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Ephemeral   Listen
noun
Ephemeral  n.  Anything lasting but a day, or a brief time; an ephemeral plant, insect, etc.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books



... higher law of unselfishness of the individual for the advancement of the race; that the dual nature of man, physical and spiritual, must be considered as inseparable, when dealing with the practical questions of life; that physical life, as the primary school of existence, is ephemeral, while the spiritual is the permanent and enduring; that, consequently, the path of progress for the human soul, lies almost entirely in the realms of the spiritual; that a life on the physical plane, devoted solely to selfishness, dwarfs and chokes the spiritual nature, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... social group, even the most ephemeral, will ordinarily have (a) some relatively formal method of defining its aim and formulating its policies, making them explicit, and (b) some machinery, functionary, or other arrangement for realizing its aim and carrying its ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... government of his own country and to place some check upon the despotic power of a selfish, calculating ministry; upon his uniform resolute, and fearless opposition to the wild projects of factious men, who obtained ephemeral influence in France, but whose conduct was equally hostile to the rights and welfare of the people as that of the agents of an absolute monarch; upon his steady and firm support of the constitution, formed by the deputies ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette

... copy or phonorecord 110. Limitations on exclusive rights: Exemption of certain performances and displays 111. Limitations on exclusive rights: Secondary transmissions 112. Limitations on exclusive rights: Ephemeral recordings 113. Scope of exclusive rights in pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works 114. Scope of exclusive rights in sound recordings 115. Scope of exclusive rights in nondramatic musical works: Compulsory license for making and distributing phonorecords ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... revolutionists, who carried their boldness to a pitch of madness, who were surprised by no novelty and arrested by no scruple, and who never hesitated to put any design whatever into execution. Nor must it be supposed that these new beings have been the isolated and ephemeral creation of a moment, and destined to pass away as that moment passed. They have since formed a race of beings which has perpetuated itself, and spread into all the civilised parts of the world, everywhere preserving the same physiognomy, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life" for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses unlimited "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... arms, during the minority of the second Richard, obtained in France an ephemeral superiority, St. Lo was the only town in the Cotentin, except Carentan, which the French monarch considered of sufficient strength to justify him in entrusting it with a garrison.—It was taken by the English, under Henry V. in 1418; and was again restored to the French, by capitulation, ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... that qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... across the vast untroubled sky—shepherdless, futile, imponderable—and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tea-room, and the term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical. It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch as it ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... Indian subjects cared to come forward to perform this work in the more permanent shape that I felt to be not only desirable but essential for our self-vindication. [16] I also realized the fact that the "Bow of Ulysses" was not likely to have the same ephemeral existence and effect as the newspaper and other periodical discussions of its contents, which had poured from the press in Great Britain, the United States, and very notably, of course, in all the English Colonies of the Western Hemisphere. In the West Indian papers the best writers ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... the celebrated Council of Five Hundred. During their ephemeral reign, these very rooms were designed for their halls of audience, and levees, the rich mouldings, and cornices of which were half gilt, and covered with silver paper to preserve them: the poor council were never indulged in a ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr

... connections with Italy ceased, and it maintained its own emperors and its own legions. This was in sympathy with the rising spirit of nationalities, awakened throughout the empire by Septimus Severus, but in this ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille Jullian before the Academie des Inscriptions in 1896, "as we would willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... meticulous attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching abundance was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an intricate structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again in ruins, just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers rebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done thoughtfully and calmly, as though it were a religious rite, as though it were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... to augur, quick-eared Shade. Ephemeral at the best all honours be, These even more ephemeral than their kind, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... the 'rich Englishman,'—an idle trifler with time,—an aimless wanderer from those dull shores where they eat gold till they die of surfeit! I have heard of you,—a mushroom knight, a fungus of nobility,—an ephemeral growth on a grand decaying old tree, whose roots lie buried in the annals ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... little while yet and you will lack nothing of what can charm man or woman. Though effeminate in your caprices, your intellect is manly. I have dreamed all things of you; I forgive you all. You have only to speak to have your ephemeral passions gratified. I have aggrandized your life by introducing into it that which makes it delightful to most people—the stamp of political influence and dominion. You will be as great as you now are small; but you must not break the machine by which we ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... they often sting, but they fly merrily about so long as the sun of opportunity shines upon them. A piece like the Despair of Jocrisse, which, after a lapse of years, may be still occasionally brought out, passes justly among the ephemeral productions for a classical work that has gained the crown of immortality. We must, however, see it acted by Brunet, whose face is almost a mask, and who is nearly as inexhaustible in the part of the simpleton as Puncinello is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... wonderful country whither one may go at will, without thought of any infirmity. The name "Frantz," uttered mechanically by her mother, because of a chance resemblance, represented to her a whole lifetime of illusions, of fervent hopes, ephemeral as the flush that rose to her cheeks when, on returning home at night, he used to come and chat with her a moment. How far away that was already! To think that he used to live in the little room near hers, that they used to hear his step on ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... opened wide for ventilation and the song could be heard clearly enough. As Caroline peered in vain through the glass dimmed by heat and human breath, the sentimental words floated out over her head; and the heavy organ-like accompaniment of the ground-swell made them more than ever ephemeral. A few bars of music, sounding so thin and strange against the booming of the sea, and then ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose

... The other sprang like a great river system from a multitude of sources, flowed onward by a hundred channels, always converging and uniting, until a single mighty stream emerged to water and enrich and serve a broad country and a great people. The one was ephemeral, abortive—a failure. The other was permanent, creative—a triumph. The two were inseparable, each indispensable to the other. Just as the party would never have existed if there had been no movement, so the movement ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... all, which of those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, with a number of political and other pamphlets, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... rival publication, the Canadian Review, and Literary and Historical Journal, which appears to have excited the ire of the editor of the Canadian Magazine, for he devotes several pages of one issue to a criticism of its demerits. But these publications had only an ephemeral existence, and were succeeded by others. One of those was the Museum, edited by ladies in Montreal, in 1833. It contained some articles of merit, with a good deal of sentimental gush, [Footnote: The ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot

... music produced in such abundance towards the close of the eighteenth century spurred them on to higher efforts. Dussek had lived an irregular, aimless sort of life; he had wandered from one country to another, and had acquired the ephemeral fame of the virtuoso. Perhaps he was a disappointed man; there is a tinge of sadness about these last sonatas which supports such a view. Perhaps a feeling that his life was ebbing away made him serious: his music now shows no trifling. ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock

... come to question, as never before, both its direction and its results. He is bound to perceive, if he does not perceive already, that the war's arrestment of architecture (in all but its most utilitarian and ephemeral phases) is no great loss to the world for the reason that our architecture was uninspired, unoriginal, done without joy, without reverence, without conviction: a thing which any wind of a new spirit was bound to make appear foolish to a generation with ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... which must have been contained inside of the citadel but hid from the view by its towering walls. This castle was beautiful beyond description. It was fairer far than the castles of the kings seem to be, except when "distance lends enchantment to their view." But the second scene was as ephemeral as the first. We beheld its fascinating beauties only a few seconds when its four walls again dropped into the abyss below, and there issued from its inner apartment a host of beautiful little actresses such as I did not see upon any other stage in Europe. These little fairy-like ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner

... is the fate of the humbug at home, and destruction to the jaunty career of the art critic, whose essence of success lies in his strong sense of his ephemeral existence, and his consequent horror of ennuyering his world—in short, to perceive the joke of life is rarely given to our people, whilst it forms the mainspring of the Parisian's savoir plaire. The finesse of the Frenchman, acquired in long loafing ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... met with the only other person whom I have ever encountered who had even heard of 'The Cameronian's Dream'. This was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had been greatly struck by it when he was about my age. Probably the same ephemeral edition of it reached, at the same time, each of ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... oligarchic polity, the very silence of the English has arrested the eyes of France. By a law which is universal where bodies are bound in one system, an extreme of separation has wrought its own remedy and the return towards a closer union is begun. I do not refer to such ephemeral and artificial manifestations as a special and somewhat humiliating need may demand; I consider rather that large sweep of tendency which was already apparent fifteen years after the Franco-Prussian War. An approach in taste, manners and expression well defined during our undergraduate years, has ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... he would be charged with superficiality; that which saves him from the accusation is the marvellous display of mental acuteness and a perfect mastery of the French language. The thought in his productions is as ephemeral as that in a morning newspaper; but his composition will serve to this day as a model of the possibilities of the French tongue. In this ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... cannot even stare, and you know, Granville, the object of all these strange speeches is merely to make fools stare. To be the wonder of the London world for a single day, is the great ambition of these ephemeral fame- hunters 'insects that shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth

... from the porter that the Due de Rovigo had been arrested and carried to the prison of La Force. I went into the house and was informed, to my great astonishment, that the ephemeral Minister was being measured for his official suit, an act which so completely denoted the character of the conspirator that it gave me an ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... and English meadows, and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow, frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice of their charmer. Not the ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... dream with closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosphorescence that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various

... liberties, and little gracefulnesses of our modern life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... of immediate war, the people of plain common sense recognized that the friendship of Great Britain was more dangerous than the enmity of France. They dreaded the fixed power of an organized aristocracy far more than the ephemeral anarchy of an ill-ordered democracy; they were more averse to class distinctions protected by law than even to military despotism which destroyed all distinctions, and they preferred, as man always has preferred and always will ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens

... abandonment, sad as it was in thy old age, is better than the ephemeral glory of men who only maintain their reputation by sharing in the errors ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... metaphysical question, he learned his lessons well; when such was present, the Latin grammar, with all its attendant servilities, was driven from the presence of the lordly need. That once satisfied in spite of pandies and imprisonments, he returned with fresh zest, and, indeed, with some ephemeral ardour, to the rules of syntax or prosody, though the latter, in the mode in which it was then and there taught, was almost as useless as the task set himself by a worthy lay-preacher in the neighbourhood—of learning the first nine chapters of the first ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... The sketches she has given of the City of Palaces, and of its inhabitants, prove how accurately she had seized their characteristic features. Here her pen was called into incessant activity; besides various contributions to Annuals and other ephemeral works, Miss Roberts undertook the formidable task (doubly formidable in such a climate) of editing a newspaper, and the Oriental Observer, whilst under her direction, was enriched by some valuable articles written by herself, indicating the versatility of her talents, the extent ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts

... of American sympathies with Russia. Filibusteros, rabid annexationists, inveterate Slaveholders, and Rowdies of every class, to which might have been added a few ignoble minds who made the grave of conscience a "stump" from which to pour forth Buncombe speeches to catch ephemeral popularity, constituted the body in America who sympathised with Russia. All the intelligence of the North, and a great portion of that of the South, felt the deepest interest in our success, not merely as descendants of ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... correct by his account of my father's resignation in January, 1855, on the notice of Mr. Roebuck's motion for a Committee of Inquiry. I do not wish to apply to his account the same measure which he applies by quoting an ephemeral observation of Mr. Greville to my father's speech, but I do maintain that "the ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... cage was considered a very genteel ornament for a New England kitchen. Rich men sometimes have their coats of arms sketched on the floor in colored crayons, to be effaced in one night by the feet of dancers. The Widow Lawton ornamented her kitchen floor in a manner as ephemeral, though less expensive. Every afternoon it was strewn with white sand from the beach, and marked all over with the broom in a herring-bone pattern; a very suitable coat of arms for the owner of a fish-flake. In the parlor was an ingrained carpet, the admiration and envy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... as though Nash died of a disease attributed to coarse and unwholesome cheap food. His fame proved to be singularly ephemeral. So far as I am aware, no book of his was reprinted after his death, with the single exception of "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," which was issued again in 1613. His name was mentioned and some interest in his writings was awakened at the close of the next century by Winstanley and by Langbaine, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... that immense prestige in the Far East which lasted until the arrival of European armies and navies in the nineteenth century. One is sometimes tempted to think that the irruption of the white man into China may prove almost as ephemeral as the raids of Huns and Tartars into Europe. The military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are tempted to think; and our superiority in civilization is a mere delusion. Our histories, which treat the Mediterranean as the centre of the universe, ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... shadowed banana groves and in the mangrove swamps, where the great blue crabs were beginning to crawl to land for their nightly ramble. And it died, at last, upon the highest peaks. Then the brief twilight, ephemeral as the flight of a moth, came and went; the Southern Cross peeped with its topmost eye above a row of palms, and the fire-flies heralded with their torches the ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... any one method, the preaching of the late D. L. Moody was specially steeped in the love of God. It is for want of a vision of the inevitable fate of the godless and disobedient, that much of our present-day preaching is so powerless and ephemeral. You cannot get crops out of the land merely by summer showers and sunshine; there must be the subsoil ploughing, the pulverizing frost, the wild March wind. And only when we modern preachers have seen sin as God sees it, and begin to apply ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... moss-grown, had in comparison an ephemeral, modern aspect. For a hundred years its inmates had come and gone and lived and died. They took no heed of the crag, but never a sound was lost upon it. Their drawling iterative speech the iterative echoes conned. The ringing blast of ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... something like publicity we find him attended by a brilliant company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his teaching and attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been a very ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the most, it had ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its founder had left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849 Rossetti had exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," at the Portland Gallery, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... ever take the remembrance from her, and nothing could ever alter the fact that in his weakness he had been dependent on her. She had been necessary to him then. She had a moment's fierce pleasure in the thought, but it faded as suddenly as it had come. It had been an ephemeral happiness. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... literature—in journalism. For many years he wrote a non-political leading article each week for the Leeds Mercury. His wide culture, his quiet humour, and light, graceful touch, were qualities that gave to his journalistic work far more than an ephemeral value. In politics Reed was a life-long Liberal; he utterly disapproved, however, of Mr Gladstone's latter-day policy in Ireland. Reed was a member of the Reform Club and ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed

... that Theology made the mistake of degrading sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only, we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... literary style. They are merely a fad, which is already of the past; and to-day public and publisher turn in nausea from a mess of dialect which yesterday they would have greedily devoured; so that now there is even no pecuniary excuse for dialect stories. They were doomed to an ephemeral existence, for what little charm they ever possessed was based upon the human craving for something odd and new; the best stories of Barrie and Maclaren live because of their intense human feeling, and they would have succeeded as well and endured longer ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett

... brutal, but below all this surface beats a heart full of true instincts and honest impulses. I am certain the recording angel will blot out many of his sins, as he did those of Uncle Toby. His means exhausted, he abdicates his ephemeral kingdom, and, uncomplaining, takes his pick and shovel, his frying-pan, bacon, and flour, and starts over the mountains for new diggings. Yet he gains no wisdom by experience. The same bacchanalian orgies follow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... succession of private rooms, comfortably furnished, where, screened behind thick curtains, dined somewhat "irregular" patrons: lovers who were in either the dawn, the zenith, or the decline of their often ephemeral fancies. On the top floor, spacious salons, richly decorated, were used for large and elaborate ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa

... fortunate competitor who has gone to college will, perhaps, not be doing this. He will probably be "resting his mind" with an ephemeral novel or the discursive hop-skip-and-jump reading of current periodicals. Thus he will day by day be weakening his strength, diminishing his resources. At the very same time you, by the other method, will hourly ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... panting, staring at the distant haze of a peak. Trackless and tortuous, the way underfoot was incredibly difficult. Yet the distances melted in ephemeral slopes as lovely in their tints as they were accursed in their reality of cruelty. Rhoda, unaccustomed to day travel, panted and gasped as they walked. But she held her own fairly well, while DeWitt, sick and overstrained at the start, was ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... a sash which she wore when dancing with him, and she remembered him specially in her prayers. Henceforward, one devouring desire occupied her mind. She wished—and praiseworthily—to be Burton's wife. To him, on the other hand, she was but an ephemeral fancy—one of the hundred and fifty women—his fair cousins in England and the softer and darker beauties of France and Italy—to whom he had said tender nothings. Later, when Miss Arundell saw him flirting ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... soul is most perfect and beautiful. The flower and trees and fields are beautiful. The flashing aurora, the golden clouds, the sapphire sky, are beautiful. The circling planets, the blazing sun, the starry canopy, are beautiful. But what are they compared to a human soul? What is an ephemeral flower or an age-lasting star compared with glorious reason, with eternal love, with deathless benevolence, and conscience? What were the material universe with all its sublime grandeur and awe-inspiring magnificence with no soul to gaze upon it? And yet perfect and beautiful as were our souls ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... injustice society acts sublimely, taking a harlequin at his just worth, asking nothing of him but amusement, promptly forgetting him; and asking divine great deeds of those before whom she bends the knee. Everything is judged by laws of its being; the diamond must be flawless; the ephemeral creation of fashion may be flimsy, bizarre, inconsequent. So Lucien may perhaps succeed to admiration in spite of his mistakes; he has only to profit by some happy vein or to be among good companions; ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... history, scenery, and people in 1825. During the war of the revolution, Nelson's squadron hung like a thunder-cloud round the coast, and for some time an expeditionary force of British troops held possession of the island. Our George the Third accepted the Corsican crown, but his reign was as ephemeral as that of King Theodore, the aspiring adventurer, who ended his days in ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... this time in a much quieter tone and without enthusiasm. The light died away in Janina's eyes and they strayed aimlessly over those heights of the city in the distance, without understanding anything, for she was perturbed by the thought of that ephemeral fame, for she remembered the faded wreaths of Cabinska and the bygone fame of Stanislawski, for she was thinking with growing bitterness of those thousands of famous actors who were dead and whose names even were forgotten. Janina felt a distressing conflict of feelings in her breast. She leaned ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to confess ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... cheerful and contented tenantry, the chieftain as it were of a devoted clan, the proprietor of Nannau may be truly termed a happy man. The empty blandishments of the world have no charms for him, nor have its ephemeral pleasures any allurement; for, like the gallant knight of Peugwern, when invited by Henry the Seventh to share the honors of his court, for services rendered at Bosworth Field, he would meekly but promptly reply, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various

... his great poetic powers. The sixteen sonnets which belong here show how nobly this form could be adapted to the varied expression of the most serious thought, but otherwise Milton abandoned poetry, at least the publication of it, for prose, and for prose which was mostly ephemeral. Taking up his residence in London, for some time he carried on a small private school in his own house, where he much overworked his boys in the mistaken effort to raise their intellectual ambitions to the level of his own. Naturally unwilling to confine himself to a private ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... of modern life we should use extreme care in the selection of our reading. Our best interests demand more of us than a gormandizing of newspapers or ephemeral reading of any kind. Far be it from me to disparage that great organ of the times—the newspaper, which is a source of keen delight and benefit to us all, and almost the only source of instruction to thousands of the race. But we should be judicious in this, and not allow transitional matter to ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given

... effusions of Mr. Coleridge's later years, which were given to the public in the first gloss and glow of novelty in 1834, and has proved that, though not devoid of the quality of genius, they possess upon the whole, not more than an ephemeral interest. These the Editors have not scrupled to omit on the same grounds and in the same confidence that has ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the trail of ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt

... It is really ludicrous to observe the ridiculous pride of some of these ephemeral things;—during their mayoralty, the gaudy city vehicle with four richly caparisoned horses is constantly in the drive, with six or eight persons crammed into it like a family waggon, and bedizened out in all the colours of the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... also be found in Brahmanism and Buddhism. But in Hinduism and Buddhism you will look in vain for any parallel to the Jewish doctrines of "a nothing quickened into life," or of "a world made in time," which cannot be humble enough in its thanks and praises to Jehovah for an ephemeral existence full of ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... in the speculation of paying by publication the expenses of his travels. We have no individuals in view in these remarks; we speak of things in general, as they are, or rather have been; for we believe these ephemeral travels, like other ephemerals, have had their day, and are fast dying out. The market has become so glutted with them that they are, in a great many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now, more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy to rank ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... one. I see no reason, in the analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the interstices of what our limited senses ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... upon his pallet in the shanty, the sound of Langley's horse's hoofs reached him with an accompaniment of a clear, young masculine voice singing a verse of some sentimental modern carol—a tender song ephemeral and sweet. As the sounds neared the cabin the lad sprang up restlessly, and so was standing at the open door when the singer passed. "Good-neet, ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... bias of allegiance and service came to hold with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group solidarity; ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... herself, has thence a class of deformed disciples, who succeed in entangling their false pretensions with the claims of true merit. So much dust is puffed into the eyes of the public, that it can hardly distinguish between works of durable importance and the ephemeral productions of empirics; and those who would otherwise disdain the notoriety acquired by advertisement, end in adopting the system as the only means to avoid the mortification of seeing their own ideas appropriated and uttered in another ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... the Abbe DE ST. PIERRE enlarged its moral vocabulary, by fixing in his language two significant words. One served to explain the virtue most familiar to him—bienfaisance; and that irritable vanity which magnifies its ephemeral fame, the sage reduced to a ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... hero had often desired to be acquainted with the Abbe; but the Abbe had really hitherto passed him over as a mere young man of fashion, a mere Milord Anglois, one of the ephemeral race, who appear in Parisian society, vanish, and leave no trace behind. But now he did him the honour to enter into conversation with him. The Abbe peculiarly disliked all affectation of sentiment and exaggeration: they were revolting to his good sense, good taste, and feeling. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... had not a dogma in common, these fellows in misfortune, but they held the intimate, deep-lying spirit, the calm, essential fatalism which is the world-old framework of religion, with fresh crops of dogmas growing like ephemeral ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... life of the diary of a man of genius, like Swift, who wrote one, or even of a lively observer, who lived amidst the scenes he describes, as Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, which form a regular diary, only show that they are better acquainted with the more ephemeral and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... reflection, of slowly maturing thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between excited passions ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... Institution at Claremont near Dublin. In 1813 he was placed with the mercantile firm of Messrs. Lecky and Mark, and in 1817 he appeared as an exhibitor in the second exhibition of the Cork Society, for he had already displayed considerable talent as an artist. In 1818 he contributed to an ephemeral production called 'The Literary and Political Examiner:' on the 22nd March of that year his father died, and he left Ireland, not to revisit it until he made a short excursion there in 1821 with Alfred Nicholson and Miss Nicholson (who afterwards became Mrs. Croker), children of ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker

... is so slight," he said, "one of those ephemeral productions that are forgotten in a day, that it will serve our purpose well. We must have a password—the less noticeable the better. When do you return ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells

... with Franklin, and thirty-five years passed away before they met again. Ralph, goaded to desperation, gained a wretched living in various literary adventures; writing for any body, on any side, and for any price. Indeed he eventually gained quite an ephemeral reputation. He could express himself with vivacity, and several quite prominent politicians sought the aid ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott

... than Atheism. On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske

... supports with as much zeal, and almost as much ability. But I predict that the popularity of their doctrines will not last; and if ever you visit the moon again, you will find that their glory, now at its height, like the ephemeral fashions of the earth, will ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... proper to apostles. These leaders are often subtle rhetoricians, seeking only their own personal interest, and endeavouring to persuade by flattering base instincts. The influence they can assert in this manner may be very great, but it is always ephemeral. The men of ardent convictions who have stirred the soul of crowds, the Peter the Hermits, the Luthers, the Savonarolas, the men of the French Revolution, have only exercised their fascination after having been themselves fascinated first of all by a creed. They are then able to call up ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... words, idioms, and phrases, many of them of ephemeral duration, which are thus invented by the young and old in various classes of society, in the nursery, the school, the camp, the fleet, the courts of law and the study of the man of science or literature, could all be collected together and put on record, their number in one or two centuries ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... your table with a muzzled tongue. When you are gone, Caroline, I shall devote myself to what, after all, must be the work of my life, and I shall finish the biographical history of our great hero in verse,—which I hope may at least be not ephemeral. From month to month I shall send you what I do, and you will not refuse me your friendly criticism,—and, perhaps, some slight meed of approbation,—because you are dwelling beneath the shade of a throne. Oh, Caroline, let it not be ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... long-winded Letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners, dining repartees, and other ephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remind us of what we knew well already: that however it may be with Metaphysics, and other abstract Science originating in the Head (Verstand) alone, no Life-Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), such as this of Clothes pretends to be, which originates equally in ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... a crime. And so De Brissac passed violently? And his oaths of vengeance were breaths on a mirror. Ah well, I had ceased to hate him these twenty years. Did he love yonder woman, or was his fancy like mine, ephemeral? And he married Mademoiselle de Montbazon? That is droll, ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... wise obtains tranquillity by subduing both grief and joy through means by which one may escape from grief and joy. All those things about which we are anxious, O bull among men, are ephemeral. The world is like a plantain tree, without enduring strength. Since the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, all, divested of their anxieties, sleep on the crematorium, with bodies reft of flesh and full of bare bones and shrivelled sinews, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... third monument of the third religion of this ancient town. He used the church as a necessary foundation, or stay, for the raising of the rampart; and he preserved it by covering it with feudal fortifications as with a mantle. Issoudun was at that time the seat of the ephemeral power of the Routiers and the Cottereaux, adventurers and free-lancers, whom Henry II. sent against his son Richard, at the time of his rebellion as Comte ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... which tends rapidly to become the center of activity for most of the important influences of our country, there are every year many dinners, anniversaries, and assemblies, at which oratory of an ephemeral nature finds expression and attention. All the nationalities, all the religious and literary societies, all the clubs, all the distinguished foreigners, and all the leading and following colleges, must have a dinner, and every dinner must have at least ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... victim prepared for the sacrifice. Since that time much bad gunpowder has been burned over the heads of the trees, and the roots have been shaken by the discharge of the cannon of the castle at every change of rulers, as one ephemeral government succeeded another, but these cypresses still remain unharmed, and may ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... comprise any considerable portion of biographical detail. Certain lives of some of the sufferers in the cause of the Stuarts, printed soon after the contests in behalf of those Princes, are little more than narratives of their trials and executions; they were intended merely as ephemeral productions to gratify a curious public, and merit no long existence. It would have been, indeed, for many years, scarcely prudent, and certainly not expedient, to proffer any information concerning the objects of royal indignation, except ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... stars; "they do not live long enough to know the value and purport of life, else they would combine together to live long, instead of throwing away the lives of thousands as they do. And what matters a little tyranny in so short a life? What matters a form of government for such ephemeral creatures?" ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... discovery or detection of some leading principle of action or conduct involved in them. Such grave matters, however, did not alone occupy him; for I never saw a more eager and indiscriminate reader of even the ephemeral trash loading the shelves of circulating libraries. Scarcely a novel, play, or magazine appeared, which he did not take up, and, whenever they happened to be mentioned, show as complete a knowledge of them as if they had been worthy of it. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... with the golden heart of England, And, if we fail, that golden heart will break. The world's wide eyes are on us, and our souls Are woven together into one great flag Of England. Shall we strike it? Shall it be rent Asunder with small discord, party strife, Ephemeral conflict of contemptible tongues, Or shall it be blazoned, blazoned evermore On the most heaven-wide page of history? This is that hour, I know it in my soul, When we must choose for England. Ye are kings, And sons of Vikings, exiled from your throne. Have ye forgotten? Nay, your blood remembers! ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal spheres and spaces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy vastness, yet what a splendour lights up for him and dazzles in those great halls! Anything less limitless would be ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith

... on the 3rd of June, 1822, having been absent more than twenty months. An enthusiastic welcome awaited him. Medals were struck in his honour, and in various ephemeral ways ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald

... were walking along, lined up according to size. They kept turning their heads to admire their father, suddenly glorified by his military trappings. At his side was marching his wife, affable and resigned, feeling in her simple soul a revival of love, an ephemeral Spring, born of the contact with danger. The man, a laborer of Paris, who a few months before was singing La Internacional, demanding the abolishment of armies and the brotherhood of all mankind, was now going in quest of death. His ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... of the world. In that case, they would have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis; they might have swept over the face of the earth, and scourged the human race, powerful to destroy, helpless to construct, and in consequence ephemeral; but this would have been all. But this has not been all, as regards the Turks; for, in spite of their intimate resemblance or relationship to the Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential barbarism to this day, still they, or at least great portions of the race, have been put under ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... not exaggerated the intensity of the spiritual experience I went through at Cambridge, a somewhat belated consideration for the truth compels me to register my belief that the mood would in any case have been ephemeral. The poison generated by the struggle of my nature with its environment had sunk too deep, and the very education that was supposed to make a practical man of me had turned me into a sentimentalist. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... only in the multitude where all men are confounded. He hates and envies every thing that rises above the vulgar level: all superiority, all individual grandeur, seems to him an iniquity, an injury towards that chaos of undistinguished and ephemeral beings whom he calls humanity. When we have been assailed by these base doctrines, and the shameful passions which give birth to or are born from them; when we have felt the hatefullness of them, and measured the peril, it is a lively delight to meet with ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... fact, regarded these essays, at the time, as purely ephemeral. The success of the 'Review' suggested republication long afterwards. The first collection of articles was, I presume, Sydney Smith's in 1839; Jeffrey's and Macaulay's followed in 1843; and at that time even Macaulay thought it necessary to explain that the republication was forced upon him by ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... faintly distressed. "It's just that, frankly, we feel they're getting too far away from reality. Trips to Mars and Venus—strange creatures.... It's not real—it's not dignified. Frankly, we question whether an institution like ours can afford to be connected with anything so—so ephemeral. After all ..." ...
— Reel Life Films • Samuel Kimball Merwin

... an abundance of periodicals of all sorts and upon all subjects at hand, it seems hardly possible that this wealth of ephemeral literature was virtually developed within the past two centuries. It offers such a rational means for the dissemination of the latest scientific and literary news that the mind undeceived by facts would ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... races, and never desire to repeat my visit at that season. Blacklegs and whitelegs prevail; and the next morning the course was strewed with the bodies of drunken vagabonds. It appears to me very strange that the gentry of the neighbourhood suffer a very small modicum of ephemeral newspaper notoriety to get the better of their good sense. The patronage of such a racecourse as that of Niagara, so far from being an honour, is the reverse. It is too near the frontier to be even decently ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... and those who have drawn their stores from the deep and rich mines of Coke's Littleton, seems well understood even by the unlettered common people, who apply the appellation of Blackstone-lawyers to these ephemeral ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... side, and the highest walks in life have the hardiest weeds, she knew what love should be. Here was a love—it may be modern, advanced, chic, fin-de-siecle, up-to-date, or anything the coming generation may choose to call it—but it was eminently cheap and ephemeral because it could not make a little sacrifice of vanity. For the sake of the man she loved—mark that!—not only the man to whom she was engaged, but whom she loved—Millicent Chyne could not forbear pandering to her own vanity by the sacrifice of her own modesty and purity of thought. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... him as Sylvia's father. He was probably regarded as a stranger who had drifted into the church to enjoy the familiar yet interesting spectacle of a man and a maid bound together by a rite which was the more interesting because it seemed so ephemeral, ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... theories are natural phenomena and not the capricious and ephemeral products of the free wills of those who construct and propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents of modern thought have each been able to triumph over the opposition they first aroused—the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... his Journal, stating that in the reading-room at Albany, near Washington, he perused English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. To be popular in a rising and far country has a kind of posthumous feel, very different from the ephemeral eclat and fete-ing, buzzing and party-ing compliments of the well-dressed multitude. I can safely say that, during my reign in the spring of 1812, I regretted nothing but its duration of six weeks instead of a fortnight, and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... taste. He looked back upon the episode with nausea—the inevitable psychological reaction—marvelling at himself that until yesterday he should have found her so desirable, and cursing himself that for the sake of that ephemeral and worthless gratification he should seriously have imperilled his chances of winning Mademoiselle de Kercadiou to wife. There is, after all, nothing very extraordinary in his frame of mind, so that I need not elaborate it further. It resulted ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... salutation among this people is, Hoe vaart uwe? How do you sail? adopted no doubt in the early periods of the Republic, when they were all navigators and fishermen. The usual salutation at Cairo is, How do you sweat? a dry hot skin being a sure indication of a destructive ephemeral fever. I think some author has observed, in contrasting the haughty Spaniard with the frivolous Frenchman, that the proud steady gait and inflexible solemnity of the former were expressed in his mode of salutation, Come esta? How do you stand? ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... quarters; basking in the rays of the Freedmen's Bureau and plentifully manured with promises and brotherly love by the open-mouthed and close-fisted philanthropy of New England. But like all dunghill products, the life of these was ephemeral. Its root struck no deeper than the refuse the war had left; and during its continuance the genus was so little known that a Carlyle, or a Brownlow, was looked upon with the same curiosity and disgust as a very rare, but a very ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may indeed be said without paradox that they ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... this respect he was like Bulwer Lytton, who once said to me, "I think more of my poems and 'The Lady of Lyons' and 'Richelieu' than of all my novels, from 'Pelham' to 'What will he do with it?'" (which was the last he had then written). "A poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's; and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists, from Dickens, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... empires of Mammon and Belial? Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts;—faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions;—faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... does it hasten their decay to allow seeds to ripen, but materially enfeebles the entire plant. It is wise to secure as much beauty as is possible just now from your gardens, as a single and unexpected frosty night will destroy almost everything; nothing is more ephemeral than floral beauty. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... educated criticism and scholarly eye of WILLIAM CULLEN | | BRYANT, a man reverenced among men, a poet great among | | poets. | | | | This is a Library of over 500 Volumes in one book, whose | | contents, of no ephemeral nature or interest, will never | | grow old or stale. It can be, and will be, read and re-read | | with pleasure as long as its leaves hold together. Over 800 | | pages beautifully printed, choicely illustrated, handsomely | | bound. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various

... in German dramatic literature. Not only is it the strongest and completest expression of the eighteenth-century storm and stress, but it proved a highly effective stage-play. Nor was its success ephemeral. Its author quickly outgrew it, but it maintained itself during the entire period of Germany's leadership in matters of dramatic art, and even to-day it preserves much of its old vitality. It is true that when a modern audience assembles to see a performance of 'The Robbers', they are not ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... volume of ephemeral essays to you in recognition of your worth as a man and a scientist, and as a token of ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... magnitude, form, and shade proportionate to the extent and character of the disturbing force. The permanence or evanescence of the spot would indicate the sun or earth as being the locality of such derangement. The more permanent form being developed at the sun, and the more ephemeral at the earth. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... at that time the lover of the Duchesse Cataneo, and became, for a while, the mistress of that descendant of the Memmis: the ruined palace of Varese, which Cataneo hired for Tinti, was the scene of these ephemeral relations. [Massimilla Doni.] In the winter of 1823-1824, at the home of Prince Gandolphini, in Geneva, with Genovese, Princesse Gandolphini, and an exiled Italian prince, she sang the famous quartette, "Mi manca la ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... characteristic and unique—the first published by the Tasmanian press:—"On Monday, 26th ult., R. C. Burrows to Elizabeth Tucker, both late of Norfolk Island. They had cohabited together fourteen years, verifying at last the old adage—better late than never."[71] Such were the topics of this ephemeral journal, which, however, survived the governor himself. In the number published a few days before his decease, are the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... sir. 'Tis because it is so fleeting I must needs take care of my beauty. We poor women are like the butterflies and the roses. We have as brief a summer. You men, who value us only for our outward show, should pardon some vanity in creatures so ephemeral." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... suggest a fitting monument, than to promise a faithful portrait?... Let us be grateful, however, that a great artist is to be commemorated at all, side by side with the effigies of great Butchers of mankind, and ephemeral statesmen, the ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... he had two objects in view: first the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that of recommending himself to the permanent approval of his own and following ages as a poet, and especially as a moral poet. To meet the first demand, he lays the scene of ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... whether his services to the nation were worth so much hardship, such complete isolation. The stream sang of the eternities, and his own short span of life (half gone already without any permanent accomplishment) seemed pitifully ephemeral. The guardians of these high places must forever be solitary. No ranger could rightfully be husband and father, for to bring women and children into these solitudes would ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... thing. It is a passing state. It is ephemeral and flitting. It is made up in part of present sense-impressions and in part of past experiences. These past experiences are brought forth from subconsciousness. Some are voluntarily brought forth. Some present themselves without our conscious volition, but ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton

... and false as they are, have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... branch; to save the shock Of young years widow'd, and the pain When Single State comes back again To the lone man who, reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark, And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark Why human buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral That has his day; while shrivell'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. —Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss: Rites, which custom does impose, Silver ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various



Words linked to "Ephemeral" :   insect, ephemeron, ephemeralness, transitory, ephemera, ephemerality, temporary, fugacious



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