"Incurably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indulgence to face the alternative of dieting. They may not do any harm—properly operated, they probably do not—but, at best, I would regard them as being merely temporary expedients specially devised as first aid to the incurably lazy. ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... some commonplace condition as that his Royal Highness should first ride his horse up a glassy mountain in the district, a condition which his Majesty of Barodia strongly resented. I am afraid that Roger is incurably romantic; I have had to speak to him about it before. There was nothing of the sentimental in the whole business, and the facts are exactly as ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... believe you're incurably romantic, Hugh," she said laughingly, when the men had left the room. "Here you are, what they call a paragon of success, a future senator, Ambassador to England. I hear of those remarkable things you have done—even in New York the other day a man was asking me if I knew Mr. Paret, and spoke ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... vulnerable point of Paganism: the traditional mythology. Sallustius deals with it at once. The Akroates, or pupil, he says in Section 1, needs some preliminary training. He should have been well brought up, should not be incurably stupid, and should not have been familiarized with foolish fables. Evidently the mythology was not to be taught to children. He enunciates certain postulates of religious thought, viz. that God is always good and ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... I am willing to endure that my children should be incurably sick and suffering (as they are not) and I myself stupid and yet with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one condition, namely, that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning, of a RATIONAL UNITY OF ALL THINGS, I can conceive my acts and my thoughts and my troubles ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... The flesh is incurably bad. "It is not subject to the law of God, neither, indeed, can be." It never can be any better. It is no use trying to improve the flesh. You may educate it all you please. You may train it by the most approved methods, ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... leviathan so tamed? In that case the quarantine of the opium-eater might be finished within Coleridge's time, and with Coleridge's romantic ease. But mark the contradictions of this extraordinary man. Not long ago we were domesticated with a venerable rustic, strongheaded, but incurably obstinate in his prejudices, who treated the whole body of medical men as ignorant pretenders, knowing absolutely nothing of the system which they professed to superintend. This, you will remark, is no very singular ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... landmark to remind them of their youth or the years of their power and their pride. They sat there all day long, day after day; and tourists went away with the impression that the imposing brown stone mansion on the sacred crest of Nob Mill was a sumptuously endowed retreat for the incurably aged. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... measures, of provident legislation, of preservative institutions, destined to overlook and guard from infancy this crowd of unfortunates, abandoned or perverted by frightful examples. Once more, these disinherited beings, made neither better nor worse than other creatures, do not become thus incurably corrupted but in the filth of misery, ignorance, and brutality, where they crawl into existence. Still more excited by the laughter, by the bravos of the crowd collected at the windows, the actors of the abominable ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... choice. Now that the entire work is before the world, this is plain, and it is admitted. When the second volume, containing Giuseppe Caponsacchi, appeared, men no longer found it sordid or ugly; the third, with Pompilia, convinced them that the subject was not, after all, so incurably unlovely; and the fourth, with The Pope, and the passage from the Friar's sermon, may well persuade those who needed persuasion, that moral fruitfulness depends on the master, his eye and hand, his vision and grasp, more than on this and that in the transaction which has taken ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... done to any of them, for from the first, wherever I went and got speech with them, I gave them of all that I had, such as cloth and many other things, without receiving anything in return; but they are, as I have described, incurably timid. It is true that when they are reassured and thrown off this fear they are guileless, and so liberal of all they have that no one would believe it who had not seen it. They never refuse anything that they possess when it is asked ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... her color and her appetite and forgot to remember that her heart was incurably broken and that she could never love again. She liked to think her painful experience had made her very wise. Then she went abroad, and her cure was complete. The result of it all was that poise ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... First Sight. Nothing is more firmly established than the fact that a person may fall passionately and incurably in love with a person of the opposite sex at the very first sight, in the twinkling of an eye, in the literal sense of the word. One glance may be sufficient. And such a love may exist to the end of life, and may, if reciprocated, lead to supreme happiness, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... woman. An incurably common, vulgar woman. Nobody but a woman whose vulgarity is past praying for could have conceived such a scheme as I planned and carried out with that man Clifford Titterton—nobody. This—how shall I term it?—this ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... been no Duke of Newcastle to run athwart this fine scheme, would have had his difficulties in making her Hungarian Majesty comply. Her Majesty's great heart, incurably grieved about Silesia, is bent on having, if not restoration one day, which is a hope she never quits, at any rate some ample (cannot be too ample) equivalent elsewhere. On the Hanau scheme, united Teutschland, with England for soul to it, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... wait at serious dinner parties! Or rather, I suppose he'd desert the most enticing missionary to earn a casual half-crown at even an ungodly champagne-drinking dinner! Then that's the difference between me and Ernest. Ernest's selfish, incurably and radically selfish. Because this Oswald girl happens to take his passing fancy, and to fit in with his impossible Schurzian notions, he'll actually go and marry her. Not only will he have no consideration for ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Fitzgerald and Vesci, who contended that the operations of the bill would be mischievous; but it was not carried. On the 31st the latter noble lord moved another amendment, empowering the guardians to relieve in poor-houses "all destitute persons who are either incurably lame, or blind, or sick, or labouring under permanent bodily infirmity;" also all orphan children left in a state of destitution. Ministers, however, succeeded in carrying the original clause of the bill by a majority ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... back after removing the coal-scuttle, Tommy Brock was lying a little more sideways; but he seemed even sounder asleep. He was an incurably indolent person; he was not in the least afraid of Mr. Tod; he was simply too lazy ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... they stir there must be something. It appears the clown causes those who are incurably sad to ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... are all at one. But when we are told that "conversion" or "salvation" consists in a "complete turning away from self," common sense revolts. It is not true either in every-day life or in larger matters of conduct. In every-day life the incurably "unselfish" person is an intolerable nuisance. Here the common-sense rule is very simple: you have no right to seek your own "salvation," or, in non-theological terms, your own self-approval, at the cost of other people's; ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... a lie. "Treat human beings as machines as much as you will, the fact remains that they are incurably personal." The wage-slaves of the modern world asserted their personality, and the modern Socialist-Labour Movement is the result. The forces of organized labour have won some notable victories. They are a recognized power in the land. There are those who hope, and those ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Mauves was tired of his companion; he liked women who could, frankly, amuse him better. She was too dim, too delicate, too modest; she had too few arts, too little coquetry, too much charity. Lighting a cigar some day while he summed up his situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid. It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife a Christian, and between them an impassable ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... distress with which they are assailed. But it excites our wonder and grief that statesmen, who have superfluous means for covering the country with barracks, should find themselves unable to establish comfortable asylums for all the poor who are incurably diseased, in which they should be so provided for, that it would be as criminal in them to ask, as in others ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... was probably the best way to employ them, within the existing situation. The trouble was, Them M'zangwe was incurably tactical-minded. Put those geeks of Yoorkerk's in with the Kragans and they'd be most useful in conquering Konkrook, but the trouble was that, after associating with Kragans, they might develop into ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... the children's librarian will not have to put their heads, and sometimes their hearts, together over puzzling cases—cases of fraud, of mischief-making, of ignorant evil-doing, of inherited tendencies, physical, mental, and moral— and sometimes it will seem as if the whole human creation were incurably ailing, and the doctrine of total depravity will take on alarming probability. But at this point some sound, smiling, active boy or girl comes in with a cheerful greeting, and pessimism retires into the background. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... atmospheres are intolerant of clouds, an outline that is not harsh is abominable to them. They criticized their master's vagueness and must needs mend it. They sought to give political economy a precision and conviction such a subject will not stand. They took such words as "value," an incurably and necessarily vague word, "rent," the name of the specific relation of landlord and tenant, and "capital," and sought to define them with relentless exactness and use them with inevitable effect. So doing they departed more and more from reality. They ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... from his actual self. A man cannot even be practical without this imaginary or larger self. Unless he can work off his unexpressed remnant, his limbs are not free. Even down to the meanest of us, we are incurably larger than anything we ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... flirt,—while the gentleman went on like a madman on the balcony of the Cataract, because Lady Flora ran away for half an hour in broad daylight, to Prospect Point, with an old friend of her father's, oelat fifty and incurably an invalid. Ah, well—so it has been from the days of the first flirtation (always except that of Adam and Eve, when there was neither male nor female rival in the neighborhood), and so it will be to the last—with those arrogant, unreasonable, unsatisfied "lords ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the point where his emotions were mastered by his will. But Val had seen Ricky enjoy full tantrums, and the last occasion was not so long ago that the scene had become misty in his memory. Generous to the point of self-beggary, loyal to a fault, and incurably romantic, ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... evidence of one who has faithfully visited a family for a long time is very valuable in such cases, though conviction is often difficult to secure for lack of the wife's testimony. If the married vagabond that has been punished is still incurably lazy and irresponsible, the visitor should not allow his desire to reform the man to stand in the way of the best interests of the children, born and unborn. The wife's duty to her husband is a very sacred one, But so is her ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... the working-class leaders I have ever met. He came from my own county, Devonshire, being born at Horrabridge, on the road between Plymouth and Tavistock. He was honest to the heart's core, as well as very able, but he was incurably indolent. You never could be sure of him at a public meeting. He had to be looked up beforehand, or he might forget the engagement and spend his time more agreeably. He was passionately fond of the theatre, and could talk by the hour on famous performances of old actors and actresses. During the ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... the oldest in tenure, but a man incurably young for all that, was James Cuyler, the head of the company's local department, in charge of all the business of the Metropolitan District, and an underwriter as well known to the fraternity as the asphalt pavement of the street. The Guardian's local department, which ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... longer content to regard this world as a hopeless place of squalor and sin, as intrinsically and incurably wicked, as an abode which cannot be mended and which must, therefore, be despised and forsaken in spirit, even before the time when it has to be forsaken in body. The possible flawlessness of an other-worldly state no longer ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... under the teazing constraint. I have seen tempers ruined for life by the constant irritation, and most old people can probably say that they have seen promising intellects frittered away; minds above the average at the outset of life rendered incurably desultory, shallow, and conceited. If there are readers of Wordsworth who are puzzled at this day about the drift of his poem, called "Anecdote for Fathers, Showing how the Practice of Lying May be Taught," ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... herself; loved, she insisted, body and soul. Even as the fires of Erebus slumber beneath their mantle of ice, she concealed, under a varnish of conventionality—the crust was not so thick in her case—a nature throbbing with passion. She was everlastingly unappeased, because incurably romantic. All life, she truly declared, is a search for a friend. Unfortunately she sought with her eyes open, having never grasped the elementary truth that to find a friend one must close one eye: to keep him—two. She always attributed to men qualities which, she afterwards discovered, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... explanation was possible, he said. That's the awful part of it. Incurably ruined for life—by my own heedlessness! All that I meant to have done in the world—I never dare think of it again—I'm not able to think of it. Oh! if I could only live over again, and undo all I have done! [He buries ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... tamed? In that case the quarantine of the opium-eater might be finished within Coleridge's time, and with Coleridge's romantic ease. But mark the contradictions of this extraordinary man. Not long ago we were domesticated with a venerable rustic, strong-headed, but incurably obstinate in his prejudices, who treated the whole body of medical men as ignorant pretenders, knowing absolutely nothing of the system which they professed to superintend. This, you will remark, is ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... order to have the stairs ample, strong and well protected. I am not over-anxious to have them ornate, although handsome stairs are very charming if well placed; like many other beautiful things, they become incurably ugly when too obtrusive. The architect has sent several designs of balustrades from which we are to choose, and gives this advice about the dimensions: 'As you have plenty of room, the staircase should be four or four and a-half feet wide, so that two people can ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to procreate ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... the Hun comprehension elude, They're so cleverly crass, so painstakingly crude; For, in spite of his cunning and forethought immense, He is often incurably stupid and dense To the point of allowing his patriot zeal To put a large spoke in his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... her in Paradise Lane, he was conscious that they understood each other almost as well as anyone ever can understand any other human being, because they were in some respects so alike. Something quiet and incurably reserved in him—he could never have talked as bravely as she did—yet was the same as the quality in her that enabled her to bear her secret relations with Killigrew, that had enabled her to break those relations ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... under the thought of being coupled with Mary Ann. The thing sounded so ugly—so squalid. In the actual, it was not so unpleasant, but looked at from the outside—unsympathetically—it was hopelessly vulgar, incurably ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... something she couldn't face; that she had no right to blast the poor creature's whole future. She had a vision of those dreadful years; she knew that Olive would never get over the disappointment. It would touch her in the point where she felt everything most keenly; she would be incurably lonely and eternally humiliated. It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship; it had elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that had ever existed. Of course it had been more on Olive's side than on hers, she had always known that; but that, again, didn't make any ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... and less cordial than was common where Voltaire was concerned; but though their sympathy was imperfect, there was no lack of mutual goodwill and admiration. The poet is said to have done his best to push Diderot into the Academy, but the king was incurably hostile, and Diderot was not anxious for an empty distinction. He had none of that vanity nor eagerness for recognition—pardonable enough, for that matter—which such distinctions gratify. And he perhaps agreed with Voltaire himself, who said of academies and parliaments ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Lucilla, quite overlooked among the rector's rapidly-increasing second family, was allowed to visit her maternal uncle and aunt at stated periods in every year. Born, to all appearance with the full possession of her sight, the poor child had become incurably blind before she was a year old. In all other respects, she presented a striking resemblance to her mother. Bachelor uncle Batchford, and his old maiden sister, both conceived the strongest affection ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... Madame de la Tour a letter from her aunt. The fear of death, without which hearts as insensible as hers would never feel, had alarmed her into compassion. When she wrote she was recovering from a dangerous illness, which had, however, left her incurably languid and weak. She desired her niece to return to France: or, if her health forbade her to undertake so long a voyage, she begged her to send Virginia, on whom she promised to bestow a good education, to procure for her a splendid marriage, and to leave her heiress of her whole fortune. She ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... the sequel. Morris remained as rigidly and unremittingly absent as if he had died of a broken heart, and Catherine had apparently buried the memory of this fruitless episode as deep as if it had terminated by her own choice. We know that she had been deeply and incurably wounded, but the Doctor had no means of knowing it. He was certainly curious about it, and would have given a good deal to discover the exact truth; but it was his punishment that he never knew—his punishment, I mean, for the abuse of sarcasm in his relations with his daughter. There was a good ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... to expect good? When the sons of darkness go to cast out the prince of darkness, is this possible? Can Satan cast out Satan? It is a satisfactory answer, that we rest in, and stops the mouths of all not incurably blinded, when we hear of protestations, and promises to maintain the protestant religion and laws of the land; when we see, that the effecting of the one is by the sword of papists, of the other, by the hand of delinquents; except ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... everyone concerned that there was no sign of bad temper among the officers of the battalion. The colonel lived a good deal by himself in his tent, but was always quietly good-humoured. Lieutenant Dalton, an incurably merry boy, kept the other subalterns cheerful. Only Captain Maitland was inclined to complain a little, and he had a special grievance, an excuse which justified a certain amount of grumbling. He slept badly at night, and liked to read a book of some ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... disposition and previous acquaintance. Shu[u]zen Dono was not so easily balked. All the objections were brushed aside. Youth was everything in my favour. His eyes twinkled with inward amusement as he spoke. All the easier came the practice which everyone must go through. If Shimo was incurably awkward she would not be dismembered, but dismissed. Great would be the forbearance. That she had everything to learn pleased him all the more. She would be the more readily moulded to his service. At the yashiki youth ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... its continuous existence. It is the same when witnessing a legerdemain performance. Seeing is not always believing, despite the proverb; but believing is often seeing. It is not to the point that in that little matter of the door Wimp was as hopelessly and incurably wrong as he has been in everything all along. Though the door was securely bolted, I confess that I should have seen that I had broken the bolt in forcing the door, even if it had been broken beforehand. Never once since December ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... my vengeance, and write soon, for I long to have a letter from you; of you I have heard often—but of and from, though they may be both brothers of the family of the prepositions, are very different in meaning. I have not written one word of Caroline or Ellen. Am I not incurably egotistical? The former declares she is sure you will have no time to read a letter from her, with such a volume as mine, and Ellen says she has no time by this opportunity. I told her she ought to get up as I did, she blushed, looked confused enough ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... judgment, and the other a colossal excess of self-esteem,[3120] constitute its sources, and nowhere are both more prolific than in Marat. Never did a man with such diversified culture, possess such an incurably perverted intellect. Never did a man, after so many abortive speculations and such repeated malpractices, conceive and maintain so high an opinion of himself. Each of these two sources in him augments ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... candidate for the Market Malford division, where the influence of Fontenoy's family was considerable. Since the general election, which had taken place in June, and had returned a moderate Conservative Government to power, the member for Market Malford had become incurably ill. The seat might be vacant at any moment. Fontenoy asked for a telegram, and urged ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I found, of a distinguished bard on the platform, told me, with emotion in her look and voice, how dear were these solemnities to the heart of her people, how deep was the interest which is aroused by them. I believe her, but still the whole performance, on that particular morning, was incurably lifeless. The recitation of the prize compositions began: pieces of verse and prose in the Welsh language, an essay on punctuality being, if I remember right, one of them; a poem on the march of Havelock, another. This went on ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... was taught by charity. Even when a boy he was forced to labor for his bread. In the first opening of manhood a terrible calamity fell upon him, in magnitude fit to form the mystery or centre of an antique drama. He had to dwell, all his days, with a person incurably mad. From poverty he passed at once to unpleasant toil and perpetual fear. These were the sole changes in his fortune. Yet he gained friends, respect, a position, and great sympathy from all; showing what one poor man of genius, under grievous misfortune, may do, if he ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... his ambition always to be calm, oracular, weighty; always to be sure of himself; but his temperament was incurably nervous, restless, and impulsive. He could not be still, he could not wait. Instinct drove him to action for the sake of action, instinct made him seek continually for notice, prominence, comment. These fundamental appetites had urged him into public life—to the Borough Council ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... thousand individuals. In contact with the white man the Indian tended to deteriorate. He frequented the settlements often to the annoyance of the men and the dread of the women and children; he got into debt, was incurably slothful and idle, and developed an uncontrollable desire to drink and steal. Where the Indians were not a menace, they were a nuisance, and the colonies passed many laws concerning the Indians which were designed to meet ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... loan-monger or the village oaf than he is of the swine in the sty. But are we justified in thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and intellectual understandings? Because some people seem to me steadfastly and consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull and confused, does it follow that there are not phases, albeit I have never chanced to see them, of exaltation in the one case and illumination in the other? And may I not be a little restricting my perception of Good? While I have been ready enough to pronounce this or that ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... attempt of the prisoners to sham madness, in order to get to Bedlam, from which they can get out when cured. One woman deceived all the medical people, clergyman, jailer, and turnkeys, was removed to Bedlam as incurably mad, and from Bedlam made her escape. I saw a girl of about eighteen, who had been educated at Miss Hesketh's school, and had been put to service in a friend's family. She was in love with a footman who was turned away: the old housekeeper refused ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... fatal competition is never that of goods produced at low wages-cost. It is that of superior goods; and if foreign textiles have the aid of better dyes than are available to our manufacturers our industry will be wounded incurably. It appears in fact to be the superior quality of German fabric gloves, and not their cheapness, that has hitherto defeated the competition of the native product. To protect inferior production is simply the road to ruin for a British industry. Delicacy ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... difficult to judge of a nation in arms from the writings of its stay-at-homes; but no one can read recent articles by the leaders of German thought without feeling that the Germans are still, before all things and incurably, "the people of poets and philosophers," and that, by a tragic irony, it is the best and most characteristic qualities of the race which are sustaining and will continue to sustain it in the conflict in which its dreams have ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... control over my aunt's fortune (which would have more than satisfied her highest ambition) she would have guarded it from the assaults of strangers with a maternal ferocity. She would, however, have seen no great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, had she given only to those who were already rich. Perhaps she felt that such persons, not being actually in need of my aunt's presents, could not be suspected of simulating ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... just as a mad dog runs on and bites at every one he meets; nor can I doubt but that, should one of those infected, diseased creatures have bitten any man or woman while the frenzy of the distemper was upon them, they, I mean the person so wounded, would as certainly have been incurably infected as one that was sick before, and had ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... it, then, beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will be some incurably diseased in morals and in body, some for whom nothing can be done, some of whom even the optimist must despair, and for whom he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... long rankle even when the appearance of tranquillity is restored. We therefore assure your Majesty that it is with shame and sorrow we have seen several acts of hostility which could have no other tendency than incurably to alienate the minds of your American subjects. To excite, by a proclamation issued by your Majesty's governor, an universal insurrection of negro slaves in any of the colonies is a measure full of complicated horrors, absolutely illegal, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... half-minute intervals with his bilingual disharmonies. He was pallid, meagerly built, stoop-shouldered, bristly-haired, pock-marked, and stiff-gaited, with a face which would have been totally insignificant but for an obstinate chin and a pair of velvet-black, pathetically questioning eyes; and he was incurably an outlander. For five years he had lived among us, occupying a cubbyhole in Schepstein's basement full of ribs, handles, crooks, patches, and springs, without appreciably improving his speech or his position. It was said ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... gold? Since in this way of speaking, nothing is gold but what partakes of an essence, which we, not knowing, cannot know where it is or is not, and so cannot be sure that any parcel of matter in the world is or is not in this sense gold; being incurably ignorant whether IT has of has not that which makes anything to be called gold; i. e. that real essence of gold whereof we have no idea at all. This being as impossible for us to know as it is for a blind man to tell in what flower the colour of a pansy is or is not to be found, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... a diviner life, and uplifting it with a new courage." One of the most brilliant of the eighteenth-century poets said: "The lapse of time changes all but man, who ever has been, and ever will be, just what he is." Which means that man is by make incurably selfish. This is a lie. And it is the worst kind of lying, for it represents not only the inability to find good in man, but the inability to believe that there is good to be found. My own stand is where thought and experience have forced me. From human nature left to itself I hope ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... barred and deserted. I had no company save a couple of ravens who, after assuring themselves, with that infernal cunning of theirs, that I carried no gun, became as friendly as could be expected of such solemn fowls. They are always in pairs—incurably monogamous; whereas the carrion crow, for reasons of its own, has a fondness for living in trios. This menage a trois may have subtle advantages and seems to be a step in the direction of the truly social habits of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... much money is really wanted by people who don't deserve it any more than I do; and who, besides, are so weak and stupid and lazy and honest—or so incurably dishonest—that they can't make it for themselves! I have to look after a good many of these people. Barty was fond of them, honest or not. They are so incurably prolific; and so was he, poor dear boy! but, oh, the difference! Grapes don't grow ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Tacitus in fragments is still the colossal torso of history. Velleius Paterculas, of whom a fragment only has reached us, we owe to a single copy: no other having ever been discovered, and which has occasioned the text of this historian to remain incurably corrupt. Taste and criticism have certainly incurred an irreparable loss in that Treatise on the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence, by Quintilian; which he has himself noticed with so much satisfaction in his "Institutes." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... prisoner, and threatened Horner with that old, cold stare of challenge, and frequently Horner had to drive him off in order to save his share of the feast from the rapacity of the eaglet. But as for the female, she remained incurably suspicious and protesting. From the upper ledge, where she devoted her care to the other nestling, she would yelp down her threats and execrations, but she ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... did his best to resist the influence of these darkening ideas. He tried to keep it up that everything was going well and that most of these shadows and complaints were the mischief of a few incurably restless personalities. He tried to keep it up that to belong to the working class was a thoroughly jolly thing—for those who were used to it. He declared that all who wanted to alter our laws or our ideas ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... something great and embracing, a return to fellowship. Here beside me, veiled from me only by our transient embarrassment and the tarnish of separation and silences, was the one person who had ever broken down the crust of shy insincerity which is so incurably my characteristic and talked intimately of the inmost things of life to me. I discovered now for the first time how intense had been my loneliness for the past five years. I discovered now that through all those years I had been hungry for such talk as Mary alone could give me. My mind was filled ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... miserable invalid, afflicted with diseases that sharpen the temper and narrow the mind. John Randolph well might have outgrown inherited prejudices and limitations, and attained to the stature of a modern, a national, a republican man. John Randolph sick—radically and incurably sick—ceased to grow just when his best growth ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... been written as a memorial of tradition within a century or two of our aera. To suppose, even for the sake of answering, the case of a forgery, is too gross and shocking: though a very common practice amongst writers miscalled religious, but in fact radically, incurably unspiritual. This might be shown to be abominable even in an intellectual sense; because no adequate, no rational purpose could be answered by such a labour. The sole conceivable case would be, that from the eldest days the Jews had been governed by all the Mosaic ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... close, it makes the earth Burn in a frenzy of breeding,—smoke and flame Of lives burning up from agoniz'd loam! Those monstrous sappy jungles of clutcht growth, Enormous weed hugging enormous weed, What can such fearful increase have to do With prospering bounty? A rage works in the ground, Incurably, like frantic lechery, Pouring its passion out in crops and spawns. 'Tis as the mighty spirit of life, that here Walketh beautifully praising, glad of God, Should, stepping on the poison'd Indian shore, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... nervous as in the case of annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days of rain, when all one's gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with the rain; or as at the idiotically consoling tick-tack of a clock, when one sits and grows incurably tired of one's self; or at watching the flowers of the wall-paper, when the same chain of worn-out dreams clanks about against one's will in the brain and the links are joined and come apart and in a stifling ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being merely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator between these ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... dear boy," said Amroth. "This is rather out of your depth. But I am somewhat disappointed at your view of the situation. Surely these are all very important matters? Your disposition is, I am afraid, incurably frivolous! How could people be more worthily employed than in getting rid of the last traces of intellectual error, and in referring everything to its actual origin? Did not your heart burn within you at his luminous exposition? I had always thought you ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I know too much," replied Fisher, with his eye on the river. "I know that, and I know a great many other things. I know the atmosphere and the way the whole thing works. I know this fellow has succeeded in making himself something incurably commonplace and comic. I know you can't get up a persecution of old Toole or Little Tich. If I were to tell Hoggs or Halkett that old Jink was an assassin, they would almost die of laughter before my eyes. Oh, I ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... degraded status," we find in the forefront of them that the worker must be secured "payment as a human being, and not merely as a mortal tenement of so much labour power for which an efficient demand exists." This, especially to an incurably lazy person like myself, is an extremely attractive programme. To be paid, and paid well, merely in return for having "taken the trouble to be born," is an ideal towards which my happiest dreams have ever struggled in vain. But would it work ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... we may assume they are favourable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas. Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional they may show, they are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... telegraphic messenger, I may have passed him daily for a year without any kind of notice. But on a day in the early spring of 1886—mid-April at a guess—I came upon him in such a way as to remark him incurably. I saw before me on that morning of tender leafage, of pale sunlight and blue mist contending for the day, a strangely assorted pair proceeding slowly toward the Inn. A telegraph boy was one; by his side walked, vehemently explaining, a tall, elderly solicitor—white-whiskered, drab-spatted, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... aloud and hastened in his usual way through the Oliva Gate along the Langfuhr[11] to the Carlsberg. He looked down into Sorrento, and the tears gushed from his eyes. "Oh!" he cried, "Oh! how deep, how incurably deep an injury, O thou eternal ruling Power, does thy bitter irony inflict upon poor man's soft heart! But no, no! But why should the child cry over the incurable pain when instead of enjoying the light and warmth he thrusts his hand into the flames? Destiny visibly laid its hand upon me, ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... renders a sexual relationship incurably offensive to others and altogether wrong, and that is cruelty. But who can define cruelty? How far is the leaving of a third person to count as cruelty? There again I hesitate to judge. To love and not be loved is a fate for which it seems no one can be blamed; to lose ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation—no telling is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and passion would not have taken me. But between myself and Isabel things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we had, the jolly march of our minds together. That has always mattered enormously. I should have wanted her company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we would have hunted shoulder to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... sort in English literature of the ancient and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever transformed it. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... important in its moral results—and therefore how praiseworthy in itself—is the act of eating and drinking! The social virtues center in the stomach. A man who is not a better husband, father, and brother after dinner than before is, digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man. What hidden charms of character disclose themselves, what dormant amiabilities awaken, when our common humanity gathers together to pour out the gastric juice! At the opening of the hampers from Thorpe Ambrose, sweet Sociability (offspring of the happy union of Civilization ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... tear: not because your sins have found you out, but for secret sins that you know can never find you out in this world? And, still better, do you ever weep in secret places not for sin, but for sinfulness—which is a very different matter? Do you ever weep to yourself and to God alone over your incurably wicked heart? If not, then weep for that with all your might, night and day. No mortal man has so much cause to weep as you have. Go to God on the spot, on every spot, and say with Bishop Andrewes, who is both Mr. Desires-awake and Mr. Wet- eyes ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... squire 'in his place' handling the reins, which had not been witnessed for many a day and so it appeared that the recent guest had been exceptionally complimented. 'But why not a warm word, instead of turning me off to decipher a bit of Egyptian on baked brick,' he thought, incurably ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are speedily overcome by the moth, and answer only to breed a horde of destroyers to ravage the rest of his Apiary. The time spent upon them is often as absolutely wasted, as the time devoted to a sick animal incurably diseased, and which can never be of any service, while by nursing it along, its owner incurs the risk of infecting his whole stock with its deadly taint. If, on the score of kindness, he should shut it up, and let it starve to death, few of us, I imagine, would care ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... Europe everywhere except in the mountains, the water is flat and insipid beyond the power of words to describe. It is served lukewarm; but no matter, ice could not help it; it is incurably flat, incurably insipid. It is only good to wash with; I wonder it doesn't occur to the average inhabitant to try it for that. In Europe the people say contemptuously, "Nobody drinks water here." Indeed, they have a sound ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... scolding, there will not be a single man of letters or higher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there will be less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics will have been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is conversant with the class in which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling is carried out to the final extremity of the university degree knows that its scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows little about literature ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... correctly imagined the manner of its heralding. He had imagined in his early simplicity that one day Constance, blushing, might put her mouth to his ear and whisper—something positive. It had not occurred in the least like that. But things are so obstinately, so incurably unsentimental. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... beginning. Perhaps she had been aware that there was something missing. Perhaps not. Maisie had seemed always singularly unaware. That was because she didn't care for him. Perhaps, if he had loved her passionately she would have cared more. Perhaps not. Maisie was incurably cold. She shrank from the slightest gesture of approach; she was afraid of any emotion. She was one of those unhappy women who are born with an aversion from warm contacts, who cannot give themselves. What puzzled ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... a little lift to her superb shoulders. "You're incurably romantic, Moya. It's only a scramble for money, ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... There is no nerve in France that will respond to such an appeal. That house has no place in the affections of the people. It was forced upon them, at the point of the bayonet, in 1814. It has been tried a second time: found to be incurably despotic, and every indication attests that the revolution which has again ejected them from the throne, is, in this respect, popular throughout France. The influence of that family is extinguished for ever, ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... clerks already with me, but I must have additional help. In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... or lame Jimmy, as he was often called, was a delicate-looking boy of ten, with a fair complexion and sweet face, but incurably lame, a defect which, added to his delicate constitution, was likely to interfere seriously with his success in life. But, as frequently happens, Jimmy was all the more endeared to his mother and brother by his misfortune and bodily weakness, and if either were obliged to suffer from poverty, ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... it, I fear. And the certainty has made me perfectly miserable, because his is such a valuable life to the world, and he himself is such a splendid, wholesome, noble specimen of youth and courage, that I cannot bear to believe him incurably afflicted." ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... night of solitary musing upon certain waste places known best to outlanders, walked up Saint James's Street at six o'clock in the morning, talking lightly and fiercely to himself. A long life of loneliness had given him that habit incurably. Discovering the hour by a clock in Piccadilly, he realised that it was too early to wait upon Mrs. Germain in Albemarle Street, so continued his way up the empty hill, entered the Park, and flung himself upon the turf under the elms. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Ambrosian Library, while Lord Risborough, occupying a villa in the neighbourhood of the Torre San Gallo, was giving himself to the artistic researches and the cosmopolitan society which suited his health and his tastes. He was a dilettante of the old sort, incurably in love with living, in spite of the loss of his wife, and his only son; in spite also of an impaired heart—in the physical sense—and various other drawbacks. He came across the bright girl student, discovered that she could talk very creditably about manuscripts and ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... province among those who partake of what is abstractedly good, and can have too much or too little of these. Now there are beings who cannot have too much of them, as perhaps the gods; there are others, again, to whom no particle of them is of use, those who are incurably wicked to whom all things are hurtful; others to whom they are useful to a certain degree: for this reason then the province of Justice ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... for incurably credulous readers is an official report of the French War Ministry—not a private rumor, be it noted, but an official ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... Catherick had not died when she did, what should I have done? I should, in that case, have assisted worn-out Nature in finding permanent repose. I should have opened the doors of the Prison of Life, and have extended to the captive (incurably afflicted in mind and body both) ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... car and stepped off. As Claude passed him, he stood waving his handkerchief,—a rather funny figure under the station lights, in his black clothes and his stiff straw hat, his short legs well apart, wearing his incurably ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... side of your nature, physical, material, animal; but you have got a mind and emotions or "soul"; and you have got a spirit. To act as though you had not is just as futile as to pretend that you have not got a body. "Where there is no vision the people perish." "Mankind is incurably religious." "All the world seeks after God." Those proverbs, those sayings, which are familiar to all, crystallize the world's experience that human beings are spiritual beings. If there is any person who thinks ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... like the sight of somebody's hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... broad-shouldered, of a Cumbria type commonly held to be of Scandinavian origin. His eye was a little wandering and absent, and the ragged gray whiskers which surrounded his countenance emphasized the slight incoherence of its expression. Quiet he was and looked. But his wife knew him for one of the most incurably obstinate of men; the inveterate critic moreover of everything and every one about him, beginning with herself. This trait of his led her unconsciously to throw most of her remarks to him into the form of questions, as offering ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... added to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones; they fused inseparably with others that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself with a certain comprehensive perception of London, complete indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way a whole that began with my first visit and is still being mellowed ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... no other explanation of it possible, he said. That is the most horrible part of it. My whole life incurably ruined—just because of my own imprudence. All that I wanted to do in the world-not to dare to think of it any more—not to be able to think of it! Oh! if only I could live my life over again—if only I could undo what I have done! (Throws himself ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... might be left to wait without speculation about his purpose. Guessing at the possible business of an unknown and distant man is a form of mental exertion very distasteful to any one who has entered into the calm joy of drifting home after sunset. But Meldon was a man of incurably active mind. He was deeply interested in the solitary figure on the beach. The yacht was borne very slowly on, and it became possible at last to distinguish the figure ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... neutral powers may have of their own, it may be said generally that they are keenly interested in preventing the settlement from degenerating into a deal in points of vantage for any further aggressions in any direction. Both the United States of America and China are traditionally and incurably pacific powers, professing and practicing an unaggressive policy, and the chief outstanding minor States are equally concerned in securing a ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... household who came to see Samson at more or less frequent intervals were individuals of the native community whom he encouraged to intimacy for ethnological and social reasons. When they gave him information about Gungadhura's doings, that was merely because they were incurably addicted to gossip; as a gentleman, and in some sense a representative of His Majesty the King, he would not dream, of course, of paying attention to any such stuff; but one could not, of course, be so rude and high-handed as to stop their talking even ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... thus drew upon her considerable notice. She was prevailed on, though with some difficulty, to leave the haystack; and after a residence of a considerable period in the country, supported by subscriptions, she was removed, on its being ascertained that she was incurably insane, to an hospital in London, where, after continuing several ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Operation is to render the foot insensitive to pain, and to give to an otherwise incurably lame animal a further period of usefulness. After the operation, as time goes on, this object may become defeated by the reunion of the divided ends of the nerve. In that case, neurectomy must necessarily be ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... "Being incurably honest I am bound to tell tales on myself. Yes, I do mean it. I'd probably be rushing round for freckle lotion and patent nose pins, to give me a Greek-boy effect. I'd take to swathing myself in chiffons and have my hair a different tint each season. I think every business woman would ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... the horse's back would become incurably sore if I rode him with his back in the condition it was, I suggested that the horse had better be led. Wilson therefore ordered me into the wagon to drive the team, and required Havely, my fellow-slave, to walk,—intending we should take turns. After ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... in Lisbon and spent six days which, in a journal privately issued afterwards, they described as of "unique interest." Richard had audiences with ministers, and foretold a crisis at no distant date, "the foundations of government being incurably corrupt. Yet how blame, etc."; while Clarissa inspected the royal stables, and took several snapshots showing men now exiled and windows now broken. Among other things she photographed Fielding's ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... history of the South Pole! If anyone had hinted a word of anything of the sort four or five years ago, I should have looked upon him as incurably mad. And yet the madman would have been right. One circumstance has followed on the heels of another, and everything has turned out so entirely different from what I ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... insist upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to supply them and make a virtue out of it. It mattered little to the official mind that the system was incurably bad and immoral; the main thing was to speedily and effectually transfer an awkward burden to other shoulders. The entire history of penal transportation from Great Britain throws a sinister light upon the national character. The practice originated with banishment of convicts to the American colonies ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... one example of this immortal great genius and incurably indolent painter; it was a Knight of Malta, a Templar kneeling in prayer. The picture was painted on slate, and in its unfaded color and its finish was immeasurably finer than ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... composed by a Fleming at the end of the fifteenth century, a quick, sobbing rhythm, expressive of naive petulance at delay in the Virgin's intercession. Mr. Innes called it natural music—music which the modern Church abhorred and shamefully ostracised; and the conversation turned on the incurably bad taste and the musical misdeeds of a certain priest, Father Gordon, whom Mr. Innes judged to be responsible for all the bad music to ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... in that state of nervous irritability which seeks relief in rapidity of motion. Public opinion in the neighborhood (especially public opinion among the women) had long since decided that his manners were offensive, and his temper incurably bad. The men who happened to pass him on the footpath said "Good-morning" grudgingly. The women took no notice of him—with one exception. She was young and saucy, and seeing him walking at the top of his speed on the way to the ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... escaped from the Commentaries of Julius Caesar into the genial society of Feuerbach. That jurist died in May 1833 (poisoned, say the Kasparites), a new guardian was appointed, and Kaspar lived with Dr. Meyer. Finding him incurably untruthful, the doctor ceased to provoke him by comments on his inaccuracies, and Kaspar got a small clerkly place. With this he was much dissatisfied, for he, like Feuerbach, had expected Lord Stanhope to take him to England. Feuerbach, in the dedication to Lord Stanhope of his book (1832), writes, ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... cosmical import of the myth with the later, personal interests of the story, is curiously illustrated by the place which the poem assigns to Hecate. This strange Titaness is, first, a nymph only; afterwards, as if changed incurably by the passionate cry of Persephone, she becomes her constant attendant, and is even identified with her. But in the Homeric hymn her lunar character is clear; she is really the moon only, who hears the cry of Persephone, as the sun saw her, when Aidoneus carried her away. One morning, as ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of "Radial Paralysis" and "Brachial Paralysis," there is to be found in veterinary literature a discussion of conditions which vary in character from the almost insignificant form of paresis to the incurably affected conditions wherein the whole shoulder is ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... of kindred were strong. He suffered much inward distress as he thought of the father and son, and their old touching dependence upon him. Chudleigh, as Jacob knew well, was himself incurably ill. Could he ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or simply running races. He was known through the whole town, and beloved for his many endearing qualities of heart. As to his mind, it was perhaps not much to brag of, and he certainly had some defects of character. He was incurably lazy, and his laziness grew upon him as he grew older, till hardly anything but the sight of a gun or a bone would move him. He lost his interest in politics, and, though there is no reason to suppose that he ever became indifferent to his principles, it is certain that he ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... temperament of arrogance. I cannot pretend to be humble myself; all I can confess is the knowledge that in so far as I could acquire humility I should be happier. Indeed, many instances prove that success and humility are not incompatible. One of the most eminent of our politicians is by nature incurably modest. The difficulty in reconciling the two qualities lies in that "perpetual presence of self to self which, though common enough in men of great ambition and ability, never ceases to ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... failure is more tragic than all the rest. They love to be impressive, to produce a panic of apprehension and a thrill of reverence in their enemy; and they have completely failed to impress the ordinary British private. He remains incurably humorous, and so little moved to passion that his daily offices ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... impotent, an outcast as well as his son,[216] a cripple, a madman, an idiot, one blind, one incurably diseased, and such like,[217] are to be maintained, but do not share ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... lived for many years after, his punishment was terrible. He was incurably maimed; and being unable to work, he was forced, for existence, to beg alms of those who had once feared and flattered him. He suffered, too, increasingly, under his own horrible interpretation of the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... five minutes, by doing or saying something odious. He differed from other children, and differed unpleasantly. He had taken the full tinge of his sanctimonious upbringing; he was pharisaical, cruel at times, incurably twisted by his father's creed that wrong becomes right when committed by a pious person from pious motives. (His mother had once destroyed a cat because she found herself growing fond of it and believed that a Christian's soul must be weaned ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... said. "All of them. Close-mouthed, anti-social, fiercely independent, incurably romantic, always convinced that the big strike is just a piece of rock away. McCann, now, he was a bit more realistic than most. He'd be the one I'd expect to take out a retirement policy. A real pence-pincher, that one, though I shouldn't say it as he's dead. But that's the way he was. Brighter ...
— The Risk Profession • Donald Edwin Westlake
... story. So then the men, having in the first part of the contest done things worthy of themselves, and having for the most part, although not all, yet the majority, avoided the (not) falling into ditches and the like incurably at least, came presently to the wooden fence, which I conjecture to be the wall meant by the Delphic oracle. It being then necessary either remaining on the hither side to be driven away from all hope of the prize or leaping to run risks concerning their lives, and the ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... Carleton papers are covered with descriptive lists of claimed and counter-claimed niggers—Julius Caesars, Jupiters, Venuses, Dianas, and so on, who were either 'stout wenches' and 'likely fellows' or 'incurably lazy' ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... are at apogee of sartorial ridiculousness I maintain that the garments of women, from the comfort standpoint, anyhow, are not any more foolish than the garments to which the average man is incurably addicted. If women are vassals to fashion men are slaves to convention, and fashion has the merit that it alters overnight, whereas convention is a slow moving thing that stands still a long time before it does move. Convention is the wooden ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... criticism a mockery, and something of a shame. In what I have written I have dealt less with his work than with the false estimate of it which, for a year or two, has been thrust upon the public by a certain band of writers who are either hopelessly incompetent to assess our labours or incurably dishonest, It is very possible indeed that Mr. Crockett is wholly undeserving of censure in this regard, that he has not in any way asked or aided the manufacture of this balloon of a reputation in which he has ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of jocularity was not the worst. Steele, whose imprudence of generosity, or vanity of profusion, kept him always incurably necessitous, upon some pressing exigence, in an evil hour, borrowed a hundred pounds of his friend, probably without much purpose of repayment; but Addison, who seems to have had other notions of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... Karl who created difficulties. He said—and Donovan believed him—that he was personally quite willing to marry Madame Ypsilante. He desired to marry her. She was the only woman in the world whom he would marry of his own free will. But he remained incurably terrified of the Emperor. Donovan talked to him about the rights of free citizens. He said that the humblest man had power to choose his wife. Nothing he said had the slightest influence on ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... institution of a regency necessary. In one word, the purpose of the measure was to prevent such a situation from arising in Prussia as prevails now in Bavaria, where, since 1886 the throne has been occupied by a lunatic prince, who was incurably insane for many years before his accession to the crown, and whose dementia takes that peculiar form, which is described in the Bible as having overtaken Nebuchadnezzar. King Otto of Bavaria imagines ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... missionary service in the far East. I had no liking for the prayer-meetings of the students, but I joined the movement for holding religious services in the city almshouse, a primitive institution which had no chaplain, and where were sent not only the incurably poor and the incurably sick, but the idiots and half-witted, as well as the temporarily incapacitated poor, who would have been, in a better and more complete social organization, sent to a hospital, which ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... said to me while we were passing an incurably ugly house, "The man who built that must have had a very good excuse for it!" It was a profound remark, but if that particular building were the only one needing apology for its ugliness, or if there were no common faults of construction and interior arrangement, I should not think you in special ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... degree, the qualities we have named, no man ever did, and no man ever will, become a gentleman. Where they do not bear sway, society may be brilliant in garniture, high in pretension, but it is intrinsically and incurably vulgar!" ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... is a difficulty that we make ourselves: 'is the false preconception which we bring to the question, that the problem is insoluble, that no such thing ever was done or ever will be done.' On the contrary, those who are incurably sceptical of federation, owe their scepticism not to a preconception at all, but to a reasoned examination of actual schemes that have been proposed, and of actual obstacles that irresistible circumstances interpose. It is when we consider the real life, the material pursuits, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... that the empire cannot be sound when an important, a vital part of its political frame is incurably sore. Let that sore be healed by justice, large, generous, and complete; let Ireland be truly and really represented, in whatever manner her representation may be carried out, and the sudden rise of the little western isle in wealth, contentment, true prosperity, and happiness, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this mortal has put on immortality. Even what we call our material desires are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton |
