"Indestructible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reckoning of years, it is only a brief moment in eternity when this fair Earth, and also the beauteous splendor of the silent stars, will be locked forever in darkness, and the final sleep of doom." If this be so, we ask of the inmost soul, if life be but the fitful awakenings of the indestructible spirit, ebbing and flowing in response to the rise and fall of Nature's cosmic barometer and the transmutations of matter; if life is, in reality, but a brief and passing moment, eternally repeated, from the flush of youth, "the gilded salon to the bier and the shroud, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... me," she said slowly, "that there is something between us which is indestructible, Frida. We didn't make it, and we can't unmake it. For my part, I think it is worth our preserving, but I don't believe we could lose it if we tried. You may put me away from you for any reason that seems good to you, as ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... unchangeable, drab quality in emotional affairs which is characteristic of advanced middle-age, when there are no great joys or sorrows to look back on, and no expectation for the future. She had always had something of the indestructible quality of frail things like thistledown or cottonwool; violence and explosion that would blow strong and distinct organisms to atoms only puffed her a yard or two away where she alighted again without shock, instead of injuring or annihilating her. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... prejudice would have operated as powerfully as it has done, if it had not fallen in with the doctrine of the scholastic jurists of the realist sect, who taught that, whatever turn actual legislation might take, a right, how long soever neglected, was in point of fact indestructible. The remains of this state of feeling still exist. Wherever the philosophy of law is earnestly discussed, questions respecting the speculative basis of Prescription are always hotly disputed; and it is still a point of the greatest interest in France ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... indestructible mountain upon our left hand, one of a noble range which, rising from the green plain, runs eastward. The last peak there is the mountain of which I speak, whose foot is in the Ictian sea and ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... ever be destroyed? It cannot be destroyed, it can only be obscured. Those who hold themselves under the sway of ignorance, who serve the flesh and neglect the Atman or the real Self, are not able to perceive the effulgent and indestructible nature of their Soul; hence they fall into the realm where the Soul light does not shine. Here the Upanishad shows that the only hell is absence of knowledge. As long as man is overpowered by the darkness of ignorance, he ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... end, he is careful for charms and talismans, that may chance to have some friendly power in them, when the inevitable shipwreck comes. Such sentiment is a part of the eternal basis of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles," but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... speaking with much fervour. 'The feelings that animate me towards your family are not the feelings of chance: they are the creation of sympathy; tried by time, tested by thought. And must they perish? Can they perish? They were inevitable; they are indestructible. Yes, sir, it is in vain to speak of the enmities that are fostered between you and my grandfather; the love that exists between your daughter and myself is stronger than ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... one stupendous whole." When this has been accomplished by the law in the case of the Negro, as in the case of other alien ethnic elements of the citizenship, it will be more gradually, but assuredly, accomplished by society at large, the indestructible foundation of which was laid by the reckless and brutal prostitution of black women by white men in the days of slavery, from which a vast army of mulattoes were produced, who have been and are, gradually, by honorable marriage among themselves, ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... brown tint. These plants, which are so minute as to be individually invisible, save under the higher powers of the microscope, have the curious property of encrusting themselves with a sheath, or shell, of pure silica. These shells remain after the death of the plant, and are as indestructible as flint. They are marvellous objects, both as respects the elegance of their forms and the beauty of their markings. So great is the accumulation of these shells at the bottom of the sea, that they have formed an immense bank 400 miles in length by 120 in ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... physical philosopher of the present day would be satisfied to accept any demonstration of the eternity of matter. All he would admit is that, so far as his observation goes, no change in the quantity of matter can be produced by the action of any known cause. It seems to be equally uncreatable and indestructible. But he would, at the same time, admit that his experience no more sufficed to settle the question than the observation of an animal for a single day would settle the question of the duration of its life, or prove that ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... rebels; and the contemptuous phlegm of Lord Galloway's army, commanded, as it was, by a heretic condottiere? Outside the official spheres, the isolation was therefore complete, and during that three months' crisis the errant royalty of Philip V., represented by his courageous consort, struck indestructible roots in the hearts of his subjects. The northern shores and the great province of Andalusia, joining to those divers motives the hatred with which England inspired the maritime population, resolutely declared for the House ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... We should be forsaking the lines of nature were we to imagine for a moment that the new creature was to be formed out of nothing. Nothing can be made out of nothing. Matter is uncreatable and indestructible; Nature and man can only form and transform. Hence when a new animal is made, no new clay is made. Life merely enters into already existing matter, assimilates more of the same sort and rebuilds it. The spiritual Artist works in the same way. He must ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... sun is shining on them; and when they shed their flowers, the ground below is carpeted as with gold. Another valuable timber tree, the "nispera" (Achras sapota), is also common, growing on the dryer ridges. It attains to a great size, and its timber is almost indestructible, so that we used it in the construction of all our permanent works. White ants do not eat it, nor, excepting when first cut, and before it is barked, do any of the wood-boring beetles. It bears a round fruit ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... one of us two had understood the elementary principles of human engineering, that one would have said (privately): 'Truth is indestructible. Truth will out. Truth is never in a hurry. If it doesn't come out to-day it will come out to-morrow or next year. It can take care of itself. Ultimately my wife (or my husband) will learn the essential cosmic truth about the rent of ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... industrious sewer I have ever known,—and not only industrious, but neat, conscientious, and rapid. Machines, with iron frames and wheels, had not then been invented; but since they have, I have never seen a better one than my mother. Her frame, if not of iron, seemed quite as indestructible, even if it did turn out fewer stitches. Times without number has she sat up till midnight, plying her needle by the dull light of a common candle: for there was no gas in our suburban district. While we children were sound asleep, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... of few but enduring friendships, he had admitted but one love to his life, except the love of his mother. This one love for seven years he had sought to kill. But anything forceful enough to penetrate to the stronghold of Nicol Brinn's soul was indestructible, even ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... the soul or self, which is neither produced nor productive, and the other twenty-four are all modifications of Prakriti or matter, which is unproduced but productive. Prakriti means the original ground form of external existence (as distinguished from Vikriti, modified form). It is uncreated and indestructible, but it has a tendency to variation or evolution. The Sankhya holds in the strictest sense that ex nihilo nihil fit. Substance can only be produced from substance and properly speaking there is no such thing as origination but only manifestation. Causality is regarded solely from the ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months—for years—his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration—like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... however, is undeniable and the mind of man can never wholly escape it. Familiarity may temper, but inborn human superstition is indestructible. The brooding silence will shadow the lightest nature. The storms must ever inspire wonder. The gloom hushes the voice. And so the growing dread. Man may curse the hills in his brutal moments, the thoughtful ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the Spirit of the Universe throbbing through one's own veins and arteries,—the quiet yet exultant sense of knowing instinctively beyond all formulated theory or dogma, that one is a vital part of the immortal Entity, as indestructible as Itself. And a great calm was gradually taking possession of his soul,—a smoothing of all the waves of his emotional and nervous temperament. Under this mystic touch of unseen and uncomprehended heavenly tenderness, all sorrows, all disappointments, all disillusions ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... distinct laws for each. Gravity is common to all matter, and equal in amount in equal masses of matter, whatever be the kind; it follows the law of the diffusion of space from a point (the inverse square of the distance); it extends to distances unlimited; it is indestructible and invariable. Cohesion is special for each separate substance; it decreases according to distance much more rapidly than the inverse square, vanishing entirely at very small distances. Two such forces have not sufficient kindred to be generalized into one force; the generalization is only ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... easy to discover the relation in which these other souls are thought of as standing to God. In the Timaeus, the matter is put in this way. The soul of the world, and all other souls human and divine, are the work of the Creator, who is identified with God, and they are not inherently indestructible, since anything that has been made can be unmade. They are, however, practically indestructible, since God made all things because He was good and wished them also to be as good as possible. His goodness, therefore, will not suffer Him to destroy what He has once made. That of course is mythically ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... "success" of the work as a consolatory example illustrating the fate of our classical music in the hands of our conducting musicians. Classical music retains its warmth, and continues to exist in spite of the maltreatment they subject it to. It appears truly indestructible: and the Spirit of German art may accept this indestructibility as a consoling fact, and may fearlessly continue its efforts in future. It might be asked: But what do the queer conductors with celebrated ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... inconceivable and impossible to a child than the possibility of his parents dying or doing wrong. When he awakens to consciousness he finds around him eternal things,—rocks, hills, rivers, stars, parents! They all seem to belong to the same order of indestructible existence, and he would as soon expect to see the sun blotted from heaven as a parent removed from earth! And when his ethical perceptions awake, he has another experience of a similar character. His father and mother stand to him for the very moral order itself! To his mind, it is inconceivable ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... as the world, our birth was before the hills. We are the cup that holds the sea And the framework of the peak that parts the sky. When Chaos shall again return, And endless Night shall spread her wings upon a rained world, We alone shall stand up from the shattered earth, Indestructible, invincible ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... unsatisfactory. He buys them secretly, lest his wife justly accuse him of extravagance, and practises cunning in getting rid of them afterward; for to a conscientious gentleman throwing away a razor is a responsible matter. It is hard to think of any place where a razor-blade, indestructible and horribly sharp as it is,—for all purposes except shaving,—can be thrown away without some worry over possible consequences. A baby may find and swallow it; the ashman sever an artery; dropping it overboard at sea is impracticable, ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... United in the practical exigencies of their search for Karen, united in their indestructible relation of respective dependence and stability, which the last catastrophe had hardly touched—for Mercedes had accepted her betrayal with a singular passivity, as if it had been a force of nature that had overtaken her—there was yet a whole new region of distrust between them. She and Mercedes, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... had wanted her, and the power that had swept them together had been as far beyond resistance as a great gale loosening the leaves of the forest.... Only, there stood between them, fixed and upright in the general upheaval, the indestructible ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... It takes too much labor to put it in any form to promote decay, and is even then too indestructible. It is also possible that its decay may induce root rot of trees. We should burn the stuff and spread the ashes. Vineyard prunings are more promising because more easily and quickly reduced by decay. Vinecane-hashers have been proposed from time ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... she has turned from me to another? Is my love then in the power of fortune, or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure; and I will make a Goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her: and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form; and when that fails, the memory of it shall survive; and my bosom shall be proof to scorn, as hers has been to pity; and I will ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... less, there are two points in the law of Causality, which appear to favour the idea of fatalism, though in reality, they are merely corollaries of Karma. According to the first, every force is fatal, in the sense that, if left to itself, it is indestructible. This is not fatality, for the force can be modified by meeting with forces differing in character, and if no such encounter takes place, it finally unites with the cosmic Law, or else is broken to pieces upon it, according as it moves with evolution or against it.[35] ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... atom in space; but a single proton; but a single electron; each indestructible; each mutually destroying. Yet never do they collide. Never in all science, when even electrons bombard atoms with the awful expelling force of the exploding atom behind them, never do they reach the proton, to touch and annihilate it. Yet—the proton is positive and attracts the ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... indestructible: Its holy flame for ever burneth, From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth; Too oft on Earth a troubled guest, At times deceived, at times opprest, It here is tried and purified, Then hath in Heaven its perfect rest: ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... of burning, demonstrates that peat consists of two kinds of substance; one of which, the larger portion, is combustible, and is organic or vegetable matter; the other, smaller portion, remaining indestructible by fire is inorganic matter or ash. We shall consider ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... very little of personal ambition and of a future wrapped up in myself. In political relations serfdom may have an end; but the dominion of one soul over another in the spirit region—should that not remain indestructible?"—Oh, Liszt's prophetic soul! Thereafter his life was shaped by this extraordinary woman, for weal and, it must be confessed, for reasons which will appear later, ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... fibres which nothing can rot. These, when thoroughly purged of the foul black pollution in which they have sweltered so long, will go out to all quarters of the world under the name of "coir" to make indestructible door mats and other indispensable things. It will penetrate to every corner of India in which a white man lives, to mat his verandahs and ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... the feeble endeavour made in these volumes to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... was great, when he found this town occupied, not by a feeble rear-guard of Schwartzenberg, but by a powerful division of Russians, commanded by Sacken, and, therefore, belonging to the apparently indestructible army of Blucher. These unexpected enemies were charged in the streets, and at length retired out of the town (which was burnt to the ground in the struggle) and thence beyond the Aube—which, in that quarter, runs nearly parallel ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... scarred and blackened; glared at each other across a three-mile expanse that had now turned to cinders. And that was all. Practically indestructible, and evenly matched, they had fought to a standstill. Neither ship had ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... very noticeable relaxations of the existing prerogative, were, as respected the temper which dictated them, no more than everyday manifestations of the emperor's perpetual benignity. Fortunately for Marcus, the indestructible privilege of the divina domus exalted it so unapproachably beyond all competition, that no possible remissions of aulic rigor could ever be misinterpreted; fear there could be none, lest such paternal indulgences should lose their effect and acceptation as ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... alive, or dead? How cruel—cruel!' And he ground his teeth in one of those paroxysms which every now and then, at long intervals, represented the return upon him of the indestructible past. Often for months together it meant little or nothing to him, but the dull weight of his secret; twelve years had inevitably deadened feeling, and filled the mind with fresh interests, while of late the tumult of his Academy and Press campaign ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the tribe of Dan is not numbered among those who are sealed in the Apocalypse... Now, I think no one can consider the dispersion and providential preservation of the Jews among all the nations of the world and the indestructible vitality of their race without believing that they are reserved for some future action of His judgment and Grace. And this is foretold again and again in ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... error was detected by Mr. Dallinger. He found among the lower forms of life the most surprising and indestructible vitality. Many animals could survive much higher temperatures than Dr. Bastian had applied to annihilate them. Some germs almost refused to be ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it. At any rate, it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen. The pillar nearest the great entrance, on the left of ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done for the Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September of that year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the city ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... tree, belonging to the mallow family. The inner bark of the young branches yields a tough fiber, fit for cordage, and used in Demerara for making coffee bags, and the finer pieces of it for cigar envelopes. The wood is considered almost indestructible under water, and its hardness and durability render it valuable for various purposes. The flower buds and unripe fruits yield a viscid yellow juice, useful as a dye, and a thick, deep, red-colored oil is expressed from ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up then at the surface, and fade and waste and crumble and blow away, there being much weather there; but down below he is gold and adamant and indestructible." ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... used to Witig in his boyhood, "I will establish such peace in my father's realm and mine, that it shall not be in the power of every wandering adventurer to challenge me to single combat". Moreover, throughout all the wild vagaries of the narrative, character, that mysterious and indestructible essence, is not wholly lost. No two books can be more absolutely unlike one another than the "Wilkina-Saga" and the "Various Letters of Cassiodorus", yet the same hot-tempered, impulsive, generous man is ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... of the year 1860, there existed in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, a strong, active, and apparently indestructible Union party. Three months after the close of the year there remained in the city no trace of Union sentiment. To show how this feeling was destroyed, sinking slowly, and with many reactions, under influences ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... who, without confessing it, are susceptible in varying degrees to impressions of this sort. And do not such people often, because of an old stone wall, a garden known and loved since childhood, an old terrace which has become in indestructible part of their memory, or an old tree that has not changed form within their lives, seek a warrant for their own ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... and wild, complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly to begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that indescribable and indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the elements of the familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously fair and queer, was more violent and vociferous than ever—so the whole spectacle there seemed ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... repealed, that of attraction or affinity or cohesion, for example, the whole material world, with its solid granite and adamant, its veins of gold and silver, its trap and porphyry, its huge beds of coal, our own frames and the very ribs and bones of this apparently indestructible earth, would instantaneously dissolve, with all Suns and Stars and Worlds throughout all the Universe of God, into a thin invisible vapor of infinitely minute particles or atoms, diffused throughout ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... became a link in the magic chain, he himself became a Kabir. He was admitted into an indestructible association and, as ancient inscriptions express it, joined to the army of the higher gods" (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung). And the revolution that took place in the life of one who received ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... distant planet, and as far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character. Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human action, the results of which at any specific period are only the necessary and inevitable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for antique variety so large an area of a monotonous suburb; they spent a morning in the Abbey and went on a penny-steamer to the Tower; they looked at pictures both in public and private collections and sat on various occasions beneath the great trees in Kensington Gardens. Henrietta proved an indestructible sight-seer and a more lenient judge than Ralph had ventured to hope. She had indeed many disappointments, and London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of the strong points of the American civic idea; but she made the best of its dingy ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... the fund of profit and loss, that's all. Never let me hear you sport those old theories again. Capital is indestructible, as I am ready to prove to you any day, in half an hour. But let us sit down seriously to business. We are rich enough to pay for the advertisements, and that is all we need care for in the meantime. The public is sure to step in, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... the use of a mother who desired instruction on the topic from Fenelon. His argument on the "Being of a God" was prepared as a duty of his preceptorship to the prince. But the one book of Fenelon which was an historical event when it appeared, and which stands an indestructible classic in literature, is the "Telemachus." It remains for us briefly to give some idea ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... annihilated distance as it does today. An earthquake may wreck a city and demolish the lighting plant and telegraph station, but the thoughts of Watt, Edison and Morse remain, and upon the basis of their indestructible ideas new machinery may be constructed and operations resumed. Thus thoughts are more permanent ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... and queer by-ways of history had they travelled hither, these wandering Jews, "sated with contempt," these shrewd eager fanatics, these sensual ascetics, these human paradoxes, adaptive to every environment, energizing in every field of activity, omnipresent like sonic great natural force, indestructible and almost inconvertible, surviving—with the incurable optimism that overlay all their poetic sadness—Babylon and Carthage, Greece and Rome; involuntarily financing the Crusades, outliving the Inquisition, illusive of all baits, unshaken ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... this economy there is an air of comfort, a complete absence of squalor. In cold weather the school-girls wear snug hoods, or little fur turbans; and boys have the picturesque and almost indestructible berets of cloth or corduroy. Cloth boots that will conveniently slip inside sabots for outdoor use are greatly in vogue, and the comfortable Capuchin cloaks—whose peaked hood can be drawn over the head, thus obviating the use of umbrellas—are favoured ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... to the soldiers, and they have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the graves. Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover them, and when some favourite comrade goes, the men scorning ephemeral tributes, club together to buy a monstrous indestructible wreath with emblazoned streamers. It was near the end of the afternoon, and many soldiers were strolling along the paths between the graves. "It's their favourite walk at this hour," the Colonel said. He stopped to look down on a grave smothered in beady tokens, the grave ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... custom,[5207] a plenary and absolute authority, a right above all other rights, by virtue of which, in cases determined by himself, he provided in a discretionary way for all Catholic interests, of which he thus becomes the supreme judge, the sole interpreter and the court of last appeal. An indestructible precedent was set up; it was the great corner-stone in the support of the modern Church edifice; on this definitive foundation all other stones were to be superposed, one by one. In 1801, Pius VII., under the pressure ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... although the other continents have long feared this propaganda, it is to be hoped that she will carry out her program of love and of fraternization, because thus America will have established international and economic relations with the entire world upon indestructible foundations. ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... stable. In reality, it is undergoing a profound change. The idea which constituted its most distinctive feature, and in the belief of many represents America's most valuable contribution to the science of government, is being forgotten. Formed to be "an indestructible Union composed of indestructible states," our dual system is losing its duality. The states are fading out of ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... just touched with frost; her nose is of a strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly shrunken effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned. A tough, pleasant, indestructible woman—for use, we thought, not ornament—the mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... teach the world, or to miss her destiny in failing to teach, has with us passed into a truism, and is yet continually lost sight of; it is the magnificent result of three thousand years of experiment: the simple truth, that no government is so firm, so truly conservative, and so wholly indestructible, as a government founded and dependent for support upon the affections and good-will of a moral, intelligent, and educated community. In our politics, we hear much of State-rights and centralization,—of distribution of power,—of checks and balances,—of constitutions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me. To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality. My reality! what is it? Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable? Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that there can be no escape out of its dungeon? Be it so! There is, at least, that ethereal quality in my spirit, that ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... morning, so indestructible is the happiness of youth, she awoke with her hope as fresh as if it had not been blighted the evening before. As she lay in bed, with her loosened hair making a cloud over the pillows, and her eyes shining like blue flowers ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... wait or to manage others, he is incapable of yielding to their will except through constraint, and his collaborators are to him nothing more than subjects under the name of allies.—Later, at St. Helena, with his indestructible imaginative energy and power of illusion, he plays on the public with his humanitarian illusions.[12112] But, as he himself avows, the accomplishment of his retrospective dream required beforehand the entire submission of all Europe; a liberal sovereign and pacificator, "a crowned Washington, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the scenery around her. He said (Wahrheit und Dichtung): 'Her figure never looked more charming than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm of her bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... been known; they are perhaps the first in date in the science of hypnosis or artificial sleep. How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey's slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children's games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... And because you are strong, and almost indestructible, you suddenly decide that you can now get your revenge on the people who have ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... note that the first observation which led to this most important scientific conclusion that energy is indestructible however much it may change its form, was made by an American, Benjamin Thompson, who left this country at the time of the Revolution, and after a curious life became the executive officer, and in effect king, of Bavaria. While ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... relates {FN26-3} that it was he, in a former incarnation, who communicated the indestructible yoga to an ancient illuminato, Vivasvat, who gave it to Manu, the great legislator. {FN26-4} He, in turn, instructed Ikshwaku, the father of India's solar warrior dynasty. Passing thus from one to another, the royal ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... lamplight through the water-globe, By simmering stew-pots, by the serious looms, Afield, in factories, with the birds astir, Their nimble feet and fingers; not denied Refreshful chatter, laughter, galliard songs. So like Earth's indestructible they were, That wrestling with its anguish rose her pride, To feel where in each breast the thought of her, On whom the circle Hours laid leaded thongs, Was constant; spoken sometimes in low tone At lip or in a fluttered look, A ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in a more advanced stage that obscurity gathers and difficulties arise. The sexual life is no longer lived, as it were, openly. Symbolism and mysticism develop; a more complex social life provides disguised outlets for primitive and indestructible feelings. Sexualism, instead of being something to be glorified, and, so to speak, annotated by religious ceremonies, becomes something to be hidden or decried. Ignored it may be. Decried it may be; but it will not be denied. That ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... century still hissed with the heat and distilled streams of water from each end, as if the tree had been cut down within a week or two. Next there were large sticks, sound, black and heavy, which had lost the principle of decay and were indestructible except by fire, wherein they glowed like red-hot bars of iron. On this solid basis Tabitha would rear a lighter structure, composed of the splinters of door-panels, ornamented mouldings, and such quick combustibles, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... oppressors," we ought not to wonder that some of the Greeks should be mean, perfidious, and dissembling, but rather that any (as Mr. Gordon says) "had courage to adhere to their religion, and to eat the bread of affliction." But noble aspirations are fortunately indestructible in human nature. And in Greece the lamp of independence of spirit had been partially kept alive by the existence of a native militia, to whom the Ottoman government, out of mere necessity, had committed ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... footsteps of the poor have obliterated the record in many a noble house abandoned by history; even the fated steps of the Queen save in one bloodstained closet have left but little authentic trace. But Knox is still present with all the force of an indestructible individuality—in the existing life of the country which took so strong an impression from him, and in the absolutely personal facts of the church in which he preached, the house in which he lived, the stone ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... but far more shall I grieve to leave animals who have followed our steps affectionately for years, without knowing for certainty their ultimate fate, though I firmly believe that the living principle is never extinguished. Since the atoms of matter are indestructible, as far as we know, it is difficult to believe that the spark which gives to their union life, memory, affection, intelligence, and fidelity, is evanescent. Every atom in the human frame, as well as in that of animals, undergoes a periodical change by continual waste and renovation; the abode ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... supported in their undertakings by such powerful and numerous interests that they cannot fail without involving public credit; even governments are forced to come to their aid. One of these powerful and indestructible enterprises I have dreamed of grafting on to the European Credit Company, the Universal Credit Company. Its very name is a programme in itself. To stretch over the four quarters of the globe like an immense net, and draw into its meshes all financial speculators: ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... erstwhile compacted towards the western horizon, in an island form, began to break up on high and send its fragments over the surface. It seemed indestructible, for vainly did the winds stretch it, pull and toss it asunder, continually tearing away dark strips, which they waved over the pale yellow sky, gradually becoming intensely and icily livid. Ever more strongly grew the wind that threw ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... the infinite could not have been created. It is indestructible and that which cannot be destroyed was not created. I am ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the hand or with some suitable implement, but it was not carefully finished like the interior, nor was it treated like the latter with a specially prepared material. The material employed for the walls was admirably suited for the purpose, being when dry almost as hard as sandstone and practically indestructible. The manner in which such walls disintegrate under atmospheric influences has already been set forth in detail in this report. An inhabited structure with walls like these would last indefinitely, provided occupancy continued and a few slight repairs, which would accompany occupancy, ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff
... country; but even with us the recovery halts and is impeded at times, and there are immediately serviceable acts of legislation which it seems to me we ought to attempt, to assist that recovery and prove the indestructible recuperative force of a great government of the people. One of these is to prove that a great democracy can keep house as successfully and in as business-like a fashion as any other government. It seems to me that the first step toward providing this is to supply ourselves ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... been marked by certain great romantic passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded and will continue to mould the national imagination. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... softened the lips, whose patient outline breathed only wakefulness and expectation,—a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,—a hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's limits,—a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... listening to the beating of their hearts, mingling their love with the sweet clearness of the summer nights, and so united that by the simple power of their love, they would easily divine each other's inmost thoughts. And that would endure indefinitely, in the serenity of an indestructible affection. ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... discover no remedy for the evil that threatens us. But material and tangible truths are never anything but a more or less salient angle of greater and deeper-lying truths. And, on the other hand, mankind appears to be such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has always, hitherto, not only survived the most desperate ordeals, but succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Longings and aspirations, weaknesses and woes, the limits of creature helps and loves, the disproportion between us and the objects around us—all these facts of familiar experience do witness, alike by blank misgivings and by bright hopes, by many disappointments and by indestructible expectations surviving them all, that nothing which has a date, a beginning, or an end, can fill our souls or give us rest. Can you fill up the swamps of the Mississippi with any cartloads of faggots you can fling in? Can you fill your souls with anything which belongs to this fleeting life? ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... on its superiority to the natural process, and to construct, with the deepest energy of its being, ever richer moral and spiritual contents for itself; for it is these contents which constitute the growth of the meaning and value of the new world, as well as of its indestructible reality beyond the process ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... Desdemona to pray and to confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her soul with her body! Here, at the moment of the most intense excitement, in the desperate mood of a murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see the indestructible nobility ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... earth, converted to beneficent energy the burden of corruption thrust upon it. Active at first because she dreaded the self-communings of idleness, she found in her labour and her endurance sources of stern inspiration; her indestructible idealism grasped at the core of spiritual beauty in a life even such as this. She did not reason with herself hysterically of evil passions to be purified by asceticism, of mysterious iniquities to be washed out in her ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... sin-darkened but sun-lit Southern Isles. To me she became a sort of living thing, the impersonation of a living and throbbing love in the heart of thousands of "shareholders"; and I said, with a deep, indestructible faith,—"The Lord has provided—the Lord ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... all those hitherto followed, to further the growth and fruitfulness of a science indispensable to human reason—a science from which every branch it has borne may be cut away, but whose roots remain indestructible. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... so! Why do you keep on living, you poor little shrimp? Why don't you die? Why can't both of us die? Many people die who want to live! Why should we live who want to die? Tell me that, little miserable!" But the baby defiantly sucked his thumb, as if it held the elixir of life, and looked indestructible vitality from his ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... summoning every ounce of strength, rage, and mad protesting frenzy against the life-long torturing tyrant, he delivered a Homeric blow at the champion's head, beside and behind the ear. (Since he was indestructible by the ordinary point-of-the-chin knock-out, let him make the best of that fearful blow upon the base of the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... structure, as we phrase it—that is to say, the ultimate particle of which water is composed, is not changed, and this is precisely the explanation which Anaxagoras gave of the same phenomena. For him the unit particle of water constituted an elementary body, uncreated, unchangeable, indestructible. This particle, in association with like particles, constitutes the substance which we call water. The same particle in association with particles unlike itself, might produce totally different substances—as, for example, when water is taken up by the roots of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... through all his minor adventures, his faith in the great adventure to come. It was this faith that made him so easy a victim when love had at last appeared clad in the attributes of romance: the imaginative man's indestructible dream of a ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... not dead. Every word she uttered—every idea she formed and expressed, was an inexhaustible and indestructible impulse." He paused, considered a little further, and relapsed into gloom, adding, "and the dozen others whose names will be with hers in the 'Times' to-morrow? Their words too are still in the air, to endure there to all eternity. Hm! How the air ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... at least in our garden they do. I fancy that Providence must have originally intended to bring in an amending Act, or whatever it's called, providing either for a less destructive sparrow or a more indestructible crocus. The one consoling point about our garden is that it's not visible from the drawing-room or the smoking- room, so unless people are dinning or lunching with us they can't spy out the nakedness of the land. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... his parents became not less, but greater. That barrier which, almost from the beginning, they had watched with pain rise up between them now seemed indestructible, and all their efforts only made it more obvious and more stable. It was like some tropical plant which, for being cut down, grew ever with greater luxuriance. And there was a mischievous devil present at all their conversations that made them misunderstand one another as completely as though ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... casual travelers of a later and more careless day, walk now together over the place which is the indestructible memorial of a great man, and putting aside the measuring-stick of criticism—the sign of small natures—try to live for an hour in the atmosphere which was the breath of life to one who, if he failed greatly, also succeeded greatly, and whose noble achievement ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... They however loved their pursuits for the pursuits themselves. They felt their abstraction and their unlimited nature, and on that account contemplated them with admiration. They valued them (for such is the indestructible character of the human mind) for the pains they had bestowed on them. The sweat of their brow grew into a part as it were of the intrinsic merit of the articles; and that which had with so much pains been attained by them, they could not but regard ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... that had formerly been Moscow. But when we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was destroyed, except something intangible ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... those of expediency, it might be objected that a bargain which on one side you allow to be discreditable leaves the legacy of an indestructible desire on that side to wipe out the discredit by tearing it up. Though Cavour became great by his connection with a movement which, before all things, was swayed by sentiment, he never entirely recognised the part that sentiment plays ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... in reference to force which must be noticed. It is indestructible, but it is capable of what is termed "degradation." It may exist in various intensities and quantities, and a small quantity of force of a higher intensity may be changed into a larger quantity of force at ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... are to go into every nook and lane of ice that will yield at all to wind and steam, they must be as nearly indestructible as man can make them. For Arctic work, therefore, and for discovery work, ships built of the teak wood of Malabar and Java are considered most precisely fitted. Ships built of teak are said to be wholly ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... de Warens, an old lady with a passion for travel, a free thinker, whose mother was a friend of Voltaire in her youth and whose father had been a member of the Jacobin club; she was eighty-four years of age, declared herself indestructible by time, and her one last ambition to be a burial at sea. She was also a Socialistic-Anarchist, possessed an income of some forty thousand pounds a year derived from speculations of her late husband ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... bards against the kings who desired to stamp them out. The strife was the longer in its duration, in that Christianity among the Celtic peoples never employed force against rival religions, and, at the worst, left to the vanquished the liberty of ill humour. Belief in prophets, indestructible among these peoples, created, in despite of faith the Anti-Christian type of Merlin, and caused his acceptance by the whole of Europe. Gildas and the orthodox Bretons were ceaseless in their thunderings against the prophets, and opposed to them Elias and Samuel, two bards who ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... jagged rock masses at the foot of the cliff harbingers of ill omen to the traveller,—had it not been that his isolation might possibly make even trivial trouble serious. For he had come safely through so many scrapes, not a few being of his own making, that I had nicknamed him in my mind "indestructible Ike." ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Henry, seated at his mother's feet, with his hands clasped on her lap and his eyes riveted on her face, would gather up her gently sparkling words in his young heart, and they became a pavement of diamonds, indestructible as it ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the rugged Iron King—dead? He who, if not as indestructible as he seemed, was at least constituted of that stern stuff of which centenarians are made, and whom all expected should live far up into the eighties or nineties—dead? The father who had lived over them like some mighty ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth |
