"Incomprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all my life out of town. When, in 1881, I went to live in Moscow, the poverty of the town greatly surprised me. I am familiar with poverty in the country; but city poverty was new and incomprehensible to me. In Moscow it was impossible to pass along the street without encountering beggars, and especially beggars who are unlike those in the country. These beggars do not go about with their pouches in the name of Christ, as country beggars are accustomed to do, but these beggars ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... finally swallowed up in huge worsted stockings, which embrace all the drawers, short petticoats, ends of handkerchiefs, comfortables, and shawls they can reach, and are generally gartered in some incomprehensible fashion round the waist. But mark! this is only the foundation. Now comes the thickly-wadded winter pelisse of silk or merino, with bands or ligatures, which instantly bury themselves in the depths of the surrounding hillocks, till within the case of clothes before you, which stands ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... his late agency, and had talked about sundry matters of business. He constantly perceived, however, that he could not impose upon Sir Arthur; but the idea that he could know all the mazes of the law, and yet prefer the straight road, was incomprehensible. ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... traitor in one. Let a man be as great a fool as he likes, so that he does not set a bad example. Fools need only be civil, and in consideration thereof they may aim at being the basis of monarchies. The narrowness of Clancharlie's mind was incomprehensible. His eyes were still dazzled by the phantasmagoria of the revolution. He had allowed himself to be taken in by the republic—yes; and cast out. He was an affront to his country. The attitude he assumed was downright felony. Absence was an insult. He held aloof from the public ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... looked them over with a questioning eye. He noted also that the occupant of the room had neither washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned over the dental plate in the bowl, and frowned again at its incomprehensible presence. ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... (-lemures-), and afterwards its deities of foul air, of fever, of diseases, perhaps even of theft (-laverna-); but it was unable to excite that mysterious awe after which the human heart has always a longing, or thoroughly to embody the incomprehensible and even the malignant elements in nature and in man, which must not be wanting in religion if it would reflect man as a whole. In the religion of Rome there was hardly anything secret except possibly the names of the gods of the city, the Penates; the real character, moreover, even of these ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... wife and myself. Probably it would not be an exaggeration to say it has aged us all. That he should have come through Jutland, done worthy deeds, won honorable mention and the D. S. O., then to be snatched out of life in this incomprehensible manner—nay, perhaps even by supernatural means, for we cannot yet actually declare it is not so. All this makes it impossible to say much that can comfort you or dear Mary. Time must pass I fear, Walter. You must get her away into another environment. ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the nature of God's providential government over men. It is not simply retributive, as the three friends had maintained, so that the measure of a man's outward sufferings is the measure of his sins; nor is it simply incomprehensible, so that there can be no reasoning about it; but it is disciplinary, in such a way that sorrow, though always the fruit of sin, comes upon good men as well as upon the wicked, being a fatherly chastisement intended for their benefit, and which, if properly improved, will in ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... correct light and proportion. This was in the spirit of the Ruskinian doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle. On that study I spent such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then the coming of autumn stopped me. Any difficulty in literal rendering of a subject was incomprehensible to me, and in fact in that kind of work there is little difference, for it is but copying, and requires only a correct eye and infinite patience, both of which I had; and it was a puzzle to me rather than a compliment when the veteran Durand said to me of one of my studies, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... surprised by the effect of his words. Tochatti turned to her mistress eagerly, and began pouring out a stream of Italian which was quite incomprehensible to Anstice, who was no better at modern languages than the average public school and University product. And Chloe replied in the same tongue, though without the wealth of gesture employed by the other woman; while Anstice waited, silently, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... steal a momentary glance at my comrade's face. To my unutterable surprise I discovered a whimsical twinkling at the corners of his eyes and a mirthful expression of mischief in his countenance. This was incomprehensible to me, for I could imagine no more awe-inspiring position than the ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... those to whom mercy and justice have so long called aloud in vain. In truth, if the case for instant emancipation was strong everywhere, it was in no quarter half so strong as in the Mauritius; and the distribution of the grant by Parliament to this Colony was the most unjustifiable, and even incomprehensible. For, elsewhere, there existed at least a title to the slave, over whom an unjust and unchristian law recognised the right of property. But in the Mauritius there was not, nor is there now, one negro to whom a good title is clearly provable. The atrocious ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... earnestly to come to Versailles that he might speak with her. M. Colbert escorted her thither and the king conversed for an hour with her and wept bitterly. Mme. de Montespan was there to meet her, with open arms and tears in her eyes." "It is all incomprehensible," adds Mme. de Sevigne; "some say that she will remain at Versailles and at court, others that she will return to Chaillot; we ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... drawing-room, and gazed around it in wonder. If, as it seemed, Reckitt and Forbes had taken unlawful possession of an untenanted house, then it was probable they would not return to get rid of my remains. The whole affair was incomprehensible. It seemed evident that Sylvia had not fallen a victim to the vengeance of the pair, as I had feared, but that perhaps I had owed my ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... the wrong way. Our only hope is that she will find the conditions so utterly discouraging at the very start that she will give it up and come home. If you are a man you will help to make them so. She has promised to stay with that country girl with whom she contracted such an incomprehensible ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... desire here to brand it as at once a platitude and a falsehood. How ever the idea gained currency that childhood is the happiest period of life, I cannot conceive. How ever, once started, it kept afloat is equally incomprehensible. I should have supposed that the experience of every sane person would have given the lie to it. I should have supposed that every soul, as it burst into flower, would have hurled off the vile imputation. I can only account for it by recurring to Lady Mary Wortley Montague's statistics, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Archbishop of Rheims and Dunois. The Archbishop had never been friendly to the Maid, and now it was clear, watched her with that half satirical, half amused look of the wise man, curious and cynical in presence of the incomprehensible, observing her ways and very ready to catch her tripping and to entangle her if possible in her own words. The people thronged the way, full of enthusiasm, acclaiming the King and shouting their joyful exclamations of "Noel!" though it does not appear that any part of their ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... vol. i., p. xxi., where the register of St. Margaret's parish, Westminster, is quoted to the effect that Pepys was married December 1st, 1655. It seems incomprehensible that both husband and wife should have been wrong as to the date of their wedding day, but Mrs. Pepys was unquestionably wrong as to the number of years, for they had been married ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... certainly the most incomprehensible fellow this afternoon," exclaimed Roy. "What's ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... Tom had held several colloquies, in incomprehensible French that raced like a mill-stream over a weir, with acquaintances who accosted them on the promenade or in the stalls, and at length Tom and Loulou had left the 'loge' for a few minutes in order to accept the hospitality of friends in the great ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... old-fashioned, but it will always possess a certain charm for two classes of people: habitual vagabonds who beg and are freely accused of stealing, and the literary, artistic, antiquarian, or scientific vagabonds who take to tramping by fits and starts. The latter class, being quite incomprehensible to the rustic mind in Guyenne, are regarded by it with almost as much ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... conversation, wondered for the first time in his life if Helen Douglas was a coquette. If she knew Van Shaw as well as he and Walter knew him would she smile so sweetly at him, and on such brief acquaintance? To Felix Bauer the whole thing was incomprehensible. Even allowing something for the swiftness with which acquaintances can be made in the desert during a camping experience, especially under circumstances favoured by such an accident as had occurred, it still was not seemly that a girl like Helen Douglas should even in the slightest degree encourage ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... casings was honourably his, but they were more to him than all his legitimate possessions. To ask him to return the objects to the galleries and museums to which they belonged would be asking Cleigh to tear out his heart. Though the passion was incomprehensible, Jane readily observed its effects. She had sensed the misery, the anxiety, the stinging curiosity of all these months. Not to know exactly what had become of the rug and the paintings! Not to know if he would ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... much a mystery as though we were begotten without an earthly father, spoken into existence, or sprang like Minerva from the brow of Jove? Why should the world stand agaze for nineteen centuries at one miracle, when sixty, full as great, as incomprehensible, are happening every minute? If God is the author of us all, is it more wonderful that He should create us in one way than in another? Was it necessary that the All-Father should change the order of generation to prove His existence, or that Christ should enter the world ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... which were to follow the Child to his end, and survive him on earth—incomprehensible in his day, a dispute in this—an enigma to all who do not or cannot understand that every man is two in one—a deathless Soul and a ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... dealt, and the fateful, to Chester the incomprehensible, words were quickly uttered. Chester saw that Sylvia, unknowing of the fact, had won—that five louis were added to her original stake. The fair-haired Frenchman in evening dress by whom Mrs. Bailey had been sitting looked round; not seeing her, he himself ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the other; neither can call itself master of the other: the people are masters of both. This division of power, it is true, is in a great measure unknown in Europe. It is the peculiar system of America; and, though new and singular, it is not incomprehensible. The State constitutions are established by the people of the States. This Constitution is established by the people of all the States. How, then, can a State secede? How can a State undo what the whole ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... was incomprehensible to the Flemings, but on their side a man with a bound-up head and another limping were produced, and the head man spoke of more serious damage to others who could not appear, demanding both the aggressors to be dealt with, i.e. to be hanged on ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Wondrous strange it seemed,—incomprehensible,—more than she could manage or control. There are prisoners whose pardon proves the world too large for them: they find no rest until their prison-door is opened ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... as the days preceding it, the queen in deep distress, the king in a state almost incomprehensible, and all the house uneasy and alarmed. The Drawing-room was again put off, and a steady residence seemed fixed ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... a "Mbwiri," they meant that the white man had been bleached by the grave as Dante had been darkened by his visit below, and consequently he was a subject of fear and awe. They have a material, evanescent, intelligible future, not an immaterial, incomprehensible eternity; the ghost endures only for awhile and perishes like the memory of the little-great name. Hence the ignoble dread in East and West Africa of a death which leads to a shadowy world, and eventually to utter annihilation. Seeing nought beyond the present-future, there is no hope for ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... explained the previous incomprehensible difference between the distant "C" and present person, the realization of the companionship, the romance, the friendship gone to wreck on this reef of musk and bear's-grease came over Nattie with a rush, and for a moment so affected her that she ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... feel within myself that it does produce it. I will to act, and I act; I wish to move my body, and my body moves; but that an inanimate body in repose should move itself, or should produce motion, is incomprehensible and without example."... "If matter moved shows me will, matter moved according to certain laws shows me intelligence; this is my second article of faith." We see that the universe has a plan, although ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... are so very common, because they are constantly being repeated in their noble monotony and springing up from every side, numberless as the essential actions of our daily life; and glorious because before this war they seemed so rare and almost legendary and incomprehensible. ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... alive with bees, the little Strelka brook bubbled and fretted like a tea-kettle, and the sun rose gloriously; its rays fell between the leaves of the lime-tree, and threw patches of light on the strange face of one of the strangest and most incomprehensible ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... possible and natural. Because she knew there was such a thing as romance, and that it was something quite beyond her comprehension, she was the more willing to receive this event quietly from finding it incomprehensible. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... as Rickman had anticipated, an exquisite disapproval. His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity. How a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was incomprehensible ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... some nameless cause, at least some cause to us incomprehensible, the affections take fire the instant two persons, whose minds are in unison, observe each other, which, however, they may often ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... weariness and a contempt. To ally myself with them against the "upper world" would have been mere dishonesty, or sheer despair. What they at heart desired, was to me barren; what I coveted, was to them for ever incomprehensible. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... in the hospital with their routine and monotony, creating an incomprehensible break in his life, his memory retained nothing; but the unchanging grief, weighing like a slab of stone on a grave, was ever present in his soul with inexorable and brutal force during these many months. He only half recalled the ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... to be invaded? Why, the Nightingale, on his way from the rose-leaf, had, perhaps somewhat inconsiderately, tapped at his door, to inform him that all he could get out of the Dewdrop was (a very incomprehensible sentiment to a sleepy bird), that he was a tear wept by the Sky when it lost the Sun; and he was bound in all sincerity to add, that it seemed rather a dull and ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... individual that met with the "distressing accident"? Considering the elaborate circumstantiality of detail observable in the item, it seems to me that it ought to contain more information than it does. On the contrary, it is obscure and not only obscure, but utterly incomprehensible. Was the breaking of Mr. Schuyler's leg, fifteen years ago, the "distressing accident" that plunged Mr. Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up here at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... all is clear, I see the link in the chain; everything is explained, and I now understand why Arne Saknussemm, put out of court, forced to hide his magnificent discoveries, was compelled to conceal beneath the veil of an incomprehensible cryptograph, the secret—" ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... with all its incomprehensible additions, and I had such extended notions of it, that I know not how to express them. Among the rest, how vile, how gross, how absurd did every pleasant thing look!—I mean, that we had counted pleasant ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... household, His Eminence sent His Holiness as soon as possible packing for Rome. Though I am neither a cardinal nor a prophet, should you and I live twenty years longer, and the other Continental Sovereigns not alter their present incomprehensible conduct, I can, without any risk, predict that we shall see Rome salute the second Charlemagne an Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, if before that time death does not put a period to his encroachments ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... the theatre, and Kate felt the chilling sense of separation which exists between the public and a debutante being gradually filled in by a delicious but almost incomprehensible notion of contact—a sensation more delicate than the touch of a lover's breath on your face. This reached a climax when she sang the third verse, and had not etiquette forbade, she would have had an ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... grunt. "Thought as much. They get like that." He spoke as if referring to the victims of an incomprehensible and ravaging disease. "An' it's always the good ones that get nabbed." He eyed the King's Messenger with an expression of melancholy omniscience. "Not so ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... quartettes there. But these performances only attracted a small number of artists;[236] and so far as the general public was concerned the Societe des derniers quartuors de Beethoven had the reputation for devoting itself to a singular and incomprehensible kind of music that had been written ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... which had no beginning, and Reason adds, "else there could be nothing now." For example, Space could not have had a beginning, that Duration could not, that Truth could not, that somehow, somewhere these Three Eternals must have been co-eternal, incomprehensible. And in this Trinity "none is afore or after the other," which recalls ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... packed our traps on our baggage animal, and prepared to go forward under Bracewell's guidance. Old Bob, his hut-keeper and factotum, dropped behind to drive on the baggage-horse at a greater speed than Toby was inclined to move. I heard him talking to the black in a lingo which was utterly incomprehensible ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston
... any pretenses in Nibelheim; and when I first met you, your talk about virtue and morality and self-sacrifice was simply incomprehensible to me. It seemed something quite apart from life. But now I've come to perceive that this is what makes possible the system under ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... loved my father, had urged me to tell my tale, hoping that I would explain this act and give him some opportunity to indulge in a doubt. And I had failed to respond to the hint he had given me. The act itself must appear so sinister and the impulse which drove me to it so incomprehensible, without the heart-rending explanation I dare not subjoin, that I never questioned the wisdom of silence ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... to have such regard for Pythagoras that he was given every opportunity to know the inmost secrets of the mysteries. He said he encompassed them all, save those alone which were incomprehensible. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; for though the former marveled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... "falling over one another in Cape Town." This comforting gem glittered less in our minds as the days sped past, and the prospects of a speedy liberation receded correspondingly. The delay was to us incomprehensible. We fell back on our old theory, that the more protracted the Siege the greater the fame and honour for the men to whose 'prentice hands had been committed the destinies of a free community. It was hard to believe that these armed martinets could play with their responsibilities in such a crisis. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... vast confused shouting, mingled with rapid punctuation of revolver fire. As they came into full view of the middle portion of the street, they saw it occupied by the entire population of Heart's Desire, all apparently gone mad with some incomprehensible emotion. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... meets us everywhere, and I prefer to encounter it in the world of physical phenomena before reaching that of living actions. It is only the name for the incomprehensible cause of certain changes known to our consciousness, and assumed to be outside of it. For me it is the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... angels were acquainted with the mystery of the Incarnation: and yet they put this question, being desirous that Christ should give them more perfect knowledge of the details of this mystery, which are incomprehensible to any created intellect. Thus Maximus [*Maximus of Constantinople] says that "there can be no question that the angels knew that the Incarnation was to take place. But it was not given to them to trace the manner ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... on earth were these revelations which Barthorpe hinted at—these unpleasant truths which would so wound and hurt Peggie Wynne? Could it be possible that there really was some mystery about that will of which only Barthorpe knew the secret? It was incomprehensible to Mr. Halfpenny that any man could be so cool, so apparently cocksure about matters as Barthorpe was unless he felt absolutely certain of his own case. What that case could be, Mr. Halfpenny could not imagine—the only thing really certain ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... I have done something more than has been accomplished by my predecessors, or contemporaries, with the significant language under consideration. I have written a purely flash song, of which the great and peculiar merit consists in its being utterly incomprehensible to the uninformed understanding, while its meaning must be perfectly clear and perspicuous to the practised patterer of Romany, or Pedlar's French. I have, moreover, been the first to introduce and naturalize amongst us a measure ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... utterly overcome by the terrible excitement and mental strain through which he had passed. M. Dantes forced him to swallow a glass of wine that partially restored him; then, turning to M. Lamartine, who had been an astonished spectator of this strange and to him incomprehensible ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... he remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a "poor creature" grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... look for high compliments from you and Charlotte on this very sage instance of my unfathomable, incomprehensible wisdom. Talking of Charlotte, I must tell her that I have, to the best of my power, paid her a poetic compliment, now completed. The air is admirable: true old Highland. It was the tune of a Gaelic song, which ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of this, I recollect an incident the mention of which will, I fear, send a cold shudder through any worshipper of "Nubian" nocturnes and incomprehensible "arrangements." On one occasion after leaving the banquet of this Guild I beheld Whistler—"Jimmy" of the snowy tuft, the martyred butterfly of the "peacock room"—to whose impressionable soul the very ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... and said "Women!" under his breath. Mutabile semper! No matter how much you knew about them, they remained incomprehensible. Their whims passed explanation. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Flora, "it looks as if you had been acquiring some penetration; you were not so explicit the last time you insisted on thanking me. Who can have been teaching you? It seems, however, that I'm still incomprehensible." ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... the time will suffer his description, I'll give it you. He is one, the author calls him Carlo Buffone, an impudent common jester, a violent railer, and an incomprehensible epicure; one whose company is desired of all men, but beloved of none; he will sooner lose his soul than a jest, and profane even the most holy things, to excite laughter: no honourable or reverend personage ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... then, who has learned these things, and known all the angels and their causes, is rendered invisible and incomprehensible to the angels and powers, even as Caulacau also was. And as the Son was unknown to all, so must they also be known by no one; but while they know all and pass through all, they themselves remain invisible and unknown to all; for "Do ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... anecdotes, as I began them, by repeating that animals communicate their impressions, and the feelings that move them, by various modulations of their inarticulate cries, which are incomprehensible to us unless we have succeeded by attentive observation in connecting them with the acts that follow or precede them. We have also seen that the articulation of a few words learned by parrots aids us greatly in learning the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... magistrate came to the flight of Mme. Acquet and her sojourn with the Vanniers and Langelley, and it was necessary without divulging Licquet's proceedings to tell of her arrest, he became altogether incomprehensible. He must have thought himself lucky in not having before him, on the prisoners' bench, a man bold enough to show up the odious subterfuges that had been used in order to entrap the conspirators and obtain their confessions; there is no doubt that such a revelation would have gained for the ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... I thrust the knife upward; the big boy uttered a howl, and ran, still howling. I looked for blood, but there was none visible; I came to the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. I spent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which were incomprehensible to the members of my family, and ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... course is incomprehensible to me. You seem to take this matter as a joke. It may be necessary for me to let the law take its course to achieve my purpose. I do not fear your threats. Please call and ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... frequent and unfavorable comment on this state of affairs goes without saying; yet, had she been enabled to see her beloved brother but once a month and her cadet friends at intervals almost as rare, that incomprehensible young damsel would have preferred the Point to any other ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... material-minded. And therefore —excuse the digression, Raja Vikram —he married an old maid, tall, thin, yellow, strictly proper, cold-mannered, a conversationist, and who prided herself upon spirituality. But more wonderful still, after he did marry her, he actually loved her —what an incomprehensible being is man ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... represented by man's attitude to woman she could understand, but that a man who admittedly did not love her and had no other apparent desire than to rid himself of the incubus of a wife as soon as he was wed, should wish to marry her was incomprehensible. That he had already published the banns of her marriage left her gasping at his audacity. Strange how her thoughts leapt all the events of the morning: the wild rush to escape, the struggle with the hideously masked man, and all that went before or followed, ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... an artiste. England in fair competition against the world! We looked for these gems of art in the Crystal Hall—but found them only in the catalogue! We asked where they were, and the nymph Echo answered "where!" If there be any unworthy motive for this, to us, incomprehensible exclusion of native art, let such be dissipated by the breath of public opinion. But we would fain persuade ourselves that there must be some misapprehension. The works of a lady—patronized by the Queen, to be excluded from an Exhibition open to the people of all nations—we cannot comprehend ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... his antagonist. Now, instead of terror and self-abasement, he met scorn—the cold contempt of a being rarefied, and raised above him by centuries of gentler thought and living. When he laid his paws on her shoulders he felt that he held there a pale, soft shell empty of her incomprehensible spirit, which at his ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... coming and ahead of him rolled the sinister-looking cloud on our left. Then happened the strangest thing! The line trembled from one end to the other, as the Algerian troops immediately on our left, jumped out of their trenches, falling as they ran. The whole thing seemed absolutely incomprehensible—until I got a whiff of the gas. They ran like men possessed, gasping, choking, blinded and dropping with suffocation. They could hardly be blamed. It was a new device in warfare and thoroughly illustrative of the Prussian idea of ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... of this fact could only be produced from the engineer's own lips, and they must wait for that till speech returned. Rubbing had re-established the circulation of the blood. Cyrus Harding moved his arm again, then his head, and a few incomprehensible words escaped him. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... the many. After weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build a scaffold on which to stand. It seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the love for the old place was stronger than that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... each new day, that the enemy may have so perfected their systems of rays that they will be able to detect us and destroy us, even in our underground and heavily shielded retreats, by means of forces even more incomprehensible than those ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... of a queer and almost incomprehensible stab at the heart. She answered without hesitation or change of ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... aristocrats cannot understand that a man should take an interest in any one, or any thing, but himself," replied Menou, half laughing, half in earnest. "It is incomprehensible to your stiff, proud, republican egotism, which makes you look down upon us Creoles, and upon all the rest of the world, as beings of an inferior order. We, on the other hand, take care of ourselves, but we also ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... humour. If there were ought to draw a judgment upon a virtuous and honourable household like my lord's, renounce me if I think not it were this piping, whining, childish trick of poetry, that came among us with Master Walter Wittypate here and his comrades, twisting into all manner of uncouth and incomprehensible forms of speech, the honest plain English phrase which God gave us to express ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... extended experience and intimate acquaintance with the use of arms had fully impressed him with its importance, and no man ever lived whose opinions upon this subject should carry greater weight. As incomprehensible as it may appear to persons accustomed to the use of fire-arms, recruits are very prone, before they have been drilled at target practice with ball cartridges, to place the ball below the powder in the ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... declaration is no less astonishing than incomprehensible. We have waited upon you by your own express invitation on the day appointed by yourself; and we have been received in a manner, I must say, we did not expect, considering this is the first visit of our niece ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the despatches?" However, they could only surmise, and no more. But the dog being turned out of the cabin in compliance with Ramsay's wish, was the most important point of all. They could have got over all the rest, but that was quite incomprehensible; and they all agreed with Coble, when he observed, hitching up his trousers, "Depend upon it, there's a screw ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... anti-human. The term inhuman does not express my meaning, anti-human is better; outre-human, in the sense of beyond, outside, almost grotesque in its attitude towards, would nearly convey it. Everything is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... view the phenomena of psychic development are totally incomprehensible. Everybody knows that the new-born child has no consciousness, no knowledge of itself and the surrounding world. Every parent who has impartially followed the mental development of his children will find it impossible ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... beggars a hearty English cheer was raised. As Captain Martin had expected, the guns on the port side had not been reloaded after the last discharge, and the Good Venture was two or three hundred yards away before the Spaniards recovered from their surprise at what seemed the incomprehensible maneuver of their foes, and awoke to the fact that they had been tricked, and that instead of a ship crowded with beggars of the sea their supposed assailant had been an English trader that was ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... was in danger, away went Peter, very sad about me, but even more distressed lest he should forget what he was sent for. He kept repeating the words over and over as he went, till they became by mere repetition something perfectly incomprehensible, so that when he reached Melazzo nobody could make head or tail of his message. Group after group gathered about and interrogated him, and at last, by means of pantomime, discovered that his master was very ill. Signs were made to inquire if bleeding was required, or if it ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... another. It is their tremendous distance from us that makes this motion inappreciable. The sun seems far away from us, but the nearest star is 200,000 times as far away from us as is the sun. Expressed in miles, the figure is so huge as to be incomprehensible. A special unit has, therefore, been invented—a unit represented by the distance traversed by light in one year. In one second, light travels over 186,000 miles. In 8-1/3 minutes, light reaches us from the ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... Jesus Christ and His mother. For Catholic children this relationship is not a thing far off, but the faith which teaches them of God Incarnate bids them also understand that He is their own "God who gives joy to their youth"—and that His mother is also theirs. There are many incomprehensible things in which children are taught to affirm their belief, and the acts of faith in which they recite these truths are far beyond their understanding. But they can and do understand if we take pains to teach them that they are loved by Our Lord ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity,—which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime,—would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect: it was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the main condition ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with incomprehensible swiftness, at the same time arranging the fire so that it rapidly burned down to a firm, strong, level bed of coals, and by the time the bed of coals were ready, the meat was prepared in thick steaks to broil ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... produces certain unobserved phenomena of activity, penetration, and vision. In our love of the marvelous, a passion begotten of our pride, we have translated these effects into poetical inventions, because we did not understand them. It is so convenient to deify the incomprehensible! ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... crash or sinister rumors are heard or anticipated; alarm descends from high places, spreads through the army and echoes along the lines of the lowest ranks. In 1815, the soldier has full confidence in himself and in Napoleon; "but he is moody, distrustful of his other leaders.... Every march incomprehensible to him makes him uneasy and he thinks himself betrayed."[3368] At Waterloo, dragoons that pass him with their swords drawn and old corporals shout to the Emperor that Soult and Vandamme, who are at this moment about going into battle, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss and beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as she stooped to see this strange, incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the rubber caps. At her merest touch it crumbled ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... that Jew for having taught him the art of irritating his commercial antagonist and leading him to forget his own thoughts in his impatience to suggest those over which his tormentor was stuttering. No affair had ever needed the assistance of deafness, impediments of speech, and all the incomprehensible circumlocutions with which Grandet enveloped his ideas, as much as the affair now in hand. In the first place, he did not mean to shoulder the responsibility of his own scheme; in the next, he was determined ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... so much Glory and Perfection, who is the Source of Being, the Fountain of all that Existence which we and his whole Creation derive from him. Let us therefore with the utmost Humility acknowledge, that as some Being must necessarily have existed from Eternity, so this Being does exist after an incomprehensible manner, since it is impossible for a Being to have existed from Eternity after our Manner or Notions of Existence. Revelation confirms these natural Dictates of Reason in the Accounts which it gives us of the Divine Existence, where ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Picot's name did you arrive at all this knowledge, Mademoiselle?" Bigot began to see that there was nothing for it but to comply with every caprice of this incomprehensible girl if he ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... those midnight travellers, listening to that incomprehensible sound? Have they struck against a rower? Are they about to be precipitated on the roofs? Do you hear it? It is like the sound ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... big, quiet, vital man hadn't any limits, except those of the globe itself. A tall, fair man with a large head, decided features, chilly gray eyes, and an uncompromising mouth adorned with a short, stiff mustache, his square chin was cleft by an incomprehensible dimple. His wife declared she had married him because of that cleft; it gave her an object in life to find out what ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... that neither I nor the regiment of Hussars of Conflans were at Moscow. We were left behind on the lines of communication at Borodino. How the Emperor could have advanced without us is incomprehensible to me, and, indeed, it was only then that I understood that his judgment was weakening and that he was no longer the man that he had been. However, a soldier has to obey orders, and so I remained at this village, which was poisoned by the bodies of ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brought out a packet of square envelopes addressed to him in a faded, angular hand. They were all that remained now of his youth, of the past. Not a ghost, not a remembered fragrance nor accent, rose from the delicate paper. They had been the property of a man dead twelve years ago, slain by incomprehensible mischance; and the man in the contracted cabin, vibrating from the elemental and violent forces without, forebore to open them. He burned the packet to a ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the sun sets it goes down behind a precipice so far off that he could not walk to it, but he does not know how it gets back to the east. Rain comes from the clouds, but he does not know how it got there except that thunder and lightning bring it. These things are incomprehensible to him and he has apparently invented no stories concerning them. While thunder and lightning are good because they bring rain, yet if they are exceedingly violent he becomes afraid and tries to stop them by burning deer's bones, which, ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... mountain of prejudices which distort and deprave it, in spite of all the ordure through which it has been dragged, love, eternal and fatal love, is none the less a celestial law as powerful and as incomprehensible as that which suspends ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... upon Haeckel's carbon-hypothesis, to which the latter still clings, and says: "That from the properties of carbon, combined with the properties of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc., in certain proportions albumen should result, is a process which in its essence is as incomprehensible as that a living cell should arise from a certain organization of different albumina." Then the speaker is inevitably led to speak of the doctrine of Descent ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... ready-baked, the reverse of Lessing's principle. What we look for above all are conclusions. This clearness of the "ready-made" is a superficial clearness—physical, outward, solar clearness, so to speak, but in the absence of a sense for origin and genesis it is the clearness of the incomprehensible, the clearness of opacity, the clearness of the obscure. We are always trifling on the surface. Our temper is formal—that is to say, frivolous and material, or rather artistic and not philosophical. For what it seeks is the figure, the fashion and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... boy, I'm absolved from any allegiance to you," he muttered, as he walked smartly down the garden walk towards the gate; "so if I do a good deal more than your bidding you mustn't be surprised. But your sudden burst of anger is incomprehensible. However, that's not my ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... across the street. A woman, leaning out of a window, wanted to know what the Artist was doing. I explained our interest in the arch. Had there been a gate in her grandmother's time? Why, when so much of a former age had disappeared, did this half-arch remain? The woman was puzzled. It was incomprehensible that anyone should be interested in the arch, which had always been there. I thought I would try ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... dissolution of Christianity a great part of antiquity has become incomprehensible to us, for instance, the entire religious basis of life. On this account an imitation of antiquity is a false tendency . the betrayers or the betrayed are the philologists who still think of such a thing. We live in a period when many different conceptions of life are to be found: hence ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... militant and triumphant, is, to my mind, infinitely nobler and more religious than all paraphernalia, genuflexions, and man-millinery. How any Protestant, however "high" in his tendencies, can feel otherwise is incomprehensible to me. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... such moods about a little woman like Mathilde; but the important fact remains that for some twenty years Heine was Mathilde's faithful husband, and that the commonplace, pretty, ignorant, pleasure-loving, bourgeoise Mathilde was good and faithful to a crippled, incomprehensible mate. Perhaps, after all, the wonder in this marriage is even more on the side of Mathilde than of Heine. Think what such a woman must have had to forego, to suffer, to "put up with," with such a man—a man, remember, whose real significance must have been ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... opening we discovered a dim trail which soon led us into a natural park of level ground hidden among the foothills. Here we found Dave who alone had caught and tied down both the calves and was preparing to start a fire to heat the branding irons. What he had done seemed like magic and was entirely incomprehensible to an inexperienced tenderfoot. ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... when the door closed behind her, and, taking up Theodore Parker's "Discourses," began to read. Poor, famishing soul! what chaff she eagerly devoured! In her anxious haste she paused not to perceive that the attempted refutations of Christianity contained objections more gross and incomprehensible than the doctrine assailed. Long before she had arrived at the conclusion that ethical and theological truth must be firmly established on psychological foundations, hence she plunged into metaphysics, studying treatise after ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... and history, as the repeating of names that were hard to pronounce, and lists of products and populations and heights and lengths, and as lists and dates—oh! and boredom indescribable. He thought of religion as the recital of more or less incomprehensible words that were hard to remember, and of the Divinity as of a limitless Being having the nature of a schoolmaster and making infinite rules, known and unknown rules, that were always ruthlessly enforced, and with an infinite capacity for punishment and, most horrible ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... infested his body were the forerunners of the human race. This sort of stuff, however, could only appeal to the illiterate; for intellectual and educated persons something more was required. And so it came about that a system, based originally upon the quite incomprehensible Book of Changes, generally regarded as the oldest portion of the Confucian Canon, was gradually elaborated and brought to a finite state during the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era. According to this system, there was a time, almost beyond the reach of expression ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... very sad and grave, and Meg, suddenly opening her eyes, found him regarding her with this incomprehensible expression. ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once felt this while men did not, and so women once ruled the world. But men are awakening from their mental slumber, and are becoming incomprehensible. Lord Reggie is an instance of what I mean. The average person finds him exquisitely difficult to comprehend. He fascinates by being sedulously unexpected. Listen to his anthem. He is beginning to play it. How unexpected it is. It always does what the ear wants, and all modern music does ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... health, with "success lying easily upon him"—said one; "at the very summit of his career," said another—and all agreed it was "queer," "strange,"—unless, they argued, he was really ill. Even the most acute students of human affairs among his friends wondered. It seemed incomprehensible that any man should want to give up before he was, for some reason, compelled to do so. A man should go on until he "dropped ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... invalid, unable to travel, lingered at Luckenough. Regularly he received his pay; twice he received an extension of leave of absence; and all through the instrumentality of—Thorg. Yet all this filled Edith with the greatest uneasiness and foreboding—ungrateful, incomprehensible, yet impossible ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... I stood wonderingly staring at the white face of the creature. It was really marvelous, and quite incomprehensible; and a more strange and weird-looking ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... obedient servants, all his subjects were every instant despising his laws, defeating his will and insulting his person? Let ecclesiastics then acknowledge, that their God is an assemblage of incompatible qualities, as incomprehensible to their understanding as to mine. No: they say, in reply to these difficulties, that wisdom and justice in God, are qualities so much above or so unlike those qualities in us, that they bear no relation or affinity towards human wisdom ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... "Au Printemps" translated literally meant "in the springtime," and "in the springtime at one o'clock" was mere gibberish, incomprehensible. There is in Paris a department store calling itself "Au Printemps"; but surely no one was suggesting to Lanyard in New York a rendezvous ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... have their letters read than their thoughts. For this superfeminine discretion Alan repaid her by—being Alan. There could have been no completer reward. He was the key to the meaning of life, the justification of what must have seemed as incomprehensible as it was odious, had it not all-sufficingly ended in himself. He was a perfect son, and Mrs. Quentin had ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... with every idea that I can form to myself of his situation, his present or future views, his interest, or his personal feelings. I by no means think the circumstance which you mention sufficient to afford a clue for it; and the more I reflect upon it, the more incomprehensible ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... hardly begun to grow before it was plucked hastily up by the roots again. The plantations of Mary's reign, and the still larger operations carried on in that of her sister, awakened a deep-seated feeling of distrust, a rooted belief in the law as a mysterious and incomprehensible instrument invented solely for the perpetration of injustice, a belief which is certainly not wholly extinguished even ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... length; 'I hear no moans now over your lost fortunes. It is the outside world that is pitying you. "Those poor girls," I hear on all sides, "after the very marked way in which old Miss Dane told everybody they would be heiresses at her death. It is most incomprehensible."' ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... ejaculated Willis, in consternation. "And why, I wonder? Most incomprehensible affair. Can she be a woman of whims—with eyes like those? Never. Impossible. And yet what else ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... merely lines before were now deep grooves. Yet the fierce, baffled look that had been in his eyes since the escape was entirely gone. He smiled at the group most tenderly, and his moustache wiggled in a most incomprehensible fashion. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... imitator of Banneker developed a daily half-column of self-improvement and inspiration upon moral topics, achieving his effects by capitalizing all the words which otherwise would have been too feeble or banal to attract notice, thereby giving an air of sublimated importance to the mildly incomprehensible. Nine tenths of The Patriot's editorial readers believed that they were following a great philosopher along the path of the eternal profundities. To give a touch of science, an amateur astronomer wrote stirring imaginative ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in that part where a deadly experience told him that the heart was to be found, and looked up to Heaven, all with a change of expression and momentary gravity quite incomprehensible to men ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... a wanderer in the realms of imagination, alias, a novel-writer, and in this capacity she continued to make the public stare for a series of years. We say stare, for we can find no more appropriate word for expressing the feelings which her fictions are calculated to excite. With plots of almost incomprehensible absurdity, they combine a style more inflated than any balloon in which Madame Blanchard ever sailed through the regions of air—a language, or rather jargon, composed of the pickings of nearly every idiom that ever did live, or is at present in existence, and sentiments which would be often of a ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... know, my children, of my attachment to the family of Mediana. You can judge, then, of the grief which this news has given me—news the more incomprehensible, since one neither knows by whom, or for what reason such a crime should be committed. Alas, my children! I lose a powerful protector in the Countess de Mediana; and in me the heart of the old and faithful servant ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... as to life itself, they are, in man, not on any separate tenure, not primarily, but derivatively, and only in so far as God enters into the nature of man; that 'we live and move' only so far and so long as the incomprehensible union takes place between the human spirit and the fontal abyss of the divine. In short, here, and here only, is found the outermost expansion, the centrifugal, of the TO catholic, united with the innermost centripetal of the personal consciousness. Had, therefore, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... she was commanded and stood there with some irrepressible and incomprehensible mischief gleaming out from under her long eye-lashes and from the corners of ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... was incomprehensible. Either side was championed here by millions living among us who were of European birth. Their contradictory accusations threw our thought into disarray, and in the first chaotic days we could see no clear issue that affected ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... all the rest is a deceitful exaggeration. It must be observed that the proclamations which Bonaparte regarded as calculated to dazzle an ever too credulous public were amplifications often ridiculous and incomprehensible upon the spot, and which only excited the laughter of men of common sense. In all Bonaparte's correspondence there is an endeavour to disguise his reverses, and impose on the public, and even on his own generals. For example, he wrote to General Dugua, commandant of Cairo, on the 15th of February, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... causes which Gibbon has assigned for the rapidity with which Christianity spread over the world, while Judaism scarcely ever acquired a proselyte, operated more powerfully than this feeling. God, the uncreated, the incomprehensible, the invisible, attracted few worshippers. A philosopher might admire so noble a conception; but the crowd turned away in disgust from words which presented no image to their minds. It was before Deity embodied in a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the mixture he had prepared for her, she took it eagerly, and Rags breathed a sigh of satisfaction. Then he ate some of the bread and ham himself and swallowed half the whiskey, and stretched out beside the child and fanned her while she slept. It was something strangely incomprehensible to Rags that he should feel so keen a satisfaction in doing even this little for her, but he gave up wondering, and forgot everything else in watching the strange beauty of the sleeping baby and in the odd feeling of responsibility and ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... knees? Was it not rather the religious grandeur of the hymns and of the prayer: the exalted and rational views of the Divine Nature, the union of a whole people in the adoration of the one Great, Incomprehensible, Almighty, Everlasting Creator? ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... her as "good material." It sent its angels, those voluntary servants of the state, the acquaintances who call themselves friends. These at first approved of her, always misunderstood her, and at length despised her. They misunderstood her, because a person truly inarticulate was incomprehensible to them. Her naivete they mistook for insolence, her dreaminess for disrespect. They confused her memory with her understanding. They gave her books to read, brought her to lectures, sat her at the theatre, took her to hear sermons, prayed with her and drank ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... shook me, and I ceased playing. An uncomfortable sensation came over me, as of some invisible presence being near me and approaching softly, slowly, yet always more closely; and I hurriedly rose from my seat, shut the organ, and prepared to leave the chapel, overcome by a strange incomprehensible terror. I was glad when I found myself safely outside the door, and I rushed into the hall as though I were being pursued; yet the oddest part of my feeling was, that whoever thus pursued me, did so out of love, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... sun upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incomprehensible existence of these transcendental heavens because they are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create, when we merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, and from what, could we create these same spiritual worlds? ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... but the same did not hold good with regard to the adulterer. At the time of Tacitus, the gens was still in bloom among the Germans. He, to whom, living under the advanced Roman conditions, the old gentile constitution, together with its principles, was bound to seem strange and incomprehensible, narrates with astonishment that, with the Germans, the mother's brother, considered his nephew as an own son; aye, some looked upon the bond of consanguinity between the uncle on the mother's side and his nephew as more sacred and closer ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... it." That would sound silly and incomprehensible, like an impromptu lecture on the sins of strong drink. His eyes wandered over her, resting on one white arm that ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... is attached laterally to the edges of the signet of the cricoid which it pulls with an incomprehensible power against the posterior wall of the hypopharynx, thus closing the mouth of the esophagus. Its other attachment is in the median posterior raphe. Between these circular fibers (the cricopharyngeal muscle) and the oblique fibers of the inferior ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... poor demoniac Wandering about the fields, and uttering His unintelligible blasphemies Among the common people, who receive As prophecies the words they comprehend not! Deluded folk! The incomprehensible Alone excites their wonder. There is none So visionary, or so void of sense, But he will find ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... true. The great roots of giant trees, denuded by storm and flood, lie exposed to view; and deep vistas are given of shadowy glade and swift-running mountain torrent. All is somber, terrible, and tells of forces that tossed these mountain-tops like bowls, and of a Power immense, immeasurable, incomprehensible, eternal in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard |
