"Immutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he, fiercely, "questions or reasons now; the crisis is at hand, and you will soon, happen what may, know all: mean time what I have said is a fact, and immutable: and you must hasten my end, or give me a chance for avoiding it, as you think fit. I scarce care at this instant which way you decide remember, however, all I ask of you is to defer your departure; what else I have to hope is ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... with an idea which he calls Tyche. The word is untranslatable when used in this way. It is something between chance, fortune and fate. It is more comprehensive and more personal than chance; it has not the immutable, the "lawbound" character of fate; rather it denotes the incalculability, the capriciousness associated, especially in earlier usage, with the word fortune, but without the tendency of this word to be used ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... that space and time are not as immutable as they appear: that our universe may suffer distortion, that time may lag or hasten without our being in the least aware, may be made interestingly clear by an illustration first suggested by Helmholtz, of which the following is in the ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... greed, from the narrowing lust of gold, from losing sight of the fact that "righteousness exalteth a nation, but that sin is a reproach to any people." It is here where our real danger lies—not in the secession of States from the Union, but in the secession of the Union itself from the great and immutable principles of right, of justice, of fair play for all regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The fact that the Union has been saved, that these rebellious States have been brought ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... pleased to hear from that earnest woman, Susan B. Anthony, inspired by the immutable abstract truths of justice and equity. Reports say that she has the air of a Catholic devotee. She said that in defiance of "the powers that be" she took a place on that platform in Independence square, and at the proper time delivered ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... more than half the thousand pounds now, and the cannon ball had dissolved like a chocolate cream; but the car stood like a rock, fixed, immutable. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... days the railroad rate was not the sacred, immutable thing which it subsequently became, although the argument for equal treatment of shippers existed theoretically just as strongly forty years ago as it does today. The rebate was just as illegal then as it is at present; ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... and cinctured, * of Saints, his guided steps held on To where on the far crystelline pale * of that transtellar Heaven there shone The immutable crocean dawn * ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... theological sense, the ten commandments are said to embrace and constitute the moral law, because they are its best exponent, yet jurists have given to the term a more general latitude, in defining the moral laws to be "the eternal, immutable laws of good and evil, to which the Creator himself, in all dispensations, conforms, and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions."[96] Perhaps the well known summary of Justinian will give the best idea of what this law is, ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... method, her particular kind of game, her particular points of attack and tricks of fence; but in the midst of this variety of talents we observe, immutable and predominant, the perfect accordance of the surgery with the victim's organization and the larva's needs. The art of one will not explain the art of another, no less exact in the delicacy of its rules. Each operator has her own tactics, which tolerate no apprenticeship. The Ammophila, ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... of Heaven, to love their neighbor as themselves, to subdue irregular inclinations, and to be guided in all things by reason; that God is the original and ultimate end of all things, which he produced and preserves, himself eternal, infinite, and immutable; one, supremely holy, supremely intelligent, and invisible. He often mentioned the expectation of a Messias to come, a perfect guide and teacher of virtue; calling him the holy man, and the holy person, who is expected to ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... with her, those words. Daylight had come again, and passed again, and it was evening once more; but those words remained, insensible to change, immutable in their foreboding. And Rhoda Gray, as Gypsy Nan, shuddered now as she scuffled along a shabby street deep in the heart of the East Side. She was Danglar's wife—by proxy. At dawn that morning when the gray had come creeping into the miserable attic through the small and ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... taken a lively interest in the advancement of medical science, firmly believing in the immutable principles that govern the administration of homeopathic medicine as well as the curative effect. He has always been anxious to induce young men that proposed to study the science of medicine to follow the example of the illustrious Hahnemann. His lectures in the Cleveland ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... Theory of Nature; founded on the immutable basis of Meteoric Action. By P. Murphy,[817] Esq. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... artist "sang with expression." But what constitutes "expression" in singing? No great artist—no matter what the vehicle or medium through which his art finds manifestation—does anything at random. "The wind bloweth where it listeth" only in appearance; in reality, it is governed by immutable law. Similarly, the outward form of an art is only apparently dictated by caprice and freedom from rule. The effective presentation of every art is based on well-defined and accepted principles. And it is with the earnest desire ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... which has obtained among any people or at any period of time, we must ask, How far did its priests and sages teach exalted ideas of Deity, of the soul, and of immortality? How far did they arrive at lofty and immutable principles of morality? How far did religion, such as was taught, practically affect the lives of those who professed it, and lead them to just and reasonable treatment of one another, or to holy contemplation, or noble deeds, or sublime repose in anticipation of a higher and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... would entitle him to execute against all, and so must be accorded full faith and credit in Louisiana when offered as the basis of an action in debt against a resident of that State who had not been served by process in the New York action. Pressed with the argument that by "the immutable principles of justice" no man's rights should be impaired without his being given an opportunity to defend them, the Court ruled that, interpreted in the light of the principles of "international law and comity" as they existed in 1790, the act of Congress of ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... united us in soul and sentiment, as the aspirations of our hearts simultaneously ascended to the mercy-seat of the great Jehovah! The remembrance of emotions like these are ineffaceable by care or sorrow, and only blotted out by the immutable hand of death. These halcyon hours of budding existence are to memory as the oasis of the desert, where we may recline beneath the soothing influence of their umbrage, and quaff in the goblet of retrospection the lucid draught that refreshes ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... applied to society. Mr. Ripley had great faith in scientific agriculture. Was there to be science applied to society? Was it true that the actual laws applicable to social life had been discovered? Were they immutable as the laws of earthly bodies—of the sun, the stars and the universe? And did they actually agree with the laws of music, color and mathematics? It seemed so. They could but try them. And with a faith for which, during all these ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... elements of thought contend To form a whole which life may comprehend. Only to those of high intent Is life revealed, and quick dreams sent - Half glimpsed truths omnipotent. Out of the silence of an unborn space A spirit moves, and thought comes face to face With the immutable, and time is past, And the spent soul, done, meets truth at last. Chance, fate, occasion, circumstance, In interfused radiance Are lost. Past, present, future, all combined In one sure instantaneous grasp of mind, And all infinity unrolls at our command, And beast and man and God unite, ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... say: "No, O tyrant, O world, devil and flesh, though you may injure me bodily, may beat or torment me, banish me or even take my life, you shall not deprive me of my Lord Jesus Christ—of God's grace and mercy." So faith taught them and confirmed to them that such suffering was God's purpose and immutable will concerning themselves, which, whatever attitude towards them he might assume, he could not alter, even as he could not in the case of Christ himself. This discipline and experience of faith strengthened the martyrs and soon ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... their salt for their soup-pot was seized as contraband, unless it bore the government stamp, and, if they dared say a word of resistance, there were the manacles and the prison under Vittorio and Umberto as under Bourbon or Bonaparte; for there are some things which are immutable as fate. At long intervals, during the passing of ages, the poor stir, like trodden worms, under this inexorable monotony of their treatment by their rulers; and then baleful fires redden the sky, and blood runs in the conduits, ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained,—namely, that each species has been independently created,—is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Condillac. Arsenio does not dream that you come with us, so that even should he change his mind, at least we have no cause to fear a betrayal. But he will not change his mind. The prospect of fifty pistoles has rendered it immutable." ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... from which no naval commander can secure his good name, who knowing the paramount necessity of regularity and strict discipline in a ship of war, adopts an appropriate plan for the attainment of these objects, and remains constant and immutable in the execution. To an Athenian, who, in praising a public functionary, had said, that every one either applauded him or left him without censure, a philosopher replied, "How seldom then must he have done ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to his point that the "rights of neutrals are based upon principle, not upon expediency, and the principles are immutable. Illegal and inhuman acts ... are manifestly indefensible when they deprive neutrals of their acknowledged rights, particularly when they violate the right to life itself. If a belligerent cannot retaliate against ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way. I perceived by this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the life-long education of my body and members. They were steeped in ignorance; they knew nothing—nothing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... which there is much written that I already yearn to understand. All things visible, your sister said to me, are but the bodying forth in nature of things invisible, yet in harmony with immutable laws ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... While it no more demands regular and persevering beneficent action than it demands other Christian duties, it imperiously demands regular and persevering beneficent action as an essential branch of Christian conduct, inevitably resulting from those immutable principles which form the basis of the Christ-like character. Thus the particular or individual system grows, by a moral necessity, out of the general system of thoughts, affections, and volitions, here unfolded; it being a moral impossibility for one cordially ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... the fundamental laws of physics, of electricity, of gravitation, and of chemistry. They saw globular aggregations of matter, the suns and their planets, comprising solar systems; saw solar systems, in accordance with those immutable laws, grouped into galaxies, galaxies in turn—here the flow was suddenly shut off as though a valve had been ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... in Karen. She saw guile on Mrs. Talcott's storm-beaten and immutable face; and she heard specious reassurance in her voice. Mrs. Talcott was dangerous. She had set her heart on this last desire of her passionless, impersonal life and had determined that she and Gregory should come together again. It was this desire that had unsealed her lips: she would never relinquish, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... "Der Ring des Nibelungen," "Parsifal," and, in a lesser degree, "Lohengrin," are examples of the old tragedy type. To them the restrictions of time and space do not apply. They deal with large passions, and their heroes are gods or godlike men who are shattered against the rock of immutable law—the "Fate" of the ancient tragedians. His only significant essay in the field of comedy was made in "Die Meistersinger," and this is as faithful to the old conception of comedy as the dramas mentioned ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in silence. The words came with the power of immutable conviction. She could not believe, yet she was glad ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... for a moment, motionless as stone, his dark face immutable and impassive. Then he stretched wide his right arm in the direction of No Name Mountains, now losing their last faint traces of the afterglow, and he shook his head. He made the same impressive gesture toward the Sonoyta Oasis ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... to check myself in an exclusive admiration for that nation, who conquered their conquerors, whose annals extend back indisputably to a period more remote than mythological or Bible times, who by their immutable institutions have preserved the integrity of their empire, whose monuments are gigantic, whose administration is perfect, among whom revolutions are impossible, who have regarded ideal beauty as a barren element in ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... old, and of change and chance breaking up the wonted calm of her little household circle. That the march of Time should be so irresistible, that his flight could not be stayed or slackened by pope or kaiser, that his decrees should be so immutable, his destiny so inexorable, and that the youngest must soon cease to be young, and the middle-aged become old—or die! this was the thought that preyed on her very soul. She could not endure the conviction that her own father must one day walk with a less elastic step, and smile on her ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Cartes proceeded to apply it. The basis of certitude being consciousness, he interrogated his consciousness, and found that he had an idea of a substance infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent. This he called an idea of God: he said, "I exist as a miserably imperfect finite being, subject to change—ignorant, incapable of creating anything—I find by my finitude that I am not the infinite; by my liability ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... was again, that one word, that immutable obstacle which seemed to arise always. Houston reached for ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... hills. None but sailors, well practised in treading the deck of a rolling ship, could possibly have maintained their footing: for the boatswain, the wooden leg, and the fisherman, kept up their horses inexorably to their duty of an immutable gallop; the hearse and its plumes flew through the solitary valley; the post-chaises, carrying a similar crew on their upper decks, flew after the hearse; and in the rear of the whole, with all the sail they ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... the knives and spoon at the right hand, the forks at the left, the oyster fork diagonally, with the prongs crossing the handles of the others, the law of their arrangement being nowise immutable ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... character, thy humanity. God does not break his laws to punish its sins. The laws themselves punish; every fresh wrong deed, and wrong thought, and wrong desire of thine sets thee more and more out of tune with those immutable and eternal laws of the Moral Universe, which have their root in the absolute and necessary character of God himself. All things that he has ordained; the laws of the human body, the laws of the human soul, the laws of society, the laws of all heaven and earth ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... imperfect, prejudiced, liable to error, changeable, headstrong, ignorant, and limited; in short, it possesses nothing but what is borrowed. The other is common to all men, and superior to them. It is perfect, eternal, immutable, ever ready to communicate itself in all places, and to rectify all minds that err and mistake; in short, incapable of ever being either exhausted or divided, although it communicates itself to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... preserved to see it delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the immortal statues of the Greek sculptors find worshippers, and the demonstrations of Euclid a consenting intellect. But that unfortunate, that audacious policy of usurpation once entered upon, there was no going back. He who is infallible must needs be immutable. In its very nature the action implied compulsion, compulsion implied the possession of power, and the whole policy insured an explosion the moment that the means of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... not try to establish any school of discipline or systematic thought. They revealed throughout the dawn of an experience of an immutable Reality as the self of man, as the only abiding truth behind all changes. But Buddhism holds that this immutable self of man is a delusion and a false knowledge. The first postulate of the system is that impermanence is sorrow. Ignorance about sorrow, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... was not yet done. He was hungry again, but for him there could be no more food yet, and he turned with the same immutable and dumbly dogged air that characterized so many of his actions, and made off down the "sea-bank." Once he hid—vanished utterly would better express it—to avoid the passage of an eel-spearer, an inhabitant of the estuary almost ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... had from myself all the perfection, however little, which I actually possessed, I should have been able, for the same reason, to have had from myself the whole remainder of perfection, of the want of which I was conscious, and thus could of myself have become infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient, all-powerful, and, in fine, have possessed all the perfections which I could recognize in God. For in order to know the nature of God (whose existence has been established by the preceding reasonings), as far as my own nature permitted, I had only to ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... there is the pyramid of Cheops, whose immutable base we had to skirt on our way hither. In the moonlight we could see the separate blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even in their layers, which lie one above the other to infinity, getting ever ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... always been afraid of him. I've met him three times since then, and he puts such a frightful look in his eyes—and he was so violent, and headstrong, and so terribly angry,—that time. He accused me of leading him on, and playing with him; and he said something about an immutable law of chance, and a governing balance of events—that I couldn't understand, only where he said that for all the suffering we inflict on others, we receive an equal amount ourselves. Then he went away—in ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... which would turn an instrument of life into an immutable law of its existence—that habit is always with us. We may outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or Private Property only to establish some new totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by no means confined ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... greater; and the oath is to them an end of all gainsaying, for a confirmation. (17)Wherein God, wishing more abundantly to show to the heirs of the promise the immutability of his counsel, interposed with an oath; (18)that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible that God should lie, we may have strong encouragement, who fled for refuge to lay hold on the hope set before us, (19)which we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... the more subtile agencies whatever. The granting of this postulate will put me on quite easy terms with regard to the very positive objection entertained by me towards a certain Mr. Desole Arcubus, who, by provision of an immutable Medo-Persic edict promulgated by Mrs. Silvernail, occupied the chair next mine at the first-rate table of that rigid expounder of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and individual felicity. Watching with an equal and comprehensive eye over this great assemblage of communities and interests, he laid the foundations of our national policy in the unerring, immutable principles of morality, based on religion, exemplifying the pre-eminence of free government by all the attributes which win the affections, of its citizens, or command the respect of ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... places in the South in which to live through a campaign. We had strict orders to protect all private property and molest nothing outside of camp requirements, but the men would forage at night, bring in a sheep or hog, divide up, and by the immutable law of camps it was always proper to hang a choice piece of mutton or pork at the door of the officers' tent. This helped to soothe the conscience of the men and pave the way to immunity from punishment. The stereotyped ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... questioners; then, in a voice in which entreaty was mingled with the energy that denotes an immutable resolve, she said: ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... wrong, would not be morally wrong. He would have to say, 'here I am amongst barbarians, who not only refuse to do justice, but encourage the greatest of all crimes. I am therefore in a state of nature: for, so far as there is no law, it is a state of nature: and consequently, upon the eternal and immutable law of justice, which requires that he who sheds man's blood should have his blood shed[273], I will stab the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... believe that the State, as at present constituted, is the end and culmination of all human effort. According to this view, the State is the best possible state, and its organization is considered so perfect that its laws, discipline and formulae are held to be sacred and immutable in men's eyes. Maura and all conservatives must be reckoned in this group, and Lerroux too, appears to belong with them, as he holds discipline in such ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... energy—are but counters of mind exchanged in default of elusive realities. They know that the pressure of research has reduced many of the lesser generalizations and theories to a fluid and amorphous state. "Immutable" laws have been turned into faulty conclusions, hastily drawn and readily abandoned before the advance of new facts. The fixity of the elements in chemistry, the undulatory movement of light, the stability of the planetary orbits, the indestructibility ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... therefore every spirit must at last return to the Good. For the Good alone exists; evil has no existence, no substance. This is a doctrine which we shall meet with again. Man, he expressly asserts, cannot be consubstantial with God, for man can change, while God is immutable. He does not see, apparently, that, from the point of view of the Platonist, his universalism makes man's freedom to change an illusion, as belonging to time only ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... we behold may each have their variety of intelligent 'being,' as links in nature's beautiful chain, connecting the smallest insect with the incomprehensible and immutable God. The beautiful variety we see in his works portrays His will, and we are justified in following this variety up to His throne. His attributes of love and joy beam forth from the heavens, and are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... much less the practice of any court, ought to have weight or authority in Parliament, further than as such doctrine, rule, or practice is agreeable to the proceedings in Parliament, or hath received the sanction of approved precedent there, or is founded on the immutable principles of substantial justice, without which, your Committee readily agrees, no practice in any court, high or low, is proper ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... estimated according to definite theories; but in literature we judge from a taste never formed, from a thousand prejudices and ignorant predilections. We do not yet comprehend that the author is an artist, and that the true rules of art by which he should be tested are precise and immutable. Hence the singular and fantastic caprices of the popular opinion,—its exaggerations of praise or censure, its passion and reaction. At one while, its solemn contempt for Wordsworth; at another, its absurd idolatry. At one while we are stunned by the noisy celebrity of Byron, at another ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the nature of the divine beings and on the meaning of traditions inherited from remote ancestors. As their own interests demanded, that clergy constantly amended the sacred traditions and modified their spirit when the letter was immutable, in order to make them agree with the new aspirations of a more advanced period. They had their mysteries and their initiates to whom they revealed a wisdom that was above the vulgar ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... there for from the moment he could give his good old friend no conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs. Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square thick house, where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows and tinkle in the quieter bells, all these things represented best the kind of supreme solace to which the master ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... novice raised his hand and twitched his lip, while even the placid senior brothers glanced across at each other and coughed to cover their amusement. The Abbot alone sat gray and immutable, with a drawn face and ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... no illusion - there are only grades of reality; and what we call phantasmagorias are merely very fleeting realities, created by man, in comparison to the eternal and immutable realities which we apprehend with our soul and our senses, and which must be of higher origin. But we will not give to human creations honors alone due to the Divine, and will not pronounce hollow ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... what the perfection of any special object is: this needs the knowledge of what its nature is. And we have to rest content with very general terms defining God's Holiness as the essential and absolute good. 'Holiness is the free, deliberate, calm, and immutable affirmation of Himself, who is goodness, or of goodness, which is Himself' (Godet on John xvii. 11). 'Holiness is that attribute in virtue of which Jehovah makes Himself the absolute standard of Himself, of His ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... to the ceremonies of their ancestors, and were desirous of imposing them on the Gentiles, who continually augmented the number of believers. These Judaizing Christians seem to have argued with some degree of plausibility from the divine origin of the Mosaic law, and from the immutable perfections of its great Author. They affirmed, that if the Being, who is the same through all eternity, had designed to abolish those sacred rites which had served to distinguish his chosen people, the repeal of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... powerful than the laws, may render modifications necessary, which it is utterly impossible for me to foresee; still the great fundamental principles upon which every sensible plan for such an Establishment must be founded, appear to me to be certain and immutable; and when rightly understood, there can be no great difficulty in accommodating the plan to all those particular circumstances under which it may be carried into execution, without making any ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... powerful and beneficent influence. This effect has often been called an answer to prayer, and has been attributed by the ignorant to what they call a "special interposition of Providence," instead of to the unerring action of the great and immutable divine law. ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... inviolate belongs to a different class [of commands] from those relating to the sabbath, to marriage, or to property. These are founded on the permanent relations of men in the present state of existence. They are not in their own nature immutable. But truth is at all times sacred, because it is one of the essential attributes of God, so that whatever militates against or is hostile to truth is in opposition to the ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... They found that a rule, wise and necessary for a legislative body, did not suit an executive one, which, being governed by events, must change their purposes as those change. Besides, their session was then to become of equal duration with the war; and a rule, which should render their legislation immutable during all that period, could not be submitted to. They, therefore, renounced it in practice, and have ever since continued to reconsider their questions freely. The only restraint, as yet provided against ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... this clear, you must consider the circumstances in which you live, your past. Reckon up what you consider important and what unimportant in life. Find out what you believe in; that is, what you look on as eternal and immutable truth, and what you will take for your guide in life. And not only find out, but make clear to your own mind, and try to practise or to learn to practise in your daily life; because until you practise what you believe you cannot tell whether you ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... shall keep it to the utmost of my power to your destruction. Take this for your final answer, and forbear any farther solicitations; for if you trouble me with any more messages of this nature, I will burn the paper and hang up the bearer. This is the immutable resolution, and shall be the undoubted practice of him who accounts it his chiefest glory to be his majesty's most loyal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile and varieties invariably fertile; or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... reassured himself. One does get fat. "Every one gets fat," said he, "after he gets married." He reviewed his friends and acquaintances, and found that this was true, and he bowed before an immutable decree. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... because they were not the inventors of it. Listen to this wise reflection of a contemporary writer: "Philosophy allows us to range ourselves on the side of Platonism: why should it not also allow us to range ourselves on the side of the Christian faith, if there it is that we find wisdom and immutable truth? The choice ought to seem as free and as worthy of respect on the one side as on the other; and philosophy which claims liberty for itself, is least of all warranted in refusing it to others."[18] To be free, is to look for truth wherever it may be found, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... infallibly conclude that the devotional instinct implanted in the heart of the entire human race has its correlative that the longing for immortal life which burns in the breast of man was not a brutal mistake, else concede Nature a poor blunderer and all this prattle anent her "immutable laws" mere nonsense. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the robust and brass-bound man commissioned first for sea His fragile raft, Poseidon laughed, and, "Mariner," said he, "Behold, a Law immutable I lay on thee and thine, That never shall ye act or tell a falsehood ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... antimony, lead, and many other materials, for a true mercury that has just as many names as there are substances in which it is found; oil, vinegar, honey, wormwood, etc. Under all its names mercury is still, however, a single immutable thing. It was also called an incombustible sulphur for whoever has his conscience once rightly awakened, has in his heart an endlessly burning flame that eats up everything that is contrary to his nature. This fire that can burn like "poison" is a powerful ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... its legislative powers; it is not, as is the Congress of the United States, restrained within a very limited sphere of action; it is not, as are both the Congress and the State Legislatures of the Union, bound hand and foot by the articles of a rigid Constitution; it is not compelled to respect any immutable maxims of legislation. Hence the Victorian Parliament—in this resembling its creator, the British Parliament—exercises an amount of legislative freedom unknown to most foreign representative assemblies. It can, and does, legislate on education, on ecclesiastical topics, on the tenure ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... them only eighty-six years, therefore the time of their going forth hath not yet arrived. If it be Thy will, give me permission to take them back to Egypt, that they may continue in slavery for the three hundred and fourteen years that are left, and Thy word be fulfilled. As Thou are immutable, so ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... religion, to re-discover to man's wondering eyes the imperishable beauty of a religion allied to no transitory elements, wrapped up in no individual philosophy, bounded by no limitations of time, place or race, but ever the self-same immutable reality, though manifesting itself in most diverse ways, the sense of the infinite in man, and the communion of his spirit with ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... this would make no difference between them? Of course they would be friends as ever—nay, more than ever? She could never forget his nobly generous impulse. But let him reflect on her broken life, her immutable sadness; he would understand how much she would have wronged such a man as he in taking advantage of that moment's heroic weakness. To this effusive epistle came speedily a brief response. Of course all was as before, wrote Wrybolt. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... indicate the character or intentions of the man who lived in this singular place, save that he must be of Spartan habits and cared little for the comforts of life. When I thought of the heavy rains and looked at the gaping roof I understood how strong and immutable must be the purpose which had kept him in that inhospitable abode. Was he our malignant enemy, or was he by chance our guardian angel? I swore that I would not leave the hut ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... may be clearly and firmly taught and informed what that godly Confession is which we and the churches and schools of our realms at all times professed and embraced, we emphatically testify that next to the pure and immutable truth of God's Word we wish to embrace the first Augsburg Confession alone which was presented to the Emperor Charles V, in the year 1530, at the famous Diet of Augsburg, this alone (we say), and no other." ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... beneficial error into which human reason could ever have fallen, since it at last drives us to search for the key to escape from this labyrinth; and when this key is found, it further discovers that which we did not seek but yet had need of, namely, a view into a higher and an immutable order of things, in which we even now are, and in which we are thereby enabled by definite precepts to continue to live according to the highest dictates ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... transient. The latter is obvious to all, in the form of plants and animals; with regard to the former, there is room for discussion, as to whether its elements are one or many. The third, differing from the other two, is immutable and is maintained by certain persons to be separable. Some make two divisions of it, whereas others class together, as of one nature, ideas and mathematical entities; and others again admit only the latter. The first ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... true," said Adonis, "and I suppose the cherubs make as good caddies as we can expect. Caddies will be caddies, and that's the end of it. You can't expect a caddie to do just right any more than you can expect water to flow uphill. There are certain immutable laws of the universe which are as unchangeable in Olympus as on earth or in Hades. Ice is cold, fire is hot, water is wet, and ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... how perfectly just and righteous their punishment is and therefore how properly inflicted by the supreme Governor of the world.... They will rejoice when they see him who is their Father and eternal portion so glorious in his justice. The sight of this strict and immutable justice of God will render him amiable and adorable in their eyes. It will occasion rejoicing in them, as they will have the greater sense of their own happiness, by seeing the contrary misery. It is the nature of pleasure and pain, of happiness and misery, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... which is love: these dissolve And resume themselves, here assume beauty, there terror; And the phantasmagoria of infinite error, And endless complexity, lasts but a while; Life's self, the immortal, immutable smile Of God, on the soul in the deep heart of Heaven Lives changeless, unchanged: and our morning and even Are earth's alternations, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... father, I must recall them. I have the right to be heard. I cannot pass over in silence any of the facts, which have led me to take the immutable resolution that I am ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... toward between the Florentines' Secretary of State and the Duke of Valentinois, each mistrustful of the other. In the end Cesare, a little out of patience at so much inconclusiveness, though outwardly preserving his immutable serenity, sought to come to grips by demanding that Florence should declare whether he was to account her his friend or not. But this was precisely what Macchiavelli's instructions forbade him from declaring. He answered that he must first write to the Signory, and begged ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... sinister opening the war seemed almost belittled by its tame conclusion. Years of nerve-racking experiences, the hardships, and the immutable association which towns like Ypres, Arras and Albert, and the trench-dwellings of Flanders and the Somme possessed, had indisposed the mind to receive new impressions from the last battle of the war. Patient from a hundred moves from trench to billet, from billet to trench, the British ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... self-expression; and on Sundays, I dare say, he goes, like Cezanne, to lean on M. le Cure, who leans on Rome, while his concierge receives the pure gospel of Syndicalism, which, also, is based on absolute truths, immutable, and above criticism. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... a new revelation; for, from his almost immutable reserve, I had supposed that the Commodore never meddled immediately with the concerns of the ship, but left all that to the captain. But the longer we live, the more ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... consequences are known to be so, whilst the great catholic acts of life are entirely (and, if we may so phrase it, haughtily) independent of consequences. For instance, fidelity to a trust is a law of immutable morality subject to no casuistry whatever. You have been left executor to a friend—you are to pay over his last legacy to X, though a dissolute scoundrel; and you are to give no shilling of it to the poor brother of X, though a good man, and a wise man, struggling with ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... community, whether of insects, birds, wild animals, or men and women, is bound to fight for existence,—therefore those who cry: 'Peace, peace!' only clamour for a vain thing. The very stones and rocks and mountains maintain a perpetual war with destroying elements,—they appear immutable things to our short lives, but they change in their turn even as we do—they die to live again in other forms, even as we do. And what is it all for? What is the sum and substance of so much striving—if merest ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... similar propositions, formerly admitted without hesitation as axioms, were, even at the period of which I speak, seen to be untenable. How absurd in these people, then, to persist in putting faith in "axioms" as immutable bases of Truth! But even out of the mouths of their soundest reasoners it is easy to demonstrate the futility, the impalpability of their axioms in general. Who was the soundest of their logicians? Let me see! I will go and ask Pundit and be back in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Expiation, by which they strive to atone for the offenses of the past. The feeling of dependence is the instinct which urges us to pray. It is the feeling that our existence and welfare are in the hands of a superior power; not an inexorable fate, not an immutable law; but a Being having at least so far the attribute of personality that he can show favor or severity to those who are dependent upon Him, and can be regarded by them with feelings of hope and fear, and reverence and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and silver-gilt work of the iconostas, where they are ranged symmetrically upon the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced works of art. These figures, seen amid the golden reflections and twinkling light of the lamps, easily assume a phantasmagorical life, capable of impressing sensitive imaginations ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... "That God, by an eternal and immutable decree in Jesus Christ his son, before the world was created, resolved to save in Jesus Christ, on account of Jesus Christ, and through Jesus Christ, those, from among mankind fallen in sin, who, by the grace of the Holy ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... accordance with the highest aims of reason, and not merely technical, or according to certain accidentally-observed similarities existing between the different parts of the whole science. For this reason, also, is the division immutable and of legislative authority. But the reader may observe in it a few points to which he ought to demur, and which may weaken his conviction of ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... of the Omnipotent; they believed themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set them above the stars; and immediately they discovered humility. It was only another example of the same immutable paradox. It is always ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Mere authorities never satisfied me, unless, passing behind the black gowns, I could follow up the reasoning to the first fountains—the small original truths, the nicely discriminated requisitions of immutable justice—the clearly-defined and inevitable wants of a superior and prosperous society. Everything that could illustrate law as well as fortify it; every collateral aid, in the shape of history or moral truth, I gathered together, even as the dragoon whose chief agent is his ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... and formalized by a trivial or merely conventional treatment.[1] In these really domestic scenes, where the painter sought unreproved his models in simple nature, and trusted for his effect to what was holiest and most immutable in our common humanity, he must have been a bungler indeed if he did not succeed in touching some responsive chord of sympathy in the bosom of the observer. This is, perhaps, the secret of the universal, and, in general, deserved popularity of these ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... had just that morning begun a four days' gakt[n]ta which, among other provisions, excluded all visitors. It was of no use to argue that we had come by the express request of Tsiskwa. The laws of the gakt[n]ta were as immutable as those of the Medes and Persians, and neither doctor nor patient could hope for favorable results from the treatment unless the regulations were enforced to the letter. But although we might not enter the house, there was no reason why we should not talk to the old man, so seats ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... from religion, the root of that life. The spirit of the Roman religion was however originally, and before the substance of it was sacrificed to foreign ornament, quite different from that of the Grecian. The latter was yielding and flexible to the hand of art, the former immutable beneath the rigorous jealousy of priestcraft. The Roman faith, and the customs founded on it, were more serious, more moral, and pious, displaying more insight into nature, and more magical and mysterious, than the Greek religion, at least than that part of it which was ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... enchantment in an Arabian tale. We might just as plausibly suppose, that the reptile, after it became mature, was suddenly transformed into a bird, as that it underwent this change before it was hatched. All the evidence attainable goes to show, that the law of development is as immutable before as after birth, the several stages of progress succeeding each other in a constant order, and affecting the individual only, not the race. A young monkey is no more likely to be transmuted into a man than an old one; nor is such a metamorphosis at ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... steps of stone through iron doors I entered that red room and saw the rack, And round the walls I saw them sit in black, The immutable and urgent councillors. My heart was clotted with an old remorse, Despair a vulture fast upon my back. I saw my body like an empty sack Tossed disarticulate ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... predestination and free will did not appear reasonable to him. Marg'et Ann thought it very daring of him to exact reasonableness of those in spiritual high places. She would as soon have thought of criticising the Creator for making the sky blue instead of green as for any of His immutable decrees as set forth in the Confession of Faith. It did not prevent her liking Lloyd Archer that her father and several of the elders whom he had ventured to engage in religious discussion pronounced ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... same time declared his immutable purpose to maintain the institution of Parliament, and named March 5, 1907, as the date of the convening ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... artifex ... pereo!" And, as the author remarks: "He rendered to immutable nature his Hamletic soul." William enters and, discovering his Kate, gives her a sound beating; not the first or the last, as she apprises us. The poem ends with this motto: Un Hamlet de moins; la race n'en est pas perdue, qu'on se le ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own being, and of that of Babylon. His soul launched out into infinity, and, detached from the senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when afterwards, returning to himself, and entering into his own heart, he considered that Astarte had perhaps died for him, the universe vanished from his sight, and he beheld nothing in the whole compass of nature ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... of Europe, and at all these young men now so different, at the silence and the cover, and the hefty, disposable little guns. But when I had my face turned southward again to get back to a meal, that other aspect of Europe, its eternity, was pictured all abroad. For there right before me stood the immutable mountains, which stand enormous and sullen, but also vague at the base, and, therefore, in their summits, unearthly, above the Limagne. There was that upper valley of the Allier down which Csar had retreated, gathering his legions into the North, and there was ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... is capable of disintegration. "Although we do not know how to break atoms up, they are liable every now and then themselves to explode, and so resolve themselves into simpler forms." "Atoms of matter are not the indestructible and immutable things they were once thought."[3] The idea of the amount of energy thus revealed as available for all kinds of active work is so vast as to baffle calculation and even imagination. It has been said that there is energy enough ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... Israel said,' and therefore Israel is concerned in the divine word, which is not of private reference, but meant for all. 'The Rock of Israel spake,' and therefore Israel may trust the Word, which rests on His immutable ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... this important object is founded upon what the King owes to his own dignity, upon the essential interests of his people, and upon the incontestible right, which every Sovereign has to determine at his pleasure, that which is clearly within his jurisdiction. This resolution is as immutable, as the foundation upon which it rests. From the application of this principle to the different points of the first, second, and third articles, results the melancholy, but indispensable necessity of declining all that is proposed in these different articles relative ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... resistance should be too feeble to permit them to glut themselves with blood. The creatures of caste, the emigrants could not conceive of man as a variable animal, or of the birth of a race of warriors under their eyes. To them human nature remained constant. Such, they believed, was the immutable will of God. ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... told that he had just that morning begun a four days' gakt[^u]['][n]ta which, among other provisions, excluded all visitors. It was of no use to argue that we had come by the express request of Tsiskwa. The laws of the gakt[^u]['][n]ta were as immutable as those of the Medes and Persians, and neither doctor nor patient could hope for favorable results from the treatment unless the regulations were enforced to the letter. But although we might not enter the house, there was no reason why we should not talk ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... the law of nature. For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... no brighter one for me," was the answer. "She had a brighter one, poor child—and mine was a heavy trouble to her. Why should we deceive ourselves? What are we in His sight—in the sight of Immutable, Eternal God? We can only do His will and await the end. We have reason which we may not use; we can only believe and suffer. There is agony on every side of us which, if it were His will, He might relieve, but does not. It is His will, and what is the impotent rebellion of Nature against ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Three things immutable and sure, His promise, covenant, and oath, Reveal God's purpose, and secure Whate'er man needs for life ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... round a nation's decay. All the long, stern reign of Plymouth Rock and Salem Meeting-House was well spent, since it had this for an end,—to plough into the American race the tradition of absolute righteousness, as the immutable foundation of all. This was the purpose of our fathers. There should be here no European frivolity, even if European grace went with it. For the sake of this great purpose, history will pardon all their excesses,—overwork, grim Sabbaths, prohibition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... is nothing but a conformity to reason; that there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things, which are the same to every rational being that considers them; that the immutable measures of right and wrong impose an obligation, not only on human creatures, but also on the Deity himself: All these systems concur in the opinion, that morality, like truth, is discerned merely by ideas, and by their juxta-position and ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again,—its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... replaces the garden, but where ends the Desert? Reft from my senses are the laws which gave order and place to their old questionless realm. I stand lost and appalled amidst Chaos. Did my Mind misconstrue the laws it deemed fixed and immutable? Be it so! But still Nature cannot be lawless; Creation is not a Chaos. If my senses deceive me in some things, they are still unerring in others; if thus, in some things, fallacious, still, in other things, truthful. Are there within me senses finer than those I have cultured, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Mr. Brott gave signs of the man underneath. The air of polite interest had left his face. He glanced swiftly and keenly at his companion. Mr. Sabin's expression was immutable. It was he who scored, for he marked the change, whilst Mr. Brott could not be sure whether he had noticed ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as he had disclaimed before in talking to Ananda, all idea of dictating to the order: his memory is not to become a paralyzing tradition. What he had to teach, he has taught freely, holding back nothing in "a clenched fist." The truths are indeed essential and immutable. But they must become a living part of the believer, until he is no longer a follower but a light unto himself. The rest does not matter: the order can change all the minor rules if expedient. But in everyday life discipline ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... my child," replied Mr Meldrum, drawing her fondly to his side, and speaking as if they were alone together. "You have taught me a lesson, and I will repine no longer about the immutable. It is best to look forward, as you say. We ought to recollect that all our days must not necessarily be gloomy because for the moment they may ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... proposed with a terrible coolness, with an immutable resolution, so utterly surprised Gyges, who was expecting reproaches, menaces, and a violent scene, that he remained for several minutes without colour and without voice, livid as a shade on the shores of the black rivers ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... by magic two long rows of immutable boulders wabbled for a second and then thundered down the hillside, while ten score of wild, naked human beings sent up yells of horrid glee to ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... he serves the Devil. Doubtless, Slavery, though opposed to God's laws, is included in the plan of God's providence, but, in the long run, the providence most terribly confirms the laws. The stream of events, having its fountains in iniquity, has its end in retribution. It is because God's laws are immutable that God's providence can be foreseen as well as seen. The mere fact that a thing exists, and persists in existing, is of little importance in determining its right to exist, or its eventual destiny. These must be found in an inspection of the principles by which it exists; and from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... which once held these views as "the immutable first principles of Irish Nationalism" and was now so vigorously loyal and energetically military, appeared to the Sinn Feiners to have changed its ground, and thus to be betraying Ireland—quite forgetting that all the while ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... worthy a philosopher. Thirdly, from what has been premised no reason can be drawn why the history of nature should not still be studied, and observations and experiments made, which, that they are of use to mankind, and enable us to draw any general conclusions, is not the result of any immutable habitudes or relations between things themselves, but only of God's goodness and kindness to men in the administration of the world. See sect. 30 and 31 Fourthly, by a diligent observation of the phenomena within our view, we may discover the general laws of nature, and from them ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... The unbounded view of waters, the incessant and tremendous dashing of the waves along the shore, accompanied with a noise resembling the roar of loud and distant thunder, filled our minds with the most sublime and awful sensation, and fixed on them as immutable truths the tradition we had received from our old men, that the great waters divide the residence of the Great Spirit from the temporary abodes of his red children. We have contemplated in silent dread the immense difficulties ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... believer in the fixity of species bear him out much better. It is to be found on the opening page of a brief introduction to the wild animals. M. Geoffroy quotes it thus: "We shall see Nature dictating her laws, so simple yet so unchangeable, and imprinting her own immutable characters upon every species." But M. Geoffroy does not give the passage which, on the same page, admits mutability among domesticated animals, in the case of which he declares we find Nature "rarement perfectionnee, souvent alteree, defiguree;" nor yet does he deem it necessary to show ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... plan to work through simple, natural means, so that we may not be looking and waiting for the supernatural. And yet it would seem that many are so irrational that, when they find mere feeling passing away, they give up their hope and all relationship to Christ, acting as if the immutable love of God were changing with ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... on, "all the ascertained veracities are immutable. One holds to them, or, rather, they hold to one, with an indissoluble tenacity. But convictions are in the region of character and are of remote origin. In their safety one indulges one's self in expectations, in tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... door opened, closed again, and Cleek and the superintendent stood in the presence of it—the silent, immutable It which yesterday had been a living woman. Cleek went over and looked at the quiet figure, particularly at the wounds on the arms, both of them close to the shoulder, and immediately below the larger, muscle, then turned and looked round the room. It was richly appointed, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... his own day but whom subsequent generations already begin to honor as one of the greatest of American statesmen, not only preeminent in ability and acquirements, but even more to be honored for profound, immutable honesty of purpose and broad, noble ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... crestfallen. Perhaps the scene lacked a denouement. Oh, I was sure that implacable hate burned under that smile of his, just as I knew that beneath the rise and fall of Gretchen's bosom the steady fire of immutable love burned, burned as it burned in my own heart. It was a defeat for the Prince, a triumph for Gretchen and me. The greeting took but a moment. I stepped back, strong and hopeful. She loved me. I knew that her heart was singing the same ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... had done something very wrong or very foolish. Peter McGrath was, in truth, out of work because he had committed an outrage on economics. He had been guilty of the enormous error of misunderstanding, and trying to set at naught in his own person, the immutable law ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... planet offers an ideal field in seeking an understanding of the reign of immutable law through the Infinite Universe of God, and owing to the clear rarified atmosphere of Mars, unusual opportunity is presented to students in ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... of degrees of imitation; a word is either the perfect expression of a thing, or a mere inarticulate sound (a fallacy which is still prevalent among theorizers about the origin of language). He is at once a philosopher and a sophist; for while wanting to rest language on an immutable basis, he would deny the possibility of falsehood. He is inclined to derive all truth from language, and in language he sees reflected the philosophy of Heracleitus. His views are not like those of Hermogenes, hastily taken up, but are said to be the result of mature consideration, ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... reason the blind often hear with greater ease and distinctness than other people. The sense of smell becomes almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and vagueness of things. Thus, according to an immutable law, the senses ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... time when this mental and moral advance commenced, and man's physical character became fixed and almost immutable, a new series of causes would come into action, and take part in his mental growth. The diverse aspects of nature would now make themselves felt, and profoundly influence the character of ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and space, a grasp of many factors, and the strictest attention to the various steps in the problems it presents. At the same time, it is a science which repays the student, although he may have no direct concern with military affairs; for not only will a comprehension of its immutable principles add a new interest to the records of stirring times and great achievements, but it will make him ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... of Mind-healing, is that disease is unreal; and the efficacy of my system, beyond other systems of medicine, vouches for the validity of that statement. Sin and disease are not scientific, because they embody not the idea of divine Principle, and are not the phenomena of the immutable laws of God; and they do not arise from the divine consciousness and true ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... and brilliant in the sunshine, Blank as the desert, Blank as the Sphinx, Winking golden eyes in the twinkles of light, Silent, immutable, vacuous infinity, Illimitable ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... representative of the theory of animal magnetism. This good man regards me as a son; I owe my training to him.—Well, this worthy old Bouvard it was who proposed to prove to me that nerve-force put in motion by the magnetizer was, not indeed infinite, for man is under immutable laws, but a power acting like other powers of nature whose elemental essence escapes ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... faculty of the imagination to the end that the student may behold, as it were in one sublime vision, the whole scale of being in its range from the lowest to the highest under the divine decree of order and subordination, without losing sight of the immutable veracity at the heart of all variation, which "is only the praise and surname of virtue." This was no new vision, nor has it ever been quite forgotten. It was the whole meaning of religion to Hooker, from whom it passed ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Personality, so that in all tongues singular and plural are alike applicable to Him. He is spirit; he is the circle which circumscribes everything and which nothing ever circumscribes; immense, eternal, immutable, He is the Primal out of which all is darkness. Unlimited by time, without laws save in His own will, in the bosom of eternity, He, who is three in One, acts;—Power executes what Wisdom proposes, and Infinite Love is forever germing into ever new ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... may follow what course she will, may build as she pleases, may probe to the heart of things, may pursue the eternal Law without let from the pigmies; and here, if anywhere from man's precarious standpoint, shall he perceive the immutable and observe a presentment of himself in those ephemera that dance above the burn at dawn, and ere twilight passes gather up their gauze wings ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... were not ordained of Zeus, And she who sits enthroned with gods below, Justice, enacted not these human laws. Nor did I deem that thou, a mortal man, Could'st by a breath annul and override The immutable unwritten laws of Heaven. They were not born today nor yesterday; They die not; and none knoweth whence they sprang. I was not like, who feared no mortal's frown, To disobey these laws and so provoke The wrath of Heaven. I knew that ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... She is teaching the world that the ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment, and not authority; she is teaching it to estimate the value of evidence; she is creating a firm and living faith in the existence of immutable moral and physical laws, perfect obedience to which is the highest possible ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... If it were only the Duke—Ah!" She stopped, a new alarm in her eyes. She searched my face eagerly. Of deliberate purpose I set it to an immutable stolidity. ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... powerfully circumstances influence the feelings and opinions of men, how often vices pass into virtues and paradoxes into axioms, learns to distinguish what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the virtuous, knowing that the character would be purified in the endeavor, and that the consciousness of the progress made, step by step, would be of itself a reward. The object of science was, as he taught, the true, the eternal, the immutable, that which is; in one alone could these attributes be found united—that is God. Man's duty, then, according to the Platonic system is to know God and His attributes, and to aim at being under the practical influence of this knowledge. This ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... alas, it is not Grief and Love alone who conduct us to the chambers of the dead; the sad and silent Angel of Reproach also stands beside the bed, and the shadow of his wings falls upon the features fixed in their immutable appeal, their pathetic and unwilling accusation. Then it is that veil after veil is lifted from the past, till in the pitiless light we read ourselves with a new understanding of our faults. We see that through some element of hardness in ourselves ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... there has always been a suspicion among scholars that this view was wrong. The more we study the moral aspects of humanity the more we become convinced that the flower and fruit of civilization are evolved according to laws as immutable as those laws governing the manifestations of physical life. Historians have written that Greece was invaded by Aryans about 1400 B.C., and that henceforth arose the wonderful civilization; but the student ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... of being! Source of good! Immutable thou dost remain! Nor can the shadow of a change Obscure the glories of ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... followed change, but the chime was immutable. And always, whatever came, it rang out calmly over the beautiful old city of Morningquest, and entered into it, and was part of the life of it, mixing itself impartially with the good and evil; with all the sin and suffering, the pitiful pettiness, the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand |
