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Protean   /proʊtˈiən/  /prˈoʊtiən/   Listen
Protean

adjective
1.
Taking on different forms.






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"Protean" Quotes from Famous Books



... again, gazing dreamily at the drifting rings of pipe smoke. He smiled, the twisted smile which was the sole indication that one side of his face was the master work of a great surgeon-sculptor. A marvelous piece of work, that, but no less marvelous than the protean changes that Bolton himself could make in his appearance. It was this genius at impersonation that had won Bolton his commission in the Intelligence Service, when, in 1992, the world ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... all autobiographies is an intellectual autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... their prototype, even as to the size of the volume and the form of the page. What has become of these "Varieties of Literature," and "Delights of Literature," and "Delicacies of Literature," and "Relics of Literature,"—and the other Protean forms of uninspired compilation? Dead as they deserve to be: while the work, the idea of which occurred to its writer in his early youth, and which he lived virtually to execute in all the ripeness of his studious manhood, remains as fresh and popular as ever,—the Literary ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... mortification. In another early treatise, "The Degrees of Humility and of Pride," the modes of pride are exhibited forcibly, and with not a little humour. Curiosity, thoughtless mirth, mock humility, and other symptoms of the protean vice ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... Ovid metamorphosed from a restless man to a fickle sea-god; the other assumed so many deceptive shapes to those who visited his cave, that his memory has been preserved in the word Protean. Such fancies well apply to a part of Nature which shifts like the sands, and ranges from the hideous Cuttle-fish and ravenous Shark to the delicate Medusa, whose graceful form and trailing tentacles float among the waving fronds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... was Protean. Much of her work, the lawless part of it, was organized in the shape and dress of Mr. Michaelis. Some of her letters to the Press were signed Edgar McKenna, Albert Birrell, Andrew Asquith, Edgmont Harcourt, Felicia Ward, Millicent Curzon, Judith ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... as such, has nothing to do with the soul of man which is hyperphysical. That such an entity exists, that the correlated {286} physical forces go through their Protean transformations, have their persistent ebb and flow outside of the world of WILL and SELF-CONSCIOUS MORAL BEING, are propositions the proofs of which have no place in this work. This at least may however be confidently affirmed, that no ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... cases being expressed by postpositions, which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion, instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two last ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... a day, or in a week, possibly in a month. But persistence and a protean adaptability to meet his moods might accomplish something. I don't say will, I only say might. If Sweetwater had the job, with unlimited time in which to carry out any plan he may have, or even for a change ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green

... equal, in angular velocity, to that of Mars's rotation, it shifts very slowly through the sky toward the west, and for two or three successive days and nights it remains above the horizon, the sun overtaking and passing it again and again, while, in the meantime, its protean face swiftly changes from full circle to half-moon, from half-moon to crescent, from crescent back to half, and from half to full, and so ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... in prolonging the story of this wrestle; there was a certain sameness in every phase, though the dangers seemed to change with such protean swiftness. For three days it lasted, and on the third day Tom Lennard, Ferrier, the patients, and the crew, were far more interested in the steward's efforts to boil coffee than they were in the arrowy flight of the ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... scoundrel," said Val, "that you may labor under no mistake, I think it fair to tell you that Browbeater and I know everything about you, and all the Protean shapes you have gone through for the last three years, in different parts of the kingdom Now listen to me, you d——d impostor; listen to me, I say—you have it in your power to become a useful man to the ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... of protean protein clay All the human's space has room for, for whom time makes a day, From the sage whose words of wisdom prince or parliament obey, To the parrots who but prattle, and the asses who but bray— So full was this Atom-Molecule, Of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various

... incoherent exclamations as they first embrace; then to the seething mass of tone is added (l), and gradually out of chaos and confusion emerges one clean-cut melody after another. The daylight-theme which begins the introduction is Protean in the shapes it assumes, and the emotions, now hot passion, now the gentlest tenderness, it is made to express. The ferment settles down, and we get the hymn to night and a series of melodies which are love's own voice speaking. The dreamy voluptuousness ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... possible, by moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window, Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... say that the Spirit guides them, and it would be unfair to disbelieve them, but the historian who should investigate conditions like these would lose his head in the labyrinth unless he made a separate study of each of these Protean movements. They are surely not worth ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... malady, the seat of which is unknown. She suffers from incomprehensible nervous attacks. At one time the doctors think she has an attack of heart disease, at another time they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another they declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day this protean malady, that assumes a thousand forms and a thousand modes of attack, is attributed to the stomach, which is the great caldron and regulator of the body. This is why we have come here. For my part, I am rather inclined ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... on the subject may find a theme presenting aspects both sad and comical. When, however, one reflects that amulets, in some one of their protean forms, have been invested with supernatural preventive and healing powers by the people of all lands and epochs, and that they have been worn not only by kings and princes, but by philosophers, prelates, and physicians of eminence as ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... things is essentially human; we alone have extra-physical tools. We have added to our teeth the knife, sword, scissors, mowing machine; to our claws the spade, harrow, plough, drill, dredge. We are a protean creature, using the larger brain power through a wide variety of changing weapons. This is one of our main and vital distinctions. Ancient animal races are traced and known by mere bones and shells, ancient human races by their ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... novels, operas, pictures, and various phenomena of London life. She kept up the ball with him very smartly. She was every winter, May, and June, in London, mixed much in society, and saw everything that was to be seen. Lord Curryfin, with all his Protean accomplishments, could not start a subject on which she had not something to say. But she originated nothing. He spoke, and she answered. One thing he remarked as singular, that though she spoke with knowledge of many things, she did not speak as with taste or distaste ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... power under its Protean forms, styled "Vital Forces," and "The Physical Forces," works in the atmosphere and is the source of nearly all its phenomena. It causes and directs movements in every province of nature. Nothing else has so intimate relations ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... it is a wild and savage thing that carries terror in its train. It would be an angel of light, if it were not a power of darkness; and it would be a power of darkness, if it were not an angel of light. But as it is, it is both by turns, and neither long, but runs through its Protean changes, according to the exigencies of the flowing discourse of the learned author. Surely such inconsistency, so glaring and so portentous, and all exhibited on one and the same page, is no evidence that the genius of the great commentator was ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... need of an excitator, which excitator may be either good or evil; but is more frequently Satan himself, by reason of some previous oppignoration or compact with witches. The power, indeed, is in the witch, and not conferred by him; but this versipellous or Protean impostor—these are his words—will not suffer her to know that it is of her own natural endowment, though for the present charmed into somnolent inactivity by the narcotic of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... provokes wonder as to God's sensations at having such amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist "experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity is considered justifiable, because the glory of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... a writ in his pocket. These fellows have some protean qualities about them, and, as occasion requires, assume all shapes for the purpose of taking care of their customers; they are however a sort of necessary evil. The old one in brown is a well-known dealer, a deep old file, and knows ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... gentle, clinging, and timid; or the one was more ardent, the other more calm and placid; or again, the one was the more independent, original, and self-contained; the other the more generous, hasty, and vivacious. In short, the difference was that of intensity or energy in one or other of its protean forms; it did not extend more deeply into the structure of the characters. The more vivacious might be subdued by ill health, until he assumed the character of the other; or the latter might be raised by excellent health to that of the former. The difference was in the ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Malicorne was happy; but this love, which he could not help feeling, he had the strength to conceal with care; persuaded that at the least relaxing of the ties by which he had bound his Protean female, the demon would overthrow and laugh at him. He humbled his mistress by disdaining her. Burning with desire, when she advanced to tempt him, he had the art to appear ice, persuaded that if he opened his arms, she would run away laughing at him. On her side, Montalais ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... if he has shown A jolly nut-brown bastard of your own. Ah! happy you, with ease and with delight, Who act those follies, Poets toil to write! The sweating Muse does almost leave the chase; She puffs, and hardly keeps your Protean vices pace. Pinch you but in one vice, away you fly To some new frisk of contrariety. You roll like snow-balls, gathering as you run, 20 And get seven devils, when dispossess'd of one. Your Venus once was a Platonic queen; Nothing ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... from the pure and polished exposition of his cause to awake a feeling of commiseration for the wrongs which he unfolded.[571] Tiberius played but on a single chord; Caius on many. Tiberius appealed to noble instincts, Caius appealed to all and his Protean manifestations were a symbol of a more complex creed, a wider knowledge of humanity, a greater recklessness as to his means, and of that burning consciousness, which Tiberius had not, that there were personal wrongs to be avenged as well as political ideas to be ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... heaven or was turned into stone, and it was by their aid and counsel that the savages who possessed the land renounced their barbarous habits and commenced to till the soil. There can be no doubt but that this in turn is but another transformation of the Protean myth we ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... shimmerings of my Protean friend, Who means to couch them shortly. Thou wilt eye Many fantastic moulds of him ere long, Such as, bethink thee, oft ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... touch of grace, whose help once in life is the privilege of the most undeserving, flung open for him the portals of beyond, and in contemplating there the certitude immaterial and precious he forgot all the meaningless accidents of existence: the bliss of getting, the delight of enjoying; all the protean and enticing forms of the cupidity that rules a material world of foolish joys, of contemptible sorrows. Faith!—Love!—the undoubting, clear faith in the truth of a soul—the great tenderness, deep as the ocean, serene and eternal, like the infinite ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... related with as much gravity as the loss of a battle, or the march of a desolating plague. Montaigne, in his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and highly wrought; but then his moods are Protean, and he is constantly alternating his stateliness with familiarity, anecdote, humour, coarseness. His Essays are like a mythological landscape—you hear the pipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... madness." In its milder forms, the fallacy is now known by every one as the "personal equation"; in its pronounced, abnormal manifestations it is known by the psychoanalysts as "transference." It is a Protean fallacy woven into the emotional texture of the human mind. Nothing, for it, is sacred enough to be inviolate. For Spinoza discovered it sanctimoniously enshrined even in the Sacred Scriptures. As he brilliantly shows us in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... causes, such as underlie all animate nature. Yet that of Stella—for undoubtedly she had power—suggested another interpretation to his mind. Or was it, after all, nothing but a variant, one of the Protean shapes of the ancient, life-compelling mystery? And her strange chant, the song of which her father made light, but feared so much; her quick insight into the workings of his own thought; her courage in the face of danger and sharp physical miseries; her charm, her mastery. ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... of death, can release. But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... distinguished a prevalent disease now about to come under our consideration, which was first observed on the continent. The rapidity with which it spread, the strange protean appearances which it assumed, and its too frequent fatal termination, surprised and puzzled the veterinary surgeons; and they called it "la maladie des chiens," the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... kinetic system has stood a crucial test by making possible the shockless operation. It has offered a plausible explanation of the cause and the treatment of Graves' disease. Will the kinetic theory stand also the clinical test of controlling that protean disease bred in the midst of the stress of our present-day life? Present-day life, in which one must ever have one hand on the sword and the other on the throttle, is a constant stimulus of the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... which are more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Suppose for a moment that this law did not hold—then what would become of all our reasoning? Where would be the use of establishing conclusions about things, if they were liable to evade us by a Protean change of identity? ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... him, knew him as the most astonishing human expression of the Creative Spirit we had ever seen. His manifold talents, his protean interests, his tireless energy, his thunderbolts which he did not let loose, as well as those he did, his masterful will sheathed in self-control like a sword in its scabbard, would have rendered him superhuman, had he not possessed other qualities which ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... had ever presented itself, as an irreverent thought, which he dared not for a moment be guilty of entertaining. It was besides, an idea too absurd to be indulged in by one who, in his wildest imaginations, always, through every Protean embodiment, sought and loved and clung to the real. His chief thought was simply to find favour in the eyes of the girl. His ideas hovered about her image, but it was continually to burn themselves in incense to her sweet ladyhood. As often as a ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... community of descent, together with the amount of modification which the forms have undergone. The characters by which domestic varieties differ from each other are more {412} variable than those distinguishing species, though hardly more so than with certain protean species; but this greater degree of variability is not surprising, as varieties have generally been exposed within recent times to fluctuating conditions of life, are much more liable to have been crossed, and are still in many cases undergoing, or have recently undergone, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... to form a tolerable estimate of the mycologic flora. Of the Hymenomycetes, the greater part belong to Agaricus: there are but four or five Polypori in Zeyher's collection, one of which is protean. The Gasteromycetes are interesting, belonging to many genera, and presenting two, Scoleciocarpus and Phellorinia, which were founded upon specimens in this collection. Batarrea, Tulostoma, and Mycenastrum are represented by European species. ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... art that have grown up in England and elsewhere and flourished side by side, vying with one another to express the protean graces of man, of architecture and domestic interior, of earth and sky and sea. Where is the Swiss school? Where, in any public gallery, will you find a masterpiece which triumphantly vindicates the charm of Swiss scenery? You will, find it vindicated only ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... these Protean changes of makeup, if not of character, Sir John Willison has never abandoned two early habits; lawn bowling and reading the Globe. He is an expert in both. Bowling vexes him least, because its rules never change. The Globe gives him pangs because alas! it is now engaged in the ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... ELSIE JANIS, the wonderful protean actress, says:—"I can not speak in too high praise of the opening remarks. If carefully read, will greatly assist. Have several books of choice selections, but I find some in 'Humorous Hits' ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser

... times, together with a hundred other incidents, just as a chance tag of association recalled them to his swift and picturesque memory. He would, indeed, make a show of fixing dates by reference to his temporary profession; but so Protean seem to have been his changes of fortune in their number and rapidity that I could never keep count of them or their order. Nor does it matter. The man's life was as disconnected as ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... most notorious international spy in the world—a protean individual with aliases, professions, and experiences sufficient for an entire jail full of criminals. His father was a German Jew; his mother a Circassian girl; he was educated in Germany, France, Italy, ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... uniformity by no means excludes any amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, though no one doubts that, under all these Protean changes, it is one and the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley



Words linked to "Protean" :   Proteus, variable



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