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More "Fickleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... phenomenon of wind and storm but have failed signally, nor can they succeed while they seek a mechanical solution to what is really a manifestation of life. Could they see the hosts of sylphs winging their way hither and thither, they would know who and what is responsible for the fickleness of the wind; could they watch a storm at sea from the etheric view-point they would perceive that the saying "the war of the elements" is not an empty phrase, for the heaving sea is truly then a battlefield of sylphs and undines and the howling ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... account somewhat unfairly for this sudden change; for besides some hard and unjust surmises concerning female fickleness and mutability, he began to suspect that he owed this want of civility to his want of horses; a sort of animals which, as they dirty no sheets, are thought in inns to pay better for their beds than their riders, and are therefore considered as the more desirable company; but Mrs Whitefield, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Richard reopened it with "a most royal Christmas feast" of twenty-eight oxen and three hundred sheep, and game and fowls without number, feeding ten thousand guests for many days. Yet but a few years afterwards (such is the fickleness of fortune and the instability of human affairs) this same king, who had seen the "Merciless Parliament," who had robbed Hereford of his estates, who had been robed in cloth of gold and precious ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... aristocracy. Even in the first steps of his enterprise he was made to feel the need of caution, and it was by statute, after all, not by decree, that the whole matter was finally regulated. So curious is popular fickleness that an Emperor who could boldly tyrannize in almost any other direction felt that he dared not take the risk of constituting himself a fountain of honor, such as ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the intelligence of what for the nonce seemed Viviette's wanton fickleness that he quite omitted to look at the second letter; and remembered nothing about it till an hour afterwards, when sitting in his own room ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... built after a fashion much in vogue a century since, and which, by a fickleness that influences marine architecture as well as less important things, is again coming into use, for vessels of her force. The accommodations of the commander were on the same deck with the batteries of the ship, and they were frequently ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... enter upon the prescribed exercises of college with more readiness and effect than others, will ordinarily prosecute and finish their course with proportionably higher reputation. Indeed, to the want of a thorough initiation into the rudiments of learning may be traced much of that indolence and fickleness and easy yielding to temptation, by which the mind, untaught in the labor of successful occupation, and discouraged by the failure of its imprudent efforts, is presently paralyzed, and lost to every honorable and useful purpose. If then it may be provided that early instruction ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... unreasonable when, having enough to content themselves with at home, they go in search of something else. I have often seen people who, not content with sufficiency, have aimed at bettering themselves, and have fallen into a worse position than they were in before. Such persons receive no pity, for fickleness is ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the weakness, no doubt, it was yet an affection to which every better quality of her nature had contributed its share. Hazlehurst's determination never to forgive himself for the sorrow he had caused her, was a just one. His fickleness had deeply wounded a heart, warm, true, and generous, as ever ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... undertaken; how easy the deed was; how soon it would be over; and how the action of one short night would give to all their nights and days to come sovereign sway and royalty! Then she threw contempt on his change of purpose, and accused him of fickleness and cowardice; and declared that she had given suck, and knew how tender it was to love the babe that milked her; but she would, while it was smiling in her face, have plucked it from her breast, and dashed its brains out, if she had so sworn to do it, as he had sworn to perform that ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... Mirza Abu-Taleb,[19] and in much the same line of argument—to the effect that the dowery which the eastern husband is bound by law to pay over in money to his wife in the event of a separation, is a far more effectual protection to the wife from the fickleness and caprice of her partner, ("whose interest it thus becomes, setting affection wholly out of the question, to remain on good terms with her,") than any remedy afforded by the laws of England; where a wife, though bound by ties less easily dissolved than under the Mohammedan ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... moment of my life I form such wishes. You may see by this that I preserve still that sincere friendship which has united our hearts from our tenderest years:—recognize at least, my dear Sister, that you did me a sensible wrong when you suspected me of fickleness towards you, and believed false reports of my listening to tale-bearers; me, who love only you, and whom neither absence nor lying rumors could change in respect of you. At least don't again believe ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... with no party; he is looked at with distrust, contempt, and aversion by all. His former friends think him a good riddance, and his new friends are cold and strange; and as to the impartial public, their very first impulse is to impute the change to some eccentricity of character, or fickleness of mind, or tender attachment, or private interest. Their utmost praise is the reluctant confession that "doubtless he is very sincere." Churchmen and Dissenters, men of Rome and men of the Kirk, are equally subject to this remark. Not ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... serious, the love that is light. And experience had taught her why it is that human nature soon tires of intensity, turns to frivolity. She felt that, if she could act, she would try to show that not Turiddu's fickleness nor his contempt of the woman who had yielded, but Santuzza's sad intensity and Lola's butterfly gayety had cost Santuzza her lover and her lover his life. So, it was not Santuzza's but Lola's ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... putting his trust in the friendship of the sea, neglects the strength and cunning of his right hand, is a fool! As if it were too great, too mighty for common virtues, the ocean has no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory. Its fickleness is to be held true to men's purposes only by an undaunted resolution and by a sleepless, armed, jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there has always been more hate than love. Odi et amo may well be the confession of ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... working-class and of the middle-class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses. That shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of "society," middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists of a past generation always held that public opinion. At the same time, we have no reason to ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... nearest possible point of access to your venerable gateway. Besides, even you have too much regard to the land of Kit North, to entertain any desire to see its most attractive shrine of pilgrimage too suddenly eclipsed; and why should you court such an exposure of popular fickleness, when about to become yourself "the comet of a season," and to go through that brilliant perihelion, in which, reversing the feat of Horace with his lofty head, you will sweep away all other stars with a swinge of your luminous caudality? Yes, Godfrey—spare your own feelings, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... incredulous priests shall not go without an answer, that will, I am sure, induce them to place a great confidence in the benefit arising from Christians, who damn themselves every hour of the day. For while they speak of the vainness and fickleness of oaths, as an objection against our project, they little consider that this fickleness and vainness is the common practice among all the people of this sublunary world; and that consequently, instead of being an objection ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... he cried, in affected surprise. "You were not wont, in past days, to consider my presence an insult, and I could never have believed fickleness a part of your nature. You are now of age, and have a right to listen to my defense, and my suit for your heart ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... about some affair of love either past or in contemplation; but when non-lovers meet, no one asks the reason why, because people know that talking to another is natural, whether friendship or mere pleasure be the motive. Once more, if you fear the fickleness of friendship, consider that in any other case a quarrel might be a mutual calamity; but now, when you have given up what is most precious to you, you will be the greater loser, and therefore, you will have more reason in being afraid of the lover, for his vexations are many, and he is ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... one offends the divine will, which desires that all be happy as far as it is possible. I will say as much of the fourth section, where there is mention of the source of wrong elections, which are error or ignorance, negligence, fickleness in changing too readily, stubbornness in not changing in time, and bad habits; finally there is the importunity of the appetites, which often drive us inopportunely towards external things. The fifth section ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... we continued to travel southward—further and further from home, as it seemed to us. Whenever we could meet, Halliday, Ben, and I—not trusting to the sheikh's promises, of whose fickleness we had many proofs—eagerly discussed the possibility of escaping. Ben's idea was, that if we should arrive at length at a river running into the sea, we might either steal a canoe or build a raft, and float down the stream. We might thus escape from our ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... hills of Vijiapore. Another moment and brave Timma sat Upon the bridal seat, the veil was drawn, And, through the veil, the sacred knot was tied Round Chandra's neck, and all was merry there. And still another moment when—alas! For that strange fickleness of human life Whose joys and griefs each other follow like The spokes of some fast-going wheel—there came The wounded Bukka with a violent wail That Timma had the king's adviser slain, Whose body lay upon the riverside, Exposed to all the carrion birds of prey, And him too wounded, but the ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... by their nice names," pleaded Nan. "It's not fickleness—it's fertility of imagination; it's not a collapse—it's only a fresh beginning! But we really mean it this time, and you mean to say 'Yes,' too. I know you do; so nothing now remains but to talk it over with Kitty in ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a German source that the resignation of Count TISZA was procured by Marshal VON HINDENBURG. It is a curious commentary on the fickleness of the multitude that the KAISER isn't even mentioned as having taken a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... tender, saddened light, long, patient suffering had wrought; the lips, once curved in haughtiest disdain, had taken the sweetness of years of hopeless pain. And so, after three-and-twenty years, Victor Catheron saw the woman, whose life his father's falsity and fickleness had wrecked. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... of Julia, constant against the fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child?—of Helena, against the petulance and insult of a careless youth?—of the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the "unlessoned girl," who appears among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive passions of ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... fellow-creatures with indifference, with satisfaction, and at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be regarded as a portent of wickedness; and such a man was Barere. The history of his downward progress is full of instruction. Weakness, cowardice, and fickleness were born with him; the best quality which he received from nature was a good temper. These, it is true, are not very promising materials; yet, out of materials as unpromising, high sentiments of piety and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... implied a fickleness of temperament that was disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... Alexandrian theology were as little appreciated by the Celts of Asia as is the stately churchmanship of England by the Celts of Wales. They were the foreigner's thoughts, too cold for Celtic zeal, too grand for Celtic narrowness. Fickleness is not inconsistent with a true and deep religious instinct, and we may find something austere and high behind the ever-changing phases of spiritual excitement. Thus the ideal holiness of the church, upheld by Montanists and Novatians, ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... moment's weakness; in brief, not the stuff of which friends are made! When the knight appears and kills her monster, he loses his halo for Andromede, who cherishes her monstrous guardian. Perseus, a prig disgusted by the fickleness of the Young Person, flees, and the death of the monster brings to life a lovely youth—put under the spell of malignant powers—who promptly weds his ward. In Lohengrin, Son of Parsifal, the whole machinery ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... affianced bride. No suitor had ever felt his suit to be more hopeless than he had done; and yet he now regarded himself as one whose high hopes of happy love had all been destroyed by the treachery of a friend and the fickleness of ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... of my early character was plasticity and fickleness. I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as gross mistakes in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... hastens to fall on my breast. Then fickleness soon bids it onwards be flowing; A second draws ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... the country of their origin. "Its abruptness and severity, and the sadness of its tone, are caused by their sudden perversion from the doctrine which the Apostle had taught them, and which at first they had received so willingly. It is no fancy, if we see in this fickleness a specimen of that 'esprit impretueux, ouvert a toutes les impressions,' and that 'mobilite extreme,' which Thierry marks as characteristic of the Gaulish race." At all events, the language of the Gauls disappeared in Central France to make way for the language or the Capital—the ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... anniversaries of his coming of age. Nor had he altogether yet got over the passion of greed for the whole group of the well-favoured of the fair sex, which in his early youth had made it bitter for him to submit to the fickleness, not to say the modest fickleness, of any handsome one of them in yielding her hand to a man and suffering herself to be led away. Ladies whom he had only heard of as ladies of some beauty incurred his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... downstairs in the highest good humor. He had been convinced of two things in the interview with his wife: The first was that she could be induced to return to him; the second was that she loved Riley Sinclair. He did not hate her for such fickleness. He merely despised her for her lack of brains. No thinking woman could hesitate a moment between the ranches and the lumber tracts of Cartwright and the empty purse ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... should speak about the excellent qualities of the man, especially of those qualities which she knows are pleasing to the girl. She should, moreover, speak with disparagement of the other lovers of the girl, and talk about the avarice and indiscretion of their parents, and the fickleness of their relations. She should also quote samples of many girls of ancient times, such as Sakuntala and others, who, having united themselves with lovers of their own caste and their own choice, were ever happy afterwards in their society. And ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... anticipate. While all this was occurring, the struggle in Peru had continued to show the fickleness of the fortunes of war. Rondeau had been appointed General-in-Chief of the Army of Peru; he, however, had proved himself a General of slow movements, and suffered several defeats. He also fell out with Guemes, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... was forever having a "crush" on some girl or other, getting suddenly over it, and seeking another affinity with bewildering fickleness. Eva Larry had been proclaimed her dearest friend for a longer term than most who had ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... Accordingly, with a fickleness not confined to the people of Nomansland, no sooner was the late King laid in his grave than they pronounced him to have been a usurper; turned all his family out of the palace, and left it empty for the reception ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... if excusing the fickleness of the absent woman—"perhaps some fresh knowledge concerning the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... gentlemen when they break off their engagements is not generally very publicly known, but the duke came out from this interview in a fit of great vexation and anger. He pulled off the queen's ring and threw it from him, muttering curses upon the fickleness and faithlessness ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Nicolas, I saw a lexicon there, compiled by father Fray Martin de Rada, which contained a great number of words. This must have been of no little aid to those who came afterward. The fathers did not dare baptize the Indians immediately; for, on the one hand, they feared their fickleness, since they knew with what ease those who had received baptism in the time of General Magallanes, had apostatized. Besides, the fathers did not know what orders would be given them, or whether they would be commanded to retire. Thus they were very ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... might wear a changeful sign, And fickleness the Sky— Yet, even then, that love of thine ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... consolation to reflect that my change was owing to my fortitude or to my capacity for instruction. Better thoughts grew up in my mind imperceptibly. I cannot but congratulate myself on the change, though, perhaps, it merely argues a fickleness of temper, and ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... bitter mortification to one in whose bosom pride still rested. She would not have thus tormented herself with turning and twisting Mary's information into such ideas, had she not felt assured that he had penetrated her weakness, and despised her. Fickleness was no part of St. Eval's character, of that she was convinced; but it was natural he should cease to love, when he had ceased to esteem, and in the society and charms of Louisa Manvers ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... owner. A glass of claret was the third grace. But, if we had been there, we should have devoted ourselves to one of the sparkling sisters; for one wine, like one woman, is sufficient to interest one's feelings for four-and-twenty hours. Fickleness we abhor. ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... our happiness, if at first the even tenor of a quiet life seems tedious, when we look at it more closely we discover that the pleasantest habit of mind consists in a moderate enjoyment which leaves little scope for desire and aversion. The unrest of passion causes curiosity and fickleness; the emptiness of noisy pleasures causes weariness. We never weary of our state when we know none more delightful. Savages suffer less than other men from curiosity and from tedium; everything is the same to them—themselves, not their ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... hurt by this proof of the rapidity of feminine fickleness, I began to congratulate her effusively on having obtained such an excellent substitute for my worthless self, and to wish the happy couple all earthly felicities, when she explained that he was not a fiance, but merely a sort of friend, and Mrs MANKLETOW ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... one of his nature, he forgot entirely his ruminations upon the advisability of discarding her, and the difficulty he experienced in devising a plan whereby this could be done easily and gracefully. He only thought of himself as the blameless victim of a woman's fickleness. The bitter things he had read and heard of the sex's inconstancy rose in his mind, as acrid bile sometimes ascends ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... the Anugita, and you will find that Arjuna after the great battle, forgetting the teaching that was given him on Kurukshetra, asked his Teacher to repeat that teaching once again. And Shri Krishna, rebuking him for the fickleness of his mind and stating that He was much displeased that such knowledge should by fickleness have been forgotten, uttered these remarkable words: "It is not possible for me to state it in full in that way. I discoursed to thee ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... for a short time Lannes, reduced to his own troops, found himself in a difficult position. He was, moreover, ill from a fall from his horse, but succeeded in winning the battle, and drove before him, one after another, all the divisions of the enemy's army. With the cruel and heedless fickleness of revolutionary governments, the Junta of Aranjuez hurriedly cashiered Generals Blake and Castanos. The Marquis of Romana's soldiers having distinguished themselves at Espinosa, he was appointed general of the united armies. Already, in ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... Rightly or wrongly, I have the reputation of fickleness in regard to women, and Aniela must have heard remarks about it; maybe it is for that very reason the dear girl shows such unbounded confidence in me. I understand, and can almost hear the pure soul saying: "They wrong you,—you are not fickle; and those who ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... been quite willing to forget the whole episode and even more than willing that she should forget it, there had been a time when he had moped in wretched melancholy because of what he had then considered her utter fickleness. Shortly after this he had been sent East to college and had borne the separation with a fortitude that had rather surprised him when he recalled how bitter a thing her heartlessness ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... sincerest integrity of purpose in maintenance of popular rights, unspotted, I trust, by one single vote of a contrary tendency, I, together with many others of the staunchest friends of those rights, experienced such extreme fickleness of popular opinion that this conclusion has long been formed in my mind: that the great body of the people of this Province (without doubt there are many honourable exceptions), in no wise ignorant of their rights or the great value ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... respective young leaders as Il Capo della Repubblica and "Il Signore di Firenze." Better far as matters turned out, had it been deemed sufficient to advance Ippolito alone. His splendid talents—although linked to fickleness and inconsistency—and his liberality, appealed to the Florentines, and he might have proved a second Lorenzo ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... on the essential and increasing individuality of women, which is to a large extent a recent phenomenon. The cynical commonplace is "All women are alike"—and then follows the specific accusation—"in fickleness", "in extravagance", "in unreasonableness", in this trick or that. The chief effort of conservatism is to make them alike, to fit each one for the same life by the same training in habits, knowledge, abilities, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... be observed, however, that the characteristic idleness of criminals makes them disinclined to adopt any profession, and when they do, their extreme fickleness ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... Mansoul some willingness to surrender up themselves unto them, might they but have the colour of an invitation to do it under. Yea, so far as I could gather, the town had been surrendered up to them before now, had it not been for the opposition of old Incredulity, and the fickleness of the thoughts of my Lord Will-be-will. Diabolus also began to rave, wherefore Mansoul, as to yielding, was not yet all of one mind, therefore, they still lay distressed ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... very beginning that none dared attack him. The one, in a word, by the depth of his genius and the incredible resources of his courage, rose superior to the greatest perils and even knew how to profit by every kind of fickleness of fortune; the other, by reason of the advantages derived from high birth, by his great conceptions derived from Heaven, and by a kind of admirable instinct, the secret of which is not given to ordinary men, seemed born ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... France, chiefly at the instigation of Gobel, who was, in reward, appointed bishop of Paris, and whose nephew, Rengger, shortly afterward became a member of the revolutionary government in Berne. In Geneva, during the preceding year, the French faction had gained the upper hand. The fickleness of the war kept the rest of the patriots in a state of suspense, but, on the seizure of the left bank of the Rhine by the French, the movements in Switzerland assumed a more serious character. The abbot, Beda, of St. Gall, 1795, pacified his subjects by concessions, which his ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... on, and the quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, his artful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty and fickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a small space in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at his plays and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... wind, came hither in the palmy days of mediaeval Portugal, but returned discomfited. Goths from the Northern bounds of Thuringian pine forests followed in their turn, but the power and prestige of Hindu Java remained invincible until destroyed by the wayward fickleness of her own children. Brahminism was finally discarded for the specious promises of Arabian invaders, and the lightly-held faith succumbed to the creed of Islam. Mosques were built, Hindu temples were forsaken, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... for the Baesle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more serious—for Mozart a very serious—affair, was his infatuation with Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... slice—hoping it might hold the picayune, and thus symbolize good fortune. The ring presaged the next bride or groom, the darning needle single blessedness to the end, the thimble, many to sew for, or feed, the button, fickleness or disappointment. After the bridal party had done cutting, other young folk tempted fate. Bride's cake was not for eating—instead, fragments of it, duly wrapped and put under the pillow, were thought to make whatever the sleeper dreamed come true. Especially if the dream included a ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... variously represented. Sometimes she is depicted bearing in her hand two rudders, with one of which she steers the bark of the fortunate, and with the other that of the unfortunate among mortals. In later times she appears blindfolded, and stands on a ball or wheel, indicative of the fickleness and ever-revolving {148} changes of fortune. She frequently bears the sceptre and cornucopia[49] or horn of plenty, and is usually winged. In her temple at Thebes, she is represented holding the infant Plutus in her arms, to symbolize her ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... Gradually the idea gained upon him, that it was not impossible to repair the past. His conduct had been unpardonable, no doubt; yet, perhaps it might be forgiven. But even if Elinor could forget his inexcusable fickleness, would her friends ever consent to risk her future peace with one who had so recklessly trifled with her already? Mr. Wyllys had been deeply indignant at his conduct; his whole manner had changed, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... justify such fickleness; but affection did justify it. There was but little of the Roman about Mr Harding. He could not sacrifice his Lucretia even though she should be polluted by the accepted addresses of the clerical Tarquin at the palace. If Tarquin could be prevented, well and ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... defeat. Finally a little fellow, who had surreptitiously smeared the inside of his breeches with pitch, reached the top and seized the prize. The crowd went wild, threw its hats high in the air over this performance, then, with the fickleness of its nature, it turned again toward the avenue and the free lemonade dispensed by the fairest maidens in Jordantown. But before the stream could turn the corner, a long-legged black pig greased with the lard of its forbears was turned loose—to become the property of any man who could ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... brings down the affairs of Greece to the battle of Marathon and the death of Miltiades. In the sentence passed on the hero of Marathon, the operation of a popular government has been often disadvantageously traced; the Athenians have been accused of fickleness and ingratitude. Mr Grote repels the charge. With some observations upon this defence, which forms the conclusion of the fourth and last of the published volumes, we shall bring our own notice ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... President and his party. Edwin D. Morgan so understood it, and although he had heretofore sustained the President, he now stood with the Radicals. Raymond also knew the gravity of the situation. But Raymond, who often wavered and sometimes exhibited an astonishing fickleness,[1054] saw only one side to the question, and on April 9 when the House, by a vote of 122 to 41, overrode the veto, he was one of only seven ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Bikkure To'elet ("Useful First Fruits"), which he published at Amsterdam, in 1820, under the auspices of the Maskilim society To'elet. The Talmudic narrative about the seduction of the celebrated wife of Rabbi Meir, forms the subject of an excellent poem, entitled "Beruriah", on the fickleness ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... destruction of men, O bull among men. Indeed, every one of these wait for opportunity in respect of men, like a hunter expectant of opportunities in respect of deer. Assertion of one's own superiority, desire of enjoying others' wives, humiliating others from excess of pride, wrathfulness, fickleness, and refusing to maintain those worthy of being maintained, these six acts of wickedness are always practised by sinful men defying all dangers here and hereafter. He that regards the gratification of lust to be one of life's aims, he that is exceedingly proud, he that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the officers congregated in the chateau grounds 'the order of the Iron Cross'—a generous supply of these decorations being carried in a basket by one of his orderlies, following him about as he walked along. Meantime the King, leaving Napoleon in the chateau to ruminate on the fickleness of fortune, drove off to see his own victorious soldiers, who greeted him with huzzas that rent the air, and must have added to the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... entered public life in 1851, as one of the three representatives for Melbourne in Victoria's first Parliament. But, doubtful perhaps, with his anti-radical temperament as to the fickleness of large town populations, as well, possibly, as the dread of his liability to get compromised by the over-zeal of supporters, he changed the venue to the small semi-Irish town of Kilmore, where his seat was always secure, until, in his ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... Cleopatra;(192) the Newcastle was all haughtiness and coldness. Mr. Pelham, who foresaw the storm, had prudently prepared himself for the breach by all kind of invectives against the house of Leveson. The ground of all, besides Newcastle's natural fickleness and jealousy, is, that the Bedford and Sandwich have got the Duke. A crash @as been expected, but people now seem to think that they will rub on a little longer, though all the world seems indifferent whether they will or ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... 