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More "Fleeting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Will you wait? He will return in a very few minutes." Her voice was clear and low, her accent charming. The smile in her eyes somehow struck him as sad, even fleeting in its attempt at mirth. As she spoke, it disappeared altogether and an almost sombre expression came into ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... clenching between her fingers, dropped to the floor. With a purely automatic movement, I bent to recover it for her; she leaned down to receive it. Her pale face and lovely dilated eyes were close to me for a fleeting second, and though her lips did not move, I seemed to catch the merest breath, the faintest gossamer ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... was a glorious one. Old Sol cast his rays upon the sea which gave them back broken and shattered into a thousand shafts of shimmering light. The air was cool and clear. Here and there in the distance a white sail like a fleeting gull marked the position of a sailing vessel, while a smudge of smoke from a steamer far away to the west ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... body are really nothing more than reliefs from pains of one kind or another. And, next, the pleasures of the soul, being of the eternal order, are necessarily more real than those of the body, which are fleeting—in fact, mere ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... hand still resting heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope and well- nigh achieved through such dread, fleeting back to the earth from which its material was drawn to give bloom, indeed—but to herbs; joy ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... that is scored therewith. In composition thereof is quicksilver and white brimstone, and therefore it is not so heavy as gold. There are two manner of silvers, simple and compound. The simple is fleeting, and is called quicksilver; the silver compounded is massy and sad, and is compounded of quicksilver pure and clean, and of white brimstone, ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... the third day that followed the gale; the sky once more took its steel-grey shade, the sharp breezes stole over gentle rollers and covered each sad-coloured bulge with fleeting ripples. That blessed breeze, so pure, so crisp, so potently shot through with magic savours of iodine and ozone, exhilarates the spirits until the most staid of men break at times into schoolboy fun. Do you imagine that religious people ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... with that fierce and fleeting little smile which rarely lit his face for a second, "if you don't know him he knows ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... at the only passenger remaining, caught the fleeting shadow of interest on his face, regarded him with natural indifference, and looked out of the window, forgetting him. A few moments later, accidentally aware of him again, she carelessly noted his superficially ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... this is poetry rather than history, although the legends and facts upon which it rests have been gathered with much painstaking research and careful verification. It should be kept in mind that these poems are impressionistic attempts to present the fleeting feeling of the moment, landscape moods, and the ephemeral attitudes of the past. Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded. Above all here ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... variations now occasionally appear, but these are rejected as faults or deviations from the standard of perfection in each breed. The common goose has not given rise to any marked varieties; hence the Toulouse and the common breed, which differ only in colour, that most fleeting of characters, have lately been exhibited as distinct ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... worth of a peace which is only secured by ignoring realities, and which can be shattered into fragments by anything that compels a man to see himself as he is? In such a fool's paradise thousands of us live. 'Use and wont,' the continual occupation with the trifles of our daily lives, the fleeting satisfactions of our animal nature, the shallow wisdom which bids us 'let sleeping dogs lie,' all conspire to mask, to many consciences, their unrest and their sin. We abstain from lifting the curtain behind which the serpent lies coiled in our hearts, because we dread to see its loathly length, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... juncture, the lady having been restored to her senses, you might suppose that the rescue-party would take at least some fleeting interest in the disposal of their prisoners. There you would be in error. The final curtain is due and there are peremptory affairs of the heart to be wound up before we can get away. So, to clear the ground, one of the admirers makes a gallant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... I know what fleeting and trifling things varieties very often are; but my query applies to such as have been thought worth marking and recording. If you could screw time to send me ever so brief an answer to this, pretty soon, it would be a great service ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... waken the vague foreboding, which slumbers in every feeling heart, into a distinct consciousness that the happiness after which we are here striving is unattainable; that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls; and that all earthly enjoyment is but a fleeting and momentary illusion. When the soul, resting as it were under the willows of exile, [Footnote: Trauerweiden der verbannung, literally the weeping willows of banishment, an allusion, as every reader must know, to the 137th Psalm. Linnaeus, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... somewhat hypercritical. Great thoughts must not be trimmed to the exact dialect of business-men. LONGFELLOW reveals important truths; he utters what is pent within him from the impulse of utterance: he tells us that 'Art is long and Time is fleeting;' now some arts are not long, and time often drags heavily. It will not do to be too ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... enemy. By night the Chinese soldiery work as openly as they please, for no outpost may waste its ammunition by indiscriminate shooting. But during the day, orders or no orders, it has become rash for the enemy to expose himself to our view; and even the fleeting glimpse of a moving hand is made the excuse for a hailstorm of fire. This has made excessive caution the order of the day, and you can almost believe, when no rifles are firing to disturb such a conviction, that there are only dead men round us. Yet with ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... to the country. The hostile climate gave them a very short time in which to admire nature, and for this reason the Dutch artists admire it only the more and salute the spring with greater joy. The fleeting smiles of the heavens are strongly impressed on their imagination. The country is not beautiful, but it is doubly dear to them because it has been wrested from the sea and from the hands of strangers. They painted it with affection, making ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful, that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came before him at his most doleful moments—sometimes unsought by his imagination, though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadness played upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree he could die upon them in one wild ecstasy, her eyes for depth and purity the very mountain wells. She lived, breathed, moved, smiled, sighed in this same austere atmosphere under the same grey sky that hung low outside ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... restored to its coign high above unlovely Greeley Square warned him that his hour was fleeting: in twenty minutes it would be six o'clock; at six, sharp, Blessington's would close its doors. Distressed, he scurried on, crossed Thirty-fourth Street, aimed himself courageously for the wide entrance of the department store, battled manfully through the retreating army of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... Herrick reviewed this portion of his life, he owned to himself that during the five weeks that followed the Templeton Bean-feast he had lived in a fool's paradise—in a state of beatitude that was as unsubstantial and fleeting as the sunset clouds that piled themselves behind the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in 1875 or '6, when very young, in the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... securing a Chinese interpreter in Burma forced me to go to Hong Kong, and once there, lack of time made it necessary that I should choose the shortest route into West China, and that was by way of Haiphong and the Red River railway. After all, there were compensations. Even a fleeting vision from the windows of a railway carriage gives some idea of what the French are doing in their great Eastern colony. Moreover, there could be no better starting-point for such a trip as I had before me than the free port of Hong Kong, ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... leg of an anchored data desk, he raised himself half upright as he lunged desperately at Brecken. Strangely, it occurred to Phillips for a fleeting lapse of time that old Varret had been reasonably astute in his selections, if he desired violent-tempered throwbacks. Then the breath was knocked out of him as he smashed into Brecken with a force that sent them both hurtling into ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... filled her days. He glanced about the room, beautiful, formal, exquisitely appointed. His father's portrait was gone from over the mantel, and an old French water-color hung there instead. That was too bad of Natalie. Or had it been Rodney? He would bring it back. And he gave a fleeting thought to Graham and his request to go abroad. He had not meant it. It was sheer reaction. But he ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... portion in a wine-glass, according to the directions, proceeded to administer it to the gasping patient; but, while the glass was at her lips, the last paroxysm of death came on, and with it something more of that consciousness now fleeting for ever. Dashing aside the nostrum with one hand, with the other she drew the shrinking and half-fainting girl to her side, and, pressing her down beside her, appeared to give utterance to that which, from the ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... own brief innings better, as men who know that our March is passing where Pepys' May has flown before, and that we shall soon be with him and his wife, and the Scot, and the red- faced parson. So fleeting is life, whose record outlives it for ever; so brief, so swift, so faint the joys and sorrows, and all that we make marvel of in our own fortunes and ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the emblem of thy state In flowers that bloom and die; Or in the shadow's fleeting form, That ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... Cain and Ham, and Pope and Turk, who are as father and son to each other, can afford to despise the judgment of the true Church on the strength of fleeting and meager successes in this life, why can not we afford in turn to despise their power and censure, on the strength of the everlasting blessings which we possess? Ham was not moved by his father's curse. Full of anger against him, and ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... she always did. And even had she suffered far more on the girl's account than she actually had, who could have resisted such pleading to be forgiven? Contrition had been so plainly visible in those grey-green eyes, and Arethusa had given so many kisses—soft and fleeting as thistledown they were, yet very satisfactory to Miss Letitia as kisses—that it was quite impossible for Miss Letitia not to believe in the perfect genuineness of ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... at 'Zekiel. His face was grave, but he nodded for her to go on. "She stayed in bed for three weeks, and during that time she lived over her short life a hundred, yes, a thousand, times; she knew that her fancy had been but a fleeting dream. A suspicion that perhaps the young man had imagined her feelings towards him was what had nearly broken her heart. Supposing you were the man, 'Zekiel, and I were the woman in this little story, could you forgive me if I said I was sorry and ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... years of preparation mark the pathway for the splendid souls, And generations live and die and seem no nearer to their goals, And yet the purpose of it all, the fleeting pleasure and the woe, The laughter and the grief of life that all who come to earth must know May be to pave the way for one—one man to serve the Will Divine And it is possible that he may be your little boy ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to 'get a toy? For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy? Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown, Would with the sceptre ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... brought the watch from the nail over the mantel, where, all through his sickness it had ticked away the weary hours, just as it ticked the night its first owner died, with only Hugh sitting near, and listening as it told the fleeting moments. ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... passed them in Whitehall a motorcar going very fast, the occupant of which, a handsome young man, caught the most fleeting glimpse of them—hardly enough to be certain he recognized Zara. But it gave him a ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... a near-by market is a little florist's shop, so small that one might pass twenty times without noticing it; the man, a local authority, who has kept it for years, makes a specialty of the great long-stemmed single violets, whose fleeting fragrance no words may express. They call them Californias now, but they are evidently the opulent kin of those sturdy, dark-eyed Russian violets of my mother's garden, and as they mean more than any other flower to me, Evan always ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... to you how this world and all its fleeting follies seemed to melt away before us, and how each of us felt our soul alone in the presence of our Maker, as though nothing mattered, or ever would matter, but how we stood with Him. One hardly dared to draw one's breath. Mademoiselle de Bourbon was almost stifled with the sobs she tried to restrain ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spell that he began to work that very night. After that he spent nearly all his time working with the magic palette. He often passed whole days beside the sheet of water in the forest. He painted it when the sun shone on it and it was spotted all over with the reflections of fleeting white clouds. He painted it covered with water lilies rocking on the ripples. He painted it by moonlight, when but two or three stars in the empty sky shone down upon it; and at sunset, when it lay ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others. At least, those who have not thoroughly examined to the bottom all their own tenets, must confess they are unfit to prescribe to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... necessarily indulge the pleasing idea of gratitude, and join a thought of my first great friend Mr. LOFFT. And on this head, I believe every reader, who has himself any feeling, will judge rightly of mine: if otherwise, I would much rather he would lay down this volume, and grasp hold of such fleeting pleasures as the world's business may afford him. I speak not of that gentleman as a public character, or as a scholar. Of the former I know but little, and of the latter nothing. But I know from experience, and I glory in this fair opportunity of saying it, ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... soul about. It was certainly a dreary expanse, but the sunlight there seemed strangely brilliant, I thought, and, what was more curious, appeared to be alive. It was quivering. The transient glittering of some seagulls remote in the blue was as if you could glimpse, now and then, fleeting hints of what is immaculate in heaven. Nothing of our business was in sight anywhere except the white stalk of a lighthouse, and that, I knew, was miles away across the estuary whose waters were then invisible, for it was not only low tide, but I was descending ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... between the warning and the flood; and for all that time he held on his way, nor faltered in his faith. Does our faith realise that which lies before us with anything like similar clearness? Do we see that future shining through all the trivial, fleeting present? Does it possess weight and solidity enough to shape our lives? Noah's creed was much shorter than ours; but I fear his ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... beaten and tossed, they rested disheartened and hopeless. Then, as they drifted, a sound struggled to them against the wind—a faint cry, illusive and fleeting as a dream voice—and, still doubting, they heard ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... How much beneficial reflection and conversation it excited! How necessary, in an age of sensation morals and free-love theories, to have self-indulgence occasionally exhibited in all its hideous nastiness, and without any of its fleeting, deceptive, imaginary charms! The instantaneous detection of the Otero murderers last autumn, and of the robbers of Adams's express-car last winter, as related in the daily papers, and the picture presented ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... jealous fancies thus conjured up are fleeting in the shadows of summer clouds; and, soon passing, give place to pleasanter thoughts. Now that land is near, and a seaport soon to be reached, the young ladies are this night unusually elated; and, listening to the vivid description of South Sea scenes, they reflect less sadly and ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... knew little of the Mehrikans save what I had learned at college, a perfunctory and fleeting knowledge, as they were a people who interested ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... In the fleeting and impoverished life of Vauvenargues his friendships were the main adventure. We have mentioned a name which is too frequently the object of malignity on English lips, the name of Voltaire. No one would pretend that the multiform ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... was all Alice got. Her burning curiosity to know precisely how this young couple stood must go unsatisfied for the time being. She had only caught a few fleeting glimpses of the man who had given Joan the key to life, and every time had wondered, from something in his eyes, whether he found things wholly good. She was just a little suspicious of romances. Her own had worn thin so quickly. "Good-by, my dear," she said. "Don't forget you're dining ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... is the meaning of a "perennial plant" in botany? Ans. A plant continuing more than two years.—Give the contrary of "perennial." Ans. Fleeting, short-lived. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... just below the spot I was standing on, the water plunged down a nearly precipitous descent, from which it apparently (for the spray prevented one seeing exactly) fell perpendicularly into the pool below, sending up as it did so gossamer veils of spray full of fleeting, faint, and ever varying iris hues. This pool is flanked, and probably about 100 yards below the foot of the previously mentioned fall, on the northern side by a precipice about 250 feet high, down which, in four separate cascades, falls the water of the branch of the river which cuts off ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... jeweler had an impulse of shame—obscure, instinctive, and fleeting; shame of his eagerness to be informed, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... this theory what we call the world, with all its supposed infinitudes of space and time, its systems of suns and planets, its seemingly endless forms of inorganic matter and organic life, shrivels up, on a close inspection, into a fleeting, a momentary figment of thought. It is like one of those glass baubles, iridescent with a thousand varied and delicate hues, which a single touch suffices to shatter into dust. The philosopher, like the sorcerer, has but to wave his ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... such. To us it certainly often seems as if there were masses of human beings whose sole idea of living is to gratify their bodily needs,—but I fancy it is only because we do not know them sufficiently that we judge them thus. Few, if any, are so utterly materialistic as never to have had some fleeting intuition of the Higher existence. They may lack the force to comprehend it, or to follow its teaching,—but in my opinion, the Divine is revealed to all men once at least in ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... that everything was fleeting, that everything wore out, that everything that was not dead would die, and that even the illusory ties holding them together would not endure. Their sadness did not bring them together. On the contrary, they were separated by all the force of their two sorrows. To suffer together, alas, ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... not rather a mere confluence of various tongues perpetually subject to changes and intermixtures. It is this which has made English literature so extremely mutable, and the reputation built upon it so fleeting. Unless thought can be committed to something more permanent and unchangeable than such a medium, even thought must share the fate of everything else, and fall into decay. This should serve as a check upon ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... you like to see her?" Jewel gave a fleeting glance at Mrs. Forbes. "She always comes to the table with ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... a strange old superstition that even Death must listen to the voice of Time in gold; that, when the scanty numbered moments of the sick are fleeting, a gold watch laid in the wasted palm, and pointing the earthly hours, compels the scythe of Death to pause, the timeless power to bow before the two great gods of the human race—time ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... Think of the premise. As God the invisible is the changeless, what is the variable, fleeting, visible unreality? The real is everlasting, the unreal is transitory. The real is ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... I had launched was a wilderness indeed in comparison with the Eden I had left. I would not have made the slightest effort to escape from death in any form; and though I was not senseless enough to prefer an eternity of untried wretchedness to the fleeting sorrows of mortal life, yet as my conscience was lulled to rest by the self-delusion that I suffered more than I deserved, and had therefore a claim on divine justice, and as I was willing to receive the supposed ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... dragged by. Jonas put in his time alternately going over the new plan and feeling more frightened than he had ever believed possible. Claerten reached him once, but the contact was weak and fleeting; the director hadn't enough strength to reach him again, at least not for a day or so. Jonas was exactly where he'd wanted to ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... seems to be the cause of this great danger of the Kurus. Alas, this sin was committed from temptation by foolish Duryodhana, desirous of wealth; I believe all this to be the untoward effect of ever-fleeting Time that bringeth on everything. Tied to the wheel of Time, like its periphery, I am not capable of flying away from it. Tell me, O Sanjaya, where shall I go? What shall I do, and, how shall I do it? These foolish Kauravas will all be destroyed, their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... roses: none of them had ever equaled the western light on the old red paint. Over and over again he had tried to recall the magic, to set the door at the precise angle to catch the level rays, but in vain. It was a moment of beauty, fleeting as the sunset itself, and only to be found in the one permanence that is memory. He remembered it now with a thousand other impressions as lasting and as lost, and childhood and youth came alive in him and hurt and helped him. Yes, this was home. In a hostile universe there was one ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the swifter they fly; Love takes no account of the fleeting hours; He walks in a dream 'mid the blooming of flowers, And never awakes till the blossoms die. Ah lovers are lovers the wide world over— In the hunter's lodge and the royal palace. Sweet are the lips of his love to the lover— Sweet as new wine in a golden chalice From ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... of his attire. He recalled it now, for the frosty gray eyes of Juliana ran about him and came to rest upon his own eyes. For the taut moment that he braved her glance it unaccountably seemed to him that the forbidding mouth of the woman twitched nervously into the beginning of a smile. It was a fleeting effect, but it did seem as if she had almost laughed, then caught herself. And there was a tremolo defect in the organ tone with which she now again demanded in blistering politeness, "May ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... no further obstacle to the free progress of our love; and accordingly my dear Dubois became my mistress, and we made each other happy during all the time we spent at Berne. I was quite cured of my misadventure with the horrible widow, and I found that if love's pleasures are fleeting so are its pains. I will go farther and maintain that the pleasures are of much longer duration, as they leave memories which can be enjoyed in old age, whereas, if a man does happen to remember the pains, it is so slightly as to have ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... much in the keen satire of his drawing and legends, but in his startling, his strikingly truthful creations. Creations we have had from Leech, Keene, and others—from Leech's pure sense of fun and jollity; from Keene's unerring observation of men and women, and fleeting emotion—but those of Mr. du Maurier go deeper into vices, virtues, habits, and motives, and are at the root of his pictorial commentaries. He has given us true pictures of the manners of his time; and those manners he has satirised with more ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... from his poem the termination of his exile; he reckoned on Fame as his mediator; but he died too soon to receive the palm of his country. Often is the fleeting life of man worn out in adversity! and if glory triumph, if at length he land upon a happier shore, he no sooner enters the port than the grave yawns before him, and destiny, in a thousand shapes, often announces the end of life by the ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... Heaven and Earth. How silent! How solitary! It stands alone and changes not. It revolves without danger to itself and is the mother of the universe. I do not know its name and so call it the Path. With reluctance I call it the Infinite. Infinity is the Fleeting, the Fleeting is the Vanishing, the Vanishing is the Reverting." The Tao is in the Passage rather than the Path. It is the spirit of Cosmic Change,—the eternal growth which returns upon itself to produce new forms. It recoils upon itself like the dragon, the beloved ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... conversation. Even had not the chauffeur's presence acted as a restraint, none of the party would have had the heart to make perfunctory conversation; the tragedy of the moment had touched them too deeply. What a strange, wonderful unraveling of life's tangled skeins had come with the few fleeting hours. Each turned the drama over in his mind, trying to make a reality of it and spin into the warp and woof of the tapestry time had already woven this thread of new color. But so startling was it in hue that ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... careworn face reminded Charlotte of the smile on St. Stephen's face, when he was dying. It was unearthly, angelic; but it was also very fleeting. Presently he added ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... hawthorn brake, Where bluebells draw the sky down to the wood, Where, 'mid brown leaves, the primroses awake And hidden violets smell of solitude; Beneath green leaves bright-fluttered by the wing Of fleeting, beautiful, immortal Spring, I should have said, "I love you," and your eyes Have said, "I, too . . . " The ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... together, let not man put asunder.' I had received the soul's highest and clearest intuition as a direct revelation from the Divine, and I relied upon it as such implicitly, undoubtingly. Oh, with what earnest faith, for a brief and fleeting season, I believed that the seal of the Omnipotent had been set upon our union, earthly as well as spiritual, and that no power on earth or in hell could prevail against its consummation! How I revelled in this sweet belief; how this blest and silent consciousness wrapped my soul in light, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a winter hath my absence been From Thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... A fleeting contortion, like mirthless ridicule, touched her lips as she saw him, with head lowered, cut more savagely into the piece of wood. She noticed, ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... hundred years the fleeting Caesars of Constantinople and Germany, I now descend, in the reign of Heraclius, on the eastern borders of the Greek monarchy. While the state was exhausted by the Persian war, and the church was distracted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... interested in a certain rare quality of delicate femininity in the girl's face and figure, and his ear too quick to appreciate the music of her cultured voice, that he should not be able to recall such pleasant memories later. Indeed, during those fleeting moments on the threshold of the theater, he had garnered quite a number of minor impressions, not only of the ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... Ever since they had fallen into the habit of abstracted talks on this imponderable subject, Piney had seemed able, with a sort of elfin craft, to make Bruce remember Miss Elsie Gossamer's light, fleeting touch upon his life. He had never mentioned Miss Gossamer to Piney in all their mutual experience, yet the tramp-boy was constantly skirmishing up from afar with a generalisation, like a high-held transparency, that illuminated Miss Gossamer's ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... 29th of July, 1830, Mrs. Boardman writes to her sister from Maulmain, whither they had gone for the benefit of her children's health: "We must look beyond this frail fleeting world for our true peace. Alas, I know by most bitter experience, that it is in vain to seek for true happiness here below. My fondest earthly hopes have again and again been dashed. Torn from the bosom of my dear father's family, my heart was almost broken; and when ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... Though the Church made the attempt in "Parzival", it could never lay its hands so effectively upon this Celtic material, because it contained too many elements which were root and branch inconsistent with the essential teachings of Christianity. A fleeting comparison of the noble end of Charlemagne's Peers fighting for their God and their King at Ronceval with the futile and dilettante careers of Arthur's knights in joust and hunt, will show better than mere words ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... the tribes differ, but there is a prevalent belief in a principle of good that the Moros call Tuhan. The sun, moon, and stars are the light that shines from him,—he is everywhere, all-seeing, all-powerful; he has given fleeting souls to brutes and eternal souls to men. The soul enters a child's body at birth, through the soft space in the top of the head, and leaves through the skull at death. Their first men were giants, and Eve was fifty feet high, but as men's minds grew their bodies ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... fast asleep, And dreamt she heard them bleating; But when she awoke, she found it a joke, For they were still a-fleeting. ...
— Ring O' Roses - A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book • Anonymous
... past life were razed to the ground, and the place they had once occupied was sown with salt, to be rebuilt no more for ever. It was like the change from this Life to that other hidden one, when so many of the motives which have actuated all our earthly existence, will have become more fleeting than the shadows of a dream. With a wrench of his soul from the past, so much of which was as nothing, and worse than nothing to him now, Mr. Carson took some hours, after he had witnessed the death of his son's murderer, to consider ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... that my new companion could not have abandoned herself to me in this manner, without having made up her mind to be complaisant; but this was not enough for me, it was my humour to be loved. This was my chief aim, everything else was only fleeting enjoyment, and as I had not had a love affair since I parted with Zaira, I hoped most fervently that the present adventure would prove to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and restful inebriety. Life no doubt had moments with that quality of beauty, of unbidden flying rapture, but the trouble was, they lasted no longer than the span of a cloud's flight over the sun; impossible to keep them with you, as Art caught beauty and held it fast. They were fleeting as one of the glimmering or golden visions one had of the soul in nature, glimpses of its remote and brooding spirit. Here, with the sun hot on his face, a cuckoo calling from a thorn tree, and in the air the honey savour of gorse—here ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in the midst of certain most important experiences— must lie in the nature of the feeling of personality. What is that feeling? On what is it based? How can it be described? The difficulties of introspection have led many to deny the possibility of such self-fixation. The fleeting moment passes, and we grasp only an idea or a feeling; the Ego has slipped away like a drop of mercury under the fingers. Like the hero of the German poet, who ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... for his suffering, and he thought how he must go away and travel again; only open solitude and wandering with rough men could still his pain; primitive Nature was the one balm.... That fellow Tahar—why did he delay? Owen thought of the eagles, the awful bird pursuing the fleeting deer, and himself riding in pursuit. This was the life that would cure him— how soon? In three months? in six? in ten years? It would be strange if he were to become a bedouin for love of her, and he walked on thinking how they had lain together one night listening to the silence, hearing nothing ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... that you are father to this child, this dispenser of immortalities. You who bear a name that will still live in the mouths of men when all the race of kings has been forgotten, it is not meet that you bare your head before the fleeting fames and dignities of a day—cover yourself!" And truly he looked right fine and princely when he said that. Then he gave order that the Bailly of Rheims be brought; and when he was come, and stood bent low and bare, the King said to ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... of this kind undergoing a slow decomposition and possessing little volatility, it, when mixed with other very fleeting scents, gives permanence to them on the handkerchief, and for this quality the ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... began afresh! The black night caught me in his mesh, Whirled me up, and flung me prone! I was left on the college-step alone. I looked, and far there, ever fleeting Far, far away, the receding gesture, And looming of the lessening vesture, Swept forward from my stupid hand, While I watched my foolish heart expand In the lazy glow of benevolence O'er the various modes of man's belief. I sprang up with fear's vehemence. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... recollection, yet living in the dreams of his soul. He thought of the period when he, a happy child like those before him, had knelt and heard the same sweet words breathed o'er his bending head: he remembered having received a father's kiss, and a mother's smile gleamed like a star in his memory; but the fleeting visions of childhood were fading again into darkness, when Kenneth arose, and, clasping the Indian wildly to his breast, exclaimed, "My son, my son! my long lost Charles!" The springs of the father's love ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... were the fleeting shadows of the Docetes. A more substantial, though less simple, hypothesis, was contrived by Cerinthus of Asia, [14] who dared to oppose the last of the apostles. Placed on the confines of the Jewish and Gentile world, he labored to reconcile the Gnostic with the Ebionite, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... positive relief, therefore, when the vehicle bowled swiftly into a quiet cross street, and he was vouchsafed only fleeting glimpses of broad avenues where fresh multitudes of lamps again ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... regard. After watching him a while the conductor suddenly turned his head and looked directly at Mary Louise, with a curious expression, as if connecting his two passengers. Then he went on through the train, but the girl's heart was beating high and the little man, while seeming to eye the fleeting landscape through the window, wriggled somewhat uneasily ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... reveal the soul, the mouth the flesh, the chin stands for purpose, the nose means will. But over and behind all is that fleeting Something we call "expression." This Something is not set or fixed, it is fluid as the ether, changeful as the clouds that move in mysterious majesty across the surface of a summer sky, subtle as the sob of rustling leaves—too faint at times for human ears—elusive as the ripples that play ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... them all our worldly hankerings after the seen and temporal. Then we shall bear fruit that He will gather into His garner. The cares and the pleasures and the wealth that terminate in, and are occupied with, this poor fleeting present are small and insignificant. Let us try to yield ourselves up wholly to the higher influences of that Divine Spirit, and in true consecration receive the engrafted word. And then He will give to us to drink of that river of His pleasures, drinking of which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that Jane would now look upon him with very different eyes. And even while he hoped, his spirit sank a bit now and again in her company. But he put the weak side away and told himself that love was at best a fleeting passion. ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... worth to win? Deserving rather of our blame were he Who having seen thee undisturbed could be.' None such was I, for, straightway stricken sore, My heart bowed low to Love, the conqueror. And ah! no false and fleeting love is mine, Such as for painted beauty feigns to pine; Nor doth my passion, although deep and strong, Seek its own wicked pleasure in thy wrong. Nay; on this journey I would rather die Than know that thou hadst fallen, and that I Had wrought thy shame and foully brought to harm The virtue which ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... rear parlour that was Mrs. Page's bedroom was a rather dim and dreary place; such light as it had fell through one long, high window that gave only upon a narrow air shaft; it was only in mid-July that the actual sunlight—a bright and fleeting triangle—touched the worn red carpet and the curly-maple bed. In winter the window gave almost no light at all. Julia dressed by gaslight ten months out of the year, and had to sit up in her warm blankets and stare ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Even Jill had a fleeting realisation that the true meaning of Christmas was something quite apart from presents, and turkey, and plum-puddings, while Betty's thoughts flew back to the day of her confirmation, and she vowed herself ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... unconscious selection, as far as pigeons are concerned, depends on a universal principle in human nature, namely, on our rivalry, and desire to outdo our neighbours. We see this in every fleeting fashion, even in our dress, and it leads the fancier to endeavour to exaggerate every peculiarity in his breeds. A great authority on pigeons (6/44. Eaton 'Treatise on Pigeons' 1858 page 86.), says, "Fanciers do not and will not admire a medium standard, that is, half and half, which is neither ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... wrong to say that they had never been associated with the charming vivacity of Adele, as well as, at other times, with the sweet graces of Rose Elderkin. But these illusions had been of a character so transitory, so fleeting, that he had come to love their brilliant changes, and to look forward with some dread to the possible permanence of them, or such fixedness as should take away the charming drift of his vagaries. If, in some wanton and quite impossible moment, the modest Rose had conquered her delicacy so far ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... years Of pleasure, and of varied pleasure too, Had worn the soft impression half away. What I once felt, I would recall; the faint Responsive voice grew fainter each reply: Imagination sank amid the scenes It laboured to create; the vivid joy Of fleeting youth I followed, and possessed. 'Tis the first moment of the tenderest hour, 'Tis the first mien on entering new delights, We give our peace, our power, ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... ancient Gaul. It was a great, unregulated force, rushing hither and thither. Impelled by insatiate greed for the possessions of their neighbors, there was no permanence in their loves or their hatreds. The enemies of to-day were the allies of to-morrow. Guided entirely by the fleeting desires and passions of the moment, with no far-reaching plans to restrain, the sixty or more tribes composing the Gallic people were in perpetual state of feud and anarchy, apparently insensible to the ties of brotherhood, ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... me," she said cheerfully, resuming her seat. She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss's hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm. "Of course you wanted to smoke. I can't think why I didn't realize it ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... for Death's harvest, The fruits of life long tarrying, Full early to pluck them In the fleeting bloom of spring—Was it thy lot, was it thy bourn? Thy lot and thy ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... S. KING, NO. 1 CORNHILL. "'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume; And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science; blinds The ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... the great masters of style in the language. In his greatest passages, as in the Vision of Sudden Death and the Dream Fugue, the cadence of his elaborately piled-up sentences falls like cathedral music, or gives an abiding expression to the fleeting pictures of his most gorgeous dreams. His character unfortunately bore no correspondence to his intellectual endowments. His moral system had in fact been shattered by indulgence in opium. His appearance ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... once bright—genial—heavenly. So sudden and so early a prelusion of summer, it was generally feared, could not last. But that only made everybody the more eager to lose no hour of an enjoyment that might prove so fleeting. It seemed as if the whole population of the place, a population among the most numerous in Christendom, had been composed of hybernating animals suddenly awakened by the balmy sunshine from their long winter's torpor. Through every hour of the golden ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... you love me not—a man of the world, you have given me your plighted troth, and are ready to redeem it; but that entire affection, that love whole and abiding, where—where is that vision of my youth? I am but a pastime of your life, and I would be its all;—but a fleeting thought, and I would be your whole soul. I would have our two hearts one; but ah, my Arthur, how lonely yours is! how little you give me of it! You speak of our parting, with a smile on your lip; of our meeting, ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sidney were treading the complicated measure; and simultaneously Henry ceased to be a youngish twenty-one and was even conscious of a fleeting doubt as to whether he was really ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... in one year there be, So many windows in this Church we see; As many marble pillars here appear As there are hours throughout the fleeting year; (8760) As many gates as moons one year does view. Strange tale to tell; yet not ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... knowledge of wild animals is gained from rare, fleeting glimpses of frightened hoof or wing in the woods, to consider that there can be such a thing as a school for the Wood Folk; or that instruction has any place in the life of the wild things. Nevertheless it is probably true that education ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... Nort heard Bud yell, seemingly from a great distance, though, in reality from a position directly behind him. Then as his vision dimmed again, Nort caught a fleeting sight of a lasso whirling and writhing through the air ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... who would linger till bright eyes grow dim, Kind voices mute, and faithful bosoms cold? Till carking care, and toil, and anguish grim, Cast their dark shadows o'er this fleeting world, Till fancy's many-coloured wings are furled, And all, save the proud spirit, ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... hastened onward, never pausing for breath, till he found himself all at once in the great Ring. He knew the city well, but in his race he had bestowed no attention upon the familiar windings and turnings, thinking only of overtaking the fleeting vision, no matter how, no matter where. Now, on a sudden, the great, irregular square opened before him, flanked on the one side by the fantastic spires of the Teyn Church, and the blackened front of the huge Kinsky Palace, on the other by the half-modern Town Hall with its ancient ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... he lay there wondering vaguely at his strange misfortunes. The fever in his blood was running high, and, instead of harboring sober thought, his mind was filled with fleeting fancies. ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... time to learn its name or to know whither I was driving; it whirled me past the houses and out into the country beyond; only when I had pulled up two miles beyond did I know what I had done and did I realise that I had missed for ever one of those pleasures which, fleeting as they are, are all that is to be discovered in human life. It went so fast, that before I knew what had happened the Griffin had flashed by me ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind, but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined, alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will not be very troublesome! ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... better to act folly than to talk it. The essence of pantomime is practical absurdity keeping the wits in constant chase, coming upon one by surprise, and starting off again before you can arrest the fleeting 'phantom:' the essence of this piece was prosing stupidity remaining like a mawkish picture on the stage, and overcoming your impatience by the force of ennui. A speaking pantomime such as this one is not unlike a flying waggon," ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... being on the verge of impertinence to Captain Merrifield, she submitted to the prospect more quietly than her friends had dared to hope. Lance had almost expected her to deport her charge, parrot and all, suddenly and secretly by an Australian liner, and had advised Bernard, on a fleeting meeting at Bexley, to be on his guard if she hinted at anything so preposterous; but Bernard shook his head, and said Angel was more to be trusted than her elders thought. "Waves and storms don't go over us for ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... as come he must, Grieve not that we this sorry dust Do leave behind. For when this fleeting life be run, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Another fleeting pause at the top rewarded his endeavor, and then a couple of hundred yards of hardly perceptible upward incline produced again the swift and ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... had herself been heard to use seemed to overwhelm her. Her calmness fled and she cast a fleeting look of anguish at Mr. Jeffrey. But his face was turned from sight, and, meeting with no help there, or anywhere, indeed, save in her own powerful nature, she recovered as best she could the ground she had lost and, with a trembling question ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... antecedent embodied existence, and for its cause the difference of degree of merit and demerit of animated beings, liable to faults such as ignorance and the like, is well known—from /S/ruti, Sm/ri/ti, and reasoning—to be non-eternal, of a fleeting, changing nature (sa/m/sara). The following text, for instance, 'As long as he is in the body he cannot get free from pleasure and pain' (Ch. Up. VIII, 12, 1), refers to the sa/m/sara-state as described above. From the following passage, on the other ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... tearful eye, Mary, Seems to ask me why, Mary, I can wait till sunset on'y. Ah! turn not away; I am out for the day On a Fleet and fleeting pony. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the Colonel, with the piety of a confessor, (wringing Mr. Lovelace's hand,) snatch these few fleeting moments, and commend yourself ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... outspread, In happy days ere Love, alas, was dead; So now, farewell! Ere the new day shall break Adown their gleaming track, my way I take." She turned; but ere the gate that looked without She reached, one fleeting moment paused in doubt Upon a river's brink. In one swift glance All coming time she saw. A weird romance Wherein she traced great peoples yet unborn, New springing cycles, strange lands cleft with tarn Or pleasant vale, and green plains stretching far, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... from the fresh, the soft and tender bed Of her still mother, gentle night out flew, The fleeting balm on hills and dales she shed, With honey drops of pure and precious dew, And on the verdure of green forests spread The virgin primrose and the violet blue, And sweet-breathed Zephyr on his spreading wings, Sleep, ease, repose, rest, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... eyes—the dreamy, cognisant expression; glance at the pretty mouth and the dainty ears. Her demeanour is obviously that of a meek and modest woman, but Punter, with his true genius, has caught that glint of inward fire, that fleeting look of shy mischief that earned for her the ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... repaired with the emperor to Malmaison, and the faithful, who were not willing to leave him in his misfortune, gathered around him, watched over his life, and gave to his residence a fleeting reflection of the old grandeur and magnificence. For they who now stood around Napoleon, guarding his person from any immediate danger that threatened him at the hands of fanatic enemies or hired assassins, were ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... preaching according to the forms of the new religion was to be practised in places where it had already taken place. Letters general were immediately despatched to the senates of all the cities, proclaiming these articles of agreement and ordering their execution. Thus for a fleeting moment there was a thrill of joy throughout the Netherlands. The inquisition was thought forever abolished, the era ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I represent the Denver Round-up. I'm interested in this sheep-herder killing—merely as a reporter," he added, with a fleeting smile. "Did you know old man Dunn, of Deer Creek, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... very engaging specimen of the genus Baronet in Sir Barnet Skettles, who was so kind to Paul Dombey and so angry with poor Mr. Baps. Sir Leicester Dedlock is on a larger scale—in fact, almost too "fine and large" for life. But I recall a fleeting vision of perfect loveliness among Miss Monflathers's pupils—"a baronet's daughter who by some extraordinary reversal of the laws of Nature was not only plain in feature but ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... earth to-day, are living so close to the borderland of the new birth that they catch fleeting glimpses of the longed-for freedom, but the full import of its meaning does not dawn. There is yet another veil, however thin, ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... to wagering money," observed Rackliff wisely, "the fellow who bets on sympathy or loyalty is a chump. I always back my judgment and try to use some common sense about it. I hope you don't think for a fleeting moment that I contemplate finishing my preparatory school education in this stagnant hole. Not for little Herbert. I'd get paresis here in less than a year. I'm pretty sure the governor simply chucked me down here for a term, as sort of a warning. I'll go back ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... sea swept in a torrent. Fighting madly for the exit hatch into the chamber below, McClure was dashed off his feet by the lurch of the smitten submarine and sprawled against the steel side of the conning tower. With the spray dashing in his face Jack had a fleeting glimpse of his commander, and by a superhuman effort drew himself back into the turret against the mass of water. Hurling himself forward, he groped about for his captain and found him finally on the floor of the turret. Exerting all his strength, he succeeded in hurling "Little Mack" down into ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... must be done, too, according to the teacher's knowledge of the principles of evolution, and not merely out of regard to small and fleeting interests. The teacher must therefore gradually learn his own place in evolution, so that he may become one-pointed as to himself; unless he practises one-pointedness with regard to his own ideal for himself, he will not be able to bring it to bear on his surroundings. He must try ...
— Education as Service • J. Krishnamurti
... botanically, geologically, and otherwise. It was one of his vexations that nature, art, science, history, commerce, were so long, and time and a voraciously intelligent but mortal and limited baronet so fleeting. He would have liked to spend several months on the Pacific coast, looking into a thousand things with unflagging zeal and interest. It was really afflicting to turn his back upon the early Spanish settlers, the Jesuit missions, the grape and olive production, mining ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... had been too hurried for more than fleeting moments of self-study, but on this idle Sunday morning Price Ruyler's perturbed mind wandered to that inner self of his to which he once had longed to give a freer expression. It was odd that the conservative training, ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... our wedding day; Joyous hour, we give thee greeting! Whither, whither art thou fleeting? Fickle moment, prithee stay! What though mortal joys be hollow? Pleasures come, if sorrows follow. Though the tocsin sound, ere long, Ding dong! Ding dong! Yet until the shadows fall Over one and over all, Sing a merry madrigal - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Captain's house. When, at his motion, I opened the door and stepped into the hall, which was somewhat dark after the glare of the street, there came a flurry of lace, and soft arms were around my neck. And—well, what could a man do but return that kiss with interest? But the best things are but fleeting, for, when she glanced at my face, and saw who I was, she gave a little cry, broke from my arms, and vanished in confusion up the stairway, followed by the merry laughter of the real ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... of colours in a pigeon's neck, or the appearance of the broken oar in the water, must be allowed to have weight. But these and the like objections vanish, if we do not maintain the being of absolute external originals, but place the reality of things in ideas, fleeting indeed, and changeable;—however, not changed at random, but according to the fixed order of nature. For, herein consists that constancy and truth of things which secures all the concerns ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... the man who has mastered the apparently capricious, yet logical, reasoning of her heart; who can track her thought through the seemingly contradictory workings of her mind, and read the sensations, shy or bold, written in fleeting red, a bewildering ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... course of human affairs, the frailty and transitoriness of things apparently most durable and strong. In the case of this embroidery, on the contrary, we are struck with the durability and permanence of what would seem to be most frail and fleeting. William's conquest of England took place in 1066. This piece of tapestry, therefore, if Matilda really worked it, is about eight hundred years old. And when we consider how delicate, slender, and frail is the ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... light fleeting spirits, that glide o'er the steep, Oh, would ye but waft me across the wild deep! There fearless I'd mix in the battle's loud roar, I'd die with my Connel, and leave him ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... barrier of philosophic reasoning in their way; they still clung to me, in spite of every effort to the contrary. But the fact is, that I was, for the moment, the slave of a morbid and feverish sentiment, that left me completely at the mercy of the dark and fleeting images that passed over my fancy. I now came to a turn where the road began to slope down into the depths of a valley that ran across it. When I looked forward into the bottom of it, all was darkness impenetrable, for the moon-beams were thrown off by the height of the mountains that rose on ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... the fleeting figure until it vanished in the obscurity of Ludgate Hill and then with a ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... this quaint old region, this fleeting oasis in the Sahara of the building-mad suburban metropolis? I do, well; its market gardens, its circumambient lanes, its old, antiquarian stone ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... circulates among a whole people. The present nickname originated in derision on the expulsion of the majority of the Long Parliament by the usurping minority. It probably slept; for who would have stirred it through the Protectorate? and finally awakened at Richard's restored, but fleeting "Rump," to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... paying a fleeting return visit to the largest of the jewellery stores. After which she told herself that it was little short of going without shoes or stockings through the streets to have been married the length of time she had been married and to possess not a ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... But I don't reckon you'll ever get that fond wish gratified. We're not liable to meet up with each other again pronto. To-day we're here and to-morrow we're at Yuma, Arizona, say, for life is short and darned fleeting ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... struck me. There was no one, of all who spoke, who began to say as many things in favor of Joseph Hooker as I for years have done; and not in fleeting words, but printed chapters. There was plenty of eulogy, in nine-tenths of which I joined with all my heart. But it was of the soldiers'-talk order,—cheering and honest and loyal, appealing to the sentiments rather than the intelligence. What I have said ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... discharged the contents of my rifle rapidly, but without any attempt at aim, and then turning and flinging the now useless weapon into the canoe, I concentrated all my fast fleeting energies into one ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... society; called into being under the stern system of nature, to do the casual work of the world, the tasks which were transient and irregular, and yet which had to be done. They did not know that they were such, of course; they only knew that they sought the job, and that the job was fleeting. In the early summer they would be in Texas, and as the crops were ready they would follow north with the season, ending with the fall in Manitoba. Then they would seek out the big lumber camps, where there was winter work; or failing in this, would drift to the cities, and ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... the meaning of a "perennial plant" in botany? Ans. A plant continuing more than two years.—Give the contrary of "perennial." Ans. Fleeting, short-lived. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... which comes up naturally from the most ordinary situations; there is nothing superfluous, nothing retarding, nothing extraneous. But in addition to these general merits, we are also interested in Turgenev's novel because in it is caught and held a current, fleeting moment of a passing phenomenon, and in which a momentary phase of our life is typically drawn and arrested not only for ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... thy voice, Chloris! I feel my heart decay That powerful voice Calls my fleeting soul away: Oh! suppress that magic sound, ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... As a wave of bitter envy swept over him Telemachus saw for a moment the face of his mother Penelope, brows contracted with warning, white hand raised in admonition. For a fleeting second the memory of his quest brushed through the back of his mind. But ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... seen when his gaze had compelled hers, a look which seemed to him full of confession of things unutterable, full almost of appeal as if she realized that she was betraying a feeling that she feared to own even to herself, this look of a moment so fleeting clocks could hardly have measured it, filled him with a wild, unreasoning bliss. He did not again try to challenge her eyes. He sat in a dream of happiness; a vague, intangible, ecstatic sense that all was well, that the universe was in tune, ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... press, his successor, Grover Cleveland, in the first year of his second administration, is paying a high price for fleeting fame, with the serious question of what to do with the relative coinage of gold and silver, and the Democrats in Congress, for the first time in the history of the world, are referring each other with hot breath and flashing eye to the ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... brought back my fleeting senses, and I made a convulsive clutch with the other hand at the gunwale; while the next thing I remember is feeling myself helped over the side by the boy, who had climbed in, and lying in the bottom with the sun beating down ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... "if the strange offspring of my poor wit about which we have held pleasant counsel to-night hath mayhap had some small interest for ye, let these matters serve to call to mind the lesson that our fleeting life is rounded and beset with enigmas. Whence we came and whither we go be riddles, and albeit such as these we may never bring within our understanding, yet there be many others with which we and they that do come after us will ever strive for the answer. Whether success do ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the lagoon wears a different aspect each morning when you rise, the sky offers a varied composition of cloud each evening as the sun sets. Words cannot describe Venice, nor brush portray her ever-fleeting, ever-varying charm. Venice is to be felt, not reproduced; to live there is to live a poem, to be daily surfeited with a wealth of beauty enough to ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... newly-awakened interest at Lettice; for the first time he thought of her as other than a school-girl; for the first time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex. Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting, unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable lapse of time. A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him ... she had been in his, Gordon Makimmon's, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was even and almost deferential, but the detective's watchful eyes intercepted a fleeting glance cast by the butler over his shoulder in the direction of the still ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... a right character, connected with the former, and very much in our power to form ourselves to." This, then, is the view which we think should be entertained with respect to the natural evils of this life: they are intended by the infinitely wise and good Ruler of the world to detach us from the fleeting things of time and sense, by the gradual formation of a habit of moral goodness, arising from a resistance against the influence of such things and firm adherence to the will of God, and to form our character for a state of fixed eternal blessedness. Such is the beneficent ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... that seemed to be forming in his countenance. It stole upon the features as if they were being slowly sprinkled with fine dust, blotting their expression into a flat lifelessness. Then the rush of a train passing over the bridge disturbed him. With a fleeting look of pain he sat up, glanced first furtively at me, and then ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... on Thornton's knee, Buck was content to adore at a distance. He would lie by the hour, eager, alert, at Thornton's feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it, studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting expression, every movement or change of feature. Or, as chance might have it, he would lie farther away, to the side or rear, watching the outlines of the man and the occasional movements of his body. And often, such was the communion in which they lived, the strength of Buck's gaze ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... you, furl the battered sail, Fling out the anchor, and with rapture hail The pleasant prospect—storms will come too soon. They are but suicides, at best, who fail To seize when'er they can Joy's fleeting boon— Fools, who exclaim "'tis night," yet always ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... weak? He could look back to that squalid tragedy of his youth, and see that a more violent, a more determined man could have possessed himself of the girl whom he had lost. And now would it not be more manly, if more brutal, to stay here, where a hope, however fleeting, however fitful, of what might have been, had revisited him in the love of this young girl? He felt sure, if anything were sure, that something in him, in spite of their wide disparity of years, had captured ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... in them, if they did not go away, came into the hotel. The Maxwells themselves did this at last, for the sake of the warmth and the human companionship around the blazing hearth-fires in the parlors. They got a room with a stove in it, so that he could write; and there was a pensive, fleeting coziness in it all, with the shrinking numbers in the vast dining-room grouped at two or three tables for dinner, and then gathered in the light of the evening lamps over the evening papers. In these conditions ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... of you for a couple of days. I think, at the beginning of the third, I had just three and sixpence left wherewith to buy a razor to cut my throat withal. "Stuff and nonsense!" cried the last of the fleeting friends who had abided with me. "Three and sixpence for a razor, forsooth! why, a yard of good new cord, quite strong enough to bear your weight, can be bought in any shop in Tooley-street for a penny. You have just three and fivepence left, brother, to make yourself merry for the day, and, please ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... an hour of intimate excitement, when the burden of his friend's sacrifice seemed for a fleeting moment more intolerable than the wrench of explanation with his wife, had too effectually compromised himself. He had cringed, procrastinated, promised; had been ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... that loseth His life shall find it": so the Scripture runs. But I so hugged the fleeting self in me, So loved the lovely perishable hours, So kissed myself to death upon their lips, That on one pyre we perished in the end— A grimmer bonfire than the Church e'er lit! Yet all was well—or seemed so—till I heard That younger voice, an echo of my own, And, like a wanderer turning to ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... best. I loved her, but HAD loved her; three whole years Of pleasure, and of varied pleasure too, Had worn the soft impression half away. What I once felt, I would recall; the faint Responsive voice grew fainter each reply: Imagination sank amid the scenes It laboured to create; the vivid joy Of fleeting youth I followed, and possessed. 'Tis the first moment of the tenderest hour, 'Tis the first mien on entering new delights, We give our peace, our power, ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... to know that whenever you enter your gate and glance upward, you will always see the curtains parted, and between them, like an idol in a shrine, the ugly wooden back of a little oval or oblong looking-glass. It gives one a sense of permanence in a world where all is fleeting." ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... sitting next to Captain Courtenay?" she asked, and she had a fleeting impression that he was anxious for her to speak, ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... not been lighted, and as she came downstairs, a last Trustee stood, on the point of departure, in the open door that led to the porte-cochere. Jerusha caught only a fleeting impression of the man—and the impression consisted entirely of tallness. He was waving his arm towards an automobile waiting in the curved drive. As it sprang into motion and approached, head on for an instant, the glaring ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... is not bright, and its lower part is not obscure. Ceaseless in its action, it yet cannot be named, and then it again returns and becomes nothing. This is called the Form of the Formless, and the Semblance of the Invisible; this is called the Fleeting ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... work to another, his temporary habitations ranging from modern hotels to dog tents and shacks. In all the world there was no spot that he could call home; and there was no one who cared a button whether he came or went. His glimpses of other men's homes were rare and fleeting, and he was apt to thank Heaven that he was ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... feet treading the new road. But yet the total effect of that endless procession is to impress on the observer the transiency of humanity. And that wholesome thought is made more poignant still by the comparison which the writer here draws between the fleeting generations and the abiding earth. Man is the lord of earth, and can mould it to his purpose, but it remains and he passes. He is but a lodger in an old house that has had generations of tenants, each of whom has said for a while, 'It is mine'; and they all have drifted ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December's bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer's time; The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widow'd ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... these things; continually he had to be playing a part, trying to hide his folly under a pretence of being like other people, sensible and informed and amusing, whereas really he was more like an animal, interested in the foolish and fleeting impressions of the moment. He was not fit ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... the west. This gigantic and solitary apparition on a rock in the ocean was supposed to indicate the existence of a new world, and the direction in which it was to be sought, but it is probable that the shipwrecked Fleeting was quite innocent of any such magnificent visions. The original designation of the Flemish Islands, derived from their first colonization by Netherlanders, was changed to Azores by Portuguese mariners, amazed at the myriads of hawks which they found there. But ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mother mine," said she, turning in elfish mood to brush her lips across the frustrated fingers. "Art is long, if time is fleeting," she sang to the measure of her Non piu mesta, beginning again to shower its diamonds about till all the air seemed bright with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... call, in vain, in vain I call, While she like fleeting, fleeting Air; When press'd by some tempestuous Wind, Flys swifter from the voice of my Despair: Nor cast a pitying, pitying, pitying, pitying look behind, No not one, no not one, not one pitying, pitying look, ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... of violence with every suggestion of the sordid, but the poor sobbing fellow who now lay in the chair with his arms and head drooping over the big leather arm seemed to him as immaculately dressed as himself. Remembering the fleeting posture at the door, his eyes went involuntarily to the hanging, graphic hands. In the light of his reading-lamp they gleamed white, and as he watched, his heart sinking with pity at their thinness, two slow red drops rolled from under the cuffs down the palms, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... them. There was nothing to indicate that he was even interested. But Constance knew that that was the method of his shadowing. Never for a moment, she knew, did he permit himself to look into the eyes of his quarry, even for the most fleeting glance. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... when attracted by a face, would follow till he was able to transfer it to paper. Ida Prentice Whitcomb, who has compiled many anecdotes of da Vinci, says that it was also his habit to invite peasants to his house, and there amuse them with funny stories till he caught some fleeting expression of mirth which he was ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... link is the testimony of the man whose name you expect to bear. Miss Gordon"—she stooped closer, and whispered slowly: "Do not upbraid your lover; be tender, cling to him; and afford me the consolation of knowing that the unfortunate woman you befriended, and trusted, cast not even a fleeting shadow between your heart and his. Pray for me, that I may be patient and strong. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... about 1 p.m. our infantry made a second dash across the wall and this time reached the top of the hill. Below them they saw the stream of flying Boers hurrying across the veld. It was the moment for a vigorous outburst of musketry, but 'some one blundered,' and the fleeting moment sped without being taken advantage of. It is true that those men who first arrived on the summit were firing away, and were joined in doing so by every other man who breathlessly arrived. The company officers had just got their men well in hand, and were directing the ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... offence, By harmless merriment, or useful sense. Where aught of bright or fair the piece displays, Approve it only;—'tis too late to praise. If want of skill or want of care appear, Forbear to hiss;—the poet cannot hear. By all, like him, must praise and blame be found, At last, a fleeting gleam, or empty sound; Yet then shall calm reflection bless the night, When liberal pity dignified delight; When pleasure fir'd her torch at virtue's flame, And mirth was ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and life is fleeting; Artists, when their subjects treating, Should be very, very far ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... insipid and palled upon the sense. Let us eat, drink, and love, for to-morrow we die, would be in fact the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow? But, if awed by observing the improvable powers of the mind, we disdain to confine our wishes or thoughts to such a comparatively mean field of action; that only appears grand and important as it is connected with a boundless prospect and sublime hopes; what necessity ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... better days had evidently been used for a barn. The children were as much surprised as Peace, and after one frightened glance at the intruder, they both buried their heads in their patched aprons and cowered still lower among the weeds. But from the fleeting glimpse Peace had caught of the little faces, she knew they had been crying, and her first thought was, "They ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... little, flexed his muscles, grown stiff by his cramped position, and as he did so he caught a glimpse of a figure on the south face of the wall. But it was so fleeting he was not sure. If he had only brought his glasses with him he might have decided, but he was without them, and he concluded finally that it was merely an optical illusion. He and the Indian had the mountain walls to themselves, ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... round it. I think with awe still, of those rapid words, uttered in the shadow of the canopy, as my pallid wife sits by her, her Prayer-book on her knee; as the attendants move to and fro noiselessly; as the clock ticks without, and strikes the fleeting hours; as the sun falls upon the Kneller picture of Beatrix in her beauty, with the blushing cheeks, the smiling lips, the waving auburn tresses, and the eyes which seem to look towards the dim figure moaning ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and several after him at Court, had made a gallantry with——On this he paused for some time, and reflected on his passion for Sylvia; and this fantastic intrigue of the Prince's inspired him with a kind of curiosity to try, whether fleeting love, would carry him back again to this abandoned maid. In these thoughts, and such discourse, they passed away the time during supper; which ended, and a fresh bottle brought to the table, with a new command that none should interrupt them, the impatient Philander obliged Tomaso to give him ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... for forty-eight hours and to them it had no more terrors. Men overworked to the breaking point and women unnerved by hysteria dropped down on the cooling ashes and slept where they lay, for had they not seen the tall steel skyscrapers burn like a torch? Had they not beheld the cataracts of flame fleeting unhindered up the broad avenues, and over the solid ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... Twice the Sergeant lifted his Henry, sighting along the brown barrel, lowering the weapon again in doubt of the distance. He was conscious of exultation, of a swifter pulse of the heart, yet his nerves were like steel, his grip steady. Only a dim fleeting memory of the girl, half hidden in the darkness behind, gave him uneasiness—he could not turn and look into her eyes. Roman Nose was advancing now at the centre of that creeping half circle, a hulking figure ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... thoughts, like the labouring spider, That spreads her nets to entrap the silly fly, Or like the restless billows of the seas, That ever alter by the fleeting air, Still hovering past their wonted passions, Makes me amazed in these extremities. The king commands me on his embassage To Osrick's daughter, beauteous Alfrida, The height and pride of all this bounding ill; To post amain, plead love in his behalf, To court for him, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... and ruffled his feathers. He gave his head sundry little sidewise jerks and rapidly shifted his point of vision. Once there was the fleeting little ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... ignoring realities, and which can be shattered into fragments by anything that compels a man to see himself as he is? In such a fool's paradise thousands of us live. 'Use and wont,' the continual occupation with the trifles of our daily lives, the fleeting satisfactions of our animal nature, the shallow wisdom which bids us 'let sleeping dogs lie,' all conspire to mask, to many consciences, their unrest and their sin. We abstain from lifting the curtain behind which the serpent lies coiled ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... keenly for a chance to put his helm down. There was a perceptible lull in the wind, but the sea was high as ever. The heavy, racing clouds had broken in the zenith; there were rifts here and there through which shone fleeting gleams from the moon, lighting the furious ocean for a moment, then vanishing as the storm-wrack ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... realized, and forbear to follow it with untired gaze only when another, another, and yet another, come to provoke the same aesthetic fancy,—to win the same unspoken praise! How often does one long for artist's power to fix the fleeting lines, to catch the color, to seize the whole exotic charm of some special type!... One finds a strange charm even in the timbre of these voices,—these half-breed voices, always with a tendency ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... as the dog, even if dumb, which in justice he could scarcely be thought, was thus judged entitled to a consideration never vouchsafed to others, and duly received it, therefore, at all times in this enlightened land. And not only in the fleeting years of his existence, but equally when he lay down under the common hand of death. The dog, in those forgotten days, received embalmment, just as his master and mistress, and was then carried with some solemnity to the burial-ground ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... great Apostle to confer not with flesh and blood, and which took him into Arabia before he went to Jerusalem, was leading this quiet, country maiden to see that to be a follower of Christ means something more than to win a fleeting happiness in this life and a kind of pension in the next. She was beginning to understand that to be really Christ's means also to be a Christ; that to be His, one must seek for the lost sheep for whom He died. And so Rhoda—I call ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... I going?" She felt like one borne upon a wave, seaward, to the wonder, to the danger, perhaps, of a murmuring unknown. The rocks leaned forward; their teeth were fastened in the sky; they enclosed the train, banishing the sun and the world from all the lives within it. She caught a fleeting glimpse of rushing waters far beneath her; of crumbling banks, covered with debris like the banks of a disused quarry; of shattered boulders, grouped in a wild disorder, as if they had been vomited forth from some underworld or cast headlong ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... to a movement of friendliness for this working daughter of the people, and joined her on the other side of the stile in token of his approval. She, twisting round to face him, leaned now with her back against the bar, and the sunset fires lent a fleeting glory to her face. Perhaps she guessed how becoming the light was, for she took off her hat and let it touch to gold the ends and fringes of her rough abundant hair. Thus and at this moment she made an agreeable picture, to which stood as background ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... apple-trees.—No, said he, they are too long growing, and I don't want to plant for other people. The young farmer's father was spoken to about it; but he, with better reason, alleged that apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting. At last some one mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer. He had nothing else to do,—so he stuck in some trees. He lived long enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in America—who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting beauty than the Chicago of the stock-yards and the Pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their thousands—and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... place. The isolation for a white man must be terrible; sometimes two months will go by without his seeing another white face but that in his looking-glass, and when he does see another, it is only by a fleeting visit such as we now pay him, and to make the most of this, he stays on board ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... nurse he was more than polite, he was kind, and to Sibyl he was all in all, everything that father could be, everything that love could imagine. He kept himself, his wounded conscience, his fears, his heavy burden of sin in abeyance for the sake of the fast-fleeting little life, because he willed, with all the strength of his nature, to give the child every comfort that lay in his power during her ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... sharp Bang! as the right front tire went. The steering wheel snapped through his father's hands by half a turn. There was a splintering crash as the car shattered its way through the retaining fence, then came a fleeting moment of breathless silence as if the entire universe had ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Ray Vandyck, and Constance, lifting her eyes to his face, caught there a fleeting look that caused ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... wise men came to gaze and throngs of fools gaped, passing with flattering words. Where I go now I know not; but since I go from that humble house where they loved me, I shall be sad and alone. They pass so soon,—those fleeting mortal lives! Only we endure,—we, the things that the human brain creates. We can but bless them a little as they glide by: if we have done that, we have done what our masters wished. So in us our masters, being dead, yet ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... cold and grey above the ridge opposed to the burning brightness of the western horizon, and Grace Ashton pointed out the beautiful but fleeting hues of the landscape around them. Her companion, however, was engrossed by another object. Before them was an eminence marking the horizon to the north-west, though not more than a good bowshot from where they stood. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... mortal bane! Spite of thy charms, thou causest often pain And sore regret, of which we daily find A thousand instances attend mankind: For thou—O may it not displease the fair— A fleeting pleasure art, but lasting care. And always proves, alas! too dear the prize, Which, in the moment ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... when young, they appear as ignorant of the symptoms that mark its stages in the lives of their children, as if all memory of its existence had been obliterated out of their being. Perhaps this may be wisely designed, and no doubt it is, but, alas! its truth is a melancholy comment upon the fleeting character of the only passion that charms our early life, and fills the soul with sensations too ethereal to be retained by a heart which grosser associations have brought beneath the standard of purity necessary for their ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... earliest glimpse of morn, Pleas'd with the lapse of time, return; For now, perchance, I might not fail, To see the long expected sail! Then, as it blankly wore away, Courted the fleeting eye to stay! As they regardless mov'd along, Wooed the slow moments in a song. The time approaches! but the Hours With languid steps advance, And loiter o'er the summer flowers, Or in the sun-beams dance! Oh! haste along! for, lingering, ye Detain ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... retort was a mounting torment. He grasped the decanter and rattled its crystal mouth against the glass in his trembling hand. He flushed the glass, and then stood erect, holding it aloft for an instant. For one fleeting moment he held his head above the drowning waves of his abyss. He nodded easily at Goodwin, raised his brimming glass and murmured a "health" that men had used in his ancient Paradise Lost. And then so suddenly that he spilled the brandy over his ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... not speak at once, yet in those fleeting moments Mary had a strange sense of a question asked and answered. It was as if he were calling upon her for something she was not ready to give—as if he were drawing from her some subconscious admission, swaying her by a ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... been clenching between her fingers, dropped to the floor. With a purely automatic movement, I bent to recover it for her; she leaned down to receive it. Her pale face and lovely dilated eyes were close to me for a fleeting second, and though her lips did not move, I seemed to catch the merest breath, the faintest ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... some time is past over." His own time could neither appreciate nor reward them. Here is an element of greatness worthy of all imitation: he who works for popular applause, may have his reward, but it is fleeting and unsatisfying; he who works for truth alone, has a grand inner consequence while he works, and his name will be honored, if for nothing else, for this loyalty to truth. After what has been said of his servility and dishonesty, it is pleasing to contemplate this unsullied side of his escutcheon, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... listening to the same blessed words. It seems so mad and dreamlike that I have found myself thinking that, despite all our confidence, the world may be but a phantasmagoria, and ourselves, with our flesh that seems so solid, may be no more than fleeting wraiths. There is no one to rush between the scowling nations, as the poor hermit did between the gladiators in wicked Rome; there is no one to say, "Poor, silly peasant from pleasant France, why should you care to stab and torment that other poor flaxen-haired simpleton from Silesia? ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... fleeting hour, a month, a year, Is all that God permits us here, That we may learn to prize more high That heavenly ...
— Silver Links • Various
... the highway there came riding by a stranger, For an instant on her features, he a fleeting glance bestowed, Then he said: "My heart is fickle and the world is full of danger," And he offered her his stirrup and he ...
— Are Women People? • Alice Duer Miller
... we may call attention to the fact that the average man is a victim of Arrested Development, and that the fleeting years bring an increase of knowledge only in very exceptional cases. Health and prosperity are not pure blessings—a certain element of discontent is necessary to spur men on to a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... side before the galley should be reached. By my tactics of quick rushes I had doubtless made too fleeting a target to draw their fire, so I dashed at this third door. It was closed but yielded to my shoulder. As I entered, and became instantaneously aware that it contained no foe, my nerves were fired by the sound of ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... conscious of an unusual feeling of exaltation as she went along. London, while it can be one of the most depressing cities in the world when one is alone and friendless, quickens the imagination. As they went through Trafalgar Square and caught a fleeting glimpse of the National Gallery, Nora resolved that she would give herself a real treat and renew old acquaintance with that institution as well as see the Wallace collection and the Tate Gallery, both of which ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... Laban my brother, to Haran, and tarry with him for seven years, until thy brother's fury turn away." In the goodness of her heart, Rebekah could not but believe that the anger of Esau was only a fleeting passion, and would disappear in the course of time. But she was mistaken, his hate persisted until the end of ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... is no law at all, for it is not a rule of action. Still, we may sometimes be bound, when only our own rights are infringed, to submit to such an imposition, not as a law, for it is none, but on the score of prudence, to escape direr evils. A law is no fleeting, occasional rule of conduct, suited to meet some passing emergency or superficial disturbance. The reason of a law lies deep down, lasting and widespread in the nature of the governed. A law, then, has these two further attributes of permanence in duration and amplitude in area. Every law is ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... he resented the veil that was shutting away so much that was fine and fleeting by way of ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... traitor to his doom? Nay; let me tell you, friends, that the Republic has no use for curs, and calls him a traitor who allows one of her enemies to remain inviolate through his cowardice, his terror of that intangible and fleeting shadow—the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... suddenly, and there was a startled sort of look in the wide brown eyes, a fleeting expression of fear; and at the same time her hand went to her breast in ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... fall and selected a plain cigarette. Then as he lit it, his eyes encountered for a fleeting instant the clear gaze of the nurse. Immediately she looked away and, rising, perhaps too hurriedly, left the room. However, that single glance had been sufficient to tell Roger what was in ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... he had adopted an inflexible resolution from which he would not recede for anything. The Greek evidently understood this, as great uneasiness was reflected on his features. The Mahdi observed both children with a fleeting glance, brightened his fat face with his customary smile, after which he first addressed ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... emphasize that none of this had the quality of a dream; it was clear-cut, as vivid as anything I had ever experienced; my mind worked with an unusual precision and clarity, and not even a fleeting doubt came to me of the reality of my observations. "This is some sort of bombing attack," I remember reflecting, "some assault of super-monsters of the skies, perfected by a super science." And I did not have to be told the fact; I knew, as by an all-illuminating inner ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... our liberty. Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun; And, as a vapor or a drop of rain, Once lost, can ne'er be found again: So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade, All love, all liking, all delight Lies drowned with us in endless night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying, Come, my Corinna, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... here in California had been too hurried for more than fleeting moments of self-study, but on this idle Sunday morning Price Ruyler's perturbed mind wandered to that inner self of his to which he once had longed to give a freer expression. It was odd that the conservative training, the rigid traditions of his ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of the last of the conquistadores, who had found only villages of barbarians and tribes of half-naked savages, and returned empty-handed from his long chase after the Will-o' the-wisp of Quivira and its fleeting treasures. Little did he dream that Quivira would yet become the central region of one of the greatest civilized nations of the world, and rich in productions ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... from her lord to tear, Farewell to all our days are o'er, Lanka and giants are no more. In vain, in vain, an earnest friend, I warn thee, King, and pray. Thou wilt not to my prayers attend, Or heed the words I say So men, when life is fleeting fast And death's sad hour is nigh, Heedless and blinded to the last ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... between his set teeth. Poor innocent boy, it was not his fault if she had loved him so much. Women have done things for great singers that they have not done for martyrs or heroes. It seems so certain that the voice that sings so tenderly is speaking to them individually. Music is such a fleeting, passionate thing that a woman takes it all to herself; how could he sing like that for anyone else? And yet there is always someone for whom he does really pour out his heart, and all the rest are the dolls of life, to be looked ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... the Projectile, though advancing northward with a pretty uniform velocity, had neither gained nor lost in its nearness to the lunar disc. Each moment altering the character of the fleeting landscape beneath them, the travellers, as may well be imagined, never thought of taking an instant's repose. At about half past one, looking to their right on the west, they saw the summits of another mountain; Barbican, consulting his ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... this, a thousand-fold and colourful, had always been there, always the sun and the moon had shone, always rivers had roared and bees had buzzed, but in former times all of this had been nothing more to Siddhartha than a fleeting, deceptive veil before his eyes, looked upon in distrust, destined to be penetrated and destroyed by thought, since it was not the essential existence, since this essence lay beyond, on the other side of, the visible. But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... caught a fleeting glint. Quickly she brought her glass to bear on the spot. Again the purple sage, magnified in color and size and wave, for long moments irritated her with its monotony. Then from out of the sage on the ridge flew up a broad, white object, flashed in the sunlight and vanished. ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... image; and it is with minds maimed by the cruel machinery of life, natures stunted and starved by adverse and innutritive condition, that the artist in man must be satisfied. With what pathetic little flashes of faculty, what fleeting and illusory glimpses of insight, what waifs and strays of attractiveness, must he work and be happy, and with what a thankfulness that the tenth rate is not ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... one wing of the house, and another appeared behind the fan-light in the entrance-hall when the leader of the three highbinders had tramped up the steps and touched the bell-push. Blount had a fleeting glimpse of a black head with a fringe of snowy wool when the door was opened, but he did not hear what was said. After the negro serving-man disappeared there was a little wait. At the end of the interval the door was opened wide, and Blount had ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... not the fleeting passion of the eye Attracts me to her. My unconquered sense Had set at naught the fiery shafts of love Till I beheld this wondrous maiden, sent By a divine appointment to become The savior of this kingdom, and my wife; And on the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... do her good, but seemed to be hampered by an old man's sluggishness and dislike of change. I think he will not live a great while, for he seems very frail. When he dies the little girl will inherit what property he may leave. A lady, Catharine Fleeting, an Englishwoman, and a friend of Mr. Kirkup, has engaged to take her in charge. She followed us merrily to the door, and so did the Persian kitten, and Mr. Kirkup shook hands with us, over and over again, with vivacious courtesy, his manner having been characterized ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are now rapidly fleeting, and Cockenoe is advancing in years with the settlements. The power of the Montauks is a thing of the past; they exercise no control over the rest of the Long Island Indians, who convey land without the assent of the Montauk Sachem. As most of the younger ...
— John Eliot's First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de-Long Island and The Story of His Career from the Early Records • William Wallace Tooker
... Any fleeting suspicion she might have had of his complicity in the Chinaman's pursuit vanished. He showed plain bewilderment. For a moment he was more at sea than herself. The next she saw the shadow of a thought so disturbing that it sharpened his ruddy face to harshness. He stepped toward her. ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... things. Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived. The odour of fruits wafts me to my Southern home, to my childish frolics in the peach orchard. Other odours, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening grain fields ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... done, too, according to the teacher's knowledge of the principles of evolution, and not merely out of regard to small and fleeting interests. The teacher must therefore gradually learn his own place in evolution, so that he may become one-pointed as to himself; unless he practises one-pointedness with regard to his own ideal for himself, he will not be able to bring ...
— Education as Service • J. Krishnamurti
... by a call from Dannevig, who seemed again to be in the full bloom of prosperity. And yet, that inexpressible flavor of aristocracy, and that absolute fineness of type which at our first meeting had so fascinated me, had undergone some subtle change which was almost too fleeting for words to express. To put it bluntly, he had not borne transplantation well. Like the finest European grapes, he had thriven in our soil, but turned out a coarser product than nature intended. He talked with oppressive brilliancy about everything ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... scenes of my youth! Oh, all ye gleams of love, ye divine fleeting gleams! How could ye perish so soon for me! I think of you ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Rome. Ay, Marius, father, friends, more blest than thee! They dead, I live; I thralled, they are free. Here in Praeneste am I cooped up, Amongst a troop of hunger-starved men, Set to prevent false Sylla's fierce approach, But now exempted both of life and all. Well, fortune, since thy fleeting change hath cast Poor Marius from his hopes and true desires, My resolution shall exceed thy power. Thy colour'd wings steeped in purple blood, Thy blinding wreath distain'd in purple blood, Thy royal robes wash'd in my purple blood, Shall witness to the world thy thirst of blood; And when ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... fast asleep, And dreamed she heard them bleating; When she awoke she found it a joke, For they still were all fleeting. ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... that imparts a knowledge of manners and customs, and the teaching which pertains to simple deportment on the stage is necessary and most useful; but you cannot possibly be taught any tradition of character, for that has no permanence. Nothing is more fleeting than any traditional method of impersonation. You may learn where a particular personage used to stand on the stage, or down which trap the ghost of Hamlet's father vanished; but the soul of interpretation is lost, and it is this ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... as it should be!" When the father is of the party, he has a calm face and sits beside his son with his arm around the son's shoulders, and always the taxi speeds madly, so that each time one gets only the most fleeting ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... this might be yours,' he said, 'the wide-open gates, the Heavenly City, the seat on the glorious Throne; but you are turning your backs on it all, and you are choosing instead—what? A few of earth's fleeting pleasures, a little of this world's passing enjoyment. Oh, dear friends, think before it is too late, what ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... that was waking up one morning and seeing a peach-tree in bloom through the window beside his bed; and he was always glad that this vision of beauty was his very earliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloom without a swelling of the heart, without some fleeting sense that ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... problems of our day can be settled peaceably. The entire matter is largely in the hands of the ruling classes. And, while the socialists in all countries are determined not to allow themselves to be provoked into acts of despair by temporary and fleeting methods of repression, conditions may of course arise where no organization, however powerful, could prevent the masses from breaking into an open and bloody conflict. On one memorable occasion (March 31, 1886), August Bebel uttered some ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... This fleeting scene is but a stage, Where various images appear, In different parts of youth and age Alike ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... made me call for a little more attendance than ordinary; and I had reason to think myself slighted, where an indulgent father can least bear to be so, that is, where he most loves; and that by young upstarts, who are growing up to the enjoyment of those pleasures which have run away from me, fleeting rascals as they are! before I was willing to part with them. And I rung and rung, and "Where's Polly?" (for I honour the slut with too much of my notice), "Where's Polly?" was all my cry, to every one who came up to ask what I rung for. And, at last, in burst the pert baggage, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
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