"Hard-and-fast" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nothing,' Albrechtsberger added, 'and will never do anything in decent style.' This was in allusion to Beethoven's wilfulness in persistently transgressing certain established rules of composition. The old teacher failed to see that Beethoven's refusal to be bound by hard-and-fast rules arose, not from mere caprice, but from the force of a genius which would not submit to be trammelled by any kind of artificial limitations. The wisdom of Beethoven is, however, shown by the fact that he wrote out his exercises with the most scrupulous care, and ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... told me; often one hears that remark, even from adults. As if a father could not be a fool like anybody else! That a child should have hard-and-fast opinions—it is engaging. Children are egocentric. A fellow of this size ought to ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... sold at auction for firewood and for such bits of their metal as weren't rusted to pieces. He read the catalog. Then he telegraphed to me to wire him a loan of one hundred dollars. For the catalog gave the date of one schooner's building as 1804. He knew it used to be a hard-and-fast custom of ship-builders to put a silver dollar under the mainmast of every vessel they built, a dollar of that particular year. He bought the schooner for $70. He spent ten dollars in hiring men to rip out her mast. Under it was an 1804 dollar. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... for my part," he remarks, "I owe him as much as I gave him, for his love lighted up the gold of affection that was in me and consumed the dross. It was from him that I first learned that there was no such thing as a hard-and-fast line between the physical and the spiritual in friendship." This relationship lasted for some years, when the young man married; its effects are described as very beneficial to both parties; all the sexual troubles vanished, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the occasion of my first appearance. San Francisco knew me then only as a reporter, and I was to make my bow to San Francisco as a lecturer. I knew that nothing short of compulsion would get me to the theatre. So I bound myself by a hard-and-fast contract so that I could not escape. I got to the theatre forty-five minutes before the hour set for the lecture. My knees were shaking so that I didn't know whether I could stand up. If there is an awful, horrible malady in the world, it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
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