Famous quotes containing the word perpetual:
“Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration; some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense or notion, which in tract of time makes an observable change in the air and features of a language, as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.”
—Richard Bentley (1662–1742)
“What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“His breast was the seat of all those passions which degrade our nature, and disturb our reason. There they raged in a perpetual conflict; but avarice, the meanest of them all, generally triumphed, ruled absolutely, and in many instances, which I forbear to mention, most scandalously.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)