"Conceivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... period, would have offered no security for the early suppression of discontent; would have divided the people into the vanquishers and the vanquished; and would have envenomed hatred rather than have restored affection. Once established, no precise limit to their continuance was conceivable. They would have occasioned an incalculable and exhausting expense. * * * The powers of patronage and rule which would have been exercised, under the President, over a vast and populous and naturally wealthy region, are greater than, under ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... over themselves, and ... hara-kiri.... Of course, it was all very wicked; it is impossible to justify them in any way. In Bayswater and all other haunts of unbridled chastity they were tortured, burnt alive, stewed in oil, and submitted to every conceivable penalty for their saucy effrontery. Yet, somehow, there was a touch about it, this spectacle of four men defying the law and order of the greatest country in the world, which thrilled every man with any devil in him. Peter the Painter is ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... summits—'on the Canadian border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold.' He had made the voyage in an ocean tramp, the Ludgate Hill, the sort of craft which any person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror. Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the "strange floating menagerie."'" Thus he describes it in a letter to Mr ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... applied to the soil in almost every conceivable form. Whole bones are often used in very large quantities; their action, however, is extremely slow, and it is never advisable to use bones in ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... order to free his style from the character imparted to it by writing detached weekly articles. The composing of these articles had been a pleasure; the writing of English history was to be his life-work, and no divided allegiance was conceivable to him. But we may indeed be thankful that he resisted the views of other friends who wished to drive him into copying German models. This class Green called 'Pragmatic Historians';[58] and, while acknowledging their solid contributions to history, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... after-thought.' [27:3] And yet almost in the same breath he adopts as his 'two fundamental principles, Love to God and love to man.' He commends a 'morality based upon the earnest and intelligent acceptance of Divine Law, and perfect recognition of the brotherhood of man,' as 'the highest conceivable by humanity.' [27:4] He speaks of the 'purity of heart which alone "sees God.'" [27:5] He enforces the necessity of 'rising to higher conceptions of an infinitely wise and beneficent Being ... whose laws of wondrous ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... proceeded homewards. My very soul sickened at the contemplation of the scenes that would be enacted at my arrival. When we drew in sight of the village, we found every lodge laid prostrate. We entered amid shrieks, cries, and yells. Blood was streaming from every conceivable part of the bodies of all who were old enough to comprehend their loss. Hundreds of fingers were dismembered; hair torn from the head lay in profusion about the paths; wails and moans in every direction assailed ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... request the organist kept her place till night had actually descended. Out of all oratorios, and from many an opera, she brought the immortal graces, and all conceivable renderings of passions, fears, and aspirations of men. At last, and as it seemed quite suddenly, she broke off, closed the organ-doors and locked them, then rose from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Prussia is withdrawing his troops from Holland. Should this alliance show itself, it would seem that France thus strengthened might dictate the re-establishment of the affairs of Holland in her own form. For it is not conceivable that Prussia would dare to move, nor that England would alone undertake such a war, and for such a purpose. She appears, indeed, triumphant at present, but the question ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... me, and I have the honour to refer to it with scorn. It contains only one statement of conceivable interest, that your health is better; the rest is null, and so far as disquisitory unsound. I am all right, but David Balfour is ailing; this came from my visit to the man-of-war, where I had a cup of tea, and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one on each side united the water spaces, and one at the top the steam spaces. In 1830 all this had disappeared, and we find in Mr. Nasmyth's sketch a regular fire-box, such as is used to this moment. In one word, the Rocket of 1829 is different from the Rocket of 1830 in almost every conceivable respect; and we are driven perforce to the conclusion that the Rocket of 1829 never worked at all on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; the engine of 1830 was an entirely new engine. We see no possible way of escaping from this conclusion. The most that can be said against it is that the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... The subject is not to be here treated in detail. 212 Sec. 2. The conceivable modes of manifestation of Spiritual Beings are four. 212 Sec. 3. And these are in or through creature forms familiar to us. 213 Sec. 4. Supernatural character may be impressed on these either by phenomena inconsistent ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... and of light. Pain was as intelligible as rapture. The terms of comparison were present in the conditions of human life and its various atmospheres of suffering and of intellect. Thus the most extraordinary traditions of hell and purgatory were quite naturally conceivable. ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... equal the demand. Then came conflict. Conflict is an essential element in all progress. There is conflict between the lower and higher impulses in the human mind, conflict between selfish ambition and the welfare of the group, conflict among individuals and races for a place in the sun. It is conceivable that the baser impulses that provoke much social conflict may give way to more rational and altruistic purpose, but it is difficult to see how all friction can be avoided in social relations. It is certainly to be reckoned with in the ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... noblest emotions towards the Lear, Cordelia, &c. and employed with the severest economy! But even Shakspeare's grossness—that which is really so, independently of the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things indifferent,—(for there is a state of manners conceivable so pure, that the language of Hamlet at Ophelia's feet might be a harmless rallying, or playful teazing, of a shame that would exist in Paradise)—at the worst, how diverse in kind is it from Beaumont and Fletcher's! In Shakspeare ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... they are steadily and rapidly increasing in power. No political party is altogether free from their influence, and no political party is solely responsible for them. We have laws prohibiting almost every conceivable official neglect and abuse, and penalties are affixed to the violation of those laws which can not be regarded as inadequate. The difficulty is to secure their enforcement. Those whose duty it is to detect and prosecute are often interested in maintaining good relations with ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... money and accounts, his character and conduct present the same extraordinary mixture as is seen in everything else that concerns him. Money flows profusely upon valentines, gloves, books, and every sort of thing conceivable; yet he grudges the price of his wife's dress although it is a sum much smaller than the cost of his own. He allows her L30 for all expenses of the household, and she is immensely pleased, for the sum is much larger than she had expected. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... work, or Mosaic in wood. It would be impossible to exceed the results achieved by the Persian artizans, especially those of Shiraz, in this wonderful and difficult art.... Chairs, tables, sofas, boxes, violins, guitars, canes, picture frames, almost every conceivable object, in fact, which is made of wood, may be found overlaid with an exquisite casing of inlaid work, so minute sometimes that thirty-live or forty pieces may be counted in the space of a square eighth of an inch. I have counted four hundred and twenty-eight distinct ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... to which the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become, according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves, weary of life. Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer. Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... track. Miss Goold, too, looked appropriately solemn at the suggestion. As a matter of fact, the authorities in Dublin Castle did occasionally send a detective in plain clothes to walk after her. It is not conceivable that they suspected her of wanting to blow up Nelson's pillar or assassinate a judge. Probably they merely wished to exercise the members of the force, and, in the absence of any actual crime in the country, felt that no harm could come to anyone through ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... enabled him to see, hear and feel things of which we other mortals did not even dream the existence. Yet when he lays them bare we know that they are not fictitious, not invented, but as real as the ordinary familiar facts of life. This faculty of his playing on all conceivable objects, all conceivable emotions, no matter how microscopic, endows them with life and a soul. By virtue of this power The Steppe, an uneventful record of peasants travelling day after day through flat, monotonous fields, becomes instinct with dramatic interest, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... ponderously open, disclosing a rock-hewn cavern. Three walls of the cavern were lined with shelves containing inventions of all kinds—telegraph and telephone instruments, engine models, railroad-signaling and safety devices, racks of bottles containing dangerous chemicals and their antidotes—all conceivable manner of mechanical and scientific paraphernalia. It was literally a Graveyard of Genius—harboring the ghosts of ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... reply before he went down to breakfast—a piece of ordinary small-talk, that seemed to him the most wretched stuff conceivable. But he pulled two pens to ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... secrecy from motives of fear should arise an instinctive feeling that the sexual act must always be hidden, is a natural enough sequence. And since it is not a long step between thinking of an act as needing concealment and thinking of it as wrong, it is easily conceivable that sexual intercourse comes to be regarded as a stolen and therefore, in some degree, a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... phrases in which he would tell his revelation on the morrow. He knew that this must be done tactfully, in spite of its divine source. It would be a momentous thing to the people and to the priesthood. It was conceivable, indeed, that members of the latter might dispute it and argue with him, or even denounce him for a heretic. But only at first; the thing was too simply true to be long questioned. In any event, his duty was plain; with righteousness as the girdle of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... would ask him for money to take the house at Bayreuth, but with the warning that he was not to come there himself, as she had promised Forcheville and the Verdurins to invite them. Oh, how he would have loved it, had it been conceivable that she would have that audacity. What joy he would have in refusing, in drawing up that vindictive reply, the terms of which he amused himself by selecting and declaiming aloud, as though he had actually ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Percies, or even to himself, as portionists. "The cause," he says, "which he espoused would guarantee to Owyn his rights in Wales, and, in case Richard were dead, would place the Earl of March on the throne." It is, indeed, scarcely conceivable that the nobles, the gentry, and the people at large would have suffered their land to be cut up into portions, destroying the integrity of the kingdom, and exposing it with increased facilities to foreign (p. 157) invasion, and interminable intestine warfare; ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... appellation is not well sustained, and cannot be admitted: the fourth compartment in the descending scale was indeed termed the Thetic census, because it contained all the Thetes, and because most of its members were of that humble description; but it is not conceivable that a proprietor whose land yielded to him a clear annual return of 100, 120, 140, or 180 drachmas, could ever have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... before that on which Lizzie and her party had reached Carlisle. If it were so, if Mr. Smiler and Billy Cann had both been at work at the hotel, then,—so argued they who opposed the Bunfit theory,—it was hardly conceivable that the robbery should have been arranged by Lord George. According to the Bunfit theory, the only thing needed by the conspirators had been that the diamonds should be handed over by Lady Eustace to Lord George in such a way as to escape suspicion that such ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... them by their hair, and then set fire to them; moisten their wounds with quicklime, boiling pitch, or molten lead; make them sit on red-hot iron stools; burn their sides with torches; break their bones on wheels, and torture them in every conceivable way. And, with all this, physical pain counts for nothing; indeed, it seems to be desired. Moreover, a continual miracle protects them. John drinks poison but is unharmed. Sebastian smiles although pierced with ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... your imagination run away with you. What conceivable motive could she have had to conspire against ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... not mischievous, in the human sense. They frolic in the pure delight of motion. By mortal standards of age they are between childhood and youth, when limbs are long and bodies supple. Their only draperies are narrow scarfs which they twist about them in every conceivable way. ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... forfeiture, my own abdication, but for the abdication of universal suffrage for ten years, by the coming generations, over whom I have no right, over whom you, an usurper, force me to usurp power, which, by the way, be it said in passing, would suffice to nullify that monstrous ballot, if all conceivable nullities were not already piled, heaped and welded upon it. What! is that what you would have me do? You make me vote that all is finished, that nothing remains, that the people is a slave! What! you say to me: "Since you are sovereign, you shall give ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Francisco knew him no more. At the same time, however, one Owen M'Ginnis, a neighboring sandhill squatter, also disappeared, leaving San Francisco for the southern mines, and he was said to have taken Billy with him,—for no conceivable reason except for companionship. Howbeit, it was the turning-point of Billy's career; such restraint as kindness, civilization, or even policemen had exercised upon his nature was gone. He retained, I fear, a certain wicked intelligence, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... succeeded in making it clear to her father that it would be highly advantageous to her, as the nearest relative, to show Herr Carovius every conceivable favour. Andreas Doederlein baulked at first; but he could not refuse recognition to the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... etc. Carlyle broke out on him with, 'None of your Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Companies for me. We do know what is wickedness, I know wicked men, men whom I would not live with—men whom under some conceivable circumstances I would kill or they should kill me. No, Milnes, there's no truth or greatness in all that. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... off less than a week before the day. I wish I could show you her letter, but, of course, I mustn't. It's very amusing. They had quarrelled about every conceivable thing—all but one, and this came up at last. They were talking about meals, and Mr. Dally said that he liked a bloater for breakfast every morning. 'A bloater!' cried Patty. 'Then I hope you won't ask me to cook it for you. ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... You must live . . ." "That isn't the thing," was the comment that escaped him under his breath. I ignored it, and went on combating what I assumed to be the scruples of an exaggerated delicacy. "On every conceivable ground," I concluded, "you must let me help you." "You can't," he said very simply and gently, and holding fast to some deep idea which I could detect shimmering like a pool of water in the dark, but which I despaired ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... by the dozens in every conceivable manner. The cowboys were always telling about shooting their heads off, and they said the Indians used an arrow, spearing them in the neck just back of the head. They never let one get away if they could help ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... prove that the myopia is rather due to heredity? It would, by a process of exclusion, if every conceivable environmental factor had been measured and found wanting. That point in the investigation can never be reached, but a tremendously strong suspicion is at least justified. Now if the degree of resemblance between the prevalence of myopia in parents and ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... the simplest matter conceivable. The forces inside our atom—itself, mind you, the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... through a small antechamber, and into a brilliant salon, the very reverse of antique. Here all was light and color. Here were hangings of flowered chintz; fantastic divans; lounge-chairs of every conceivable shape and hue; great Indian jars; richly framed drawings; stands of exotic plants; Chinese cages, filled with valuable birds from distant climes; folios of engravings; and, above all, a large cabinet in marqueterie, crowded with bronzes, Chinese carvings, pastille ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... chairs to the stove, in which the smouldering fire, revived by the opened draft, roared and snapped. It was midnight, as the sharp strokes of a wooden clock declared from the kitchen, and they were alone together, and all the other inmates of the house were asleep. The situation, scarcely conceivable to another civilization, is so common in ours, where youth commands its fate and trusts solely to itself, that it may be said to be characteristic of the New England civilization wherever it keeps its simplicity. It was not stolen or clandestine; it would have interested every one, but would have ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the Pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their thousands—and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair always recalled to me the story of Michael Angelo, who carved a figure in snow ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... man's fancy runs absolutely riot in humorous observation. "The Distressed Poet," with the baby squalling in his bed, the poor wife stitching at his solitary pair of breeches, and a strapping milkmaid clamouring for payment of her account; "The Enraged Musician," with every conceivable pandemonium of noise congregated beneath his window; above all, "The Sleeping Congregation," collected in a conventicle of very early Georgian design, and unanimously occupied in carrying out the precept of their reverend pastor's text, "Come unto me ... and I will give ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... wart the size of a pea. This approach to the form of man is aided by another point of personal resemblance—long whiskers. That the tail should have been worn off against the rocks, or in climbing the fences to get at orchards and melon-patches, is easily conceivable. How the evolutionists account for the retention of the beard does not yet appear. The females carry their young as adroitly and carefully as do the Kabyle women, and ascend the rocks with them with much greater activity. A young monkey has a less neglected look than a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... tobacco belt that sweeps down the pleasant ranges of the Piedmont region, east of the Blue Appalachians. Or, to speak more correctly, the plantation was in that indeterminate belt which neither of the great staples could claim exclusively as its own—that delectable land where every conceivable product of the temperate zone grows, if not in its rankest luxuriance, at least in perfection and abundance. Tobacco on the hillsides, corn upon the wide bottoms, cotton on the gray uplands, and wheat, oats, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... line of reasoning I learned, clearly and once for all, that inconceivability is not a proof of impossibility; but, on the other hand, that we know many things to be true that are not conceivable to the finite mind, and therefore we must follow truth learned by experience and observation, irrespective of rationalism. In this way the mighty fetters of rationalism that held me in bondage were cut and I was set ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... how much more defensible the new doctrine is than the old one. Even could the supporters of the Development Hypothesis merely show that the origination of species by the process of modification is conceivable, they would be in a better position than their opponents. But they can do much more than this. They can show that the process of modification has effected, and is effecting, decided changes in all organisms subject to modifying influences. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... related to him by blood. We cannot express the feeling of a supreme power, independent of men, derived from the grace of God, the King of kings, more strongly than it was expressed by Edgar under Dunstan's influence; the ruling motives of life in Church and State make it conceivable that a monkish hierarch, such as Dunstan, shared, as it were, the King's power, and shaped the course of the authority of ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... one's ideas; but here the subtler obstacles of taste and pride intervened. Not even Bessy's transparent manoeuvrings, her tender solicitude for her friend's happiness, could for a moment weaken Justine's resistance. If she must marry without love—and this was growing conceivable to her—she must at least merge her craving for personal happiness in some view of life ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... and looked. Upon the page of folio, close to an illuminated capital, the black drop had flattened itself. Around the original sphere had been shed splashes of all conceivable shapes-rays, rockets, dotted lines, arrowheads, all the freakish impromptu of chaos. Next, the slope lending its aid, the channels had drained into one, and by this time a black rivulet was crawling downward to the margin. One or two readers near had risen, and now eyed me like examining magistrates. ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... reason will carry on such a profound question. I believe that the merit of the Sacrifice made in this world of ours might be made available in all worlds that need it, be their sin what it may. It is also very conceivable that the good news might be conveyed to those worlds by angels, just as the good news is made known in our world by men. The same principle would hold. In the one case there would be a wider application of the message than ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... had the woman to do with her? She had suffered as much as if the woman had not forgotten it all. His reckoning was with Ida,—was with her. Where should he find her? In what limbo could he imagine her? Ah, that was the wildering cruelty of it. She was not this woman, nor was she dead in any conceivable natural way so that her girlish spirit might have remained eternally fixed. She was nothing. She was nowhere. She existed only in this locket, and her only soul was in his heart, far more surely than in this ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... spread that the Governor was there, persons came to see us, and volunteered all kinds of information, illustrating it by samples of the gold, which was of a uniform kind, "scale-gold," bright and beautiful. A large variety, of every conceivable shape and form, was found in the smaller gulches round about, but the gold in the river-bed was uniformly "scale-gold." I remember that Mr. Clark was in camp, talking to Colonel Mason about matters and things generally, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... persuade himself, God could not be Love. God was Justice, Order, Unity, Perfection; He could not be human and imperfect, nor could the Son or the Holy Ghost be other than the Father. The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; she alone was Favour, Duality, Diversity. Under any conceivable form of religion, this duality must find embodiment somewhere, and the Middle Ages logically insisted that, as it could not be in the Trinity, either separately or together, it must be in the Mother. If ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of things,—a universal nebula, if you will,—in his secret soul he makes one exception—himself. That there is a great deal more assent than conviction in the world is a chiding which may come as justly from the teacher's table as from the preacher's pulpit. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... was their springing apart and so ready the mind to believe what the heart denied, that it was almost conceivable that he had not seen. There was not even a pause, and through the perfunctory greetings of these two men of strangest relation, Lilly found herself somehow back at her desk, little prickles out all over her body and particularly ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... though the fragrant odors of the mountainside had crept into and clung to the little house. A great fireplace crowned the room. Before it now stretched a huge Maltese cat. And most surprising of all—there were books everywhere, on shelves built in every conceivable nook and corner, on the big table, on the arm of the great chair drawn close to ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... mountain torn up by the roots, as fabled in Milton, if it moved with the least conceivable velocity, throw ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... cemetery certain changeable changing characteristic chauffeur choose chose chosen clothes coarse column coming commission committee comparative compel compelled competent concede conceivable conferred conquer conqueror conscience conscientious considered continuous control controlled cooperate country course courteous courtesy ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... these Indians suppose a revolt in heaven without having seen one on earth? Such a jump from human nature to divine nature is barely conceivable. Usually one goes ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... I shall get my money," said Tamada, and something looked out of his eyes that betrayed a purpose already gained, Rainey fancied, as a chess player might gain assurance of victory by the looking ahead to all conceivable moves against him, and providing a counter-play that would achieve the game. It was borne in upon him that Tamada had resources he could not fathom. The Oriental gave a swift smile, that held no mirth, no friendship, ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... or the girl had lied; but the story had an air of truth to it. If it were a fact that there had recently been a quarrel between these cousins, whose uncousinly attitude towards each other was fast becoming clear to Mr. Taggett, then here was a conceivable key to an enigma which had ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... lie within the circle; and the question is, by what art or artifice—we might almost say by what sorcery—can they be transplanted out of it, without at the same time being made to overpass the limits of the sphere? There are just four conceivable answers to this question—answers illustrative of three great schools of philosophy, and of a fourth which is now ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... a very great (and what looks like an insuperable) difficulty was to be got over by some amazingly clever trick not easily conceivable, when a number of books, as if written by Tacitus, were to precede a history which he had composed, commencing: "When I begin this work"—"Initium mihi operis;" those words which now in all the editions properly stand at the head of a separate and substantive work, "Historiarum Liber I." ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... rigmarole resolutions at nonsensical public meetings; and they get invited with their women to assemblies at their leader's where they see stars and blue ribbons, and above all, us, whom they little think in appearing on such occasions, make the greatest conceivable sacrifice. Well then, of course such people are entirely in one's power, if one only had time and inclination to notice them. You can do anything with them. Ask them to a ball, and they will give ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... the young, religious, moral and pecuniary, unite to urge them to establish, in the outset of life, the rule of unswerving honesty and integrity, as their constant guide. Let it not be forgotten, that in every possible point of view, and in every conceivable condition of things, it will always be true, that "Honesty ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... without any conceivable beginning and conceivable end was so thoroughly realised by the Hindu sages that the chiefdom of Heaven itself was to them the concern of a moment. Nothing less than unchangeable felicity for all times was the object they pursued. All other things and states ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... capacity for the destruction of their opponents the throne of the tyrant or the liberty of the people may be dependent. Nations, companies, and individuals have expended years of time and millions of money in testing every conceivable contrivance which offered a hope of improvement in precision, force, facility of loading or firing, or any of the minute details which contribute to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... see you are busy," said he. "It is not particularly pressing for the moment," said I, placing my work aside. He then commenced to interview me concerning Morphy, asking my opinion and description of him in every conceivable manner; Staunton, Buckle, Anderssen, Steinitz and Blackburne followed in rapid succession. All things temporal have an end and a welcome pause came in this case. Taking up a chess book lying by my side which happened to be a gilt copy of Chess Masterpieces, just out, he said, "How much might ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... last-named lecture, shows strong feeling. A reply by Mr. Huxley appeared in the July number of the same Journal. The most heretical discussion from a modern standpoint is at page 311, where he asks how it is conceivable that the bright colours of butterflies and shells or the elegant forms of Foraminifera can possibly be of service to their possessors; and it is this which especially struck Darwin, judging by the pencil notes on his copy of the Lecture.) Though I believe, as far as my knowledge ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... rendering Michelet's, 'Ce damne Salvator' tenderly as 'that condemned Salvator.' But Mr. Ruskin now perceives in him the 'last traces of spiritual life in the art of Europe, the last man to whom the thought of a spiritual existence presented itself as a conceivable reality. All succeeding men, however powerful,—Rembrandt, Rubens, Vandyck, Reynolds,—would have mocked at the idea of a spirit. They were men of the world, they are never in earnest, and they are never appalled. But Salvator was capable of pensiveness, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... has no strings to it, and is followed up by similar sentiments throughout the article. But why, in that case, are the gates into the yard locked, and the man with the rifle provided? If Warden Moyer renders life at Atlanta prison more bearable than at any other in the country, what conceivable grounds are there that his affectionate inmates should wish to run away from him? That warmhearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly put the Government to the expense of supplying safeguards against ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... were no special day. And yet, as his first rays could strike music from the Memnon's Statue on the Nile, what tones were these, so thrilling, tremulous of preparation and foreboding, which he awoke in every bosom at Versailles! Huge Paris, in all conceivable and inconceivable vehicles, is pouring itself forth; from each Town and Village come subsidiary rills; Versailles is a very sea of men. But above all, from the Church of St. Louis to the Church ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of artificial swarming has been zealously advocated, which, if it could only be made to answer, would be, of all conceivable plans the most effectual, and as it would require the smallest amount of labor, experience, or skill, would be everywhere practiced. A number of hives must be put in connection with each other, so as ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... empire of wagerers she knew; they wagered for and against every conceivable thing which had its dependence ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... question as to whether or not a crocodile was to be classified as an insect; and the instructive feature in the disquisition was this, that although a crocodile differs from an insect as regards every conceivable particular of its internal anatomy, no allusion at all is made to this fact, while the whole discussion is made to turn on the hardness of the external casing of a crocodile resembling the hardness of the external casing of a beetle; and when at last Buffon decides ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... the siege of Jerusalem, he set ambushes to seize the famishing Jews, who stole out of the city by night to glean food in the valleys: these he would first dreadfully scourge, then torment them with all conceivable tortures, and, at last, crucify them before the wall of the city. According to Josephus, not less than five hundred a day were thus tormented. And when many of the Jews, frantic with famine, deserted to the Romans, Titus cut off their hands and drove them back. After the destruction of Jerusalem, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... had the patience to keep on at his strenuous task unremittingly for, perhaps, twenty-four hours or more, it is conceivable that this fierce digger might have succeeded in making his way into the chamber. There was no such implacable purpose, however, in his attack. In a very little while he would have desisted from what he knew to be a vain undertaking. Even had he succeeded, the beavers ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... here and sew as go to bed and lie there. I shouldn't sleep," replied Maria, with the gentlest sadness conceivable. There was in it no shadow of complaining. Of late years all the fire of resistance had seemed to die out in the girl. She was unfailingly sweet, but nerveless. Often when she raised a hand it seemed as if she could not even let it fall, as if it must remain poised by some curious inertia. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... highest law of the drama is the law of psychological truth, which requires that the characters be humanly conceivable and act as human beings would act under the circumstances imagined. This law is not kept in 'The Bride of Messina', with the result that the first three acts fall short of the effect that they are intended to produce. It is different with the fourth act. There everything is in order, and the simple ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... is to be observed that the interest of a work of art is confined to works of poetic art. It does not exist in the case of fine art, or of music or architecture. Nay, with these forms of art it is not even conceivable, unless, indeed, the interest be of an entirely personal character, and confined to one or two spectators; as, for example, where a picture is a portrait of some one whom we love or hate; the building, my house or my prison; the music, my wedding dance, or the tune to which I marched ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... have been credited with almost every conceivable atrocity that man is capable of perpetrating. Whether these brutalities are perpetrated with the sanction of the German authorities, or are merely the expression of individual hatred, one is not prepared to state. We have ceased to be angry with or alarmed at their tactics of intimidation. ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... elaboration of a colonisation scheme for the relief of those who, although perfectly willing to work, find themselves unable to obtain employment in consequence of the present overcrowded condition of every conceivable avocation. I can see my way perfectly clearly up to a certain point; but there I find myself brought to a standstill for want of means—for I must tell you that although my colony, once fairly launched, would be self-supporting, the launching of it would be a terribly ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... unfortunate conversation with the Vicar's wife, when in response to various leading questions Toni had shown a lamentable ignorance of the great gulf which yawns between Church and Chapel—a quite conceivable ignorance on the part of the London tradesman's niece, who had attended Chapel with her aunt and uncle on Sunday evenings as cheerfully as she joined in the more attractive service in the Church which the genteel Fanny generally patronized ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... country will be exchanged for European and Asiatic products; wealth will certainly increase, and increase indefinitely. There is no calculating the future resources and wealth of the New World, especially in the United States. There are no conceivable bounds to their future commerce, manufactures, and agricultural products. We can predict with certainty the rise of new cities, villas, palaces, material splendor, limited only to the increasing resources ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... which had taken possession of De Scuderi's mind on Olivier's first entry into the room, had now acquired form and content—and in a fearful way. She saw the son of her dear Anne innocently entangled in such a way that there hardly seemed any conceivable means of saving him from a shameful death. She honoured the young man's heroic purpose in choosing to die under an unjust burden of guilt rather than divulge a secret that would certainly kill his ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... God is the totality of Being. But it is not to be inferred that he identified God with the visible, or with any conceivable Universe. For either of these must fall far short of infinity, and the Being of God is infinite. All I mean, when I say that Spinoza identifies God with the totality of existence, is that he regards the deity as that Perfect Being without beginning or end, whose essence ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... river, rising and falling a considerable number of feet, the natural impediment in the way of such an enterprise would, I think, have staggered us. We should have built a bridge costing two or three millions sterling, on which no conceivable amount of traffic would pay a fair dividend. Here, in crossing the Susquehanna, the boat is so constructed that its deck shall be level with the line of the railway at half tide, so that the inclined plane from the shore down to the boat, or from the shore up to the boat, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... to promote the most gigantic of modern enterprises, with inexhaustible raw and cultivated products, with labor to produce any conceivable commodity, the humiliating fact confronted the people of the United States a few months since of seeing its official delegates to the Pan-American Congress at Rio de Janeiro set forth in a steamship flying the ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... the night, and instead of pelting showers and tossing branches he saw a pale grey wall of mist against his windows. All excitement had gone from the atmosphere, leaving the dreary certainty that the mist would presently clear only to condense into a slow, persistent, autumn rain. It is conceivable that he would not have exchanged his waking dreams so quickly for more definite thoughts and speculations had his eyes rested upon the blue hills of the western skyline, for he was peculiarly susceptible to the moods ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... provocative of very indirect and long-distance advances. Cephas Cole, to the amazement of every one but his (constitutionally) exasperated mother, was "toning down" the ell of the family mansion, mitigating the lively yellow, and putting another fresh coat of paint on it, for no conceivable reason save that of pleasing the eye of a certain capricious, ungrateful young hussy, who would probably say, when her verdict was asked, that she didn't see any particular difference in it, ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Marie Antoinette disconcerted all that were aimed at her by the uniform prudence of her conduct. Happily for her, with all his defects, her husband was still one in whom she could feel perfect confidence. As she told Mercy, under any conceivable circumstances she was sure of his views and intentions being always right; the only difficulty was to engage him in a sufficiently decided course of action, which his timid and sluggish disposition rendered almost painful to him. And just at this ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... and decay, and flowers, and every conceivable discordant odor. Flashes of insane colorings formed themselves in his eyes. He heard the chaotic uproar which meant that his auditory nerves, like the nerves in his eyes and nostrils and skin, were stimulated to violent activity, reporting every ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... render objects in the little room indistinguishable when Patty awoke. She made a hasty toilet, lighted the fire, and while the water was heating for her coffee, delved into the pack sack and drew out a gray flannel shirt which she viewed critically from every conceivable angle. She tried it on, turning this way and that, before the mirror. "Daddy wasn't so much larger than I am," she smiled, "I can take a tuck in the sleeves, and turn back the collar and it will fit pretty well. Anyway, it will be better than that riding jacket. It ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... perpendicular, there being but one oblique opening having a very small mound, and the main mound is somewhat wider than long. Occasionally the burrows are very tortuous, and there are often two or three extra openings, each sometimes covered by a mound. There is every conceivable shape and size in the chimneys, ranging from a mere ridge of mud, evidently the first foundation, to those with a breadth one-half the height. The typical mound is one which covers the perpendicular burrow in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... came pouring in on long trains of express and freight cars; mounted officers and orderlies ploughed their rushing way through great heaps and dunes of ever-shifting sand, leaving behind them stifling clouds of scintillating particles, which filtered through every conceivable crevice and made the effort to breathe a suffocating nightmare. Over all the tumultuous scene a torrid sun beat down from a cloudless sky, while its scorching rays, reflected from the fierce sand under foot, produced a heat so intolerable that even the tropical ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... as he spoke. "It is not the view of the materialists, but it is conceivable that the materialists may be wrong," he responded. "In this case, however, it is the concrete and practical we have to grapple with, my friend. You say you are going inland to search for that man, and for a while I go that way, but though I have my ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... mean to say his own heir—and a young girl like that——? By Jove, I say, how dreadful!" he exclaimed, and, in fact, he would hardly believe such a thing conceivable until all the choice spirits in turn had assured him that there was practically no doubt ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... appetite. The object of scientific education is to discover what the spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in every conceivable form. ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... and humane deed, and on all sides we hear people and parties declaring,' I didn't do it, nor countenance him to do it in any conceivable way. It can't fairly be inferred from my past career.' Ye need n't take so much pains, my friends, to wash your skirts of him. No one will ever be convinced that he was any creature of yours. He went and came, as he ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Fontenelle's argument, that the forces of nature being permanent human ability is in all ages the same. "May there not," he asks, "many circumstances concur to one production that do not to any other in one or many ages?" Fontenelle speaks of trees. It is conceivable that various conditions and accidents "may produce an oak, a fig, or a plane-tree, that shall deserve to be renowned in story, and shall not perhaps be paralleled in other countries or times. May not the same have happened in the production, growth, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... supposition. The idea of cause is a necessary idea. An event being given, the idea of cause is necessarily implied. An uncaused event is an impossible conception. The idea of cause is also a universal idea extending to all events, actual or conceivable, and affirmed by all minds. It is a rational fact, attested by universal consciousness, that we can not think of an event transpiring without a cause; of a thing being the author of its own existence; of something generated by and out of nothing. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... by the profounder impressions made upon it while in the persons of its parents, between its present and last preceding development. To maintain this is to maintain use and disuse to be the main factors throughout organic development; to deny it is to deny that use and disuse can have any conceivable effect. For the detailed reasons which led me to my own conclusions I must refer the reader to my books Life and Habit and Unconscious Memory, the conclusions of which have been often adopted, but never, that I have seen, disputed. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... anything like a breeze, you must get well outside the town. Never in hot, dusty, crowded cities have I felt so half-suffocated as at the two first named places. Pougues, on the contrary, lies in a broad expanse of beautifully varied woodland and champaign, no more appropriate site conceivable for the now popular air-cure. "Pougues-les-Eaux, Cure d'Eau and Cure d'Air," is now its proud title, folks flocking hither, not only to imbibe its delicious, ice-cold, sparkling waters, but to drink in its highly nourishing air. The iron-gaseous waters resemble in properties those ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... extending before the main building, is of an ampleness scarcely conceivable until once viewed. It is purely French in design and is of the epoch of the tenancy of the Comte de Toulouse. Before the admirably grouped lindens was a boathouse, and off in every direction ran alleys of acacias, while here and there tulip beds, rose gardens ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... provocative signal for nine men out of ten, but which will haunt the tenth: a child's face with a passionate woman's eyes burning and dying in it—black hair, black eyes, thin pale cheeks, equine nostrils, red lips, small ears, and the smallest chin conceivable. He smiled at ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... call, you see! My party was such a singularly animated soiree that I haven't undressed all night. Oh, it was the liveliest affair conceivable! And, like a true Norwegian host, I tracked LOeVBORG home; and it is only my duty, as a friend of the house, and cock of the walk, to take the first opportunity of telling you that he finished up the evening by coming to mere loggerheads with a red-haired opera-singer, and being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... there exist vibrations of every conceivable degree of rapidity, filling the whole vast space intervening between the slow sound waves and the swift light waves; nor is even that all, for there are undoubtedly vibrations slower than those of sound, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... people, and these spirits, speaking through Yellow Bird's lips, had saved him from Cassidy at the fishing camp and had performed the miracle on the shore of Wollaston and had predicted the salvation that had come to him out on the Barren. And so—was it not conceivable that the other would ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... faculties, as other kinds of dissipation are to the bodily functions. One book, well read and thoroughly digested, nay, one single train of thought, carefully elaborated and attentively considered, is worth more than any conceivable amount of that indolent, dreamy sort of reading in which many persons indulge. There is in fact no more unsafe criterion of knowledge than the number of books a man has read. A young man once told me he had read the entire ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... unity, a definite terminus a quo is provided in ix. 13 by the mention of the Greeks, whose sons are opposed to the sons of Zion. Such a relation of Jews to Greeks is not conceivable before the time of Alexander the Great, and this fact alone would throw the prophecy, at the earliest, into the fourth century B.C. But there are other facts which seem to some to make for a pre-exilic date: e.g. the mention of Judah and Ephraim together, ix. 13 (cf. ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... to be a drawn battle at this point, and after eating his brief supper John saw the automobiles and stretchers bringing in the wounded. They passed him in thousands and thousands, hurt in every conceivable manner. At first he could scarcely bear to look at them, but it was astonishing how soon one hardened to ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... which changed the boundaries of countries, called into being new nations, and reduced the power and territories of the vanquished. Accordingly, it was bound to face the problem of how far it was prepared to cooeperate with the victors in any settlement of Europe's difficulties. By no conceivable process, therefore, could America be disentangled from the web of world affairs. Isolation, if desirable, had become impossible. Within three hundred years from the founding of the tiny settlements at Jamestown and ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... and cotton umbrellas, the classic figures in the frieze began to chase the peacocks furiously across the ceilings, the storks hopped wildly around on their one available leg, draperies of every conceivable hue and texture, from spider webs to sole leather, shaking the dust from their folds, slipped uneasily about on their glittering rings, and showers of Japanese fans floated down like falling apple blossoms in the month of May. He seemed to see the Old Curiosity Shop, ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... morning sun glinted in by the window-pane, and showed it off; my bed, my mails, and washing-dish, with some disorder of my clothes, and the unlighted chimney, made the only plenishing; no mistake but it looked bare and cold, and the most unsuitable, beggarly place conceivable to harbour a young lady. At the same time came in on my mind the recollection of the clothes that I had bought for her; and I thought this contrast of poverty and prodigality bore ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... purest abstraction. The second great risk is that of allowing the sense of duty to predominate over the temptation to stay—a temptation, be it remembered, that is not weakened by the motive that any conceivable penalty can attach to it. Even then it is always doubtful whether the traveller will be ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... Chioggia fluttered like gaudy butterflies before them, dipping their wings of orange and crimson and every conceivable sunset tint to catch the breeze; and the air was suddenly vibrant with sounds of traffic and busy life. Men called to each other with song and jest from heavily laden barks, while they waited the hour of sailing; or lay at ease on the top of their wares, smoking ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the event impressed on my mind after seventy years of a busy life, full of almost every conceivable event—I saw, emerging from a bystreet that led from Bedford Jail, and coming along through the square and near the window where I was standing, a common farm cart, drawn by a horse which was led by a labouring man. As I was above ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... a shuddering chill) it seemed altogether insufficient: not even cruelty could wring such cries from madness. But of one thing I was sure: I could not live in a house where such a thing was half conceivable, and not probe the matter home and, if ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apathy or the positive pull-back of their antagonism delay the remedying of existing evils. The ideal lies in keeping morality plastic while giving its approved forms our hearty allegiance. Widely different ideals are theoretically conceivable; but we live in a specific time and place and must defer to the code of our fellows; it is along these lines, and by gradual steps, that progress must be made. We must be on the alert for new suggestions, but slow to tear down till we can build better. The greatest of prophets, keenly as ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... that night. Sleep would not come. Hour after hour passed, and her wrath refused to be quelled. She tried every conceivable method, but time hung heavily. It was not quite peep of day, however, when she laid her well-worn family Bible aside. It had been her mother's, and amid all the anxieties and tribulations incident to the life of a woman who had free negroes and a miserable husband ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... themselves to be conducted upon the same tour of inspection that they had made the former evening. They found everything precisely as it had been on that occasion. There was no possibility of concealing any person in the cabinet or the back parlour, and no apparent or conceivable means by which any person could reach those apartments, except ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... have reached the ether, the full surface of the rudder pushed out and exposed broadside may not have much effect in changing our course. This is one of the things that we cannot possibly know till we try. However, if ether is anything at all but a name, if it is the thinnest, lightest conceivable gas, and we are rushing through it at a speed of a thousand miles a minute, our rudder certainly should ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... are most wondrous—yet who will dare to say they take precedence over the wondrous ways of the stomach? And the ways are ironic; is it not conceivable that the two should align in devious fruition? For Gral found answer, not in his groping hands, but ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... conference at the rear of the cabin brought to light the fact that every one of our friends, including even Dinah, understood that their peril was of the gravest nature conceivable. ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... called. She knew that a letter from Cornelia was possible, and she knew also that it would really be as fateful to herself, as to Hyde. If, as she suspected, it was Rem Van Ariens who had detained the misdirected letter, there was only one conceivable result as regarded herself. She, an upright, honourable English girl, loving truth with all her heart, and despising whatever was underhand and disloyal, had but one course to take—she must break off her engagement ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... round his neck, and Karna, who wanted to be motherly to him, went over his face with a corner of her pocket-handkerchief, which she moistened with her tongue. She was rather officious, but for that matter it was quite conceivable that the boy might have got dirty again since his ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... no longer to her what material portion of her possessions and environment was due to her own efforts, or to his. Nothing that might be called hers could remain conceivable as hers unless he shared it. Their rights in each other included everything temporal and spiritual; everything of mind and matter alike. Of what consequence, then, might be the origin of possessions that could not exist for her unless possession ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... out into the flower garden. What fragrance was there, and what loveliness! Every conceivable flower was there in full bloom; there were some for every season; no picture book could be gayer and prettier. Gerda jumped high for joy, and played till the sun went down behind the high cherry trees; then she was put into a lovely bed, with red silk pillows stuffed with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... made effective in a charter. Immigration, within these restrictions, was not likely to be voluntary and eager, as was the case in New England, and, since the company was under the one compulsion of providing a certain number of colonists and slaves, immigration was forced. Every conceivable sound economic and philosophical principle was violated, and yet investors came from all parts of Europe. "Crowds of crazed speculators jostled and fought each other" before the offices of the company ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... It is hardly conceivable that a responsible officer, such as the Director-General of Health, would take action under these provisions unless he had strong reason to believe that such action was justified. But, even if he makes a mistake or is misinformed, the worst that can happen to an innocent person wrongfully ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... valley "El Kasab," we were assured that in winter time the whole breadth is sometimes inundated, and even after this has subsided, the alluvial soil is dangerous for attempting to travel in, it becomes a bog for animals of burden. Thus it is quite conceivable that at the occurrence of a mighty storm, divinely and specially commissioned to destroy, the host of Sisera and his chariots ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... sympathetic nature—we think it of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality—that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men—lies ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... paid them the greatest honor and reverence." Furthermore, we are told that when the story got wind in Venice, straightway the whole city, gentle and simple, flocked to the house to embrace the three travellers, and to make much of them with every conceivable demonstration ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... the building—the thud and clanking of heavy machinery, and at intervals a human groan; and looking up I saw that the long friezes in bas-relief represented men and women tortured and torturing with all conceivable variety of method and circumstance—flayed, racked, burned, torn asunder, loaded with weights, pinched with hot irons, and so on without end. And it added to the horror of these sculptures that while the limbs and ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... many qualities into one individual thing. This individualising principle unites, as he conceives, with the cooperating action of magnetism, electricity, and chemistry. At least, such is the inference to be drawn from the present state of science; though it is easily conceivable that future discoveries may bring us acquainted with powers more directly connected with Life. The most general law governing the action of Life, as a tendency to individuation, is here designated polarity; for instance, the power termed magnetism (not meaning ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and clash, and neatly equal the commentators in number. Yet possibly each one of these unriddlings, with no doubt a host of others, is conceivable: so that wisdom will dwell upon none of ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... change this restriction in the Constitution? Indeed, it is hardly to be supposed that they will agree to it in the first instance, so far as it regards the acquisition of territory; but of what avail would it be to the South? There is but one conceivable acquisition—I speak of possible things, and I hope gentlemen will not understand me as coveting my neighbor's goods, or desiring to lay violent hands on the property of any other States or nations—but, if things should so happen ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... felt it true. To be 'out' of the body was merely to think and feel away from self. As they listened they realised themselves in touch with every nation and with every time, with all possible beliefs and disbeliefs, with every conceivable kind of thinking, that is, which ever has existed ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... clock anywhere to tell me the time of day, but the sun was shining, and I imagined it must be afternoon. Adjoining this luxurious apartment was an equally luxurious bathroom, furnished with every conceivable elegance,—the bath itself was of marble, and the water bubbled up from its centre like a natural spring, sparkling as it came. I found all my clothes, books and other belongings arranged with care where I could most easily get at them, and to my joy the book ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... of these shops. One that I visited, a glass show-room containing chandeliers priced upwards of a thousand dollars, and all varieties of fancy-wares of every description, had large mirrors at the ends of the room, covering the entire walls, and producing the grandest effect conceivable. The objects in the room were thus infinitely multiplied in both directions, so that whichever way one turned his face, glittering glassware was seen "as far as ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... life so attractive to American readers of British novels, is, taken on the whole, the most insipid existence conceivable. The women lack the sparkle and charm of ours; the men, who are out all day shooting or hunting according to the season, get back so fagged that if they do not actually drop asleep at the dinner-table, they will nap immediately after, brightening only when the ladies have retired, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... is conceivable that by some who cheered it the speech may have been misunderstood. Yet it is not probable that many who heard Redmond believed that in order to serve England he was flinging away Ireland's national claim, to the successful furtherance of which his whole ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... word of all this had been put upon paper, and that if the German Emperor would consent to arbitrate, the President would praise him publicly for his broadmindedness. The Ambassador was still convinced that no arbitration was conceivable. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... representation of the God of Truth to be such, that the more honest a man is, the less can he accept it. That the honest man, however, should not thereupon set himself to see whether there might not be a true God notwithstanding, whether such a God was not conceivable consistently with things as they are, whether the believers had not distorted the revelation they professed to follow; especially that he should prefer to believe in some sort of vitalic machine, equally void of beneficence and malevolence, existing because it can not help ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... see him may be, diffuse and indefinite as one must leave its application, is there any other formula that describes so well the result at which our institutions ought to aim? If they do that, they do the best thing conceivable. If they fail to do it, they fail in very deed. It surely is a fine synthetic formula. If our faculties and graduates could once collectively come to realize it as the great underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... ground that, at the date of their foundation, the differences between Lutheranism and Romanism were unknown? Both parties have disputed, and still dispute, with equal plausibility, on these points. Both alike have found it difficult to prove their right. Law can be applied only to conceivable cases, and perhaps spiritual foundations are not among the number of these, and still less where the conditions of the founders generally extended to a system of doctrines; for how is it conceivable that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... resolved, and for the work itself, that at least the sensation caused would lead to a full hall and thus, in a very favourable manner, guarantee satisfactory returns, and contradict their belief that the fund was menaced. Thus the Ninth Symphony had, in every conceivable way, become for me a point of honour, for the success of which I had to exercise all my powers to the utmost. The committee had misgivings regarding the outlay needed for procuring the orchestral parts, so I borrowed them ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... in my heart I felt a sudden vacancy, a drear, strange loneliness. With my faithful servant near me I had felt conscious of the presence of a friend, for friend he was in his own humble, unobtrusive fashion; but now I was alone—alone in a loneliness beyond all conceivable comparison—alone to do my work, without prevention or detection. I felt, as it were, isolated from humanity, set apart with my victim on some dim point of time, from which the rest of the world receded, where the searching eye of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... with me and offered me the situation of clerk in his counting room. I accepted his offer, and also became an inmate of his dwelling, which was adorned with every conceivable luxury. His family consisted of ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... pretensions of this new instrument; or, if it did, how can the character of the instrument affect the general condition of a science? Besides, is not the science a growth from very ancient times? With great respect for the Earl of Rosse, is it conceivable that he, or any man, by one hour's working the tackle of his new instrument, can have carried any stunning revolutionary effect into the heart of a section so ancient in our mathematical physics? But the reader is to consider, that the ruins made by Lord Rosse, are ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey |
