"Incomprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... outbursts of enthusiastic admiration, some of eloquence, hidden, however, among pages so incomprehensible to the average lover of the sublime in Nature that the glory of Little Zion was lost in its very discovery. So remote did it lie from the usual lines of travel and traffic that, though its importance resulted in its conservation as a national monument in 1909, it was six or ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... (if I can call it so, and if it does not deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as the poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the misery of the people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte, and some few upstart contractors or army commissaries, the greatest privations must be submitted to in order ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... that under the surface there is incurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans hold to be sound. Thus If all between two stools—but it is more comfortable there on the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... clearly one of three things: it is what it pretends to be, an unexplained and as yet incomprehensible physical influence; it is delusion, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with regard to the captain, the wholesale crime of thrusting so many innocent persons out to the mercy of the winds and waves, or to the death from hunger and thirst which they must have believed would inevitably overtake them, is incomprehensible. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... dream, and not a reality. The bad hearts are there, but I believe that they are in a small, poor minority. One thing is sure: They are much the most interesting people in the world—and the nearest to being incomprehensible. At any rate, the hardest to account for. Their character and their history, their customs and their religion, confront you with riddles at every turn-riddles which are a trifle more perplexing after they are explained ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... deserted paths winding on the heights. In him, the chaos of other things, of the luminous "other places", of the splendors or of the terrors foreign to his own life, agitated itself confusedly, trying to disentangle itself—But no, all this, being indistinct and incomprehensible, remained formless ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... has left the house this morning; here is a letter which he has written to me. Read it, and let me know if you can explain some portion of it, which to me is incomprehensible. Sit down and read ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... less astonishing than incomprehensible. We have waited upon you by your own express invitation on the day appointed by yourself; and we have been received in a manner, I must say, we did not expect, considering this is the first visit of our niece ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... itself. First, excepting in melodrama and rough-and-tumble farces, the audience must know the motives actuating the personages of the drama—their situation, their emotions, ambitions, fears and what not. Without that all drama would be an incomprehensible jabbering and gesticulating of mummers, fit only to be put on the London stage at the present moment. Second, if Wagner spread himself in the expression of certain things where an ordinary dramatist would have dealt with them more briefly, it must be remembered that he was writing ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... month of the session the floor of the House began steadily to grow more and more tumultuous. To an unpolitical onlooker, leaning over the gallery rail, it was often an incomprehensible Bedlam, or perhaps one might have been reminded of an ant-heap by the hurry-and-scurry and life-and-death haste in a hundred directions at once, quite without any distinguishable purpose. Twenty men might be rampaging ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... the Church, whose leaders they often accused of a hankering for the "flesh-pots" that induced them to lead their followers into Egypt, rather than out of it. They were partly moved by a hatred of slavery and its long train of abuses that was irrepressible, and which to most persons was incomprehensible, and partly by a love for their fellows in distress that was so insistent as to make them forget themselves. Their impulses seemed to be largely intuitive, if not instinctive, and if called upon for a philosophical explanation they could ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... result that instantly she seemed to freeze—to become cold and hard as marble. He could not understand her, he feared her somewhat, and his pride took alarm. At the least he could keep his feelings to himself, he need not expose them to be trampled upon by this incomprehensible girl. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... this one thing on which her heart was set—while he was yet, if possible, more utterly without sympathy for the fear that moved her than her father or Marcantonio had been. But if the one woman in Venice had but one desire, however desperate and incomprehensible,—"Basta! It is enough," said Piero to himself,—she should not die with it unfulfilled, if he ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... writings; and the book to which Dorothy refers here and in Letter 21, is probably the Poems and Fancies, an edition of which was published, I believe, in this year [1653]. Many of her verses are more strangely incomprehensible than anything even in the poetry of to-day. Take, for instance, a poem of four lines, from the ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... His incomprehensible irony had so often perplexed Rachel, that she did not know whether his serious apologetic tone were making game of her annoyance, and she answered not very graciously, "Oh, never mind, it did not signify." And at the same time ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the Christian God. It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling, fighting gods and goddesses. A being who is Incomprehensible as well as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for human readers. The gods in the Iliad shock us because they are too like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... 'tedious wearisomeness.' Oh, sorrowful woe, and also woeful sorrow, when an Edmund Burke arises, like a cheeta or hunting leopard coupled in a tiger-chase with a German poodle. To think, in a merciful spirit, of the jungle—barely to contemplate, in a temper of humanity, the incomprehensible cane-thickets, dark and bristly, into which that bloody cheeta ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Catholicism is totally distinct in its essence from that of Protestantism. The devotion of Protestants is scriptural and reasonable; that of Roman Catholics poetical and affectionate. The Protestant considers God as a spiritual being, and, as such, incomprehensible, the only object of worship, the only fountain of grace and pardon. The Roman Catholic represents the Eternal in material forms, accessible only through the indirect medium of intercession, and addresses ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... up to the still screaming and fluttering bird, they were able to understand what had appeared so incomprehensible. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... with him, and came back across the snow-drifted fields, under the frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them, he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet, that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A question hung in the ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... perpetual fluctuation of everything. The whole art is really to live all the DAYS of our life; and not with anxious care disturb the sweetest hour that life affords—which is the present. Admire the Creator, and all His works, to us incomprehensible; and do all the good you can upon earth; and take the chance of eternity without dismay." He expired in his wife's arms, holding Nelson by the hand; and almost in his last words, left her to his protection; requesting him that he would see justice done her by the government, as he knew ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... forty, and that, as he had not a grey hair in his head, he could still pass for a young man, though his grave disposition made him feel older than he was. Of the three melancholic men in whose society she chiefly lived, her father was selfish and morose; Griggs was gentle, but silent and incomprehensible, though he exerted an undoubted influence over her; Reanda alone, though naturally melancholy, was at once gentle, companionable, ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... what the Czar expected to learn from such an agent, nobody undertook to explain. The phrase was a convenient one, and, like many others equally senseless, was currently adopted because it seemed to explain the incomprehensible; and certainly, to the multitude, no man was ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... perhaps is the absence of all clue to the burial-ground of this stalwart race; for only a stalwart people could have built those temple walls and those amazing fortifications. Where then are the bones of their dead? Strange and incomprehensible as it may seem, no excavations have yet unearthed human bones, or brought to light any spot that might be supposed ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... later teaching of the Academy and Pyrrhonism is evident, and Sextus treats of it briefly, as not requiring discussion,[5] as Philo taught that the nature of facts is incomprehensible, and Antiochus transferred the Stoa to the Academy. It is therefore evident, from the comparison which we have made, that we do not find in the Academy, with which Scepticism after the death of Timon was so long united, the exact continuance of Pyrrhonism. The philosophical enmity ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... that it was impossible to distinguish a word they said. Others, of more imaginative temperament, protested, on the contrary, that their voices were perfectly audible, but that the language they talked was some mysterious or diabolical language of their own, incomprehensible to everybody but themselves. One or two expert and daring spies had even contrived to look in at them through the window, unperceived; but had seen nothing uncommon, nothing supernatural,—nothing, in short, beyond the spectacle of two ladies sitting ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... especially of these phrases seemed so strange that I repeated it to myself again and again. It was—The kinchin will bite the bubble—I pondered, and fifty times questioned—'Who is the kinchin? What is bite the bubble? I But in vain: it was incomprehensible! ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... "Incomprehensible!" she exclaimed. "Only a short time before his death, we cherished—deceitful, indeed, they proved, but, oh, what blessed hopes! we reckoned on casualties, on what might possibly occur to assist as. Neither of us could endure to dwell on the idea of separation; and yet—yet since—Oh, my God," ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... of the one which was there, here are others! It is a miracle, then, exactly like that the Lord performed! ... With what object? Nay, all the rest of it is not less incomprehensible! Ah! demon, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... may sound, I must confess to having slept well on the first night I spent under the roof of my mother's ancestors. Sleep surprised me whilst I was reflecting on the strange and incomprehensible character of Francis. Proud, generous, noble-hearted, quick-witted, beautiful—and yet with all her charms (which I could feel had already begun to work upon me) spoilt by a detestable education, by the manners of a sutler and a rudeness of the worst kind. And then, in addition to all this, there ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... that raki was available and that hospitality would do no harm; Benham and Amanda sat up and various romantic figures with splendid moustaches came forward and shook hands with him, modestly ignoring Amanda. There was drinking, in which Benham shared, incomprehensible compliments, much ineffective saying of "BUONA NOTTE," and at last Amanda and Benham counterfeited sleep. This seemed to remove a check on the conversation and a heated discussion in tense undertones went on, it seemed interminably.... Probably very few aspects of Benham and Amanda ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... I looked for blood, but there was none visible; I came to the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. I spent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which were incomprehensible to the members of my family, and ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... mistreated the body and neglected the mind, this sect would not exist. The doctors, with their awful doses of nauseous and destructive drugs, went to one extreme. The reaction was the formation of a sect that has gone to the other extreme. The Christian Scientists are incomprehensible in spots to us mortals who believe in a body as well as a mind, but they have a cheerful and helpful philosophy which brings enjoyment on earth and they have done an immense amount of good by teaching people to cease thinking and talking ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... and folk art is evidently yearning without end, without hope, also power invisible, the fateful stamp of destiny, and the fate in preordination, one of the fundamental principles of our race, which explains much that in Russian life seems incomprehensible for the foreigners." ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... men round her, I began to suspect that religion and effeminacy had a good deal to do with each other. For the women, whatsoever their temperaments, or even their tastes might be, took to this to me incomprehensible religion naturally and instinctively; while the very few men who were in their clique were-I don't deny some of them were good men enough-if they had been men at all: if they had been well-read, or well-bred, or gallant, or clear-headed, or liberal- ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... Stated in this way the whole matter is plain and rational enough. It is, in fact, one of the many striking examples of adaptation in the English political system. A collection of rules that appear cumbrous and antiquated, and that even now are well-nigh incomprehensible when described in all their involved technicality, have been pruned away until they furnish a procedure almost as simple, direct, and appropriate as any one could devise." Government of England, I., 277-278. The procedure of the House of Commons on public ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... apartment after apartment, and found no one to address. It was nine o'clock in the morning, yet the master and mistress of the house had not left their room, and not a domestic was at his post. It was quite incomprehensible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... restlessness and fear almost beyond the average assailed me. It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes, so little known, so incomprehensible to the healthy. The north and east owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The south could calm, the west sometimes cheer: unless, indeed, they brought on their wings ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... that's bound for Stirling, and craves the protection of your honour's party in these kittle times. Ah' your honour has a notable faculty in searching and explaining the secret,—ay, the secret and obscure and incomprehensible causes of the backslidings of the land; ay, your honour touches the root o' ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... have not got over the difficulty yet, for of all the wonderful truths we are commanded to believe, no one is so wonderful and so incomprehensible as the Love of God ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... on the east shore of the river, and directed their course towards them. Their new guide began to call to them in an incomprehensible manner, and said that the natives did not belong to his tribe, but were a very wicked people, who would beat them cruelly, and pull out their hair, and maltreat them in various ways. Despite this warning Mackenzie advanced, and soon found them to be quite as willing to accept of gifts ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... book from him reverently, and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... grandfather and grandmother were wasted. They are a couple of dear old people, and it would have been a crime to allow them to suffer more than they must of necessity. It all seems so different when they talk; and when I see the home, luxuries, and friends my mother had, it appears utterly incomprehensible that she dared leave them for a stranger. Probably the reason she did was because she was grandfather's daughter. He is gentle and tender some of the time, but when anything irritates him, and something does every few minutes, he breaks loose, and such another explosion you ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... is steadily Friedrich's attitude; long after this, he refuses to say whom he will vote for as Kaiser: "Fortune of War will decide it," answers he, in regard to that and to many other things; and keeps himself to an incomprehensible extent loose; ready, for weeks and months after, to make bargain on his own Silesian Affair with anybody that can. [Ranke, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... analysis, utterly incomprehensible to her, of Lutwyche's plan for intertwining love and hate; and with every word the malice deepens, becomes directer in its address. If any one should ask this painter who can hate supremely, how his hate can "grin through Love's rose-braided mask," and how, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Dionysius into Latin along with the commentaries of Maximus, and his system is essentially based upon theirs. The negative theology is adopted, and God is stated to be predicateless Being, above all categories, and therefore not improperly called Nothing [query, No-Thing]. Out of this Nothing or incomprehensible essence the world of ideas or primordial causes is eternally created. This is the Word or Son of God, in whom all things exist, so far as they have substantial existence. All existence is a theophany, and as God is the beginning of all things, so also is He the end. Erigena teaches the ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... inheritance, teaching must be admitted as a means of at any rate modifying an instinct. We observe this in our own case; and we know that animals have great powers of communicating their ideas to one another, though their manner of doing this is as incomprehensible by us as a plant's knowledge of chemistry, or the manner in which an amoeba makes its test, or a spider its web, without having gone through a long course of mathematics. I think most readers will allow that our early training ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... close to a water famine! The Atlantic, the source of all life, was asleep, and what if it should never wake! We know not its ways, it mocks all our science. Close to us lies this great mystery, incomprehensible, and yet our very breath depends upon it. Why should not the sweet tides of soft moist air cease to stream in upon us? No reason could be given why every green herb and living thing should not perish; no reason, save ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... incriminating evidence were deposited beside him. The Elcuanams and the other Indians, crowding about the entrance, crooked their necks with anxiety to see what would happen. Pio had not yet disrobed, and stood dolefully awaiting the worst, from nightcap to stockings a clown like and altogether incomprehensible figure. Again the Father's funny vein got the better of him. He knew that he was compromising himself forever, but for the life of him he could not help it—his lip trembled, he tried to control it but failed, ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... under the rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful, closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private hoard of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as things happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was a matter of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his vision had been. The sphere was the earth with all its continents and seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges. It was so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full that he could ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... its celestial magnitudes who is there who is really great or small, and what is the difference between you and me, my work and yours? I sought refuge in the idea of GOD, the God of a starry night with its incomprehensible distances; and I was at peace, content to be the meanest worm of all the millions that crawl ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... de sagesse, and this accounts, to some extent, for her popularity. You have not only no dates and no places, but no indication who writes the letters or to whom they are written, though, unless you are very stupid, you soon find out. The personae are Lelia—a femme incomprise, if not incomprehensible; Stenio, a young poet, who is, in the profoundest and saddest sense of the adverb, hopelessly in love with her; and a mysterious personage—a sort of Solomon-Socrates-Senancour—who bears the Ossianesque ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... father's storehouses contained chests of spices and bales of cloth, he did not know one more queenly. That he could have preferred, even for a single moment, the Countess von Montfort, whose sole advantage over her was her nimble tongue and gay, bold manners, now seemed incomprehensible. He had joined Cordula's admirers only to forget at her feet the annoyances with which he had been wearied at home. He had but one thing for which to thank the countess—her remark concerning ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... This was incomprehensible to me, having as yet no knowledge of the illogical workings of an artistically poetic and musical temperament. But I drew my own conclusions, and it was not surprising that I considered the devout father the true one, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... was strongly disposed to account for the origination of all past and present species of living things by natural causes. But he would have liked, at the same time, to keep the name of creation for a natural process which he imagined to be incomprehensible. ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... merely lines before were now deep grooves. Yet the fierce, baffled look that had been in his eyes since the escape was entirely gone. He smiled at the group most tenderly, and his moustache wiggled in a most incomprehensible fashion. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... fell into your hands, conceal nothing from me." I related plainly all that had passed, and declared I had chosen rather to pass for a thief than to reveal that tragical adventure. "Good God," exclaimed the governor, "thy judgments are incomprehensible, and we ought to submit to them without murmuring. I receive, with entire submission, the stroke thou hast been pleased to inflict upon me." Then directing his discourse to me: "My son," said he, "having now heard ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... evening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; for though the former marveled greatly, what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown that inspired awe and ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... thing that remained incomprehensible to the girl was the idolatrous regard in which MacNair was held by his own Indians. To them he was a superman—the one great man among all white men. His word was accepted without question. Upon leaving for the southward MacNair had told the men to work, therefore ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... on the playground and looked at each other, quite perplexed. The one was stout little Ritz, who long since had forgotten his great trouble and had listened intently to the exciting, although incomprehensible story. The other was his brother Edi, a slender, tall fellow with a high forehead and serious grey eyes beneath. He was hardly two years older than his brother; but for his not quite nine years, he was tall, and appeared much ...
— Erick and Sally • Johanna Spyri
... exceedingly great in the life to come. And even if there were no life to come, his present life is happier far than that of the man who grabs at all the wealth he can get until he drops into the grave. The man who works "all for love and nothing for reward" is a being incomprehensible to us ordinary mortals; he is an angel, and if ever he was a candidate for a seat in Parliament he was not elected. Even love—"which rules the court, the camp, the grove"—is given only with the hope of a return of love; for hopeless love is ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the forest. Chickango, who had his rifle in his hand, raised it. Stanley shouted to him not to fire, and while he hesitated, the stranger had darted behind the trees. The black returned, uttering words which, though incomprehensible to us, showed that he was very angry. At length, when somewhat calmed, Timbo, who had been unable himself to understand what was said, learned from him that the stranger was one of a band of Pangwes who were advancing towards the territory of the Bakeles. He had ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... teaching them to speak French; for it was the reproach of the Jesuit missions that they left the savage a savage still, and asked little of him but the practice of certain rites and the passive acceptance of dogmas to him incomprehensible. ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much upon the sea, predictions which, in consideration of an uneasy stomach, I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. Two incidents alone relieved the dead level of idiocy and incomprehensible gabble. The first was the comical announcement that "when I drew fish to the Marquis of Bute, I should take care of my sweetheart," from which I deduce the fact that at some period of my life I shall drive a fishmonger's cart. The second, in the middle of such nonsense, had a touch of the tragic. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "It's incomprehensible as a genuine popular movement," said he on one of Bob's periodical returns to headquarters. The young man now held a commission, and lived with the Thornes when at home. "The opposition up there was so rabid ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... partly assumed; his indifference was a mere habit. The assumption of the former saved him infinite worry and responsibility; the habit of indifference did away with the necessity of coming to a decision upon general questions. This state of mind may, to townsmen, be incomprehensible. Certain it is that such as are in that condition are not found among the foremost dwellers in cities. But in the country it is a different matter. Such cases are only too common, and (without breath of disparagement) they are usually ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... can have suggested anything? Whether, in spite of all precautions, any idle story-book can have got into the house for Louisa or Thomas to read? Because in minds that have been practically formed by rule and line, from the cradle upwards, this is incomprehensible." ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... is!" exclaimed the Inkstand. "It is incomprehensible! That is what I always say." It was thus the Inkstand addressed itself to the Pen, and to everything else that could hear it on the table. "It is really astonishing all that can come from me! It is ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... Duchess of Merwold had counted the Marquis as her own, considering him fitted by nature to be the spouse of her eldest girl, a fine young woman with projecting teeth, who had hung fire. She felt Emily Fox-Seton's incomprehensible success to be a piece of impudent presumption, and she had no reason to restrain the expression of her sentiments so long as she conveyed them by methods of ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... young woman," Julian said thoughtfully, "but a little incomprehensible. If the Princess Torski is her aunt, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Indeed, so much are we the creatures of circumstance, and so liable to be influenced by surroundings, that Arthur, who, a few hours before, had been plunged into the depths of depression, turned into his narrow berth, after a tremendous struggle with the sheets—which stewards arrange on a principle incomprehensible to landlubbers, and probably only partially understood by themselves—with considerable satisfaction and a ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... amazed—she had till this moment never thought of such a thing. Mr. Harper's whole manner of speech and proceeding was so very incomprehensible—like a lover's—that she told the entire truth in simply saying "that she ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... I did not understand." The feeling of having scored a point made Derek feel a little better. "I admit it. Your behavior is incomprehensible. Where did ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... subodore is scented from afar; so that our only course will be to sketch out imperfectly certain conjugal situations of an analogous kind, thus imitating the philosopher of ancient time who, seeking in vain to explain motion, walked forward in his attempt to comprehend laws which were incomprehensible. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the inexpressible, the incomprehensible God. His terrible hand swirls, with unresting power, yonder innumerable congregation of suns in their mighty orbits, and yet stoops, with tender touch, to build up the petals of the anemone, and paint with rainbow hues the mealy ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... orphan girl by asking for it on the eve of his bankruptcy. Had I my property I might perhaps have given up teaching for a while, and gone away for a little change and rest, but God has willed it otherwise, no doubt for some wise purpose, and to some wise end, although so difficult and incomprehensible at present. It is all doubtless for the trial of my faith and trust in Him. Let me then trust in Him! Yea, though He slay me, let me yet trust in Him! Has He ever yet failed me? Has He not proved Himself in all ages to be the Father ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... names loom large out of Barbizon. Daubigny, Diaz and Rousseau are great painters, and they each have disciples and imitators who paint as well as they; but Corot and Millet stand out separate and alone, incomprehensible and unrivaled. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... out very wide fields, into which we must not even glance now; but I cannot help pausing here to repeat the remark already made, as to the gigantic and incomprehensible self-confidence that speaks here. 'Followeth Me'; then Jesus Christ calmly proposes Himself as the aim and goal for every soul of man; sets up His own doings as an all-sufficient rule for us all, with all our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... it, he mixed up those stories with his aunt's fairy-tales, thus creating for himself a chaos of adventures wherein the bright colours of fantasy were whimsically intertwined with the stern shades of reality. This resulted in something colossal, incomprehensible; the boy closed his eyes and drove it all away from him and tried to check the play of his imagination, which frightened him. In vain he attempted to fall asleep, and the chamber became more and more crowded with dark images. Then ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... she had clothes enough, and clothes that were good enough for married life. I couldn't understand why a young woman, on becoming a wife, should need a lot of new and elaborate dresses, such as she had never worn and never cared to wear, and an endless variety of under-garments of mysterious and incomprehensible make, with frills and fringes and laces and edgings, as if, up to that time, she had never had anything next to her precious person, except what was visible to the exterior world. And even assuming that she donned these things ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... by judicious arrangements of mustache and side-whiskers. By profession he was a lawyer, and had been most successful as adviser to wholesale thieves on depredations bent or in search of immunity for depredations done. It was incomprehensible to him why he was unpopular with the masses. It irritated him that they could not appreciate his purely abstract point of view on life; it irritated him because his unpopularity with them meant that there were limits, and very narrow ones, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... 1796, and the facts in evidence give a strange picture of the times. A duel actually fought in the garden of an inn, a noble lord close by in a bower therein, and his lady certainly within HEARING of the shots, and doubtless a spectator of the bloody spectacle. But this is not the point,—the incomprehensible point,—to which I have alluded—which is, how Lord Derby and the other gentlemen of the highest standing could come forward to speak to the character of DICK ENGLAND, if he was the same man who killed the unfortunate brewer ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... what right have we to complain of the indifference of the universe, what right to declare it incomprehensible, and monstrous? Why this surprise at an injustice in which we ourselves take so active a part? It is true that there is no trace of justice to be found in disease, accident, or most of the hazards of external ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... was restricted to a radius of a few miles. There was no money; there was no necessity for it, since the government of the Great Nobles took all produce and portioned it out again according to need. It was communism on a vast and—incomprehensible as it may seem to the modern mind—workable scale. Their minds were as different from ours as their bodies were similar; the concept "freedom" would have ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... third one above another, do constitute one entire harmony, which governs and comprises all the sounds that by art or imagination can be joined together in musical concordance, that, I cannot but think a significant emblem of that Supreme and Incomprehensible Three in One, governing, comprising, and disposing the whole machine of the world, with all its included parts, in a most perfect and ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... though unwillingly, signed the treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible to Castlereagh was religious enthusiasm. "The fact is," he wrote home to the English Premier, "that the Emperor's mind is not completely sound." [243] Apart, however, from the Czar's sanity or insanity, it was impossible for the Prince Regent, or for any person except the responsible Minister, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... a certain sense, he is so; and it is his greatest charm. But incomprehensible!—no. The essence of all artistic poetry is in the perfect blending of matter and form, so that the meaning creeps in upon us, but with a certain vagueness, a certain indefiniteness, which reaches ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hat to leave. I followed him out to the door, and shook hands with him cordially. The burden felt lighter on my shoulders already. For four long years that mystery had haunted me day and night, as a thing impenetrable, incomprehensible, not even to be inquired about. The mere sense that I might now begin to ask what it meant seemed to make it immediately less awful ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... and other places on the northern Volga in this neighborhood, widely construed, are mines of information and delight. However, as there are no books wherewith a foreigner can inform himself on this subject, any attempt at details would not only seem pedantic, but would be incomprehensible without tiresome explanations and many illustrations, which are not possible here. I may remark, however, that Viollet-le-Duc and Fergusson do not understand the subject of Russian architecture, and that their few observations on the matter are nearly ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... produced in a child's mind by the pure action of its imagination, was that of a little boy who overheard a conversation between his mother and a friend upon the subject of the purchase of some stuff, which she had not bought, "because," said she, "it was ell wide." The words "ell wide," perfectly incomprehensible to the child, seized upon his fancy, and produced some image of terror by which for a long time his poor little mind was haunted. Certainly this is a powerful instance, among innumerable and striking ones, of the fact that the fears ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... set about packing her effects, and all the time her thoughts were of her lonely friend in the hill-side cabin. In this hour of her departure she felt herself drawn even more strangely and tenderly toward that weird, incomprehensible creature; such a tugging at her heart the girl had never experienced till now. What would Miss Woppit say—what would she think? The thought of going away with never so much as a good-by struck Mary Lackington as being a wanton piece of heartlessness. ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... its direction, but to go farther is to condemn oneself to utter confusion in this medley of impulsive, passionate, fantastic movements which were born, shot upward, and fell to earth again, at the caprice of a thousand incomprehensible circumstances. In certain counties of England there are at the present day villages having as many as eight and ten places of worship for a few hundreds of inhabitants. Many of these people change their denomination every three or four years, returning to that they ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... of the heavy, costly bells was filling the whole garden in the moonlight. The white walls, the white crosses on the tombs, the white birch-trees and black shadows, and the far-away moon in the sky exactly over the convent, seemed now living their own life, apart and incomprehensible, yet very near to man. It was the beginning of April, and after the warm spring day it turned cool; there was a faint touch of frost, and the breath of spring could be felt in the soft, chilly air. The road from the convent ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... only put one little thought into giving a woman what she wants, instead of giving her what you think she ought to want; if you kept as up-to-date in your love-making as you do in your law practise, women wouldn't be the incomprehensible riddle you always make them out ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... He, then, who has learned these things, and known all the angels and their causes, is rendered invisible and incomprehensible to the angels and powers, even as Caulacau also was. And as the Son was unknown to all, so must they also be known by no one; but while they know all and pass through all, they themselves remain invisible and unknown to all; for "Do thou," they say, "know all, but let nobody ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... horse towards the group. The two first that I lifted had nothing attached to them, but proved to be mere empty gourds floating before the wind; but when I tried to seize the largest, it eluded my grasp in a most incomprehensible manner, and slid away astern of me with a curious hollow gabbling sort of noise, whereupon my palfrey snorted and reared, and nearly capsized me over his bows. What a noble fish, thought I, as I tacked in chase, but my Bucephalus refused ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... without any remarkable progress in my knowledge of this strange being, though I found myself growing more and more sensitive to the presence of it each day; and at the same time the incomprehensible sympathy with Nature, for I know not what else to call it, seemed growing stronger and more startling in the effects it produced on the landscape. The influence was no longer confined to twilight, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... followed his own fancies in the mode of laying out his garden; and, in consequence, the plan that had undoubtedly existed in his mind was utterly incomprehensible to every one but himself. It was an intermixture of kitchen and flower garden, a labyrinth of winding paths, bordered by hedges, and impeded by shrubbery. Many of the original trees of the forest were still flourishing among the exotics which the doctor had transplanted thither. ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was the most ignorant, and therefore the least guilty, of all the persons mentioned in this passage. He had probably never heard the name of Jesus till that day, and saw nothing but an ordinary Jewish peasant, whom his countrymen, like the incomprehensible and troublesome people they were, wished, for some fantastic ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... at first sight almost incomprehensible that, thus endowed as a philosopher, mechanic, inventor, discoverer, the fame of Leonardo should now rest on the works he has left as a painter. We cannot, within these limits, attempt to explain why and how it is that as the man of science he has been naturally and necessarily left behind by the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... It is only by showing them the truth that they can know their best interests and the real motives which will lead them to happiness. Long enough have the instructors of the people fixed their eyes on heaven; let them at last bring them back to the earth. Tired of an incomprehensible theology, of ridiculous fables, of impenetrable mysteries, of puerile ceremonies, let the human mind occupy itself with natural things, intelligible objects, sensible truths, and useful knowledge. Let the vain chimeras which beset the people be dissipated, and very soon rational opinions will fill ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier |
