"Inscrutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and added, "All the same, Brother Gerard, you will have to see to it that you are as modest as you are free in your discourse. It may well be, that in order to be able to know us well, that sagaciously clever and inscrutable minded prince pretends not to hear us, just to prove our mettle. Doubtless he knows that it belongs to that perfection which we profess to fulfil, that lesson of our Lord which tells us, 'In your patience ye shall possess your souls,' ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... not according to the inscrutable wisdom of Providence that she should ever be restored to her father's house. Among the victims of the great earthquake which destroyed Port Royal a few days after the date of her letter, was this unfortunate ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... I said, casting aside all doubt and fear, and yielding myself wholly to the spell of her inscrutable eyes and wooing lips. 'You are mine, and I am yours, and let us be happy while ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... occurred I am quite sure that it is of a cheerful nature, as there is a telltale light in Archie's eyes that seems to say when they meet mine: "I have been sworn to secrecy, find out if you can!" Lydia's face is inscrutable; but her color is a little brighter than usual and she seems to avoid meeting my gaze, and drops her eyelids in a way that she has when the sun is bright. Then, she is beside me and consequently I cannot see her face as I can Archie's. Our ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... bears a principal part in the intrigue, like the Blifil of Tom Jones is so constantly illuminated by the lightnings of the ironical mode of presentation as always to seem unreal in himself and seriously to imperil the reality of the story. And, lastly, there are the chivalrous Percy Waring and the inscrutable Mrs. Lovell, two gentle ghosts whose proper place is the shadow-land of the American novel. But when all these are removed (and for the judicious reader their removal is far from difficult) a treasure of reality remains. What an intensity of life it is that hurries and throbs and burns ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... may be inscrutable, but he is no more puzzling than the average American. We admit that we are hard, keen, practical, —the adjectives that every casual European applies to us,—and yet any book-store window or railway news-stand will show that we prefer sentimental ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and appears anxious. Even to the author the ways of the women in his works are inscrutable; so upon this occasion. She is pale, but I cannot say why. Can it be that she has an intuitive knowledge that to-night may decide her whole future life? Who can tell? Woman's intuitions are great, and there be those who say they are unerringly ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... idly shifted a piece of paper over the notes on his blotting-pad. His face was inscrutable. She could not tell whether her statement had startled him or not. For all the change in his expression she might have merely remarked that the weather was fine. Had it been any one else he would have said that before the day was out he expected a dozen or more people ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... and greeted the official. Still the Chinese Minister regarded her gravely with his inscrutable Oriental eyes that seemed to look her through and through. He seemed always about to ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... fishermen, who followed the migratory herring; from fishing-ground to fishing-ground, were in another category. Their contribution, when on the Scottish coast, figured out at a man per buss, but as they were for some inscrutable reason called upon to pay similar tribute on other parts of the coast, they cannot be said to have escaped any too lightly. Neither did the four hundred fishing-boats composing the Isle of Man fleet. Their crews were obliged to surrender one man in every ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... tantalising and inscrutable a maid? And as she had treated the King and his chief favourite, she treated all her other playfellows. The Earl of Arlington, a grave, dignified Lord of the Bedchamber, so far unbended as to make love to the little witch, who stood so well in the favour ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... threshold of his chamber. More silent than ever, more benignly silent, did the hush about him seem to Dion; more profound were his peace and serenity. He and the child had surely withdrawn a little farther from all that was not intended, but that, for some inscrutable reason, had come to be. His winged sandals had carried him still farther away. As Dion looked at him he seemed ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... tree. He was like a caricature. In the doorway Maria was encouraging him rather jeeringly, whilst she winked at me. Marco was stifling his hysterical amusement in his mother's apron, and prancing with glee. Paolo and Giovanni stood by the fallen tree, very grave and unmoved, inscrutable, abstract. Then the youth came away to the doorway, with a flush mounting on his face and a grimace distorting its youngness. Only Paolo, unmoved and detached, stood by the tree with unchanging, abstract face, very strange, his ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... but her expression was curiously intent. It was as though she were gathering together her forces, concentrating them towards some definite purpose, veiled in the inscrutable depths of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... the end of all things; the great lapses of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it was in a slumber ill-exchanged for all the sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father's life was comparatively a dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... instant Delcasse's face was composed, and his eyes, behind their immense glasses, as inscrutable as ever. The President, so ingenuous and child-like, must never suspect ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Colwyn's attention and stimulated his intellectual curiosity. The human face is usually an index to the owner's character, but this girl's face was a mask which revealed nothing. The features might have been marble for anything they displayed, as she stood by the bedside regarding with grave inscrutable eyes the group of men in the doorway. There was something pathetic in the contrast between her grace and beauty and stillness and the uncouth gestures and meaningless stare of the old woman in the ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... guessing what the world, or glories, or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn away from others, by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves and inscrutable to man's understanding. Even when I was a very young boy at school, instead of running about on holidays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them and walk into the fields, either alone with a book, ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... the Spanish type, in which they moved loosely. Her hair, which she had always worn with a certain Greek simplicity, was parted at one side. Yet her face, with its regularity of feature, and small, thin, red-lipped mouth, was quite unchanged; and her velvety brown eyes were as beautiful and inscrutable as ever. ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... clamorous, ubiquitous, its objects known to every urchin on the streets, but the Trust was silent, its ways inscrutable, the public saw only results. It worked on in the dark, calm, disciplined, irresistible. Abruptly Dyke received the impression of the multitudinous ramifications of the colossus. Under his feet the ground seemed mined; down there below him in the dark the huge tentacles went silently twisting ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... in pity for Hanaud's misconception, "I see that you are not in the habit of attending seances. It would never do for a spirit to admit that it did not know. At once its authority would be gone, and with it Mlle. Celie's as well. But on the other hand, for inscrutable reasons the spirit might not ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... "Colonization Society may be a part of the grand system of the Ruler of the Universe, to provide for the transfer of negroes to their mother country. Their introduction into this land may have been one of the inscrutable ways of Providence to confer blessings upon that race—it may have been decreed that they shall be the means of conveying to the minds of their benighted countrymen, the blessing of religious and civil liberty. But I fear there is little ground to believe the means have ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... a funny sight to him. But Lola's beautiful black eyes blazed across at him with a light that none had ever seen before in their inscrutable depths. ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... from it a morocco case, evidently a miniature. She returned to her chair and seated herself again, swaying her body gently to and fro as if confirming some difficult resolution, but with the same inscrutable expression upon her face. Still holding the case in ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... into which that corner jutted far enough for them. They have just landed, or they are about to sail again, and they might be standing on the shore eyeing the town beyond, in which the luck of ships is cast by strangers they never see, but who are inimical to them, and whose ways are inscrutable. ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... dropped before that glance. There was an inscrutable look upon her face, but it was a look that would have told another woman that Mrs. Romaine was disappointed by the news which she had just heard. Caspar Brooke, being ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... wonder &c. 870; see through a glass darkly &c. (ignorance) 491. not understand one another; play at cross purposes &c. (misinterpret) 523. Adj. unintelligible, unaccountable, undecipherable, undiscoverable, unknowable, unfathomable; incognizable[obs3], inexplicable, inscrutable; inapprehensible[obs3], incomprehensible; insolvable[obs3], insoluble; impenetrable. illegible, as Greek to one, unexplained, paradoxical; enigmatic, enigmatical, puzzling (secret) 533; indecipherable. obscure, dark, muddy, clear as mud, seen through a mist, dim, nebulous, shrouded in mystery; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... all, what the theist needs is, not an eternal energy, but a personality. An inscrutable existence will not do. There is no dispute that something exists. There is no quarrel over mere existence. It is with the nature of what exists and the mode of its operation that the issue arises. The theist needs a special kind of energy, a special form of existence, a special kind ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... colored thoughts and the result was puzzling both to teacher and student. With the other teachers she had little commerce. They were in no sense her sort of folk. Miss Smith represented the older New England of her parents—honest, inscrutable, determined, with a conscience which she worshipped, and utterly unselfish. She appealed to Miss Taylor's ruddier and daintier vision but dimly and distantly as some memory of the past. The other teachers were indistinct personalities, always very busy ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the Paymaster presently in tones of sepulchral gloom, "the neophyte of AESCULAPIUS, to whose care the inscrutable wisdom of Providence has entrusted our lives, is being excruciatingly funny. Number One says it is belated remorse for the gallant servants of His Majesty whom he has consigned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... fiercest brutes; the other, as far removed, by excellence, from the majority of mankind, and as near the angels and their ineffable joy as the dull earth will let him. Say what we will, the gifts of Heaven are inscrutable as mysterious, and education gives no clue to them. The business of the hour went on, and my attention was soon wholly taken up in the development of the gigantic guilt of the wretched culprit before me. I could not have conceived of such atrocity as I heard brought home ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... gloom of evening settled in upon it. Mhtoon Pah moved about looking at his goods, and touching them with careful hands. He hovered over an ivory lady carrying an umbrella, and looked long at a white marble Buddha, who returned his look with an equally inscrutable regard. The Buddha sat cross-legged, thinking for ever and ever about eternity, and Mhtoon Pah moved round in red velvet toe-slippers, pattering lightly as he went, for in spite of his bulk Mhtoon Pah had an almost soundless ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... the equity and wisdom of the measure. Whatever, therefore, may be the fate of its authors, I have no fear that it will produce to this country every blessing of commerce and revenue; and by extending a generous and humane government over those millions whom the inscrutable dispensations of Providence have placed under us, in the remotest regions of the earth, it will consecrate the name of England among the noblest of the nations." While this bill was pending in the commons, the East India Company and the city of London presented strong petitions against ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... with that strange, inscrutable look upon her face, and that battle light in her eyes which we were all learning to know. She was sitting upon her horse; for though a number of animals had been taken across in the night, no horse of hers had been so conducted, and we had led the creature with its ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... conquered where self-assertion might have provoked opposition, and even Mrs. Peyton felt herself impelled to come forward with an outstretched hand scarcely less frank than her husband's. Then Clarence lifted his eyes. He saw before him the woman to whom his childish heart had gone out with the inscrutable longing and adoration of a motherless, homeless, companionless boy; the woman who had absorbed the love of his playmate without sharing it with him; who had showered her protecting and maternal caresses on Susy, a waif like himself, yet had not only left his heart ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... permanent yoke of prosperity. It lay round his thick brown neck with the low clean line of his blue cotton smock, and he carried it without offensive consciousness, looking up and down by no means in search of customers, rather in the exercise of the opaque, inscrutable philosophy tied up in ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... contradictions, some tending to drift away in good, others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was less and more than human—capable of falling below the scale of the tiger, or of rising above that of man. Such chaotic souls exist. There was something inscrutable in that face. Its secret reached the abstract. You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is the calculation, and the after-taste which is the zero. In his impassibility, which was perhaps only on the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... to the supernatural), was this mysterious being liable to touch? Was he not of some impassive nature, inaudible, invisible, impalpable? Many of his escapes, if truly reported, seemed to argue as much. If, then, connected with the spiritual world, was it with the good or the evil in that inscrutable region? But, then, the bloodshed, the torn dresses, the marks of deadly struggle, which remained behind in some of those cases where mysterious disappearances had occurred,—these seemed undeniable arguments of murder, foul and treacherous murder. Every attempt, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... promising. At the time, however, I did not know what an untrustworthy humbug Schomberg was. The "boy" might have been forty or a hundred and forty for all you could tell—one of those Chinamen of the death's-head type of face and completely inscrutable. Before the end of the third day he had revealed himself as a confirmed opium-smoker, a gambler, a most audacious thief, and a first-class sprinter. When he departed at the top of his speed with thirty-two golden sovereigns ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... has made to triumph over death: if Emily removes the veil she becomes, with her lack of training, her useless equipment, a helpless beggar; if she does not remove it, if she never sees her mother's face, she will be tormented by memory, bound forever, as she was in life, to a blank and inscrutable shawl. Is it forgiveness—or justice, mercy ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Hermiston pew. For a moment, they were riveted. Next she had plucked her gaze home again like a tame bird who should have meditated flight. Possibilities crowded on her; she hung over the future and grew dizzy; the image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with the inscrutable half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a chasm. "I wonder, will I have met my fate?" she ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the pure collegiate-gothic style of the low hall that extended north and south three hundred feet in either direction from the base of the great tower; he would note the artistry of the iron-braced, oaken doors, flanked at the lintels by inscrutable faces of carven stone, of the windows with their diamonded panes of milky glass peeping through a wilderness of encroaching vines. Nor would this be all. Had he ever viewed the quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge, he might be able to infer that here, on this ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous ascendancy which the inscrutable scrivener had over me, and from which ascendancy, for all my chafing, I could not completely escape, I slowly went down stairs and out into the street, and while walking round the block, considered what I ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... appearance never altered for the better—a human derelict, battered and wrecked, they had found him; a human derelict, battered and wrecked, he would remain until death claimed him. Though still in his thirties, Alexis Paulvitch could easily have passed for eighty. Inscrutable Nature had demanded of the accomplice a greater penalty than his ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lives and teachings of both men must have led them to look with indifference upon such an end. For Confucius in his teaching treated only of man's life on earth, and seems to have had no ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if he had any ideas he preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a moralist he prescribed the duties of the king and of the father, and advocated the cultivation by the individual man of that rest or apathy of mind which resembles so much the disposition aimed at by the Greek ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... inscrutable smile. Then he whispered something into the judge's ear that made the old man wrinkle from his neck up ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... for some inscrutable reason, vouchsafe me the years of Methuselah, one of the pleasantest recollections that will abide with me to the close of the nine hundredth and sixty-ninth year, will be of that delightful odor of cooking food which regaled our senses as we came back. From the boiling ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... pocket-lamp on him and saw that he was young—about thirty—with damp dark hair and a thin face. He had received a flesh-wound above the eyes, and his forehead was bandaged, but the rest of the face uncovered. As the light fell on him he lifted his eyelids and looked at me: his look was inscrutable. ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... of affectionate reproach in the demeanour of her daughter when she bade her farewell. Whatever might be the consciousness of the mother, she was successful in concealing her impression. Very kind, but calm and inscrutable, Lady Annabel, having given directions for postponing the dinner-hour, embraced her child and entered ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... believe," I asked, "that there is between the silent grave and the silent stars an answer to this problem we have discussed to-night, of the inter-relation between spirit and matter, between soul and soul? To me it seems hopelessly inscrutable, and all effort to elucidate it, like the language of the Son of Maia, 'by night bringeth darkness before the eyes, and in the daytime nought clearer.' I shall as soon expect to wrest her buried secrets from the Sphinx, or to revive the lost mysteries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... they followed a narrow path through a grove of pine trees. The path took an unexpected curve to the right and led them around the side of a grassy embankment under which sat the stone image of the Compassionate God, Jizu. The inscrutable smile of the nation hovered on the lips of the ancient idol, and his compassionate stone eyes looked out upon the green little world around him with a gentle tolerance. Time and tempests had worn away his arms and softened the outlines of his stone countenance. He was indeed ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... which has been made in the last two hundred years, towards solving the same problem. The origin of evil, the ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more comfortable theology, it is probably because we are less logical than they. It is perhaps because we have forgotten or refused to look at some things at which they did ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... the river to push his fortunes. But there was never any sign of such an intention on the part of Will. On the contrary, he had the inn set on a better footing, and hired a couple of servants to assist him in carrying it on; and there he settled down, a kind, talkative, inscrutable young man, six feet three in his stockings, with an iron constitution and a friendly voice. He soon began to take rank in the district as a bit of an oddity: it was not much to be wondered at from the first, for he was always full of notions, and kept calling the plainest commonsense ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there in the darkness. But the prisoners slowly awake; there are some who draw nigh to the threshold, and their radiance is greater than hers. There flows from them a light less material, softer and purer than that of the bold, hard flame which her hand protects. They are the inscrutable powers of goodness and love; and others follow behind, more mysterious still, and more infinite, seeking admission. What shall she do? If, at the time that she took her stand there on the threshold, she had still lacked the courage to learn that she could not exist alone, then will she be ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... its placidity secrets that none can discern. He was always near nowadays, on the fringe of their lives, just beyond the radius of their preoccupations, the silent witness of this strange love affair, in the humble station that Allah, for some inscrutable reason, had decreed ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... enlightened, and this narrowness enlarged, let the magnificent theism of the Psalms, of Job, and of Isaiah testify. Solomon declares "The heaven of heavens cannot contain him, how much less this house that I have builded." Job and the Psalms and Isaiah describe the omniscience, omnipresence, and inscrutable perfections of the Deity in language to which twenty centuries have been able ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... irritation in such troubles which adds a whole armoury of small knife-cuts to intensify the agony of the evil from which we suffer. It is more dreadful to be moaning over our own mistakes than over the inscrutable perversity of an ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... rain. He needed no eyes to see. All he wanted was to know through touch. She was like a piece of palpable darkness. He found her in the darkness, put his arms round her and his hands upon her. She was silent and inscrutable. But he did not want to know anything about her, he only wanted to discover her. And through her clothing, what absolute beauty ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... The inscrutable ways of Chance—Destiny, call it what you will—brought about the greatest catastrophe that had so far obtained in the Guernsey ranks. Major Davey moved his party over an area—at about 11 in the morning of a warm, sunny Sunday—coming in for a spell of shelling extraordinary in intensity. ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... theoretic, and if he sometimes explained matters rather more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far (like some practitioners one has heard of) as to trust to the explanation alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which was, after all, the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a clever man; and this is really the reason why Dr. Sloper had become ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... bent an inscrutable look upon Clarissa and then bidding her remain until his return, hastily left the room. But though he was gone, Clarissa sat gloating upon the mental picture of his manly beauty. He seemed taller than before, for the stoop he had worn in the afternoon ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... God," Dickenson went to work. Indeed, to do him justice, he seems to have been always ready enough to use his burly strength and small wit, trusting to them to carry him through the world wherein his soul was beleaguered by many inscrutable judgments of God and the universal treachery of ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... being so would no longer be of the slightest use to him; but the Duke of Omnium, and Lord de Courcy, and Mr Moffat were all Whigs; Whigs, however, differing altogether in politics from Sir Roger, who belonged to the Manchester school, and whose pretensions, through some of those inscrutable twists in modern politics which are quite unintelligible to the minds of ordinary men outside the circle, were on this occasion secretly favoured by ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... full strength of the nation is duly arrayed and led to victory. We must be patient, as our fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities, we must remember that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who vindicated the insulted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... seemed peopled by tiny folk, living out their timid, inscrutable lives around him. A water-rat, passing bright-eyed upon his lawful occasion, paused on the border of the stream to consider the stranger, and was lost to view. A stagnant pool among some reeds caught the reflection of the sunset ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... significant and impressive about an Indian when he points anywhere. It is as if he says, "There, way beyond, over the ranges, is a place I know, and it is far." The fact was that I looked at the Piute's dark, inscrutable face before I looked ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... the chaos of gloom, and vast nothingness yawned before her: a bottomless abyss—an insatiable throat, swallowing down with greedy thirst all that was left; till where the world had been, with gods and men and all their works, there was only nothingness; hideous, inscrutable and unfathomable. And in it, above it, around it—for what are the dimensions of nothingness?—there reigned the incomprehensible Unity of the Primal One, in calm and pitiless self-concentration, beyond—the Real, nay even beyond the Conceivable—for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rapine, and injustice; and doubtless a devout Spaniard of those days would sing Te Deum for the comfortable exhibition of an auto de fe, in which those who differed from the dogmas of the holy Catholic church were burnt for the glory of GOD. The ways of Providence are inscrutable, and are best viewed by human ignorance in silent humility and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... full of eligible week-enders of both sexes her wish was always gratified. And no one except Betty Gower ever knew that merely to sit looking out on the Gulf from that vantage point afforded her father some inscrutable satisfaction. ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... with his back to the mantel, facing the door, when Nancy entered the room. In the filmy black Mrs. Vandervelde had selected for her, tall and slim, she paused for the fraction of a second and lifted her cool, shining, inscrutable green eyes to his lazy blue ones. Mrs. Vandervelde had prevailed upon her to retain her own fashion of wearing her hair in plaits wound around her head, and the new maid had managed to soften the severity of the style and so heightened its effectiveness. A small string of black ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... nectarine leisurely—she seemed to enjoy it more than all the rest of her dinner. And what could that expression mean on her face? Inscrutable—cynical was it? No—absorbed. As absolutely unconscious of self and others as if she had been alone in the room. What could she be thinking of never to worry ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... hour, with an intensity that it was promptly to lose in the poverty and patchiness of rehearsal; he could see its life reflected, in a way that was sweet to him, in the stillness of the little semi-circle of attentive and inscrutable, of water-proofed and muddy-booted, actors. Miss Violet Grey was the auditor he had most to say to, and he tried on the spot, across the shabby stage, to let her have the soul of her part. Her attitude was graceful, ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... to find the patriarch standing at his side. Silent and dim through the fog, he had come thither with sandaled feet, and now stood with a strange, inscrutable smile on his ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... her competitor as a student and her rival in beauty, Miss May Hutchings. Her animosity was intensified by the fact that, when they entered the Sophomore class together, Miss May had made her acquaintance, had tried to become friends with her, and then, for some inscrutable reason, had drawn coldly away. By dint of working twice as hard as May, Ida had managed to outstrip her, and to begin the Junior year as the first of the class; but all the while she was conscious that her success was due to ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... my dear boy, when I say from the bottom of my heart that I respect every good Catholic and every good Protestant, and that I recognise that each of these forms of faith has been a powerful instrument in the hands of that inscrutable Providence which rules all things. Just as in the course of history one finds that the most far-reaching and admirable effects may proceed from a crime; so in religion, although a creed be founded upon an entirely ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... Hugh caught sight of a cloudy, inscrutable dissatisfaction slightly contracting the eyebrows of the lady. Mr. Arnold, however, seemed not ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... of them they couldn't have said more about it. There were no words for the inscrutable ecstasy ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... whether Thrush had thought of it before that moment. The round glasses were levelled at Mr. Upton with an inscrutable stare of the marine ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... to the design of Nature. Nature is physical. To create for limitless endurance for eternal life. That must be Nature's inscrutable design. ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... that music is an unfathomable mystery, like all half truths has wrought much mischief, and has greatly retarded musical progress in social life. Behind the Divine Art, as behind Religion, lies the inscrutable mystery of Life, and in both there is a Holy of Holies only the consecrated may enter. Before the portals of this are reached there is a broad, fertile field for intellectual activity that all may work to advantage, preparing the way to the ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... mysterious, having chambers built up and down, and communicating with each other in the most unexpected manner, so that the whole interior is a perfect labyrinth of galleries, cells, hiding-places, and rooms on different stages. This is just the sort of tower which seemed fitted for that inscrutable tyrant, Louis XI.; who wrote upon one of the windows, with a diamond, these words: "O la grande Folie!" alluding, it was believed, to what he considered his weakness, in having abandoned ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the souls of the most hardened villains and thereby renders them often instruments of justice upon themselves; so that it seems not virtue only is its own reward, but vice also brings upon itself those torments which it ought to feel. Thus Providence ordereth, with inscrutable wisdom, that every man should feel happiness or misery according as his own demeanour serves. But it is now time that we ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... reports of the different committees which had been appointed by the two Houses of Parliament amply furnished him with evidence for this purpose. Accordingly he read and considered them with attention: but for anything beyond this the season was now past. The Supreme Disposer of All, against whose inscrutable counsels it is vain as well as impious to murmur, did not permit him to enter on the execution of the task which he meditated. It was resolved, therefore, by one of his friends, after much hesitation, and under a very painful responsibility, to make such an attempt as he could ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... which might lie the fierce, wild things of romance that only men have known. It alarmed, even while it exhilarated her. She felt afraid, yet daring. She was beginning to feel the lure of Alaska—the vast, the untamed, the inscrutable, the promising. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... length Juliet, generally silenced, came to be silenced not unwillingly. All the time, their common humanity, each perceiving that the other had suffered, was urging to mutual consolation. And all the time, that mysterious force, inscrutable as creation itself, which draws the individual man and woman together, was mightily at work between them—a force which, terrible as is the array of its attendant shadows, will at length appear to have been one of the most ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... disasters, and difficulties, which, following close upon each other, disgusted our officers, disheartened our soldiers, and finally sunk us all into irretrievable ruin, as though Heaven itself, by a combination of evil circumstances, for its own inscrutable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... room were several men. Roy Beaumont the young inventor with his calm face and inscrutable air was looking up as he spoke to De Valdez, the famous composer. Roy Beaumont wore minute boot-buttons on ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... as splitting wood and lifting coal from the bin; and in the intervals between tending the fallen giant and waiting on the customers, Tony's wife sat in her accustomed chair, knitting fiercely, with an inscrutable smile about her purple ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... Throat's face was inscrutable. He looked at Menard without a word until the silence grew tense, and the maid caught her breath. Then he said, with the cool, diplomatic tone that concealed whatever kindness or justice may ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... mysterious, a. inscrutable, cryptic, obscure, unexplainable, enigmatical, unfathomed, unfathomable, abstruse, mystic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... as in her lay, upon that being in whose hands are the issues of life and death. From the moment her husband left the threshold of his childless house on that morning until his return, her prayers to God and the saints were truly incessant. And who is so well acquainted with the inscrutable ways of the Almighty, as to dare assert that the humble supplications of this pious and sorrowful mother were not heard and answered? Whether it was owing to the fervor of an imagination wrought upon by the influence of a creed which nourishes religious enthusiasm in ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... thereupon cried out in terror at what she saw. And the goddess heard her; and a sudden anger seizing her, she plucked the child from the fire and cast it on the ground,—the child she would fain have made immortal, but who must now share the common destiny of all men, though some inscrutable grace should still be his, because he had lain for awhile on the knees and in the bosom ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... seaport, where, after getting together a little money, he had set up as a shopkeeper. His name—but I could never learn whether it was his real one, or a nickname that had grown out of his habits and success in life—was Gathergold. Being shrewd and active, and endowed by Providence with that inscrutable faculty which develops itself in what the world calls luck, he became an exceedingly rich merchant, and owner of a whole fleet of bulky-bottomed ships. All the countries of the globe appeared to join hands for the mere purpose of adding heap after heap to the mountainous accumulation ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... at once to diminish his sufferings, but conquered this weakness. The next evening he passed at the chateau of M. des Rameures; and though his heart was bleeding, he piqued himself on presenting an unclouded brow and an inscrutable smile to Madame de Tecle. He announced the brief absence he intended, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... came broken to the farm and went away healed. Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... again exhorting a suffering people to fortitude under their privations, when you are telling them, "These are the chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficent purpose, it may be, to humble our pride, or to punish our unfaithfulness, or to impress us with the sense of our own nothingness and dependence on His mercy," when you are thus addressing your suffering fellow-subjects, and encouraging them to ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... glory to be unresigned. We are not resigned even to a thorny cactus, whose spiky exterior seems a convincing argument against its use for food. When we see a barren plain we do not say as our fathers did: God made plains so in his inscrutable wisdom; his will be done! We call for irrigation and, when the fructifying waters flow, we say, Thy will be done! in the way we think God wishes to have it said. We do not passively submit to God's ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... forgetfulness, and, the little thread of life spun out, will it not claim its own? For the compact that it has sealed is holy among holy things; that love which it has given is of its own nature, and not of the body alone—it is inscrutable as death, and ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... countenance of Mark, or in the lofty and more practised bearing of the front and eye of the Indian, any thing like wavering of purpose. An emotion foreign to the scene appeared to possess them both, each active frame unconsciously accommodating itself to the bloody business of the hour, while the inscrutable agency of the mind held them, for ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... of his face, and, for the rest, his nose was short, his eyes blue and close together, and his forehead high and narrow. He looked closely at Gimblet as he went by, and for a moment the eyes of the two men met, both equally inscrutable and unflinching; then the stranger glanced aside and strode on to where a small boat lay moored. The detective turned his back while the fair man got in and pushed off into ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... this, for I had entertained hopes that all when brought under Christian instruction would have accepted the truth; but God's ways are inscrutable—we only know that they are just ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... "on with the new love," he was, at any rate, satisfactorily "off with the old," Blake drove his spanking ponies off to Tarrong, while Ellen Harriott went about her household work with a face as inscrutable and calm as though no stone had ruffled the mill-pond ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind; the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow-shower moving here and there like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... minor overstatements of his case; used many intemperances; and suffered himself to be provoked into expressions of heat and impatience by the cabals of the defendant and his party, and the intolerable incompetence of the tribunal. It is one of the inscrutable perplexities of human affairs, that in the logic of practical [v.04 p.0831] life, in order to reach conclusions that cover enough for truth, we are constantly driven to premises that cover too much, and that in order to secure their right weight to justice and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... a glance upon him, then, as he passed, in a vain attempt to read the sombre expression of his inscrutable face grown five years older in the last five days, I shuffled after the girl now flitting before me down Broome Street. As I did so, I noticed her dress to its minutest details, somewhat surprised to find how ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... all nature is miracle. Man has learned that by planting the seed of the grape in suitable soil, and by due cultivation, he may conduce to the growth of what shall be a mature and fruitful vine; but is there no miracle, even in the sense of inscrutable processes, in that development? Is there less of real miracle in the so-called natural course of plant development—the growth of root, stem, leaves, and fruit, with the final elaboration of the rich nectar of the vine—than there was in what appears supernatural in the transmutation of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... scene of domestic happiness and prosperity rarely surpassed. The work of life having been successfully done, it seemed that a peaceful and serene descent into the vale of years was secured to Francis and Rebecca Nurse. But far otherwise was the allotment of a dark and inscrutable providence. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... instant she withdrew herself, her soul, her ego, so utterly that I felt myself gazing at an inscrutable stone image, as she ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for omniscience than for human science, and aiming only at some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will be a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret—or at most, in reverent faith, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all History and in ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... had to be sent for. He came with unbecoming expedition. Then in the same way that I have seen the Chinese doctors in Australia diagnose the ailments of their human patients of the same great family, he examined the poor mule with the inscrutable air of one to whom are unveiled the mysteries of futurity, and he retired with his fee. The medicine came later in a large basket, and consisted of an assortment of herbs so varied that one at least might ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... the wondrous mother formeth, None have ever read aright; Hid forever is her working, And inscrutable ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... her husband, who had been to the ship, and was in the returning boat now making its way through the water to take her off. Sad she was, and pale and anxious, for the wide world was all before her, a world of new scenes and strange faces. A future as inscrutable and mysterious almost as that from which humanity instinctively shrinks, which leads so many to cling with expiring energy to evils with which they have grown familiar, rather than launch alone into that unknown sea which never bears upon its bosom a returning sail. Ah! ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... overpowered it and swept it out of sight. Thane could have told him that it must be so. There was room for too many mourners in that primeval waste. Whose small special grief could make itself heard in that vast arid silence, the voice of which was God? God in nature, awful, inscrutable, alone, had gained a new meaning for Mr. Withers. Miles of desert, days of desert, like waves of brute oblivion had swept over him. Never before had he felt the oppression of purely natural causes, the force ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... his greatest refuge. They neither forgot nor deceived him. The souls which he cherished in them had risen above the flood of time. They were inscrutable, fixed for eternity in the love they inspired and seemed to feel, and gave forth once more to those who loved them. He was Professor of AEsthetics and the History of Music, and he was like an old wood quivering with the songs of birds. Some of these songs sounded very far away. They came ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... to compare them—reading an ironical comedy between the lines ... creating the scenes that were being enacted by the triangle of women in front of the Hilmer dwelling every day in the early morning sunshine. For, as time went on, it appeared that Ginger walked through her inscrutable part with irritating fidelity—that is, irritating to Helen Starratt. It could not be otherwise, Fred decided, remembering the look of cool contempt which his wife had thrown at Ginger's departing figure on the day of their last interview. He saw Mrs. Hilmer only vaguely, ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... business paper—a good one, s'entend; but there is no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night: there are no harmonics, there is scarce harmony to his music; and in Henley—all of these; a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition. The First London Voluntary knocked me wholly.—Ever yours affectionately, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and the first blast of it made us all jump. I could think of nothing but Apollyon amusing himself at the expense of the poor pilgrims in the valley of the shadow of death; for the exhibition was persisted in with a pertinacity inscrutable to any wisdom except his own. It ended by a brace of thumps on the wall, each of which produced a report equal to a cannon; and with this salvo of artillery the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... his calm, inscrutable self, and but for the fact that his forehead and his right hand were heavily bandaged, carrying no evidence of his ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... heritage. But if the Sire God in His inscrutable providence should call your son to His holy side, what provision have you made for so mighty a fortune? Does your ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... Israel at that time." As no prophet is mentioned in Israel during their defection, this was a signal testimony of the divine favour upon their repentance; and while observing that out of the millions of Israel a woman was chosen to execute the great purposes of Heaven, we cannot but admire the inscrutable wisdom that appoints all persons to their stations, qualifies all agents for their particular instrumentality, and regulates all the movements of this lower world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground, nor an angel wings his flight, but in ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... done with ferns and mosses and lichens. The soil is marrowy and full of innumerable forests. Standing in these fragrant aisles, I feel the strength of the vegetable kingdom, and am awed by the deep and inscrutable processes of life going on ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... of a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with a divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket. She made him the inscrutable answer: "Ah, poor man! you will go down ignorant to your grave!" We laughed, and to this day I cannot ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... there as a volunteer missionary for many months before the massacre, the mystery of his sudden and unexplained disappearance from the State capital on the day of his inauguration was not cleared up and made intelligible, but darkened and rendered more inscrutable. ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... authority, however, is seldom given, and inverted commas are conspicuous by their absence. It can hardly be imagined that all this poetry is by the writer of the book. In one instance he quotes a well-known verse by ASHBY-STERRY, without acknowledgment, in which, for some inscrutable reason, he has introduced a rugged final line which effectually mars the harmony of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... for four months. But that didn't console me in the least. I hated the man. Will you stop smiling in that inscrutable way and ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... architecture of Solomon's temple, and in a manner so pointed, and yet labored, as to cause the youngest of us to flame with indignation. Happily, however, it was lost upon Jack: I do not think he even heard it. His handsome, colorless face, albeit a trifle worn and thoughtful, was inscrutable. Only once, during the singing of a hymn, at a certain note in the contralto's voice, there crept into his dark eyes a look of wistful tenderness, so yearning and yet so hopeless, that those who were watching him felt their own glisten. Yet I retain a very vivid remembrance of his standing ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... congratulation let us not forget those whose suffering and self-sacrifice, in the inscrutable wisdom of Providence, prepared the way for the triumph which we celebrate. As we call the long, illustrious roll of Italian patriotism—the young, the brave, and beautiful; the gray-haired, saintly confessors; the scholars, poets, artists, who, shut out from ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... divine will we should not pry, but should absolutely refrain from it as from the divine majesty, for it is inscrutable, and God has had no desire to declare it in this life. He desires to show it under certain tokens or coverings, as Baptism, the Word and the Lord's Supper. These are the images of the deity and are his will as expressed through ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... between wonderful, mossy, willow-mottled mountains, while above and below the gulch was dotted with tents and huts, and everywhere, from basin to hill crest, men dug and blasted, punily, patiently, while their tracks grew daily plainer over the face of this inscrutable wilderness. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... it strange, young man, that, after all, the wretched survivor stood again at the altar. But he was a mysterious being, whose ways were inscrutable, who, thirsting for domestic bliss, was doomed ever to seek and never to find it. His third bride was Madeleine. I well remember her. She was a beauty, in the true sense of the word. It may seem strange to you to hear the praise of beauty ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... such subtle reflections, we both fell into artless meditation; we set to work to detect in ourselves the inscrutable phenomena of the origin of thoughts, which Lambert hoped to discover in their earliest germ, so as to describe some day the unknown process. Then, after much discussion, often mixed up with childish notions, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... for money," apparently in reference to the controversy about the pay-question, then just beginning, and to the more mercenary aims they attributed to the white soldiers. But "Hangman Johnny" remained always a myth as inscrutable as "Becky Lawton." ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... canvases which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn over toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, the eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over the hair—even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the Duchess's—the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her chin and which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty, the ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... of his permission is his inscrutable[d] wisedome, who out of euill bringeth good; so Paul had a minister of Sathan to buffet him, to keepe him in humility, that hee might not waxe proude and high-minded, in regard of those great mysteries which were reuealed when hee was taken into the third heauen, ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... changed. After all that I had seen I had expected that she would take the earliest opportunity of claiming the man she believed to be her old-world lover, but this, for some reason of her own, which was at the time quite inscrutable to me, she did not do. All that she did was to attend to his wants quietly, and with a humility which was in striking contrast with her former imperious bearing, addressing him always in a tone of something very like respect, and keeping him with her ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... to face with the sheer difficulty of living on at all. He even concluded in a kind of lethargy that if nothing had occurred, no 'change,' he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet Lawford, in his best visitor's room, deciding between inscrutable life and just—death. He supposed he was tired out. His thoughts hadn't even the energy to complete themselves. None cared ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... refuge from inexplicable realities in the dangerous stimulant of angry partisanship or the indolent narcotick of vague and hopeful vaticination: fortunamque suo temperat arbitrio. Both by reason of my age and my natural temperament, I am unfitted for either. Unable to penetrate the inscrutable judgments of God, I am more than ever thankful that my life has been prolonged till I could in some small measure comprehend His mercy. As there is no man who does not at some time render himself amenable to the one,—quum ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... her usual impulse and be uncompromisingly honest, she would have said, perhaps: "I am silent because I am afraid to speak and yet I do not know why I am afraid, nor what it is that I fear." In her own mind she was hardly more lucid than this, and the mystery of her heart was as inscrutable to herself as it was ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... a withered wreath on your bridal bed, the bed to which I owe my miserable being? Oh, no, my father! sad was the hour of separation for my mother and yourself. It may have dimmed the lustre of her eye, and shaded your locks with premature grey; but whatever may have been its inscrutable cause, there was one victim of that dark hour, less thought of than yourselves, and yet a greater sufferer than both, the being in whose heart you implanted affections, whose unfulfilled tenderness has made that wretched ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... a number of eyes had been fixed on them, eager to catch some sign of emotion, full of horrible curiosity to know what the Griffiths felt and thought; but Mrs Griffith had been inscrutable. ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... streets, and shall perhaps establish a stall or small shop, where Testaments and Testaments alone will be sold.—No exertion of which I am capable will be spared, and if 'the Word of the Lord' become not speedily better known at Madrid, it will be because the Lord in His inscrutable wisdom does not ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... among historians of pre-revolutionary France, has somewhere pointed out that under the old regime the administration took the place of Providence. It sought to be as omniscient and as omnipotent; its ways were quite as inscrutable. In this policy the intendant was the royal man-of-all-work. The king spoke and the intendant transformed his words into action. As the sovereign's great interest in the colony moved him to speak often, the intendant's activity was prodigious. Ordinances, edicts, judgments and ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... sober expression of sympathy came for a second in the horseman's steady eyes, as he glanced where his pony was standing, it quickly gave way to something more inscrutable as he looked up at Beth, in advancing once more ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... inscrutable way Sister Dominica during that long conversation, while Mrs. Grace and her other daughters dispensed egg-nog in the parlor—it was New Year's Day—had made the young girl a part of her very self, until Teresa indulged the fancy that without and within she was ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the resemblance was sufficient to make it impossible for him to offer any empty phrases of cheer and consolation. After a long time the hopeless, dazed expression slowly faded from the young man's face; in its place came a calm, inscrutable look. The irresponsible boy was dead; the man had been born—in rancorous bitterness, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... appearance of glory which we once had in view—that hope—that laudable ambition of serving our country, and meriting its applause, are now no more: all is dwindled into ease, sloth, and fatal inactivity. In a word, all is lost, if the ways of men in power, like certain ways of Providence, are not inscrutable. But we who view the actions of great men at a distance can only form conjectures agreeably to a limited perception; and, being ignorant of the comprehensive schemes which may be in contemplation, might mistake egregiously in judging of things from ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... a word to me at parting!" he thought. "I've done everything for the best; I've as good as told her how fond of her I am, and this is the way she treats me!" He stopped, and stood looking absently at the sinking sun, and the fast-darkening waters of the Mere. Some inscrutable influence in the scene forced its way stealthily into his mind, and diverted his thoughts from Miss Milroy to his absent friend. He started, and ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... character is determined by his motives, if it is not the other way about; in any case, a man's motives are for the most part inscrutable and can only be deduced from conduct, while the world usually makes the mistake of explaining conduct by attributing its own motives. Tried, then, by the standard of conduct, the only one available, the Emperor, as a man, shows us a high type of humanity. It may not, probably does not, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw |