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 ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Christendom from which he came fell in some strange fashion upon him; and riding out alone before the people, he cried out, "I am your leader"; and himself promised to grant them all they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to be seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, and Parliament almost certainly ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Delsarte was born good, generous, above the petty tendencies which deform and degrade the human type. On these diverse points, religious faith could scarcely show its effect; but he also declared himself to be irritable and violent—he confessed to a dangerous fickleness—still, he would readily have slandered himself in the interests of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... haunted by a jealousy that, instead of being diminished by time and absence, increased with each passing day, even waking up in her a vital force of imagination she had not suspected she possessed. She knew men as a race au fond—knew their fickleness, swift forgetfulness, readiness to be content with the second best, so different from the far greater Epicureanism of women; knew their uneasy appetites, their lack of self-restraint; and, adding to this sum of knowledge her personal knowledge of Baroudi as a young, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... dying song and sends it to his lady, "who," he says, "of her noble grace shall show thee courtesy." All the poets were not as constant as their own lines would have us believe. Dante reproaches the famous Cino da Pistoja for fickleness, and the latter confesses the charge, and declares he cannot get "free from Love's pitiless aim." Guido Cavalcanti rebukes Dante himself for his way of life after the death of Beatrice; and this valuable sonnet should be read in connection with the beautiful passage in the Purgatory ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... met a contrary wind in that region," said Christobal, laughing. "Monsieur de Poincilit here, were he in a very bad temper, might exclaim, 'Mille diables!' Why should not our excellent Fernando rail against the almost inconceivable fickleness which could be displayed by eleven times as ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... one, "I am opposed to fickleness and change." Ah! indeed; does it betray fickleness to leave a church to become a missionary? Did God favor fickleness and change when he prevented the permanent location of the apostles in Palestine, by a voice from heaven, and by violent persecutions? Did the Saviour favor fickleness in ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... hated, and it was not the multitude so much as the rulers that hated him. Many of those now shrieking 'Crucify Him!' had shouted 'Hosanna!' a day or two before till they were hoarse. The populace was guilty of fickleness, blindness, rashness, too easy credence of the crafty calumnies of the rulers. But a far deeper stain rests on these rulers who had resisted the light, and were now animated by the basest self-interest in the garb of keen regard ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Spaniards, who first crossed the Isthmus of Panama, under the belief that the whole sea was always as calm as was then the portion they beheld. Storms, if less frequent, are certainly not less violent than in other portions of the world. We certainly very frequently experienced the fickleness of the elements. As we were about to haul up to the northward, the wind suddenly shifted round to that very quarter, and then shifted somewhat to the eastward. We stood away on the starboard-tack, but were evidently ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... Disappointed, bewildered, cut to the quick, yet as much in love as ever, he could only in bitter silence turn over in his thoughts the issue of his cherished dream; now persuading himself that Ellen's denial was the effect of a sudden bashfulness, now inveighing against the fickleness of the sex, as all men do when they are angry with any one woman in particular. But his exhibition must go on in spite of wretchedness; and he went about mechanically, talking of curtains and candles, and music, and attitudes, and pauses, and emphasis, looking like a somnambulist whose "eyes ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... delusion and endurance, the scales drop from the eyes of the wife, and revenge or despair drives her into a hostile position towards her lord and master, she is an inhuman criminal, and the hue and cry against the fickleness of women and the falsity of their nature is endless. Oh, the injustice of society and the injustice of cruel man. Is there no relief for helpless women that are bound by the ties of marriage to men who are ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... piece of Injustice in us, to charge the French with Fickleness; for, to give them their due, They are ten times more constant in their Judgments, than we; Their Cid and Iphigenia in Aulis, are Acted at this very day, with as much Applause as they were thirty Years ago: All London ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... the purchaser of the said lands and estate." The honest writer refused to partake of a splendid entertainment with which Gilbert Glossin, Esquire, now of Ellangowan, treated the rest of the company, and returned home in huge bitterness of spirit, which he vented in complaints against the fickleness and caprice of these Indian nabobs, who never knew what they would be at for ten days together. Fortune generously determined to take the blame upon herself, and cut off even ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... desirous of the like fame, how will he guess what it is I have omitted,[1] so as to wish to hand down that same to posterity; since each man has a turn of thinking of his own, and a tone peculiar to himself. It was not, therefore, {any} fickleness, but assured grounds, that set me upon writing {again}. Wherefore, Particulo,[2] as you are amused by Fables (which I will style "Aesopian," not "those of Aesop;" for whereas he published but few, ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... and inspiring as the distant glimpse of the Pyramids from Cairo! We would fain have lingered long before this glorious picture, but the air was too cold to admit of a halt after our heating walk in the blazing sun. The great drawback to travelling in the Jura, indeed, is this terrible fickleness of climate. As a rule, even thus early in the autumn, you are obliged to make several toilettes a day, putting on winter clothes when you get up, and towards mid-day exchanging them for the lightest summer ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... his loneliness and the aching sorrow of his starved, empty heart to lead him into this girl's life. That he had been new to women and newer still to love did not permit him to excuse himself, and a hundred times he cursed his folly and stupidity, and what he thought was fickleness. ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... assurance of being able to bring Dora forward as a witness in his defense that Florence, for the first time, feels a strong doubt thrown upon the belief she has formed of his being a monster of fickleness. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... Tidings? horrible certainty!—Egmont condemned!—what tribunal has the right to summon him?—And they dare to condemn him!—Does the king condemn him, or the duke? And the Regent withdraws herself! Orange hesitates, and all his friends!—Is this the world, of whose fickleness and treachery I have heard so much, and as yet experienced nothing? Is this the world?—Who could be so base as to hear malice against one so dear? Could villainy itself be audacious enough to overwhelm with sudden destruction the object of a nation's homage? Yet so it is—it is-O ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... the heavens are opening now. Perhaps up there, this night, some lonely soul Gazes at earth, watches our dawning moon, And wonders, as we wonder." In that dark We knelt together . . . Very strange to see The vanity and fickleness of princes. Before his enemies had provoked the wrath Of Rome against him, he had given the name Of Medicean stars to those four moons In honour of Prince Cosmo. This aroused The court of France to seek a lasting place ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... circumstance which tended to embitter a good deal the close of Weber's life was the arrival in London of Rossini, to whom and to whose works the public immediately transferred its demonstrations of passionate admiration with even more, than its accustomed fickleness. Disparaging comparisons and contrasts to Weber's disadvantage were drawn between the two great composers in the public prints; the enthusiastic adulation of society and the great world not unnaturally followed the brilliant, joyous, sparkling, witty ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Gerard replied that the king had already approved the treaty, that it was now engrossed on parchment, and that a new arrangement would entail "inconvenience and considerable delay." But finally, not without showing some irritation at the fickleness of the commissioners, he was brought to agree that Congress might ratify the treaty either with or without these articles, as it should see fit. This business cost Franklin, as an annoying incident, an encounter with Mr. Izard, and a ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... as majestic and as youthful as in the days when he wooed her in the pleasaunce, with her golden hair glittering as before in the sunshine, and the love-light again in her eye. And beside her, oh! fickleness of a woman's heart, oh! irony of life, oh! cruelty to the most faithful passion, Colonel Livingstone, now my Lord Kilsyth. And an expression of fierce satisfaction lit up the Covenanter's ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... he recognized, as readily as would any five-year-old child, this invitation to go motoring. And it banished the memory of Lady's fickleness. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... invitation, I desired that he would go over to Fort Providence, and remain near the Indians whom he had engaged for our service. I feared lest they should become impatient at our unexpected delay, and, with the usual fickleness of the Indian character, remove from the establishment before we could arrive. It had been my intention to go to them myself, could the articles, with which they expected to be presented on my arrival, have been provided at these establishments; but as they could not ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... upon the fickleness of popular favor that the time was so short before these universal favorites dropped out of popular ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... equilibrium between the several European powers, never in fact existed in the king's mind, nor even in Sully's, whom he equally divests of much unfounded glory and fictitious greatness. No doubt, but for his fickleness and inconsistency, Henry could have done a good deal toward realizing such ideas and reforming European politics; but it is saying too much for Henry's influence on the popular opinions of Europe, to affirm, what Michelet gives us to understand, that he could have combined the nations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... The popularity of Caesar with the Roman mob and the jealousy of the official classes—the two motive forces of the play—are revealed. The fickleness of the mob is shown in a spirit of comedy; the antagonism of Marullus and Flavius strikes the note ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... was too evidently genuine; Dick must have written it (as a matter of fact he had; in a moment of pique, no doubt, at some caprice of his real enslaver Dulcie's—but his fickleness brought fatal results on his poor father's undeserving head)—if this diabolical Chawner carried out his threats he would indeed be "done for"; he did not yet fully understand the other's motive, but he thought that he feared lest Paul, in declaring his own sorrows, might also accuse ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... vicissitudes of fortune, a spectacle not less dramatic and infinitely more momentous for the general history of Europe. In Italy, as in Flanders, the fair ideal of civic freedom was blurred and defaced by party feuds and personal ambitions, by the fickleness and passion of the mob, by the lust of conquest and the fratricidal jealousies of neighbouring republics. Yet to the influence of this ideal we must attribute both the solidarity of the Italian city-state and the wealth ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... vague notion that the mother of his new pupil might be induced to defray the expenses of this Review, but he did not wish to move too rapidly lest he should frighten the lady away; he intended to prepare the way gently. Unfortunately, Madame de Barancy, on account of her very fickleness of nature, was difficult to reach. She would continually change the conversation just at the important point, because ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... you. Hibiscus Delicate beauty. Hollyhock Ambition. Hydrangea Vain glory. Ice Plant Your looks freeze me. Ivy Friendship. Iris, German Flame. Iris, Common Garden A message for thee. Jonquil Affection returned. Jessamine, White Amiability. Jessamine, Yellow Gracefulness. Larkspur Fickleness. Lantana Rigor. Laurel Words though sweet may deceive. Lavender Mistrust. Lemon Blossom Discretion. Lady Slipper Capricious beauty. Lily of the Valley Return of happiness. Lilac, White Youth. " Blue First emotions of love. Lily, Water Eloquence. May Flower Welcome. Marigold Sacred ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... information, and then made his farewells. Edna's good wishes were couched in a spirit of frigid magnanimity. She had too much self-respect to let him perceive that she resented his fickleness. ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... it; while his ultimate and firm approval of the new Constitution, after it had received the chief amendments called for by his criticisms, has been passionately described as an example of gross political fickleness and inconsistency, instead of being, as it really was, a most logical proceeding on his part, and in perfect harmony with the principles ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... me. Sit down again, for I have a long story to tell. I have not changed my mind, nor am I guilty of any special fickleness. But circumstances have arisen which make it impossible for me to keep my engagement. Captain Bertram sees this as plainly as I do. He is very thankful to ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... perish in Winter if not congregated in masses. Admirable adaptation, 144. Swarming necessary. Circumstances in which it takes place. June the swarming month. Preparations for swarming. Old queen accompanies the first swarm. No infallible signs of 1st swarming, 145. Fickleness of bees about swarming. Indications of swarming. Hours of swarming, 146. Proceedings within the hive before swarming. Interesting scene. Bells and frying-pans useless, 147. Neglected bees apt to fly away in swarming. Bees properly cared for seldom do it. Methods of arresting ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... species with mathematical precision. Moreover, he is careful, cautious, observant, and steady-going—a model business man, in fact, of sound middle-class morals and sober middle-class intelligence. No flitting for him, no coquetting, no fickleness. Therefore, the flowers that have adapted themselves to his needs, and that depend upon him mainly or solely for fertilisation, waste no unnecessary material on those big flaunting coloured posters which we human observers know ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... generation and became totally forgotten in another. What jealousies, what petty bickerings, what extravagances! With fancy and desire unchecked, what ingenious tricks they used to keep themselves in the public mind,—tricks begot of fickleness and fickleness begetting. And yet, it was a curious phase: their influence was generally found when history untangled for posterity some Gordian knot. In old times they had sung the Marseillaise and danced the carmagnole and indirectly plied the guillotine. And to-day they smashed ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... true that the chief bridesmaid's mother shook her head at him, and called him fickle, but then his fickleness was of so open and boyish an order that it could hardly be regarded as a fault, especially since no one—with the exception of the chief bridesmaid—ever took him seriously. And to her at least young Noel Wyndham was always ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... Human existence in the most favourable situations does not abound with pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills; capricious foolish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills as if they were the peculiar property of his particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead, and is almost, without exception, a constant source ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... political groups have their reactions, in which, notwithstanding the great room for improvement, they stand for morality and justice. The relations of man to man are becoming better understood every day. His fickleness and selfishness are more readily observed in recent than in former times, and as a result the evils of the present are magnified, because they are better understood; in reality, social conditions are improving, and the fact ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... for it. These colossal ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to have done, but we have even left undone those things that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... whole as a dream, and reproaches the king for his fickleness, as he had just before fallen in love with Kuvalayamala, the princess of Kuntala, and recommends him to be content with the queen, as "a partridge in the hand is better than a pea-hen ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... to a time of stress when Minna began to suffer from the fickleness of some one nearer to her than fortune. Wagner began to cast meaning glances over the garden wall. As Mr. Henderson says: "He was as inconstant as the wind, a rover, and a faithless husband. His misdoings ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... the object of this singular and characteristic procession. The tenants of the Lagunes, with the fickleness with which extreme ignorance acts on human passions, had suddenly experienced a violent revolution in their feelings towards their ancient comrade. He who, an hour before, had been derided as a vain and ridiculous pretender, and on whose head bitter imprecations had been ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... know that thou art present, With love that seems to be A band to bind me willingly To heaven and to thee. At noon-day, when the tumult and The din of life is heard, When in life's battle each heart is With various passions stirred, I turn me from the blazonry, The fickleness of life, And think of thee in earnest thought, My dearest one-my wife! When the daylight hath departed, And shadows of the night Bring forth the stars, as beacons fair For angels in their flight, I think of thee ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... non-development. An Oriental thinks that women are by nature peculiarly voluptuous; see the violent abuse of them on this ground in Hindoo writings. An Englishman usually thinks that they are by nature cold. The sayings about women's fickleness are mostly of French origin; from the famous distich of Francis the First, upward and downward. In England it is a common remark, how much more constant women are than men. Inconstancy has been longer reckoned discreditable to a woman, in England than in France; ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... volume, in deference to the advice of friends; probably wise, for unless the change had been made, the book might never have been read at all.' So writes the author in his last pages; and returning to his first love, it is hard to say whether from fickleness or from constancy he adds, 'So far as I am concerned, I regretted the change then, and ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... While affairs were in this state in Isauria, and while the king of Persia was involved in wars upon his frontier, repulsing from his borders a set of ferocious tribes which, being full of fickleness, were continually either attacking him in a hostile manner, or, as often happens, aiding him when he turned his arms against us, a certain noble, by name Nohodares, having been appointed to invade Mesopotamia, whenever occasion ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... window was gained, and all were saved. The multitude in the street absolutely danced with triumph, and huzzaed, and yelled till you would have fancied their very throats would crack; and then, with all the fickleness of interest characteristic of a large body of people, pressed and stumbled, and cursed and swore, in the hurry to get out of Dunham Street, and back to the immediate scene of the fire, the mighty diapason of whose roaring flames formed an awful accompaniment ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... effect, and three missionaries of great merit and learning were sent. By dint of great hardships, and, by living in the same manner as the Indians, they succeeded in baptizing many; but when they learned the fickleness of the Indian nature, and that it was as easy for them to become baptized as it was to take to the mountains to continue their former mode of life, the missionaries proceeded more cautiously in giving them the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... respecting the frontiers, and arrange about the marching of his troops. His constant word to them was forward! forward! For the precious time for action was slipping away, and he feared their Indian allies, so important to their security while on the march, might, with their usual fickleness, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... Then, with the customary fickleness of a mob, the soldiers applauded the corporal, who again announced his determination to thrash the first man of his squad who should declare non-combatant principles. Bravo, the corporal! they would soon settle ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... this that Jael had quarreled with Grace for her fickleness, and gave her a look of beaming affection; then fell into a dead silence, and soon tears were seen stealing down ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... this is too much. I deserved distrust by my wretched folly and fickleness last year, but I did not know what you were to me then—my most precious one! Can you not trust me! Do you not ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for it; also she thought a refusal showed a superior mind—one likely to appeal to a serious young man, who had no taste for the gaudy, gay, or fast, and who also had a tendency towards seasickness. But, alas, for the fickleness of man! While Denah stood with her father and Mijnheer, Julia rode round the centre of lighted mirrors on a prancing wooden horse, and Joost—the serious, the sometimes seasick—rode beside her on a dappled grey, to the familiar old English ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... did determine,—and did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with Parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his fortitude, to steady their fickleness by his constancy, to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom, to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious,—to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... politician by nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his "Clerk's Tale" he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people," its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity, and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his "Nun's Priest's Tale" he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry ever put upon paper by a direct reference to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... delay from calms in the tropical latitudes, through which we should have to pass—from storms off Cape Horn, renowned among mariners for the fickleness of its wind—other obstacles might be encountered, and the voyage protracted far beyond the period ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... else but sense-experience could reach her mind. She had seen tragedies of animal life, lonely death-struggles, horrible flights and more horrible captures, she had seen joyous wooings, love-pinings, partings, and bereavements. She had seen maternal fickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of mated bliss and its—renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad beautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These had all been objective ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... and did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his fortitude—to steady their fickleness by his constancy—to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom—to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people he resolved to make them great and glorious; to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... of a sailor's life is to be "certain of his position." It is a source of great worry at times, but I don't think that it need be so at this time. Yet even the best position has its dangers on account of the fickleness of the elements. But I think that, left untrammelled to the individual effort of its creators and to the collective spirit of its servants, the British Merchant Service will manage to maintain its position on this restless and ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... the Legislature demands their protection against the assaults of the Executive; they defend the Union from the disobedience of the States, the States from the exaggerated claims of the Union, the public interest against private interests and the conservative spirit of stability against the fickleness of the democracy." The contrast between these observations and the disheartened words in which Jay declined renomination to the chief justiceship in 1801 gives perhaps a fair measure of ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... this our father died, and John wished to be married at once. But Ellen, although she could not hide her attachment to him, steadily refused to engage herself on account of her invalid mother, whose only and devoted attendant she was. Fickleness was not one of my brother's faults, and he was true and steady in his love for the girl—how true and steady I never knew until I learned it from himself in my ship's cabin on the broad Atlantic. I found myself with a few thousand pounds ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... she laughed softly, because the other two were coming back on to the lawn. "I wonder that you have—I have half a mind to say the impudence—to ask such a thing. You have confessed your fickleness in an almost shameless way; and now you ask me to help you with the other girl! No, my lord: if I know anything of Brenda van Huysman's nature, there is no one who can help you except ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... chateau grounds 'the order of the Iron Cross'—a generous supply of these decorations being carried in a basket by one of his orderlies, following him about as he walked along. Meantime the King, leaving Napoleon in the chateau to ruminate on the fickleness of fortune, drove off to see his own victorious soldiers, who greeted him with huzzas that rent the air, and must have added to the pangs ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... voice is held Fast for my ear alone— Stays with me always, well content, With Darby to be Joan. No fickleness disturbs our lot; No jars its peace to smother; Ah, no; my faithful pipe and I Have ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... action implies a principle from which it proceeds. Fluctuating opinions and feelings produce fickleness of conduct; while settled convictions, stability of affections, and fixedness of purpose, give birth to persevering and methodical action. A system of beneficence must be founded ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... But, as they changed soon after, insomuch that they wore collars up to the chin, covering the whole of the neck and throat, so have I hopes they will change again; not indeed so much from motives of decency, as through that fickleness, which pervades every action of ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... qualities of the man, especially of those qualities which she knows are pleasing to the girl. She should, moreover, speak with disparagement of the other lovers of the girl, and talk about the avarice and indiscretion of their parents, and the fickleness of their relations. She should also quote samples of many girls of ancient times, such as Sakuntala and others, who, having united themselves with lovers of their own caste and their own choice, were ever happy afterwards ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... gentleman might have a job for him; but now Hiram was not looking for a job. He had given himself heartily to the project of making the old Atterson farm pay; nor was he the sort of fellow to show fickleness in ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... that is serious, the love that is light. And experience had taught her why it is that human nature soon tires of intensity, turns to frivolity. She felt that, if she could act, she would try to show that not Turiddu's fickleness nor his contempt of the woman who had yielded, but Santuzza's sad intensity and Lola's butterfly gayety had cost Santuzza her lover and her lover his life. So, it was not Santuzza's but Lola's ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... have been expected to welcome the Romans. One of these, Abgarus, prince of Osrhoene, or the tract east of the Euphrates about the city of Edessa, had been received into the Roman alliance by Pompey, but, with the fickleness common among Orientals, he now readily changed sides, and undertook to play a double part for the advantage of the Parthians. Another, Alchaudonius, an Arab sheikh of these parts, had made his submission to Rome even earlier; but having ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... our father died, and John wished to be married at once. But Ellen, although she could not hide her attachment to him, steadily refused to engage herself on account of her invalid mother, whose only and devoted attendant she was. Fickleness was not one of my brother's faults, and he was true and steady in his love for the girl—how true and steady I never knew until I learned it from himself in my ship's cabin on the broad Atlantic. I found ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... astonished. Having counted on general Marion as his firmest foe, they were utterly mortified to find him his fastest friend, and, venting their passion with great freedom, taxed him with inconsistency and fickleness that but illy suited with general ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... have mothers, sisters, daughters—have you not watched those dear to you in the many moods of which a feminine heart is capable; have you not seen them affectionate, tender, and impulsive? Would you love them so dearly but for the fickleness of their moods? Have you not worshipped them in your hearts, for those sublime impulses which put all man's plans and calculations to shame? Look on the accused, citizens. She loves the Republic, the people of France, and feared that I, an unworthy representative of her sons, was hatching treason ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... he knew it. I have no cause for complaint against him. And I would not have told you this, had I not felt it a duty to put in the strongest possible light my reasons for leaving him, so that a day may never come when you turn round upon me and blame me—as others have done—for fickleness, for ill-temper, for impatience with my husband; because now you know—as no one ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... they tend. Much of the plain is in vegetables, for the use of Paris; though there is occasionally a vineyard, or a field of grain. The weather has become settled and autumnal, and is equally without the chilling moisture of the winter, or the fickleness of the spring. The kind-hearted peasants see me pass among them without distrust, and my salutations are answered with cheerfulness and civility. Even at this trifling distance from the capital, I miss the brusque ferocity that is so apt to characterise the deportment of its lower classes, who ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Indies; that you had there found an American beauty, on whom you lavished those endearments which belonged of right to her alone. This news made, at first, a deep impression on her mind, but it soon wore away; and whether from this cause, from fickleness of disposition, or that she never sincerely loved you, I know not; but this I do know, that a youth has been for some time past her almost constant companion. To convince you of this, you need only tomorrow evening, about sunset, conceal yourself near the long avenue ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... going to do about it? You are going to wind up your lead and line, shoulder your birch canoe, as the old sea-kings used, and thrid the deep forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water again, when you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is that fickleness? What else can you do? Must you launch your bark on the unquiet stream, against whose pebbly bottom the keel continually grates and rasps your nerves—simply that your reputation suffer no detriment? Fickleness? ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... at last, after long years of delusion and endurance, the scales drop from the eyes of the wife, and revenge or despair drives her into a hostile position towards her lord and master, she is an inhuman criminal, and the hue and cry against the fickleness of women and the falsity of their nature is endless. Oh, the injustice of society and the injustice of cruel man. Is there no relief for helpless women that are bound by the ties of marriage to men who are nothing but ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... regard are rather understood than announced, and which, with the freedoms which it permits, and the uncertainties that attend it, often forms the most delightful hours of human existence, and as frequently leads to those which are darkened by disappointment, fickleness, and all the pains of ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... praise due to any, we may forfeit the reputation of all; and instead of uniting the suffrages of the whole world in our favour, we may end in becoming a sort of bye-word for affectation, cant, hollow professions, trimming, fickleness, and effeminate imbecility. It is best to choose and act up to some one leading character, as it is best to have some settled profession or ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... he will not fall headlong in love—and headlong is just the word for it—with any other woman after he has married her. I did not want the poor fellow to stick to me, but when I come to think of it that is the trouble. How short-sighted I am! It is his perverted fickleness rather than his actual fickleness which worries me. He has proposed to Peggy when he was in love with another woman, probably because he was in love with another woman. Now Peggy, although she is not brilliant, in spite of her co-education (perhaps because of it), is a darling, and she ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... Love's young dream was dispersed by the realities of Harrow; but the scarlet book continued to receive my daily confidences. Soon—alas for puerile fickleness!—the name of "Kate" disappears, and is replaced by rougher appellations, such as "Bob" and "Charlie;" "Carrots" this, and "Chaw" that. To Harrow succeeds Oxford, and now more recognizable names begin to appear—"Liddon" and "Holland," "Gore" and ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... haughtiness and coldness. Mr. Pelham, who foresaw the storm, had prudently prepared himself for the breach by all kind of invectives against the house of Leveson. The ground of all, besides Newcastle's natural fickleness and jealousy, is, that the Bedford and Sandwich have got the Duke. A crash @as been expected, but people now seem to think that they will rub on a little longer, though all the world seems indifferent whether they will or not. Mankind ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... cried, in affected surprise. "You were not wont, in past days, to consider my presence an insult, and I could never have believed fickleness a part of your nature. You are now of age, and have a right to listen to my defense, and my suit for your heart ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... disconnected talk about the set of the wind, or the rates of pay on various lines, or stowage, or freights, or rigs, or currents, or the characters of various skippers and mates, or the liveliness or sulkiness or homeliness or fickleness of this or that kind of cargo, they would revert extra-professionally to Uncle Tibe: of whom the old stories would be repeated over and over, with long pauses, chuckles, slow appreciations—'Ay, Tibe! . . . He was a none-such, if ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... concluding, I cannot help remarking that this circuit of the wind from SW. by W. to NW. or N., from our insular position, imparts to our climate its fickleness and inconstancy. How often will our brightest sky become suffused by the blackest vapours on the slightest breach of SW. wind, and the clouds will then disappear as speedily as they formed, when the NW. upper current ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... Troitsa, and summoned around her the gentlemen-at-arms. Khovanski was invited to attend, was arrested on the way, and put to death with his son. The streltsi attempted a new rising, but, with the usual fickleness of a popular militia, suddenly passed from the extreme of insolence to the extreme of humility. They marched to Troitsa, this time in the guise of suppliants, with cords round their necks, carrying axes and blocks for the death they expected. The patriarch consented to intercede for them, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... it might reach her heart, was everything to mine. It was the worship of the devotee to his protecting saint. It was the faith that made me rise above misfortune and mishap, and led me onward; and in this way I could have borne anything, everything, rather than the imputation of fickleness. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... pastures. Hunted in the winter only, he has a good six months of planning and putting into practice plans of preservation as against the six months of active warfare when the trapper's wits are pitted against his. The fickleness of Fashion's foibles, too, in his favour. In no line of personal adornment is there such changing fashion as in furs. A fur popular this season and last will next spring be unsaleable at half its original value, and some despised fur comes to ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... of Nature returned homeward, too blest in the triumph of his own love to feel more than a kindly compassion for the wounded heart, consigned with no doubt of the healing result to the fickleness of youth and the consolations of philosophy. Not for a moment did the happier rival suspect that Kenelm's love was returned; that an atom in the heart of the girl who had promised to be his bride could take its light or shadow ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... estate." The honest writer refused to partake of a splendid entertainment with which Gilbert Glossin, Esquire, now of Ellangowan, treated the rest of the company, and returned home in huge bitterness of spirit, which he vented in complaints against the fickleness and caprice of these Indian nabobs, who never knew what they would be at for ten days together. Fortune generously determined to take the blame upon herself, and cut off even this ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... with such full assurance of being able to bring Dora forward as a witness in his defense that Florence, for the first time, feels a strong doubt thrown upon the belief she has formed of his being a monster of fickleness. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... occurs now, when every servant tries to turn his position to an advantage over those who do business with his master. The dominance of the scribe in managing affairs and making profits was familiar in ancient as in modern times. And recent events in Egypt have reminded us of the old fickleness shown in the saying, 'Thy entering into a village begins with acclamations; at thy going out thou ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... conquistas are found in the town of Moncayo and are also scattered about on the upper Slug. The missionaries found the Debabon people very recalcitrant; the comparatively few converts made evinced, on the one hand, all the fickleness and instability of the Manbo and, on the other, the aggressiveness of ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... as unstable as mercury, it seemed. Frances despised her for her fickleness, scorned her for the mean face of friendship over the treachery of her soul. Not that she regretted Major King. Nola was free to take him and make the most of him. But she was not to come in as a wedge to rive her from ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... years in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, and Palermo, but residing principally at Genoa. In Italy, he began to indulge in his love of splendid extravagance, and in the fastidious fickleness which belonged to the evil side of his character. At Rome he was called 'the cavalier painter,' yet his first complaint on his return to Antwerp was, that he could not live on the profits of his painting! He avoided the society of his ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Hypsipyle, "sitting in the meadow and plucking flower after flower, snatching at each prize with gladsome heart, insatiable in its childish delight,"[324] so in the case of each of us, owing to our love of novelty and fickleness, the recent flower ever attracts, and makes us inconstant, frequently laying the foundations of many friendships and intimacies that come to nothing, neglecting in love of what we eagerly pursue what we have already possession of. To begin therefore ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... arbitrary, because irresponsible). A similar phenomenon of panic, sympathetic hope and despair, is exhibited by every stock-exchange, and is not peculiar to political life. And when political opinion is not manufactured solely in the reverberating furnace of a city, fickleness ceases to characterise democracy; and, in fact, is not found in Switzerland, or the United States, nor in France so far as politics, depend ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... "With quite incomprehensible fickleness, Marseilles, whose name during the Terror had been, as one may say, the symbol of the most advanced opinions, had become almost entirely Royalist in 1815. Nevertheless, its inhabitants saw without a murmur the tricolour flag after ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... mother had the most pitiful experience of all, child," she replied. "She married. Shortly after you were born, she died, fortunately spared all knowledge of your father's faithless fickleness. Adnah, he, too, married again! You, Adnah, was too young to protect yourself from a stepmother, but we came to your rescue. Your great uncle, Peter, had just died and left us this fine estate, and here we are, trying to shield you from the wiles ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... in different persons, and in the same person at different times. These fluids, and particularly the saliva, assist in the formation and change of taste. This accounts not only for the different tastes of different persons, but also for the varying taste of the same persons, and for that fickleness of taste which is so common in sickness, when the fluids of the mouth, in a disordered and deranged state, mix with the food, and produce the disagreeable taste so often complained of at such times, and which, moreover, occasionally create a permanent ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... they woo pursuit, And a winning voice has fame; Men labor for love and work for wealth And struggle to gain a name; Yet find but fickleness, need and scorn, If not ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... untamable nature of the mountaineers. His petition had no effect, and three missionaries of great merit and learning were sent. By dint of great hardships, and, by living in the same manner as the Indians, they succeeded in baptizing many; but when they learned the fickleness of the Indian nature, and that it was as easy for them to become baptized as it was to take to the mountains to continue their former mode of life, the missionaries proceeded more cautiously in giving them ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... from a German source that the resignation of Count TISZA was procured by Marshal VON HINDENBURG. It is a curious commentary on the fickleness of the multitude that the KAISER isn't even mentioned as having taken a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... lamentable thing that every Man is full of Complaints, and constantly uttering Sentences against the Fickleness of Fortune, when People generally bring upon themselves all the Calamities they fall into, and are constantly heaping up Matter for their own Sorrow and Disappointment. That which produces the greatest Part of the [Delusions [2]] of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... a green gown he clothed was full fair, Which underneath did hide his filthiness; And in his hand a burning heart he bare, Full of vain follies and new fangleness; For he was false and fraught with fickleness; And learned had to love with secret looks; And well could dance; and sing with ruefulness; And fortunes tell; and read in loving books; And thousand other ways to bait ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... tribunal has the right to summon him?—And they dare to condemn him!—Does the king condemn him, or the duke? And the Regent withdraws herself! Orange hesitates, and all his friends!—Is this the world, of whose fickleness and treachery I have heard so much, and as yet experienced nothing? Is this the world?—Who could be so base as to hear malice against one so dear? Could villainy itself be audacious enough to overwhelm with sudden destruction the object of a nation's ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... wishes. You may see by this that I preserve still that sincere friendship which has united our hearts from our tenderest years:—recognize at least, my dear Sister, that you did me a sensible wrong when you suspected me of fickleness towards you, and believed false reports of my listening to tale-bearers; me, who love only you, and whom neither absence nor lying rumors could change in respect of you. At least don't again believe such things on my score, and never mistrust me till you have had clear proof,—or till God has forsaken ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... all for my soul," but this very request is foreshadowed at the end of chap. 37 of Book ix. in the touching passage, surely inspired by personal experience, as to the sickness "that is the greatest pain a prisoner may have"; and the reflections on English fickleness in the first chapter of Book xxi., though the Wars of the Roses might have inspired them in any one, come most naturally from an author who was a ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... when we look at it more closely we discover that the pleasantest habit of mind consists in a moderate enjoyment which leaves little scope for desire and aversion. The unrest of passion causes curiosity and fickleness; the emptiness of noisy pleasures causes weariness. We never weary of our state when we know none more delightful. Savages suffer less than other men from curiosity and from tedium; everything is the same to them—themselves, not their ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... is so irrevocable that even itself may not change or modify it. To rescind a recent vote is, no doubt, as Sir Robert Peel said, a step not wholly free from objection. It should be an exceptional act, as one which, if often repeated, would give an appearance of capricious fickleness and instability to the opinions of Parliament, calculated to impair that respect for it which the whole state and nation are deeply concerned in upholding; but to refuse, under any circumstances, to confess a change of judgment, would lay the Parliament open to an imputation at least equally ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... more just than his deliberate moral opinions; as if his characters had taken the matter into their own hands, against his will. Or is it art, and art of the subtlest order, which in Kjartan Olafsson, the glorious hero, still leaves something of lightness, of fickleness, as compared both with the intensity of the passion of Gudrun and the dogged resolution of Bolli? There is another Saga in which a hero of the likeness of Kjartan is contrasted with a dark, malevolent, not ignoble figure,—the story of the Faroes, of Sigmund Brestisson ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... red," of startling if somewhat factitious beauty. To say that the plot now thickens would be to use too coarse a word; it becomes slightly tinged with incident, inasmuch as Euphues falls in love with Lucilla, the destined bride of Philautus. She reciprocates his passion, and the double fickleness of mistress and friend forms an excellent opportunity, which Lyly does not fail to seize, for infinite moralizings in euphuistic strains. Philautus is naturally indignant at the turn affairs have taken, and the former friends exchange ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Only there might come a day, in which, as in Judea of old, "after He had said these things, many were offended, and walked no more with Him:" when his hearers and admirers would grow fewer and more few, some through bigotry, some through envy, some through fickleness, some through cowardice, till He was left alone with a little knot of earnest disciples; who might diminish, alas, but too rapidly, when they found at He, as in Judea of old, did not intend to become the head of a new sect, and ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Round during the night; but in this they were disappointed, for a little after midnight, very suddenly the wind got round to the S.W., the coast became foggy, and the weather altogether exceedingly foul; an evidence of the fickleness of the climate. Having split their main-sail, they had to ply to windward as well as they could, endeavouring to get shelter in Port Famine; but this they were unable to effect; and, as in consequence of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... Hill looked upon the motionless form of the woman whose love and confidence he had gained and who had been to him such a faithful wife in spite of his fickleness, he wept, and vowed; but what are tears and vows when the will has been weakened by self-indulgence? He looked about him helplessly. What was he to do? What could he do without her? He was almost a stranger to his children, and had no idea how ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... already gained, to win the city and to force their will upon the country. Was not their Princess among them? Had not important persons already declared for her? Were there not hundreds of others ready to do so, only that fear of the people's fickleness and half-heartedness held ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... one was fire and fickleness,[343] a child Most mutable in wishes, but in mind A wit as various,—gay, grave, sage, or wild,— Historian, bard, philosopher, combined;[ks] He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... they succeed while they seek a mechanical solution to what is really a manifestation of life. Could they see the hosts of sylphs winging their way hither and thither, they would know who and what is responsible for the fickleness of the wind; could they watch a storm at sea from the etheric view-point they would perceive that the saying "the war of the elements" is not an empty phrase, for the heaving sea is truly then a battlefield of sylphs and ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... Egyptian"—individualized and placed before us. Her mental accomplishments, her unequalled grace, her woman's wit and woman's wiles, her irresistible allurements, her starts of irregular grandeur, her bursts of ungovernable temper, her vivacity of imagination, her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, her childish susceptibility to flattery, her magnificent spirit, her royal pride, the gorgeous eastern coloring of the character; all these contradictory elements has Shakspeare seized, mingled them in their extremes, and fused them into one brilliant ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... at him with a pang about her heart. From which side of the house had come this fickleness, this instability and love of change in Oliver's character? she asked herself—a new interest every day—all the traditions of his forefathers violated. How could she overcome it in him? how make him more practical? Years before, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... art present, With love that seems to be A band to bind me willingly To heaven and to thee. At noon-day, when the tumult and The din of life is heard, When in life's battle each heart is With various passions stirred, I turn me from the blazonry, The fickleness of life, And think of thee in earnest thought, My dearest one-my wife! When the daylight hath departed, And shadows of the night Bring forth the stars, as beacons fair For angels in their flight, I think of thee as ever mine, Of thee as ever best, And turn ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... against him were known to him on the 12th. He appeared delighted, that a command was given to Marshal Ney; not that he held any intelligence with him; but because he knew the weakness and fickleness of his character. He directed the Grand Marshal to write to him. "You will inform him," said he, "of the delirium excited by my return, and of all the forces sent against me having joined my army in succession. You will tell him, that ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh. Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and, grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... gunners were simply expending a little ammunition in practice at range-finding for their guidance in future eventualities. Any story proved acceptable as a relief to the weariness of life in camp, that day when the thermometer registered 108 deg. in the shade. What a climate Natal has! For fickleness it beats anything we have to grumble about in England. At night the temperature went down to 65 deg., and the brilliant summer weather broke up suddenly in a fierce thunderstorm. For a time every object roundabout would be blotted out by inky blackness, and for the next two ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... such fickleness; but affection did justify it. There was but little of the Roman about Mr Harding. He could not sacrifice his Lucretia even though she should be polluted by the accepted addresses of the clerical ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... soon be cured, and was told so by a woman to whom he had once sung a song of another passion. It is very hard to answer a woman in such circumstances, because her womanhood gives her so strong a ground of vantage! Lady Laura might venture to throw in his teeth the fickleness of his heart, but he could not in reply tell her that to change a love was better than to marry without love,—that to be capable of such a change showed no such inferiority of nature as did the capacity for such a marriage. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... sneered incredulously, and having made it plain that he refused to think—thought! He had risked so much in this enterprise, gone through so much; and to lose it all! He cursed the girl's fickleness, her coyness, her obstinacy! He hated her. And do what he might for her now, he doubted if he could cozen her or get much from her. Yet in that lay his only chance, apart from Mr. Pomeroy. His eye was cunning and his tone ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... the Baesle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more serious—for Mozart a very serious—affair, was his infatuation with Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... compromises either himself or the lady; but leaves open to both, at any future period, an opportunity of retiring from the position of courtship taken up on the one side, and of receiving addresses on the other, without laying either party open to the accusation of fickleness or jilting. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... Esperantists, at present in possession of the field, poke fun at these new-fangled schemes. A parody in Esperanto verse, entitled Lingvo de Molenaar, and sung to the tune of the American song Riding down from Bangor, narrates the fickleness of Pan-Roman and how it changed into Universal. It is said that a group of Continental Esperantists, at a convivial sitting, burnt the apostate Idiom Neutral in effigy by making a bonfire of Neutral literature. On the other side amenities are not ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... and the Spaniard, ripened by the African sun and dignified by the long companionship of Nature. There was a grace about her movements, a purity in her face, a mystery in the wide eyes and curved and smiling lips, such as Leonard had never seen before, and which overcame him utterly. Alas for the fickleness of the human heart! from that moment the adoration of his youth, the dream of his lonely years of wandering, Jane Beach, began to grow faint and fade away. But though this was so, as yet he did not admit it to himself; ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... He—man or people—who, putting his trust in the friendship of the sea, neglects the strength and cunning of his right hand, is a fool! As if it were too great, too mighty for common virtues, the ocean has no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory. Its fickleness is to be held true to men's purposes only by an undaunted resolution and by a sleepless, armed, jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there has always been more hate than love. Odi et amo may well be the confession of those who consciously or blindly have surrendered their existence to ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... most licentious pleasures, yet conducted herself with an art so exquisite as to elude discovery, and even suspicion. In her amours she was equally inconstant as ardent, till the young Count Hippolitus de Vereza attracted her attention. The natural fickleness of her disposition seemed then to cease, and upon him she ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... Muse" sold tolerably well for some months, and Mr. Whittaker told Mr. Emmerson that "he thought they would get off" the first edition. But the time was rapidly approaching when literary fame or failure, the constancy or fickleness of friends, the pangs of poverty or the joys of competence were to be alike matters of indifference to John Clare. He began to write in a piteous strain to Mrs. Emmerson, Mr. Taylor, and Dr. Darling, all ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Pompilius, the second of their kings, according to which, the priesthood, with all the influence annexed to that order, was placed in the hands of the aristocracy. By this wise policy a restraint was put upon the fickleness and violence of the people in matters of government, and a decided superiority given to the Senate both in the deliberative and executive parts of administration. This advantage was afterwards indeed diminished ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... record of from the days when the advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all the despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of them to fascinate and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Abu-Taleb,[19] and in much the same line of argument—to the effect that the dowery which the eastern husband is bound by law to pay over in money to his wife in the event of a separation, is a far more effectual protection to the wife from the fickleness and caprice of her partner, ("whose interest it thus becomes, setting affection wholly out of the question, to remain on good terms with her,") than any remedy afforded by the laws of England; where a wife, though bound by ties less easily dissolved ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... what's-its-name place—Guy, Earl of Warwick, you know—what is it?—Dun Cow—to claim the flitch of bacon? And Mortimer, whose name is for ever blotted out from my list of lovers, by reason first of fickleness and then of base desertion, how do YOU do, wretch? And Mr Wrayburn, YOU here! What can YOU come for, because we are all very sure before-hand that you are not going to talk! And Veneering, M.P., how are things going on down at the house, and when will you turn out those terrible people for us? ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... at such times; by his energy, and also by his numerous mental and bodily requirements; and by his defects,—which were, a slight tendency to indiscretion, a want of prudence injurious to his interests, impatience, and a kind of intermittent and apparent fickleness. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Madame de Tecle and M. des Rameures all the duties of respectful gratitude. Yet avoiding all allusion to the past, guarding himself scrupulously from confidential converse, and observing a frigid politeness to Mademoiselle Marie, there remained doubt in his mind that, the fickleness of the fair sex aiding him, the young mother of the girl would renounce her chimerical project. His error was great: and it may be here remarked that a hard and scornful scepticism may in this world engender as ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... cabal, plot. cacher (), to hide (from). calme, m., calm, peace. calme, calm. calmer, to calm. calomnie, f., calumny. campagne, f., fields. cantique, m., hymn. caprice, m., fickleness, capriciousness. capti-f, -ve, m., f., captive, prisoner, slave; also adj. captivit, f., captivity. carnage, m., slaughter. cause, f., case. causer, to cause, give. ce, cet, m., cette, f., this, that, it; ces, pl., these, those. cdre, m., cedar. clbre, celebrated, famous. clbrer, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... obscure and invincible force that lies at the end of every existence. Doubtless, from one point of view, unhappiness must always remain the portion of man, and the fatal abyss be ever open before him, vowed as he is to death, to the fickleness of matter, to old age and disease. If we fix our eyes only upon the end of a life, the happiest and most triumphant existence must of necessity contain its elements of misery and fatality. But let us not make a wrong use of these words; ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... spontaneous, and reflect the varying moods of the writer. At times of special excitement they follow each other day by day, and sometimes more than once in the same day; and the writer seems to conceal nothing, however much it might expose him to ridicule, and to the charge of fickleness, weakness, or even cowardice. Those addressed to other friends are sometimes familiar and playful, sometimes angry and indignant. Some of them are careful and elaborate state papers, others mere formal ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... instantly banished her from his heart. The persuasions, therefore, of the priest, who was a prudent, well-meaning man, had their effect; Camacho and his party sheathed their weapons and remained satisfied, blaming rather the fickleness of Quiteria than the cunning of Basilius. With much reason Camacho thought within himself that if Quiteria loved Basilius when a virgin, she would love him also when married, and that he had more cause to ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the chief bridesmaid's mother shook her head at him, and called him fickle, but then his fickleness was of so open and boyish an order that it could hardly be regarded as a fault, especially since no one—with the exception of the chief bridesmaid—ever took him seriously. And to her at least young Noel Wyndham was always ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... this incident as a glimpse of glory before His sufferings. Alas! it was but a glimpse. What a picture of the fickleness and treachery of the heart!—That excited populace who are now shouting their hosannahs, are ere long to be raising the cry, "Crucify Him, crucify Him!" Four days hence we shall find the palm branches lying withered on the Bethany road, and the blazing torches of an assassin-band nigh the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... and the aching sorrow of his starved, empty heart to lead him into this girl's life. That he had been new to women and newer still to love did not permit him to excuse himself, and a hundred times he cursed his folly and stupidity, and what he thought was fickleness. ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... first crossed the Isthmus of Panama, under the belief that the whole sea was always as calm as was then the portion they beheld. Storms, if less frequent, are certainly not less violent than in other portions of the world. We certainly very frequently experienced the fickleness of the elements. As we were about to haul up to the northward, the wind suddenly shifted round to that very quarter, and then shifted somewhat to the eastward. We stood away on the starboard-tack, but were evidently making a great ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no more just then than such complaints are now. Then, as now, he got his deserts; and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sell himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if he chose to remain in ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... that. Elizabeth's policy changed almost from day to day. She was tormented with temporal fears of a continental crusade against her, and by the spiritual terrors of the Pope's Bull; and her unfathomable fickleness was the despair ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... result for some days, at the very earliest, and the surprise and pleasure with which he learned it were almost equal. Carrington did not believe in good; he absolutely distrusted and despised human nature, and he never dreamed of imputing Madame Durski's conduct to anything but coquetry and fickleness. "She's on with the new love, beyond a doubt," said he to himself, as he read Miss Brewer's letter; "whether she's off with the old is quite another question, and rests with him rather than with ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... was occupied with disagreeable reflections. Perhaps both the girls at last understood him, and had been comparing notes, to his infinite disadvantage. His fickleness and the dilemma he was in may have become a jest between them. What could he do? Resentment, except against himself, was impossible. If Amy understood him, in what other way could she meet any approach to sentiment on his part than by a laughing scorn? If Miss Hargrove had divined ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... them, might they but have the colour of an invitation to do it under. Yea, so far as I could gather, the town had been surrendered up to them before now, had it not been for the opposition of old Incredulity, and the fickleness of the thoughts of my Lord Willbewill. Diabolus also began to rave; wherefore Mansoul, as to yielding, was not yet all of one mind; therefore they still lay distressed under these ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... however, the prospect of seeing her dear Margaret again completely obliterated any thought of her stepmother from Janetta's mind; and when she was snugly ensconced in her own little, white bed, she could not help shedding a few tears of relief and joy. For Margaret's apparent fickleness had weighed heavily on Janetta's mind; and she now felt proud of the friend in whom she had believed in spite of appearances, and of whose faithfulness she had steadily refused to hear a doubt. These feelings ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... eyes, and more animation in her countenance than on the previous days; but still the crowd passed on unnoticed. Even the learned Brahmins, who stood immovable in rows on each side of her throne, became impatient: they talked about the fickleness of the sex, the impossibility of inducing them to make up their minds; they whispered wise saws and sayings from Ferdistan and others, about the caprice of women, and the instability of their natures, and the more their legs ached from such perpetual ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... riding out alone before the people, he cried out, "I am your leader"; and himself promised to grant them all they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to be seen as they are, is that Parliament ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... emotions, strengthening and supporting him, was a secret bitterness towards Kate—a certain contempt of her fickleness, her lightness, her shallow love, her readiness to be off with the old love and on with the new. There was a sort of pride in his own higher type of devotion, his sterner passion. Pete invited him to the wedding, but he would not go, he would invent ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... been lighted, every one withdrew except the king and queen. She then said to him: "You know how faithless you have been to me, and with this handsome body you will be a much greater attraction to other women. I know the fickleness of your disposition. Can you expect that I will confer on you this beauty for the sake of ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... achieving nothing save to torment himself and show to others that he is unable to bear with equanimity not only his own poverty but also the wealth of others. So also a man who has not been well deceived by his mistress thinks of nothing but the fickleness of women, their faithlessness, and their other oft-proclaimed failing—all of which he forgets as soon as he is taken into favor by his mistress again. He, therefore, who desires to govern his emotions and appetites from a love of liberty alone will strive as much as he can to know virtues ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... he told the whole story, accusing Fiordelisa of having betrayed the secret of his visits to make her peace with the Queen, and indeed saying a great many hard things about her fickleness and her deceitful beauty, and so on. The Enchanter quite agreed with him, and even went further, declaring that all Princesses were alike, except perhaps in the matter of beauty, and advised him to have done with Fiordelisa, and forget all about her. But, somehow or other, this advice did not ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... this implied a fickleness of temperament that was disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... had a little sore feeling at her heart, as if the others cared less about losing her than she should have cared had she been in their place. This idea cost her some private tears; she comforted herself by a poem which she called "Fickleness," and which began: ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... "The fickleness is all on her ladyship's part,—not on mine," said Lord George; whereupon Lady Eustace walked out of the room and was not seen ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... children, little eyases [i.e. young hawks],' dominated the theatrical world, and monopolised public applause. 'These are now the fashion,' the dramatist lamented, {214b} and he made the topic the text of a reflection on the fickleness of public taste: ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... their hearts was the fickleness of Jeanne's humor. One night, as the doctor hung over her, she gave way to tears. For a whole day her hate changed to feverish tenderness, and Helene felt happy once more; but on the morrow, when the doctor entered the room, the child ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... younger sisters, what could she know of the difference between love and friendship? And when the development of her understanding disclosed the true nature of this intercourse to her, her affections were already engaged to her friend, and all she feared was lest other attractions and fickleness might make him break ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... is a beautiful thought," put in Mr. Whitechoker. "It is, I presume, an allegory to contrast faithful devotion and constancy with unfaithfulness and fickleness. Such thoughts occur only to the wholly gifted. It is only to the poetic temperament that the conception of such a thought can come coupled with the ability to voice it in fitting terms. There is a grandeur about the lines the Idiot has quoted that ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... show any of that severity which would break my heart, none of that fickleness of manner which would be worse ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... this cooling of the original Republican fervency was owing to the recent experience of the public fickleness and of the necessity of not "confining Providence" too much in the decision of what to-morrow should bring forth, there was a special cause in the relations now subsisting between ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... with more readiness and effect than others, will ordinarily prosecute and finish their course with proportionably higher reputation. Indeed, to the want of a thorough initiation into the rudiments of learning may be traced much of that indolence and fickleness and easy yielding to temptation, by which the mind, untaught in the labor of successful occupation, and discouraged by the failure of its imprudent efforts, is presently paralyzed, and lost to every honorable and useful ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... debut, by an unseasonable fit of gout or economy in papa, ever felt more irreparably aggrieved than now did the dejected Corporal. His master had not yet even acquainted him with the cause of the countermarch; and, in his own heart, he believed it nothing but the wanton levity and unpardonable fickleness "common to all them ere boys afore they have seen the world." He certainly considered himself a singularly ill-used and injured man, and drawing himself up to his full height, as if it were a matter with which Heaven should be acquainted at the earliest ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wind in that region," said Christobal, laughing. "Monsieur de Poincilit here, were he in a very bad temper, might exclaim, 'Mille diables!' Why should not our excellent Fernando rail against the almost inconceivable fickleness which could be displayed by eleven ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... this Troilus for love! *end Such fine hath all his *greate worthiness!* *exalted royal rank* Such fine hath his estate royal above! Such fine his lust,* such fine hath his nobless! *pleasure Such fine hath false worlde's brittleness!* *fickleness, instability And thus began his loving of Cresside, As I have told; and in ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Devaki, thy form also, as the Lord of the universe, then became known to me! What thy holy self said unto me at that time, O Kesava, through affection, has all been forgotten by me, O chief of men, in consequence of the fickleness of my mind. Repeatedly, however, have I been curious on the subject of those truths. Thou again, O Madhava, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... time you cherished in your bosom, has proved the most detestable of villains, the blot and the deformity of the human character. How far the marchioness has been involved in his guilt, I am not able to ascertain. Surely however the fickleness and inconstancy of her conduct cannot be unstained with the pollution of depravity. After the most diligent search I have learned a report, which was at that time faintly whispered at Cosenza, that you were upon the point of marriage with the only daughter of the duke ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... dwelt upon the difference of his behaviour in their preceding meeting, the more angry as well as amazed she became at the change, and though she still concluded the pursuit of some other object occasioned it, she could find no excuse for his fickleness if that pursuit was recent, nor for his caprice if ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... as an interview of first love, went on our first meeting with this Northern river. But water, the feminine element, is so mobile and impressible that it must protect itself by much that seems caprice and fickleness. We might be sure that the Penobscot would not always flow so gently, nor all the way from forests to the sea conduct our bark without one shiver of panic, where rapids broke noisy and foaming over rocks that showed their grinding teeth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... soon it would be over; and how the action of one short night would give to all their nights and days to come sovereign sway and royalty! Then she threw contempt on his change of purpose, and accused him of fickleness and cowardice; and declared that she had given suck, and knew how tender it was to love the babe 'that milked her; but she would, while it was smiling in her face, have plucked it from her breast, and dashed its brains out, if she had so sworn to do it, as he had sworn to perform ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... extinguished the hope which the young Prince might have entertained of one day becoming Stadtholder. But God laughs at the presumption of man, who wants to raise and prostrate the powers on earth without consulting the King above; and the fickleness and caprice of the Dutch combined with the terror inspired by Louis XIV., in repealing the Perpetual Edict, and re-establishing the office of Stadtholder in favour of William of Orange, for whom the hand ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... next night. I finished my work, said good bye to my acquaintances, and went on board. Fifteen minutes before the steamer sailed I had my luggage tumbled from her deck back on to the wharf, and came ashore, swearing at myself for a fool, and knowing that I would be well laughed at and quizzed for my fickleness by every one ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... not know me, I replied: I am of humble birth; whereat thou, smiling, Didst smite me with thy hand, and saidst again: Thou shalt be king; and let the friendly blows That Manahem hath given thee on this day Remind thee of the fickleness of fortune. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of Jim Polk may be human, but the other two-thirds is politician. He will flatter that lady into confidences. She is well nigh distracted at best, these days, what with the fickleness of her husband and the yet harder abandonment by her old admirer Pakenham; so Polk will cajole her into disclosures, never fear. In return, when the time comes, he will send an army of occupation into her country! And all the while, on ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... life. Human existence in the most favourable situations does not abound with pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills; capricious foolish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills as if they were the peculiar property of his particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead, and is almost, without exception, a constant ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Ambition. Hydrangea Vain glory. Ice Plant Your looks freeze me. Ivy Friendship. Iris, German Flame. Iris, Common Garden A message for thee. Jonquil Affection returned. Jessamine, White Amiability. Jessamine, Yellow Gracefulness. Larkspur Fickleness. Lantana Rigor. Laurel Words though sweet may deceive. Lavender Mistrust. Lemon Blossom Discretion. Lady Slipper Capricious beauty. Lily of the Valley Return of happiness. Lilac, White Youth. " Blue First emotions of love. Lily, Water Eloquence. May Flower ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... rubber button as a return for the smile he got at the sly twist he gave her hair as he passed her desk on his way to the spelling class. As for Miss Lucy, who saw herself displaced, she wrote to Philemon Ward, and told him of her jilting, and railed at the fickleness and frailty ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... consistency in his incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his "Clerk's Tale" he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people," its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity, and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his "Nun's Priest's Tale" he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry ever put upon paper by a direct reference to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the Kohong (a company of merchants possessing the monopoly of the European trade,) although the members of this body could have no concern in the transaction." Capt. K. is decidedly of opinion, that nothing but resolute conduct will overcome the fickleness and knavery of the Chinese. He pays a high compliment to our countrymen, especially Mr Drummond, president of the factory, who interfered in his behalf when at Whampoa, and with effect, when they could easily have thwarted his plan, and embroiled his government ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... attitude of the world; he could not stay at home without seeing his noble wife uncomplainingly nursing a child that was not hers. He cursed himself for his sins and follies; he cursed the world for its fickleness and want of sympathy. 'His wit,' says Heron, 'became more gloomy and sarcastic, and his conversation and writings began to assume a misanthropical tone, by which they had not been before in any eminent degree distinguished. But with all his failings his was still that exalted ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... She was forever having a "crush" on some girl or other, getting suddenly over it, and seeking another affinity with bewildering fickleness. Eva Larry had been proclaimed her dearest friend for a longer term than most ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... cases, I argue, an implied exception; if I am able, provided it is right for me to do so, if these things be so and so. Make the position the same when you ask me to fulfil my promise, as it was when I gave it, and it will be mere fickleness to disappoint you; but if something new has taken place in the meanwhile, why should you wonder at my intentions being changed when the conditions under which I gave the promise are changed? Put everything back as it was, and I shall be the same as I was. We ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... household. And of those who really enjoy their homes most are remarried after a divorce, or even after two or more. Our society suffers from a plague worse than the pestilence itself, a plague of greed for excitement, eagerness for novelty, of peevishness and fickleness. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... the wind, true to its proverbial character of fickleness, died away, and we were left without any guide by which to steer our course across the trackless deep. Still we pulled on, I fancied, in the direction of the coast. We should have been wise had we laid on our oars, and gone to sleep. As I could not see ahead, I steered by the wake astern, and was ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... and the sadness of its tone, are caused by their sudden perversion from the doctrine which the Apostle had taught them, and which at first they had received so willingly. It is no fancy, if we see in this fickleness a specimen of that 'esprit impretueux, ouvert a toutes les impressions,' and that 'mobilite extreme,' which Thierry marks as characteristic of the Gaulish race." At all events, the language of the Gauls disappeared in Central ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... listen to me. Sit down again, for I have a long story to tell. I have not changed my mind, nor am I guilty of any special fickleness. But circumstances have arisen which make it impossible for me to keep my engagement. Captain Bertram sees this as plainly as I do. He is very thankful to ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... Ashvamedha Parva which contains the Anugita, and you will find that Arjuna after the great battle, forgetting the teaching that was given him on Kurukshetra, asked his Teacher to repeat that teaching once again. And Shri Krishna, rebuking him for the fickleness of his mind and stating that He was much displeased that such knowledge should by fickleness have been forgotten, uttered these remarkable words: "It is not possible for me to state it in full in that way. I discoursed to thee on the Supreme Brahman, having ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... petty tendencies which deform and degrade the human type. On these diverse points, religious faith could scarcely show its effect; but he also declared himself to be irritable and violent—he confessed to a dangerous fickleness—still, he would readily have slandered himself in the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... evenings, in the cold Spring mornings, and in the still Summer days, she feels that all worth living for is gone, while she is surrounded by all her body wants—her example is corrupting others. The scorned lover, who was rejected because he was poor, goes away to curse woman's fickleness and to marry some one whom he can not love; and the thoughtless girls, by whom the glitter of fortune is taken for the real gold of happiness, follow the venal example, and flirt and jilt till they fancy that they ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... simple nomads to the institutions of a far-away human father, how it put to shame Judah's delinquency from the commands of her Divine Father! This contrast is in line with the others, which we have seen Jeremiah emphasising, between his people's fickleness towards God and the obdurate adherence of the Gentiles to their national gods, or the constancy of the processes of nature: the birds that know the seasons of their coming, the unfailing snows of Lebanon and the streams ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... popular adoration and the royal regard were worthily bestowed and well earned. He had never seemed stirred by the popular odium, he never seemed to prize the popular praise, which he received; it was not for praise that he had worked, but for simple duty; and his experience of the fickleness of public favour might make him something scornful of it. To the honours which his Sovereign delighted to shower on him—honours perhaps never before bestowed on a subject by a monarch—he was sensitive. The ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... are enlivened with anecdotes of gallantry in the vast bulk of the world's unwritten history, he alone is the hero of much mysterious affirmation but of no particular romance. The Reynolds affair is open history and not a case in point. It is probable that, owing to inherent fickleness and Betsey's gentle manipulation, his affairs rarely lasted long enough to attract attention. It is one of the accidents of life that the world barely knew of his acquaintance with Eliza Croix, she who ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... by this proof of the rapidity of feminine fickleness, I began to congratulate her effusively on having obtained such an excellent substitute for my worthless self, and to wish the happy couple all earthly felicities, when she explained that he was not a fiance, but merely a sort of friend, and Mrs MANKLETOW severely added that they ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... attending on rank and wealth: but under this fascinating exterior, I suspect our Frattino to be a very worthless, as well as a very unhappy being. While he pleases, he repels me. There is a want of heart about him, a want of fixed principles—a degree of profligacy, of selfishness, of fickleness, caprice and ill-temper, and an excess of vanity, which all his courtly address and savoir faire cannot hide. What would be insufferable in another, is in him bearable, and even interesting and amusing: ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... his attempted bribery, his broken-hearted sorrow when he failed, he seemed to be now content. Indeed, he had made no opposition to the match. When Caroline had freely spoken to him about it, he made some little snappish remark as to the fickleness of women; but he at the same time signified that ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the working-class and of the middle-class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses. That shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of "society," middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists of a past generation always held that public opinion. At the same time, we have no reason to grumble ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... question of vital consequence. He knew that her happiness as well as his own was in the balance. He was not embittered or deluded, as a narrower man might have been, into the fallacy that her treatment of him denoted fickleness. Adrienne was merely running the boundary line that separates deep friendship from love, a boundary which is often confusing. When she had finally staked out the disputed frontier, it would never again be questioned. But on which side ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... was at Lons-le-Saulnier, to come and join him. Ney had set off from the Court with a promise to bring Napoleon, "like a wild beast in a cage, to Paris." Scott excuses Ney's heart at the expense of his head, and fancies that the Marshal was rather carried away by circumstances, by vanity, and by fickleness, than actuated by premeditated treachery, and it is quite possible that these protestations were sincerely uttered when Ney left Paris, but, infected by the ardour of his troops, he was unable to resist a contagion so much in harmony with all his antecedents, and to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... standing with his back to them, was Mr. Sandy Kilday. He was engaged in a fierce encounter with an unnamed monster whose eyes were green. During his pauses for breath he composed a few comprehensive and scathing remarks which he intended to bestow upon Miss Fenton at his earliest convenience. Fickleness was a thing not to be tolerated. She had confessed her preference for him over all others; she must and should prove it. Just when his indignation had reached the exploding-point, he ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... everything that looks or tastes or smells like California!" With his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying California less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in that Nazareth. To his great satisfaction, one of the leading California corporations, the Spring Valley Water Company, "cooked" a dividend of its own about ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... saw the greatest warrior of the age—conqueror of Italy—humbler of Germany—terror of the North—saw him account all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you are now in a condition to win—saw him contemn the fickleness of fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with Parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his fortitude, to steady their fickleness by his constancy, to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom, to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious,—to make England, inclined to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... understood it, and although he had heretofore sustained the President, he now stood with the Radicals. Raymond also knew the gravity of the situation. But Raymond, who often wavered and sometimes exhibited an astonishing fickleness,[1054] saw only one side to the question, and on April 9 when the House, by a vote of 122 to 41, overrode the veto, he was one of only seven Unionists to ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... humble abilities as their representative in Parliament, with the sincerest integrity of purpose in maintenance of popular rights, unspotted, I trust, by one single vote of a contrary tendency, I, together with many others of the staunchest friends of those rights, experienced such extreme fickleness of popular opinion that this conclusion has long been formed in my mind: that the great body of the people of this Province (without doubt there are many honourable exceptions), in no wise ignorant of their rights or the great value of them, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... news filled them with terror, for they feared that the Snake warriors might make a circuit to the rear, and fall upon the camp where they had left their women and children. The great chief spent all his eloquence in vain, nobody would listen to him; and with characteristic fickleness they gave over the enterprise, and retreated in a panic. "Our advance was made in good order; but not so our retreat," says the Chevalier's journal. "Everybody fled his own way. Our horses, though good, were ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... world save the happiness of a tranquil family life. The next day, I told them that I had changed my mind, and should not go away, but should establish myself in Berlin. Of course, I received a torrent of gibes on my fickleness; for they did not understand my feelings in respect to the responsibility that I feared to take ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... gloriously. With mountain fickleness the wind blew gently from the east, the air was precisely like late March, and the short and tender grass, the small flowers in the sheltered corners of the rocks, and the multitudinous bleatings of the lambs were all in keeping. It was spring in ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... resided one Hans Scrapschins, an industrious and close-shaving barber. His industry met with due encouragement from the bearded portion of the community; and the softer sex, whose greatest fault is fickleness, generally selected Hans for the honour of new-fronting them, when they had grown tired of the ringlets nature had bestowed and which time ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... punish him for daring to stay away so long!' she exclaimed as soon as she got upstairs. 'It is as bad to show constancy in your manners as fickleness in your heart at such a time ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
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