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adjective
Transitory  adj.  Continuing only for a short time; not enduring; fleeting; evanescent. "Comfort and succor all those who, in this transitory life, are in trouble." "It was not the transitory light of a comet, which shines and glows for a wile, and then... vanishes into nothing."
Transitory action (Law), an action which may be brought in any county, as actions for debt, and the like; opposed to local action.
Synonyms: transient; short-lived; brief. See Transient.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Transitory" Quotes from Famous Books



... carpenters (especially the Pantechnicon) continued to look sideways with one eye down pieces of wood, as if they were absorbed in the contemplation of the perspective of the Thames Tunnel, and had entirely relinquished the vanities of this transitory world; but still there was an improvement, and it is confirmed to-day. White lime is to be seen in kitchens, the bath-room is gradually resolving itself from an abstract idea into a fact—youthful, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... distribution of magnetism in our planet with relation to its intensity and direction, but does not enter into a consideration of the laws of attraction or repulsion of the poles, or the means of eliciting either permanent or transitory electro-magnetic currents. Physical geography depicts in broad outlines the even or irregular configuration of continents, the relations of superficial area, and the distribution of continental masses in the two hemispheres, a distribution which exercises a powerful influence ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... its character, the Myth will be seen to be one of the transitory expressions of the religious sentiment, which in enlightened lands it has already outgrown and should lay aside. So far as it relates to events, real or alleged, historic or geologic, it deals with that which ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... my neighbors; as we live longer the print and thrill must be feebler, and when we pass away the impress of the great artist will vanish from the world." The regret that a great art should in its nature be transitory, explains the lively interest which many feel in reading anecdotes or descriptions ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... should disqualify a work of art for museum purposes. But—broadly—dramatic and didactic art should be universally national, the luster of our streets, the treasure of our palaces, the pleasure of our homes. Much art that is weak, transitory, and rude may thus become helpful to us. But the museum is only for what is eternally right, and well done, according to divine law and human skill. The least things are to be there—and the greatest—but all good with the goodness that ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... cataclysm, it was gone. I saw but a blurred chaos. This was near 4,000 A.D. Then it was rebuilt, smaller, with more trees growing about, until presently there seemed only a forest. People, if they still were here, were building such transitory structures that ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... excepting the piano, had a transitory look; two light wicker arm-chairs by the fire, the two frail stands of dark, polished wood, the couple of flimsy chairs, and the case of books in the recess—all seemed uneasy, as if they might be tossed out to leave the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... Wolfer House. The black dress in which she looked so slight, and against which the ivory pallor of her face was accentuated, was worn as mourning for Mrs. Lorton; for that estimable lady had genteelly faded away, and Nell and Dick were alone in this transitory world. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... come I here? What for and whom I grieve? Reflecting on these questions one obtains tranquillity. Life and its environments are constantly revolving like a wheel, and the companionship of those that are dear is transitory. The union with brother, mother, father, and friend is like that of travellers in an inn. Men of knowledge behold, as if with corporeal eyes, the next world that is unseen. Without disregarding the scriptures, one desirous of knowledge should have faith. One possessed of knowledge should perform ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... convenience of examination the eyelids can readily be everted. Paleness means weak circulation or poor blood. Increased redness occurs physiologically in painful conditions, excitement, and following severe exertion. Under such conditions the increase of circulation is transitory. In fevers there is an increased redness in the mucous membrane, and this continues so long as the fever lasts. In some diseases red spots or streaks form in the mucous membrane. This usually indicates an infectious disease of considerable severity, and occurs in blood poisoning, purpura ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... pray you all give your audience, And hear this matter with reverence, By figure a moral play— The Summoning of Everyman called it is, That of our lives and ending shows How transitory we be all day. This matter is wondrous precious, But the intent of it is more gracious, And sweet to bear away. The story saith,—Man, in the beginning, Look well, and take good heed to the ending, Be you never so gay! Ye think sin in the beginning full sweet, Which ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous

... the faculties an opportunity of developing themselves; that it was not just that a whole people should depend on one man; and that a national representation afforded the only means of guaranteeing the transitory benefits that might be derived from the reign of a virtuous sovereign. But what came Bonaparte to offer? Did he bring a greater liberty to foreign nations? There was not a monarch in Europe who would in a whole year have ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein

... had to die instead of Christ and as a type of Christ; and so it was a temporal testament in the blood of the paschal lamb, which was shed for the obtaining and possessing of that land of Canaan. And as the paschal lamb, which died in the old testament for the land of Canaan, was a temporal and transitory thing, so too the old testament, together with that possession or land of Canaan allotted and promised ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... worldly pleasure. The kiss of her beautiful soft lips had been sweet, the melody of her voice still more blissful. It had given him hours of rapture; but were these joys worth the long repentance which was already beginning? It was wise to sacrifice the transitory pleasures of earth to loftier purposes. One thing alone promised permanent duration even here—what he was achieving for the future greatness of his own name and that of his race. For them he was now going ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... are moments when I can hardly credit that anything I have done should be found worthy to give even transitory pleasure to such men as Mr. Thackeray, Sir John Herschel, Mr. Fonblanque, Leigh Hunt, and Mr. Lewes—that my humble efforts should have had such a ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... simple as his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labour of others. We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be; nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. Many ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled. Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the millions of men whom it will feed and contain? for no European ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... paramount to all others, and, in due time, inveterate; and besides perpetually stimulating one's personal vanity and desire for admiration and applause, directs whatever ambition one has to the least exalted of aims, the production of evanescent effects and transitory emotions. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... fragility. To-day she sees her ancient principles vanishing one by one. Mechanics is losing its axioms, and matter, formerly the eternal substratum of the worlds, becomes a simple aggregate of ephemeral forces in transitory condensation. ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... was my emotion at the sudden and abrupt entrance into the room of an officer of the king's garde du corps! in the self-same uniform as that from which I had parted with such anguish in the morning! A transitory hope glanced like lightning upon my brain, with an idea that the body-guard was all at hand; but as evanescent as bright was the flash! The concentrated and mournful look of the officer assured me ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... Among many merely transitory results of these treaties there were two provisions of momentous import. The first of these, Spain's cession of Louisiana to France in exchange for certain advantages in Italy, does not concern us here directly. When war again broke out, Bonaparte sold the district to the United States, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white, undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... beneficial nature.—With this the mantra also agrees: 'Thou dost not die, thou goest to the gods on easy paths; where virtuous men go, not evil-doers, there the divine Savitri may lead thee.' An act which has a healing tendency, although it may cause a transitory pain, men of insight declare to be preservative ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... much greater confidence may a good Christian despise, and even deride, all temporary and short transitory evils! If the poor wretch, who is trudging on to his miserable cottage, can laugh at the storms and tempests, the rain and whirlwinds, which surround him, while his richest hope is only that of rest; how much more chearfully must a man pass through such transient evils, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... of the illustrious dead participate in the concerns and cares of those who are dear to them in this transitory life, O ever dear and venerated shade of my departed father, look down with scrutiny on the conduct of your suffering son, and see if I have even for a moment deviated from those principles of morality and patriotism which it was your care to instill into my youthful mind, and for an adherence ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... circumstances under which the new government had been set up, or the principles it professed to act upon, which could tend to make foreign powers regard it as either more stable or more trustworthy than the transitory forms it had supplanted." ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... Of vast cathedral, or conventual gloom, Their vigils kept: when tapers day and night On the dim altar burn'd continually, In token that the house was evermore Watching to God. Religious men were they, Nor would their reason, tutor'd to aspire Above this transitory world, allow That there should pass a moment of the year When in their land the Almighty's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various

... mine no more; The flying hours are gone, Like transitory dreams given o'er, Whose images are kept in store By ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... to take up any newspaper or magazine and not find some reference to his work and name. Both series of letters—even one mainly concerned, as the Vailima Letters are, with matters of interest both remote and transitory—had been read in edition after edition: and readers had been and were continually asking for more. The time was thought to have come for a new and definitive edition, in which the two series of letters already published should be thrown into one, and as much new material added as could be found ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... soul, and stretch thy wings, Thy better portion trace; Rise from transitory things Toward heaven, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... 'Triumph! rather transitory; finishes in smoke,' and she pushed two or three of the unburnt leaves amongst the ashes and covered them over. He stooped down, picked up a leaf, smoothed it between his fingers, and then raised his eyes. They met hers at that instant, as she lifted ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... importations and of machinery are misled by allowing themselves to form too hasty a judgment from immediate and transitory effects, instead of following these up to their general ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat

... holy mendicants, who devote themselves to the expected joys of the next world, and abstract themselves from those of this silly transitory scene; they are generally fanatics and enthusiasts—sometimes mad, and often hypocrites. They are much venerated by the superstitious Asiatics, and are allowed uncommon privileges, which they naturally ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... I packed my little trunk on that memorable Saturday, were of a mixed character; but pleasure predominated. Hope beckoned me on; and the sadness attendant on breaking loose from the unfriendly home in which I had lived so long was but transitory. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... been said that the Manbo is ungrateful, but I do not think that his gratitude is so rare nor so transitory a virtue as is claimed by those who pretend to know him. It is true that he has no word to express thanks, but he expects the giver to make known his desires and ask for what he wants. This is the reason why he himself is such ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... back upon these events. With regard to the Moon evolution this cannot be done in such sharp and definite outlines as are characteristic of earthly perceptions. In the Moon period we are mainly concerned with variable, changing impressions, with shifting, moving pictures and their transitory stages. We have, moreover, to bear in mind that we are contemplating an evolution continuing through long, long periods of time, and that out of all that presents itself, it is possible to seize upon only momentary pictures and ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... Lashmar Common, Eric stood gazing at the stars and drinking in the thousand mingled scents and sounds of the night. Somewhere hard by, a bonfire was pungently smouldering; there was a sour smell where a flock of geese had been feeding all day; flaring acridly across was a transitory reek of burnt lubricating oil, and the hint of a cigar so faint that it was gone before he could be sure of it. . . . The lumbering creak of the mill-wheel rose assertively above the drone and plash of the stream; a shiver of rain and a gentle sigh of wind in the top branches of the trees behind ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna

... a need for this long wait under a transitory form that requires no feeding. The egg is laid by the mother on the surface of the nest, somewhere near a suitable cell, I dare say, but still at a distance from the fostering larva, which is protected by a thick rampart. It is for the new born grub to make its ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... fortunate in defending, Prince Rupert was fond of those sciences which soften and adorn a hero's private hours, and knew how to mix them with his minutes of amusement, without dedicating his life to their pursuit, like us, who, wanting capacity for momentous views, make serious study of what is only the transitory occupation of a genius. Had the court of the first Charles been peaceful, how agreeably had the prince's congenial propensity flattered and confirmed the inclination of his uncle! How the muse of arts would ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... of different emotional states, these can get intense and do change quite rapidly. The physical body, too, will manifest transitory conditions. Some can be quite uncomfortable. But, I don't want to leave the reader with the impression that fasting is inevitably painful. So I will now recount my ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... When in those transitory sleeps I lie, I oft his beauteous, bleeding form review; A mild, benignant lustre lights his eye, As come to bid a ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham

... tolerably well with them, and they were not bleared. I felt my arms, and thighs, and teeth—they were strong and sound enough; so now was the time to labour, to marry, eat strong flesh, and beget strong children—the power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly transitory. I bethought me that a time would come when my eyes would be bleared, and, perhaps, sightless; my arms and thighs strengthless and sapless; when my teeth would shake in my jaws, even supposing they did not drop out. No going a wooing ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... strength seems increased. The person usually feels the better for it, though this is not always the case; some have a headache or feel very sleepy. It has been repeatedly proved that these good results are but transitory. The heart, although at first stimulated, is more exhausted after the action of the alcohol has passed away than it was at first. This is true of all the organs of the body which were stimulated. In consequence of the dilatation of the blood vessels of the ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan

... time being. In the Roman world you must pay for your ambitions, and this was the most approved way of paying. We might moralise over the enormous frivolity which could waste day after day thousands and thousands of pounds upon such transitory pleasures, instead of conferring lasting benefits in the way of hospitals or schools. But it is not the object of this book to moralise. We may feel confident that the Roman populace, if offered the choice, would have voted for the chariot-races or ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... cash. This was quite demoralizing to honest industry, and, as might be expected, a serious reaction has followed. Legitimate trade and industry will require years before they can reassert themselves. Sudden and seeming prosperity is almost sure to be equally transitory. We were told that, during the entire period in which the Confederates resorted here under the open encouragement and protection of England, the town was the scene of the most shameful drunken orgies from ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... conceived the idea of the supernatural, and to have a hope beyond what he saw. Death was the first mystery, and it placed man on the track of other mysteries. It raised his thoughts from the visible to the invisible, from the transitory to the eternal, from the human to ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... it separates and individualizes its objects as far as possible; that it places the sense of the individual part, in opposition to the sense of the whole,—to the analogia fidei or spiritus which alone gives unity to the book of nature, while it dilutes and renders as transitory as possible the sense of the universal in the whole.... And as it laid great stress upon the letter in the book of nature, it fell into polytheism. The particular symbol of the divine, or of the Godhead, became a myth of some special ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... synchronous and successive associations. How does the logical terminology express these 'clusters' and 'trains'? Mill answers by a theory of 'naming.' Language fulfils two purposes; it is required in order to make our ideas known to others; and in order to fix our own ideas. Ideas are fluctuating, transitory, and 'come into the mind unbidden.' We must catch and make a note of these shifting crowds of impalpable entities. We therefore put marks upon the simple sensations or upon the 'clusters.' We ticket them as a tradesman ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... gone,—had slipped away during my absence. The church I had known in boyhood had been torn down to make room for a business building on Boyne Street; the edifice in which I sat was expensive, gave forth no distinctive note; seemingly transitory with its hybrid interior, its shiny oak and blue and red organ-pipes, betokening a compromised and weakened faith. Nondescript, likewise, seemed the new minister, Mr. Randlett, as he prayed unctuously in front of the flowers massed on the platform. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... spirit of the movement of the sky or firmament; not merely the fast flying of the transitory cloud, but the great motion of the heavens and stars themselves. Thus, in his highest power, he corresponds to the "primo mobile" of the later Italian philosophy, and, in his simplest, is the guide of all mysterious and cloudy movement, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... head of affairs must be independent of public opinion if they wish to achieve anything and never try to conciliate a press that, in all fairness, it must be said,—with a few exceptions—does not attempt to guide, for more than a transitory moment, anyone ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith

... while at the same time her conduct in her own house had been enough to check his confidence—enough even to make him doubt if the Well-Beloved really resided within those contours, or had ever been more than the most transitory passenger through that interesting ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy

... out of these specimens from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners of that time. Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely aspects—those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural strength of such literature will, of course, be ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... emoluments he enjoyed, would feel a propensity, not easy to be resisted by such a man, to make the best use of the opportunity he enjoyed while it lasted, and might not scruple to have recourse to the most corrupt expedients to make the harvest as abundant as it was transitory; though the same man, probably, with a different prospect before him, might content himself with the regular perquisites of his situation, and might even be unwilling to risk the consequences of an abuse of ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... the hand of the bestower with what they forsake. Tossed in the billows of doubt, they are exposed to the rocks of misconception, and are too often wrecked through the total absence of any chart to guide them in their new voyage of life. The transitory step is always a dangerous one to a people who have not entire confidence in their leader, for his plans may inspire neither conviction nor approval, and if they fail, leave his followers exposed to all the fury of storms without any haven in which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory, and Beckenham seems to me a quite transitory phase. But really they were there several years; through nearly all my married life, in fact, and far longer than the year and odd months we lived together at Wimblehurst. But the Wimblehurst time with them is fuller in my memory by far then ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... Cornelius Agrippa and other wizards. The soap-bubble is such a globe; only one had need of second sight or double sight to see the pictures on so transitory a mirror. Perhaps it is some vague expectation of such wonders, that makes us so fond of blowing them in childish years. But, perhaps, it is rather as a prelude to the occupation of our lives, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... rings under glass and trying to affect an air of indifference concerning them. With all her husband's rise in the world he did not see fit to bestow upon his wife any substantial token of his regard. The vague and transitory idea he once entertained of playing off fairy godfather to her and placing a fortune at her feet had become past history. Now that Gay did run a motor and wear monogrammed silk shirts he saw to ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... torch, should one day, by common consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... the teaching of Aristotle, but conformable to that of the Stoics. (2) Slavery is just as a consequence of sin. This is the new principle peculiar to St. Augustine. He has found a principle of slavery, which is neither natural inequality, nor war, nor agreement, but sin. Slavery is no more a transitory fact which we accept provisionally, so as not to precipitate a social revolution: it is an institution which has become natural as a result of the corruption of our nature. (3) It must not be said that slavery, resulting from sin, is destroyed by Christ who destroyed ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien

... your future state would be, if your children in the outer darkness were to be for ever reproaching you, "You brought us up to the world and not to God, you fed our bodies but not our souls, you set before us the transitory life as the one thing to care for, and did not teach us to lay up treasure and toil for the life eternal!" Think, also, how it will increase your happiness to have your children in Life Eternal, and to receive their blessing, and experience their gratitude for having so taught them, by word ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould

... elements, in which at last the yielding water won a victory over adamant. It is an evidence, too, of Nature's patient methods; a triumph of the delicate over the strong, the liquid over the solid, the transitory over the enduring. At present, the softer material has been exhausted, and the rapacious river, shrunken in size, must satisfy itself by gnawing only the archaic granite which still curbs its course. Yet if this calculation overpowers ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... Ungulates, we find many strange side-branches which flourished for a time, but are unknown to-day. Machoerodus, usually known as "the sabre-toothed tiger," though not a tiger, was one of the most formidable of these transitory races. Its upper canine teeth (the "sabres") were several inches in length, and it had enormously distensible jaws to make them effective. The great development of such animals, with large numbers of hyaenas, civets, wolves, bears, and other Carnivores, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... this is that the man can build into the ego (that is, into his true self) nothing but good qualities; the evil qualities which he develops are in their nature transitory and must be thrown aside as he advances, because he has no longer within him matter which can express them. The difference between the causal bodies of the savage and the saint is that the first is empty and colourless, while the second ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater

... of the whole architectural concert. Now these great expositions in which the architects and artists are given a free hand, are in the nature of preliminary studies in which these functionaries sketch in transitory form the things they desire to do in more permanent form. They are forecasts of the future, a future which in certain quarters is already beginning to realize itself. It is therefore probable that architectural ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... light was on her face, A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam Of peaceful radiance, silvering o'er the stream Of human thought with unabiding glory; Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream, A visitation, bright and transitory. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... and general way I regard uncles as not out of place in this transitory state of existence. They stand for a great many possible advantages. They are liable to "tip" you at school, they are resources in vacation, they come grandly in play about the holidays, at which season mv heart always did warm towards them with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... pleasure are of a transitory nature only, while pain and sorrow are of a permanent and accumulative character. Is all of life worth the sorrow, the ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... while a transitory opulence enlivened the studio. Julio had increased his expenses, considering himself rich. But the letters from his uncle in America soon dissipated these illusions. At first the remittances exceeded very slightly the monthly allowance that his father had ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... thing which we may call modernness, for no better word to express the idea presents itself. His object is to detach from fashion whatever it may contain of the poetry in history, to draw the eternal from the transitory. If we glance at the exhibitions of modern pictures, we are struck with the general tendency of the artists to dress all their subjects in ancient costumes. That is obviously the sign of great laziness, for it is much easier to declare that everything ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors, great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it then. It is ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... that thou slay me not with thee. For there was never a mother woman-born Loved her sons better; and never a queen of men More perfect in her heart toward whom she loved. For what lies light on many and they forget, Small things and transitory as a wind o' the sea, I forget never; I have seen thee all thine years A man in arms, strong and a joy to men Seeing thine head glitter and thine hand burn its way Through a heavy and iron furrow of sundering spears; But always also a flower of three suns old, The small one thing that lying ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the banks of these ponds, several transitory encampments of the natives were found, but none that had been inhabited within these four or six months; by all of them were found abundance of the pearl muscle-shell so common on the Lachlan. The soil, as far as we examined round our tents, east of the ponds, was a good sandy loam. The ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley

... any insult and do nothing. I hardly pick up a paper that does not have a sarcastic paragraph or cartoon. We are on the brink of convincing the English that we'll not act, whatever the provocation. By the English, I do not mean the lighter, transitory public opinion, but I mean the thoughtful men who do not wish us or expect us to fire a gun. They say that the American democracy, since Cleveland's day, has become a mere agglomeration of different ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... differently constituted in different individuals. In some, impressions are vivid and transitory; in others, more deep and lasting: indeed, there are some philosophers who pretend to trace a connection between the physical and mental powers of the animal; but, for my part, madam, I believe that the one is much influenced by habit and association, and the other ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... conductivity, freezing and boiling points, recalescence, etc. A course of advanced electrical measurements should have a parallel lecture course in which the theoretical aspects of electromagnetism, the classical theories, and the equations that represent transitory and equilibrium conditions in complex circuits are discussed. In optics, likewise, there is ample material of great importance: physical, geometrical optics, spectroscopy, photography, X-ray crystallography, etc. The ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... fall in the European market. This high price of corn, however, seems evidently to have been the effect of the extraordinary unfavourableness of the seasons, and ought, therefore, to be regarded, not as a permanent, but as a transitory and occasional event. The seasons, for these ten or twelve years past, have been unfavourable through the greater part of Europe; and the disorders of Poland have very much increased the scarcity in all those countries, which, in dear years, used to be supplied from that market. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... arid transitory consolation. I knew that, wandering at random, I might never reach the outlet of this cavern, or might be disabled, by hunger and fatigue, from going farther than the outlet. The cravings which had lately been satiated would speedily return, and my negligence had ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... Turkey carpet—four hundred square feet of it, upon which young Redwood was soon to crawl—stretched to the grill-guarded electric radiator that was to warm the whole place. A man from Cossar's hung amidst scaffolding overhead, fixing the great frame that was to hold the transitory pictures. A blotting-paper book for plant specimens as big as a house door leant against the wall, and from it projected a gigantic stalk, a leaf edge or so and one flower of chickweed, all of that gigantic size that was soon to make Urshot famous ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... 'transitory world wisdom alone is enduring and permanent. And woe to him who deserts the eternal for things as fleeting as clouds are. His heart will never know peace, and his mind will dance like a ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... pleasantries from an ordinary stranger, but this libertine might be held to have earned his charter, and moreover I had further use for him. We were loitering on the steps between the glass veranda and the terrace at the back of the hotel. The little sunlit stage was full of vivid, trivial, transitory life, it seemed as a foil to the vast eternal scene. The hanging judge still strutted with his cigar, peering jocosely from under the broad brim of his Panama; the great actor still posed aloof, the human Matterhorn of the group. I descried no showy woman with a tall youth dancing ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung

... incarnation; and so, because there is present in the body of man this long-traveled soul, bearing with it traces of its eternal past, these letters which are the elements of its speech have impressed on them a correspondence, not only with the forces natural to its transitory surroundings, but also with that vaster evolution of nature in which it has taken part. These correspondences ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... rat-riddled, mouldy with memories, Lingers to babble, to a broken tune (Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!) So melancholy a soliloquy It sounds as it might tell The secret of the unending grief-in-grain, The terror of Time and Change and Death, That wastes this floating, transitory world. ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley

... is one which recurred again and again in the history of his race, yet nothing can take from it its touching features. At six years old even the intimation of a father's death, especially when taking place at a distance, would make but a transitory impression upon the mind; yet we may well imagine the child taken from his toys, wrapped from head to foot in some royal mantle, with a man's crown held over his baby head, receiving with large eyes of wonder and fright easily translated into ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... day, my dear madam, in this transitory life. And once in a while the tables turn. I think I remember a time when I pleaded with perhaps not so much eloquence, but quite as much earnestness, for a boon at the hands of pretty Mildred Deering. I didn't get it, and I have survived, you see. We are apt to magnify our misfortunes;" ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... may be due to the existence of a resisting medium. If the changes already suspected should be confirmed by repeated observations with the same instruments, it will be worth while to investigate more carefully whether Saturn's rings are permanent or transitory elements of the solar system, and whether in that part of the heavens we see celestial immutability or terrestrial corruption and generation, and the old order giving place to the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... countenance, and to save the soul from hell by the punishment of the body. Vegetables were allowed to rot in the cellars, and to make everybody sick with their noxious odors so that we might not be too much wedded to this transitory existence. Pork, beans, and cabbage must be devoured in enormous quantities just before going to bed for the purpose of inspiring midnight groans and prayers to be delivered from the pangs of the civil war in ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... a libeller, instead of justifying him as a dramatic poet. Non quod verum est, sed quod verisimile, is the dramatist's rule. At all events, the poet who chooses transitory manners, ought to content himself with transitory praise. If his object be reputation, he ought not to expect fame. The utmost he can look forwards to, is to be quoted by, and to enliven the writings of, an antiquarian. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... productive capacity than ever before. There has been constant gain in knowledge and education; there has been continuous advance in science and invention; there has been distinct gain in public health. Business depressions have been recurrent in the life of our country and are but transitory. The Nation has emerged from each of them with increased strength and virility because of the enlightenment they have brought, the readjustments and the larger understanding of the realities and obligations of life and work ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover

... mirth is now depriu'd of all her glory, Our Taburins in dolefull dumps are drownd. Our viols want their sweet and pleasing sound, our melodie is mar'd and we of ioyes debard, O wicked world so mutable and transitory. 30 ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... are of the decaying body; his heart and his thoughts are set on things which soon fly away. But the earnest believer in God pierces through all these superficial and transitory objects and pursuits, and fastens his affections to imperishable verities: he feels, far down in his soul, the living well of faith and fruition, the cool fresh fountain of spiritual hope and joy, whose stream of life flows unto eternity. The vain sensualist and hollow worldling ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... attention and become the facile instrument of men of the greatest genius, writers of whom any age and any language might be proud. It has been tender and fiery, severe and voluminous, gorgeous and marmoreal, in turns. It has translated into words feelings so subtle, so transitory, moods so fragile and intangible, that the rough hand of prose would but have crushed them. And this, surely, indicates the great gift of Victorian lyrical poetry to the race. During a time of extreme mental and moral restlessness, a time of speculation and evolution, ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various

... would provide me a crop of apparitions that I might analyse. But I was disappointed; opium I found to give me only a great tranquillity and clearness of thought. Once or twice only have I had a vision, and that but a transitory landscape. I used in vain to look upon that black mixture which lies before one in the dark, and try to make its fragmentary lights arrange themselves into definite shapes. And I have imaged ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... olfactory perspective of an endless vista of departed breakfasts, dinners, and suppers. It is similar, if not identical, in all temperate climates; a kind of neutral tint, which forms the perpetual background upon which the banquet of today strikes out its keener but more transitory aroma. I don't think it necessary to go into any further particulars, because this atmospheric character has the effect of making the dining-rooms of all boarding-houses seem very much alike; and the accident of a hair-cloth sofa, cold, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... pause, some ironical words in Mrs. Falchion's voice floated across the room to me: "It is so strange to see you so. And you preach, and baptise; and marry, and bury, and care for the poor and—ah, what is it?—'all those who, in this transitory life, are in sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity'? . . . And do you never long for the flesh-pots of Egypt? Never long for"—here her voice was not quite so ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... nameless man, amid the crowd that thronged the daily mart, Let fall a word of Hope and Love, unstudied, from the heart; A whisper on the tumult thrown—a transitory breath— It raised a brother from the dust; it saved a soul from death. O germ! O fount! O word of love! O thought at random cast! Ye were but little at the first, but mighty ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... still engrossed with other things than the real poesy of music. Notwithstanding this, under cover of such performances as these, he believed he could announce himself to the family as a musician. They regarded such efforts at composition however as a mere transitory passion, which would disappear like others especially so as he was not proficient on even one instrument, and could not therefore assume to do the work of a practical musician with any degree of assurance. At this time a strange and confused impression was made upon the young mind, which ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... transmigration of the soul or reincarnation. The last of these terms best expresses Indian, especially Buddhist, ideas but still the usual Sanskrit equivalent, Samsara, means migration. The body breaks up at death but something passes on and migrates to another equally transitory tenement. Neither Brahmans nor Buddhists seem to contemplate the possibility that the human soul may be a temporary manifestation of the Eternal Spirit which comes to an end at death—a leaf on a tree or a momentary ripple on the water. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... memory of mingled pain and sweetness, recalled in after time with something of self-pity and something of surprise that such things had ever seemed real and not visionary, and had touched the warm springs in the heart now chilled, it may be, by the stern exigencies of this transitory life. ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... in that there is no true nor constant beauty, and for this reason it cannot evoke true nor constant love. That beauty, which is seen in bodies is accidental and transitory, and is like those which are absorbed, changed, and spoiled by the changing of the subject, which very often, from being beautiful, becomes ugly, without any change taking place in the soul. The reason then ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... This letter is unhappily lost; but the answer to it is preserved, in which Petrarch tells the monarch that his epitaph rendered his niece an object rather of envy than of lamentation. "O happy Clementina!" says the poet, "after passing through a transitory life, you have attained a double immortality, one in heaven, and another on earth." He then compares the posthumous good fortune of the princess to that of Achilles, who had been immortalized by Homer. It is possible that ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... believe the monarch's real name was Halfdan the Black. So beloved was he in life that after death his body was divided into four portions, so that each province might possess some part of him. Yet the noblest fame is transitory, and nobody now knows exactly where any one of his ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... Grace and my Lords to be advertised that this present Sunday, the 6th September, Edward Lewkner, prisoner, attainted by long sickness, departed this transitory life to God, about the hour of eight of the clock of the night. Who was a willing man in the forenoon of this day to have received the blessed Sacrament, but the priest that did serve in the absence ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... the nations God; when dispersed among the Gentiles, its office ought to have been the same. But be that as it may, the conception here set forth is as true to-day as ever it was. For the prophetic teachings, rooted though they may be in the transitory circumstances of a tiny nation, are 'not for an age, but for all time,' and we get a great deal nearer the heart of them when we grasp the permanent truths that underlie them, than when we learnedly exhume the dead history which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... would have found a more forcible, though perhaps less poetic, illustration of their idea in the friendships formed by passengers in the same steamer. They are intimate, but they are as a rule utterly transitory. However I have no right to complain. The friendship which Gorman forced on me has lasted eighteen months and shows no sign ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... and disbelieved by the untaught. The poetic soul lays hold of every such tender pageant of beauty and keeps it forever. Iglesias, having an additional method of preservation, did not fail to pencil rapidly the wondrous scene. When he had finished his dashing sketch of this glory, so transitory, he peppered the whole with cabalistic cipher, which only he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... Oh, he's grown cautiously rich, and will venture none of his substantial Stock in transitory Traffick. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... triumph only for a day. Love, the most transitory of all passions, is inevitably ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... field; nor was the empire which they founded less extended. With a celerity equally surprising, it rose to a gigantic height, but it rested on a foundation no less insecure, and it was quite as transitory in its duration. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... be high in his kingdom must go near to him at the bottom, to uphold and minister to all that they may or can uphold and minister unto. There is no other law of precedence, no other law of rank and position in God's kingdom. And mind, that is the kingdom. The other kingdom passes away—it is a transitory, ephemeral, passing, bad thing, and away it must go. It is only there on sufferance, because in the mind of God even that which is bad ministers to that which is good; and when the new kingdom is built the old ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... and Value of Human Life.—How could man know that he was more than an atom in a whirlpool of atoms, his life of sense but a transitory thing, if it had not been for the Scriptures which seek to impress upon him the value of his life in the sight of God (John 3:16,17; Matthew 16:26)? Without the pale of the Christian faith men hold life but cheaply, they squander it and waste it in sin; they ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell

... later works for any picture with a similar motif. In general he shared Plato's opinion—that violent passions are unsuitable subjects for art; not so much because the sight of them is degrading, as because what is at once hideous and transitory in its ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... rheo], 'fluo'), that is, the earth as the transitory, the ever-flowing nature, the flux and sum of 'phenomena', or objects of the outward sense, in contradistinction from the earth as Vesta, as the firmamental law that sustains and disposes the apparent world! The Satyrs represent ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... feelings of jealousy, that he appears to be very much relieved by its contemplation; and his son, if I am not mistaken, participates in this feeling. We are all of opinion, however, that the old gentleman's danger, even at its crisis, was very slight, and that he merely laboured under one of those transitory weaknesses to which persons of his temperament are now and then liable, and which become less and less alarming at every return, until they wholly subside. I have no doubt he will remain a jolly old widower for the rest of his life, ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens

... "fly in amber," He after eagles clamber? Nay, faction's ante-chamber Were fitter place for him, A trifler transitory, To gasconade of "glory"! He'd foul fair France's story, Her lustre pale ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various



Words linked to "Transitory" :   transient, temporary, fugacious, transitoriness



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