"Inconceivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she felt in every fibre of her averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable mistake ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... being observed in its operation in different portions of man's habitat, the most primitive wanderer must have come to have full faith in the universal action of the observed law of gravitation. Indeed, it is inconceivable that he can have imagined a place on the earth where this law does not operate. On the other hand, of course, he never grasped the conception of the operation of this law beyond the close proximity of the earth. To extend the reach of gravitation out to the moon ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... tastes, talked with him for an hour. At the end of that time, to everybody's astonishment, he engaged this hopeless idler as his personal guide for three months, at the sum of five francs a day! It was inconceivable, it was unheard of! The Englander was as mad as Gottlieb, whose intellect had always been under suspicion! The schoolmaster pursed up his lips, the pastor shook his head; no good could come of it; the family looked upon it ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... in every charter-party, enabling the governor to send the convicts to Norfolk Island in the ship that brought them out, if he should see occasion; as the difficulty with which they were got together for that purpose, when once landed, was inconceivable. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward,—southward, and so draping with the city-smoke not you but the city. Here for hours would Coleridge talk, concerning all conceivable or inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an intelligent, or failing that, even a silent and patient human listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at least the most surprising talker extant in this world,—and ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... truths in our mind, Shakespeare's intense sensitiveness and sensuality, and his almost inconceivable snobbishness, we may now ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... forward—The noise above stairs was dreadful—I blundered and missed the stairs, but the terrified boy had run after me to shew me. I heard two pistols fire as I ascended—The horror that struck my heart was inconceivable!—A fellow armed with a bludgeon was standing to guard the door. My pistols were unlocked and ready: I presented and bade him give way—He instantly obeyed—I made the lock fly and entered!—The first object that struck my sight was Frank, besmeared with ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... before. She said to herself that it would never come to anything but misery and pain; yet even misery was better than nothingness, and he who had loved had lived. To think that a quiet, middle-aged Englishwoman, a pattern of domestic duty, should think thus, and exult in her son's inconceivable and, as she believed, unhappy passion, is almost too much to be ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... would not join the marriage party; refused to eat with it or sit with it at all. Day after day, for six days, flatly refused; and after nightfall of the sixth, glided out with her foster-brother into the woods, into by-paths and inconceivable wanderings; and, in effect, got home to Denmark. Brother Svein was not for the moment there; probably enough gone to England again. But Thyri knew too well he would not allow her to stay here, or anywhere that he ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... among other things, a very pretty brass-bound chest being thrown about like a feather. . . . The unhappy Ostend packet, unable to get in or go back, beat about the Channel all Tuesday night, and until noon yesterday; when I saw her come in, with five men at the wheel, a picture of misery inconceivable. . . . The effect of the readings at Hastings and Dover really seems to have outdone the best usual impression; and at Dover they wouldn't go, but sat applauding like mad. The most delicate audience I have seen in any provincial place, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... should proceed to destroy the capitol or set fire to the arsenal. He who should make these attempts, would be a bad tribune. He who assails the power of the people, is no longer a tribune at all. Is it not inconceivable, that a tribune should have power to imprison a consul, and the people have no authority to degrade him when he uses that honor which he received from them, to their detriment? For the tribunes, as well as the consuls, hold ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... father was a decurion. I have bartered my nobility—for which I feel neither shame nor sorrow—for the sake of others." It is difficult to reconcile this statement with the assurance given in the "Confession" that his father was a humble deacon. "It is inconceivable," as Father Bullen Morris argues, "that the Saint, sprung from a noble family, should base his claim to nobility on the fact that his father, Calphurnius, was a deacon. On the other hand, the theory that Calphurnius was a Roman officer fits in with both ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... blindfold me and lead me in. When I opened my eyes, there they stood. Twenty-five happy faces smiling into mine, and twenty babies to match. It was the kiddies that saved the day. I was not a little bewildered, and tears stung my eyes. But with one accord the babies set up a howl at anything so inconceivable as a queer foreign thing with a tan head appearing in their midst. When peace was restored by natural methods, ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... now that the rustic speaking in a patois could write Venus and Adonis, manifestly it was inconceivable in 1593, when Venus and Adonis was signed "William Shakespeare." No man who knew the actor (as described) could believe that he was the author, but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that the faintest doubt was thrown on the actor's authorship; ignorant ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... that in obtaining the intimate history of a woman a difficulty is met with in the natural reluctance to telling what often seems to the patient painful and unnecessary details. To some people it seems inconceivable that fears, pains and aches, sleeplessness, etc., can arise out of difficulties like the monotony of housework, temperament, or troubles with the husband. Furthermore, though some women understand well enough the source of their conflicts, they are ashamed to tell and rest mainly ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... would ye endure life without that hope, ye discerning ones? Neither in the inconceivable could ye have been born, nor in ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such a language inconceivable. Instead of summarizing all our experiences of a thing by one word, its name, we should have to recall by appropriate adjectives the various sensations we had received from it; the objects we think of would be disintegrated, or, rather, would never have been unified. For "sun," they would ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... crowd would gather on the pavement and disperse again. To each and all the speakers, the one intolerable thing was the total disappearance of the poor lost one. No body—no clothes—no tangible relic of the dead: it was a sore trial to customary beliefs. Heaven and hell seemed alike inconceivable when there was no phantom grave-body to make trial of them. One woman after another declared that it would send her mad if it ever happened to any belonging of hers. "But it's a mercy there's no one to fret—nobbut t' little gell—an she's ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by the superficiality of your cui bono, and shall make you the answer that I am willing for an exceedingly paltry honorarium to rush into the Gordian knot and write you the most superior essays on every conceivable and inconceivable subject under the sun, as per enclosed samples which I forward respectfully for your delightful and golden opinions, guaranteeing faithfully that all of your readers in every hemisphere and postal district will fall in love with such a ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the wind and its pressure, the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability. They ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... some slight obstacle. At length Miss Strictland, who had lately been very courteous to Mr. Vivian, took an opportunity of drawing him into one of the recessed windows; where, with infinite difficulty in bringing herself to speak on such a subject, after inconceivable bridlings of the head, and contortions of every muscle of her neck, she insinuated to him her fears, that my Lord Glistonbury's confidence had been very ill placed in Lord Lidhurst's tutor: she was aware that Mr. Russell had the honour of Mr. Vivian's friendship, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... a thing, under all its circumstances, inconceivable, that everything should by the Emperor be abandoned to the king of Prussia. That monarch was considered as principal. In the nature of things, as well as in his position with regard to the war, he was only an ally, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... poet families. A close corporation, they appear to have resented every innovation, and were content to continue the tradition of their ancestors. The direct consequence of this tenacious clinging to the fashions of by-gone days rendered it impossible, nay almost inconceivable, that the literary men of Ireland should have exerted any profound or immediate influence upon England or western Europe. Yet, nowadays, few serious scholars will be prepared to deny that the island contributed in considerable measure ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Dorsenne. "It is inconceivable, but it is thus. Ah! she is truly the worthy friend of that knave Hafner, whom his daughter's broken engagement has not grieved, in spite of his discomfiture. I forgot to tell you that he had just sold Palais Castagna to a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... this about his own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his bed for seven sleepless hours, Barnes arose and gloomily breakfasted alone. He was not discouraged over his failure to arrive at anything tangible in the shape of a plan of action. It was inconceivable that he should not be able in very short order to bring about the release of the fair guest of Green Fancy. He realised that the conspiracy in which she appeared to be a vital link was far-reaching and undoubtedly pernicious in character. There was not the slightest doubt in his mind ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... unbounded passion for low wit, the importance she gave to every kind of printed trash, either complimentary or abusive, the despotism and transports of her oracles, her excessive admiration or dislike of everything, which did not permit her to speak upon any subject without convulsions, her inconceivable prejudices, invincible obstinacy, and the enthusiasm of folly to which this carried her in her passionate judgments; all disgusted me and diminished the attention I wished to pay her. I neglected ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty that he should commit iniquity." An evil God, one that could commit evil would be a contradiction in terms, an impossible, inconceivable idea. Job seemed to doubt that the principle on which the universe was conducted was one of absolute equity. He must know that God is free from all evil-doing. However hidden the meaning of His dealings, He is always just. God never did, never will do wrong to any of His creatures; He ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... morning journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my college life. You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him; his virtues, I make sure, are inconceivable to his successors, just as they were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically alone in the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how much he was cast down at times, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of grave, universal beauty. Of the new note that came into the Norwegian lyric with Bjoernson, I can discover no hint in his predecessors. Such a poem as, for instance, "Nils Finn," with its inimitably droll refrain—how utterly inconceivable it would be in the mouth of Wergeland or Welhaven! The new quality in it is as unexplainable as the poem itself is untranslatable. It has that inexpressible cadence and inflection of the Norse dialect which you feel (if you have the conditions for recognizing ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of His mouth were given These phrases. O replace them whence they came. He, only, knows our inconceivable "Heaven," Our hidden "Father," and the ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... immense Space which those take up, and which they move in at this Time, must be supposed, before they had Being, to be plac'd there: As God himself was, and existed before all Being, Time, or Place, so the Heaven of Heavens, or the Place, where the Thrones and Dominions of his Kingdom then existed, inconceivable and ineffable, had an existence before the glorious Seraphs, the innumerable company of Angels which attended about the Throne of God existed; these all had a Being long before, as the Eternal Creator of them ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... thumping outside. The Sudberrys were well acquainted by this time with that sound and its cause. At first it had filled Mrs Sudberry with great alarm, raising in her feeble mind horrible reminiscences of tales of burglary and midnight murder. After suffering inconceivable torments of apprehension for two nights, the good lady could stand it no longer, and insisted on her husband going out to see what it could be. As the sound appeared to come from the cottage, or off-shoot from the White ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... remained in it, unless it had been sent abroad for food, or other perishable commodities; but these were supplied by a small portion of the fruits of the farm, in which the farmer allowed he had a very good bargain. In fact, it is inconceivable what sums may be collected by starving only, and how easy it is for a man to die rich if he will but ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... The reflex action of the working of the spirit of freedom on these shores of the new hemisphere upon the welfare of the countless millions of the Old World, has been of a value incalculable and inconceivable to the minds against ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... necessities, and most of them in a troubled and greatly excited state of mind. The emancipation of the slaves had destroyed the traditional labor system upon which they had depended. Free negro labor was still inconceivable to them. There were exceptions, but, as a rule, their ardent, and in a certain sense not unnatural, desire was to resist its introduction, and to save or restore as much of the slave labor system ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Above all these elements of man, controlling all, and preserving its individuality throughout, is "spirit." Yet even this, when absorbed into Nirvana, is lost in that great whole which includes all things and is Nature herself. Lost, do I say?—yes, lost for inconceivable ages upon ages, yet destined to come forth again at some moment in eternity, and to begin its round through the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... deceived. As she could not understand how the same men who had depressed monarchy desired to sustain it, she played a double and ignoble part. The tactics of the Feuillant advisers brought a revival of popular feeling in favour of the Court, which seemed inconceivable at the epoch of the arrest. King and queen were applauded in the streets, and at the theatre the cry "Long live the king!" silenced the cry "Long live the nation!" This was in October 1791, before the Legislative ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Empire."[22] These are great changes, and without entering too deeply into details of how these new bodies are to be brought into being, it is certain that one of the conditions of their successful working is that they must be fully representative. It is inconceivable that a national council can be set up for Wales, or for Scotland, or for Ireland, without provision for the adequate representation of minorities. Lord Morley, in instituting the new Councils in India, was compelled to make provision for the representation of Muhammedans. Mr. ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... the little cabin, at the painted beams, at the tarnished varnish of bulkheads; he looked round as if appealing to all its shabby strangeness, to the disorderly jumble of unfamiliar things that belong to an inconceivable life of stress, of power, of endeavour, of unbelief—to the strong life of white men, which rolls on irresistible and hard on the edge of outer darkness. He stretched out his arms as if to embrace it and us. We waited. The wind and ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... no doubt inconceivable, in the case of any modern nation, that a climax of the kind just indicated could never reach its completion. If all the capitalists, for example, of Great Britain or America, were suddenly determined ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... it is stated, are allowed to travel on this route, and some quaint instances of inconceivable official formality on the part of the Government of India are cited. For instance, a German was allowed to travel by the route from Quetta to Sistan, but another German who wished at the same time to travel from Sistan to Quetta was arrested at the frontier, detained ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... understand, at last, that he really intended to make her a declaration of love. It was unheard of, almost inconceivable. But there he was at her feet, looking very handsome in the moonlight, his face turned up to hers with an unmistakable look of devotion in its rather grave lines. His voice, too, had a new sound in it. Indifferent as he might be by daylight ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... would be purer, live faster, do greater, die younger. What magnificent physical improvements, we may suppose, will then aid the powers of the soul! The old world would then be subdued, nevermore to strike a blow at its lithe conqueror, man. The department of the newspaper, with inconceivable photographic and telegraphic resources, may then be extended to the solar or the stellar systems, and the turmoils of all creation would be reported at our breakfast-tables. Men would rise every morning to take an intelligible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... lip, on the right side, near the base of his flaring nostril. Many moles have hairs in them; Pierre's mole had not merely half a dozen hairs, but a whole crop. They grew thick and long; and, with a perversion of vanity almost inconceivable in a sane person, Pierre had twisted these hairs together, as a man twists a mustache, and had trained them to grow obliquely across his cheek bone. He was a big fellow, for a Frenchman, and, as he walked towards Cleggett with a mincing elasticity of gait, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... was not gathered at the ankles, but hung loose like occidental trousers; and the day we met she wore simply her own hair. There was not much of it on top, and she had it cut short in the neck. She was rather a terrible figure. Her having ever been married would have been inconceivable, except ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... around them.] ere long they venture to put forward one foot—they then repeat the effort and walk a little, holding at the same time by a chair; and lastly they acquire, with joy to them inexpressible and to us inconceivable, the ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... manager was at his Avit's end, till Tottola, the librettist, suggested a prayer for the Israelites before and after the passage of the host through the cleft waters. Rossini instantly seized the idea, and, springing from bed in his night-shirt, wrote the music with almost inconceivable rapidity, before his embarrassed visitors recovered from their surprise. The same evening the magnificent Dal tuo stellato soglio ("To thee, Great Lord") was ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, only cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediaeval Church, but also very different ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the engagement began, and the protestant camp was attacked in three places with inconceivable fury. The fight was maintained with great obstinacy and perseverance on both sides, continuing without intermission for the space of four hours; for the several companies on both sides relieved each other alternately, and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... staffed by officers of the Reserve before the war. Whatever their pre-war associations, if any, with the War Ministry, hostilities must have found them keenly alive to the possibilities of their unique research and organic chemical producing facilities. It is inconceivable that this military personnel should not have greatly assisted the I.G. in its operations, inventions and general assistance for ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... Examples of this poverty of number knowledge are found among the forest tribes of Brazil, the native races of Australia and elsewhere, and they are considered in some detail in the next chapter. At first thought it seems quite inconceivable that any human being should be destitute of the power of counting beyond 2. But such is the case; and in a few instances languages have been found to be absolutely destitute of pure numeral words. The Chiquitos of Bolivia had no real numerals whatever,[1] ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... his own sublime self, the heart and focus of Political Nature; left in this manner, now when the sordid English and Dutch declined spending blood and money for him farther. "Ungrateful, sordid, inconceivable souls," answered Karl, "was there ever, since the early Christian times, such a martyr as you have now made of me!" So answered Karl, in diplomatic groans and shrieks, to all ends of Europe. But the sulky English and Allies, thoroughly tired of paying and bleeding, did not heed him; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the sea are inconceivable, and have contributed to bring about what you could never expect to see, a force almost equal to the enemy in number, and you know that less would do our business. Besides, never men were so transported as to be brought in such secrecy so ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... time, sufficiently showed to be no common man. Many grave persons were offended at the vehement sentiments expressed in the Robbers; and the unquestioned ability with which these extravagances were expressed, but made the matter worse. To Schiller's superiors, above all, such things were inconceivable: he might perhaps be a very great genius, but was certainly a dangerous servant for his Highness the Grand Duke of Wuertemberg. Officious people mingled themselves in the affair: nay, the graziers of the Alps were brought ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... of life in Alaska is all but inconceivable. The summer tourist can hardly realize it, because he brings to the settlement the only variety it knows; and this comes so seldom—once or twice a month—that the population arises as a man and rejoices so long as the steamer is in port. Please to picture this people after the excitement is ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the manifest identity of the two translations. So that unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of his genuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,—which, of course, is possible, but not probable—or unless,—what is in the last degree inconceivable,—Spenser had afterwards been willing to take the trouble of turning the blank verse of Du Bellay's unknown translator into rime, the Dutchman who dates his Theatre of Worldlings on the 25th May, 1569, must have employed ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... then they narrowed. The Colonel thought there was another woman. How could he, proud soul, even think for a moment that Virginia herself had betrayed him? No, to his high mind it was inconceivable that a daughter of his should violate a trust; and ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... had scarcely been made when Corbulo with inconceivable swiftness reached the Euphrates and there waited for the retreating force. When the two armies approached each other you would have been struck with the difference between them and between their generals: one set were fairly aglow with delight at their ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... enough for us to distinguish the discharge of every single piece. I remarked on this occasion the incredible exertions of the French voltigeurs, who defended a ditch near the Kuhthurm, ran to and fro on the bank with inconceivable agility, availed themselves of the protection afforded by every tree and every hedge, and fired away as briskly as though they had carried with them the confederation of the Rhine, as their own property, in their cartouch-boxes. ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor in the other but in the union of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Sontag or Malibran ever warbled a note that contained a hundredth part of the sweetness and music that was comprised in that simple and unsophisticated ejaculation; it decided in an instant, and beyond all possibility of doubt, who and what was the speaker. His joy was inconceivable, and he could scarce refrain from giving vent to it in a loud shout. Returning immediately, he communicated the joyful intelligence to his friends; and the whole party, with light hearts and rapid steps, advanced towards the beach. Just as they stepped ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... accustomed to having men show their appreciation of the fact. It was new to her thus essentially to be ignored, and not quite agreeable. There could be no tender interest between herself and this handsome barbarian. The idea even of flirtation was quite inconceivable. Nevertheless, it was strange that he should be so imperceptive of her charms. Doubtless, his eyes were blind to the refinements of beauty. They should be opened. It would be dreadful if the fellow should grow away from the girl who was waiting for him. And yet—Josephine checked ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... is abundant evidence of variation—none of what is ordinarily understood as progression; and, if the known geological record is to be regarded as even any considerable fragment of the whole, it is inconceivable that any theory of a necessarily progressive development can stand, for the numerous orders and families cited afford no trace of such ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... considered to be a judge of horseflesh, and to have a most tremendous interest in horse-training and racing? Yet it would be half our little incomes out of our pockets if we didn't take on to have those sporting tastes. It is the same (inconceivable why!) with Farming. Shooting, equally so. I am sure that so regular as the months of August, September, and October come round, I am ashamed of myself in my own private bosom for the way in which I make ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... exertions to tear away the serpents with his hands, they turned themselves still tighter, stopped his breath, and he fell to the floor, where he continued for a moment, as if in the most inconceivable agony, rolling over, and covering every part of his body with his own blood and froth, until he ceased to move, and appeared to have expired. In his last struggle, he had wounded the black serpent with his teeth, as it was striving, as it were, to force its head into ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... no more than a lyric poem or a burst of music. Every one in his practical moments acknowledges tacitly, at least, the difference between the intrinsic goodness and badness of experiences. A life of even delight or even wretchedness, or of colorless indifference, is not inconceivable, but it is not the lot of any actual ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... arches. Now, it does not matter two soldi to the history of art who built, but who designed and carved the Loggia. It is out and out the grandest in Italy, and its archaic virtues themselves are impracticable and inconceivable. I don't vouch for its being Orcagna's, nor do I vouch for the Campo Santo frescoes being his. I have never specially studied him; nor do I know what men of might there were to work with or after him. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... position, lying on the back, that shouted its sinister evidence at General Feraud. He could not possibly imagine that it might have been deliberately assumed by a living man. It was inconceivable. It was beyond the range of sane supposition. There was no possibility to guess the reason for it. And it must be said that General D'Hubert's turned-up feet looked thoroughly dead. General Feraud expanded his lungs for a stentorian shout to his seconds, but from ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... ocean. And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in our own hearts where alone we can hear the voice of God, and where, at any hour or in any scene, we can find ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... outbuildings of the temple the most inconceivable mountebanks have taken up their quarters, their black streamers, painted with white letters, looking like funereal trappings as they float in the wind from the top of their tall flagstaffs. Hither we turn out steps, as soon ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... manner of mortal man, so far as he can conceive of personality. Limitless personality is inconceivable. His person and perfection are neither self-created, nor discerned through imperfection; and of God as a person, human reason, imagination, and revelation give us no knowledge. Error would fashion Deity in a manlike mould, while Truth is moulding ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... failure, to my sense, that I cannot refuse the implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the "pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity—and that when departure from this was the circumstance through which he had to show the more ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... choice was made. And as she grew accustomed to the stern companionship she often found herself wondering how a woman of such curiously harsh disposition could ever have been the victim of such a passion as was attributed to her. It was almost inconceivable, especially when she tried to picture the father, whom she had never known, but who was reputed to be such an intensely human man, so full of the many frailties ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... say," said Cutts, with singularly elaborate articulation—"You don't mean to say that you were such an inconceivable ass as to pay up your letter of allotment? Well—I never heard of such a piece of deliberate infatuation! Why, man, a blacksmith with half an eye must have seen that the game was utterly up a week before the calls were due. I don't think there is a single man out of Scotland who ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... very many witnesses, as many sometimes as eight at a single sitting. And there are the photographs which include Miss Cook and show that the two women were quite different. Was he honestly mistaken? But that is inconceivable. Read the original narrative and see if you can find any solution save that it is true. If a man can read that sober, cautious statement and not be convinced, then assuredly his brain, is out of gear. Finally, ask yourself whether any ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... received letters from Malta, which gave birth to most extraordinary suspicions. The agonized feelings of his heroic mind are not to be described; but, nothing could for a moment divert him from the painful discharge of it's duty. In a state of inconceivable agitation, he wrote the following letter to Sir ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... distance from, one another. If this be so, it follows that there must be two totally different kinds of causes of motion: the one impact—a vera causa, of which, to all appearance, we have constant experience; the other, attractive or repulsive 'force'—a metaphysical entity which is physically inconceivable. Newton expressly repudiated the notion of the existence of attractive forces, in the sense in which that term is ordinarily understood; and he refused to put forward any hypothesis as to the physical cause of the so-called 'attraction of gravitation.' As ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... only did those abominable things because I was ill—when I was not myself; whereas now I am well, and the evil has passed from me. Besides, I only showed that wicked side of my nature to Christopher, through my love; it is inconceivable that I could ever have acted that way with another man. Christopher knows that. He knows there is no possible doubt about that. How much difference does this knowledge make to ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... supposition. It was a wide gallery. The dim light could not show us both its walls at once. The fall of the waters which were carrying us away exceeded that of the swiftest rapids in American rivers. Its surface seemed composed of a sheaf of arrows hurled with inconceivable force; I cannot convey my impressions by a better comparison. The raft, occasionally seized by an eddy, spun round as it still flew along. When it approached the walls of the gallery I threw on them the light of the lantern, and I could judge ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of the princess is very noble and well sustained. When I said I did not conceive her meaning, I expressed myself ill. I did not suppose she, did intrigue with Bireno; but I meant that it was not natural Paladore should suspect she did, since it is inconceivable that a princess should refuse her cousin in marriage for the mere caprice of intriguing with him. Had she managed her father, and, from the dread of his anger, temporized about Bireno, Paladore would have had more reason to doubt ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... inconceivable, and the two looked again to the rear to learn the cause of her unaccountable delusion. Five minutes later Sanders ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... peak that bobs up its twenty thousand feet of snowy grandeur serenely in his path. What a Ceasar is lost to this benighted world, because in its blindness, it will not search out such men as Alkali and ask them to lead it onward to deeds of inconceivable greatness. Alkali Bill can whittle more chips in an hour than some men could in a week. Much of the Humboldt Valley, through which my road now runs, is at present flooded from the vast quantities of water that are pouring into it from the Ruby Range of mountains now visible to the southeast, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... which population increases when unchecked, and with such a body of evidence before him to elucidate even the manner by which the general laws of nature repress a redundant population, it is perfectly inconceivable to me how he could write the passage that I have quoted. He was a strenuous advocate for early marriages, as the best preservative against vicious manners. He had no fanciful conceptions about the extinction of the passion between the sexes, ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... walks—those fast-flying delicious days that I passed all alone by myself, with my good and simple Therese, my beloved dog, my old cat, with the wild birds and the roes of the forest, with all Nature and her inconceivable Maker. ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... mine shall prove successful, I may in my next Journey that way, take an Abstract of their most admirable Tracts in Navigation, and the Mysteries of Chinese Mathematicks; which out-do all Modern Invention at that Rate, that 'tis Inconceivable: In this Elaborate Work I must run thro' the 365 Volumes of Augro-machi-lanquaro-zi, the most ancient Mathematician in all China: From thence I shall give a Description of a Fleet of Ships of 100000 Sail, built at the Expence of the Emperor Tangro the 15th; who ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... of our system is a consequence of this. The parts, into which the ideas of space and time resolve themselves, become at last indivisible; and these indivisible parts, being nothing in themselves, are inconceivable when not filled with something real and existent. The ideas of space and time are therefore no separate or distinct ideas, but merely those of the manner or order, in which objects exist: Or in other words, it is impossible to conceive either a vacuum and extension without ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... with terror, and looked timidly at the two ladies. It was evidently almost inconceivable to herself that she could sit down beside them. At the thought of it, she was so frightened that she hurriedly got up again, and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Principles, endeavours to press Sir W. Hamilton into the service of Pantheism and Positivism together, by adopting the negative portion only of his philosophy—in which, in common with many other writers, he declares the absolute to be inconceivable by the mere intellect,—and rejecting the positive portions, in which he most emphatically maintains that the belief in a personal God is imperatively demanded by the facts of our moral and emotional consciousness. ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... utterly that only the slow action of the ages could again restore it; although of course much could be done to prevent the still further eastward extension of the Mongolian Desert if the Chinese Government would act at once. The accompanying cuts from photographs show the inconceivable desolation of the barren mountains in which certain of these rivers rise—mountains, be it remembered, which formerly supported dense forests of larches and firs, now unable to produce any wood, and because of their condition a source of danger ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then what ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... told by a well-informed source, these assertions do not at all correspond to the facts; furthermore, from the very nature of the steps undertaken by the dual monarchy in Belgrade, this would have been entirely inconceivable. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... course would, on the whole, have been to impeach on the Rohilla charge, and to acquit on the Benares charge. Had the Benares charge appeared to us in the same light in which it appeared to Mr. Pitt, we should, without hesitation, have voted for acquittal on that charge. The one course which it is inconceivable that any man of a tenth part of Mr. Pitt's abilities can have honestly taken was the course which he took. He acquitted Hastings on the Rohilla charge. He softened down the Benares charge till it became no charge at all; and then he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... despotism as complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that the Zionist movement will offer, even as it has offered in the past, a strenuous opposition to Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will be able to resist the blandishments that Germany is certainly prepared to shower on it. For great as is the progress the Jewish settlers made in Palestine during the twenty or twenty-five ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... become unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing, a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite and pass on—a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do with the meat in the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... said the Ancient again. Then followed a terrible spectacle. The man went raving mad. He bounded into the air to a height inconceivable. He threw himself upon the ground and rolled upon the rock. He rose again and staggered round and round, tearing pieces out of his arms with his teeth. He yelled hideously like one possessed. He grovelled, beating his forehead against the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... being pursued, he fled with incredible swiftness to the Table Mountain at the back of the town, whence this single miscreant, still animated by the effect of the opium, for two days resisted and defied every force that was sent against him. The alarm and terror into which the town was thrown were inconceivable; for two days none ventured from within their houses, either masters or slaves; for an order was issued (as the most likely means of destroying him, should he appear in the town) that whatever Malay was seen in the streets should be instantly killed ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... in disgrace and exile at Mekka." On the dignified bearing and self-possession of our youthful sovereign, the Khan enlarges in the strain of eulogy which might be expected from one to whom the sight of the ensigns of sovereignty borne by a female hand was in itself an almost inconceivable novelty, declaring, that "the justice and virtues of her Majesty have obliterated the name of Nushirvan from the face of the earth!" But the remarks of the simple-minded Parsees on the same subject will be found, from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... ever betrayed that ignorance."—Bourrienne. I., 19, 21: At Brienne, "unfortunately for us, the monks to whom the education of youth was confided knew nothing, and were too poor to pay good foreign teachers.... It is inconceivable how any capable man ever graduated from this educational institution."—Yung, I., 125 (Notes made by him on Bonaparte, when he left the Military Academy): "Very fond of the abstract sciences, indifferent to others, well grounded ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... only Olivier from the state of nothingness into which he cast all human beings).—Art is no more true than love. What room does it really occupy in life? With what sort of love do they love it, they who declare their devotion to it?... The poverty of human feeling is inconceivable. Outside the instincts of species, the cosmic force which is the lever of the world, nothing exists save a scattered dust of emotion. The majority of men have not vitality enough to give themselves wholly to any passion. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... therefore, it is intended to regard the right of private capture at sea as still subsisting. Without it, indeed, naval warfare is almost inconceivable, and in any case no one has any experience of such a truncated method of war on which ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... Solitude:'—"The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. All he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean of colour and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment.... He had a remorse, running to despair, of his social GAUCHERIES, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... water. One dead camel's skeleton is uncommonly like another, and they lay about in various directions, showing that caravans converged to or diverged from El Obeid by different routes. When the sun burst forth with all that inconceivable grandeur which drives artists who visit the country to despair, and causes untravelled gazers on their pictures to accuse them of exaggeration, when their efforts have as a fact fallen far short of the reality, Harry's eyes scanned the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... that evening Lydia Carr completely routed Dundee's carefully worked-up case against her. It was inconceivable, he told himself, that a mind cunning enough to have executed this murder would give itself away in such a fashion. If she had indeed pried among her mistress' papers and found the will and note, would she not, from the most primitive instinct of self-preservation, have pretended ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... as applied to Printing are in the highest degree advantageous and admirable. Once types were cast in moulds, such as boys use for casting bullets. Now they are turned out, with inconceivable rapidity, from a casting-machine worked by steam. Ink and paper, too, are made by machinery; and when the types are set, we invoke the aid of the Steam-Press, and so print off at least fifty impressions to each one produced under the old process ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... difficulty. The time that had lapsed since the lamentable break-down had been sufficient to bring upon the scene an inconceivable crowd. After satisfying their curiosity ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... really the only parties invited who got nothing at all of the banquet, it becomes a question of some interest,—what did they get? They were merely mocked, if they had no compensatory interest in the dinner! For surely it was an inconceivable mode of honoring Jupiter, that you and I should eat a piece of roast beef, leaving to the god's share only the mockery of a Barmecide invitation, assigning him a chair which every body knew that he would never fill, and a plate which might as well have been filled with ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... the subways and tubes the stoppage of the trains had automatically discontinued the suction ventilation. The underground thousands, in mortal terror of the non-existent third-rail danger, groped their way painfully to the stations. With inconceivable swiftness the mephitic vapors gathered. Strong men staggered fainting into the streets. When revived they told dreadful tales of stumbling over ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... seem. He will be, and thereby, not therefore, seem. Yet, once more, even on him, the idea of asserting the truth in holy power such as he could have put forth, must have dawned in grandeur. The thought was good: to have yielded to it would have been the loss of the world; nay, far worse—ill inconceivable to the human mind—the God of obedience had fallen from ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the road at a pace he could only make when he was alone. It had looked threatening when he left the house, but, as he went, the clouds piled themselves up with inconceivable rapidity, and before he was three miles out on the plain, the storm broke, with a sudden fury from which there was no escape. He took to his heels, and ran to the next village, some quarter of a mile in front of him. There, in the smoky room ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... tells us, that "he would sometimes be silent and thoughtful, and look all the while as if he were saying his prayers." A French princess, desirous of seeing the great moralist NICOLLE, experienced an inconceivable disappointment when the moral instructor, entering with the most perplexing bow imaginable, silently sank into his chair. The interview promoted no conversation, and the retired student, whose elevated spirit might have endured martyrdom, shrunk ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... if these things were true and important, it is inconceivable that the Church Fathers, the very founders of Christianity, should have been all at sea in regard to them, should have held divergent opinions, and should have been discussing these questions one way and the other for ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... friends Forster was thought of as a sort of permanent bachelor. His configuration and air were entirely suited to life in chambers: he was thoroughly literary; his friends were literary; there he gave his dinners; married life with him was inconceivable. He had lately secured an important official post, that of Secretary to the Lunacy Commissioners, which he gained owing to his useful services when editing the Examiner. This necessarily led to the Commissionership, which was worth a good ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... repeated Sylvia, bewildered. "But it is inconceivable that Anna could have left Lacville without telling me—or, for the matter of that, ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... beginning, as it has no end: the clock of Time is futile there: it might as well attempt to go in vacuo. Nevertheless, in respect to finite intelligences like ourselves, seeing that eternity is an idea totally inconceivable, it is wise, nay it is only possible, to be presented to the mind piecemeal. Even our deepest mathematicians do not scruple to speak of points "infinitely remote;" as if in that phrase there existed ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... tyranny, the tyranny of a Kultur whose ideal is the uniformity of a perfect mechanism, not the variety of life. Such a fate humanity could not long have tolerated; yet before the iron mechanism could have been shattered, if once it had been established, there must have been inconceivable suffering, and civilisation must have fallen back many stages towards barbarism. From this fate, we may perhaps claim, the world was saved from the moment when not Britain only, but the British Empire, refused to await its turn according to the German plan, threw its whole weight ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... which are reared in the vast forests of the interior, at no expense to the inhabitants, are the great staple of Servian product and export. In districts where acorns abound, they fatten to an inconceivable size. They are first pushed swimming across the Save, as a substitute for quarantine, and then driven to Pesth and Vienna by easy stages; latterly large quantities have been sent up the Danube in ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... hard at work pumping water and drenching the ruins with it; for, as they said, the great heat dried up the moisture with inconceivable rapidity, and if once these ruins fired, nothing short of a miracle could save the remainder of the houses. Other stout fellows were upon the roofs with their buckets, emptying them as fast as they were filled upon the roofs and walls, ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... beyond the doom-door was but developed from the faint sketch traced by the strivings of our spirit—to each man his own picture, but filled in, perfected, vivified a thousandfold, for terror or for joy perfect and inconceivable? ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... people have said, and do say, that that arrest was and is a great evil. I say it was and is a great good. Why? Answer: It was and would now be premature. Had it been carried out, it would have been and would now be evil, immense, inconceivable,—to master, slave, America, Africa, and the world; because neither master, slave, America, Africa, the world, were, or are, ready for emancipation. God has a great deal to do before he is ready for emancipation. He tells us so by this arrest put upon that tendency to ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... now he was definitely in communication with the enemies of Mr. King! Ah; but Mr. King did not know how formidable was the armament of those enemies! He (Soames) had overrated Mr. King; and because that invisible being could inspire Fear in an inconceivable degree, he had thought him all-powerful. Now, he realized that Mr. King was unaware of the existence of at least one clue held by the police; was unaware that his name was associated with the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... they are compelled to believe Moses and St. Paul in the right, and the philosophers of the present day, whether male or female, in the wrong. To speak frankly, the excessive boldness of these new theories, the incalculable and inconceivable benefits promised us from this revolution from the natural condition of things in Christendom—and throughout the world indeed—would lead us to suspicion. Guides who appeal to the imagination when discussing ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... end of nearly ten years, am I allowed to supply those missing links which make up the whole of that remarkable chain. The crime was of interest in itself, but that interest was as nothing to me compared to the inconceivable sequel, which afforded me the greatest shock and surprise of any event in my adventurous life. Even now, after this long interval, I find myself thrilling as I think of it, and feeling once more that sudden flood of joy, amazement, and incredulity which utterly submerged my mind. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... country so unwilling to supply us as at present. By military authority, we collect a kind of casual subsistence that can scarcely be called our daily bread. The fatigue of campaigning in this country is almost inconceivable. I have slept, when I have had time to sleep, in my clothes. I seldom divest myself of my sword, boots or coat; my horse is constantly saddled, and we eat when provisions are to be got, and we have nothing else to do. The dangers of the field are neither more ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... this original sin, he would be the first after the king, and we should see him, in a short time, at the head of the armies. He gains new friends every day. He insinuates himself into all hearts with inconceivable skill. He is highly honored by the men, and no less beloved by the ladies. His face is very well formed, the nose neither too large nor too small. His eyes are very soft; his skin brown, but very smooth; and his whole features animated ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... and extension of the highway system is of national importance just as is development and extension of railways, and concerted action throughout a nation is a prerequisite to an adequate policy in regard to either. It is inconceivable that any community in a nation can prosper greatly without some benefit accruing to many other parts of the country. Increased consumption, which always accompanies material prosperity, means increased production somewhere, and people purchase from many varied sources to supply the things that they ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below. On the other hand, I surveyed the famous river Ohio that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucky with inconceivable grandeur. At a vast distance I beheld the mountains lift their venerable brows, and penetrate the clouds. All things were still. I kindled a fire near a fountain of sweet water, and feasted on the loin of a buck, which a few hours before I had killed. The sullen shades of night ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip
... expression which this writer uses does not necessarily mean that the temple was in the exact centre of one of the two divisions of the town, it certainly implies that it lay towards the middle of one division—well within it—and not upon its outskirts. It is indeed inconceivable that the main sanctuary of the place, where the kings constantly offered their worship, should have been nine or ten miles from the palace! The distance between the Amran mound and Babil, which is about two miles, is quite as great as probability ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... and beyond the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The tale that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend. But it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as many modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine as little, localized and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk, astricti globis, rooted to their towns or trades; and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... to know that our boys at the front are concerned with two broad aims beyond the winning of the war; and their thinking and their opinion coincide with what most Americans here back home are mulling over. They know, and we know, that it would be inconceivable—it would, indeed, be sacrilegious—if this Nation and the world did not attain some real, lasting good out of all these efforts and sufferings ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... office, and that she hath observed that Sir W. Pen never had a kindness to her son, since W. Pen told her son that he had applied himself to me. That his rise hath been by her and her husband's means, and that it is a most inconceivable thing how this man can have the face to use her and her family with the neglect that he do them. That he was in the late war a most devilish plunderer, and that got him his estate, which he hath in Ireland, and nothing else, and that he ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... questioning and turning and returning of the most fundamental subjects—religion, foreign policy, and domestic economics—are quite familiar to him. But the editor was not selecting news for that real man; he was selecting news for an imaginary retired officer of inconceivable stupidity and ignorance, redeemed by a childlike simplicity. If a book came in, for instance, on biology, and there was a chance of having it reviewed by one of the first biologists of the day, he would say: "Oh, our Public won't stand ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... of Pfalz was given to his Cousin of BAIERN (Bavaria),—so far as an indignant Kaiser could. However, at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) it was found incompetent to any Kaiser to abrogate PFULZ or the like of Pfalz, a Kurfurst of the Empire. So, after jargon inconceivable, it was settled, That PFALZ must be reinstated, though with territories much clipped, and at the bottom of the list, not the top as formerly; and that BAIERN, who could not stand to be balked after twenty ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... published, or perhaps ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is, however, all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them; but it throbs and flashes with the love of his subject—a love disconcerted and abjured, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... answer these conundrums: they presupposed inconceivable situations, which yet, though inconceivable, were shortly coming to pass, for Olga's advent might be expected before October, that season of tea-parties that ushered in the multifarious gaieties of the winter. Would Olga form part of the moonlit ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... be in no hurry about anything. The hunters were bringing in plenty of game, and the village life went forward merrily. But Henry judged that they were merely waiting. It was inconceivable that the Wyandots should remain there long in peace while the Indian world of all that great valley ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... especially chivalrous periods and in all especially chivalrous communities. No illustrator would portray a young planter of the Old South without his cane; and that fragrant old-school figure, a southern "Colonel," without his cane is inconceivable. Canes connote more or less leisure. They convey a subtle insinuation of some degree ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... life lasts, the irresolute will, the bodily languor, the ever-present sense of hopeless, helpless ruin. The opium-eater must take his choice between the two. On the one hand is hope, continually brightening in the future—on the other is the inconceivable wretchedness of one from whom hope ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... in the South are rather nasty things, too," continued the bachelor bird. "I'm used to them, of course, and I've proved dozens of times that there's no such thing as hypnotism; but the effect of a snake's eye on very young and inexperienced birds is inconceivable, and not to be reconciled to the Darwinian theory or Mendel's law. What between snakes, hawks, and women's hats, the life of ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... no sense a release of a separate soul; so that the birth of a child is but a new manifestation in physical form of the one soul, and in no sense the apparition of an additional soul? It is difficult to think otherwise. The birth and death of souls are inconceivable; the immortality of a vast and varying number of individual souls is equally inconceivable. Immortality implies unity, not number. The mind can grasp the possibility of one soul, the manifestation of which is the universe and ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... that spanned the heavens. The green tint deepened into emerald, assuming a delicate rose hue as it faded upward into rays that diverged from the top until the whole resembled a gigantic crown. Every ray became a panorama of gorgeous colors, resembling tiny sparks, moving hither and thither with inconceivable swiftness. Sometimes a veil of mist of delicate green hue depended from the base of the crown, and swayed gently back and forth. As soon as the swaying motion commenced, the most gorgeous colors were revealed. Myriads of sparks, no larger than snow-flakes, swarmed across the delicate green ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Europe, could not fail to raise the entire continent against Napoleon and France, and thus to bring on the ruin of both. "Rome," as it is said by Montesquieu, "extended her empire because her wars only followed in succession. Each nation, such was her inconceivable good fortune, waited till another had been conquered, before beginning the attack." Rome fell as soon as all the nations assailed and penetrated on ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... late. The papers have been full of it. Police brutality, illegal arrests, assaults in station houses, star-chamber methods that would disgrace the middle ages. A state of affairs exists to-day in the city of New York which is inconceivable. Here we are living in a civilized country, every man's liberty is guaranteed by the Constitution, yet citizens, as they walk our streets, are in greater peril than the inhabitants of terror-stricken Russia. Take a police official of ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... would take paper if he could help it. No one knew to-day what his notes would be worth to-morrow. "Never," says Duclos, in his Secret Memoirs of the Regency, "was seen a more capricious government-never was a more frantic tyranny exercised by hands less firm. It is inconceivable to those who were witnesses of the horrors of those times, and who look back upon them now as on a dream, that a sudden revolution did not break out—that Law and the Regent did not perish by a tragical death. They were both held in horror, but the people ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... requiring highly developed skill, and apparently highly charged with emotional tone, are the precursors of pairing. They are generally confined to the males, whose fierce combats during the period of sexual activity are part of the emotional manifestation. It is inconceivable that they have no biological meaning; and it is difficult to conceive that they have any other biological end than to evoke in the generally more passive female the pairing impulse. They, are based on ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... expostulations, prayers, threats, had been all in vain to procure one smile, one word, one glance of compliance or forgiveness. And the fate of Dr. Grimshaw, with his unwon bride, was like that of Tantalus. And now the inconceivable tortures of jealousy were about to be added to his other torments, for this man now sitting by his side, and basking in the sunshine of her smiles, was the all-praised Adonis who had won ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... questionable supremacy in clouds. There is no effect of sky possible in the lowlands which may not in equal perfection be seen among the hills; but there are effects by tens of thousands, for ever invisible and inconceivable to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for the beauty of it, there is more ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... two impulsions; one having for its object change, the other immutability, and yet it is these two notions that exhaust the notion of humanity, and a third fundamental impulsion, holding a medium between them, is quite inconceivable. How then shall we re-establish the unity of human nature, a unity that appears completely destroyed by ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a Latin proverb which means that one man alone is no man at all. A man who should be neither son, brother, husband, father, neighbor, citizen, or friend is inconceivable. To try to think of such a man is like trying to think of a stone without size, weight, surface, or color. Man is by nature a social being. Apart from society man would not be man. "Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." To take out of a man all that he gets from his ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... merry, could outfoot them all when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of religion and the gibbering anthropomorphisms of those who loved not to die. At such times Saxon was oppressed by these sad children of art. It was inconceivable that they, of all people, should be ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... Vaughan and her father so that she should think it was Swain who was following them; he picked up the blood-stained handkerchief, which Swain had dropped perhaps when he fled from the arbour, and placed it beside the body; and in some way inconceivable to me he pressed the prints of Swain's fingers on the dead man's robe. Now, to do that, he must have known that Swain was injured—the blood-stained handkerchief would tell him that; but he must also have known that it was his ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... make him angry with Madame des Ursins. The complaints raised against her were then universal, at least at Versailles, and at a distance it was difficult to separate those which were founded on false reports. With the well-known temper which characterised Louis XIV., it must have seemed a thing inconceivable that such importance should be conceded to a woman whom he had placed there to do his bidding. Finding that his grandson and the young queen were disposed to resist his recall of the camerara-mayor, he addressed them as a ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... inconceivable torture. If you knew how I dread spending the Carnival without a single amusement! We found the ambassadress's card at our home, so she has returned the visit. It is rather late, all the same. Her cousin came at dinner time. The Grand Duke of L—— asked who we ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... is not inconceivable that objects may act directly on our consciousness without taking the intermediary of our nervous system. Some authors, the spiritualists notably, believe in the possibility of disembodied souls, and they admit by implication that these souls remain in communication with the terrestrial ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... volcano silk, with lava buttons. Whether (as the Neapolitan wits said) he had studied dancing under Saint Vitus, or whether David, dancing in a linen vest, was his model, is not known; but Mr. Brown danced with such inconceivable alacrity and vigour, that he threw the Queen of Naples into convulsions of laughter, which terminated in a miscarriage, and changed the ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... have been satisfactory to have discovered the occasion of the inconceivable licentiousness which was thus sanctioned by the legislator,—this overturning of the principles of society, and this public ridicule of its laws, its customs, and its feelings. We are told, these festivals, dedicated to Saturn, were designed to represent ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... twenty-nine years of age. And yet, under circumstances of inconceivable difficulty, with unhesitating reliance upon his own mental resources, he assumed the enormous care of creating and administering a Lew government for thirty millions of people. Never did he achieve a victory which displayed ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... a portrait can be considered, but they are some of the more extreme of those prevalent at the present time. Neither is it contended that they are incompatible with each other: the qualities of two or more of these points of view are often found in the same work. And it is not inconceivable that a single portrait might contain all and be a striking lifelike presentment, a faithful catalogue of all the features, a symbol of the person and a symphony of form and colour. But the chances ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... thickness in different parts of their length, and possess distinctive characters in each group of insects. This complex apparatus, so different from anything in the eyes of vertebrates, may subserve some function quite inconceivable by us, as well as that which we know as vision. There is reason to believe that insects appreciate sounds of extreme delicacy, and it is supposed that certain minute organs, plentifully supplied with nerves, and situated in the subcostal vein of the wing in most insects, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... close proximity to the great Church of St. Peter's—the largest and most gorgeous church in the world. Indeed, the church and the palaces form, as it were, one vast architectural pile, which is of almost inconceivable magnificence and grandeur. ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... sneered at Lieutenant von Blutgierig as he sat at breakfast. The Belgians are indeed a stiff-necked race, but with God's help they shall be made to understand the sympathetic gentleness of the German character. But to sneer at a man in uniform is an inconceivable crime worthy only of an Englishman. The lieutenant has had to go into hospital to recover from this shameful treatment. He is a true German and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... rhubarb pills! They turned him aside, however, and, breaking through the left flank of the khedda, he took refuge in the thickest jungle he could find. The whole khedda followed in hot pursuit, crashing through overgrowth of canes, creepers, and trees, in the midst of confusion and rumpus utterly inconceivable, therefore beyond my powers of description! We had to look out sharply in this chase, for we were passing under branches at times. One of these caught my man Quin, and swept him clean off his pad. But he ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... imperfections in the method, the demand, with the growth of the new ideas, for a new expansion of the powers of Language, in a given direction, made the contrivance of the great chemist a successful interpolation upon the speech-usages of the world. It is certainly not therefore inconceivable—because of any governing necessity that Language should be a purely natural growth—that other and greater modifications of the speech of mankind may occur; when—not an arbitrary contrivance upon an imperfect basis and of a limited application is in question, but—when ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... belabored science. It was conceded that the only tenable interpretation of the record in the rocks is that numerous populations of creatures, distinct from one another and from present forms, have risen and passed away; and that the geologic ages in which these creatures lived were of inconceivable length. The rank and file came thus, with the aid of fossil records, to realize the import of an idea which James Hutton, and here and there another thinker, had conceived with the swift intuition of genius long before the science of paleontology came into ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn that Barere was afterwards accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of the public to the tastes of the court. To one of these reports he had the inconceivable folly and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virgil, fit only for such essays as he had been in the habit of composing ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... assurance almost inconceivable, took it within his own, and giving it a hard shake, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... innumerable, flying in awful confusion through the expanse of heaven, fell before, behind, and on every side, while in the distance were visible the ships of the rebels standing erect, lofty as mountains. The fierce daring of the rebels was inconceivable; officers and men fell at their posts. Every effort to resist the onset was in vain, and a ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris |
