"Irretrievable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ankle and the nape of his neck, and thrust him head foremost into the hissing liquid. Tearing his hair, and putting on the hypocritical garb of innocence, Ruus ran hither and thither screaming, and lamenting in the face of all his saints the irretrievable misfortune which had happened to his master. By such deception, leading the friars by the nose, Ruus caused them to see combined in him tenderness of heart and guilelessness of conduct, and to make him ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... into hers, Lady Constance could not master her agitation. The train had left the metals, so to speak, and the result was confusion dire. A great shame held her, a dislocation of mind. She suffered that loneliness of soul which forms so integral a part of the misery of all apparently irretrievable disaster, whether moral or physical, and places the victim of it, in imagination at all events, rather terribly beyond ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Sir, that I have never been faulty in my will; that ever since my calamity became irretrievable, I have been in a state of preparation; that I have the strongest assurance that the Almighty has accepted my unfeigned repentance; and that by this time you will (as I humbly presume to hope,) have been the means of adding one to the number of the blessed; ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... pile of blue papers with printed headings. From time to time he turned them over in his hands and replaced them on the table with a groan. To the earl they meant ruin—absolute, irretrievable ruin, and with it the loss of his stately home that had been the pride of the Oxheads for generations. More than that—the world would now know the ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... eminence in political knowledge, to the tyrannies of those reigns. The prospect, now before us, in America, ought, in the same manner, to engage the attention of every man of learning to matters of power and of right, that we may be neither led nor driven blindfolded to irretrievable destruction.——Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for us, by somebody or other in Great Britain. There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.—This however ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... face, the face of a man who has had his troubles of which he does not care to speak, was seized with a sort of sudden heroic madness. At that moment of irretrievable defeat, when he must have known that the company was annihilated and that there was not a man left to answer his summons, he grasped his bugle, carried it to his lips and sounded the general, in so tempestuous, ear-splitting strains ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... with a certain amount of anxiety. Would Lupin not try to resume the offensive? Would he accept with a good grace the irretrievable loss of the woman he loved? Twice or three times, suspicious-looking people were seen prowling round the villa; and Valmeras even had to defend himself one evening against a so-called drunken man, who fired a pistol at him ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... a long time in the window staring out at the fading water. The sight of it had roused her for the first time to a realization of what she had done. Even the feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought her this sharp sense of the irretrievable. For an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing. She heard the door open behind her, and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... morning at Brighton took his seat perhaps opposite a young lady whom he thought pretty and interesting. When he arrived at Cuckfield he began to be in love; at Crawley he was desperately smitten; at Reigate his passion became irretrievable, and when he gave her an arm to ascend the steep ridges of Reigate Hill—a just emblem, by the way, of human life—he declared his passion, and they were married soon after. Nothing of this sort ever occurs on ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... irretrievable, but she gave her approval to it as superbly as if it were submitted in its inception. Only, Mr. Fulkerson must not suppose she should ever like New York. She would not deceive him on that point. She never should like it. She did not conceal, either, that she did not like taking ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... be denied that there are life-long burdens and griefs,—incurable illnesses, irretrievable losses, bereavements that will never cease to be felt, and cannot be replaced. Especially in advanced years there are infirmities, disabilities, and privations, which cannot by any possibility have a resultant revenue equivalent to what they take from us; for ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... my person to the horror of his children. I ought to have familiarized the old De Lacey to me, and by degrees to have discovered myself to the rest of his family, when they should have been prepared for my approach. But I did not believe my errors to be irretrievable, and after much consideration I resolved to return to the cottage, seek the old man, and by my representations ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... rising ground they could see the little army of their enemies come on directly to their habitation, and, in a moment more, could see all their huts and household stuff flaming up together, to their great grief and mortification; for this was a great loss to them, irretrievable, indeed, for some time. They kept their station for a while, till they found the savages, like wild beasts, spread themselves all over the place, rummaging every way, and every place they could think of, in search of prey; and in particular for the ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... as free men and fellow-citizens, these Frenchmen omitted to perceive that a great part of their devotion to Toussaint was loyalty to their race. Proceeding on this mistake, Leclerc and his council, sanctioned by the First Consul, ruined their work, lost their object, and brought irretrievable disgrace upon their names—some of which are immortalised only by the infamy ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... would make a man of you again, I never believed that you could be such a brute as to carry out your threats. I saw you do your best to corrupt a poor, silly little woman, who only escaped ruin by a miracle; I saw you deal out what might have been irretrievable disaster to a young man just starting in life. Since your return to London, you have done as little good, and as much harm, with your ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... first to mobilize, she took this step in consequence of German threats. We repeat that in spite of the three empires taking this action, discussion was still possible between Russia and Austria,[97] and might have had good results. In fact, the situation was not irretrievable, if Germany had not rendered it so by issuing her ultimatum to Russia. Once again we may ask, was this crime ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... ourselves, that slavery can be extirpated in the United States in a short time. It will require time and patience to attain an object, so desirable. Hasty and inconsiderate action will be likely to prove abortive, and result in no good to either master or slave; if not in irretrievable ruin to both. We should avoid everything in word or deed, which has a tendency to irritate the South and arouse them to resistance. Abolitionists by their low abuse and vile misrepresentations, have done everything in their power to excite and irritate ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... 'Things in the Postage Department are tolerably quiescent at present. Naturally I shall be missed, if I go out. But my absence will not spell irretrievable ruin, as it would at a period of greater commercial activity. Comrades Rossiter and Bristow have studied my methods. They know how I like things to be done. They are fully competent to conduct the business of the ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... deviation from your usual course to independent writers—or one step towards commendation from your gang, might induce the public to believe I had abandoned my character, and become one of your honourable fraternity-the very suspicion of which would (to me) produce irretrievable ruin. Your masters, the trading brotherhood, will (as usual) direct you in the course you should pursue; whether to approve or condemn, as their 'peculiar interests may dictate. Most sapient sirs of the secret bandit' of the screen, inquisitors of literature, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... while it is a diversion to the too great intensity of our disgust, it carries the pathos to the highest pitch of which it is capable, by showing the pitiable weakness of the old king's conduct and its irretrievable consequences in the most familiar point of view. Lear may well 'beat at the gate which let his folly in', after, as the Fool says, 'he has made his daughters his mothers'. The character is dropped in the third act to ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... impediments in the way of erecting a magnificent city. On a small scale, he resembled Santa Anna in the activity with which he could organize an army after defeat, or resuscitate affairs when apparently irretrievable. He knew how to improve the most slender means to the accomplishment of ulterior purposes. Perseverance is not one of the leading characteristics of the Spanish race, yet it is surprising to see how much ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... 'Is this a time for Frenchmen and fellow-soldiers to fall out? We are in the midst of our enemies; a quarrel, a loud word, may suffice to plunge us back into irretrievable distress. Monsieur le Commandant, you have been gravely offended. I make it my request, I make it my prayer—if need be, I give you my orders—that the matter shall stand by until we come safe to France. Then, if you please, I will serve you in any capacity. And for you, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... room to fulfil the Governor's instructions, while Basilivitch remounted his horse and returned to his kretschma, to serve, with smiling countenance and friendly mien, the men whom he had devoted to irretrievable ruin. ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... expression changed when he had done so, and she sat very still, with one hand tightly closed, for she now realized what the cost of her lover's defeat might be. In his case it would not mean a grapple with temporary difficulties, or a curtailing of unnecessary luxuries, but disaster complete and irretrievable, perhaps for years. If he failed, he would vanish out of her life; and it was becoming rapidly clear that, however hard pressed he might be, there was, after all, no way in which she could help him. The unyielding pride or ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... when our laws may spare the life of a guilty man, and suffer him to atone for his errors or his crimes by repentance. Such a law would respect the life which can never be restored; and while another exists which casts an irretrievable stain upon our honour, there would be a law of restoration capable of raising the man sanctified by repentance to the dignity which punishment ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... of the same way of thinking, in regard to names, with that profound philosopher, Mr. Shandy, the elder, who maintained that some inspired high thoughts and heroic aims, while others entailed irretrievable meanness and vulgarity; insomuch that a man might sink under the insignificance of his name, and be absolutely "Nicodemused into nothing." I have ever, therefore, thought it a great hardship for a man to ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... lean years had cost them their reputation. Each season they had needed smaller bands of "hoppers," and their standard had been lowered. It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote reason, the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view. Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the application of all available ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to enforce peace would have to begin its regime with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as it resolves itself into a question of taste and prepossession. An answer to it would also not ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... with the wicked. That there is a mysterious and awful malignity attaching to sin—that to be in sin means to be in misery and ruin in this life or any other life—and that sin persisted in tends to utter and irretrievable ruin. No arguments about the love and power of God to save to the uttermost can cancel the fact of the free-will of man or the plain statements of Scripture confirmed beyond question by the loving Lord Himself as to the awful fate of ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... irresolution. Othello comes to grief through mad jealousy. Antony fails and falls through excess of lust; Lear through trust in men, and Timon through heedless generosity. All these are separate studies of Shakespeare's own weaknesses; but the ruin is irretrievable, and reaches its ultimate in Timon. Trust and generosity, Shakespeare would like to tell us, were his supremest faults. In this he deceived himself. Neither "Lear" nor "Timon" is his greatest tragedy; but "Antony and Cleopatra," for lust ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... beautiful?" he said to me (in his wife's hearing!). "What a figure, and what a voice! You remember her voice? It's a loss, my dear lady, an irretrievable loss, to the operatic stage! Do you know, when I think what that grand creature might have done, I sometimes ask myself if I really had any right to marry her. I feel, upon my honor I feel, as if I had committed a fraud on ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself. In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear, strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that we enjoy communion ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... should depute the great and solemn duty of determining what amount shall be expended for military purposes. There is not a country in the world that would not have been bankrupt long since, and plunged into irretrievable ruin, if the military authorities had been allowed to determine the amount of military force to be kept up, and the amount of revenue to be devoted ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... Cassiodorus was born. Pope Gregory the Great, the converter of England, was within fifteen years of his accession to the Pontificate when Cassiodorus died. The first great schism between the Eastern and Western Churches was begun in his boyhood and ended before he had reached old age. He saw the irretrievable ruin of Rome, such as Augustus and Trajan had known her; the extinction of the Roman Senate; the practical abolition of the Consulate; the close of the schools ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... attached, overwhelmed him. For while with some people "one blow drives out another," with some the second serves only to drive home, deepen, and aggravate the first. For years he was satisfied to believe both losses irretrievable. And so he might still have gone on believing, except ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... out, and waves in token of internal distress;" for all the time the inebriate has been pouring down his daily draught and making merry over the cup, morbid changes have been going on within; and though these are unseen, and, it may be, unsuspected, they are fatal, irretrievable. A few of the most important of these changes I shall ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my own hands! Alone, I might have been content to starve. But you were to be given back to me! Do you think, then, dear Clifford," added she, with a wretched smile, "that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace on the old house, by opening a little shop in the front gable? Our great-great-grandfather did the same, when there was far less need! Are you ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Furneaux had erred three times in as many seconds. He had switched on the light prematurely, and his ready banter had warned the parricide that a well-built scheme was crumbling to irretrievable ruin. Moreover, he had underrated the nervous forces of the man thus trapped and outwitted. Fenley knew that when his feet touched the earth he would begin a ghastly pilgrimage to the scaffold. Two yellow orbs of light were already springing up the slight incline from the rock, betokening ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... be filled with stories of the strange and exciting incidents that grew out of this pretended popish plot. Its consequences extended disastrously through many years, and involved a vast number of innocent persons in irretrievable ruin. The true character of Oates and his accomplices was, however, at length fully proved, and they themselves suffered the fate at last which they had brought upon others. The whole affair was a disgrace to the age. There is no ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... retired from interruption to an obscure place in the suburbs. His poetical guide to godliness hearing nothing of him during half a year, and apprehending he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him just in time to prevent what Ruffhead calls "an irretrievable derangement." ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... Of absolute and irretrievable black,—black's soul of black Beyond white's power to disintensify,— Of that I saw no sample: such may wreck My life and ruin my ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... of little England, two mighty hosts were at death-grips day and night, the one fighting for all that is dearest and most sacred to the heart of man; and the other to save itself from what could be nothing less than irretrievable disaster. ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... life of the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, empirical, parts of a vast nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural, psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on" incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is "heavenly," a creation "not made with hands," but wrought out of the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... not expected to find the despised "outcast" there. For once her admirable self-control was near to being shattered. If she had been permitted to exercise the right of speech at that crucial moment, she would have committed the irretrievable error of denouncing the brazen creature in the presence of disinterested persons. Afterwards she thanked her lucky stars for the circumstances which compelled her to remain angrily passive, for she was soon to ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... possible without a knowledge of nature." Herbart says: "Here (in nature) lies the abode of real truth, which does not retreat before tests into an inaccessible past (as does history). This genuinely empirical character distinguishes the natural sciences and makes their loss irretrievable. It is here (in nature) that the object disentangles itself from all fancies and opinions and constantly stimulates the spirit of observation. Here then is found an obstruction to extravagant thinking such as the sciences themselves could not better devise." ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... out. Physical science, particularly physiology, from its intimate acquaintance with the human organism, is admirably adapted for the function of a danger-signal, so to speak, to warn the ignorant and indifferent that a life undisciplined and ill-regulated cannot but end in irretrievable disaster. It thus most powerfully subserves the ends of private and individual morality, just as historical science, which, as Professor Huxley accurately noted, can in no wise be tested in a retort or a crucible, can point the moral when the lawless actions of public bodies or nations threaten ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... over; and then what Quickly follows? The next thing is, The Kingdoms of this World, are become the Kingdoms of Our Lord, and of His Christ: and then down goes the Kingdom of the Devil, so that he cannot any more come down upon us. Now, the Irrecoverable and Irretrievable Humiliations that have lately befallen the Turkish Power, are but so many Declarations of the second Woe passing away. And the dealings of God with the European parts of the world, at this day, do further strengthen this our expectation. We do see, at this hour a great Earth-quake ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... his bed at night scheming how he may with impunity exploit his fellow-man, and who rises in the morning with a strained consciousness of possible fluctuations in the market which may overwhelm him in irretrievable disaster, lives in perils which easily bear comparison with those which threaten the precarious existence of primitive man. To masses of men in civilized communities the problem of the food supply is all-absorbing, and may exclude all other and broader interests. The factory-worker, with ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... imagination is at its highest pitch of inventing and projecting. There are few artists who have not, at times, experienced in themselves a more than ordinary disposition or aptitude, for this operation of the mind; and it is these critical moments, which may otherwise be irretrievable, they ought particularly to improve, with as little diversion from them as possible. They should pursue a thought, or a hint of a thought, from its first crudity to ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... reason why any musical person should have an unmusical voice, especially since this bad production of the voice often strains the muscles and inflames the mucous membrane of the throat. In connection with this question of music, it should be remembered that almost irretrievable injury to the voice may be done by allowing a boy to continue singing after his voice ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... yielded to temptation, when in distress for money wherewith to save his estate; and sold his vote. His crime was discovered, and his fall followed instantly. Nothing could reinstate him in the confidence of the people, his ruin was irretrievable—his disgrace complete. All doors were closed against him, all men avoided him. After years of skulking retirement and dissipation, death had relieved him of his troubles at last, and his funeral followed ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... his voyage-from which so few return? Or is he to have another chance, to be still looked on as one who has gone a little astray, but who will come back? I urge you, gentlemen, do not ruin this young man! For, as a result of those four minutes, ruin, utter and irretrievable, stares him in the face. He can be saved now. Imprison him as a criminal, and I affirm to you that he will be lost. He has neither the face nor the manner of one who can survive that terrible ordeal. Weigh in the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... prayer, the free will of man, and the immortality of the soul—are at hopeless variance with intellect and logic; others exclaim, and surely not without reason, that this casts upon our faculties the opprobrium of irretrievable contradictions! As for those "spiritualists"—and they are, perhaps, at present the greater part—who profess, in some sense, to pay homage to the New Testament, they are at infinite variance as to how much—whether 7 1/2, 30, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... thrice our own. This risk I must run, or all is lost. We must beat him or die, all of us, before his batteries." He burst unawares upon the Austrian left, and rolled their whole host together, corps upon corps, in a tumult of irretrievable ruin. ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... delicacy there is no grace, and without a veil, beauty loses her most captivating charms. I pity you, my dear, for having let your veil be blown aside malheureusement. But such accidents will happen. Who can control the passions or the winds? After all, l'erreur d'un moment is not irretrievable, and you reproach yourself too bitterly, my sweet friend, for your involuntary injustice to Lady Leonora. Assuredly it could not be your intention to sacrifice your repose to Mr. L——. You loved him against your will, did you not? And it is, you know, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... it is only one of them who looks at the other. Nanda, gazing vaguely about and not seeking a seat, slowly drew off her gloves while her mother's sad eyes considered her from top to toe. "Tea's gone," Mrs. Brook then said as if there were something in the loss peculiarly irretrievable. "But I suppose," she added, "he gave you ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... As a soldier he was conscious of the crime he was about to commit against discipline; as a faithful subject, he felt that he ought to commit it if he wished to avoid plunging a corps of ten thousand men, belonging to your majesty alone, into utter and irretrievable destruction." ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... defection of part of the army from his staunch friend Bolivar, and accepted the comparatively insignificant appointment of Minister Plenipotentiary to the Governments of Chili and Buenos Ayres. In 1829, a serious rebellion, that threatened irretrievable disasters, having broken out in the Republic of Bolivia, the friends of order appealed to their old friend General Santa Cruz as being the only man capable of re-establishing public tranquillity. His firmness ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... in a grand tragi-comic style, over the Lilliputian difficulties and petty disappointments it has to encounter, gives way to all the fretfulness of grief and all the turbulence of resentment, makes a fuss about nothing because there is nothing to make a fuss about—when an impending calamity, an irretrievable loss, would instantly bring it to its recollection, and tame it in its preposterous career. A man may be in a great passion and give himself strange airs at so simple a thing as a game at ball, for instance; may rage like ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... spoken word is impossible to recall, how much more irretrievable the word that is printed in millions of newspapers. The name of Dyckman was a household word. It resounded now in every household throughout the country, and across the sea, where the name had become familiar in all the nations from the big financial ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... unavoidable ruin, but it was his last and only chance. He was driven to playing a desperate game, in which the dice were loaded against him. If his plan failed, he told Clement over and over again, it would mean for him irretrievable ruin, and in his fall he would drag down the Church. If it succeeded, he would be hardly more secure, for success meant the predominance of Anne Boleyn and of her anti-ecclesiastical kin. Under the circumstances, it is possible to attach too much ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... it impossible to submit any longer to the insulting tyranny of Wilder; he determined, therefore, to leave, not merely the college, but also his native land, and to bury what he conceived to be his irretrievable disgrace in some distant country. He accordingly sold his books and clothes, and sallied forth from the college walls the very next day, intending to embark at Cork for—he scarce knew where—America, or any ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... insult it. When I returned to England, all was over. I was silent on the same principle that you are silent about it in your letter; that it was not the time for speaking; and I only felt, what I hinted at when I wrote last, a bitter grief, which prompted me, when the act was irretrievable, to hide myself from you. However, I have spoken, with whatever pain to myself, the first ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... considerations as pecuniary ruin, and personal discomfort, was the shock which the moral nature felt from the irretrievable discomfiture of all the hopes, aims, and aspirations which had hitherto sustained and nourished his soul. In a few months the labour of twenty years was swept away without a trace of it being left. It was not merely a political defeat ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... disappointment, which happen almost every day, are dreadful to relate; and no punishment can be too great for those whose wilful conduct becomes the occasion of such catastrophes. Parents are deeply laden with guilt, who by this means plunge their children into irretrievable ruin; and lovers are deserving of no forgiveness, whose treacherous conduct annihilates the hopes and even the existence ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... Washington. Apparently General Lee, too, had drunk the poison of triumph, and dreamed of occupying the national capital, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and dictating the terms of peace to a disheartened North. The fascinating scheme—the irretrievable and fatal ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... depended on the accidents of the winds and the waves. In the division and decline of the empire, the tributary harvests of Egypt and Africa were withdrawn; the numbers of the inhabitants continually diminished with the means of subsistence; and the country was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war, pestilence and famine. Pope Gelasius was a subject of Odoacer, and he affirms, with strong exaggeration, that in Emilia, Tuscany, and the adjacent provinces, the human species was almost extirpated."[21] Again the same accurate author observes ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... despair. She could not tell—could not guess—what had happened. She only knew that the man whose happiness meant more to her than her own, and the woman she had learned to love as a friend, had somehow come to irretrievable misunderstanding and disaster. At last she turned back ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey is fast mouldering into irretrievable decay. A sum of One Hundred Pounds will effect a perfect repair. The Committee have not thought it right to fix any limit to the subscription; they themselves, have opened the list with a contribution ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... Pankey' from his perch on the top of Larry's shoulders, noticing our hasty retreat from the left of the stockade, our fellows indeed rushing back in their scurrying flight into the midst of the centre column and mixing it up into irretrievable confusion. "Steady there! Face ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... of the night a pang of emptiness, of vast, irretrievable loss, possessed her. She and Love had touched each other for a space—then had flung violently apart, and were speeding each in their eternally separate direction. Life for her might be rich and full of honour and achievement, but as she looked forward into the long procession of years, ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... before her time. Perchance she mourned the absence of one she loved, and was wearied with anxiety for his return; perhaps the canker-worm of remorse was at work within her, for a fault committed and irretrievable; perhaps she was the victim of lawless outrage, a captive against her will; perhaps she had been severed from all she loved on earth, and the bright hopes of life had been blasted for ever. At last she closed her book with a smile; but it was ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon her knees. "That part of my life is over and done with and may rest in peace. I forgave him then, and he forgives me now. One always forgives when one understands, you know, and we both understand to-day—he no less than I. The chief thing was that we made a huge, irretrievable mistake—the mistake that two people make when they think that love can be coddled and nursed like a domestic pet—when they forget that it goes wild and free and comes at no man's call. Folly like that is its own ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... firmly established &c. v.; deep-rooted, ineradicable; inveterate; obstinate &c. 606. transfixed, stuck fast, aground, high and dry, stranded. [movable object rendered unmovable] stuck, jammed; unremovable; quiescent &c. 265; deterioration &c. 659. indefeasible, irretrievable, intransmutable[obs3], incommutable[obs3], irresoluble[obs3], irrevocable, irreversible, reverseless[obs3], inextinguishable, irreducible; indissoluble, indissolvable[obs3]; indestructible, undying, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... were for that which was irretrievable. Fear and pity for herself, and fondness for him made her weep. Sanine lifted her up and set her on his knee. She meekly submitted like some sorrowful child. As in a dream she could hear him gently comforting her in a tender, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... loss of my father hath placed me in a situation wherein, from the magnitude and delicacy of the concern, every hour may afford an important crisis; and in which a single omission, a momentary absence, may entail consequences irretrievable, in matters wherein the result to me and mine is to be conjoined reputation and affluence, or disgrace and penury. I cannot, under impression of such alternatives, delegate an iota of conduct to a second person. I have laid down a systematic plan of conduct for myself, which in ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... Consul, in the same manner which I was more lately on the point of achieving it under the monarchical forms." When we find such ideas retaining hold of Napoleon's imagination, and arising to his tongue after his irretrievable fall, it is impossible to avoid exclaiming, Did ambition ever conceive so wild a dream, and had so wild a vision ever a termination so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... not. It is time that this ignorance should vanish. The knowledge of me and of my actions may be of use to you. It may teach you to avoid the shoals on which my virtue and my peace have been wrecked; but to the rest of mankind it can be of no use. The ruin of my fame is, perhaps, irretrievable; but the height of my iniquity need not be known. I perceive in you a rectitude and firmness worthy to be trusted; promise me, therefore, that not a syllable of what I tell you shall ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... said. "Is this a time for Frenchmen and fellow-soldiers to fall out? We are in the midst of our enemies; a quarrel, a loud word, may suffice to plunge us back into irretrievable distress. Monsieur le Commandant, you have been gravely offended. I make it my request, I make it my prayer—if need be, I give you my orders—that the matter shall stand by until we come safe to France. Then, if you please, I will serve you in any capacity.—And for you, young man, you have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... personal religion before Jesus is the prophet Jeremiah, but Jeremiah started his religious experience, not with a sense of individual need, but with a burning, patriotic, social passion. He was concerned for Judah. Her iniquities, long accumulating, were bringing upon her an irretrievable disaster. He laid his soul upon her soul and sought to breathe into her the breath of life. Then, when he saw the country he adored, the civilization he cherished, crashing into ruin, he was thrown back personally on God. He ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... fact. You must give me time to become accustomed to a whole heap of things: if we were to do anything suddenly now, we might blunder into some great mistake, perhaps irretrievable. I must train myself by degrees for another kind of life altogether; and I am going to surprise you, Keith—I am indeed. If papa takes me to the Highlands next year, you won't recognize me at all. I am going to read up all about the Highlands, and learn the ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... fellow able to scintillate like that at his own wedding," remarked the son of the Bishop to the best man's sister. "Usually they are so completely dashed by their own temerity in getting into such an irretrievable situation that they sit with their ears drooping and their eyes bleared. Do you suppose it's getting married in tennis clothes that's ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... and down the walk; out into the gay world of dissipation, down into the treacherous depths of crime; one more of the many who have chained bright intellects to the chariot wheels of vice, and have been dragged through dust and mire to final and to irretrievable disaster. ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... I cannot," answered the Constable. "The step which I have adopted as a great duty, may perhaps be a great error—I only know that it is irretrievable." ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... enemies in Asia, and of our countrymen, and of all foreign nations in Europe. It is an object of just ambition, which no one more than myself would rejoice to see effected; but I see that failure in the attempt is certain and irretrievable ruin; and I would endeavour to inspire you with the necessary caution, and make you feel that, great as are the objects to be obtained by success, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile, without a thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be considered as the consequence of the displeasure and vengeance of an offended God, Nemesis came to be regarded as the goddess of retribution, relentlessly pursuing the guilty until she has driven them into irretrievable woe and ruin. The Erinyes or Eumenides are the deities whose business it is to punish, in hades, the crimes committed upon earth. When an aggravated crime has excited their displeasure they manifest their greatest power in the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... one may do to his system through the practice of masturbation may not be very serious, in many cases that have come under the author's observation in which the habit has reached extreme limits, very serious, sometimes irretrievable damage has been done, yet the encouraging feature of this whole matter is, that if the adolescent youth, who is practicing this habit, is warned of its danger and stops at once absolutely, nature comes to his rescue, and gradually, step by step, but surely, rebuilds the whole fabric ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... than the zeal of brothers. In our fallen state, with an island reeking with blood, and the sword at our throat, directed by an administration in the best and in the worst of times hostile to Ireland, we call upon you to assist in rescuing our country from utter and irretrievable ruin—we implore you to interfere for us with our common Sovereign—to solicit at his paternal hand the removal of those wicked men, who by abusing the confidence of their Sovereign, and sacrificing their duty to ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... in the candor and sincerity of Lincoln's personality and of his Cabinet has sprung up. It was the imbecility of this administration which culminated in the catastrophe of Bull Run. Irretrievable misfortune and National disgrace never to be forgotten are to be added to the ruin of all peaceful pursuits and National bankruptcy as the result of Lincoln's running the machine for five months. Jefferson Davis will soon be in ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... her ladyship and the child's mother there was little more love than formerly. There are some injuries which women never forgive one another; and Madam Francis Esmond, in marrying her cousin, had done one of those irretrievable wrongs to Lady Castlewood. But as she was now humiliated, and in misfortune, Madam Francis could allow a truce to her enmity, and could be kind for a while, at least, to her husband's discarded mistress. So the little ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... of something which was, and will never reappear, never! Such was the word which this wild solitude murmured to Gilbert's ear. Never! repeated he to himself, and his heart was oppressed by a sense of the irretrievable. He seated himself upon the sward, a few steps from the willow, his elbows upon his knees, and his head in his hands, and lost himself in long and painful meditation. I shall tell all; he felt at intervals in the depths of his being, in the very depths, the agitation of a secret ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... analogy to each other. In order to the forming a right judgment, it is absolutely necessary to observe this distinction, which will effectually secure you from the dangerous error of taking the shadow for the substance, an irretrievable mistake, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... Vexation and Resentment. He withdrew therefore, in a solitary Mood, to the Banks of the Euphrates, now fully persuaded, that his impropitious Star had shed its most baleful Influence on him, and that his Misfortunes were irretrievable, revolving in his Mind, all his Disappointments from his first Adventure with the Court-Coquet, who had entertain'd an utter Aversion to a blind Eye, down to his late Loss of his white Armour. See! said he, the fatal Consequence of being a Sluggard! Had I been more vigilant, I had been King of Babylon; ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... him a thing of memory. He had played his game there, while admirers and friends watched his far-seeing moves. He had lost; and now, after checkmate, he must resign his place. How he struggled against the idea! He could not bring himself to acknowledge that the past was irretrievable. His spirit seemed in prison, shut in as by the bars of a dungeon, against which he might tug ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... to Sylvia, save that he admitted being tired or having a headache, when she sought to enliven him, to draw him up to her own plane of merriment. He was reminding himself every hour of the night and day that he must make no irretrievable blunder, that he must do nothing to injure his wife needlessly. Appearances were against her, but possibly ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... make a concentrated charge in front. It seemed certain that the effect of this movement would be to hurl the whole of the enemy's advance, horse and foot, back upon his battalia, and thus to break up his army in irretrievable rout. The plan was a sensible one, but it was not ingeniously executed. Before the handful of cavalry had time to make the proposed feint the cannoneers, being unduly excited, and by express command of Sir Francis Vere, fired a volley into the advancing columns of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... personal love to which death seems to menace irretrievable and final disaster. But it is personal love to which comes the divinest presage. Some voice says to our yearning heart, "Fear nothing, doubt nothing, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... military skill. But disunion in his ranks did what the Tartar sword could not effect. Many of his adherents deserted him, and the Chinese warrior who had never known defeat was brought to the brink of irretrievable disaster. From this dilemma death extricated him, he passing away at the head of his men without the stigma of defeat on his long career of victory. In the end his body was taken from the tomb and his ashes were ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Germany went to war. As soon the British Government saw that hopes for peace were no longer possible Sir Edward Grey sent to its ambassadors in Germany and France the following telegram; "London, July 31, 1914; I still trust situation is not irretrievable, but in view of prospect of mobilization in Germany it becomes essential to his Majesty's Government, in view of existing treaties, to ask whether French [and German] Government is prepared to engage to respect the neutrality of Belgium so long as no other power ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... At the end of the time Mrs. Yeobright went in, and Venn sadly retraced his steps into the heath. When he had again regained his van he lit the lantern, and with an apathetic face at once began to pull off his best clothes, till in the course of a few minutes he reappeared as the confirmed and irretrievable reddleman ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... still refused to abandon the pleasing delusion, and talked over the old plans for redress of grievances, and a constitutional union with the mother country. With little or no belief in the possibility of either, they stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon, that mythical river of irretrievable self-committal, hesitating to enter its turbid waters. A few of the bolder "shepherds of the people" tried to urge them onward; but no one was bold enough to dash in first and lead them through. Paine seized the opportunity. He had a mind whose eye always ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... of fate. The day, the month, goes by, unrelenting. It may be shattered with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... to be thrown into irretrievable confusion by Bessie's apparition and her own memory. She was quite silent as she led the way to the house, walking between Mr. Cecil Burleigh and his sister. Miss Charlotte walked behind with Bessie, and remarked that she was pleased ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... grasping the hand of the individual who had appeared so opportunely—"you have saved me from my last temptation, into which I was led so naturally, that I had not an idea of danger. If I had fallen then, as I fear I should have fallen but for you, I must have gone down, rapidly, to irretrievable ruin. How can I express to you the grateful emotions that ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... the count, and he stared, for again he thought that he saw his mother's shadow darkening the splendor of those princely halls, whose lights were flickering as though they were about to be extinguished and leave the guilty accomplices in irretrievable darkness. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... underlying motives of this radical change are doubtless somewhat mixed and contradictory, honest conviction on the part of some, and party expediency and desire of office on the part of others; but the change itself is real and irrevocable; the penalty of receding would be swift and irretrievable ruin. In any point of view the new order of things is desirable; and nothing more fully illustrates "the ways that are dark and the tricks that are vain" of party politics than the attempt of professed friends of the Union and equal rights for ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that he knew his own mind always. He believed in inspirations, and he would back his knowledge, his inspiration, by an irretrievable move. Yesterday had come an important message from his commander. That had decided him. To-day Guida should hear a message ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... glad to see you," she said simply, "I have seen nobody except the doctor once, and the undertaker twice. It is dreadful to sit alone hour after hour face to face with the irretrievable. If I had not been so foolish as to enter into that agreement with Messrs. Meeson, I could have got the money by selling my new book easily enough; and I should have been able to take Jeannie abroad, and I believe that she would have lived—at least I hoped so. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... place, and, if a conflict was, through the ignorant impetuosity of the masses, unavoidable, it would have resulted more creditably to the Greek army, not in victory indeed, for this was under the circumstances not to be hoped for, but in a defeat which was not irretrievable. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... fight," cried Yoomy, "to liberate that tribe of Hamo instantly; a way may be found, and no irretrievable evil ensue." ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... subject. But I can't let you rush headlong into a reunion that may prove disastrous . . . for you. To-night's revelation has astounded me. It isn't easy to get one's bearings all at once; but before we take any further irretrievable step I am bound, in conscience, to tell you how the land lies. When you—repudiated me, I accepted your decision as final. I never dreamed of your coming back; and I acted accordingly. I took to work as I might have taken to drink, if I had been made that way; with the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... racecourse, and to find he had expended the whole stock in this extraordinary purchase!—Moses's bargain of green spectacles did not strike more dismay into the Vicar of Wakefield's family than my grandfather's rashness into the poor old shepherd. The thing, however, was irretrievable, and they returned without the sheep. In the course of a few days, however, my grandfather, who was one of the best horsemen of his time, attended John Scott of Harden's hounds on this same horse, and displayed ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... again, with an effort, "I want to say something to you. Once in my life, when I was almost as young as you are, I made a great mistake. Therefore I know that mistakes are not irretrievable. God teaches us sometimes by our very errors, leading us through them into light and truth. Only we must follow Him, and hold fast to the right, however difficult it may be. We must not be disheartened: we must leave the past where it is, and go on to the future; do ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Homestake was the best, until the cloudburst came along and spoiled all of them. Wilhelmina still remembered how the great flood had passed the town, moving boulders as if they were pebbles; but not until it reached the place where she stood had it done irretrievable damage. The roadbed was washed out, but the streambed remained, and the banks from which to fill in more dirt; but when the flood struck the Gorge it backed up into a lake, for the narrow defile was choked. Trees and rocks and rumbling boulders had piled up against its entrance, ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... British line they attempted to deploy. The close fire upon them, however, was too terrible to admit of this movement; their flanks were enclosed by some of our guards; they got mixed together in a mass; and in that mass they were broken and slaughtered, or compelled to hasten down the hill in irretrievable confusion. The grand army of Napoleon never again stood to face its enemies; it was in fact destroyed, for "all the rest of the work was headlong, unresisted pursuit, slaughter of fugitives who had entirely lost their military ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the Assistance of Manuscripts is wanting to set an Author's Meaning right, and rescue him from those Errors which have been transmitted down thro' a Series of incorrect Editions, and a long Intervention of Time, many Passages must be desperate, and past a Cure; and their true Sense irretrievable either to Care or the Sagacity of Conjecture. But is there any Reason therefore to say, That because All cannot be retriev'd, All ought to be left desperate? We should shew very little Honesty, or Wisdom, to play the Tyrants with an Author's Text; to ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... thread of sympathy which had bound them. In this respect, he dreaded her own future as much as his own. What might she do? For he felt, in her, a potential element of desperation; a capacity to commit, at any moment, an irretrievable act. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is perverted into mischievousness. Noble aspiration is said to be selfishness. Whatever slander touches, it leaves upon it the slimy trail of the old serpent, and infuses its poisonous venom; and were it not for the angel of truth which destroys both, irretrievable ruin ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... for the Dominion need live to-day. He is also, and I am glad of it, one of us, for traditions do not wholly lose their force and we know that blood will tell. That this year has not ended in disaster irretrievable is due to our latest comrade, ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... friend of your school days; your neighbor, if so be he is allied against you when the great day comes. We must not weaken; we must keep our eyes fixed upon the ultimate good that will come out of the turmoil. But we must know! We must not make the irretrievable error of taking anything for granted. Keeping that in mind, gentlemen, we will hear first the ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... liabilities amounted to the vast sum of L102,000, for which Sir Walter was individually responsible. To a mind less balanced by native intrepidity and fortified by principle, the apparent wreck of his worldly hopes would have produced irretrievable despondency; but Scott bore his misfortune with magnanimity and manly resignation. He had been largely indebted to both the establishments which had unfortunately involved him in their fall, in the elegant production of his works, as well as in respect of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... $5,000,000. The request was ill received by the Cabinet. Ministers were decidedly averse to any further assistance out of the public treasury. The prime minister was told that it could not be done. On the other hand, if it were not done, irretrievable disaster stared Canada in the face. For if the Canadian Pacific Railway went down, what of the future of the North-West? what of the credit {125} of Canada itself? This was perhaps the supreme moment of Sir John Macdonald's career. With a ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... not have remained at anchor under the guns of Manhattan Island, either by day or night; but a few boats with muffled oars could have watched, could have given the alarm, precipitating an attack by the army, and such a movement interrupted in mid-course brings irretrievable disaster. ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... at the bridge of Hudri, composed of a few dreary abodes, which, by their aspect, seemed the connecting link between the dwellings of man and the caverns of beasts. Vegetation had long been growing more and more meagre, and it was now fast melting away into still deeper and irretrievable traces of sterility, like the shadows of a picture passing through their several transitions of color to the depth of the back-ground. The larches and cedars diminished gradually in size and numbers, until the straggling and stinted tree became a bush, and the latter finally ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... the death of their spiritual ruler, might be interesting as a history of the manners of the times, but is immaterial to the object of this chapter. We prefer rather to trace the effect on the mind of Ulpius of his personal and private bereavement; of this loss—irretrievable to him—of the master whom he loved and the guardian whom it was his privilege ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... right. Life is of inestimable value, and nothing can compensate a corpse for the loss of it. Falstaff knew that, and, like the Magpie Moth, wisely counterfeited death to avoid the irretrievable step of dying. Our prudent livers display an equal wisdom, not exactly counterfeiting death, but living gingerly—living, as it were, at half-cock, lest life should go off suddenly with a flash and bang, leaving them nowhere. Of course, they are quite right. Life being pleasurable, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... swiftness, with a dexterity beyond praise, has picked his way across that quaggy Zabern Hollow; falls, with say 5,000 horse, on the flank of this big buffalo stampede; tumbles it into instant ruin;—which proves irretrievable, as the Prussian Infantry come on again, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... and trembling for his fate, Repented soon severely, and himself Sunk in his guilty solitude, devoid Of friends, of succor, hopeless and forlorn; While those who nursed them, to the pious task Roused by their prayers, with piteous moans commixt, Fell irretrievable: the best by far, The worthiest, thus most frequent met their doom. —Trans. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... great sorrow to his harassed mind. Soon after his arrival in Paris he opened a correspondence with the Chevalier St. George, and represented to him that the misfortunes which had befallen the cause were not irretrievable, and that if ten regiments only could be landed in Scotland before the depopulating system adopted by the English Government had taken effect, an insurrection might again be raised with good grounds for ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... and penniless, from that field. I learnt from the peasants, that what I had thought to be merely a serious defeat was an irretrievable disaster; and, in spite of wounds, hunger, and want of clothes, I held ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... of cohabitation, and the rashest of all promises. Two thoughtless and romantic people, met in youth under circumstances full of delusion, have bound themselves, not by reason but by contract, to make the best, when they discover their deception, of an irretrievable mistake. Its maxim is, "If you have made a mistake, cherish it." So long as this institution survives, "philanthropy will be crossed in a thousand ways, and the still augmenting stream of abuse continue ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... the dead man from the earth which covers him, nor that the executioner should now brand the mouldering bones with dishonour. No; the beloved of my soul will weep for me as one who has fallen innocent, and time will soften her sorrow; but how irretrievable a shock would it be if she learnt of the fearful and diabolical deeds of her ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... But to the point. I am willing to do what I can to extricate you from your situation. Your first scheme[114] I was considering; but your own impatience appears to have rendered it abortive, if not irretrievable. I will deposit in Mr. Murray's hands (with his consent) the sum you mentioned, to be advanced for the time ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... section of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow could there have been a more terrible picture of hopeless and irretrievable defeat. In this area alone, eighty-seven guns of various calibres, and fully a thousand horse and oxen-drawn vehicles, nearly a hundred motor-lorries, cars, field-kitchens, water carts, and a mass of other impedimenta blocked the road, with the carcases of thousands ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... another thought find harbour in her mind. Was the past irretrievable, the future predetermined? A woman's word had an old right to be broken. If she went to him, would not he welcome her gladly, and the future might yet ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... to condole with him. I expressed my regrets, therefore, as succinctly as possible, encouraging him with the hope of seeing a new covering of down before long, but delicately abstaining from any allusion to the cauda, whose loss I knew was irretrievable. To my great surprise, however, the judge answered cheerfully; discarding, for the moment, every appearance ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... lurid fire. Then to the Trojans, turning to the throng, He call'd aloud to scale the lofty wall; They heard, and straight obey'd; some scal'd the wall: Some through the strong-built gates continuous pour'd; While in confusion irretrievable Fled to their ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... also still living in Clermont County, within a few miles of the old homestead, and is as active in mind as ever. He was a supporter of the Government during the war, and remains a firm believer, that national success by the Democratic party means irretrievable ruin. ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... had been so long expanding was short-lived in proportion to its sweetness; and perfect as is the art of Virgil, Horace, and Tibullus, within a few years of Horace's death both style and thought had entered on the path of irretrievable decline. The muse of Ovid, captivating and brilliant, has already lost the severe grace that stamps the highest classic verse; and the false tendencies forgiven in him from admiration for his talent, become painfully conspicuous ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... hearts is concerned, to that small minority who have gone through the process of conversion as recognised by Edwards' sect. All others, heathens, infants, and the great mass of professed Christians, are sentenced to irretrievable perdition. The simplicity with which he condemns all other forms even of his own religion is almost touching. He incidentally remarks, for example, that external exercises may not show true virtue, because they have frequently proceeded from false religion. Members of the Romish Church and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... all?" said she, smiling at him. "Money matters can always be arranged somehow or other; nothing is irretrievable except ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... now come upon you. You have always been the aggressors: you have brought upon yourselves these difficulties by being disaffected, and not being subject to rule. And my advice is that you become as other citizens, lest by a recurrence of these events you bring upon yourselves irretrievable ruin." ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... knew enough of the world to be aware that there is no folly to equal that of a woman who, of her own free will, truly loving one man whom she can marry if she will sit, deliberately gives herself to another. It is not only a folly, it is a crime, and, like most crimes, for this life, an irretrievable mistake. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... tried to stem the current of affairs, but she had proved as powerless to deflect it as a dried stick tossed on to a river in spate. And now, whether the end were ultimate happiness or hopeless, irretrievable disaster, Michael and Magda must still fight their way towards it, each alone, by the dim light of that "blind Understanding" which is ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... closely pressed by the Siouxes, who failed not to seize each foot of ground ceded by their enemies. Had the Tetons stayed their efforts on the margin of the grass, it is probable that the honour of the day would have been theirs, notwithstanding the irretrievable loss they had sustained in the death of Mahtoree. But the more reckless braves of the band were guilty of an indiscretion, that entirely changed the fortunes of the fight, and suddenly stripped them of their ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and whose favourite excitement was to aim at the impossible, had never been more resolved on a Dukedom than when the Reform Act deprived him of the twelve votes which he had accumulated to attain that object. While all his companions in discomfiture were bewailing their irretrievable overthrow, Lord Monmouth became almost a convert to the measure, which had furnished his devising and daring mind, palled with prosperity, and satiated with a life of success, with an object, and the stimulating enjoyment of ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... is that terrible "NEXT MORNING," when reason is wide awake, upon which remorse fastens its fangs. Has a man gambled away his all, or shot his friend in a duel—has he committed a crime or incurred a laugh—it is the next morning, when the irretrievable Past rises before him like a spectre; then doth the churchyard of memory yield up its grisly dead—then is the witching hour when the foul fiend within us can least tempt perhaps, but most torment. At night we have one thing to hope for, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and gradually relegated to oblivion, all the ancient methods that had been devised to solve the enigmas of the future. Haruspicy and the augural art were abandoned, and not even the ancient fame of the oracles could save them from falling into irretrievable desuetude. This great chimera changed religion as well as divination, its spirit penetrated everything. And truly, if, as some scholars still hold, the main feature of science is the ability to predict,[2] no branch of learning could ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... master's cause; but the surrender of Bristol to the Parliamentary army, and the dispersion of the last force Charles could gather from Wales in an attempt to relieve Chester, were followed in September by news of the crushing and irretrievable defeat of the "Great Marquis" at Philiphaugh. In the wreck of the royal cause we may pause for a moment over an incident which brings out in relief the best temper of both sides. Cromwell, who was sweeping over the southern counties to trample ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Oswald, though upon good terms with him; and have seen Franklin, since Oswald's coming, but once, when he was as silent as ever, notwithstanding my reminding him of his promise; so that I cannot help thinking that business altogether irretrievable. But neither do I know what you will gain by forcing Oswald's return; indeed I am inclined to think it might be much more prudent to save appearances by leaving him here, till you shall have completed your purpose of receiving the propositions you wish or the refusal you ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... roar of remorseless waters that came after us, with all their waves and billows rolling upon us. It was a dream in which all the material terrors of the past were renewed; but these were all as nothing when compared with a certain deep underlying feeling that possessed my soul—a sense of loss irretrievable, an expectation of impending doom, ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... Whenever slavery is touched, he sets up his scarecrow of dissolving the Union. This may do for the North, but I should conjecture that something more than a pumpkin-lantern is required to scare manifest and irretrievable Destiny out of her path. Mr. Calhoun cannot let go the apron-string of the Past. The Past is a good nurse, but we must be weaned from her sooner or later, even though, like Plotinus, we should run home from school to ask the breast, after we are tolerably well-grown youths. It will not ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... diplodoci rose above the shouts of the soldiery to fill the dust-laden air with a dreadful clamor. The battle now swayed critically; a feather's weight on either side and one army would roll back in red, irretrievable ruin. It was the psychological ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... unwilling to be satisfied with mere feeling, desirous of retrieving the irretrievable. "Fool," he muttered, "a weak fool I have been! I have fastened this ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... tendency in favour of the new views, to being a bitter opponent of them. In scientific societies and in London generally, naturally enough he constantly came across the younger scientific men, such as Huxley and Hooker, who had declared for Darwin, and he made the irretrievable mistake of for a time attempting to disguise his opposition while he was writing the most bitter of all the articles against Darwinism. That appeared in the Edinburgh Review in April, 1860, and the range of knowledge it displayed, and ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... match as a military commander for the powerful genius of Von Moltke and the persistency of Frederick Charles and the more than two hundred thousand resolute Germans who surrounded him, and brought him and his army to irretrievable ruin. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... were known that it might ruin her prospects. I wanted that miserable sum only four thousand dollars that fellow Schwiden asked to borrow it of me for a few days, and to refuse would have been to confess all. I dared not try my credit, and I just madly took that step that proved irretrievable. I counted at the moment upon funds that were coming to me only the next week sure, I thought, as possible but the man cheated me, and our embarrassments thickened from that time; that thing has been a weight oh, a weight of deadening power! round my neck ever since. ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... geographical position the one where British and French troops could most easily be assembled, and it was the one on which a serious defeat to the enemy necessarily threatened that enemy with a grave, if not an irretrievable, disaster. It is true that for the comparatively short period during which Russia really counted, that is to say during the early months before Russian munitions gave out, the Eastern Front—the Poland Front—was a weak point for the Germans. But the Russian bubble had been ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Jason, Laomedon, Thesaeus, Dedalus, &c. The Amazones, Heroines of Scythic Extraction, having lost their Husbands in Battle, took up Arms themselves, with a manly Spirit of Resentment, and (inspired with Love of their deceased Husbands, and Grief for so great and irretrievable a Loss!) subdued Asia, and built Ephesus. Hercules and Thesaeus waged War against those Heroines, and defeated them, more to the Glory of the Vanquished than their own, those Matrons having defended themselves with surprizing Resolution. They cut off the Guards set over them, and escaped ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... situation; it is, as I before told your Lordship, in every respect an untenable one. I must relinquish it, and throw myself an outcast on society. Can you, will you, my Lord, exert your influence to save me from irretrievable ruin? Can you, my Lord, in any possible way, afford employment to me? Can you take me into your service—a young man, not totally destitute of talents, eager to exert them, and willing to do anything or be anything in his power? If you can, my Lord, I will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... of Mrs. Grancy's death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder—one of fate's most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world. ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... may, perhaps, be slow with impunity; but a statesman who is slow—whatever the force of his character and the strength of his judgment—can hardly escape unhurt from the hurrying of Time's winged chariot, can hardly hope to avoid some grave disaster or some irretrievable mistake. The fate of General Gordon, so intricately interwoven with such a mass of complicated circumstance with the policies of England and of Egypt, with the fanaticism of the Mahdi, with the irreproachability of Sir Evelyn Baring, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... run upon the shore at the highest tide. All efforts to float her again were unavailing. The calamity was irretrievable. The Aimable contained all the ammunition, the mechanic tools, and the farming and household utensils. But La Salle, ever rising superior to the blows of misfortune, still retained his firmness. Diligently he engaged in removing the stores from ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... turn. The enemy charged us, and for the first time were repulsed. We pressed on determined to win. The success of the morning turned to a most irretrievable and disastrous defeat to the enemy. They were completely routed, suffering a terrible slaughter. Twenty-four guns captured in the morning were retaken, besides a large number of prisoners, and most of the enemy's artillery, numbering over fifty pieces. Our Regiment took 16 officers ...
— History of the 159th Regiment, N.Y.S.V. • Edward Duffy
... easily escape notice altogether, or at all events pass unpunished, and the reputation of the leader who commits them will remain untarnished. But if he is pitted against a master of war a single false step may lead to irretrievable ruin; and he will be classed as beneath contempt for a fault which his successful antagonist may have committed with impunity a hundred ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... year 1768, Dr. Darwin met with an accident of irretrievable injury to the human frame. His propensity to mechanics had unfortunately led him to construct a very singular carriage. It was a platform with a seat fixed upon a very high pair of wheels, and supported in the front upon the back of the horse, by means of a kind of proboscis which, ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... showman had fallen short of his printed promise. The hurricane had come by night, and with one fell swash had made an irretrievable sop of every thing. The circus trailed away its bedraggled magnificence, and the ring was cleared ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable |
