|
|
|
More "Inconceivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that could nether speak nor go for the first 6 quarters of a year as at present. This it seimes absurd to think, since that would have argued wery much imperfection in the man, which I wil be wery loath to think him capable of as he was in that state: the other syde seimes as absurd, since its inconceivable to think whow Ewe could have born a strong, robuste man of Adams strenth at the age of 30 years ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... oppressiveness. The Jews believed that they had drunk to the dregs the cup of misery, and that God must send them a Redeemer. There were no prophets to preach as at the time of the struggle with Babylon and Assyria, that the oppression was God's chastisement for their sins. And it was inconceivable to them that the power of wickedness should be allowed to triumph ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... possessed by this new idea. He worked over it that day and far into the night. His vivid imagination leaped into the future, brushing aside all obstacles, and he realized that here in his hands was an instrument capable of working inconceivable good. He recalled the days and weeks of anxiety when he was hungry for news of his loved ones; he foresaw that in affairs of state and of commerce rapid communication might mean the avoidance of war or the saving of a fortune; that, in affairs nearer ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... I am to be introduced to him! The Duke of St. James, Mr. Dacre! Mr. Dacre, the Duke of St. James! What an insult to all parties! How supremely ludicrous! What a mode of offering my gratitude to the man to whom I am under solemn and inconceivable obligations! A choice way, truly, to salute the bosom-friend of my sire, the guardian of my interests, the creator of my property, the fosterer of my orphan infancy! It is useless to conceal it; I am placed in the most disagreeable, the most inextricable situation. 'Inextricable! ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... they sprang from their backs on board them, headed by their leader, and, to the astonishment of those who beheld them from the shore, captured every one of them. To English officers it may appear inconceivable that a body of cavalry, with no other arms than their lances, and no other mode of conveyance across a rapid river than their horses, should attack and take a fleet of gunboats amidst shoals of alligators; but, strange ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... acres of unused land, it would be inconceivable folly to project into the inoffensive atmosphere twenty-eight stories of wood and iron merely to buy and sell the products of man's brain and hands. But while our Twentieth Century feverish activities are ostensibly engaged in the external ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... will tell as a compact and intelligible mass, a little way off, though confused when seen near; but also a dark touch gains at a little distance in apparent darkness, a light touch in apparent light, and a colored touch in apparent color, to a degree inconceivable by an unpractised person; so that literally, a good painter is obliged, working near his picture, to do in everything only about half of what he wants, the rest being done by the distance. And if ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... crushed and raging. She sank down again into the great red chair, and sat there crumpled, her elbows on the table, her face in her hands—a face that was on fire with shame and passion. She had offered herself, and she had been refused! The inconceivable had befallen her. The humiliation of it seemed to her something that ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... state of indescribable horror, I saw the light gradually fade away from the tops of the mountains, giving the scene around me a dim and spectral ghastliness, which, to those who were never in such a situation, is altogether inconceivable. ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... upon something else, that something else being, in the opinion of the Mercantilists, money. Notwithstanding what may be called the tangible absurdity of this doctrine, it remained unquestioned for generations; nay, to be candid, most men still cling to it—a fact which would be inconceivable did not the doctrine offer a very simple and plausible explanation of the enigmatical phenomenon that increasing capacity of production does not necessarily bring with it ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... gates are not for ever open. The time may come when those shall stand before them unto whom the words, "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me," shall sound the death-knell of all hopes throughout an inconceivable eternity. ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... at the importance of his own position in the military outpost, through the arrival of the strangers. That this grave political enthusiast and civilian should be on familiar terms with a young Englishwoman of rank was at first inconceivable to the officers. And that he had never alluded to it before seemed to them ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... my eyes, there they stood. Twenty-five happy faces smiling into mine, and twenty babies to match. It was the kiddies that saved the day. I was not a little bewildered, and tears stung my eyes. But with one accord the babies set up a howl at anything so inconceivable as a queer foreign thing with a tan head appearing in their midst. When peace was restored by natural methods, ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... importance to this prediction of a change in the month of March. I deplored, as every one did, the inconceivable errors of "Ferrand and Company," and I hoped that the Government would gradually return to those principles which were calculated to conciliate the feelings of the people. A few days after another of my friends called on me. He had exercised ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... his chair. The idea that his son could love anyone and not be loved in return was plainly quite inconceivable. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... so strenuously exclude the idea of revelation, i.e., the acquiring of imparted information from higher sources? Savages can certainly have "revelation" from civilised men. Why, then, should it be inconceivable that human beings should receive information from beings in the universe higher than themselves? It may or may not be the case that they do; but there is no scientific ground for dogmatism on the subject, nor any reason for asserting ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... be regarded as the ghosts of heavenly bodies. The heads, in some cases, may consist of separate solid fragments, though on this astronomers are by no means agreed, but the tails at any rate are in fact of almost inconceivable tenuity. We know that a cloud a few hundred feet thick is sufficient to hide, not only the stars, but even the Sun himself. A Comet is thousands of miles in thickness, and yet even extremely minute stars can be seen through ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... Boccaccio's vivid Italian Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first pleasing example of the English talent for humorous portrayal in fiction; the wonderful passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses of Shakespeare's Ulysses, and the various, unequal, sometimes almost repulsive, never otherwise than powerful, pageantry of that play, which has been perhaps more misjudged than any other of Shakespeare's,—all ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Mother feared that a ferry was going to collide with them, when beautiful youths in boating hats popped out of state-rooms like chorus-men in a musical comedy, when children banged small sand-pails, when the steamer rounded the dream-castles of lower New York, when it seemed inconceivable that the flag-staff could get under Brooklyn Bridge—which didn't clear it by much more than a hundred feet—when a totally new New York of factories and docks, of steamers bound for Ceylon and yachts bound for Newport, ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... with Flora Macdonald, are highly romantic and wonderful. Equally wonderful is the fact that, of the many to whom his secret was intrusted, not one was disposed to betray him, even in view of so splendid a bribe as thirty thousand pounds. But this fact, though surprising, is not inconceivable. Had Washington been unfortunate in his contest with the mother country, and had he wandered as a fugitive amid the mountains of Vermont, would not many Americans have shielded him, even in view of a reward of one ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... a growing demand for personality and initiative in elected persons. The press, which was once entirely subordinate politically to parliamentary politics, adopts an attitude towards parliament and party leaders nowadays which would have seemed inconceivable insolence in the days of Lord Palmerston. And there has been a vigorous agitation in support of electoral methods which are manifestly calculated to subordinate "delegated" ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... how great is your happiness; you can think of death without fear. The troubles and griefs of life do not distress you as they do the poor worldling, who looks only to the enjoyments of this life for comfort. If a Christian, you have sweet foretastes of that joy which is unspeakable and inconceivable by mortals. Though a sinner still, you feel that your sins are pardoned, and that through the merits of a crucified Saviour you will at last be accepted of God. I would fondly hope, my dear sister, that this is your happy case. But if not, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every reason to believe in their existence. Wittekind had never seen them. Vandal and Goth and every kind of Barbarian that she considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable that he had deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable that he had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did we confirm in her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... saw a dark mass of rock, weighing hundreds of tons, descending like a prodigious meteor, hurled from the heavens. It had been loosened on the mountain crest a half mile above, and was plunging downward with inconceivable momentum. Striking some obstruction, it rebounded like a rubber ball against the opposite side of the gorge, then recoiled, still diving downward, oscillating like a pendulum from wall to wall, whirling with increasing speed until it crashed to the bottom of the gorge with a shock so terrific ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... two answers to this question. One answer comes from those in the Church who still cling to the theory that there must be no race division whatever in the Church, that there must be under all conditions conceivable or inconceivable one Bishop in the same territory to all kinds, classes and races of people. "No," say they, "no negro Bishop. Whatever be your divisions in Councils or Convocations or Conventions, let one white Bishop be the bond of unity." ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... It is fundamentally because the English people have discerned that kingship is not necessarily incompatible with popular government that the monarchy has persisted. If royalty had been felt to stand inevitably in the path of democratic progress, it is inconceivable that all the forces of tradition could have pulled it through the past seventy-five or eighty years. As it is, while half a century ago there was in the country a small republican group which was fond of urging that the monarchy was but a source of needless ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... profession would depend very largely on women." Certainly, if he had to decide to-night, he would rather return to Marion, Ohio, than join his staff. Such a retreat from the glories of Chicago would be inconceivable to old Hitchcock and to the girl. He reflected that he should not like to put himself away ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... that contained a hundredth part of the sweetness and music that was comprised in that simple and unsophisticated ejaculation; it decided in an instant, and beyond all possibility of doubt, who and what was the speaker. His joy was inconceivable, and he could scarce refrain from giving vent to it in a loud shout. Returning immediately, he communicated the joyful intelligence to his friends; and the whole party, with light hearts and rapid steps, advanced towards the beach. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... negligence and fallacy of the details, Mr. Whitbread, on the contrary, with an unrelenting accuracy, laid open the minutiae of every transaction, and made evasion as impossible to others, as it was alien and inconceivable to himself. He was, perhaps, the only person, whom Sheridan had ever found proof against his powers of persuasion,—and this rigidity naturally mortified his pride full as much as it thwarted and disconcerted ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... help pausing here for a moment, to reflect upon the expressions of surprise which this minister has let fall relative to the excesses he relates. To him the departure of the troops from their ancient principles of loyalty and honor seems quite inconceivable. Surely those to whom he addresses himself know the causes of it but too well. They know the doctrines which they have preached, the decrees which they have passed, the practices which they have countenanced. The soldiers ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... gained him time and covered his retreat. He challenged my sincerity, my sanity, almost my humanity, and that of course widened our breach and confirmed our rupture. He did everything in short but convince me either that I was wrong or that he was unhappy; we separated, and I left him to his inconceivable communion. ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... many cases, painless childbirth could be a possibility by a little attention to diet, exercise and other hygienic measures during the last few months of pregnancy. Knowing this, it seems inconceivable that any woman would neglect to so fully inform herself on these matters that both she and her child could have all benefit of the ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... and a half hours later by the clamours and shakings of the exasperated monk. Protesting that such a sleep at such a time was a thing inconceivable, Balbi informed him that ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Mekka." On the dignified bearing and self-possession of our youthful sovereign, the Khan enlarges in the strain of eulogy which might be expected from one to whom the sight of the ensigns of sovereignty borne by a female hand was in itself an almost inconceivable novelty, declaring, that "the justice and virtues of her Majesty have obliterated the name of Nushirvan from the face of the earth!" But the remarks of the simple-minded Parsees on the same subject will be found, from their honest sincerity, we suspect, more germane to the matter—"We saw ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... around a moment, and then said gallantly, "I will get you the moss, Miss Alford." They saw that in some inconceivable way he intended crossing where they stood. The gorge was much too wide for the most vigorous ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... all sides in wild confusion flew The dust and leaves, the branches and the stones, With hideous tumult, inconceivable. ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... what place they were printed. They are undoubtedly deliberate forgeries. They purport, even in respect of errata, to be identical with the genuine issue of 1807; but they were not set up from the same type, and it is inconceivable that a second issue, set up from different type and with slightly different ornaments, was printed by Ridge for piratical purposes. To cite a few obvious differences—in the title of the large-paper copies the first A of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Hindustan; of South America and South Asia; among the jungly banks of the Godavery and the woody shores of the Pamoni, of the Oroonoko, and the Bramahputra—in short, in every sunny clime and region where the rigours of his own winter are not only unknown, but inconceivable. There is something sublime in the mere consideration of the prodigious remoteness from one another of the various points from which these animals have thus been collected; something gratifying to human pride, in the thought that neither the freezing atmosphere of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... sun setting into a purple ocean looked with a fiery stare upon the enormous wall of the Cordilleras, worthy witnesses of his glorious extinction. But it is inconceivable that it should have seen the ant-like men busy with their absurd and insignificant trials of killing and dying for reasons that, apart from being generally childish, were also imperfectly understood. It ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... military genius of a high order guided the movement. Only a small detachment of troops could be sent out from the central position at the Tuileries. As they could not be everywhere, the intrenchments of the populace rose in various parts of the city, unopposed, with inconceivable rapidity, and with almost military precision. Large bodies advanced simultaneously to the gunsmiths' shops, to the police stations and guard-houses, to the arsenal and powder manufactory, to the artillery depot of St. Thomas Aquinas; and the guns, muskets, and ammunition ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, only cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediaeval Church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... to get her hands on the balcony, which reminded her of Mrs. Jellyby's closet, full to overflowing with every conceivable and inconceivable thing. The floor was strewn with coats, dresses and hats while the shoes were neatly hung on a row of hooks. Very pretty, well-shaped shoes they were, too, as it seemed Jo's feet ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... inclined to think, however, that Mr. Schoeffel has included the losses made in the other cities visited by the company. There were only sixty-one representations at the Metropolitan Opera House, and it is inconceivable that they averaged a deficit of over $9,000 each. They could not have cost that sum in fact, and many of the performances drew houses which at the prevailing prices (orchestra $6) must have yielded handsome returns. Whatever the sum which loomed up as a prospective loss, however, it was ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... page in the modern history of Hellenism, has been ever since its foundation the capital of Epirus in every point of view. It is only the bad faith of the Turkish Government which could take advantage of the inconceivable patriotism of the Albanians to create all of a sudden an Albanian nationality. It is true that there does exist an Albanian race, an insignificant branch of that powerful tree of the Hellenic family; but this race has never played an important, independent, free part in history. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... methods. And if so, it is a real awakening—that and the combination with the students. I read the translations from Japanese every few days, and it would be very interesting to know whether their ignorance is real or assumed. Probably some of both—it is inconceivable that they should be as poor judges of Chinese psychology as the articles indicate. But at the same time they have to keep up a certain tone of belief among the people at home—namely, that the Chinese really prefer the Japanese to all other foreigners; for ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... significance in America that it had just gained in France; to swear eternal fidelity to liberty, equality, and fraternity, as if these were lately discovered rights which had been denied the common people for centuries by kings and nobles, who had always lived in the next street in inconceivable luxury wrung from the blood and sweat of the poor; to form Jacobin clubs pledged to the suppression of the tyranny of aristocrats in a country where, as Samuel Dexter said of New England, there was hardly ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... wind-flood overhead were roaring down the side canyons and over the cliffs, arousing the rocks and the trees and the streams alike into glorious hurrahing enthusiasm, shaking the whole Valley into one huge song. Yet inconceivable as it must seem even to those who love all Nature's wildness, the storm was telling its story on the ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... the room with a renewal of hostilities. He would lose his game of golf to-day as it was, for apart from the fact that he would scarcely have time to change his clothes (the idea of playing golf in a frock-coat and top-hat was inconceivable) and catch the 11.20 tram, he could not be seen in Puffin's company at all. And, indeed, in the future, unless Puffin could be induced to apologize and Miss Mapp to forgive, he saw, if he was to play golf at all with his friend, that endless deceptions and subterfuges were ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... doctrine has a double basis. In the first place, it is a corollary of the doctrine of two natures. In the second, it is established by the recorded facts of the gospel narrative. To take first the a priori argument. A nature without a will is inconceivable. A cognitive faculty without the dynamic of the volitional would be a machine without driving force. The absurdity of the supposition, indeed, is not fully brought out by the simile. For we can consider the machine at ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... account as sires and dams. Were I a judge at a cattle show, I certainly should disqualify every extremely fat animal entered for competition amongst the breeding stock. Unless parents are healthy and vigorous, their progeny are almost certain to be unhealthy and weakly; and it is inconceivable that an extremely obese bull and an unnaturally fat cow could be the progenitors of healthy offspring. We should by all means improve our live stock; but we should be careful not to overdo the thing. If we must have ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... animal motion, or apply our limbs to their proper use and office. That their motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable.[12] ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... revealed the intruders, and all the monkeys, except pink-face, crowding the trees above the spot where they stood, gazed down upon them with expressions in which unparalleled indignation and inconceivable surprise ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... arrival I embarked for Stamboul, the Turkish quarter, in one of those long caicks which are as it were the hackney coaches of Constantinople. The least oscillation is sufficient to upset these light barks, which are impelled with inconceivable rapidity by two or three fine light-looking Arnaouts, dressed in silken shirts. In two minutes, having traversed the Golden Horn, passing through an immense crowd of boats of every form, and ships of every nation, we disembarked upon a landing-place even more dangerous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... on the bolder and more practical minds of the Western Latins, and gives a sketch of Bernard and his Abbey of Clairvaux, which brings pleasantly enough before us the ways and works of a long-dead world, which was all but inconceivable to us till Mr, Carlyle disinterred it in his picture of Abbot Sampson, the hero of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the contemplation of the pictures that covered the panes of glass in the door, turning them into a model chart of inconceivable animals, four-cornered trees and impossible soldiers. He was glancing continually to one side, like a criminal who fears that he is going to be caught in the act. It was manifest that he had something in view which must be concealed from passers-by, and from posterity, for that matter. His ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... at last, that he really intended to make her a declaration of love. It was unheard of, almost inconceivable. But there he was at her feet, looking very handsome in the moonlight, his face turned up to hers with an unmistakable look of devotion in its rather grave lines. His voice, too, had a new sound in it. Indifferent ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... this I had my enclosures for my cattle, that is to say, my goats: and as I had taken an inconceivable deal of pains to fence and enclose this ground, I was so uneasy to see it kept entire, lest the goats should break through, that I never left off, till with infinite labour I had stuck the outside of the hedge so full of small stakes, and so near to one another, that it was rather ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... Strong tried to figure out the connection. Hardy's reputation was spotless. It seemed inconceivable that he could be involved with Vidac. And yet Hardy had selected Vidac as his right-hand man. And Vidac couldn't have gotten away with his treatment of the colonists unless Hardy had silently ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an Act of Parliament good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a great many things, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... celebrate whatever our fancy painted. Now it was an imaginary birthday—a movable feast that came to be very popular in our select artistic circle; again it was the possible—dare I say probable?—sale of a picture at a quite inconceivable price. There were always occasions enough. Would it had been the case ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... youth. The son of that great Gatholian noble who had given his life so gloriously, however futilely, in an attempt to defend Gahan's sire from the daggers of the assassins. Tasor an under-padwar in the guard of O-Tar, Jeddak of Manator! It was inconceivable—and yet it was he; there could be no doubt of it. "Tasor," Gahan repeated aloud. "But it is no Manatorian name." The statement was half interrogatory, for Gahan's curiosity was aroused. He would know how ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... they overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable infinities of space, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to outlast not only the present starry system but every other that, when earth and sun and stars have crumbled into dust, shall be built upon their ruins in the long long hereafter? ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... her shabby purse, and Claire made no protest. In a similar position she herself would have wished to pay, but it was inconceivable that she should ever be in such a position. However hurried a man might be— She rubbed her hand on her knee with a little shudder of distaste. "Wretch! He would make love to me, too, if I would allow it! How can Cecil possibly ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... truths, and useful knowledge. Let the vain chimeras which beset the people be dissipated, and very soon rational opinions will fill the minds of those who were believed fated to be always in error. To annihilate religious prejudices, it would be sufficient to show that what is inconceivable to man can not be of any use to him. Does it need, then, anything but simple common sense to perceive that a being most clearly irreconcilable with the notions of mankind, that a cause continually opposed ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... bending moments is condemned—it is condemnation of methods of calculating. Point Seven recommends reinforcing a beam for its simple beam moment. This is the greatest bending it could possibly receive, and it is inconceivable that failure could be due to this suggestion. Point Seven recommends a reasonable reinforcement over the support. This is a matter for the judgment of the designer or a rule in specifications. Failure could scarcely be attributed to ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... ignominiously punished.[120] It is well-nigh incredible that the Zuniga who championed Copernicus, and displays vigilant self-restraint in his writings, should have been guilty of such flightiness as is brought home to his namesake; it is by no means inconceivable that the Zuniga who deposed against Luis de Leon should have been guilty of occasional lapses. He is said to have been impetuous as well as vindictive;[121] he had the dangerous gift of pulpit eloquence[122] and may have acquired the trick of saying rather more ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing, a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite and pass on—a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do with ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... The dim light could not show us both its walls at once. The fall of the waters which were carrying us away exceeded that of the swiftest rapids in American rivers. Its surface seemed composed of a sheaf of arrows hurled with inconceivable force; I cannot convey my impressions by a better comparison. The raft, occasionally seized by an eddy, spun round as it still flew along. When it approached the walls of the gallery I threw on them the light of the lantern, and I could judge somewhat of the velocity of our speed by ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... indication of his presence, there is divinity, albeit not manifest. This is the case when he is grieved and withdraws his grace. On the other hand, when he discloses his grace, there is both the essence and its manifestation. But the third aspect is inconceivable for God, namely, a manifestation of divinity without the essence. This is rather a trick of the devil and his servants, who usurp the place of God and act as God, though they are anything but divine. An illustration of this we find in Ezekiel 28, 2, where the king of Tyre is ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... you," said the Captain, "to send two unendurable and inconceivable bores to intercept me with rubbish about which I neither know nor care any more than ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... on fire, and smoke and flames met them at every turn; for the conflagration spread with incredible speed. An inconceivable confusion succeeded: one sought for another; one called on another; mother ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... bite of the cobra is probably mortal,' is called a Contingent or Problematic Modal: 'Water is certainly composed of oxygen and hydrogen' is an Assertory or Certain Modal: 'Two straight lines cannot enclose a space' is a Necessary or Apodeictic Modal (the opposite being inconceivable). Propositions not ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a patois could write Venus and Adonis, manifestly it was inconceivable in 1593, when Venus and Adonis was signed "William Shakespeare." No man who knew the actor (as described) could believe that he was the author, but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that the faintest doubt was thrown on the actor's authorship; ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... an assurance almost inconceivable, took it within his own, and giving it a hard shake, after the English ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... themes in a key of grave, universal beauty. Of the new note that came into the Norwegian lyric with Bjoernson, I can discover no hint in his predecessors. Such a poem as, for instance, "Nils Finn," with its inimitably droll refrain—how utterly inconceivable it would be in the mouth of Wergeland or Welhaven! The new quality in it is as unexplainable as the poem itself is untranslatable. It has that inexpressible cadence and inflection of the Norse dialect which ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the furthest star, God is still the Author of our being, the Framer of the world and all that therein is, the Cause without which there would have been no effects. If, after creating the world, He withdrew from it to an inconceivable {92} distance, it is none the less His handiwork; if it is in and through His absence that the cosmic mechanism has got out of gear, it is yet He who willed to be so absent, well knowing what results would supervene; if a power other than He and hostile to Him has ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... disdained the company of men of approximately his own age or thereabout; he had refused an opportunity to partake of refreshment suitable to his years; and now he stepped into the Bon Ton toy store and bought for cash—most inconceivable of acquisitions!—a little wagon that was painted bright red and bore on its sides, in curlicued letters, the ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... that the only tenable interpretation of the record in the rocks is that numerous populations of creatures, distinct from one another and from present forms, have risen and passed away; and that the geologic ages in which these creatures lived were of inconceivable length. The rank and file came thus, with the aid of fossil records, to realize the import of an idea which James Hutton, and here and there another thinker, had conceived with the swift intuition of genius long before the science of paleontology came into existence. The Huttonian proposition that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... conceal the fact. He should not have lost a moment, after the death of his cousin, in making that letter public. It ought instantly to have been placed in Coroner Whidden's hands. Richard's action is inconceivable, unless—unless"— ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of Spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to dances of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in order that the queen might treat her as his son's betrothed. When they arrived at the palace, and entered the vast hall in which her majesty was seated, Isabella's escort halted at the lower end, and she herself advanced alone in all her inconceivable beauty, producing an effect like that of a brilliant meteor shooting through the sky on a calm clear night, or of a sunbeam darting at the first dawn of day through a mountain gorge. A comet she seemed, portending ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... fairly crushed hope out of him. The lights upon the shore were as distant as fixed stars. This was a country of heavy tides, he reflected, and he began to fear that the current was sweeping them out. He turned to look for the ship, but could see no traces of her, and since it was inconceivable that the Nebraska could have sunk so quietly, her disappearance confirmed his fears. More than once he fancied he heard an answer to his cries for help— the rattle of rowlocks or the splash of oars—but ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... weeks ago an admission like that would have been inconceivable. It was odd, he thought, how one thing led to another and produced an end that could not be foreseen. Now he could lie and dissemble with the best. He had no compunction about falsifying a requisition, or stealing what he could not obtain with apparent honesty. His character had sunk to an all-time ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... with freedom,—is a truth taught by Christ, is a truth proclaimed by the Church; and the faith of Christians in this principle, in spite of hesitations and misgivings, of oppositions and obstacles and inconceivable difficulties, has finally given to it its modern vigor and beneficent power. The spirit of love and mercy, which is the spirit of Christ, breathes like a heavenly zephyr through the whole earth, and under its influence the age is moved to attempt greater things than hitherto have seemed possible. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... and rocky desert. The city was thirty miles away; there was but one road, which went no further than my father's door; the rest were bridle-tracks impassable in winter; and we thus dwelt in a solitude inconceivable to the European. Our only neighbour was Dr. Grierson. To my young eyes, after the hair-oiled, chin-bearded elders of the city, and the ill-favoured and mentally stunted women of their harems, there was something agreeable in the correct manner, the fine bearing, ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... well as we: and consequently they have no other game to play. But, what merit they can build upon having joined with a Protestant army, under a King they acknowledged, to defend their own liberties and properties against a Popish enemy under an abdicated King; is, I confess to me absolutely inconceivable; and I believe will equally be so for ever, to any ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... service to the nation, which few, I think, will deny, the benefits of the whipping-post must be very apparent, as being a necessary instrument to such an execution. Indeed, the service it does to a country is inconceivable. I, myself, know a man who had proceeded to lay his hand upon a silver spoon with a design to make it his own, but on looking round, and seeing the whipping-post in his way, he desisted from the theft. Whether he suspected that the post would impeach him or not, I ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... to M. de Montmorency, and, therefore, in his menaces he let fall some hints with relation to those letters to the disadvantage of Madame de Guemenee. She thereupon ridiculed him no longer, but went almost raving mad, and fell into such an inconceivable melancholy that you would not have known her, and retired to Couperai, where she ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... and of short reach. There was positively no duty to the State which a youth was bound to observe. Broadly, it might be said that at that time discipline simply did not enter at all into the life of the poor of the towns, and charity of every conceivable and inconceivable kind did enter into ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... inconceivable, except that under duress of great pain Lilly could have engaged services so obviously quasi professional, but she was past that perception by now, her nerves from brow to shoulder crackling like ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of awkwardness with agility—of the clumsy with the graceful. He would stumble in stepping across the floor of a drawing room; he would trip himself up on a smooth-shaven grass-plot, and he would tumble in the most inconceivable manner in ascending the commodious, facile, and well-carpeted staircase of an elegant mansion, so as to bruise his nose or his lip on the upper steps, or to tread upon his hands, and even occasionally ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... absolutely shone with burnished gold, and glowed with pictures; its walls were a quarry of precious stones, so valuable were the marbles out of which they were wrought; its columns and pillars were of inconceivable costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty, and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites. Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little casket, inlaid inside with precious ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... under full steam; the black smoke whirled in spirals about the sparkling summits of the icebergs; the weather was changeable, turning from a dry cold to a snowstorm with inconceivable rapidity. Since the brig drew but little water, Hatteras hugged the west shore; he did not want to miss the entrance of Bellot Sound, for the Gulf of Boothia has no other entrance towards the south than the slightly known sound of the Fury and ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... was still so considered by the opponents of the system of Copernicus. It had, indeed, been necessary for Aristarchus to explain the fact as due to the extreme distance of the stars; a perfectly correct explanation, but one that implies distances that are altogether inconceivable. It remained for nineteenth-century astronomers to show, with the aid of instruments of greater precision, that certain of the stars have a parallax. But long before this demonstration had been brought forward, the system of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... are free from age-long prejudices, hatreds, and past scores. But if this great conflict does not lead along the lines of the constructive forces and the working out of a new world method, then the future of Europe and of the world is dark indeed. Surely it will lead to a new order—it is almost inconceivable ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this brilliant and thoughtful writer." And the ordinary citizen, knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... deacon had time to count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third. As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the languid, drowsy drone of the sea. One could hear the infinitely faraway, inconceivable time when God ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of that! That's a hundred years ago. He'll just make mamma and Uncle Regie of no good at all! And then there's a girl too—' (in a tone of inconceivable disgust) 'I don't want strange girls—an awful stuck-up swell of a Londoner, not able to do anything! I wish I had gone to spend Christmas with Bruce! I would if I had known it was ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... end, out of which he would suck the contents. He was a very good ratter, and also killed many snakes against which I pitted him. His way seemed to be to tease the snake into darting at him, when, with inconceivable rapidity, he would pounce on the reptile's head. He seemed to know instinctively which were the poisonous ones, and acted with corresponding caution. I tried him once with some sea-snakes (Hydrophis palamoides), which are poisonous, but he could get no fight out of them, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... suffering which it caused my beloved Master, the Baal Shem, yet Sabbatianism did not really play much part in my early life, because such severe measures were taken against it by the orthodox Rabbis that it seemed to be stamped out, and I myself, as I began to reflect upon it, found it inconceivable that a Jewish God should turn Turk: as well expect him to turn Christian. But indirectly this redoubtable movement entered largely into my life by way of the great Eibeschuetz-Emden controversy. For it will not be stale in the memory ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the legends [myths] about men, beasts, and gods so wildly incredible and revolting? . . . The answer is that the earliest men were in a state of almost inconceivable ignorance and savagery, and that the Greeks inherited their myths from people in the same savage stage (en un pareil etat de sauvagerie). Look at the Kaffirs and Iroquois if you want to know what the earliest men were like, and remember that the very Iroquois ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... desirable to know if the former Chancellor was present at the audience; it is regrettably not inconceivable, but is a new proof of the incompetence of the Chancellor, that he did not, according to his duty, inform his Imperial Lord of the political personality and character of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... art, O Devayani, no daughter of a hired adorer, of one that asketh for alms and accepteth gifts. Thou art the daughter of one that adores none, but of one that is adored by all! Vrishaparvan himself knoweth it, and Indra, and king Yayati too. That inconceivable Brahma, that unopposable Godhead, is my strength! The self-create, himself, gratified by me, hath said that I am for aye the lord of that which is in all things on Earth or in Heaven! I tell thee truly that it is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... bit at and clung to equally capable defensive screens of pure force. As these inconceivable forces met, the glare of their neutralization filled all nearby space. And ships and skeletons alike were disappearing in chunks, blobs, gouts, streamers and sparkles of rended, ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... was amply protected. His enemies shrieked that his statements were based on juggled figures; that even if the number of soldiers was adequate, the quality and equipment were wretched; in a word that he lied. It is a shame-less controversy inconceivable were there not many men in whom politics and prejudice far outweighed patriotism. In all this, Hitchcock was Stanton's trump card. He who had refused to advise McClellan, did not hesitate to denounce him. In response to a request from Stanton, he made a report sustaining Wadsworth. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... detached bands he met, Morgan crossed the Ohio line—tearing up roads, cutting telegraphs, and inflicting much damage and inconceivable panic—until he reached within five miles of Cincinnati. Of course, with his merely nominal force, he could make no attempt on the city; so, after fourteen days of unresting raiding—his command pressed, worn out and broken down—he headed for the river once more. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... the latter day glory is to take place through human instrumentality, can it be expected without some mighty movement on the part of the church? Can a work of such inconceivable magnitude be effected, till every redeemed sinner shall lay himself out in the enterprise, as worldly men do in their projects? If the promises of God are to be fulfilled through the efforts of men, what hope can there be of the glorious day, till men are resolute ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... bright particular manicure girl was engaged. She was doing the nails of an overdressed man and giggling with him. Babbitt hated him. He thought of waiting, but to stop the powerful system of the Pompeian was inconceivable, and he was instantly wafted ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... do our planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful than that ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... which to create a dozen bloody rebellions." How any race with the blood of the tropics boiling in their veins, with the traditions of old oppressions burning in their memory, can ever forget or forgive this language and these unbridled outrages is inconceivable. He is mad who does not see that the gulf of caste, too wide before, has widened and deepened almost unfathomably by the influence of the events of the last few months. He is mad, too, who thinks that Morant Bay, or the parish of St. Thomas in the East, with their unshrived ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and suffering. She drove him away. Like a cowed, lurking devil he was driven off, his mind working cunningly against her, devising evil for her. But she drove him off. In his moments of intense suffering, she seemed to him inconceivable, a monster, the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... force, are all dismissed as unthinkable. It is not very clear in what sense that word is to be taken. Sometimes it seems to mean, meaningless; at others, self-contradictory or absurd; at others, inconceivable, i. e. that of which no conception or mental image can be formed; at any rate, it implies what is unknowable and untenable. The result is, so far as matter is concerned, that we know nothing about it. "Our conception ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Etruscans—not a feeling they had that we can share in; and these pictures of them will be to us valuable only as the sculpture under the niches far in the shade there of the old parish church, dimly vital images of inconceivable creatures whom we shall never ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the military gentleman, with an emphasis which made Mr. Cymon Tuggs withdraw his eyes from the young lady's face with inconceivable rapidity. 'Which young men—where?' and the military gentleman clenched his fist, and glared fearfully on the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... off the knavish business successfully—I could not believe it. On the other hand, there was the British private. I have known him all my life, God bless him! Thank God, it is my privilege to know him now, as he lies knocked to bits, cheerily, in our hospital. It was inconceivable that out of sheer funk he could abandon a popular officer. And his was not even a scratch crowd, but a hard-bitten regiment with all sorts of glorious names ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions; and vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... It was inconceivable that mankind would become extinct. The whole vast resources and pooled intelligence of surviving humanity were focused upon Thurston's Disease. And the disease would yield. Humanity waited with childlike confidence for the miracle that would save it. And the miracle would ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... first was a kaleidoscopic array of colors and shapes, but the amazing, astounding, inconceivable thing about the scene was that there was no single color I could recognize! The eyes of van Manderpootz, or perhaps his brain, interpreted color in a fashion utterly alien to the way in which my own functioned, and the resultant spectrum was so bizarre that there is simply no way of describing ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... about one degree above the horizon on a true west bearing. From this point, as from the narrow point of a funnel, streams of light, resembling brightly illuminated vapour or smoke, appeared to be incessantly issuing, increasing in breadth as they proceeded, and darting with inconceivable velocity, such as the eye could scarcely keep pace with, upwards towards the zenith, and in the same easterly direction which the former arch had taken. The sky immediately under the spot from which ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... of the few great jurists and administrators whom America has ever produced, and it is inconceivable that he did not understand what he was doing. He knew perfectly well that, other things being equal, the simplest administrative mechanism is the best, and he knew also that he was helping to make an extremely complicated mechanism. Not only so, but at the heart of this complexity lay the ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... countenance expressed nothing but calm scorn and defiance. He was evidently working himself into that state of mind which these redskin warriors endeavour to assume when they are captured and taken to the stake and the torture, there to prove their title to the name of brave by enduring the most inconceivable agonies with stoical indifference, or there to bring discredit on their tribe, infamy on their name, and joy to their enemies, by breaking down under the infliction of tortures at the bare mention of which ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... With inconceivable ingenuity, the victim is seized and thrown to the ground, and the wasp plunges her sting, not at random into the body, which would involve the risk of death, but at determined points, exactly into the seat of those invisible nervous ganglions whose mechanism ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... even allude to individual instances whom we both know, but does it not remind you, on the whole, of the tone of French manners previous to the revolution—that "decence," which Horace Walpole so admired,[2] veiling the moral degradation, the inconceivable profligacy of the higher classes?—Stay—I have not yet done—not to you, but for you, I will add thus much;—our modern idea of delicacy apparently attaches more importance to words than to things—to manners than to morals. You will ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... from the saying of Descartes that the universe is a continuous creation, Malebranche deduced or rather concluded that our thoughts and actions are acts of God. There can be no action of the body on the soul to produce ideas; that would be inconceivable; but on the occasion, for instance, of our eyes resting on an object, God gives us an idea of that object, whether in conformity or not we cannot tell; but at any rate He gives us that idea of the object which He wishes us ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... bonds of friendship and interest which would thus have to be broken merely because of an insignificant jog in a boundary remote from both the nations made war between the United States and Great Britain seem absolutely inconceivable, until people realized that neither country could yield without an admission of defeat both galling to national pride and involving fundamental principles of conduct and policy for ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... through them of the whole earth; those courtiers covered with gold and scarlet, uncertain of the morrow, but mightier meanwhile than kings,—all this together seemed a species of hellish kingdom of wrong and evil. In his simple heart he marvelled that God could give such inconceivable almightiness to Satan, that He could yield the earth to him to knead, overturn, and trample it, to squeeze blood and tears from it, to twist it like a whirlwind, to storm it like a tempest, to consume it like a flame. And his Apostle-heart was alarmed by those ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... words. I did not decipher it all; I did not decipher the half. I did not need to. A spirit of divination was given me in that awful hour which enabled me to grasp its full meaning from the few sentences I did pick out. And that meaning! It was horrible, inconceivable. Murder was taught; but murder from a distance, and by an act too simple to awake revulsion. Were the wraiths of my two ancestors who had played with the spring hidden in the depths of this old closet, drawn up in mockery beside me during the hour when I stood ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... that of which we all are thinking in these days is war between civilized men. One civilized man cannot improve another civilized man by killing him, although it is not inconceivable that a civilized man may do humanity a service by destroying human savages, for with the savages he must destroy ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Bernard," said Edmee; "for after all I ought to be grateful to him; in spite of his reservations and conditions, he performed a great and inconceivable action, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and the place, for the holy spirit cautioned him, "Take heed, these things will surely come to pass."[17] But when Joseph repeated his dream to his brethren, in the presence of his father, Jacob rebuked him, saying, "I and thy brethren, that has some sense, but I and thy mother, that is inconceivable, for thy mother is dead."[18] These words of Jacob called forth a reproof from God. He said, "Thus thy descendants will in time to come seek to hinder Jeremiah in delivering his prophecies."[19] Jacob may be excused, he had spoken in this way only in order to avert the envy ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... principal and necessary warfare. The United States could not have encountered Great Britain single-handed—true; but there was not then the slightest prospect of her having to do so. The injuries of which she complained were incidental to a state of European war; inconceivable and impossible apart from it. She was therefore assured of the support of most powerful allies, occupying the attention of the British navy and draining the resources of the British empire. This condition of things was notorious, as was the fact ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... were semi-independent nobles, and the rest mere farmers of revenue, who bid against one another at the periodical settlements. Tenant right apart, the conception of private property in the soil was inconceivable to the Indian mind. Every one knows that it was borrowed by English lawyers from the Roman codes, when commercialism destroyed the old feudal nexus. Lord Cornwallis's permanent Settlement of 1793 ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... admitted to offer a full and consistent explanation of all the facts of science. There can be no better cause for any given formation than that God created it so. Men of science, however, allege that creation (out of nothing) is 'scientifically inconceivable;' but this is only throwing dust in our eyes; of course, science can not verify it, neither can it verify any other theory of causation. The question is whether reason can accept the fact, though science can not even imagine the process? If not, there is nothing for us but the eternity of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... cleared the ford, the batteries of the island and the flanking batteries on the right bank opened with deadly effect. How any British officer could have been so imprudent as to give the order to charge into the nullah is almost inconceivable; that the error was not evident, while the brave men were being mowed down by an artillery fire, which they could do nothing to silence, is still more marvellous; such, however, was the case. Colonel Havelock dashed into ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... are curiously distorted in order that both eyes may be on the upper side, where alone they would be of any use. It was objected by Mr. Mivart that a sudden transformation of the eye from one side to the other was inconceivable, while, if the transit were gradual the first step could be of no use, since this would not remove the eye from the lower side. But, as Mr. Darwin shows by reference to the researches of Malm and others, the young of these fish are quite symmetrical, and during their growth exhibit to us the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him—for ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... already reached the capital of Chaldea. The vast plain before the city swarmed with moving thousands of Medes and Persians. At this time no warriors were finer in appearance than the battlemen of the Persian prince. Their discipline had reached to an almost inconceivable degree of perfection. The wishes and desires of their great commander had become their law; and each one vied with the other in rendering obedience to his orders. Their fame had spread throughout lower Asia, and through many parts ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... line, lowers and will disappear soon; looks at the stars, the slow and regulated march of which he has observed, as have all the people of his trade, during so many nocturnal hours; is troubled in the depth of his mind by the proportions and the inconceivable ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... the joyful festival at Shiloh at the turn of the year, the reason for his doing so was not that he could have had no opportunity at his home in Ramah or Gibeah for eating and drinking before the Lord. Any strict centralisation is for that period inconceivable, alike in the religious as in every other sphere. This is seen even in the circumstance that the destruction of the temple of Shiloh, the priesthood of which we find officiating at Nob a little later, did not exercise the smallest modifying influence upon the character ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... airs of inconceivable rapture—thou weavest hearts into one with a single touch of thy fairy fingers, and with a breath again dividest them—thou forcest tears—thou driest them with a smile—alas! the next moment thou frightenest the wan smile from the quivering lip for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... conceive that the Russians would be beaten in a pitched battle by the English and French—but that they should have been so quickly followed up by the allies, as not to be able to shut their gates and man their walls, is to me inconceivable. Why, the Russians retreat like the wind, and have a thousand ruses at command, in order to retard an enemy. So at least I thought, but it is plain that I know nothing about them, nor indeed much ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... and methods and forces still active and working about us to-day." But if it be granted, or even proved, that this is true, we cannot see how it satisfies the reason when we come to the question of creation and a creator. For what a stupendous, unutterably stupendous, and almost inconceivable thing was that fire-mist that filled all space and had in it not only the germs and possibilities of suns and moons and planets and our earth, but of man and all his civilization; and those laws and methods and forces according to which the universe and man and his civilization have been evolved ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... ultimately gave out; and it was imperative to load them as lightly as possible, and discard all luxuries, especially heavy or bulky luxuries. Travelling through a wild country where there is little food for man or beast is beset with difficulties almost inconceivable to the man who does not himself know this kind of wilderness, and especially to the man who only knows the ease of civilization. A scientific party of some size, with the equipment necessary in order to do scientific work, can only ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... population; if these men are placed above poverty. But, if they are proprietors of small estates which have descended to them from their ancestors, the power which these affections will acquire amongst such men, is inconceivable by those who have only had an opportunity of observing hired labourers, farmers, and the manufacturing poor. Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... useful it need not necessarily be beautiful. In a sense, then, our Villagers have returned to a simpler, purer and surer standard. In shutting out the rest of Philistia they have also succeeded in shutting out Philistia's inconceivable ugliness. So the gods give them joy—the gods give ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... in the morning. In passing down an alley in the rear of the Rue Morgue, the fugitive's attention was arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of Madame L'Espanaye's chamber, in the fourth story of her house. Rushing to the building, it perceived the lightning rod, clambered up with inconceivable agility, grasped the shutter, which was thrown fully back against the wall, and, by its means, swung itself directly upon the headboard of the bed. The whole feat did not occupy a minute. The shutter was kicked open again by the Ourang-Outang as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and sensational point of view continuous peace is a drawback for the biographer no less than for the historian. What would history be without war?—almost inconceivable; since wars, not peace, are the principal materials with which it deals and supply it with most of its vitality and interest—must it also be admitted, its charm? For what are Hannibal or Napoleon or Frederick the Great remembered?—for ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... dramas? No plays can less well bear such inaccuracies, because they depend on their stage-setting to bring before our eyes their alien aspect, to make us feel an atmosphere with which we are wholly unfamiliar. The accessories are few, but of supreme importance; and it is inconceivable that a keenly intelligent actress like Mrs. Fiske should sacrifice vraisemblance to a meaningless refinement. In the second act of "Rosmersholm," to take a single instance, the text calls for a morning wrapper, a thing so manifestly ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Philosophers have spoken of them as forms of the human mind, but what is the mind without them? As then infinite time, or an existence out of time, which are the only possible explanations of eternal duration, are equally inconceivable to us, let us substitute for them a hundred or a thousand years after death, and ask not what will be our employment in eternity, but what will happen to us in that definite portion of time; or what is now happening to those who passed out of life a hundred or a ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... obvious and decisive objections. The first is, that Robin Hood, as already remarked, is not so much as named in contemporary history. Whether as the unsubdued leader of the Saxon peasantry, or insurgent against the tyranny of Henry or Edward, it is inconceivable that we should not hear something of him from the chroniclers. If, as Thierry says, "he had chosen Hereward for his model," it is unexplained and inexplicable why his historical fate has been so different from that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... help thinking they would feel much less respect for the "British Constitution" if they had a nearer view of some of the proceedings at Westminster. But they are human and can scarcely submit with patience to the repeated snubs they have had from the Home Government. The inconceivable bungling about New Guinea especially rankles in their breasts. No one is now so unpopular here as Mr. Gladstone and Lord Derby. Moreover, as a late Minister in South Australia said to me—Why should we send out our tradesmen, our artisans, our clerks, as volunteers, while you send out regular ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... and the gallows. Provided they would renounce the great object of the contest, he seemed really desirous that they should escape further chastisement; but to admit the worship of God according to the reformed creed, was with him an inconceivable idea. To do so was both unrighteous and impolitic. He had been brought up to believe that mankind could be saved from eternal perdition only by believing in the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome; that the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... grossness of speech which even the ladies of the party permitted themselves cannot be reproduced in the decorous print of our age. It is nothing less than inconceivable to us how Diderot can have brought himself to write down, in letters addressed to a woman of good education and decent manners, some of the talk that went on at Grandval. The coarsest schoolboy of these ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... she is and ever will be the most wonderful woman who ever lived. Thinking of you before, I said there ought to be two of her, so that one might be left for you. Now, thinking of myself, I would to God there were two of her, so that one might be left for me. Yet that is inconceivable. It might be possible to find another who looked like her; who thought like her; who was willing for the big things of life like her. But this other would not be Marjory. Besides everything else she has in common with other women, she ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the black man's mission; but ere his work was done he was converted into a machine to undo all his work. Inconceivable calamity has followed, and to him is fixed a decade which will soon ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... courtyard of the neighboring house. He glided quickly past it without pausing, but in that glimpse beheld Mrs. Brimmer and Miss Chubb half reclining in the corridor—in the attitude he had often seen them on the deck of the ship—talking and laughing with a group of Mexican gallants. A feeling of inconceivable loathing and aversion took possession of him. Was it to THIS he was returning after his despairing search for oblivion? Their empty, idle laughter seemed to ring mockingly in his ears as he hurried on, scarce knowing whither, until he paused before the broken cactus hedge and crumbling ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Infinite! and this Being, sentient of all things in the universe, providing for all things; seeing all things; maintaining order, down to the minutest particle, in a system which the finite thought of man can never grasp—and loving his creatures in myriads of worlds, of which man never dreamed. How inconceivable must be His boundless wisdom, His infinite love! Can we wonder that a Soul so glowing with love, so radiant in intelligence, should shine as the sun? Yes—this is the Central Sun, whose spiritual beams, pouring forth their Divine influences, creating as they go ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... himself," he replied, "but it seems to me, if I may say so without offence, doctor, that you are misinterpreting a somewhat elaborate joke. Mr. Holgate's explanation is reasonable enough, and besides, the only other explanation is monstrous—inconceivable!" ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... the chief elastic principle of my celestial bed is produced by artificial loadstones. About fifteen hundred pounds' weight of artificial and compound magnets are so disposed and arranged as to be continually pouring forth in an ever-flowing circle inconceivable and irrestibly powerful tides of the magnetic effluxion, which is well known to have a very strong affinity with ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... said in objection, that the error in these cases was in the minor premise, not the major; an error of fact, not of principle; that it did not consist in supposing that what is inconceivable can not be true, but in supposing antipodes to be inconceivable, when present experience proves that they can be conceived. Even if this objection were allowed, and the proposition that what is inconceivable can not be true were suffered to remain unquestioned as a speculative ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... plain before the city swarmed with moving thousands of Medes and Persians. At this time no warriors were finer in appearance than the battlemen of the Persian prince. Their discipline had reached to an almost inconceivable degree of perfection. The wishes and desires of their great commander had become their law; and each one vied with the other in rendering obedience to his orders. Their fame had spread throughout lower Asia, and through many parts ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... fact that the Jews still had some power of self-government through the Sanhedrin, the great mass of the people hated the Romans with an almost inconceivable fury. The world had never before seen such cruel rulers. The Assyrians had been bad, but the Romans were worse. Think of that form of punishment which they inflicted carelessly every day even for minor crimes—crucifixion! The poor victim was nailed by the hands and feet ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... from anticipating that any one would confound with those wretches the adopted son of General Simon, an excellent man, with whom I have had for some time the most honorable relations. We must, then, at any cost, discover the inconceivable mystery that has placed Djalma in this dangerous position;' and, I continued, 'so convinced am I of his innocence, that, for his own sake, I would not ask for any favor on his behalf. He will have sufficient courage and dignity to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... latch, I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed inconceivable that the thing had happened which had ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... must run from Dodhead to Coultartcleugh, get a horse from Jock Grieve (Buccleuch's man and tenant), and then ride into Liddesdale to Martin. But an Ettrick man, in a country of Scotts, would inevitably go to his chief and neighbour, Buccleuch: it is inconceivable that he should choose the remote Martin Elliot as his ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... existed also among the Gortynians, though no mention of it is made in their laws, for it is inconceivable that any of the grandsons could be deprived of all share in their grandfather's estate by the mere ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... repeated them to her was no additional source of uneasiness; rather, if anything, the contrary. For she could not entertain the idea that Gerry would keep back from her anything he could tell to Vereker. What had actually happened was necessarily inconceivable by her—that a recollected recollection of his own marriage with her should be interpreted by him as a memory of a marriage with some other woman unknown, who might, for anything he knew, be still living; that his inference as to the bearing of this on his own ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... is not confined to the existing world. Whatever their minor differences, geologists are agreed as to the vast thickness of the accumulated strata which compose the visible part of our earth, and the inconceivable immensity of the time of whose lapse they are the imperfect, but the only accessible witnesses. Now, throughout the greater part of this long series of stratified rocks are scattered, sometimes very abundantly, ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... this technical knowledge, at the service of artistic reproduction, has caused people to imagine the existence of an aesthetic technique of internal expression, which is tantamount to saying, a doctrine of the means of internal expression, which is altogether inconceivable. And we know well the reason why it is inconceivable; expression, considered in itself, is primary theoretic activity, and, in so far as it is this, it precedes the practical activity and the intellectual knowledge which illumines the practical activity, and is ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... the woman," said Sir Richmond. "I want mating because it is my nature to mate. I want fellowship because I am a social animal and I want it from another social animal. Not from any God—any inconceivable God. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... perhaps, than when he is writing, not about human beings, but about books. It is not inconceivable that he will live as a critic long after he is forgotten as a novelist. No book of criticism to compare with his Notes on Novelists has been published in the present century. He brought his imagination to bear upon books as he brought ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... deserves a better audience. But really, Teddy, I never heard so extraordinary a story. To marry a woman, and never have the curiosity to raise her veil to see whether she was ugly or pretty! It is inconceivable! He must ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... severe winters that sometimes were fruitful of blinding blizzards, sweeping from the north in an intensity of fury that was almost inconceivable, the buffalo too congregated there for shelter, and to browse on the ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the moccoli, are one of the episodes peculiar to the last days of the Carnival. At the sound of the fireworks the carriages instantly broke ranks, and retired by the adjacent streets. All these evolutions are executed with an inconceivable address and marvellous rapidity, without the police interfering in the matter. The pedestrians ranged themselves against the walls; then the trampling of horses and the clashing of steel were heard. A detachment of carbineers, fifteen ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the next moment his usual designation of his daughters. These young ladies presently came in, but Francie looked away from the suitor for her hand. The suggestion just dropped by her father had given him a shock—the idea of the newspaper-man's personal success with so rare a creature was inconceivable—but her charming way of avoiding his eye convinced him he had nothing to really fear from ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... given an introduction to America, through Mr. Emil Paur, by Theodor Leschetizky, couched in the most glowing terms, and is called by him "an artist of the very first rank and of inconceivable versatility." ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... use and office. That their motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable.[12] ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... 'ghosts' is very strong; but, then, our innocent phantasms are neither (as we understand their nature) ghosts nor wraiths. Kant broke the edges of his metaphysical tools against, not these phantasms, but the logically inconceivable entities which were at once material and non-material, at once 'spiritual' and 'space-filling.' There is no such difficulty about hallucinations, which, whatever else may be said about them, are familiar facts of experience. The only real objections are the statements ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... and again he wondered if Pelliter had told him everything. Was it possible that Blake had said nothing to reveal Little Mystery's identity, and that the igloo and the dead Eskimo woman had not given up the secret ? It seemed inconceivable that there would not be something in the igloo that would help to clear up the mystery. And yet, after all, he had faith in Pelliter. He knew that he would keep nothing from him even though it meant possession of the child. And then his ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... beginning. Every one was in a state of the greatest eagerness and excitement about something—nobody exactly knew what; and the interest Ellis took in the whole affair was wonderful to behold. The unnecessary number of times people ran up- and down-stairs was inconceivable, and the pace at which they did so terrific. Sir John spent his time in walking about with a hammer and a bag of nails, one of which he was constantly driving in and clenching beyond all power of extraction, in some totally wrong place, a line of conduct ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... their subjects by the eradication of the cause had they known of the existence of such a cause? Would they have spent their time in social festivities and in exchanging compliments had they known that they were on the brink of war? It is inconceivable! It would be a gross libel on them, one and all, to charge such a wanton disregard ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... say is inconceivable to me," he said, going up to her. "I grew up in a world in which every one without exception, men and women alike, worked hard ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... very leaves of Spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to dances of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says that if he were in a desert he would love ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... as to his wife's misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public. The case was pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained his decree. The folly of the wife had been inconceivable, in spite of other examples: she had quitted her children, she had followed the "other fellow" abroad. The other fellow hadn't married her, not having had time: he had lost his life in the Mediterranean by ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... not far—to the village of Civitella, now called Bellegra, a prehistoric fastness with some traces of "cyclopean" defences. Those ancients must have had cisterns; inconceivable that springs should ever have issued from this limestone crag. You can see the women of to-day fetching water from below, from a spot which I was too lazy to investigate, where perhaps the soft tertiary rock leans upon this impervious stuff and ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... of a traveller's impression on arriving at Rome, says, "Whithersoever he turns his eager steps he is alternately delighted and disgusted: the majestic remains of a great antiquity he wishes to examine with accuracy, but he stands in the midst of inconceivable filth. He turns to the churches, sacred in the eyes of Christians, but not safe from defilement in the City of Churches. He notes on the map numerous piazze, which he imagines to be fine squares, clean, if not splendid; and he observes, with few exceptions, that they resemble waste ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... thought of this world and of himself, bringing back to his soul's memory dark but delightful recollections of the glorious heritage which he has lost, but which he may win again. Strike the lyre! Lo! Paradise, with its palaces of inconceivable splendour and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... element. Love operates in attraction, as we see it in motherhood, childhood, and the love of man and maid. But it also works on the grand scale in the guise of the law of Gravity which attracts and binds universes together, and regulates and controls the swing of inconceivable immensities. Look again and we may see love working as chemical affinity to attract molecule to molecule, or as cohesion to keep the very particles ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... now, it seems inconceivable that we said as little to each other as we did, of this horrible catastrophe. That night we did not pretend to sleep. We sat in one of the deserted cabins, now talking fast, now sitting and brooding, without speaking, perhaps, for hours. Riding back the next day to meet the women and children, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... sinister or selfish motive is insinuated. His courtesy was unpleasing, while extreme coarseness met with a ready apologist. In the several Lives of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there does not appear the slightest ground upon which to found a charge of meanness of character: it is inconceivable how such should have ever been insinuated, while Northcote's "Life" of him was in existence, and Northcote must have known him well. He was most liberal in expenditure, as became his station, and the dignity which he was ambitiously desirous of conferring upon the art over which he presided. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... calls for wholly new ways and new means for manufacture is almost inconceivable. The nearer we approach to newness in the industrial world the thinner becomes the ice on which we are moving. Therefore, let us know that when we advise following habit lines in all moves in management of an existing organization we imply that the same course ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... stand on a footing of good credit with the great commercial houses. Those who are employed as servants are less remarkable for industry and honesty. They are reserved and suspicious; qualities especially observable when they have but recently emigrated into Lima. They combine personal vanity with an inconceivable degree of dirtiness. Their intellectual faculties are far beneath those of the white Creoles, of whom they stand in a degree of fear, which ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan; infinite &c. 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; fat as a pig, fat as a quail, fat as butter, fat as brawn, fat as bacon. immeasurable, unfathomable, unplumbed; inconceivable, unimaginable, unheard-of. of cosmic proportions; of epic proportions, the mother of all, teh granddaddy ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... world. And how an Army of about 200,000, in field and garrison, could be kept on foot, and in some ability to front combined Europe, on about Three Million Sterling annually ("25 million THALERS"3,150,000 pounds, that is the steady War-Budget of those years), remains to us inconceivable enough;—mournfully miraculous, as it were; and growing ever more so in the Nugget-generations that now run. Meanwhile, here are what hints I could find, on the Origins of that modest Sum, which also are a wonder: [Preuss, ii. 388-392; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Evelyn?' It was an inconceivable thought to me, a boy. I looked at her, and seeing how pale, how incomprehensibly pale she was, my heart failed me, for nothing but mortal sickness could make such a change in any one in a week, in a day. Yet how could death reach her, loved as she was ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... predecessors, the Buccaneers, both formidable and respectable. These Ishmaels of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the moment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, after serving as boon companion in some hideous debauch, or might sit at his cabin table with his own nose and his lips served up with pepper and salt ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soldiers was cooping up the Mexican army in the old town of Monterey, a new world, 37,000 miles in diameter and seventeen times as great in mass as the little world on which we dwell, was found slowly and sublimely making its way around the well nigh inconceivable periphery of the ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... been explained to us that the remembrance of this abnormal treason had been underlying and perniciously influencing the whole course of Haytian national history. All this established knowledge we are called upon to throw overboard, and accept the baseless assertions of this conjuror-up of inconceivable fables! He calls upon us to believe that, in spite of being free, educated, progressive, and at peace with [12] all men, we West Indian Blacks, were we ever to become constitutionally dominant in our native ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... in a tone of inconceivable triumph. "So it does. Now then, ALLIE, do your duty;" and, with a softly wooing, hospitable air, he opens the umbrella and holds it high ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2., No. 32, November 5, 1870 • Various
... and had steaks roasting on the fire cut out of the flank, with the hide still upon them. Pettingal, enraged by the supposed loss of his best blood-horse, poured in a volley upon them; but, apparently, without effect, for they all scrambled off with inconceivable agility among the rocks and bushes. He recovered, however, some of his own horses, and eight belonging to our neighbour which were tied up under an overhanging cliff near ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... hypothesis becomes virtually the only hypothesis possible, if it be assumed—as it generally was assumed by natural theologians of the past,—that all species of plants and animals were introduced into the world suddenly. For it is quite inconceivable that any known cause, other than intelligent design, could be competent to turn out instantaneously any one of these intricate pieces of machinery, already adapted to the performance of its special function. But, on the other hand, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... levies; but having learned by experience that the danger in an ordinary action is very trifling in comparison with its appearance to the imagination of a recruit, they face it with a determination which to him is inconceivable. Make the apparent danger real, as in the cases we have cited, and veterans become as powerless as the merest tyros. With the stimulus of the present demand, it is probable that Yankee ingenuity will erelong produce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... that I saw sink to rise no more, was now before me. Though incapable of precluding the groundless belief of preternatural visitations, I was able to banish the phantom almost at the same instant at which it appeared. Welbeck had escaped from the stream alive; or had, by some inconceivable ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... Honor Meredith was not the woman to change lightly, still less was she the woman to approach with that confession which, at all hazards, he was bound to make. Speaking of it to Paul had cost him such an effort as he ached to remember. Speaking of it to her seemed a thing inconceivable. And yet—in that case—what hope of escape from this unholy tangle, from this fury of jealousy that had stabbed his manhood broad awake ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... between the work alone and the work with his associate, and allowing for the improvement in the mechanism of play-making, I see no reason why M. Meilhac might not have written Fanny Lear and Froufrou substantially as they are had he never met M. Halevy. But it is inconceivable that M. Halevy alone could have attained so high an elevation or have gained so full a comic force. Perhaps, however, M. Halevy deserves credit for the better technical construction of the later plays: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... not the only city in the United Kingdom which has contained an Assembly which not only occasionally denied, but during the whole of its existence never admitted, the sovereignty of the Parliament at Westminster; and in the present state of the world it is inconceivable that Irish autonomy—if such be the proper term—should not excite or justify claims for local independence which would unloose the ties which bind together the huge fabric of ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... that man cannot know the future, and especially that future beyond human life. Socrates, when condemned to death, consoled himself with the inconceivable happiness in a future state when he would converse and associate with and question the mighty array of heroes, patriots, and sages who had preceded him. He said to his judges, "It is now time to depart—for me ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... must be with Honora, who has paid the price for heaven, and who discovers that by marriage she has merely joined the ranks of the Great Unattached. Hitherto it had been inconceivable to her that any one sufficiently prosperous could live in a city, or near it and dependent on it, without being socially a part of it. Most momentous of disillusions! With the exception of the Sidney Dallams and one or two young brokers who occasionally came out over Sunday, her ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... lace, who affected to believe in the transmigration of souls, suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence. The feud was in the forgotten past. It might have been something quite inconceivable in the present state of their being; but their souls remembered the animosity and manifested an instinctive antagonism. He developed his theme jocularly. Yet the affair was so absurd from the worldly, the military, the honourable, or the prudential ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Christian says, Amen! But science must find a cause for every effect. What was the cause of the teachings of the apostles, whose sincerity was such that they died for their religion? Well, Strauss says, It is inconceivable that they should have done it if Jesus himself had not designated himself as the Redeemer from sin, guilt and death, and required faith in his person as a religious duty, claiming the power to secure peace in the Holy Spirit. According to ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... creatures, covered with black hair like felt, foul of favour and small of stature, being but four spans high, yellow-eyed and black-faced; none knoweth their language nor what they are, and they shun the company of men. We feared to slay them or strike them or drive them away, because of their inconceivable multitude; lest, if we hurt one, the rest fall on us and slay us, for numbers prevail over courage; so we let them do their will, albeit we feared they would plunder our goods and gear. They swarmed up the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... unintelligible to us as the Etruscans—not a feeling they had that we can share in; and these pictures of them will be to us valuable only as the sculpture under the niches far in the shade there of the old parish church, dimly vital images of inconceivable creatures whom we shall never see the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he said, dropping his lower lip like a child, "this young pup says he has put us both out of action. Inconceivable—eh? My first command of one of the class. Eh? What shall we do with him? What shall we ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... help him solve it—if any one can. And I have great hopes, Elaine, great hopes!" regarding her with approving eyes. "How any chap could resist you is inconceivable—I could not." ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... was near enough for us to distinguish the discharge of every single piece. I remarked on this occasion the incredible exertions of the French voltigeurs, who defended a ditch near the Kuhthurm, ran to and fro on the bank with inconceivable agility, availed themselves of the protection afforded by every tree and every hedge, and fired away as briskly as though they had carried with them the confederation of the Rhine, as their own property, in their cartouch-boxes. Cannon-balls ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... abroad, are brought into contact with utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They cannot be solved by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little patent recipes, and those cut-and-dried theories of the political nursery which have such limited applicability amid the crash of elemental forces. Neither can they be solved ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... affected in the same manner and degree, and those who before were strangers to one another, become in a moment intimately acquainted. The tears which the dramatist or the orator compels them to shed for calumniated innocence or dying heroism, make friends and brothers of them all. Almost inconceivable is the power of a visible communion of numbers to give intensity to those feelings of the heart which usually retire into privacy, or only open themselves to the confidence of friendship. The faith in the validity of such emotions becomes irrefragable from its diffusion; ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... seated, sir, she said. I know not how—I feel an inconceivable diffidence in making an excuse for the inconveniences my silly caprices ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... your sufferings would be well kept. He had carefully chosen the house in which you were to die of hunger and misery. The two Chevassats were bound to be his devoted accomplices, even unto death. This is what gave him the amazing boldness, the inconceivable brutality, to watch your slow agony; no doubt he became quite impatient at your delaying suicide ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... times past, or that there is for some minds a hidden terror in the sightless, invisible death that whistles over them as they lie belly-pressing the earth in the face of an unseeable foe? It is not inconceivable that this may have an effect like some horrible nightmare amid all the glare of daylight on some minds. The man is held there in terror by the worse terror of running away; a comrade on his right grows callous by waiting, and to relieve the wants of nature raises himself up and gets hit; ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... priest and his Eries practiced there, none knew, unless it were true that the False Faces knew. But rumour whispered with a thousand tongues of horrors viewless, nameless, inconceivable; and that far to the westward Biskoonah yawned, so close indeed to the world's surface that the waters boiling deep in hell burst into burning fountains in the magic garden where the red priest ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life, and concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated with almost inconceivable stupidity.[35] ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... that, the Lexow disclosures of inconceivable rottenness of a Tammany police; the woe unto you! of Christian priests calling vainly upon the chief of the city "to save its children from a living hell," and the contemptuous reply on the witness-stand of the head of the party of organized robbery, ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... to consult you about a most damnable outrage," exploded the general. "It's inconceivable ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people—marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... to New Mexico there were still some buffaloes on the plain, the last remnant of the uncountable, inconceivable numbers that not long before had swarmed over the country. Even when the first railroads were built trains were sometimes held up for hours to let the herds pass. As late as 1871 Colonel Dodge relates that he rode for twenty-five ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... investigation with the composure of conscious innocence. Of course, she has not only submitted to an examination of her lodgings, but has insisted on it. Of course, no red sealing-wax and no medicine-chest have been found. Of course, some thief unknown, for some purpose quite inconceivable, got at the box and the seal, between the Doctor's death and the return of the Professor from Munich, and read the Instructions and stole the terrible medicine-chest. Such is the theory adopted by the defense. If you can believe it—then I have written in vain. If, on the other ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... of the soil by him, and by me on the feasibility of discovering the passage to China, [11] without the inconveniences of the ice of the north or the heats of the torrid zone, through which our sailors pass twice in going and twice in returning, with inconceivable hardships and risks, his Majesty directed Sieur de Monts to make a new outfit, and send men to continue what he had commenced. This he did. And, in view of the uncertainty of his commission, [12] he chose a new spot for his settlement, in order to deprive jealous persons ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... in the room where Mrs. Perch lay,—not even Effie. One o'clock. This war! He had thought to shut it away for a night, and here was the inconceivable occupation to which it had brought ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... face, or the specks of blood on his collar, than Balzac to do the same duty for the creations of his fancy. De Foe may be compared to those favourites of showmen who cheat you into mistaking a flat-wall painting for a bas-relief. Balzac is one of the patient Dutch artists who exhaust inconceivable skill and patience in painting every hair on the head and every wrinkle on the face till their work has a photographic accuracy. The result, it must be confessed, is sometimes rather trying to the patience. Balzac's artistic instinct, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... was a large Jewish population there amongst whom the seed would be sown. Some critics have thought "that a note addressed to Ephesus lies embedded in the 16th chapter," because, they say, it is "inconceivable that Paul could have intimately known so many individuals in a Church like that in Rome to which he was personally a stranger." But this is by no means demonstrated, nor is there evidence that the Church there was founded ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... going on of spirits and souls with new powers, which become their serviceable instruments of contact with the All of things-this is transmigration of souls. Any other kind of continued duration and continued action is inconceivable to us. Whether upon earth, or in other worlds, is a matter of indifference.' But one spirit sees these ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... meant to represent God as, in himself, wearing a human form, or having a nature partaking of our infirmities; and, therefore, it always speaks of there being something in God higher, and more perfect, than could possibly be revealed to man; and for this eternal and infinite, and inconceivable Being, it claims the reserve of our highest thoughts, or, rather, it commands us to believe, that they who shall hereafter see God face to face, shall be allowed to see something still greater than is now revealed to us, even in him who ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... again with amazement at this strange man who seemed so indifferent to the claims of wealth, position, and even to revenge. It seemed inconceivable, and yet he could not help being impressed with his perfect sincerity. He was relieved, however, when Captain Dornton rose with apparent reluctance and ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... which all their previous differences would have appeared insignificant. Mutual hatreds and hostilities would have risen that would have prevented the entrance of the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. It is not inconceivable that the history of 1812 would have been repeated, and that the men and resources of this country might have been used to support purposes which have always been hateful to the American conscience. That the world was saved from ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... from all sides in wild confusion flew The dust and leaves, the branches and the stones, With hideous tumult, inconceivable. ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... lost in the contemplation of the pictures that covered the panes of glass in the door, turning them into a model chart of inconceivable animals, four-cornered trees and impossible soldiers. He was glancing continually to one side, like a criminal who fears that he is going to be caught in the act. It was manifest that he had something in view which must be concealed ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... souls can be contented to while away precious hours in a manner so useless, and withal so displeasing to the God who gave them their time for the improvement of themselves and others, is to me absolutely inconceivable! Yet it is certainly done; and that not merely by a few solitary individuals scattered up and down the land; but in some of our most populous cities, ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... was not a character which does well by itself, and under a domineering manner she concealed her weakness, vacillation, and timidity. She was divorced from every duty, every responsibility, every natural tie, with no outlet for her interest or her sympathy. It seems inconceivable that she should willingly have led such an existence. She was however, much more satisfied with herself and with things in general, than she had formerly been. She did not have stormy repentances or outbursts against her lot; she no longer desired what was unattainable. ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... soul! To read the inconceivable, to scan The million forms of God those stars unroll When, in our turn, we show to ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... the train of events exhibits. Reckoning on the lowest estimate, and counting the organic changes which take place during the age as amounting to the thousandth part of the organic changes since the Laurentian age, we find ourselves in face once again of that inconceivable sum which was indicated by the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men,—the words God, Immortality, Duty,—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... life in Alaska is all but inconceivable. The summer tourist can hardly realize it, because he brings to the settlement the only variety it knows; and this comes so seldom—once or twice a month—that the population arises as a man and rejoices so long as the steamer is in port. Please to picture this people after ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... judgment of God: "Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt." The gorgeous rhetoric of Ranke and Froude has painted it as one of the turning points in world history. But in reality it rather marked than made an epoch. Had Philip's ships won, it is still inconceivable that he could have imposed his dominion on England any more than he could on the Netherlands. England was ripening and Spain was rotting for half a century before the collision made this fact plain to all. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... only parties invited who got nothing at all of the banquet, it becomes a question of some interest,—what did they get? They were merely mocked, if they had no compensatory interest in the dinner! For surely it was an inconceivable mode of honoring Jupiter, that you and I should eat a piece of roast beef, leaving to the god's share only the mockery of a Barmecide invitation, assigning him a chair which every body knew that he would never fill, and a plate which might as well have been filled with warm ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... series of rebirths, determined for better or for worse by its own spirituality according to the law of Karma, not in non-existence, but in its fusion with God, whose identity with the soul of man is merely temporarily obscured by the world illusion of Maya. Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... the supreme right of free thinking, even on religion, is in every man's power, and as it is inconceivable that such power could be alienated, it is also in every man's power to wield the supreme right and authority of free judgment in this behalf, and to explain and interpret religion for himself. The only reason for vesting the supreme ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... it, then?" asked Flint. It was inconceivable to Waller's mind that any one of the soldiery could have been tempted to such perfidy for an Indian's sake. There was not at the moment an Indian scout or soldier at the post, or an Indian warrior, not a prisoner, unaccounted for. There had been halfbreeds hanging about the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... this expression of her feeling, though the domestics were by, and my Lord Castlewood's attendant stood in the hall. Esmond had to whisper to him in French to take his hat off. Monsieur Baptiste was constantly neglecting his part with an inconceivable levity: more than once on the ride to London, little observations of the stranger, light remarks, and words betokening the greatest ignorance of the country the Prince came to govern, had hurt the susceptibility of the two gentlemen forming his escort; nor could either help owning in his secret ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... terrible times. Nowhere do we find more vividly portrayed the psychology of the persons that lived in that turbulent period embraced between the years 1912 and 1932—their mistakes and ignorance, their doubts and fears and misapprehensions, their ethical delusions, their violent passions, their inconceivable sordidness and selfishness. These are the things that are so hard for us of this enlightened age to understand. History tells us that these things were, and biology and psychology tell us why they were; ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... himself, and received their instructions from him. It would be almost impossible to conceive a more grotesque and gruesome picture than some of these Sabbaths were supposed to be: every impossible and inconceivable thing that man's mind could invent was apparently attributed to these meetings. In order to form some faint idea of men's beliefs in those days, I quote the following, supposedly from a more or less contemporary account, of what actually ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... proceedings of the inquisitors, and made them the arbiters of the life and honor of all Spaniards, without responsibility to anybody on earth. They were men, and as such subject to the same errors and passions as the rest of mankind, and it is inconceivable that the nation did not exact responsibility since, in virtue of the temporal power that had been delegated to them, they condemned to seclusion, imprisonment, torture, and death. Thus the inquisitors exercised a power which the Constitution denies to every ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... the mouth of a woman she utterly objected; it offended her sense of the becoming, her delicate perception of propriety. When dining alone or with Hugh, she dressed as carefully as for a ceremonious occasion. Any approach to personal disorder or neglect was inconceivable in Sibyl. Her husband had, by accident, heard her called 'the best-groomed woman in London'; he thought the praise well merited, and it ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... moment he would be dashed into eternity, and yet a medley of incongruous and commonplace thoughts darted through his mind with inconceivable rapidity. Innumerable scenes of his past life glanced before him, but more distinct than any, sharp and clear as though revealed by a flash of lightning, shone the wonderful eyes that had appeared to him from the red-stained cliffs overlooking the great lake. ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... with the darkness.—The sun now appeared amid clouds of inconceivable splendour; and unveiled a scene which in other circumstances Julia would have contemplated with rapture. From the side of the hill, down which they were winding, a vale appeared, from whence arose wild and lofty mountains, whose steeps were cloathed with hanging woods, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the "pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity—and that when departure from this was the circumstance through which he had to show the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... excited the imagination, as on our departure from France. Our last visionary dream had vanished before the walls of St. Jean d'Acre, and we were leaving on the burning sands of Egypt most of our companions in arms. An inconceivable destiny seemed to urge us on, and we were obliged ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... "It seems almost inconceivable that while so much has been done for the Indians of the plains, for the people of the Philippine Islands and for Porto Rico, in the way of sanitation, these natives who have been wards of the nation for forty-seven years should have been almost entirely ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... instrumental in drawing up the laws of Mantinea is probably due to the same source. The context shows that the reference is to the earlier constitution of Mantinea, which was a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, and is praised for its excellence. It is inconceivable that, in a Peloponnesian city during the course of, nay, presumably even before the middle of the fifth century, a notorious atheist should have been invited to advise on the revision of its constitution. It is more probable that Aristoxenus adduced this fact as an additional disproof of Diagoras's ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... the Arab's greatest exertions to tear away the serpents with his hands, they turned themselves still tighter, stopped his breath, and he fell to the floor, where he continued for a moment, as if in the most inconceivable agony, rolling over, and covering every part of his body with his own blood and froth, until he ceased to move, and appeared to have expired. In his last struggle, he had wounded the black serpent with his teeth, as it was striving, as it were, to force its head ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... that I have been. It probably never will; but for all that, there are many shy natures which will recognize tendencies in themselves in the direction of my unhappy susceptibility. Others, to whom such weakness seems inconceivable, will find their scepticism shaken, if not removed, by the calm, judicial statement of the Report drawn up for the Royal Academy. It will make little difference to me whether my story is accepted unhesitatingly or looked upon ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful than that ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... left, and the other to the right. All the left-sided crystals and all the right-sided are, however, precisely the same. The number of possible variations in the chemical structure of a substance so complex as is protoplasm is inconceivable. ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... yards, or nearly half a mile, every pound is nearly ten miles, and the whole, about 400,000 miles are produced in about sixty-six working hours. In round numbers, this is 6,000 miles per hour, or 100 miles a minute. What an astonishing effect of the combination of mechanism! What an inconceivable miracle, if it might not be witnessed by their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... it is evident that we claim to know what is truth; just as, if we talk of the hind leg of a dog, we claim to know what is a dog. Unfortunately, the philosopher who talks about aspects of truth generally also asks, "What is truth?" Frequently even he denies the existence of truth, or says it is inconceivable by the human intelligence. How, then, can he recognize its aspects? I should not like to be an artist who brought an architectural sketch to a builder, saying, "This is the south aspect of Sea-View Cottage. Sea-View Cottage, of course, does not exist." ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Narrow, blind, bigoted young man. And it was amusing to think, as a comment on his fierce consciousness of Herr Lippheim's unfitness, that here Herr Lippheim was, admitted to the very heart of Karen's sorrow. It was inconceivable that anyone but very near and dear friends should have been tolerated by her to-day. Karen, too, after her fashion, was an artist. The music, no doubt, was helpful to her. Soft thoughts of her great, lacerated friend, speeding now towards her solitudes, filled ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... claims. With regard to especial claims, I think it just deserving your attention, that if general claims are once admitted, it opens the door to great laxity in giving them. Think of the case of a very rich man, who aided SOLELY with his money, but to a grand extent—or such an inconceivable prodigy as a minister of the Crown who really cared for science. Would you give such men medals? Perhaps medals could not be better applied than EXCLUSIVELY to such men. I confess at present I incline to stick to especial claims which can be ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... so impressive that they stood motionless, watching the flaming tree and the inky heavens beyond. Suddenly in the sky they saw a figure that resembled a vast balloon slightly inclined to one side, and spinning on its axis with inconceivable swiftness. ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... much in the country, a world that was neither that of the flesh nor yet of the spirit was that in which she largely moved—a world of strange laws, and auspices, and this answering to this and that to that. It is a state inconceivable to those who live in the noise and movement of town—who find town-life, that is, the life in which they are most at ease. For where men have made the earth that is trodden underfoot, and have largely veiled the heavens themselves, it is but natural that ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... in columns, they may be battered in front. It is advantageous also to attack them obliquely, and especially in flank and reverse. The moral effect of a reverse fire upon a body of troops is inconceivable; and the best soldiers are generally put to flight by it. The fine movement of Ney on Preititz at Bautzen was neutralized by a few pieces of Kleist's artillery, which took his columns in flank, checked them, and decided the marshal to deviate from the excellent ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... heart affected by Divine love. And when the nobleman afterwards met the despised tinker and his wife, on terms of perfect equality, clothed in more glorious robes in the mansions of the blessed, how inconceivable their surprise! It must have been equally so with the learned judge, when, in the pure atmosphere of heaven, he found that the illiterate tinker, harassed by poverty and imprisonment, produced books, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... have been, we, born and reared in a free country, can hardly imagine. We have no experience by which we can judge it, and we never can do full justice to the intellectual courage and devotion of a people who, amid inconceivable obstacles and oppressions, expressed themselves in a new and vigorous literature. It was not, I have explained, openly revolutionary; but whatever tended to make men think and feel was a sort of indirect rebellion against Austria. When a society of learned ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... when they think of that other separation which endured until they met. Some one has written that love makes people believe in immortality, because there seems not to be room enough in life for so great a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few years. Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind analogies, we can ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forge-fire. The scaring necessity was, that he must stoop and kneel right over the water-but, in order to send his legs in advance down the wall to the top of the mound. It was a moment of agony. That very moment, with an appalling unearthly cry, something dark, something hideous, something of inconceivable ghastliness, as it seemed to Tommy, sprang right out of the water into the air. He tumbled from the wall among the iron, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... kept easily ahead of me. At length I did begin to grow a little afraid. Why was she so careful not to be seen? Extraordinary ugliness would account for it: she might fear terrifying me! Horror of an inconceivable monstrosity began to assail me: was I following through the dark an unheard of hideousness? Almost I repented of ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... house shivering with rage and consumed with anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter's apparatus; he had not been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire; but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the fact that Mr. Cardoza made the statement as sworn to by Prof. Miller and Mr. McKinlay, but I must state with all of the emphasis that is possible that it is inconceivable to me how Mr. Sumner or Mr. Stevens could give such advice that would give the leadership of the newly enfranchised Negroes to native whites of the master class, however conservative. All rebels were alike to Mr. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... set before him. It was grimly ironic that he should be, not only there, but actually a factor and a part of the underworld's intimate life! He, Jimmie Dale, a wealthy man, a member of New York's exclusive clubs, a member of New York's most exclusive society! It was inconceivable. He smiled sardonically. Was it? Well, then, it was none the less true. His life unquestionably was one unique, apart from any other man's, but it was, for ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... that could not be. Fate could not deal so rapaciously with a whole group of human beings; such unprecedented, inconceivable injustice could not have been done them. They had only experienced the great law of the universe and ought not to complain, because it is the course of ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... an excess of labor, or an inability to employ it, in such a country as Ireland, is to insult the general understanding. In the first place, there is an immediate and urgent demand for at least Half a Million comfortable rain-proof dwellings. The inconceivable wretched hovels in which nine-tenths of the peasantry endure existence inevitably engender indolence, filthiness and disease. Generation after generation grows up ignorant and squalid from never having had a fireside by which they could sit down to read or study, nor an example of home ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... was perhaps the most tormenting element in Faversham's consciousness. He faced it, however, with frankness. His uncle would have condemned him—wholly. The notion of serving a bad man, for money, would have been simply inconceivable to that straight and innocent soul. Are there not still herbs to be eaten under hedgerows, with the sauce ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... himself to it, "united" with it, the patriot knows his country, the artist knows the subject of his art, the lover his beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which is inconceivable as well as unattainable by the looker-on. Real knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive sympathy more or less intense, is far more accurately suggested by the symbols of touch and taste than by those of hearing ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... table is ever furnished, his cup ever full; all is blessing, no curse mingled—that our Surety took to himself; prosperity and adversity, sickness and health, light and darkness, all, all shall bless us, work for our good, turn to our profit, and end in the glory of God and our unspeakable, inconceivable happiness. ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... Madeira," and "if we join you, you must take care of Miss Skeat, and give her the best cabin," etc. etc. The Duke wisely abstained from pressing his cause, or asking why she qualified her plans. At last he got away, after promising to do every conceivable and inconceivable thing which she should now or at any future time evolve from the depths of ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... three general kinds: the CHIEF, both in antiquity and excellency, which they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God; such were David in the Psalms; Solomon in the Song of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs; Moses and Deborah in their hymns; and the writer of Job; which, beside others, the learned Emanuel Tremellius ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... which gave birth to most extraordinary suspicions. The agonized feelings of his heroic mind are not to be described; but, nothing could for a moment divert him from the painful discharge of it's duty. In a state of inconceivable agitation, he wrote the following letter to ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... would measure Marie's height with her eye, locate the basket with a brief glance, stiffen her muscles for a jump, and then as Marie stood ready to beat down the ball, as it rose in the air, Sahwah would suddenly relax, twist into some inconceivable position, shoot the ball low to center and be a dozen feet away before Marie could get her hands down ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... only substance with which an impression can be produced upon the hard stones, and they are polished by metal plates covered with this dust, and revolving with inconceivable rapidity. The saw is a very fine wire, to which the dust is affixed. This process appears to be the origin of the adage "diamond cut diamond." Before the fifteenth century, diamonds were worn in their natural state, and the art of cutting and polishing ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
