—gay, bohemian, care-free as a child, not even heeding her feet, her means of livelihood. Oh, Bibi—"Bibi Coeur d'Or," as she was called so frequently by her multitudinous adorers—would that in these mundane days you could revisit us with your girlish laugh and supple dancing form! Look at the portrait of her, painted by Coddle at the height of her amazing beauty: note the sensitive nostrils, the delicate little mouth, and ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... man will be swiftly completed, Franklin's good-humoured plea for the fullest experimentation is worth recalling. And the touch of piety with which he concludes his argument is a delightful example of the whimsical fashion in which he often undertook to bolster up a mundane theory with ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... very much as Defoe leads us after his shipwrecked Crusoe. We can scarcely credit the fact that we are not traversing our lower planet; and the angels seem vastly like our common acquaintances. We seem to recognize the "John Smiths," and "Mr. Browns," and "the old familiar faces" of our mundane habitation. The evil principle in Swedenborg's picture is, not the colossal and massive horror of the Inferno, nor that stern wrestler with fate who darkens the canvas of Paradise Lost, but an aggregation of poor, confused spirits, seeking ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... placed California there without assistance from anybody. I do not refer alone to the scenery of California which is duplicated in no other spot of the sidereal system; nor to the climate which matches it; nor to its super-mundane fertility, nor to its super-solar fecundity. The railroad folder with its voluble vocabulary has already beaten me to it. I do not refer solely to that rich yellow-and-violet, springtime bourgeoning which turns California ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... eyes in constantly increasing beauty—you having by your art, in your possession, the key to the cipher, and interpreting and translating for them—you will confer upon them one of the greatest blessings which fall to their lot on this mundane sphere. ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... I parted from my companions, who went to lunch with the cure, together with several other ecclesiastics. These occasional meetings and junketings at one another's houses are the chief mundane consolation of the rural priests, who are as weak as other mortals in the presence of a savoury dish, and, when they can afford to do so, they enter into the pleasures of hospitality with Horatian zest. Poor as they often are, they generally ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... are still, for the edification of the pious reader, stuffed with intolerably tedious stories of baptisms, conversions, and the exemplary deportment of neophytes; for these have become a part of the formula; but they are relieved abundantly by more mundane topics. One finds observations on the winds, currents, and tides of the Great Lakes; speculations on a subterranean outlet of Lake Superior; accounts of its copper-mines, and how we, the Jesuit fathers, are laboring to explore them for the profit of the colony; surmises touching the North Sea, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Smithson was much too shrewd a man too enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped by his forty years and his fourteen stone. He contrived to amuse Lesbia by his conversation, which was essentially mundane, depreciating people whom all the rest of the world admired, or pretended to admire, telling her of the secret springs by which the society she saw around her was moved. He was judicious in his revelations of hidden evil, and careful to say nothing which should offend Lady Lesbia's ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... come out, indeed, determined somehow to break down the barrier he felt rising between them. But it was not easy. They talked for long of the most obvious and mundane things. There were salmon in the Greet this month, and Helbeck had been waging noble war with them in the intervals of much business, with Laura often beside him, to join in the madness of the "rushes" down stream, to watch the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... preceding testimony, a flat contradiction is given to it not only by the recorded facts of the novelist's life, but by his sister, who knew better than George Sand and Gautier that Balzac's profession of sublimer sentiments did not exclude a more mundane feeling and practice. Commenting on George Sand's generous panegyric of her brother, she adds: "It is an error to speak of his extreme moderation. He does not deserve this praise. Outside of his work, which was first and foremost, he loved and tasted all the pleasures of this world. I think ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the same species exist in the Sandwich Islands and Arctic regions; and as far as the genera are concerned, I know that in almost every one of them species inhabit such countries as Florida, North Africa, New Holland, etc. Therefore these, genera seem to me almost mundane, and their presence in the Sandwich Islands will not, as I suspect in my ignorance, show any relation to the Arctic regions. The Sandwich Islands, though I have never considered them much, have long been a sore perplexity to me: they are eminently oceanic in position and productions; they have ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... his attention to these mundane things, Father Zalvidea had to do much for the spiritual side of the mission and its people; for it was in a more deplorable state in this respect than in that of material welfare. Fourteen years before, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... sense with the making in them of an Odyssey; or (shall we say?) of a poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus; as indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular management of his own powers, a skill in philosophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might have constituted him the most successful of Sophists. You cannot help seeing that his mind is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of men and things. Nothing, if it really arrests ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... languages and superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our own country continues to give the names of its uncouth deities to the days of our week, there is a strange genesis of not only the heavens and earth, but of the gods also. It has, besides, its scheme of the universe in its great mundane tree of three vast roots,—celestial, terrestrial, and infernal,—which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all things. The leading religions of the East which still survive, such as Buddhism, Brahminism, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... together in the same house, each occupying a floor, and were inseparables. Though perennially short of cash, they saw no reason to deny themselves the luxuries of this mundane sphere. On the contrary, they lived ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... with a system rather cosmogonical than chronological, divide the present mundane period into four ages or yugas as they call them: the Krita, the Treta, the Dwapara, and the Kali. The Krita, called also the Deva-yuga or that of the Gods, is the age of truth, the perfect age, the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... claims to be the sole accredited agent of the Eternal God, relaxes its hold upon the ever-expanding life of Humanity, all those developments of human nature which cease to be amenable to its control come to be regarded as mundane, as unspiritual, as carnal, as matters with ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... side-path of entertaining nonsense. Our home papers are almost uniformly staid; they are written conscientiously, laboriously, commendably. But, after all, the French are right in trying to inject as much entertainment as possible into the daily record of mundane things. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... charming in its simple directness, closes wistfully: "He who has not seen that whole generation, Saul Wahl amid his sons, sons-in-law, and grandsons, has failed to see the union of the Law with mundane glory, of wealth with honor and princely rectitude. May the Lord God bless us by permitting us to rejoice thus in ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... poetic imagination," admitted Louise, known to her chums as Weasie, "but I might see a family resemblance there to—well—to a first-class Turkish bath. There! How the mighty hath fallen! From the origin of noise and eternity spilled out, down to a mundane yet highly desirable Turkish bath! And girls, mine is the only practical description, for a bath it is to be, ours for all summer! ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... the way of our acceptance of Evolution, we may fairly call upon Evolution to be true to itself. We may call upon it to recognise the possibility of development in the future as well as the fact of development in the past, and not to shut up the hopes and aspirations of our race in a mundane egg because the mundane egg happens to be the special province of the physiologist. The series of developments has proceeded from the inorganic to the organic, from the organic upwards to moral and intellectual life. Why should it be arrested there? Why should it not continue its ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... there were a great many passengers from Norfolk carrying guns and pointers, and other paraphernalia of a critical description, it took a long while to make matters agreeable to all claimants, and even the barrister's seraphic indifference to mundane affairs ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... here presents itself whether the highest Person in this text be the so-called four-faced Brahm, the Lord of the mundane egg who represents the individual souls in their collective aspect, or the supreme Person who is the Lord of all.—The Prvapakshin maintains the former view. For, he argues, on the introductory question, 'He who here among men should meditate until death on the syllable Om, what would he obtain ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... conversation, which set strongly in the direction of mangold-wurzel and the rotation of crops; for Mr. Fellowes and Mr. Cleves cultivated their own glebes. Mr. Ely, too, had some agricultural notions, and even the Rev. Archibald Duke was made alive to that class of mundane subjects by the possession of some potato-ground. The two young curates talked a little aside during these discussions, which had imperfect interest for their unbeneficed minds; and the transcendental and near-sighted Mr. Baird seemed to listen somewhat ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... profited by the rule which gave to him an hour's more sleep than to the other monks, and now, although he had risen, he was quietly continuing his sleep in a large armchair as soft as eider down. The furniture of the room was more mundane than religious; a carved table, covered with a rich cloth, books of religious gallantry—that singular mixture of love and devotion, which we only meet with at that epoch of art—expensive vases, and curtains of rich damask, were some ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... this yer last new yarn about Sam Barstow,—it's the biggest thing out." And in another moment the waiting crowd, with glasses in their hands, were eagerly listening to the repetition of the "yarn" from the new expressman, to the apparent exclusion of other matters, mundane and practical. ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... whose remains she was standing. She was simply waiting for Jimmy Griffiths, and looking at the church because she had nothing else to look at. The church, indeed, afforded her some food for reflection, purely, I regret to state, of a practical and mundane character. It was a large and handsome building, with a particularly fine old tower, that was sadly out of repair; but the chancel was a modern and barn-like structure of brick and plaster, which ought, of course, to be entirely swept away, and a new and more ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... exasperate opinion against such men, the irresistible influence which these Jesuits exercised in all the courts. Meanwhile the immense wealth which they were accumulating, by means of commerce with the West Indies and in South America, betrayed, in the so-called Company of Jesus, a mundane and ambitious spirit totally incompatible with that which ought to prevail in every religious and cloistral establishment. About the middle of the eighteenth century, all the enlightened men of Europe exclaimed against that company, and ardently ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... like that of would-be aristocratic sons who conceal the humble origin of their parents. But it is more than that; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where there is nothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith in the efficiency of the biologic laws, or any mundane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasm that separates man from even the highest of the lower orders. His radical unlikeness to all the forms below him, as if he moved in a world apart, into which they could never enter, as in a sense he does, is ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Lady's fingers.' And then he bewails the fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... or intellect on mundane questions might be met by appeal to the mysteries of a universe which may conceivably be other in reality than to us it appears. But it is to be supposed that divine beneficence would give its creatures all powers of intelligence necessary to their moral ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... beauty of the covey of pink-lined dawn-clouds that made her eyes grow round, big and bright; that brought a faint flush to her cheeks; a quick intake of breath. It was something much more mundane that held her attention—the superb spectacle of Kurt Walters, mounted. The lean, brown horseman sat on his saddle as easily as though it were a cushion in a rocking chair. He was talking to three or four cattlemen and apparently paying no attention to his cavorting steed except that ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... high-flyers. Nor can I for the soul of me persuade myself that, family pride excepted, she—ay, she herself, my she, would not prefer him to me. But these gentry are all so intolerably prudent that, talk to them of passions, and they answer they must not have any. Oh, no! They are above such mundane weakness! ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... of it. It is not only cast away from the sun: it is really cast by the sun—shadow-like, although not of the nature of shadow. It only appears when the comet gets near to the sun's effulgence, and is lost altogether when that body gets far from the great source of mundane light and heat. It is raised from the comet's body, by the power of sunshine, as mist is from damp ground. When Halley's Comet of 1682 approached the fierce ordeal of its perihelion position, the exhalation ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... in the worst of conjunctions, knit her brows into one vertical furrow for a moment, but the next it would be gone. She had much of the placidity of a contented nun; with little of her piety, however; for Anastasie was of a very mundane nature, fond of oysters and old wine, and somewhat bold pleasantries, and devoted to her husband for her own sake rather than for his. She was imperturbably good-natured, but had no idea of self-sacrifice. To live in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... subject, and I was all ears on the instant. I had feared to question Sola relative to the beautiful captive, as I could not but recall the strange expression I had noted upon her face after my first encounter with the prisoner. That it denoted jealousy I could not say, and yet, judging all things by mundane standards as I still did, I felt it safer to affect indifference in the matter until I learned more surely Sola's attitude toward the object of ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Uncle Nat, as I live!" exclaimed Eugenia. "What is going to happen? He hasn't written before in years. I do wish I knew when he expected to quit this mundane sphere, and how much of his money ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... apart: A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world; A soulless life that angels may possess Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things May loll at ease beside the loveliest; A martyr for all mundane moods to tear; The slave of every passion; and the slave Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light; A trembling lyre for every wind to sound. * * * * * Within my heart I'll gather all the universe, and sing ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... twelve years is not bad evidence of Walton's popularity. But times now altered. Walton is really an Elizabethan: he has the quaint freshness, the apparently artless music of language of the great age. He is a friend of 'country contents': no lover of the town, no keen student of urban ways and mundane men. A new taste, modelled on that of the wits of Louis XIV., had come in: we are in the period of Dryden, ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... influenced by Descartes, Montaigne, and Epictetus. He, too, finds in mathematics the example for all science, and holds that whatever transcends mathematics transcends the reason. By the application of mathematics to the study of nature we attain a mundane science, which is certain, no doubt, and which makes constant progress,[1] but which does not satisfy, since it reveals nothing of the infinite, of the whole, without which the parts remain unintelligible. Hence all natural philosophy together ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... are, 1. the greater parts of the visible mundane system animated by intelligent souls, and called "sensible gods"—the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the earth itself, and known by the names Helios, Selena, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he assured her it was just the cold which had pulled her down a little, and she would be all right again as soon as the wind changed. "It's wretched, knocks everybody up." He looked so hearty and mundane that it almost seemed, when he was in the room, as if there could not be such ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... jests were given and taken in good humour, the whole relation between the pair degenerates into the unedifying complicity of a debauched old chaplain and a witty and dissolute young scholar. At this rate the house with the red door may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it may have been below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster, studied, as he tells us, the leisures of a ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a curious accentuation of the common alternation of night and day. They became separated with a widening difference of value in regard to all mundane affairs. During the day, the comet was an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousand more living interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the war storm that was now upon us. It was an astronomical phenomenon, somewhere away over China, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... pause here for a moment. When a man tells you after this that the planet of Saturn is not inhabited, tell him that you know better, that it is not only inhabited, but that the married couples up there have family fights the same as on this mundane sphere. In about ten minutes I will be ready again to explain the wonders and beauties of the sparkling heavens to such of you as prefer a million dollars' worth of scientific knowledge to ten cents in vile dross. Meanwhile permit me to call your attention to my celebrated toothache drops, ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... absolute idea before the world, the pre-existence of the logical categories before the universe came into being, is nothing else than the fantastical survival of the belief in the existence of an extra-mundane creator; that the material, sensible, actual world, to which we ourselves belong, is the only reality, and that our consciousness and thought, however supernatural they may seem, are only evidences of a material bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... a true idea of mundane matters; and bethink thee that regret is after all but an ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... true "ghost" consists of the exterior and earthly portion of the Soul, that portion which, being weighted with cares, attachments, and memories merely mundane, is detached by the Soul and remains in the astral sphere, an existence more or less definite and personal, and capable of holding, through a sensitive, converse with the living. It is, however, but ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... immutable? Yet while the Church teaches you to pray, "Thy will be done on earth, as it is done in heaven," she tacitly countenances widening disparity in condition, and openly sanctions that fearful abuse which dooms the poor man's unborn children to the mundane perdition of poverty's thousand penalties. Is God's will so done in heaven? While the Church teaches you to pray, "Thy Kingdom come," she strikes with mercenary venom at the first principle of that kingdom, namely, elementary equality ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... erroneous belief in the imminent end of the world had an important bearing upon his entire philosophy; for if the end of the world was so near it was far more important to prepare for life hereafter than to be concerned over mundane affairs. May we not view with doubt any of Jesus' teachings that depended upon his mistaken conception of the duration ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... magnate who is said to supply under contract all the meals of the Southern railway-restaurants, and who, "if ever fondest prayer for others' woe avail on high," will certainly be booked, with the vote of some of his victims, for a post-mundane berth a good deal warmer than his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad, red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see if the silhouetted pines and cattle were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... understood, that my one and only object in alluding to these trifling details is to point out that the Whittingens, being entirely engrossed in matters mundane, were the very last people in the world to be termed superstitious, and although imaginative where future husbands' calls and cards were concerned, prior to the events about to be narrated had not an ounce of superstition in their natures. Indeed, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... choose this occasion to come back dulces revisere natos, and that in their honour the hearth should be somewhat more swept and garnished than usual. Therefore they consume bundle upon bundle of well-scented joss-stick, that the noses of the spirits may run no risk of being offended by mundane smells. Candles are lighted, that these disembodied beings may be able to see their way about; and their sense of the beautiful is consulted by a tasteful arrangement of the pretty lamps in which the dirty Chinese dips are concealed. Worship on this occasion is tolerably promiscuous; the ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... relief the picture proved to be one of which Sadie could wholly approve, and she no longer required to be entertained. She became absorbed in its unrolling. The hard eyes softened a little; clearly she was lifted out of this mundane sphere of rooming-houses and attractive, fresh young men you had to be careful with, into a realm of ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... sonorous honking off stage to indicate that a large motor-car has stopped in the immediate vicinity. Then a young man handsomely attired in a dress-suit and a patent-leather silk hat comes onto the stage. He is very mundane. His contrast to the spirituality of the other two is observable as far back as the first row of the balcony. This is ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... somebody, away up above all mundane affairs—not responsible for them, perhaps, but capable, at all events, of thoroughly taking them in—smiling at them all with a sort of ferocious cynicism. In the foreground of this impression were the good friends—the really good friends she had ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of saying: "Or perhaps with some other man," but he checked himself. He was sufficiently mundane to refrain from attempting to reason Haddon out of his affection for the fugitive, or to advise him as to what to do. He knew that in merely letting Haddon unburden on him the cause of anxiety, he had done all that Haddon ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... that he entirely joined issue with me in such an opinion, and that he was often affected to sickishness by the snobbery of mundane society, adding that he hoped I would give him the look up at his paternal mansion in Prince's Square, Bayswater, shortly, since his people would be overjoyed at making my acquaintance, which both enraptured and surprised me, for hitherto he had ridden the high and rough-shoed horse, and ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... But this type of European never becomes an habitue; the habitue always sleeps. That dream-world to which opium alone holds the key becomes the real world "for the delights of which the smoker gladly resigns all mundane interests." The exiled Chinaman returns again to the sampan of his boyhood, floating joyously on the waters of some willow-lined canal; the Malay hears once more the mystic whispering in the mangrove swamps, or scents the fragrance of nutmeg and cinnamon in the far-off golden Chersonese. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... build it for seven. We've got four sages now, and his heart is set on seven. He says never mind showers and such things, because what philosopher ever bathes? And he has suggested seriously seven stoves and seven kitchens, because it is just over such mundane ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Gospel, and for the other causes afore rehearsed. And we do trust in God that it shall not be interpreted as a thing ill done on our part, if preferring the salvation of our soul and the relief of our conscience to any mundane respects or favours, we have in this cause regarded more the Divine law than the laws of man, and have thought it rather meet to obey God than to ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... do not believe in presentiments. They attribute that curious feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen to such mundane causes as liver or a chill or the weather. For my own part, I think there is more in the matter than the casual observer ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... better than when I am inspired by anger; when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well; for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... of the work he was trying to do in his school. A clergyman has social licence to be serious which is not accorded to other men. Wherefore he spoke as a clergyman might speak to a friend, saying, in general terms, how steep is the ascent when, among mundane affairs, human beings try to tread only where the angels of the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and mundane. England, my desire, what have you ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... without being accused of trying to crush free inquiry by an appeal to authority. Language is something, it pre-supposes something; and that which it pre-supposes, that from which it sprang, whatever its pre-historic, pre-mundane, pre-cosmic state may have been, must have been different from that from which it did not spring. People ask whether that germ of language was "slowly evolved," or "divinely implanted," but if they would but lay a firm grip on their words and thoughts, they would see that these two expressions, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... star, sidereal sun, solar earth, terrestrial world, mundane heaven, celestial hell, infernal earthquake, seismic ear, aural head, capital hand, manual foot, pedal breast, pectoral heart, cardial hip, sciatic tail, caudal throat, guttural lung, pulmonary bone, osseous hair, hirsute tearful, lachrymose early, primitive sweet, dulcet, sweet, saccharine young, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... good, as her face looked "very pasty," having taken Edie for the said walk—Miss Jerrold seeing the wistful eyes, sunken cheeks, and utter prostration of her niece's face, bethought her of a plan to try and revive interest in things mundane, at a time when the girl seemed to be slowly dropping out ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... something approaching to the mundane theory of the Brahmans, in the multiplicity and superposition of worlds and the division of the earth into concentric continents, each separated by oceans of various fabulous liquids. Its notions of geography are at once fanciful and crude; ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... relief at having rid ourselves of the memento of mortality, the silent evidence of the futility of our pursuits and anticipations. We know that we must one day die, but we always wish to forget it. The continual remembrance would be too great a check upon our mundane desires and wishes; and although we are told that we ever should have futurity in our thoughts, we find that life is not to be enjoyed if we are not permitted occasional forgetfulness. For who would plan what rarely he is permitted to execute, if each moment ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... humanity for oppression and rapine. This fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a conceivable relation to the whole mundane process. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... auctioneer having it—"Suppose that once in a billion of years a bird were to come from some far, distant clime and carry off in its bill a grain of sand, when the time came when the last animal matter of which this mundane sphere is composed would be carried away," said he, "boys, by that time in hell it would not be sun up." We had this sermon in the morning and the same one in the afternoon, only he commenced at the other end. Then we started home full ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... condition of existence, nevertheless, to perplexity mankind is more or less doomed in every period of life and in every mundane scene—particularly in the jungles of central Africa, as Harold and his friends found out many a time ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... reinvention. In the epic Satan must not appear, as had been proposed in the drama, at once on our earth or within our universe. He must be fetched from the transcendental regions, the vast extra-mundane spaces, of his own prior existence and history. And so, round our fair universe, newly-created and wheeling softly on its axle, conscious as yet of no evil, conscious only of the happy earth and sweet human life in the midst, and of the steady ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... matter gradually faded from the minds of the sympathisers, save when the rapidly rising fortunes of Derville, in contrast with the daily lowlier ones of Madame de la Tour, suggested some tritely sentimental reflection upon the precariousness and instability of all mundane things. For a time, it was surmised by some of the fair widow's friends, if not by herself, that the considerable services Derville had rendered her were prompted by a warmer feeling than the ostensible one of respect for the relict of his old and liberal employer; and there is no doubt that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... what would the party say about the disestablishment of the Church? Even a party must draw the line somewhere. It was bad to sacrifice things mundane; but this thing was the very Holy of Holies! Was nothing to be conserved by a Conservative party? What if Mr. Daubeny were to explain some day to the electors of East Barsetshire that an hereditary peerage was an absurdity? What if in some rural nook of his Boeotia he should suggest ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... ear for schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for discoveries, but it gave La Verendrye permission for a voyage and monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... unnecessary." And Kant defines genius as "the talent to discover that which cannot be taught or learned."[8] This appears to be more of an evasion than a definition! But the intent here is to refer all that seems to transcend mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his sublimest intuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... more than those who are afraid to venture and who remain in the valley of mediocrity. This is true, not only of those who seek to climb the steep path of spiritual attainment, but also of those who are successful in mundane affairs. In each case, they have placed in their keeping great powers and influence such as the ordinary man little dreams of. This is a grave responsibility, for if these powers are used for self-aggrandisement ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... She then lends her string of five hundred jewels to Susanoo and, he, in turn, crunches them in his mouth and blows out the fragments which are transformed into five male Kami. The beings thus strangely produced have comparatively close connexions with the mundane scheme, for the three female Kami—euphoniously designated Kami of the torrent mist, Kami of the beautiful island, and Kami of the cascade—become tutelary goddesses of the shrines in Chikuzen province (or ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
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