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Undefinable   Listen
Undefinable

adjective
1.
Not capable of being precisely or readily described; not easily put into words.  Synonym: indefinable.  "An abstract concept that seems indefinable"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Undefinable" Quotes from Famous Books



... seer in the Apocalypse felt when he said, "And immediately I was in the spirit". The truth is we have been led into the invisible world, we have gained with the poet "a sense of God". The strange, undefinable attraction of the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... simplicity, as in We are seven? These are very popular, apparently, as poems for children to recite; yet in the one case it is beyond any teacher's power to show children the unearthly flaming beauty which alone gives the poem its peculiar quality and undefinable power; and in the other the maudlin sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively dangerous to the child's health of mind. Both types of recitation work out in the end to this—that when the child attains adolescence, and the great world of literature dawns ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... probity, or pride, their positive and highly analytical genius was but little influenced by that chivalrous honor which was an enthusiasm and a religion to the feudal nations, surviving the decay of chivalry as a preservative instinct more undefinable than absolute morality. Honor with the northern gentry was subjective; with the Italians Onore was objective—an addition conferred from without, in the shape of reputation, glory, titles of distinction, or offices ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... complained of thirst, and went to a little run of water but a short distance from them, in order to satisfy it. The interruption of Jarvis was particularly unseasonable. Jane was relating, in a manner peculiar to herself, in which was mingled that undefinable exchange of looks lovers are so fond of, some incident of her early life to the colonel that greatly interested him. Knowing the captain's foibles, he pointed, therefore, with his finger, as ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper

... boisterous, wild, terrible, in many ways, but lovely in others. There is a freshness in the air that rouses glad thoughts within the breast, vague thoughts, sweet, as undefinable, and that yet mean life. The whole land seems to have sprung up from a long slumber, and to be looking with wide happy eyes upon the fresh marvels Nature is preparing for it. Rather naked she stands as yet, rubbing her sleepy lids, having just cast from her ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... Christianity on the soil of the Graeco-Roman world. If we describe this as Jewish Christian, then from the meaning which we must give to the words "Christian" and "Gentile Christian", we tacitly legitimise an undefined and undefinable aggregate of Greek ideas, along with a specifically Pauline element, as primitive Christianity, and this is perhaps not the intended, but yet desired, result of the false terminology. Now, if we describe even ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... foray,—was a hearing of the conversation which might take place between Richard Crawford and his cousin! That conversation she had determined to hear, at all hazards; for what, she scarcely knew herself, but with an undefinable impression that she must hear it—that (Jesuitically, and of course most horrible doctrine!) the end might justify the otherwise indefensible means—and that—that—in short, that she was going to do it, and this settled the matter as well as ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... difference of opinion, however friendly, without a secret suspicion that somehow or another Gammon had been too much for him, and always gained his purposes without giving Quirk any handle of dissatisfaction. In fact, Quirk was thoroughly afraid of Gammon, and Gammon knew it. In the present instance, an undefinable but increasing suspicion and discomfort forced him presently ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... not strong imagination, a keen feeling for nature, or wide sympathy with man. Leslie Stephen says: "Pope never crosses the undefinable, but yet ineffaceable line, which separates true poetry from rhetoric." The debate in regard to whether Pope's verse is ever genuine poetry may not yet be settled to the satisfaction of all; but it is well to recognize the undoubted fact that his couplets still appeal to many readers who ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... joy of many convicts. They have no hope of getting out of the country, which is of such vast extent that winter is sure to descend upon them before they can approach the border, but the freedom of life in the woods has for them an undefinable charm. Then as the frigid season approaches they permit themselves to be caught, and go back to their labor or confinement with hearts lightened by the enjoyment of their vagrant summer wanderings. There is in some cases another advantage ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... way to Dahlia's room; he put her Bible under his arm, and looked about him sadly. Time stood at a few minutes past eleven. Flinging himself into a chair, he thought of waiting in that place; but a crowd of undefinable sensations immediately beset him. Seeing Edward Blancove in the street below, he threw up the window compassionately, and Edward, casting a glance to right and left, crossed the road. Robert went ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... readily consented, and before the party broke up I had given the stranger all my heart. I had never loved before, much as I had enjoyed men's company. Yet, although I gave my heart away, I had some undefinable dread of this dark, daring stranger, with the remorseless though beautiful eye, and that dare-devil step and bearing. Many times, again, we met; frequently in the meadows when the gloaming came; and often in my ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins

... It was surely easy enough to show against the great preacher, on the one hand, that time in such a question is but a mere word that means simply a certain limited or definite period which had a beginning, whereas eternity means an unlimited and undefinable period which had no beginning;—that his seeming argument was no argument, but merely a sort of verbal play on this difference of signification in the words;—further, that man could conceive of an infinite series, whether ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... is the practical question of differences—the fundamental differences of physical appearance, of mental habit and thought, of social customs and religious beliefs, of the thousand and one things keenly and clearly appreciable, yet sometimes elusive and undefinable—these are the things which at once create and find expression in what we call race problems and race prejudices, for want of better terms. In just so far as these differences are fixed and permanently associated characteristics of two ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... seemed exalted to the clouds, yet restrained by some galling chain from the heaven it sought to enter. And then I asked myself, What is the secret of this mysterious power of music; where shall we look for the cause of those undefinable yet overwhelming emotions which it never fails to excite? A hopeless question it seemed, one which the philosophers of all ages have failed to solve, perhaps because they have not troubled themselves to inquire very seriously ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the remoter darkness of the place, and its perfect stillness, too stimulating for the imagination. The echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was no sort of comfort to me. The shadow in the alcove at the end in particular, had that undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking, living thing, that comes so easily in silence and solitude. At last, to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into it, and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... fell upon the woman's soul. It was like a heavy nightmare weight that might only be felt, not seen, and could not be shaken off. But the Countess de Mattos had experienced this undefinable misery before, when the reaction came after taking too large a dose of chlorodyne with her "solace." She hoped that it was merely this now—that it was no real warning ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson

... Huns, Olva felt increasingly that Bunning's eye was upon him. Olva had not seen the creature since the night of the revival, and he was irritated with himself for the persistence of his interest. The man's pluck had, in the first place, struck him, but now it seemed to him that they were, in some undefinable measure, linked together. As Olva watched him, half contemptuously, half sarcastically, he tried to pin his brain down to the actual, definite connection. It seemed ultimately to hang round that dreadful evening when they had been together; it was almost—-although this was absurd—as ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole

... to myself the truth of his prediction, that there was one share in my soul which nothing could ever rob him of, and that was that undefinable communion of thought and feeling, which an extraordinary fatality of circumstances, and a natural congeniality of mind, had ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton

... balance; depend. Adj. uncertain; casual; random &c (aimless) 621; changeable &c 149. doubtful, dubious; indecisive; unsettled, undecided, undetermined; in suspense, open to discussion; controvertible; in question &c (inquiry) 461. vague; indeterminate, indefinite; ambiguous, equivocal; undefined, undefinable; confused &c (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... an undefinable character and distinctiveness about Sunday morning which is not possessed by any other ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... open attentions of others, the truly loyal one will not allow herself to cherish a secret feeling or preference toward any other. Her every affection will be true as steel to the magnet. She will know no wayward inclinations, nor give way to whims and fancies, and undefinable emotions, to feelings, which she would blush to betray to ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey

... women, that she might some day appear before the throne of God even more chaste than the Virgin Mary herself,—Grandet, struck with pity, would say as he looked at her, "Poor Nanon!" The exclamation was always followed by an undefinable look cast upon him in return by the old servant. The words, uttered from time to time, formed a chain of friendship that nothing ever parted, and to which each exclamation added a link. Such compassion arising in the heart of the ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... together sitting in the balcony. They had been alone together before many times since their travels had commenced; but they both of them felt that there was something to them in the present moment different from any other period of their journey. There was something that each felt to be sweet, undefinable, and dangerous. Alice had known that it would be better for her to go up-stairs with Kate; but Kate's answer had been of such a nature that had she gone she would have shown that she had some special reason for going. Why should she show ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... been pointed out by how slight a boundary the epigram is kept distinct from other forms of poetry, and how in extreme cases its essence may remain undefinable. The two fragments of Theognis and one of Mimnermus included here[5] illustrate this. They are examples of a large number like them, which are not, strictly speaking, epigrams; being probably passages from continuous poems, selected, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... sorts of interjected remarks, often setting aside the reading altogether. That the course was a real source of intellectual profit to me I cannot doubt, but not in the form of definite information or systemized opinion. The benefit lay in a subtle expansion of the power of appreciation and an undefinable exaltation of the instincts of taste that I have since learned were more precious than any precise increments ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... met in the drawing-room, a few minutes before eight that evening. Philippa was wearing a new black dress, a model of simplicity to the untutored eye, but full of that undefinable appeal to the mysterious which even the greatest artist frequently fails to create out of any form of colour. Some fancy had induced her to strip off her jewels at the last moment, and she wore no ornaments save a band ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... writhe during the conflict. His hands were clenched, and every muscle stiffened with agony. Scorn at his own weakness, and dread, horrible undefinable dread, as he felt the omnipotent power mastering his proud spirit. The man who would have laughed at the shaking of a spear, and the loud rush of the battle, quailed before a woman's hate and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast range and possibilities of human knowledge which, as M. de Remusat remarks—the keenest and fairest of Bacon's judges—gives Bacon his claim to the undefinable but very real character of greatness. Two men stand out, "the masters of those who know," without equals up to their time, among men—the Greek Aristotle and the Englishman Bacon. They agree in the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... water never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it caused that undefinable shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially comes over one by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a slight gasping and contest against chocking, that seemed to ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... of loneliness which I had never felt before, and I longed for some one to be with me; then I began to wonder whom I would prefer for a companion, and thought of all my friends, even to old Madre Moreno, but none of them seemed to be the one to break the new and undefinable loneliness. Suddenly the form of the fair stranger, with her bright eyes and expressive face, came up before my fancy, and I exclaimed, "Yes, it is she; it is ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison

... and sister: there was a strong resemblance between them, and a slight difference in years—the young man appearing to be about eighteen, his sister one or two and twenty. She was not handsome; but the expression of melancholy on her countenance, and an undefinable air of superiority about her, engaged my attention. The brother was handsome—very handsome. His features were fine, but their expression was finer still. He had taken off his hat, and I had a full view of him. What an intellect ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various

... of colour and life. She was perfectly happy to do just nothing, only to sit with a curious, languid dignity, so careless as to be almost regal, so utterly indifferent, so confident. The bond between them was undefinable, but very strong. It kept everyone else at ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... get to sea again. There is an undefinable feeling of relief, almost of joy, when the regular throbbing of the engines begins and the ship rolls and heaves to ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday

... be rendered into Patavinian Latin. The latter part, the "Miseries of Opium," I had most unaccountably always neglected to read. Again and again, when my increasing debility had threatened to bring my studies to an abrupt conclusion, I had meditated this experiment, but an undefinable and shadowy fear had as often stayed my hand. But now that I knew that unless I could by artificial stimuli obtain a sudden increase of strength I must STARVE, I no longer hesitated. I was desperate; I believed that something ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... the piano, and struck a few notes. There was something caressing in the way in which she touched the keys; whoever she was, she knew how to make sweet music; sad music, too, full of that undefinable longing, like the holding out of one's arms to one's ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various

... he raised his head to those three mysterious faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his face, and then with an undefinable gesture sprang up the marble steps, the bronze doors closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... isolation so weird in its feeling of cut-offness as that of a night camp in the heart of the bush. The flickering camp-fires draw all that is human and tangible into its charmed circle, and without, all is undefinable darkness and uncertainty. Yet it was in this night camp among the dark pines, with even the stars shut out, that we learnt that out-bush "Houselessness" need not mean "Homelessness"—a discovery that destroyed all hope that "this would sicken her ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... thoughts were profound, saluted them all with reverence and gave them a comprehensive answer, saying: Be it heard! This universe existed only in the first divine idea yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then the sole, self-existing power, himself undiscovered, but making this world discernible, with five elements and other principles of nature, appeared with ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880

... An undefinable instinct led the man's footsteps to that lonely height. He skirted the temple and anon stood looking down on the panorama of Rome stretched out at his feet: the Palatine sloping downwards in a gentle gradient—covered with the dwellings of the rich patricians ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... the road, we come to No. 5 on the south side, which, from time immemorial, has had an undefinable, sinister, and uncanny reputation. What it is no one can exactly say, but it is sufficiently significant to keep people from occupying it. At one time it seemed as if the owners were going to allow it gradually to tumble to pieces, but this ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey

... have for its basis a mutual sentiment of affection, of a peculiar kind. If you are satisfied that this sentiment exists on his part, you are to inquire whether you can exercise it towards him. For, with many persons of great worth, whom we highly esteem, there is often wanting a certain undefinable combination of qualities, not improperly termed the soul of character; which alone seems to call out the exercise of that peculiar sentiment of which we are speaking. But I seriously charge you never to form a connection which is not based upon this principle; and that, for ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb

... every rule of conduct, every constitution, every law and social arrangement, is an instrument that has no value in itself. Whatever credit it receives, whatever reverence we give it, is derived from its utility in ministering to those concrete experiences which are as obvious and as undefinable as color or sound. We can celebrate the positively good things, we can live them, we can create them, but we cannot philosophize about them. To the anaesthetic intellect we could not convey the meaning of joy. A creature that could reason but ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... time he was alarmingly ill from bronchitis, accompanied by unusually high fever. This passed off but slowly. The bodily health and strength appeared to be fully restored at the end of a few weeks, but there was an undefinable change. Shortly after this illness, though not in consequence of it, Dr Burton resigned his office of Prison Manager. He retired on an allowance of two-thirds of his former salary, remaining chairman of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... Maggie, bending low to catch the faintest sound, heard him utter the name of "Rose." In Maggie's bosom there was no feeling for the stranger save that of pity, and yet that one word "Rose" thrilled her with a strange undefinable emotion, awaking at once a yearning desire to know something of her who bore that beautiful name, and who to the young man was undoubtedly the one in all the world ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... low descending sun was shedding the mellow light of his parting beams over the joyful face of reanimating nature. The invalid, during all the fore part of the day, had suffered greatly from pain—that general and undefinable distress which is so frequently found to be the precursor of approaching dissolution. To this had succeeded a sort of lethargic sleep, from which it was not easy to arouse her, so that she could be made to take any notice of what was passing around her. But now she awoke, clear ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... been warned of what would take place, but doubted the prediction. When it did occur they looked upon me as the cause of the Sun's being 'very sick and going to bed.' They were thoroughly alarmed, and overwhelmed with an undefinable dread." ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers

... taciturn, until at last he rarely said anything at all. He merely watched her—watched her wherever she went, and whatever she did; and he watched the children—particularly the children—with the same expression, the same undefinable secretive expression that harmonized so well with the shadows and whispers. And it was this treatment—the treatment she now received from her husband—that made Tina appreciate the company of her children. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... and he wore it in a pointed shape. His eyes were small and deep-set, but full of intelligence. He had all the manner and appearance of a man of gentle birth, but there was something more; an indescribable, undefinable air that hung about him. Many Russians have it, and the French have embodied the idea it conveys in their proverb that if you scratch a Russian you will find the Tartar. It is rather a trait of Orientalism in the blood, and it is to be noticed as much in Servians, Bulgarians, ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... But in our present state of knowledge, any reasoning on this supposition would probably appear too fanciful. Some day we may find out how much ancestral experience is capable of bequeathing in this way, whether simply shadowy, undefinable mental tendencies, or something like definite concrete ideas. If, for example, it were found that a child that was descended from a line of seafaring ancestors, and that had never itself seen or heard of the "dark-gleaming sea," manifested a feeling of recognition when first beholding ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... silvery speech,—such was the irresistible "mortal mixture of earth's mould" that men named De Quincey. He possessed in a high degree what James Russell Lowell called "the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere persuasive, and nowhere emphatic"; and his whole aspect and manner exercised an undefinable attraction over every one, gentle or simple, who came within its influence; for shy as he was, he was never rudely shy, making good his boast that he had always made it his "pride to converse familiarly more socratico with all human ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... of the true fashionable is peculiar and characteristic. From the toe of his boot to the crown of his hat, there is that unostentatious, undefinable something about him distinctive of his social position. Professional men, every body knows, have an expression common to their profession. A purblind cyclops could never mistake the expression of an Independent preacher, an universal free-black-nigger Baptist minister, or a Jesuit. Every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... strictly reducible to rules, and that there is a rule for everything. So far is it from being true that the finest breath of fancy is a definable thing, that the plainest common sense is only what Mr. Locke would have called a mixed mode, subject to a particular sort of acquired and undefinable tact. It is asked, "If you do not know the rule by which a thing is done, how can you be sure of doing it a second time?" And the answer is, "If you do not know the muscles by the help of which you walk, how is it you do not fall down at every step you take?" In art, in taste, in life, in ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... accorded to courting couples she had always felt that, on the day when she showed too open a preference, Mr. Royall might, as she phrased it, make her "pay for it." How, she did not know; and her fear was the greater because it was undefinable. If she had been accepting the attentions of one of the village youths she would have been less apprehensive: Mr. Royall could not prevent her marrying when she chose to. But everybody knew that "going with a city fellow" was a different and less straightforward affair: ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... brat under three years old, whom she jumps, dances, dandles, and feeds all day long. A very attractive person is that child-loving girl. I have never seen any one in her station who possessed so thoroughly that undefinable charm, the lady-look. See her on a Sunday in her simplicity and her white frock, and she might pass for an earl's daughter. She likes flowers too, and has a profusion of white stocks under her window, as pure and ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... of discouragement for which she rebuked herself as childish, walked sadly home again; and when she entered the vacant dining-room, she could not help bursting into tears. It is such vague undefinable states of susceptibility as this—states of excitement or depression, half mental, half physical—that determine many a tragedy in women's lives. Janet could scarcely eat anything at her solitary dinner: she tried to fix her attention ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... scarecrows we sometimes see in corn-fields, except that it was a great deal more outre in its form and dimensions. It wore an immense hat, of the shape of a cullender, and with almost as many holes, through which protruded little wisps of straw instead of feathers. The face was perfectly undefinable, having neither dimensions nor shape, resembling nothing of the live human species, and consisting apparently entirely of a nose which projected several inches beyond the brim of his hat; his shirt-collar was tied with a piece of rope; his jacket was as much too ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... young girl whose tears are ready to flow, though she is smiling a little at her own sad dreams. It seems to me that Strauss must have a secret affection for this work, which owes its inspiration to the undefinable impressions of convalescence. His fever fell asleep in it, and certain passages are full of the caressing touch of nature, and recall Berlioz's Les Troyens. But too often the music is superficial and conventional, and the tyranny of Wagner makes ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... the letter lying on the table. It had raised in her mind, not a doubt, but an undefined, undefinable anxiety. He saw the glance, and said: "I was writing to one who has been as a sister to me. She was my mother's sister though she is almost as young as I. Her name is Faith. There is nothing there of what concerns ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... frosts of external failure have braced the mental nerves to healthy endurance and fresh effort after labour, it is easy then to turn to God and trust in him, in whom all honest exertion gives an ability as well as a right to trust. It is easy in pain, so long as it does not pass certain undefinable bounds, to hope in God for deliverance, or pray for strength to endure. But what is to be done when all feeling is gone? when a man does not know whether he believes or not, whether he loves or not? when art, poetry, religion are nothing to him, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... and sunken to such a depth as almost to denote disease; small, bright, sparkling eyes they were, made to seem smaller and brighter by a constant girlish twinkle that softened and lighted up their laughter. They were neither brown eyes nor blue eyes, but were of an undefinable, changing gray, a gray that was not a color, but a light! Emotion found expression therein in the flame of fever, pleasure in the flashing rays of a sort of intoxication, passion in phosphorescence. Her short, turned-up nose, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... as the girl passed her. The whiff of unwashed garments, stale cooking, and undefinable tenement odor that reached her nostrils sickened her. Was it possible that she must let this creature have a hold even momentarily upon her last few hours? Yet she knew she must. She knew she would not rest until she had ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill

... as emphatically made, thrills the hearts of those hearing it with fear. Not fear of the common kind, but a weird undefinable apprehension. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... I was wet through and chilled to the bone. The mist was so dense that objects six feet away were almost invisible. After some difficulty we managed to gather twigs from the tree sufficient to make a "billy" of tea. The light waxed; a strange and undefinable sensation thrilled me. I seemed to be near some surprise. For a considerable time the air was perfectly still. Then, suddenly, a movement became noticeable; a sudden breeze sang out of the west, and the mist-shroud rolled away, leaving ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... regulation and limits within which it becomes unquestionable. The limit is generally a limit of toleration. Literature, pictures, exhibitions, celebrations, and festivals are controlled by some undefined, and probably undefinable, standard of decency and propriety, which sets a limit of toleration on the appeals to fun, sensuality, and various prejudices. In regard to all social customs, the mores sanction them by defining them and giving them form. Such regulated customs are etiquette. The ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, there was also an added element which, with all their genius, the Brontes did not possess—the element of charm, the petit carillon, to which Renan attributed his own success in literature: undefinable, always, this last!—but supreme.[1] There is scarcely a letter of Stevenson's that is without it, it plays about the slender volumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is present not only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchanting fairy-tale, "Prince Otto," but ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... every moment. He had been in the mountains but once since the war began. It was only George he came to see? She brought out her work and began to sew. He would not come: only George was fit to be his friend. Why should he heed her poor old father, or her?—with the undefinable awe of an unbred mind for his power and wealth of culture. And yet—something within her at the moment rose up royal—his equal. He knew her, as she might be! Between them there was something deeper than the shallow kind greeting they gave the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... his eyes on the dim outlines of the object as he stealthily approached And he stepped as noiselessly as possible, notwithstanding he meditated an encounter with nothing more than an inanimate object. But his imagination was always on the alert, and as he often feared dangers that arose undefinable and indescribable in his mind, it was not without some trepidation that he had separated himself from the horses and groped his way toward the object that had so much terrified his pony. He paused within a few feet of the object, and waited ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones

... were hidden from my sight and I groped hopelessly forward, praying in vain for an end of misery. Out of such a boyhood there came—as what else could come?—a manhood all imperfect, clothed with gloom, haunted by horror, and familiar with undefinable terrors which have weighed upon my heart until I have cried to myself that it would break—until I have almost prayed that it would break and thereby free me from the bondage of my pitiless master, Woe! To-day walled within a prison for madmen, looking from a window whose grating is iron, the sole ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... paragraph, and that was all. It was enough, it was too much! Mme Derline was seized with a feeling of undefinable confusion. It was a combination of fear and pleasure, of joy and trouble, of satisfied vanity and wounded modesty. Her dressing-gown was a little open; she folded it over with a sort of violence, and crossed it upon, her feet, abruptly drawn back towards the arm-chair. She had a feeling ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy

... that a traveler covers leagues by lying abed. The author just mentioned[159] has brought together many observations in which the solution of a mathematical, mechanical, commercial problem appeared suddenly after hours and days of vague, undefinable uneasiness, the cause of which is unknown, which, however, is only the result of an underlying cerebral working; for the trouble, sometimes rising to anguish, ceases as soon as the unawaited conclusion has entered ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... drowsy time of stillness and shadow. I seemed to have fallen in some deep well of delicious oblivion and obscurity. Dream-like images still flitted before my fancy—these were at first undefinable, but after awhile they took more certain shapes. Strange fluttering creatures hovered about me—lonely eyes stared at me from a visible deep gloom; long white bony fingers grasping at nothing made signs to me of warning or menace. Then—very gradually, there dawned upon my sense of vision ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... troops and wagons. Though the exhausted soldiers slept, even while the guns of the enemy roared in front of them, and during the brief halts which the confusion in the road caused, there was no real repose. The excitement of the battle and the retreat, and the undefinable sense of insecurity which their situation engendered, banished rest. Tired Nature asserted her claims, and the men yielded to them only when endurance had reached ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic

... especially if it be a love-secret, makes a break in that sweet, confidential intercourse between a parent and child which nothing restores. The squire hardly comprehended that there might be a secret. Charlotte was unthoughtful of wrong; but still there was a repression, a something undefinable between them, impalpable, but positive as a breath of polar air. She noticed the mountains, for he made her do so; but the birds sang sleepy songs to her unheeded, and the yellow asphodels made a kind ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... existed as Unity, to be afterward, during Eternity uttered forth, clothed with form, and the attributes that constitute them matter, the First Principle is Single and First, and yet not the VERY Illimitable Deity, incomprehensible, undefinable; but Himself in so far as manifested by the Creative Thought. To compare littleness with infinity,—Arkwright, as inventor of the spinning-jenny, and not the man Arkwright otherwise and beyond that. All we can know of the Very God is, compared to His Wholeness, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... long he had been asleep, when he started up in bed with an undefinable impression that something was wrong. He sat rubbing his eyes, and but half awake—a confused sound, he knew not what, fell upon his ear; it seemed as if some dreadful strife was going on outside his window, something seemed in a terrible ...
— Leslie Ross: - or, Fond of a Lark • Charles Bruce

... to the Constitution of the Union? If so, written constitutions are worse than useless; they are not obligatory, there is no penalty for their violation; obedience to them cannot be enforced; there is no government but that of opinion, fluctuating and uncertain, undefined and undefinable, which is paramount to the fundamental law. This is what the despots of Europe call our government, and why they predict its downfall—a prediction now in the course of fulfilment, if these anarchical principles can be recognized as the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... mythical friend who had at last a commercial wireless "televue," as he called it on the spur of the moment, when Jane, the aged caretaker, announced Dr. Scott. The new doctor was a youthfully dressed man, clean-shaven, but with an undefinable air of being much older than his smooth face led one to suppose. As he had a large practice, he said, he would beg our pardon for interrupting but ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... sources so subtile and undefinable, that it cannot be forced into particular channels; and whenever the attempt has been made, it has usually ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward

... preventives. One may say that to be reared a member of an Establishment is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help towards [xxiii] culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious life of his nation; and while he may be sure that within those forms the religious side of his own nature may find its satisfaction, he has leisure and composure to satisfy ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... of unbounded power, for undefined and undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude of the man to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to happen in the management of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the red sail, the long, keen, black shell, the naked forms of the fierce Illanums, were mixed in one undefinable blot on the ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman

... its little heralds sweeping across the face of night. First came a little motion of cold air—it was dead-still before; then an undefinable freshness; then a very slight but rather grateful smell from the soil of the conscious earth. Next twittered from the bush one little ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... we should strike off all the unmerited pensions, while the power of the crown remains unlimited, the very same undeserving persons might afterwards return to the very same list; or, if they did not, other persons, meriting as little as they do, might be put upon it to an undefinable amount. This, I think, is ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... those shadowy invaders of her hearth that threatened her maternal peace. Dick was not a boy any longer; he had outgrown his hobbledehoy ways; the slight sandy moustache that he so proudly caressed was not a greater proof of his manhood than the undefinable change that had passed ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... a principality ruled with iron and steam, bullied into a yield of three hundred and fifty thousand bushels, where even when the land was resting, unploughed, unharrowed, and unsown, the wheat came up—troubled her, and even at times filled her with an undefinable terror. To her mind there was something inordinate about it all; something almost unnatural. The direct brutality of ten thousand acres of wheat, nothing but wheat as far as the eye could see, stunned her a little. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... usually turned to some grown-up person with a question which showed that her brain had been at work upon some new impression. She very early got over childish lispings, and by the time she was four years old spoke perfectly plainly. She was afraid of her father; her feeling towards her mother was undefinable, she was not afraid of her, nor was she demonstrative to her; but she was not demonstrative even towards Agafya, though she was the only person she loved. Agafya never left her. It was curious to see them together. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev

... in the Meeker front room that he first realized his mundane existence was in danger. He could give no description of what happened beyond the fact that suddenly he was bathed in a cold, revolting air. It hung about him with the undefinable feel and smell of death. A rotten air, he described it, and could think of nothing better; remaining, he thought, for half a minute, filling him with instinctive abject terror, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... and yet it is true, that one sometimes finds even in the most commonplace countenance an undefinable something, which fascinates the attention, and forces it to recur again and again, while it is impossible to tell whether the peculiarity which thus attracts us lies in feature or in expression, or in both combined, and why it is that our observation ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... "where is he? what is his extent? what are his wishes? what his powers? what his promises?"—and here, in the light of analysis, all the divinities of heaven, earth, and hell are reduced to an incorporeal, insensible, immovable, incomprehensible, undefinable I-know-not-what; in short, to a negation of all the attributes of existence. In fact, whether man attributes to each object a special spirit or genius, or conceives the universe as governed by a single power, he in either case but SUPPOSES an unconditioned, that is, an impossible, entity, that ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... a soft springy day. A fire burned gently in the chimney, while a window open at a little distance let in Spring's whispers and fragrances; and the plain old-fashioned room looked cosy and pretty, as some rooms will look under undefinable influences. Nothing could be plainer. There was not even the quaint elegance of Mr. Linden's room; this one was wainscotted with light blue and whitewashed, and furnished with the simplest of chintz furniture. But its simplicity and purity were all in tone with the Spring air ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... coveted should be taken from him. No one but himself should write to Maude Remington, for she was his, or rather she should be his. The contents of that note might be of the most ordinary kind, but for some reason undefinable to himself he would rather she should not see it yet, and though it cost him a struggle to deal thus falsely with both, he resolved to keep it from her until she had promised to be his wife. He never dreamed it possible that she could tell him no, he had ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes

... Joe Strong did not feel much like eating. He had a sudden and undefinable suspicion ...
— Joe Strong on the Trapeze - or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer • Vance Barnum

... of undefinable apprehension, young Peveril now struck the spurs into his jaded steed, and forcing him down the broken and steep path, at a pace which set safety at defiance, he arrived at the village of Martindale-Moultrassie, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... chair; whilst La Marmotte, with all the silent notes in her heart touched in some undefinable way, hovered over her, fearing to approach her, and yet feeling ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats

... forward, and the men-at-arms rubbed their eyes and looked on in silent wonder: for one of the pair was none other than the fairy maiden who had lived so long amongst them, and had endeared herself even to these rude spirits by her grace and sweetness and undefinable charm; the other, that youth with the wonderful eyes and saint-like face who had been captured and borne away to Saut after the battle before St. Jean d'Angely, and whose body they all believed had long ago been lying beneath the sullen ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... certainly hope we do not!" exclaimed Tom, as he turned back to his work, with an undefinable sense ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton

... shock—they left the reflex of the man in her mind still unspotted, unimpaired. How could this be? Simply because they left unaltered the conviction that this man believed in God, and that the desire of his own heart brought him into some real, however undefinable, relation to him who was yet nearer to him than that desire itself, and whose presence had ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... wind fell, and the sound of the waterfall increased, and grew rough and loud, and the undefinable rushing noise that precedes a heavy fall of rain in the tropics, the voice of the wilderness, moaned through the high woods, until at length the clouds sank upon the valley in boiling mists, rolling halfway down the surrounding hills; and the water of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various

... finest quality, "that indestructible love of flowers, and odors, and dews, and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight, which are the material elements of poetry; and that fine sense of their undefinable relation to mental emotion which is its essence ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... twisted the diamond he wore on his left hand; the rainbow fires of the gem seemed to flash a sudden light on the young Countess' mind; she blushed and looked at the Baron with an undefinable expression. ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac

... out upon the still silent veranda. The chairs which he and Louise Macy had occupied were still, it seemed to him, conspicuously confidential with each other, and he separated them, but as he looked down into the Great Canyon at his feet he was conscious of some undefinable change in the prospect. A slight mist was rising from the valley, as if it were the last of last night's illusions; the first level sunbeams were obtrusively searching, and the keen morning air had a dryly practical ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... the land to the rear of the party, and others quite as obviously from the water in their front. And, most disturbing consideration of all, every one of them was absolutely unfamiliar, therefore in some vague, undefinable fashion, the more alarming. This effect was quickly made manifest by the agitated murmurings of the Indians, and the haste with which they replenished the dying fire, heaping on fuel with such a lavish hand that, for the space of a few yards all round the blaze, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... her before him, it was neither love nor hate that he felt, but an undefinable and overmastering emotion that seemed to petrify him, so that he stood there quite silent with his hand on ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller

... the regime is the result of these premises. The Fascist also loves his neighbour, but "neighbour" is not for him a vague and undefinable word: love for his neighbour does not prevent necessary educational severities. Fascism rejects professions of universal affection and, though living in the community of civilised peoples, it watches them and looks at them diffidently. It follows them in their state of mind and in the transformation ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... without the evidence of your own senses. Let me only say this, it was not so much what we saw or heard (in which you might fairly suppose that we were the dupes of our own excited fancy, or the victims of imposture in others) that drove us away, as it was an undefinable terror which seized both of us whenever we passed by the door of a certain unfurnished room, in which we neither saw nor heard anything. And the strangest marvel of all was, that for once in my life I agreed with my wife, silly woman though she be—and allowed, after the third ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... sufficient sharpness. You feel something and have not been able to express the feeling—only because you do not yet quite know what it is. We feel without understanding feeling; and our most powerful emotions are the most undefinable. This must be so, because they are inherited accumulations of feeling, and the multiplicity of them—superimposed one over another—blurs them, and makes them dim, even though enormously increasing their strength.... Unconscious brain work is the best ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn

... universe existed in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable, and undiscovered; ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... material particles can act as a bridge by which we can cross over into the domain of intelligence.... What imaginable link is there between certain movements of certain molecules in my brain, on the one hand, and on the other hand primitive, undefinable, undeniable facts such as: I have the sensation of softness, I smell the odour of a rose, I hear the sound of an organ, I ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace. This natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs, and to a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansion of their fathers. They enjoy ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... and welcomed him, that it quite startled Esmond, who looked up at her surprised as she spoke, when she withdrew her eyes from him; nor did she ever look at him afterwards when his own eyes were gazing upon her. A something hinting at grief and secret, and filling his mind with alarm undefinable, seemed to speak with that low thrilling voice of hers, and look out of those clear sad eyes. Her greeting to Esmond was so cold that it almost pained the lad, (who would have liked to fall on his knees, and kiss the skirt of her robe, so fond and ardent was his respect and regard ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... civilities, and Margaret watched the tall, lonely figure sweep up the hall to the lift. As the glass doors closed on it she had the sense of an imprisonment. The beautiful head disappeared first, still buried in the muff, the long trailing skirt followed. A woman of undefinable rarity was going up heaven-ward, like a specimen in a bottle. And into what a heaven—a vault as of hell, sooty black, from ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... disregarded? They have length, and breadth, and outline: have they nothing to do with depth? Have they only to describe, never to impress? Has nothing any claim to their use but the definite? The cause of a child's tears may be altogether undefinable: has the mother therefore no antidote for his vague misery? That may be strong in colour which has no evident outline. A fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and sweeps you away: do you begin at once ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... recalling the scattered fragments of the sonorous verses, and wondering why it was that, when each line had seemed so perfect in itself, and every thought so pure and noble in its purport and conception, the whole should have left upon her mind such an undefinable impress of dissatisfaction. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that however quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply, at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a police-constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... glared at his daughter with his bloodshot eyes. She had been up all night, and her hair was tossed, and her eyes smarted; but beside him she looked so fresh, so upright, so brave and strong, that he himself in some undefinable way felt the contrast, and shrank from her. He turned his uneasy gaze towards the bed; he would vent his spite on that weak wife of his—Martha should know what it was to keep a man with a splitting headache waiting for his tea. He made an effort to rise, and to approach ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade

... again in her search, this time more squarely, and, grasping it hard in her hand, brought it out to the light, while an undefinable thrill, half of terror, half of joy, ran through her frame, as she held it ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... and blundering colleague, had been watching the prisoner very closely for the last moment or two, conscious of a subtle, undefinable change that had come over the man during those few seconds while he, Chauvelin, had thought him dying. The pose was certainly the old familiar one, the head erect, the hand clenched, the eyes looking through and beyond the stone walls; but there was an air of listlessness in the stoop of the shoulders, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... furtive watch upon Giraumont and Gawtrey, who appeared talking together, very amicably. The younger novice of that night, equally silent, seated towards the bottom of the table, was not less watchful than Birnie. An uneasy, undefinable foreboding had come over him since the entrance of Monsieur Giraumont; this had been increased by the manner of Mr. Gawtrey. His faculty of observation, which was very acute, had detected something false in the chief's blandness to their guest—something dangerous in the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... had bounded like lightning from the deck, appeared with eager eye and excited cheek among them. To leap into the bows of the canoe, and disappear under the foliage, was the work of a single instant. All listened breathlessly for the slightest sound; and then every heart throbbed with the most undefinable emotions, as his lips were heard giving utterance to the deep emotion of his ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... which cannot be methodically proved for want of a precise principle by which they may be tested; and they, therefore, depend upon Immethodical Induction, that is, upon the examination of as many instances as can be found, relying for the rest upon the undefinable principle of the Uniformity of Nature, since we are not able to connect them with any of its definite modes enumerated in chap. xiii. Sec. 7. To this subject we shall return in chap. xix., after treating of Methodical Induction, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... of these evenings that I suddenly understood what was the cause of the undefinable change that I had noticed in her manner some time before. In the previous week the company had held a court dinner, and that was the evening when the alderman introduced his son—"My son, the captain," ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer

... on—an Italian night. The moon rose slowly in the heavens, behind the open arcades of the Coliseum. The breeze of evening sighed through the deserted galleries. Near me sat this woman, herself the living ruin of so extraordinary a fortune. A confused and undefinable emotion forced me to silence. The queen also ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... decline to go into hyperbolic eccentricities over unknown geniuses, and a single quality or power is not enough to arouse my enthusiasm. It is possible that no master ever painted a buttercup like this one, or the fringe of a robe like that one; that this poet has a unique subtlety, and that an undefinable music. I am still unconvinced, tho the man who can not see it, we are told, should at once retire to the place where there is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... resemblance seems to go for nothing, and Creation the reigning idea—in some, descent is the key,—in some, sterility an unfailing test, with others it is not worth a farthing. It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the undefinable. I suppose you have lost the odd black seed from the birds' dung, which germinated,—anyhow, it is not worth taking trouble over. I have now got about a dozen seeds out of small ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... be precipitating itself upon the brig; there was a moment of undefinable anguish; the men forsook their poles and flocked to the stern in ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... the hero of 'Contarini Fleming,' is distinctly not a poet; and the incapacity is most evident when he endeavours to pass the inexorable limits. The distinction between poetry and rhetoric is as profound as it is undefinable. A true poet, as possessing an exquisite sensibility to the capacities of his instrument, does not try to get the effects of metre when he is writing without its restrictions and its advantages. Disraeli shows occasionally a want of this delicacy of perception by breaking ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... back, so I can pass any order that may come," proposed Hal, who, truth to tell, felt an undefinable something that made him too restless to like the idea ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham

... Eastern Virginia; and am not the better reconciled to it by Grant's campaign. There is no sound success for the North now, unless they put the 'coloured' race politically on equal terms with the 'whites,' and not to do so when 'colour' is legally undefinable, and when the only loyal citizens in loyal provinces are 'coloured,' is an alarming infatuation. I suppose they must suffer more and more, until they resolve that the slave owners of Kentucky, and the colour bigots of Illinois ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... whole attitude in life will be different. But if these early associations are linked with all that is false and foul, some subtle odor of the sewer will still cling about the heart of the shrine, a nameless sense of something impure in the whole subject; an undefinable something in his way of looking at it, which has often made the purity of men—blameless in their outer life—- sadden and perplex me almost as much as the actions and words of ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... piece of reckless folly. Shortly after I left Mrs. Brentwood's last Thursday evening I had a curious experience. The shortest way down-town is diagonally through the capitol grounds, but some undefinable impulse led me to go around on the Capitol Avenue side. As I was passing the right wing of the building I saw lights in the governor's room, and in a sudden fit of desperation resolved to go up and have it out with Bucks. It was abnormally foolish, I'll confess. I had nothing definite ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... poniard of fine workmanship. His hat, with a red plume in it, seemed a scornful protest against the gravity of Florentine costume, which had been exaggerated to the utmost under the influence of the Piagnoni. Certain undefinable indications of youth made the breadth of his face and the large diameter of his waist appear the more emphatically a stamp of coarseness, and his eyes had that rude desecrating stare at all men and things which to a refined mind is as intolerable ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... heart seemed the seat of every graceful feeling. He was the first man for whose society I felt a lively preference. I used to smile at this strange delight, or sometimes weep; for the emotions which agitated me were undefinable, but they were enchanting, and unheedingly I gave them indulgence. The hours which we passed together in the interchange of reciprocal sentiments, the kind beaming of his looks, the thousand sighs ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... and in degree. That short last talk at his bedside, in which so little was said, so much felt by both of us, has never left my memory. If for no other reason, it must be recorded here for it had, I feel, an essential if undefinable influence ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... already seated with the Testament open ready to read as requested. The Cardinal raised himself in his chair,—a sense of lightness, and freedom, and ease, possessed him,—the hopeless and tired feeling which had a few minutes since weighed him down with an undefinable languor was gone,—and his voice had gained new strength and energy ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... has sought to comprehend the immensity of one and unravel the formation of the other, is hardly less wonderful than either. Still the great mystery remains unriddled; our researches have brought us no nearer the beginning, and the first cause of all continues unapproachable and undefinable as ever. Instead of explaining physical creation, we begin with it; we take the existence of matter for granted, and its attributes for granted, and forthwith begin to fabricate a universe, without first ascertaining whence was matter, or whence the laws by which it is impressed, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... respect, but as to their dry treatises on logic, immaterial dissertations on materiality, and abstruse investigations of useless subjects, they are mere literary legerdemain. Their disputations being usually built on an undefinable chimera, are solved by a paradox. Instead of exercising their power of reason they exert their powers of sophistry, and divide and subdivide every subject with such casuistical minuteness, that those who are not convinced, are almost invariably confounded. This custom, it must be granted, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... and manifest in the object of his love. Most observers would have held it more than equally accountable that a girl should have like impressions about Rex, for in his handsome face there was nothing corresponding to the undefinable stinging quality—as it were a trace of demon ancestry—which made some beholders hesitate in ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... not perceived, we conclude that an effected thing, which on the one hand is perceived and on the other is liable to destruction, must be viewed as something to be defined neither as that which is nor as that which is not. And what is thus undefinable, is false, no less than the silver imagined in the shell, the anirvakanyatva of which is proved by perception and sublation (see above, p. 102 ff.).—We further ask, 'Is a causal substance, such as clay, when producing ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... occurred to Theophil to make of him a companion; but about this time, as Mr. Moggridge would drop in of an evening to discuss church matters, the young minister would be surprised to note how lonely he felt when he had gone. Indeed Mr. Moggridge possessed that great undefinable gift of companionability. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne

... speaking she had gone to the door, and she went out without looking back. A moment later, she was by Gianluca's side. She saw that what Don Teodoro had said was true. There was an undefinable change in his features since the previous day, and at the first sight of it her heart stood still an instant and the blood left her face, so that she felt very cold. She kept her back to the light, that he might not see that she was disturbed, and while she asked ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... to grope out his way, from that sort of undefinable feeling which leads a person to identify change of place with improvement ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... see him under all sorts of circumstances; and ask at last: "Is this all?"—No, says your guide; "see here!" and flings one last door open. And that, like the door in Lord Dunsaney's play, opens on to the vastness of the stars. What is it that baffles us and remains undefined and undefinable? Just this: TAO: the Infinite Nature. You can survey the earth, and measure it with chains; but not Space, in which a billion leagues is nowise different from an inch or two, —it bears the same proportion ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... woes, And place them all in order, rank on rank? Language is weak to tell the heart's deep, wrongs. We think, and muse, and in our endless thought We strive to grasp, with all the mind's vast strength, The undefinable extent of spirit grief, And fail to accomplish the ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... be mere imagination: I have viewed with attention those of Platea, Troy, Mantinea, Leuctra, Chaeronea, and Marathon; and the field around Mount St. Jean and Hougoumont appears to want little but a better cause, and that undefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of these, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... undefinable position kept her from much repose on the second night also; but the following morning brought an unexpected letter from Swithin, written about the same hour as hers to him, and it ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... color chi sanno, like to retain a spice of mystery in our mental food. It may constitute no part of the nutriment, and may often be deleterious, but it meets a want, somehow or other, and wants, however undefinable, must be recognized. It is a spur that titillates the absorbent surfaces and helps to keep them in action. It is a craving that the race is never going to outlive, and that will afford occupation and subsistence to a considerable class of its most intelligent and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... regard to the solid materials and lighter ingredients which entered into the composition of these suspiciously cheap luxuries. There were points also connected with the process of their elaboration which had given me an undefinable uneasiness in the refreshment rooms of a hundred railway stations. I was determined to settle these moot points once for all. So I entered the establishment with an eye of as keen a speculation as an exciseman's searching ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... them in a nosegay, when a rustling among the bushes attracted her attention. She hastily advanced towards the spot, exclaiming "Frederic!" when the Baron, the man whom of all others she most hated, and, for some undefinable reason or other, feared, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it gave that undefinable sense of shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially appeals to the imagination by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a slight gasping ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... her from the path above the bay he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the real one in the summer-house. The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... the other from levity, were not sensible of that effect which the country about Rome produces upon the imagination, when it is impressed with the recollections, the sympathies, the natural beauties and the illustrious misfortunes which spread over these regions an undefinable charm. ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... her relations with boys and men she becomes self-conscious. Distinct sexual desire fortunately does not make its appearance in the girl at this period, as it does in the boy, but she becomes filled with vague undefined and undefinable longings. It is the period of "crushes" when the girl is apt to bestow her overflowing emotion on a girl friend. There is nothing reprehensible in these crushes—they act as a safety valve—and only in rare cases are they apt to lead to abnormal development. This is also the period ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... her walk towards it in dread unutterable, an undefined sense of evil filling her sinking heart; mingling with which, came, with a rush of terror, a fear of that other undefinable evil—the evil Mrs. Hare had declared ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... Melbourne. Nevertheless, it could no longer be concealed, nay, it was invariably admitted, that the political situation had been largely and most unexpectedly changed, and that there was a prospect, dim, perhaps, yet not undefinable, of the conduct of public affairs again falling to the alternate management ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli



Words linked to "Undefinable" :   vague, undefined



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