"Irreclaimable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Haddon and Ted McKnight, and nobody—according to everybody's wise assurances—was the least bit surprised. The fathers of the township (and the mothers, too) had long since given Dick up as an irresponsible and irreclaimable imp. One large section declared the boy to be 'a bit gone,' which was generally Waddy's simple and satisfactory method of accounting for any attribute of man, woman, or child not in conformity with the dull rule of conduct prevailing at Waddy. Another section persisted in its belief ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... a thing, for which Miss Sabrina owed me a grudge that was not soon given up. At the same time, I was grieved to see the testimonies of joyfulness for a holy victory, brought into such disrepute by the ill-timed demonstrations of the two irreclaimable naturals, that had not a true conception of the cause for ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... fame and prosperity might have been in store for Goldsmith, had fate so willed it; and, at forty-six, had not sudden disease carried him off. I say prosperity rather than competence, for it is probable that no sum could have put order into his affairs or sufficed for his irreclaimable habits of dissipation. It must be remembered that he owed 2,000l. when he died. "Was ever poet," Johnson asked, "so trusted before?" As has been the case with many another good fellow of his nation, his life was tracked and his substance wasted by ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who plant for profit, and are thrusting every other tree out of the way, to make room for their favourite, the larch, I would utter first a regret, that they should have selected these lovely vales for their vegetable manufactory, when there is so much barren and irreclaimable land in the neighbouring moors, and in other parts of the island, which might have been had for this purpose at a far cheaper rate. And I will also beg leave to represent to them, that they ought not ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... that no man should quit the line of route to drink without my permission. There was one, notwithstanding, who never could, in cases of extremity, resist the temptation of water, and who would rush to it, regardless of consequences. Now this man continued to be an irreclaimable character, and in six years after he had lost all the advantages he gained by his services on this occasion. The morning had been calm and very hot, but at three P.M. the sun was obscured, to our inexpressible relief, and clouds full of thunder at length overcast the whole ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... prevent the inevitable? War is a great clearer of the atmosphere; and one of our poets, Coleridge, I believe, says that 'Carnage is God's daughter'! a bold figure of rhetoric, not without its apparently sufficient apologies. Why not let the Sioux and Chippewas, or any other of the wild, irreclaimable brood, fight their bloodiest, and do their prettiest to help Nature, who seems bent on the extermination of all inferior races? They have got to die, any way!—that is a great consolation!—and if the philanthropists at Washington had only left them to themselves, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the country. I embarked my capital in the wine trade, and, could I have restrained myself from drinking, should have been successful, and in a short time might have doubled my property, as I stated to Mr Evelyn; but now, I had become an irreclaimable drunkard, and when that is the case, all hope is over. My affairs soon became deranged, and, at the request of my partner, they were wound up, and I found myself with my capital of L1500 reduced to L1000. With this, I resolved to try my fortune in ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... taught him writing, arithmetic, Cornelius Nepos, and Phaedrus. He soon discovered, however, that the worthy priest was an ignoramus, and congratulates himself on having escaped from his hands at the age of nine, otherwise he believes that he should have been an absolute and irreclaimable dunce. His mother and father-in-law were constantly repeating the maxim then so popular among the Italian nobility, that it was not necessary that a gentleman should be a doctor. It was at this early age that ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... themselves; and the confiscation of their estates, while it increased the number of malecontents, both enabled William to gratify farther the rapacity of his Norman captains, and gave them the prospect of new forfeitures and attainders. The king began to regard all his English subjects as inveterate and irreclaimable enemies; and thenceforth either embraced, or was more fully confirmed in the resolution of seizing their possessions, and of reducing them to the most abject slavery. Though the natural violence and severity of his temper made him incapable ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... at a corner of the door-way for her to pass him into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot—curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dreamer in practical affairs, and just ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimable optimist; all that is base and ugly in life passed out of view as he soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there were consolations in maternal nature, in ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... department-store assured me that shoplifting had practically ceased since a number of petty thieves had been put on probation under maximum suspended sentences. It would be impossible for me adequately to describe the gratifying surprises that came almost daily in my experience with these supposedly irreclaimable men and women. I found that they invariably grasped with desperate eagerness at a chance to reform, and the joy which they exhibited at the night sessions was oftentimes very pathetic. "We are happier than for years," ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... progress and development. The "line of the mountains" formed a frontier as plain and intelligible as that which defines the limits of the sea. To the south lay the British Empire in India; to the north were warlike tribes, barbarous, unapproachable, irreclaimable; and far beyond these, lay the other ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... small per-centage. Where can he take refuge? If Robinson Crusoe had been a social Duffer, he and Friday would not have been on speaking terms in a week. People think the poor Duffer malignant, boorish, haughty, unkind; he is only a Duffer, an irreclaimable, sad, pitiful creature, quite beyond the reach of philanthropy. On my grave write, not MISERRIMUS (though that would be true ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... drunkard's dream in moments of sobriety, and passes just as swiftly. The lustful animal appetite is too powerful; it demands the sordid pleasures which the possession of gold makes possible. Nor will it be satisfied with anything else. A tramp gold-seeker is irreclaimable. His joy lies in his quest and the dreams of fortune which are all too rarely fulfilled Every nerve centre is drugged with his lust, and, like all decadents, he must fulfil the destiny which his own original weakness has ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... had bartered years of repose for this brief season of intoxicating splendour. The barbed arrow was in her heart, and the more she struggled, the more irreclaimable it grew. Doubtless that unlucky dream had rendered her more susceptible ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Ireland is a millstone about our necks; that it would be better for us if Ireland were sunk at the bottom of the sea; that the Irish are a nation of irreclaimable savages and barbarians. How often have I heard these sentiments fall from the plump and thoughtless squire, and from the thriving English shopkeeper, who has never felt the rod of an Orange master ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... his youthful character, he would have had you believe that school was to him a place of semi-purgatorial probation,—which nothing but love of his mother, and desire to meet her wishes, prevented him, as an irreclaimable antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a time when he had learned little ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... saw at the houses whither his father carried him, filled him with such a liking to debauchery and such an irreclaimable passion for sensual pleasures, as was the source from whence his following misfortunes flowed. For what, as he himself complained, first gave him occasion to repine at his condition, and filled him with wandering inclinations of pursuing an idle and extravagant life, was the forcing ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... principal men in Rome, that "messages and letters were sent by Hannibal to Antiochus, and that envoys came secretly from the king to him. That, as some wild beasts can never be tamed, so the disposition of this man was irreclaimable and implacable. That he sometimes complained, that the state was debilitated by ease and indolence, and lulled by sloth into a lethargy, from which nothing could rouse it but the sound of arms." These accounts were deemed probable, when people recollected the former war, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... again Lampe roared—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now a third time,' cried Kant: on which for a third time the unhappy Lampe would howl out—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' And this whimsical scene of parade duty was continually repeated: duly as the day of publication came, the irreclaimable old dunce was put through the same manoeuvres, which were as invariably followed by the same blunder on the next. In spite, however, of this advantage, in the new servant, and his general superiority to his predecessor, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Mothers'-Small-Clothes-Conversion-Society. The object of this excellent Charity is—as all serious people know—to rescue unredeemed fathers' trousers from the pawnbroker, and to prevent their resumption, on the part of the irreclaimable parent, by abridging them immediately to suit the proportions of the innocent son. I was a member, at that time, of the select committee; and I mention the Society here, because my precious and admirable friend, Mr. ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... then the one civilized country in the world which still welcomed upon its shores the outcast, rejected, refuse of other lands; and, as a matter of course, when foreign capitals became positively too hot for irreclaimable characters, they flocked into Whitechapel and Soho, there to indulge their natural bent for every kind of criminality known to civilization, save those involving physical risk or physical exertion for the criminal. There were then whole quarters of the metropolis out of which every native ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... area of the State is about 3,750 square miles. With this, deduct 5,550 square miles for irreclaimable wastes, and there remains 50,000 square miles, or 32 millions of acres of arable land in Illinois,—a much greater quantity than is found in any other State. In this estimate, inundated lands, submerged ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... be in our time," said the man sadly. "I confess I am rather anxious for it to come off. Europe is a dull place at present, given up to Jews and old women. But I am an irreclaimable wanderer, and it is some time since I have been home. Things may be ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... buckle on official armour, it might interfere with the prospects of some who had never been "fast," but on the whole, society would benefit by the change. I maintain that that would be the correct method to adopt with some of those thieves who are totally irreclaimable by our present system of prison discipline. With regard to the casual and petty thieves, their case is somewhat different. Many of them could not be raised above the lowest class of common labourers, but by adopting a system of individualization, that is ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... if he would honour them by wiping his feet on them. He might walk unarmed and unattended through Ireland from end to end with perfect safety. But which of the Nationalist members could do that? Not one. The city scum, the criminal, irreclaimable class, shout 'Hell to Balfour,' but these poor readers of the Freeman's Journal and such-like prints, prepared for their special use and written down to their level, must not be classed with the people of Ireland at all. Every country has its ruffian element, every country has ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... for instance, work in chains upon his lands in the country or in a sort of prison-factory—or he may punish them with blows of the rod, the lash, or the knout; he can brand them upon the forehead if they are thieves or runaways, or in the end, if they prove irreclaimable, he can crucify them. Branded slaves who afterwards became free and rich sought to conceal the marks by wearing patches. There were inevitably some instances in which masters proved so intolerably cruel that ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... whilst inflicting upon him the lightest of punishments: 'Between me and Aziz is a river of milk, which I cannot cross.' The spirit of these words animated him in all his actions towards those connected with him. Unless they were irreclaimable, or had steeped their hands in the blood {178} of others, he ever sought to win them back by his gentleness and liberality. He loved forgiving, reinstating, trusting, and though the exercise of these noble qualities led sometimes to his being imposed upon, ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... serve the Protector and his friends. He advised Lady Bellingham to state the loss of her son to His Highness, and procure his order for the Doctor's arrest, adding, that even if innocent of this accusation, the imprisonment of one, who as an irreclaimable royalist, deserved punishment, was no breach of justice. He assured Her Ladyship, that her son's long residence in a disaffected family, had not occasioned the smallest change in his opinions, but that he showed his zeal for the good old cause, by ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... a degree of hopeless and irreclaimable vagabondage expressed in this epithet, which may not be generally understood. Only those who are familiar with the roving nature and predatory instincts of boys in large cities will appreciate its strength. It is the lowest step in the social scale to which a respectable ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... were constructed, every single living individual contributing his characteristics to the result, the result would be edifying, encouraging, or inspiring. Hugh feared that the type would but sink the most tolerant philosopher in a sense of irreclaimable depression. And yet if, guided by prejudice and preference, one made up a figure that one could wholly admire, how untrue to nature it would be, how different from the figure that other human beings ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... day bought out of mere charity, on seeing her cruelly lashed by her former master and mistress. Topsy is a fine picture of a brutalised young negro, who never speaks the truth even by chance, and steals because she cannot help it. Every one gives up Topsy as utterly irreclaimable—all except the gentle Eva. Caught in a fresh act of theft, Topsy is led away by Eva. 'There was a little glass-room at the corner of the veranda, which St Clare used as a sort of reading-room; and Eva and Topsy ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... happier, unless it may be when they receive you! How much they do make of us! and what a goodly sight at their own table they are! They are capable in themselves of making any place charming, though the man must have been enterprising who sat down five-and-twenty years ago to reclaim this park from irreclaimable down. I asked where were the maples? and where was the wood? and was shown five stunted ones in a cage to defend them from the sheep, the only things that thrive here, except little white snails, with purple lines round their ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the next morning we entered the vast Colorado desert. This was verily the desert, more like the desert which our imagination pictures, than the one we had crossed in September from Mojave. It seemed so white, so bare, so endless, and so still; irreclaimable, eternal, like Death itself. The stillness was appalling. We saw great numbers of lizards darting about like lightning; they were nearly as white as the sand itself, and sat up on their hind legs and looked at us with their pretty, beady black eyes. It seemed ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... and thoroughly reclaimed 14 Ditto, ditto, single men 49 Free from expiration of sentence, but worthless 7 Returned home to England after becoming free 1 Well-conducted men, as yet under sentence 62 Indifferent, not trustworthy 29 Depraved characters, irreclaimable 7 Sent to iron gangs and penal settlements 11 Escaped 1 Died 3 Given up at request of Government 2 Returned to Government hospital from ill health 4 ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... regular Young Person is a living nuisance, whose every act is a provocation to exterminate her. We say "her," not because, physically considered, the Y. P. is necesarily of the she sex; more commonly is it an irreclaimable male; but morally and intellectually it is an unmixed female. Her virtues are merely milk-and-morality-her intelligence is pure spiritual whey. Her conversation (to which not even her own virtues and intelligence are in any way related) is three parts rain-water that ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... systems of the two states, the results, on the one hand of political aptitude, on the other of political obtuseness and backwardness, which cannot struggle from the past into the present until the present in turn has become the past—irreclaimable. ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... Rehoboth better. These latter were engraved on the palms of his hands, and written with corroding ink on the fleshly tables of his heart. As he turned over the well-thumbed pages he made many mental calculations, sometimes smiling and sometimes sighing as his eye fell on an irreclaimable debt. Then, taking up his pencil, he entered an account on the fly-sheet of the Bible, and seemed satisfied when he discovered that his illness would not involve him in the loss which he had anticipated; and smiling the smile of selfish gain, he ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... a moment ago that you will not, but now I say you cannot. Kurzbold has just shown what an irreclaimable beast he is, and on that account, because birth, or training, or something has made you one of different caliber, you cannot thus desert him to the reprisal of that red fiend up ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... that stocking would force the waters into natural channels, and that the stock would bring fresh grasses in their train, getting accustomed to and, after a while, fattening on the despised bushes and herbs. To them it was the embodiment of a desert—irreclaimable. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the patient and persevering, but fruitless efforts which he himself had made to reclaim him, and announced his determination to cut him off from the succession to the crown as wholly and hopelessly irreclaimable. This manifesto was one of the most remarkable documents that history records. It concluded with deposing Alexis from all his rights as son and heir to his father, and appointing his younger brother Peter, the little son of Catharine, as inheritor in his stead; and finally laying the paternal ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... herself,—a young girl only fifteen, who came to the city, far from home and parents, and fell a victim to the temptation which brought her to shame and desperation. Many thus fall every year who are never counted. They fall into the ranks of those whom the world abandons as irreclaimable. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... longer to suppress his contempt for the resigned and hopeless predestinarian. "That fate should have clogged me with such confederates!" he muttered, as he left the apartment—"this bigoted fool is now nearly irreclaimable—I must to Zarah; for she, or no one, must carry us through these straits. If I can but soothe her sullen temper, and excite her vanity to action,—betwixt her address, the King's partiality for the Duke, Buckingham's matchless ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... them were confined in this way. There is a space at the stern, and another in the center of the ship, heavily barred with iron, where those who were considered utterly irreclaimable were huddled together. It would almost seem as though the authorities deliberately put them there in order that they should kill each other, as fights among them were very frequent and not a few were murdered by their companions. They did not work, ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Godless and wholly irreclaimable as Mr. Gibney and Mr. McGuffey might have been and doubtless were, each possessed in bounteous measure the sweetest of human attributes, to-wit: a soft, kind heart and a forgiving spirit. Creatures of impulse ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... The irreclaimable depravity of this man could not excite any urgent feeling of sympathy in his behalf, and our two friends took no further ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... manner she has ever put forth, with most energetic distinctness, those other great elementary truths, which either are an explanation of her mission or give a character to her work. She does not teach that human nature is irreclaimable, else wherefore should she be sent? not that it is to be shattered and reversed, but to be extricated, purified, and restored; not that it is a mere mass of evil, but that it has the promise of great things, and even now has a virtue and a praise ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... young Brooks has dared to tell you I promised him work in the greenhouse. He is irreclaimable; the worst character that ever came under my notice; he shall not set foot on the premises. If he is in want, he has only himself to blame. I do not like to think of his wife suffering, but it is the attribute ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... studied observation of Bland convinced me that he was an organic and irreclaimable scoundrel, who did wicked deeds as the cattle browse the herbage, because wicked deeds seemed the legitimate operation of his whole infernal organisation. Phrenologically, he was without a soul. Is it to be wondered at, that the devils are irreligious? What, then, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... unusually wide range upon the moors, stretching out in wild and desolate grandeur through the very centre of the county, near the foot of which stands the populous neighbourhood of Bolton-le-Moors. Rivington Pike, an irregularly conical hill rising like a huge watch-tower from these giant masses of irreclaimable waste, is a conspicuous and well-known object, crowned by a stone edifice for the convenience of rest and shelter to those whom curiosity urges to the fatigue and peril of the ascent. The view from this elevated spot, should the day be favourable, certainly repays the adventurer; ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... memorable in the traditions of Edinburgh, as well as in the records of criminal jurisprudence, was the son of a citizen of Edinburgh, who endeavoured to breed him up to his own mechanical trade of a tailor. The youth, however, had a wild and irreclaimable propensity to dissipation, which finally sent him to serve in the corps long maintained in the service of the States of Holland, and called the Scotch Dutch. Here he learned military discipline; and, returning afterwards, in the course of an idle and wandering life, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... expressive, breathing a hundred delicate suggestions of herself; not tortured into frizzles, or fringes, or artificial shapes, but winding its lustrous lengths about her head, just high enough to show the beautiful nape of her neck, "where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls run truant from the knot,— curls, half curls, root curls, vine ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps,—all these wave, or fall, or stray, loose and downward in the form of small, silken ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Italian too;' and to my astonishment he addressed me in the best Irish I ever heard spoken. 'Now,' said he, still smiling, 'you perceive that I understand Italian nearly—I will not say so well—as you do.' Now, as I am a sinner, that, I say, was ungenerous treatment. He was perfectly irreclaimable." ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... whom that taint has broken forth. Let me tell you a secret; since my first potation, my mother has never once remonstrated with me; never once upbraided; my proud, high tempered mother. She knows the folly of trying to reclaim the irreclaimable. But," lowering his voice, sadly, "my mother never ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... which was the fashionable game of that era, and was early initiated in the mysteries of "stocking the papers." The vicious habits of Simon were, of course, a sore trouble to his father, Elder Jedediah. He reasoned, he counseled, he remonstrated, and he lashed; but Simon was an incorrigible, irreclaimable devil. One day the simple-minded old man returned rather unexpectedly to the field, where he had left Simon and Ben and a negro boy named Bill at work. Ben was still following his plow, but Simon and Bill were in a fence corner, very earnestly engaged at "seven up." Of course the game was instantly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... the morning after a good night's sleep than if you had passed weary hours tossing and tumbling about in bemoaning your hard luck and picturing to yourself what might have been if you had done so and so. All rot. Let the other fellow do the worrying. Remember, my boy, the past is irreclaimable, the present the life we are struggling in, and the future what we make it, or rather try ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... Irreclaimable, Sir,—irreclaimable!—said the little gentleman.—Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones. When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians. A provisional ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... taught, but he is a hopeless idiot. I tried to make his life less hard. He is an irreclaimable drunkard, and spends in drink all the money one gives him, and knows enough to sell his new clothes ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... year 420 A.D. Shankal, the Maharajah of India, sent to Behram Gour, a ruler of the Sassanian dynasty in Persia, ten thousand minstrels, male and female, called Luri. Though lands were allotted to them, with corn and cattle, they became from the beginning irreclaimable vagabonds. Of their descendants, as they now exist, Sir ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... he replied, 'but what you predicted, and which, had I not been the most conceited dolt in existence, I, too, must have foreseen. You know that good-looking, idle, and, I fear, irreclaimable young fellow, George Hamblin?' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... I'll watch him tame] It is said, that the ferocity of beasts, insuperable and irreclaimable by any other means, is subdued by keeping ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... obvious lesson. Grim old Ben Marston's career illustrates one of the results of the stupidly cruel system of transporting persons from England to the colonies for petty offences which in these days are punished by a slight fine, and his sons are types of a class who were far from being as irreclaimable as their offences made them appear. 'Men like us,' Dick Marston is once made to say, 'are only half-and-half bad, like a good many more in this world. They are partly tempted into doing wrong by opportunity, and kept back by circumstances from ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... experience of centuries had proved that the Steppe was not everywhere and altogether an irreclaimable land, nor the Tartars an utterly ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... nice, my dear,' protested Lady Willow gently, with a deep sigh, for she thought of her own husband, who, having been all his life an irreclaimable reprobate, had commanded her utmost affection while he lived, and was the object of her tenderest regret now that he had taken his departure from a world that had never appreciated his talents; although its influence ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... marriage service. The vows were pronounced by the weeping brides in voices more distinct and audible than if they had been uttered amid the gay crowds that usually throng a bridal; for though they were the irreclaimable words that bound them forever to the men whose power over their feelings they thus proclaimed to the world, the reserve of maiden diffidence was lost in one engrossing emotion of solemnity, created by the ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a burglar, and one of Fagin's associates. Bill Sikes was a hardened, irreclaimable villian,[TN-178] but had a conscience which almost drove him mad after the murder of Nancy, who really loved him (ch. xlviii.) Bill Sikes (1 syl.) had an ill-conditioned savage dog, the beast-image ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... up shaving for many weeks past, little of his face is visible, except the nose, eyes, and forehead. All besides is a rugged mass of red hair, which rough travel has rendered an indescribable and irreclaimable waste. But the captain cares not: as long as he can clear a passage through the brushwood to his mouth, he says, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... lay up stores of strength for ourselves and our descendants by sturdily fighting it. But the effects of right living through a hundred generations are not overcome by the criminal life of one or two. Evil surroundings weigh more in producing criminals than heredity, and their children are not irreclaimable. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... endeavour, as much as I can, that good servants shall find in me a kind encourager; indifferent ones be made better, by inspiring them with a laudable emulation; and bad ones, if not too bad in nature, and quite irreclaimable, reformed by kindness, expostulation, and even proper menaces, if necessary; but most by a good example: All ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the country. I embarked my capital in the wine-trade, and, could I have restrained myself from drinking, should have been successful, and in a short time might have doubled my property, as I stated to Mr Evelyn; but now I had become an irreclaimable drunkard; and when that is the case, all hope is over. My affairs soon became deranged, and, at the request of my partner, they were wound up, and I found myself with my capital of 1,500 pounds reduced to 1,000 pounds. With this I resolved to try my fortune in shipping; I procured ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... mitigation of punishment the imperious mandate of heredity. To a mesalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition. In brief, my tastes, habits, instinct, with whatever of reason my love had left me—all fought against it. Moreover, I was an irreclaimable sentimentalist, and found a subtle charm in an impersonal and spiritual relation which acquaintance might vulgarize and marriage would certainly dispel. No woman, I argued, is what this lovely ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... "Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless! A confirmed drunkard, who has soaked away all self-respect, who has been cautioned and warned and fined a score of times, by myself and other magistrates. Dr. de Boursy-Williams, our leading practitioner here, has taken the fellow ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Grant, my lad, but the young savage is apparently irreclaimable. Perhaps when he gets older ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... and strong-feeling people driven to despair must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible to purely humane sentiments of pity and justice, and may regard the treatment of the Jews of Russia and Roumania as an indictment ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... paid Clavering's debts many times more, her wealth would be expended altogether upon this irreclaimable reprobate; and her heirs, whoever they might be, would succeed but to an emptied treasury; and Miss Amory, instead of bringing her husband a good income and a seat in Parliament, would bring to that individual her person only, and her pedigree with that lamentable ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... audience, and thus had maintained his usual serenity. He had been intensely interested and appreciative and admiring; but emotionally unmoved; but now, as this troubling music of Hughie's seemed to express the dominion of unsuspected but potent earth-forces, primitive, savage and forever irreclaimable, his calm became strangely disturbed. Dimly he realized that should every desert on the globe finally be subdued by the plow, the irrigating ditches and the pruning hook, they would still remain as realities in the mind of man, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... pasturage which prevails there during a certain portion of the year, soon withers under the aridity of the atmosphere, and leaves nothing but dreary wastes. An immense belt of rocky mountains and volcanic plains, several hundred miles in width, must ever remain an irreclaimable wilderness, intervening between the abodes of civilization, and affording a last refuge to the Indian. Here roving tribes of hunters, living in tents or lodges, and following the migrations of the game, may lead a life of savage independence, where there is nothing ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the bare downs rose hill after hill. On the left the land sloped into a shallow valley sown with various crops; and the shaws about Elliot's farm were the last trees. Beyond the farmhouse the downs ascended higher and higher, treeless, irreclaimable, scooped into long patriarchal ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... discovered. And after years of deference to ecclesiastical authority, conditional proposals of submission to the Pope upon conviction of error in his theses, or conscientious belief, Luther in time arrived at the conclusion that the church of Rome was irreclaimable, giving publicity to his deep convictions in a treatise De Captivitate Babylonica,—"The Captivity of Babylon." In the 18th chapter of this book, he discovered that Babylon is doomed to destruction. He considered the church of Rome as answering to the prophetic symbol, and of course not to ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... the central point of the the negative truth that nothing can be known is in fact a truth that guides us. [Transcriber's note: sic.] It leads us away from sterile and irreclaimable tracts of thought and emotion, and so inevitably compels the energies which would otherwise have been wasted, to feel after a more profitable direction. By leaving the old guide-marks undisturbed, you may give ease to an existing generation, but the present ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... open range will ever be farmed, but very much that was long thought to be irreclaimable has gone under irrigation or is being more or less successfully "dryfarmed." The man who brought water upon the arid lands of the West changed the entire complexion of a vast country and with it the industries of that country. Acres redeemed from the desert and added to the realm of the American ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... long Calabria was purged. Ever since the Bruttians, irreclaimable plunderers, had established themselves at Cosenza, disquieting their old Hellenic neighbours, the recesses of this country had been a favourite retreat of political malcontents. Here Spartacus drew recruits for his band of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... drank her delicious breath Whose love has yielded since to change or death; The mother kissed her child, whose days are o'er. Alas! too soon have fled The irreclaimable dead: We see them—visions strange—amid ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... cruelty. It was impossible for these, his associates, as for their Tory neighbors and enemies, to remain at their homes, or even to visit them, except at night, and then most stealthily. The country abounds with swamps more or less dense and irreclaimable, which must always remain a hiding-place for the unfortunate or desperate. In these the little bands by day were concealed, issuing forth at night to seek for food or spoils. Their families were often made the victims of revenge; and instances were numerous where feeble women and little children ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... with candles and artificial flowers, and incense-sticks are perpetually burning on it. What with the incense-sticks and abundant red silk streamers, an atmosphere is created which must be thoroughly uncongenial, even to the most irreclaimable devil. The outer chapel always contains two or four large chairs for the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the privilege of a sanctuary, unless against the writ of the Lord Chief Justice, or of the Lords of the Privy-Council. Indeed, as the place abounded with desperadoes of every description,—bankrupt citizens, ruined gamesters, irreclaimable prodigals, desperate duellists, bravoes, homicides, and debauched profligates of every description, all leagued together to maintain the immunities of their asylum,—it was both difficult and unsafe for the officers of the law to execute warrants emanating even from the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... There is still time for reformation. I can't help you now; it would only demoralize you altogether. To think, after the way I trained you, you can't battle round any better'n this! I always thought you were an irreclaimable mug, but I expected better things of you towards the end. I thought I'd make something of you. It's enough to dishearten any man and disgust him with the world. Why! you ought to be a rich man now with the chances and training you had! ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... and scorpions, give them no chance to be anything but that, and then wonder they are not doves and butterflies. Things like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaimable; but we gain nothing by extirpating the individuals; the black stream which carries them must be dammed at its source. Of the conditions which generate them, a part is the prisons and their keepers. But we are not yet at the root of the matter—the keepers ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... this world. Instead he merely chanted the old refrain, harped on the scandal brought on Samoncho[u] by the continued bickering of the married pair. Husband and wife had mutual duty toward each other; but also there was a duty toward their neighbours. Iemon was irreclaimable.... This stranger! O'Iwa San should deign to take the active part herself; not afford this ill spectacle and example to the ward. Like most parsons he was convinced by the noise of his own voice, and spoke with the intense conviction of long rehearsal. ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... and in fifteen minutes the task of transforming a remonstrating, excited, and occasionally tearful Harriet into the school beauty, was going gaily forward. Kid McCoy was supposed to be an irreclaimable tomboy, but in this crucial moment the eternal feminine came triumphantly to the fore. She sat herself down, with Patty's manicure scissors, and for three-quarters of an hour painstakingly ripped ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... quite sure of it," said the doctor. "Your experience strikingly confirms the chapter of revolutionary history which tells us that when the present economic order was established those who had been under the old system the most irreclaimable loafers and vagabonds, responding to the absolute justice and fairness of the new arrangements, rallied to the service of the state with enthusiasm. But talking of what you are to do, why was not my former suggestion a good one, that you should ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... adventurous by the success of the "Vagrancies," he next tried his hand at editorials on light or picturesque topics, and with satisfying though not equal results, for here he occasionally stumbled upon the hard-rooted prejudices of the Inside Office, and beheld his efforts vanish into the irreclaimable limbo of the scrap-basket. Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums where the waning of the city desk's favor had left him. All that he could now make he needed, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... perceived that Korah was irreclaimable, he directed the rest of his warning to those other Levites, the men of Korah's tribe, who, he feared, would join Korah in his rebellion. He admonished them to be satisfied with the honors God had granted them, and ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG |
