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Epoch-making   /ˈɛpək-mˈeɪkɪŋ/   Listen
Epoch-making

adjective
1.
Highly significant or important especially bringing about or marking the beginning of a new development or era.  Synonym: epochal.  "An epoch-making discovery"






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"Epoch-making" Quotes from Famous Books



... authority on the theory of flight, and by Professor G. H. Bryan, a great pioneer, who in 1911 produced his book on Stability in Aviation. He had long been interested in the subject; his work, which is recognized as epoch-making, laid a sound mathematical basis for the theory of flight, and directed the work of others along the lines of fruitful experiment. The theoretical conclusions of Professor Bryan were reduced to a practical form by Mr. Leonard Bairstow ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... epoch-making collaboration. When Mary Gnaedinger launched Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine she early presented THE BLIND SPOT, and printed it again in that magazine's companion Fantastic Novels. These reprints are now collectors' items, almost unobtainable, and otherwise ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... scientific aspect of the discovery. But, unlike most epoch-making results from laboratories, this discovery is one which, to a very unusual degree, is within the grasp of the popular and non-technical imagination. Among the other kinds of matter which these rays penetrate with ease is the human flesh. That a new photography has suddenly arisen which ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment I have just referred to has its own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era. Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the question. The zenith of the historico-literary ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche

... of modern literature have proved as epoch-making as the modest little volume called "Synnoeve Solbakken," which appeared in the book shops of Christiania and Copenhagen in 1857. It was a simple tale of peasant life, an idyl of the love of a boy and a girl, but it was absolutely new in its style, and in its ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... conscious act and experience of conversion. This view, subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his "epoch-making" volume on "Christian Nurture" (1846), as a departure from the orthodoxy of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... motives and driving forces of human conduct, and since conduct is the resultant of mental life, mental factors at once become for us the most important phase of our study. Both of these books represent epoch-making culminations of years of hard labor and scientific devotion to criminology by two eminent ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... book was expected to be epoch-making, and it fully justifies such expectation.... A MOST ADMIRABLE account of the mode of occurrence of practically ALL KNOWN MINERALS. Probably stands unrivalled for ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer

... book. Instantaneous photographs of just the most vital and significant events which have given character and the turn of destiny to this epoch-making period." ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 3, March, 1889 • Various

... for War, First Lord of the Admiralty, Premier, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Privy Seal. As a first step towards restoring confidence, he had, with his own hands, beheaded the former Prime Minister, the Marquis of SALISBURY, and had published a cheap and popular edition of his epoch-making Letters from Mashonaland. His Lordship's official residence had been established at the Amphitryon Club where they still preserve on constant relays of ice the Becassine bardee aux truffes which Lord RANDOLPH was about to eat when he snubbed the united ambassadors ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various

... arguments with the skill of a great advocate, and the combination of these qualities—qualities, highly appreciated everywhere, but nowhere more than in this Hall and among a Gray's Inn audience—has given an epoch-making character to his work. To-day he comes before us in a different character. He is neither judge nor advocate, but historian: and he offers to guide us through one of the most interesting and important enterprises in which our common ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... not until five years later that the Lettres Philosophiques appeared. This epoch-making book was the lens by means of which Voltaire gathered together the scattered rays of his English impressions into a focus of brilliant and burning intensity. It so happened that the nation into whose midst he had plunged, and whose characteristics he had scrutinised ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... of mere sound into self-sufficingness. What Palestrina effected in the sixteenth century, was afterwards accomplished on a wider platform by Gluck in the eighteenth, and in our own days the same deliverance has been attempted by Wagner. The efforts of all these epoch-making musicians have been directed toward restraining the tendencies of music to assert an independence, which for herself becomes the source of weakness by reducing her to co-operation with insignificant words, and which renders her subservient to merely ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... Robinson's "History of Western Europe" has been attested by the immediate and widespread adoption of the book in many of the best schools and colleges of the country. It is an epoch-making text-book on the subject, in that it solves in an entirely satisfactory manner ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... now a creed outworn. Did tender maids and virtuous matrons still cherish the hope of some day meeting their literary idols in the flesh? Did generous youth aspire to see them merely at a distance, and did doting sires teach their children that it was an epoch-making event when a great poet or novelist visited the country; or when they passed afar, did they whip some favored boy, as the father of Benvenuto Cellini whipped him at sight of a salamander in the fire that he might not forget ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... pleased to record that the beauty of this epoch-making remark and the evident subtle charm underlying it, has not yet dawned upon any of the troops with which I have come in contact, and so, apart from being aware of its existence, it has molested me in no degree. Even the Transvaal has its compensations. ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross

... made subjective. Christopher Marlowe was the first of the world's dramatists thus to set the God of all the gods within the soul itself of the man who suffers and contends and dies. But he imagined only one phase of the new and epoch-making tragic theme that he discovered. The one thing that he accomplished was to depict the ruin of an heroic nature through an insatiable ambition for supremacy, doomed by its own vastitude to defeat itself,—supremacy of conquest and dominion with Tamburlaine, supremacy ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... that Miss MARIE CORELLI, who for too long has vouchsafed nothing fresh to her countless admirers, has just completed the (Isle of) Manuscript of a story which, like all her works, is epoch-making. Connoisseurs of literature, always eager for a new frisson, will be fascinated to learn that this novel has for its subject a fellow-novelist of whose retired existence she has but lately become aware. It takes the form of a saga and is entitled Hall of the Three Legs. Editions ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, God-fearing men were appointed to decide for the people on all matters of lesser moment, while the graver cases were still reserved for Moses (xviii.)[1]The arrival at Sinai marked a crisis; for it was there that the epoch-making covenant was made—Jehovah promising to continue His grace to the people, and they, on their part, pledging themselves to obedience. Thunder and lightning and dark storm-clouds accompanied the proclamation of the ten ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... Even in rebellion youth aspires to conquer the heights, though it be through the depths. A boy finds consolation in planning to become the world's greatest hero or martyr when he is thwarted in becoming an epoch-making inventor, or discoverer. This on the male ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias

... and to search for "deer-fungus" (shika-take), the horns and the vegetables being supposed to have medical properties. All the amusements mentioned in previous sections continued to be followed in this era, and football is spoken of as having inaugurated the afterwards epoch-making friendship between Prince Naka and Kamatari. It was not played in the Occidental manner, however. The game consisted in kicking a ball from player to player without letting it fall. This was apparently a Chinese innovation. Here, also, mention may be made of thermal springs. Their sanitary properties ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... who, though they had neither to write nor to fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... his position not only to the general spirit of his philosophy, but to the manner in which he worked into a connected system the new mode of thinking, and to the incomparable power and eloquence with which he expounded and enforced it. Like all epoch-making works, the Novum Organum gave expression to ideas which were already beginning to be in the air. The time was ripe for a great change; scholasticism, long decaying, had begun to fall; the authority not only of school doctrines but of the church had been discarded; while here and there a few ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... Vallicella, in Rome, and the sacred musical dramas came to be called oratorios. While the camerata were seeking to revive the classic drama in Florence, Carissimi was experimenting with sacred material in Rome, and his epoch-making allegory, "La Rappresentazione dell' Anima e del Corpo," was brought out, almost simultaneously with Peri's "Euridice," in 1600. Putting off the fetters of plainsong, music became beautiful for its own sake, and as an agent ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... my daughter know now the importance of my two years' work, and you cannot fail to see the danger of a rumour that 'Professor Caldegard, we understand, has achieved an epoch-making discovery in the history of science. An anodyne with more than all the charms and few of the dangers of opium will bring comfort with a good conscience to thousands of sufferers in this nerve-racked world.' Every ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming

... origin of the human race, of the descent of man, is ranked by Huxley in his epoch-making book Man's Place in Nature, as the deepest with which biology has to concern itself, "the question of questions,"—the problem which underlies all others. In the same brilliant and lucid exposition, which appeared in 1863, soon after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, Huxley stated ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... courtesy of Professor Prawling, F. R. S., who has supplied us with the MS. of his recent lecture before the Psycho-Economical Society, we are in a position to give our readers a full account of that masterly and epoch-making address, of which, strange to say, no adequate notice has so far appeared ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various

... design from the point of view of sculpture rather than of painting proper. It settled his determination to work exclusively through and by the human figure, rejecting all subordinate elements of decoration. Had we possessed this epoch-making masterpiece, we should probably have known Michelangelo's genius in its flower-period of early ripeness, when anatomical learning was still combined with a sustained dependence upon Nature. The transition from the second to the third stage in this development of form-ideal remains ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... promised that they might mount the wagon and ride home from the fields on the summit of the hay mountain. This perilous privilege, so dear to their age and species, had never been granted them before. Their excitement had no bounds. They could talk of nothing but this epoch-making adventure, now. But misfortune overtook Susy on the very morning of the important day. In a sudden outbreak of passion, she corrected Clara—with a shovel, or stick, or something of the sort. At any rate, the offence committed was of a gravity clearly beyond ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... only books worth taking to Africa, or anywhere else, would be a bound copy of last year's Review of Reviews, GENERAL BOOTH's epoch-making volume, and—this is indispensable—SIR C. D-LKE's invaluable Problems of Greater Britain. When I went to Rome, I naturally took with me the "hundred best books in the world." They were a little heavy, but I thought the POPE would like to see them. However, circumstances ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various

... Revolution.—In this exciting period, when all America was distracted by partisan disputes, a storm broke in Europe—the epoch-making French Revolution—which not only shook the thrones of the Old World but stirred to its depths the young republic of the New World. The first scene in this dramatic affair occurred in the spring of 1789, a few days after Washington was inaugurated. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... fortnight later. In the afternoon Katrine had been reading by the fire an old Italian tale of love and death. It seemed hardly an epoch-making experience in her life, and yet there had come to her, like the letting in of sudden light, the knowledge that love was beyond and above reason, as religion is, as life itself, of which love is the cause. She had worked to forget, had been taught how to forget, yet she knew she had not forgotten, ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane

... Reformers of Religions: and, since {143} moral and spiritual insight are very closely connected with character, for the moral hero, the leader of men, the Saint. Especially to the new departures, the turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in ethical and religious progress connected with the appearance of such men, we may apply the term Revelation in ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... the Johns Hopkins in the winter of 1879 and was published in 1880. According to competent critics, the book gives as searching an investigation of the science of verse on its formal side as is to be had in any language. Since the treatise is so evidently an epoch-making one, I regret that the technicality of the subject forbids my attempting in this connection even a brief exposition* of its principles. I can say only that Lanier treats verse in the terms of music; that, according ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... (Copenhagen, 1866, 1871-1872); Fortegnelse over Retssamlinger, Retslitteratur i Danmark, Norge, Sverige (Copenhagen, 1876). Aagesen was Hall's successor as lecturer on Roman law at the university, and in this department his researches were epoch-making. All his pupils were profoundly impressed by his exhaustive examination of the sources, his energetic demonstration of his subject and his stringent search after truth. His noble, imposing, and yet most amiable personality won for him, moreover, universal ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... heightened into pure romance, so that even our novelists feel that they can give no adequate picture of the war without using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no doubt, agree in feeling that we are still too near to that epoch-making crisis of our national existence to do it any justice in the terms of literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected romance of the years 1861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... 169), have been notably stultified by M. Hermann Zotenberg's purchase of two volumes containing both these bones of long and vain contention. See Foreword to my Suppl. vol. iii. pp. viii.-xi., and Mr. W. F. Kirby's interesting notice of M. Zotenberg's epoch-making booklet (vol. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... years, whose name was Fernando Cortes—sometimes written {117} Hernando Cortes. Like Pizarro, whose history has been related, he was from the forgotten province of Estremadura. He was born in the year 1485, in the city of Medellin. He was seven years old when Columbus set sail upon that epoch-making voyage of discovery and he was thirty-four when he set foot for the first time on the shores of Mexico. In the intervening years much interesting and ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... Gladstone, of course, a post in the government (vice-president of the Board of Trade). Gladstone was then a protectionist like his party chief. He bore a hand in the preparation of the tariff legislation of that epoch-making administration, and though temporarily not a member of the House of Commons when the bill for the repeal of the Corn Laws was carried, in 1846, he helped to frame it, and to secure its passage. He had been fully converted to the principles ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... decided to emphasize further his return to Crowheart by issuing invitations for a dinner to be given in the Terriberry House, reserving the announcement of his future plans for this occasion; and, although Crowheart did not realize it at the time, this dinner was an epoch-making function. It was not until the printed invitations worded with such elegance by Sylvanus Starr were issued, that Crowheart dimly suspected there were sheep and goats, and this was the initial step toward ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... Trial gallops had shown that Gussie had his own way of doing things. Those interruptions had been enough to prove to the perspicacious that here, seated on the platform at the big binge of the season, was one who, if pushed forward to make a speech, might let himself go in a rather epoch-making manner. ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... belongs to experience and mature age, came to him, as they did to Hamilton, before he was out of his teens, and whether he was right or whether he was wrong, he was always the most interesting, always the most commanding figure in American journalism in the epoch-making political controversies ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke's remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first published ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... which, as it seemed to the elder woman, half-hours of this quality in life should be decently accompanied. Little heathen! Miss Anna thought grimly of all the precautions she had taken to spare the young lady's feelings—of her own emotions—her sense of a solemn and epoch-making experience. She might have ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Discovery of Circulation of the Blood recapitulated, divides itself naturally into a series of epoch-making periods: 1. The structure and functions of the valves of the heart, Erasistratus, B.C. 304. 2. The arteries carry blood during life, not air, Galen, A.D. 165. 3. The pulmonary circulation, Servetus, 1553. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... capitalist interests, but they will inevitably be ready at a price to relax to some extent the intensity of their opposition to other measures that are capitalistic and antipopular. For instance, if old age pensions are considered by the workers to be an epoch-making reform and a concession, they may be granted by the capitalists all the more readily. But if thus overvalued, advantage will be taken of this feeling, and they will in all probability be accompanied by restrictions of the rights of labor organizations. On the other hand, if such pensions, ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... the anticipation of sunny Ithaca and prudent Penelope to the hapless sufferer. Ulysses sees his own land in the image of Phaeacia, sees what he is to make out of his own island. Verily it is a great and epoch-making experience for him just before his return; he finds the ideal here which he is ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... all epoch-making men, of all great constructive and reforming geniuses, whether in the Church or in the world, that they should toil at a task, the full issues of which will not be known until their heads are laid low in the dust. But if, on the one hand, that seems hard, on the other hand there is the compensation ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... world, who translated and published some of the Odes in 1769 and was called the German Horace, Lessing said that no sovereign had ever been so beautifully addressed as was Frederick the Great in his imitation of the Maecenas ode. The epoch-making Klopstock, 1724-1803, quotes, translates, and imitates Horace, and uses Horatian subjects. Heinse reads him and writes of him enthusiastically, and Platen, 1796-1835, is so full of Homer and Horace that ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman

... in consequence of its imperfections—the "Reliques" was an epoch-making book. The nature of its service to English letters is thus stated by Macaulay, in the introduction to his "Lays of Ancient Rome": "We cannot wonder that the ballads of Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how very narrowly, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... of wine awakened in one corner of my brain (where all the rest was in mourning, the blinds down as for a funeral) a faint stir of curiosity; and while I waited the next course, wondering the while what I had ordered, I opened and began to read the epoch-making document. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne



Words linked to "Epoch-making" :   significant, epochal, important



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