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Mutability   Listen
noun
Mutability  n.  The quality of being mutable, or subject to change or alteration, either in form, state, or essential character; susceptibility of change; changeableness; inconstancy; variation. "Plato confessed that the heavens and the frame of the world are corporeal, and therefore subject to mutability."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mutability" Quotes from Famous Books



... changed me; that, by her manifest excellence, they might gain some perception of her virtue; and that, by the comprehension of her most exalted virtue, they might be able to see that all stability of mind could be in that mutability: and, therefore, they should not judge me light and unstable. I then began to praise this Lady, and if not in the most suitable manner, at least as well as I could at first; and I began to say: "Love, reasoning of my Lady in my mind." This Song chiefly has three parts. The first ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... impression of sensuous delight. When he wrote the "Shepherd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or thought of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability," ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... be found in my possession. In collecting the ashes of these two compositions, the tendency of which is so different, (for such is the complexion of the moment, that I would not have even the servant suspect I had been burning a quantity of papers,) I could not but moralize on the mutability of popular opinion. Mr. Burke's Gallic adversaries are now most of them proscribed and anathematized more than himself. Perhaps another year may see his bust erected on the piedestal which now supports that of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... Bles? Nearly all the large European galleries contain specimens of his work and in the majority of cases the pictures are queried. That fatal (?) which, since curators are more erudite and conscientious, is appearing more frequently than in former years, sets one to musing over the mutability of pictorial fortunes. Also, it awakens suspicions as to the genuineness of paint. Restorations, another fatal word, is usually a euphemism for overpainting. Between varnish and retouching it is difficult to tell where ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... world is developed in time, or change, the perfection of the faculty that places men in relation with the world will necessarily be the greatest possible mutability and extensiveness. Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action (autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under manifold aspects, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... universal reading. We take up such a book as Otto of Freising's Annals (to which, with his Acts of Frederick I., we shall have to refer again), and find the good bishop moralising thus on the mutability of human affairs, with especial reference to the break-up of the Empire in the middle ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... Reflections on the mutability of fortune, on money expended, and on the duties of love and friendship: A strange incident, shewing the propensity of man to superstitious terrors: A lamentable and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... they should go home. When they reached London, they found a great difference in the weather: it cannot be said she owes her salubrity to her climate. Fog and drizzle, frost and fog, were the embodiment of its unvarying mutability. At once Richard was worse, and dared not think, for his mother's sake, and the labour she had spent upon him, of going to the next popular concert, if indeed those delights had not ceased for the season. But he ought to try, for he ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... this secular fluctuation of the constellation figures is not without keen interest for the meditative observer. It is another reminder of the swift mutability of terrestial affairs. To the passing glance, which is all that we can bestow upon these figures, they appear so immutable that they have been called into service to form the most lasting records of ancient thought ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... framework of human life giving way daily before their eyes, men grew apt to give up the game. The very instability of all things, once established as a law, brought a sort of rest and permanence with it; "there is nothing strictly immutable," they might have said, "but mutability." Thus the law of change became a permanent thread in mortal affairs, and, with the knowledge that all the old round would be gone over again by others, grew the sense that in the acceptance of this law of nature there was involved ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... which we ourselves belong? If so, it may furnish us with some data for the further solution of these wonderful mysteries of time, and it is besides of especial importance with reference to the question of permanence of Species. Those who maintain the mutability of Species, and account for all the variety of life on earth by the gradual changes wrought by time and circumstances, do not accept historical evidence as affecting the question at all. The monuments of those oldest nations, all whose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... a little as he went on smoking; the old carelessness, mutability, and indolent philosophies were with him still, and were still inclined to thrust away and glide from all pain, as it arose. Though much of gravity and of thoughtfulness had stolen on him, much of ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... to vice in man but I affirm It is the woman's part; be it lying, note it The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; Ambitions, covetings, changes of prides, disdain, Nice longings, slanders, mutability, All faults that may be named, nay that hell knows, Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all; For even to vice They are not constant, but are changing still One vice of a minute old for one Not half so old as that. I'll write against them, Detest them, curse them.—Yet 'tis greater skill In ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... that all topicks are preoccupied, is nothing more than the murmur of ignorance or idleness, by which some discourage others, and some themselves; the mutability of mankind will always furnish writers with new images, and the luxuriance of fancy may always embellish ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... Account of Himself The Voyage Roscoe The Wife Rip Van Winkle English Writers on America Rural Life in England The Broken Heart The Art of Book-making A Royal Poet The Country Church The Widow and her Son A Sunday in London The Boar's Head Tavern The Mutability of Literature Rural Funerals The Inn Kitchen The Spectre Bridegroom Westminster Abbey Christmas The Stage-Coach Christmas Eve Christmas Day The Christmas Dinner London Antiques Little Britain Statford-on-Avon Traits ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... everywhere— Not that vast mutability which is event, The pits and pinnacles of change, But man's desire and valiance that range All circumstance, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater

... are bright, but The petals fall! In this world of ours who Shall remain forever? To-day crossing The high mountains of mutability, We shall see no fleeting dreams, Being ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it, The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, Nice longing, slanders, mutability, All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows, Why, hers, in part or all, but rather all; For even to vice They are not constant, but are changing still One vice, but of a minute old, for one Not ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... about him," though what it was she couldn't really say. Only from the first she had had that feeling in her heart—"He will not be permanent." The joy she had in his youth and mystery was drenched with the pathos of mutability. Mrs. Downey rebelled against mutability's decree. "Perhaps," she said, "we might come ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the privileged class had gone to the wall. In this era of unrestrained ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... on Cleopatra. On the contrary, she registered them every one with the accuracy of a trained observer. And as surely as the cumulative evidence of all she saw began to point with ever greater precision in the direction of her sister's fickleness and mutability, the more her health improved, and the more cheerful she became. It is remarkable how the state of being overanxious spoils a creature's humour and mars the brightest sally. A week previously Cleopatra could say nothing, however bright, that did not ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... by more dignity than was to be expected from so weak a man. He is said to have even opened a school to teach boys to read, and to have instructed the public singers in reciting poetry. His career, at least, was an impressive commentary on the mutability of fortune, to which the Greeks were ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... necessary for them to know Sorrow and Pain to be in their right Senses. Prosperous People (for Happy there are none) are hurried away with a fond Sense of their present Condition, and thoughtless of the Mutability of Fortune: Fortune is a Term which we must use in such Discourses as these, for what is wrought by the unseen Hand of the Disposer of all Things. But methinks the Disposition of a Mind which is truly great, is that which makes Misfortunes and Sorrows little ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... thinker; but his prudence, not to say timidity, in presenting in his ironical way his thoughts on the origin of things, is annoying, for we do not always understand what Buffon did really believe about the mutability or the fixity of species, as too plain speaking in the days he wrote often led to persecution ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... always something that depresses, as well as something that exhilarates, in the first day of a Session of Parliament. In the months which have elapsed, there have been plenty of events to emphasize the mutability and the everlasting tragedy of human life. Some men have died; figures that seemed almost the immortal portion of the life of Parliament have disappeared into night, and their place knows them no more; others have met the fate, more sinister and melancholy, of changing a ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... fact was so well known to prehistoric man that he employed this method, as various savage tribes employ it to this day, for the altogether practical purpose of making a fire; just as he employed his practical knowledge of the mutability of solids and liquids in smelting ores, in alloying copper with tin to make bronze, and in casting this alloy in molds to make various implements and weapons. Here, then, were the germs of an elementary ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... to the evidence of mutability of species which Agassiz did not find, he took the position "that the hypothesis of the method of creation by evolution exceeded physical science and became theology, which belonged to the province of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... those prudent English merchants, (Adam Lymburner at their head), who awaited at Charlesbourg and Beauport the issue of the contest, did not take a quiet drive, to Chateau- Bigot, were it only to indulge in a philosophical disquisition on the mutability of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... then, poor mortal, that hath cast thee into lamentation and mourning? Some strange, unwonted sight, methinks, have thine eyes seen. Thou deemest Fortune to have changed towards thee; thou mistakest. Such ever were her ways, ever such her nature. Rather in her very mutability hath she preserved towards thee her true constancy. Such was she when she loaded thee with caresses, when she deluded thee with the allurements of a false happiness. Thou hast found out how changeful is the face of the blind goddess. She who still veils ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius

... to many others, especially those who had to tramp over many miles of country to return the money they had been at such pains to collect. Even Mrs. Fraser was disappointed in the minister's action, for she had been in hopes that Annie would be the organist, and she sighed long and deeply over the mutability of the young minister. Such sudden changes of opinion, she declared, denoted an unstable character, and she feared he would not have a good influence over the wild and unsettled young men ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile "simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature, since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted, brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... humid flux, or catarrh, by the mutability of air, falls from your head into an arm or shoulder, or any other part; take you a ducat, or your chequin of gold, and apply to the place affected: see what good effect it can work. No, no, 'tis this blessed unguento, this rare extraction, that hath only power ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... a very voluminous author in verse and prose, original and translated, and is certainly to be reckoned among the predecessors of Shakespeare in dramatic composition. His earliest work, as far as can be now ascertained, was "The Mirror of Mutability," 1579, when he was in his 26th year: he dedicates it to the Earl of Oxford, and perhaps then belonged to the company of players of that nobleman, to which he had again attached himself on his return from Italy.[150] ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... family life in the most unpretending tranquillity. But nothing was wanting. I had space, verdure, affection, conversation, liberty, and employment,—the necessity of occupation, that spur and bridle which human indolence and mutability so often require. I was perfectly content. When the soul is calm, the heart full, and the mind active, situations the most opposite to those we have been accustomed to possess their charms, which speedily ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... mused on Mutability, Or on his Mistress—terms synonymous— No sound except the echo of his sigh Or step ran sadly through that antique house; When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh, A supernatural agent—or a mouse, Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass Most people as it plays ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... captivity at the hands of Alexander only to perish by those of the satrap Bessus. All antecedent historical parallels—the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Croesus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition—sank into trifles compared with the overthrow of this towering Persian colossus. The orator AEschines exprest the genuine sentiment of a Grecian spectator when he exclaimed (in a speech ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... power in itself, thus also in some manner every creature is mutable. For every creature has a twofold power, active and passive; and I call that power passive which enables anything to attain its perfection either in being, or in attaining to its end. Now if the mutability of a thing be considered according to its power for being, in that way all creatures are not mutable, but those only in which what is potential in them is consistent with non-being. Hence, in the inferior bodies there ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... there, suh. De po' lamb fell—No, suh"—the old woman's racial mutability swept her into a sudden flare of indignation —"old Cindy ain't gwineter lie for dat debble. He done it, suh. May de Lawd wither de hand what—dar now! Cindy promise her sweet lamb she ain't gwine tell. Miss Amy got hurt, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... that the earth has endured for countless ages, during which whole continents have been submerged, whole seas become dry land, again and again. Even now the heavens and the earth are being shaken by researches into the antiquity of the human race, and into the origin and the mutability of species, which, issue in what results they may, will shake for us, meanwhile, theories which are venerable with the authority of nearly eighteen hundred years, and of almost every ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... income now of $50,000 a year or an income of $1000. A bank is secure according to its capital stock, and not to be judged by the deposits for a day or a week. A man is rich according to his sterling qualities, and not according to the mutability of circumstances, which may leave with him a large amount of resources to-day and withdraw them to-morrow. If a man is worth nothing but money he is poor indeed. If a man have upright character he is rich. Property may come ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... great nobles, whose mutability of faith had so happily corresponded with every ecclesiastical vicissitude of the last three reigns, political and personal considerations may well be supposed to have held the first place; and though the old religion might still be endeared ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... cannot but believe it to have been a mighty gain to such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser's "Fairy Queen," above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many a dark eschatological superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism, which was even then tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to give him altogether a freer and more loving conception, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... noticed in such works as Lorenzo's Ambra. The subject, however, is treated in a more subtly allegorical manner than by Ovid's direct imitators, and this mode of presentment likewise characterizes Spenser's tale of Molanna in the fragment on Mutability.[106] Browne returned to a more crudely metamorphical tradition in the loves of Walla and Tavy, while a similarly mythological Naturanschauung may be traced in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... now fixed his abode. We cannot take one step in Rome without bringing the present near to the past, and different periods of the past near to each other. But we learn to reconcile ourselves to the events of our own time, in beholding the eternal mutability of the history of man; and we feel ashamed of letting our own lot disturb us in the presence of so many ages, which have all overthrown the work of the ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... epistle, you have already reached the frontiers of Egypt, advance with confidence, and depend on the succor of God and of your brethren." The experience, perhaps the secret intelligence, of Amrou had taught him to suspect the mutability of courts; and he continued his march till his tents were unquestionably pitched on Egyptian ground. He there assembled his officers, broke the seal, perused the epistle, gravely inquired the name and situation of the place, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... expressly stated that the theory of the mutability of species is Mr. Darwin's own; this, nevertheless, is the inference which the great majority of his readers were likely to draw, and did draw, from Mr. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... too little attention has been paid to the last. The federal Constitution avoids this error; and what merits particular notice, it provides for the last in a mode which increases the security for the first. Fourthly. The mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members, however qualified they may be, points out, in the strongest manner, the necessity of some stable institution in the government. Every new election in the States is ...
— The Federalist Papers

... tree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thought of skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. They seemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability of all things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to live and exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creeping changes and the insidious passing away of youth and all it meant to her! "I hate ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... of Notre-Dame-du-Bourg there seems to be a peculiar fitness. The mutability of time, forgetfulness, and at length neglect, which death suggests, are brought to mind by this old church. Once the Cathedral of Digne, but no longer Cathedral, it stands almost alone in spite of its honours and its venerable age. After the desecration by the Huguenots, its episcopal birthright ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose

... have hearkened to my story in vain, if you do not see that, however indulgent and right-minded I may seem to you now, that is no guarantee for the future. And into the power of that uncertain personality which, through the mutability of my humanity, I may hereafter become, should not common sense dissuade you, my dear Frank, from putting yourself? Consider. Would you, in your present need, be willing to accept a loan from a friend, securing him by a mortgage on your homestead, and do so, knowing that you had no reason ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... cold and naked, other times hot and flowery: nay, I cannot tell how, but even the lowest of those celestial bodies, that mother of months, and empress of seas and moisture, as if she were a mirror of our constant mutability, appeareth (by her too great nearness {21} unto us) to participate of our changes, never seeing us twice with that same face: now looking black, then pale and wan, sometimes again in the perfection and fulness of her beauty ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... instant, announce that the resolution has been taken at Vienna to deprive the Duke of Parma of the administration of his states, and to put in a regency, of which Ward is to be the head. The elevation of Ward affords not only a singular instance of the mutability of human affairs, but of the tendency of the Anglo-Saxon race, when transplanted to foreign countries, to emerge to eminence, and surpass others by the homely but rare qualities of common-sense and unfaltering energy. Ward was a Yorkshire groom. The Duke of Lucca, when on a visit to this country, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various

... daughter and declared that she was wiser than all his wise men. "Now," said Hastings, "when I appear at the Bar and hear the violent invectives {284} of my enemies, I arm myself with patience. I reflect upon the mutability of human life, and I say to myself, 'This, too, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... of the proceedings in the doubtful and transitory state of things between enmity and friendship. In this change the subjects of the transformation are by nature carefully wrapt up in their cocoons. The gay ornament of summer is not seemly in his aurelia state. This mutability is allowed to a foreign negotiator; but when a great politician condescends publicly to instruct his own countrymen on a matter which may fix their fate forever, his opinions ought not to be diurnal, or even weekly. These ephemerides of politics are not made for ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... poor, And odious pride a million more; Envy itself, and vanity, Were ministers of industry; Their darling folly—fickleness In diet, furniture, and dress— That strange, ridiculous vice, was made The very wheel that turned the trade. Their laws and clothes were equally Objects of mutability; For what was well done for a time, In half a year became ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... to proclaim the doctrine of the perpetual fluxion of the universe (to reon, to gignomenon—Unrest and Development), the endless changes of matter, and the mutability and perishability of all individual things. This restless, changing flow of things, which never are, but always are becoming, he pronounced to be the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... inaccessible heights of fame,— fame, that he then imagined was the greatest glory any human being could aspire to. He smiled as he recollected this, and thought how changed he was since then! What a difference between the former discontented mutability of his nature, and the deep, unswerving calm of patience that characterized it now! Learning and scholarship? these were the mere child's alphabet of things,—and fame was a passing breath that ruffled ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... come as rapidly as possible to the extraordinary happenings of that Saturday afternoon, which as much as any other event in this entire history, portrays the mutability of the feminine mind. I had gone out to the cabin to see that everything was in order, and Jerry was to follow later, while a few of the men fished up stream, Marcia and some of her guests driving in motors ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... be asked, have all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists rejected this view of the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... and Portugal, and the whole circle of the Hanseatic League, we trace the same ruinous [end of page iii] remains of ancient greatness, presenting a melancholy contrast with the poverty, indolence, and ignorance, of the present race of inhabitants, and an irresistible proof of the mutability of human affairs. ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... marked the place. A dead and buried city in Europe, or even in India, leaves rude but almost indestructible remains to mark where great communities once built temples and monuments, and lived and thrived, like those examples of mutability, Memphis, Paestum, Cumae, or Delhi, but not so in Japan. At first it seemed strange that a locality where half a million of people had made their homes within the period of a century should now present the ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... although now it is tempered by criticism and concedes to the practical ideals at least a refuge in faith. The conviction that the rule of neo-Kantianism is provisional does not rest merely on the mutability of human affairs. The widespread active study of the philosophy of the great Koenigsberger gives ground for the hope that also those elements in it from which the systems of the idealists have proceeded as necessary consequences will ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... Politics, for instance, are the roast beef of the times; essays, the plum pudding; and poetry the fritters, confections, custards, and all the et cotera of the table, usually denominated trifles. Yet the four winds are not liable to more mutability than the vehicles of these entertainments; for instance, on Monday, it is whispered—on Tuesday, it is rumoured—on Wednesday, it is conjectured—on Thursday, it is probable—on Friday, it is positively asserted—and, on Saturday, it is premature. But notwithstanding ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, "inhale great draughts of space," wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... the next few years afford a striking example of the mutability of political life. Though this second Baldwin-LaFontaine Administration was elected to power by a large majority—though it commanded more than five votes in the Assembly to every two of the Opposition—yet ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope

... had expended the finest flowers of his contradictory faculties, the stanch immobility of his obstinacy, his unswerving singleness of purpose in seeing only one side of a question, this afternoon, a few short hours since! The mutability of the affairs of the most ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... "Strange mutability of womanhood," he mused a half hour later as he left the lady's side. "There is a woman whom I should not care to face tomorrow morning if I were in Hugh Johnstone's shoes." It was the renegade's ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... as if we despised them for not making the king's soldiery purchase the advantage they have obtained at a dearer rate. It is not, Gentlemen, it is not to respect the dispensations of Providence, nor to provide any decent retreat in the mutability of human affairs. It leaves no medium between insolent victory and infamous defeat. It tends to alienate our minds further and further from our natural regards, and to make an eternal rent and schism in the British nation. Those ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... Fourth. The mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members, however qualified they may be, points out, in the strongest manner, the necessity of some stable institution in the government. ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... simile, I would, separating the universal and eternal course of Destiny from the fleeting generations of human life, compare the river before us to that course, and not it, but the city scattered on its banks, to the varieties and mutability of life. There (in the latter) crowded together in the great chaos of social union, we herd in the night of ages, flinging the little lustre of our dim lights over the sullen tide which rolls beside us,—seeing the tremulous ray glitter ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... our sins, comes from this blessed fountain, 1 John iv. 9, 10; Rom. iii. 24, 25. God hath been framing this righteousness from all eternity, and even this world seems to be made for this end. All God's dispensation with Adam, his making a covenant of works with him, his mutability and liableness to fall, and so governing all things in his holy providence that he should fall from his own righteousness, and involve all his posterity in the same condemnation with himself,—all this seems to be in respect of God's intention and purpose, even ordained for this end, that the righteousness ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... what did they? They grieved; they wondered; they complained. And where are they now? All dead and gone. Wilt thou also be like one of them? Or rather leaving to men of the world (whose life both in regard of themselves, and them that they converse with, is nothing but mere mutability; or men of as fickle minds, as fickle bodies; ever changing and soon changed themselves) let it be thine only care and study, how to make a right use of all such accidents. For there is good use to be made of them, and they will prove fit matter for thee to work upon, if it shall be both thy care ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... the picture of what Spain was at no remote period of time, but in her instance we have an example showing us that states are no more exempt than individuals from the mutability of fate. So was it with Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Rome, though in their case we look far back into the vista of history to recall the change, whereas in the instance of Spain we are contemporary witnesses. From a first-class power, how ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... name in arts, arms, and literature, came across the mind, it is not accompanied by any painful regret caused by the sight of present misery and degradation, but by that philosophic melancholy with which we are used to contemplate the mutability of earthly greatness. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... attention to the unceasing mutability of all chemical substances, as well as to their reciprocal actions, has occasioned those changes of colour to be ascribed to fugitiveness of the pigment, which belong to the affinities of other substances with which ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... before their son was three years old. Mr. Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant, adopted the child and gave him a splendid home. How scantily Poe appreciated and improved the advantages of this kindness he himself confesses in a letter to Lowell in 1844. "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to anything—to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim—impulse—passion—a longing for solitude—a scorn of all things present in an earnest desire for the future." He was ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... the surprising mutability of temper which was the most striking characteristic of his nature, M. Wilkie was already consoled for ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... as much as, if not more than, the first. According to the first theory the creative power has been distributed over a series of acts, according to the second theory it has been concentrated in one primal creation. The second is the theory of the mutability of species, or, in general, of evolution, but not necessarily of ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... moralise upon the mutability of human affairs, go and see the figure of Gorgius in his real, identical robes, at the waxwork.—Admittance one shilling. Children and flunkeys sixpence. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... being a mere preliminary to a holy observance which should in truth unite them, it made that later formality all but trivial. It was the aspiration of her devoutest hours that this interchange of loving promise might keep its binding sanctity for ever, that no touch of mutability might come upon her heart till the last coldness stayed its heating. A second love appeared to her self-contradicted; to transfer to another those thoughts which had wedded her soul to Wilfrid's would not merely ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... British Canada hung as if by a thread, Adam Lymburner, more prudent than loyal, retired from the sorely beset fortress to Charlesbourg, possibly to Chateau Bigot, a shooting box then known as the "Hermitage," to meditate on the mutability of human affairs. Later on, however, in the exciting times of 1791, Adam Lymburner was deputed by the colony to England to suggest amendment's to the project of the constitution to be promulgated by the home authorities. His able speech may be met with in the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... of the dogmatism of the pulpit, rather than of the philosophy of the Professor's Chair; and some of the wit strikes me as only worthy of — in the 'Quarterly.' Nevertheless, it is a grand piece of argument against mutability of species, and I read it with fear and trembling, but was well pleased to find that I had not overlooked any of the arguments, though I had put them to myself as feebly as milk and water. Have you read 'Cosmos' yet? The English ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... understand that he now found the teaching Solon had formerly given him true to his cost; which was, "That men, however fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy till they had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives," by reason of the uncertainty and mutability of human things, which, upon very light and trivial occasions, are subject to be totally changed into a quite contrary condition. And so it was that Agesilaus made answer to one who was saying what a happy young man the King of Persia was, to come so young to so mighty a kingdom: "'Tis ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... safe to the forest of Arden. Being come thither, they were glad they had so good a harbor: but fortune, who is like the chameleon, variable with every object, and constant in nothing but inconstancy, thought to make them mirrors of her mutability, and therefore still crossed them thus contrarily. Thinking still to pass on by the by-ways to get to Lyons, they chanced on a path that led into the thick of the forest, where they wandered five or six days without meat, that they were almost famished ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... Times, ascribed to Hushang, one of the earliest kings of Persia, are the following remarkable words: "The passions of men may, by long acquaintance, be thoroughly known; but the passions of women are inscrutable; therefore they ought to be separated from men, lest the mutability of their tempers ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... disposedly." In the low, oak-panelled parlour, cake and currant wine were set forth, and after courtesies and compliments exchanged, Aunt Eliza, greatly condescending, talked the fashions with Mrs Larkin; while the farmer and I, perspiring with the unusual effort, exchanged remarks on the mutability of the weather and the steady fall in the price of corn. (Who would have thought, to hear us, that only two short days ago we had confronted each other on either side of a hedge,—I triumphant, provocative, derisive; he flushed, wroth, cracking his whip, and volleying forth profanity? So powerful ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... their last meeting. She let herself be happy in spite of fate. What could it matter? In a few days she would have left Kingthorpe for ever—never to see him again. For ever, and never, are very real words to the heart of youth, which has no faith in time and mutability. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... time, you know." She made a gesture with her hand indicative of some one who puts down just what comes into her head at the time, and returned to her diary. "'Remained to tea, and was very charming. Mused afterwards on the mutability of life!'" She looked up at him with wide-open eyes. "I often muse when I'm ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne

... Icarian wing, we seek to ascend to that skiey elevation whence only can the understretching regions of an impassive mutability be satisfactorily contemplated; and if, in our heterogeneous ambition, aspirant above self-capacity, we approach too near the flammiferous Titan, and so become pinionless, and reduced again to an earthly prostration, what marvel is it, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... Cecil, my father's confidential valet, was so much scandalized, as to intimate a possibility that we might one day change conditions. These two accidental communications seemed to me a key to certain long lectures, with which my father used to regale us boys, but me in particular, upon the extreme mutability of human affairs,—the disappointment of the best-grounded hopes and expectations,—and the necessity of being so accomplished in all useful branches of knowledge, as might, in case of accidents, supply any defalcation in our ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... position and forced Aulus into any terms that Jugurtha cared to grant. The latter adopted the language of humane condescension. He said that, although he held the Roman army at his mercy, certain victims of famine or the sword, yet he was not unmindful of the mutability of human fortune, and would spare the lives of all his prisoners, if the Roman commander would make a treaty with him.[980] The army was to pass under the yoke; the Romans were to evacuate Numidia ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... affirme It is the Womans part: be it Lying, note it, The womans: Flattering, hers; Deceiuing, hers: Lust, and ranke thoughts, hers, hers: Reuenges hers: Ambitions, Couetings, change of Prides, Disdaine, Nice-longing, Slanders, Mutability; All Faults that name, nay, that Hell knowes, Why hers, in part, or all: but rather all. For euen to Vice They are not constant, but are changing still; One Vice, but of a minute old, for one Not halfe so old as that. Ile write against them, Detest them, curse them: yet ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... of the earthenware, or other vessels in which they were confined, as well as modified by the quantity of light to which they were exposed; and Mr Shaw has very recently informed us, regarding this mutability of the outer aspect of fishes, that if the head alone is placed upon a particular colour, (whether lighter or darker,) the whole body will immediately assume a corresponding shade, quite independent of the particular tint upon which the body itself may chance to rest. We know ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... It was this mutability, this power to detach herself from her environment and view it with the stoical indifference of a spectator that caused Wilton with its harsh New England standards, to characterize Celestina as "easy goin'." ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett

... the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven Remain the records of their vain endeavour, Frail spells,—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance and mutability. ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... inflict a greater wound upon his heart than any loss he might himself sustain by such irregular proceedings. He flourished much on generosity and forgiveness of mutual injuries, and hinted at the mutability of human affairs, always favourite topics with the weaker party in politics. He pathetically lamented, and gently censured, the haste which had been used in depriving him of his situation of Lord Keeper, which his experience ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... a firm hold upon the mind of Darwin, in an instant, one day while on board the "Beagle." From that very hour the thought of the mutability of species was the one controlling ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... As this Mutability of Temper and Inconsistency with our selves is the greatest Weakness of human Nature, so it makes the Person who is remarkable for it in a very particular Manner more ridiculous than any other Infirmity whatsoever, as it sets ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... does not buffet any set of beings with more industry, and withal less effect, than Actors. There may be something in the habitual mutability of their feelings that evades the blow; they live, in a great measure, out of this dull sphere, "which men call earth;" they assume the dress, the tone, the gait of emperors, kings, nobles; the world slides, and they mark it not. The Actor leaves his home, and forgets ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various

... affirmed that he drank off the cup of suffering to the very extremity of what his peculiar nature allowed. And in no life of so short a duration, have there ever been crowded equal extremities of gorgeous prosperity and abject infamy. It may be added, as another striking illustration of the rapid mutability and revolutionary excesses which belonged to what has been properly called the Roman stratocracy then disposing of the world, that within no very great succession of weeks that same victorious rebel, the Emperor ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... "it's the prevailing fashion to believe in perpetual change and mutability, and all that sort of thing, and to say we are all merely an improved form of primeval ape—of course you subscribe to ...
— Reginald • Saki

... the emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and the combined effect of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is serious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... knowledge of the lives, the achievements, and the histories of far-off, long-buried, hidden and lost peoples, communities, and even distinct personalities, were carefully planned and exactly executed by those who, already perceiving the mutability of all human life, and all its affairs, who—in a word—realizing that "the fashion of this world passeth away," sought to immortalize and perpetuate forever an absolute history of their own, and kindred races, by the uprearing of vast, imperishable monuments and temples, ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... the ruins of the abbey, which are almost vanished, and I remember nothing of them distinct. The next visit was to the gaol, which they call the castle; a fabrick built lately, such is terrestrial mutability, out of the materials of the ruined abbey. The under gaoler was very officious to show his fetters, in which there was no contrivance. The head gaoler came in, and seeing me look, I suppose, fatigued, offered me wine, and, when I went away, would not suffer his servant to take money. The ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... what they liked and say what they liked—or rather to do what they thought he would like done, and say what they thought he would like said—and then suddenly sent them about their business to ponder in poverty and disgrace on the mutability of human affairs'. In a passage like this Morier's letters show that he could distinguish between a lion and his jackals, between ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... there were all sorts of things they ought to have; yet governess and pupil, it had to be admitted, were still divided between discussing the places where any sort of thing would look best if any sort of thing should ever come and acknowledging that mutability in the child's career which was naturally unfavourable to accumulation. She stayed long enough only to miss things, not half long enough to deserve them. The way Sir Claude looked about the schoolroom had ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James

... most distinctive of the present age—the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance—proclaim the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed, the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw a line," said Hokousai. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... in town on Thursday evening after the funeral," said the talkative clerk. "And nothing of course can be done till he comes," said Mr Bideawhile. And so Frank, pondering on the mutability of human ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... remainder of the foregoing letter is published in the "Life and Letters," II., page 29. It is interesting as giving his views on the mutability of species. Thus he wrote: "With respect to books on this subject, I do not know any systematical ones, except Lamarck's, which is veritable rubbish; but there are plenty, as Lyell, Pritchard, etc., on the view of the immutability." By "Pritchard" is no doubt intended ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... the non-existent. Matter and evil obtruded themselves too constantly and convincingly to be confuted or cancelled by subtleties of Logic. It is in vain to attempt to merge the world in God, while the world of experience exhibits contrariety, imperfection, and mutability, instead of the immutability of its source. Philosophy was but another name for uncertainty; and after the mind had successively deified Nature and its own conceptions, without any practical result but toilsome occupation; when the reality it sought, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... can make you mine, For enterprise with equal charity In duty as in love elect will shine, The constant slave of mutability. Nor can your words for all their honey breath Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme, And though my ear deliver them from death One day or two, it is so little time. Nor does your beauty in its excellence ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... season. Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," I said to myself, and I should have repeated some lines from this admirable poem had I remembered any; as I did not, I walked on in the direction of Colombes, vaguely ruminating upon Pompeii, Palmyra, fish dinners at Greenwich, and the mutability of human things. I had hardly left Asnieres, however, and was plodding along a path, when I was recalled to the realities of life by half-a-dozen Mobiles springing up from behind a low wall, and calling upon me to stop, while ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... last few moments of which were made full of hopeful thoughts by the passing away of the visible clouds from the visible sky, I could not but reflect upon the glorious stability of things spiritual, contrasted with the mutability and evanescence of things temporal. Our hearts, which are united by real bonds—the love of truth, the fear of God, and the desire of duty—have remained so united through all these years of absence and distance from each other; and when I thought of our former ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... may be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various

... ignorance on several points, the precise manner in which sexual selection acts is somewhat uncertain. Nevertheless if those naturalists who already believe in the mutability of species, will read the following chapters, they will, I think, agree with me, that sexual selection has played an important part in the history of the organic world. It is certain that amongst almost all animals ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... hunters. About noon he found himself dull, melancholy, and disconsolate, before the sign of the "Pig and Whistle," on the Westerham road, where, after wetting his own whistle with a pint of half-and-half, he again journeyed onward, ruminating on the uncertainty and mutability of all earthly affairs, the comparative merits of stag-, fox-, and hare-hunting, and the necessity of getting rid of the day somehow ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... speck of madness in them, which we ought to know how to take advantage of. By firmly resolving to have the upper hand and never deviating from that aim, by bringing all our actions to bear on it, all our ideas, our cajolery, we subjugate these eminently capricious natures, which, by the very mutability of their thoughts, lend us the means ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac

... More.—You apprehend me. We have both speculated in the joys and freedom of our youth upon the possible improvement of society; and both in like manner have lived to dread with reason the effects of that restless spirit which, like the Titaness Mutability described by your immortal master, insults heaven and disturbs the earth. By comparing the great operating causes in the age of the Reformation, and in this age of revolutions, going back to the former age, looking at things as I then beheld them, ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... Lord's return, will answer for great bodies of Christians organizing themselves to Christianize the world. No institution can remain changeless in a changing world. "The one immutable factor in institutions," writes Professor Pollard, "is their infinite mutability." Almost all the divisive factors in Christendom are taken out of the past, by those who claim that a certain polity or creed or practice is that authoritatively prescribed for all time, by Christ Himself, or by His Spirit through His personally appointed apostles. ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... endeavour, with the Eleatics, to conceive pure existence apart and distinct from all phenomenal change; or we may endeavour, with Heraclitus, to conceive the universe as a system of incessant changes, immutable only in the law of its own mutability; for these two systems may be regarded as the type of all subsequent attempts. Both, however, alike aim at an object which is beyond positive conception, and which can be accepted only as something to be believed in spite of its inconceivability. ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... which led Sapor to send as envoys to the Roman camp at Dura the Surena and another great noble, who announced that they came to offer terms of peace. The great king, they said, having respect to the mutability of human affairs, was desirous of dealing mercifully with the Romans, and would allow the escape of the remnant which was left of their army, if the Caesar and his advisers accepted the conditions that he required. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... his way, who has told his threescore years and ten, and on the threshold of eternity has found the vanity of all things. Oh, look at him, and learn how hard it is, even at the door of death, to FEEL the mutability and nothingness of earth! Palsied he is, yet to the Exchange he daily hies, and his dull eye glistens on the mart—his ear is greedy for the sounds that come too tardily—his quick and treble voice is loud amongst the loudest. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. He takes what is true of a term secundum quid, treats it as true of the same term simpliciter, and then, of course, applies it to the term secundum aliud. A {281} good example of this is found in the first triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever is by the same act is not, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus the irremediable torrent of life about ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... the bottom of the Irish character, hidden under an appearance of light-headedness, mutability of feeling—nay, at times, futility and even childishness—a depth of according to the eternal laws which God gave to mankind. Nothing else is in their mind; they are pursuing no guilty and shadowy Utopia. Who knows, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... great moment in the history of thought when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action. It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one army or the other. Lyell was surrounding himself with disciples, who were making strides ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but mutability! ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley

... erected than under those of that Aristotelian Realism, which was at bottom a dialectic between the Platonic Realism and Nominalism; and which was represented as capable of uniting immanence and transcendence, history and miracle, the immutability of God and mutability, Idealism and Realism, reason ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... well brought out by the radical friar who wrote the Song of Lewes. Even to the partisan of Earl Simon, Edward was "a valiant lion, quick to attack the strongest, and fearing the onslaught of none. But if a lion in pride and fierceness, he was a panther in inconstancy and mutability, changing his word and promise, cloaking himself by pleasant speech. When he is in a strait he promises whatever you wish, but as soon as he has escaped he forgets his promise. The treachery or falsehood, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... recent date and to the evidence collected on the east and west coasts of the continent in regard to those grand earth-movements, some of which could be shown to have been accompanied by earthquake-shocks. The fossil bones, which had given him the first hint concerning the mutability of species, had by this time been studied and described by comparative anatomists, and Darwin was able to elaborate much more fully the important conclusion that the existing fauna of South America has a close analogy with that of the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... and bequeath the Farm and House of Lantrig, with all my Worldly Goods, and add my earnest hope that this may suffice to support both him and his Descendants in Godliness and Contentment, knowing how greatly these excell the Wealth of this World and the Lusts of the Flesh. But, knowing also the mutability of earthly things, I do hereby command and enjoin that, if at any time He or his Descendants be in stress and tribulation of poverty, the Head of our Family of Trenoweth shall strictly and faithfully obey these my ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Boecius made for his comfort and consolation, he being in exile for the common and public weal, having great heaviness and thoughtes, and in manner of despair, rehearsing in the said book how Philosophy appeared to him shewing the mutability of this transitory life, and also informing how fortune and hap should be understood, with the predestination and prescience of God as much as may and is possible to be known naturally, as afore is said in this said book. ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various

... gods[147]." Such identifications are common in the Vedas. Philosophically, they are an early manifestation of the mental bias which leads to pantheism, metempsychosis, and the feeling that all things and persons are transitory and partial aspects of the one reality. But evidently the mutability of the Vedic gods is also due to their nature: they are bundles of epithets and functions without much personal or local centre. And these epithets and functions are to a large extent, the same. All the gods are ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... another side. It may be taken that our laws against blasphemy have moved a good deal since Lord Coleridge's famous summing-up concerning the essential mutability of the Common Law about blasphemy which he gave in Regina v. Ramsey and Foote; if the restriction were removed what power would prevent the atheists from producing distinctly anti-Christian plays which might very well cause riots, which certainly would prove a serious counterblast, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... to particular consideration. That a man was in gaol for sedition and impiety, would, I believe, have been, within memory, a sufficient reason why he should not come out of gaol a legislator. This reason, notwithstanding the mutability of fashion, happens still to operate on the house of commons. Their notions, however strange, may be justified by a common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes have made confinement necessary, seldom makes ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... gradually, as they adapted themselves to the sudden change, such is the india-rubber-like quality of youth, almost with the same hopefulness. Yet they couldn't but meditate, left alone on the platform while Mr. Twist checked the baggage, on the mutability of life. They seemed to live in a kaleidoscope since the war began what a series of upheavals and readjustments had been theirs! Silent, and a little apart on the Clark platform, they reflected retrospectively; and as they counted up ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

... next?" for no conclusion ever quite satisfied me—even when the hero died in his own gore. I always knew there was something yet remaining to be told. The only sure conclusion we can reach is this: Life changes. And what is more enthralling to the human mind than this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!—life in the making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within our finite egoistic ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... secretary of Mr. Dana, in the same splendid style, with the Marquis de Verac, at that time French minister at the Russian Court. His mind was more impressed with the recollection of the magnificence he had then witnessed on the same spot, and with reflections on the mutability of human fortune, than with the ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... inner ear, that neither is that creature coeternal unto Thyself, whose happiness Thou only art, and which with a most persevering purity, drawing its nourishment from Thee, doth in no place and at no time put forth its natural mutability; and, Thyself being ever present with it, unto Whom with its whole affection it keeps itself, having neither future to expect, nor conveying into the past what it remembereth, is neither altered by any change, nor distracted into any times. O blessed creature, if such there be, for cleaving unto ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... or unsympathetic or the people had had some crops to get in or something else to do, and so the saint had had his festa shifted; or it may have been because some greater festival had fallen on S. Somebody's day owing to the mutability of Easter or for some other reason. I had been wishing I could have been at Castellinaria for the first anniversary of Ricuzzu's birth, I ought to have wished to be there for the festa of S. Enrico, but I did not know when it fell, nor did Peppino; but if festas might be transferred in ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably, as he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar, an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... capacity as corporal, place him under arrest. That seemed to calm him a little, for he laughed, and finally he said I smelled of stale corned-beef, and he kicked me out of his tent, and I retired to my quarters to study over the mutability of human affairs, and the unpleasant features of ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck

... do wrong, why what could a poor woman do? With a lady of such a quiet disposition, it is easy to imagine that the domestic felicity of Mr Easy was not easily disturbed. But, as people have observed before, there is a mutability in human affairs. It was at the finale of the eleventh year of their marriage that Mrs Easy at first complained that she could not enjoy her breakfast. Mrs Easy had her own suspicions, everybody else considered ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... finally stripping them of every adjunct incompatible with the serenity of absolute truth. In whatever mind humor, that is, love and cheerfulness, reigns supreme, the inconsistencies and imperfections of life, all that bears the impress of mutability, will gently and gradually be fused into the harmonious perfection of absolute, eternal truth. Mists sometimes gather about the sun, but unable to extinguish his light, they are forced to serve as his ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... hymn and lamentation from woman's lips; that it would become a dwelling for the wicked of every class- -the most part destined to perpetual labour or to the gallows. And in one century to come, what living being will be found in these cells? Oh, mighty Time! unceasing mutability of things! Can he who rightly views your power have reason for regret or despair when Fortune withdraws her smile, when he is made captive, or the scaffold presents itself to his eye? yesterday I thought myself one of the happiest of men; ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico

... has brought you, new music, new colour, new light, are poured from the outward world. The conscious love which achieves this vision may, indeed must, fluctuate—"As long as thou livest thou art subject to mutability; yea, though thou wilt not!" But the will which that love has enkindled can hold attention in the right direction. It can refuse to relapse to unreal and egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in darkness, and in the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... before the people realised that the trance of Time had paralysed his daughter Mutability as well. Every operation depending on her silent processes was arrested. The unborn could not come to life. The sick could not die. The human frame could not waste. Every one in the enjoyment of health and strength felt assured of the perpetual possession of these ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... threadbare, as jaunty and well-mannered, as in the old days when we used to play the siege of Troy, using an old packing-case for the wooden horse, and he was our Trojan victim. I was much impressed by my own age, and said a good deal in those days about the flight of time and the mutability of human affairs: I expected anybody who was grown up when I was young to be well stricken in years; and if Mr. Lenox had been a shrunken old man with altered aspect and a deep sense of the worthlessness of all efforts after temporalities, the change would have seemed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... also ascended the pulpit to speak of life and death in all their sublime relations. "There was nothing touching," says Talfourd, "in the instability of fortune, in the fragility of loveliness, in the mutability of mortal friendship, or the decay of systems, nor in the fall of States and empires, which he did not present, to give humiliating ideas of worldly grandeur. Nor was there anything heroic in sacrifice, or grand in conflict, or sublime ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... the mutability of public feeling and opinion as usual become apparent. No sooner had fame spread abroad the report of Flanagan's two-fold crime, and his imprisonment, than those very people who had only a day or two before inferred that Connor O'Donovan was guilty, because ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... affair with some man who is professionally interested in something into which she has leaped for a short time. She raves about him, follows him, flatters and adores him, and then, before the poor fellow knows where he is at, she is out of love and off somewhere else. This mutability of affection has undoubtedly saved her ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... sermon in the most unpromising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let him take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood,—fortune, mutability, death,—just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... that the fickleness of fashion exercises in constant local variations that mutability which is utterly denied to it in Brittany with regard to time. Every district, almost every commune has its own peculiar 'mode' (for both sexes) which changes not from generation to generation. As the mothers dress, so do their daughters, so ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... (for the consoler is necessarily, for the time at least, superior to the afflicted person,) and indulged his love of talking. He inflicted on the poor penitenta harangue of pitiless length, stuffed full of the usual topics of the mutability of human affairs—the eminent advantages of patience under affliction— the folly of grieving for what hath no remedy—the necessity of taking more care for the future, and some gentle rebukes on account of the past, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... found, are awful with the presence of a grand serious humanity long passed away from any other contact with living creatures. The rendering of the human form, under this impulse of Art, produced results in which the idea of mutability was so overwhelmed in this grandeur of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... still! For mutability Is woman's soul. Fond vows may yet prevail, Fierce love bears well a woman's cruelty, Nor at the lash ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... to my wedded husband, subject to the mutability of the suburban service, changing trains at——, to have and to hold, save when the card club meets on Wednesday evenings, and thereto I ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley



Words linked to "Mutability" :   immutability, mutable, changeableness, immutableness, alterability, changeability, mutableness, vicissitude



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