"Inscrutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sea, on the Rialto the agents of the seignory were wiping the cold sweat from their pale brows, and with troubled countenances and hoarse voices offering almost fabulous percentage for ready money, for the straitened republic was in want of this necessary also. Moreover, it was determined by the inscrutable decree of Providence that just at this period of extreme distress and anxiety, the faithful shepherd should be taken away from his troubled flock. Completely borne down by the burden of the public calamity, the Doge Andrea Dandolo[7] ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... up the room with a grave quiet face. His expression was inscrutable. She could read nothing from his look. Her sick imagination told her he was thus serene because he had won, and she covered her face with her hands, while her cheeks ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... electric, and if anything has occurred I am quite sure that it is of a cheerful nature, as there is a telltale light in Archie's eyes that seems to say when they meet mine: "I have been sworn to secrecy, find out if you can!" Lydia's face is inscrutable; but her color is a little brighter than usual and she seems to avoid meeting my gaze, and drops her eyelids in a way that she has when the sun is bright. Then, she is beside me and consequently I cannot see her face as I can Archie's. Our places have been changed in the auto; Lydia and Archie ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... thought: "Jenny's doing." Every time she looked at the convulsive clock Emmy said to herself: "That was Miss Jenny's cleverness when she chucked the cosy at Alf." And when Emmy said in this reflective silence of animosity the name "Alf" she drew a deep breath and looked straight up at Jenny with inscrutable eyes ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... negligently made his way through the soft gloom past the Courthouse to the Methodist Church. The double doors were open, and a flood of hot radiance rolled out into the night, together with the familiar tones of old Martin Seeker loudly importuning his invisible, inscrutable Maker. There were no houses opposite the church, and, balanced obscurely on the fence of split rails against the unrelieved night, a row of young men smoked redly glowing cigarettes; while, on the ground below them, shone ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tracks of the trail cut through a waving sea of green belly deep to the oxen, had seemed easy and inviting, and since then hardship had at least been spiced with novelty and change. But here was a new and forbidding land. This was the Far West itself; silent, inscrutable, unchanged, irreducible. The mightiness of its calm was a smiting thing. The awesomeness of its chill, indifferent nights, the unsparing ardors of its merciless noons, the measureless expanses of its levels, the cold barrenness ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... should accept the peace; but it was voluntas beneplaciti, which, as we read in another place, Deut. vii. 2, decreed to deliver the Canaanites before the Israelites, that is, to harden their hearts to come against them in battle, and so to overrule the matter, by a secret and inscrutable providence, that the Israelites might lawfully and should certainly destroy them and show them no mercy. Even as that same God who, by one word, showed unto Abraham what was his duty, bidding him ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... It can't be!" he cried aloud, as many another man has cried in the righteous rebellion of his heart against the ironical decrees of the high gods whom his simple nature has never suspected of their eternal and inscrutable irony. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... and unmistakable culture. Nor was the superintendent or the district attorney less confounded by the event. Durbin only tried to look wise and strut about, but it was of no use; he deceived nobody. Veronica Moore's real connection with Mr. Pfeiffer's death,—a death which in some inscrutable way had in so short a time led to her own,—was an overwhelming surprise to every ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... talk to his travelling companion, but was somehow unable to find words. Panawe glanced at him with an inscrutable smile—stern, yet enchanting and half feminine. He then broke the silence, but, strangely enough, Maskull could not make out whether he was singing or speaking. From his lips issued a slow musical recitative, exactly ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... deity, otherwise it has no worth; it is a stimulus to religion, and that is all. So with the glowing incandescence of the stickleback and its polished scales of silver. What make you of the hoarse voice of the gorilla? Is not the dewlap of the ox inscrutable? the mane of the lion? the tusks of the boar? the musk-sack of the deer? In the amethyst and sapphire of the peacock's wing you find no rationality; to you it is a manifestation of the wonder which is taboo. ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... the devils came by the forms in which they appeared upon the earth. They could not admit that devils could actually enter into and possess the body of a man in those latter days, although during the earlier history of the Church such things had been permitted by Divine Providence for some inscrutable but doubtless satisfactory reason:—that was Catholicism. On the other hand, they could not for an instant tolerate or even sanction the doctrine that devils had no power whatever over humanity:—that was Atheism. But it was quite ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... painfully up the arrested white valley-side, plumed with clusters of young pine-trees, into the paler white radiance of the snowy upper regions, where the wind cut fine. Joey seemed to watch all the time with wide, anxious, unseeing eyes, brilliant and inscrutable. As I drew near to Tible township, he stirred violently in the bag, though I do not know if he had recognised the place. Then, as I came to the sheds, he looked sharply from side to side, and stretched his neck out long. I was a little afraid ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... that if not "on with the new love," he was, at any rate, satisfactorily "off with the old," Blake drove his spanking ponies off to Tarrong, while Ellen Harriott went about her household work with a face as inscrutable and calm as though no stone had ruffled the mill-pond of ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... sons and daughters of those whose ancestors in the unremembered days received the divine command to create the empire over which they ruled with ever-growing glory until, by the inscrutable decrees of the Unnameable, the destroyer and oppressor were permitted to come into the land, listen with open ears and thankful hearts to the words which our Father shall put into my mouth to ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... devotion. The profundity of the problems is but an incitement. We have not hesitated to tabulate the stars, to weave precious conjectures as to their courses and destinies. Is the human soul more remote and inscrutable? We are assured that it has five windows and no more, that it is useless to look for others. But when an increasing number of explorers in the house of life tell us that there are six or seven or more, we may at any rate listen and follow their directions. Obscurantism is revelling in proclaiming ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... magnifying of what then was going on. "Just as" to quote Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr. Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable, it will some day be larger than an elephant...so we know and reverently acknowledge that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... could this be? The explanation was that the instrumentalists, occasionally visiting Thayet-myo or Rangoon, had listened there to the strains of our military bands, and had adapted these to the Burmese orchestra in some deft inscrutable manner, written music being unknown in the musical ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... The weird and impenetrable crows, most talkative of birds and most uncommunicative, their very food at this season a mystery, are almost as numerous now as in summer. They always seem like some race of banished goblins, doing penance for some primeval and inscrutable transgression, and if any bird have a history, it is they. In the Spanish version of the tradition of King Arthur it is said that he fled from the weeping queens and the island valley of Avilion in the form of a crow; and hence it is said ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... order of things, and therefore be in a position to declare that such and such events are impossible. Some of the old mythologies recognised this clearly enough. Beyond and above Zeus and Odin, there lay the unknown and inscrutable Fate which, one day or other, would crumple up them and the world they ruled to give place to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the hall that evening she ran upstairs and brought down the framed photograph wrapped lovingly in a white silk scarf. Mr. Donovan surveyed it with inscrutable eyes. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... drawled the words, and he was suave and cool, and his face was inscrutable, but a bitterness in his tone gave the lie to all he ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... been known to barter wives and children for a cupful of the liquid element. Of the inhabitants of Nepenthe it must be said to their credit that they endure their lot with equanimity, and even cheerfulness. Their wine costs nothing. Why grumble at the inscrutable ways of Providence? Why be thirsty, why be sober, when you can get as drunk as a lord for ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... in honour of him in this manner, and he neither getteth up nor sitteth down without speaking of him. Now when Attaf heard these words from the buffoon he looked up to heaven and said, O Thou whose attributes are inscrutable, bestow thy benefits upon thy servant Attaf. Then he ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Providence are inscrutable—something inscrutable, Captain Ireton. I make no doubt ye are sufficiently ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... doesna lie! And he is not a hypocrite either. If your father was half as—" She stopped abruptly, her face going red when she saw Tom sitting on his horse beyond the shoulder of rock, regarding her with that inscrutable smile which never had failed to make her squirm mentally and wonder what he thought of her. She stood up, ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... not left with me, I was not implicated, and the affair was most inscrutable. She had never been seen walking, or known to correspond with any young man. I suggested to Mrs Bradshaw that it was the fear of her father removing her from her protection which had induced her to run away, and that most probably she had gone ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... inscrutable smile that a great painter might have put on the face of some symbolic figure for the speculation and wonder ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... the little progress which has been made in the last two hundred years, towards solving the same problem. The origin of evil, the ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more comfortable theology, it is probably because we are less logical than they. It is perhaps because we have forgotten or refused to look at some things at which they ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... English woman and an inscrutable stranger meet and love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged this season with magnificent cast and ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... in a corner, listening to the chatter of the women, with the inscrutable smile that always vexed Mrs. Frederick. Mrs. George wondered within herself what he did there among the women. She also wondered just where he belonged on the family tree. He was not one of the uncles, yet he could not be ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... at once sent for, made a minute search, assisted by the peasants, but discovered nothing. In the same way, the examining-magistrates, after a close inquiry lasting for several days, found no clue capable of throwing the least light upon this inscrutable tragedy. On the contrary, the investigations only led to further mysteries ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... Dan'l inquired of old Daniel when the other little girl was coming again, and nodded emphatically when asked if she had had a nice time. Evidently both had enjoyed, after the inscrutable fashion of childhood, their silent session with each other. Content came generally once a week, and old Daniel was invited to take little Dan'l to the rector's. On that occasion Lucy Rose was present, and ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... hidden in the umbrella Ned held over her. George pulled a long sweeping stroke, bringing it up with a jerk that made the rowlocks sound sharply. When he bent back they could feel the light boat lift under them. He looked round now and then, steering himself by some means inscrutable to the others, who without him would have been lost ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... could make of the ardent love of life and joy which inspired him, was the belief that it was implanted in man, that he might have, for some inscrutable reason, a motive for experiencing, and for desiring to continue to experience, the strange discipline of the world. If men did not love life and ease so intensely, at the first discouragement, at the first touch ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... flash the answer came to me. A representation of the spirit of Death! Neither more nor less. There was the shroud; there the cold, inscrutable countenance suggesting mysteries that it hid. But the torch and the wings? Well, the torch was that which lighted souls to the other world, and on the wings they flew thither. Whoever fashioned that statue hoped for another life, or so I ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... down Each spirit: and it cries: "O God, support My helplessness; unto Thy perfect will Do I resign my vain and evil hopes, My burdens; and Thy Will Be Done Forever." Thus, with arms folded on despairing breast, With head bowed to the inscrutable decree, They seek Him: and a sudden glory fills The humbled bosom; all His stars and thrones Shine down upon it; all His majesty Enters that lowly door, lifts up, sustains The sundered soul; and His beneficence ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... unknown man. Better were it that mere earthly historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for omniscience than for human science, and aiming only at some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will be a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret—or at most, in reverent faith, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all History and in Eternity will ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... how. Subsequently, by a series of moral errors, the world became gradually worse and worse—true of the physical orders as well—until it assumed the dismal aspect it wears to-day. Excellent! The Greeks looked upon the world and the gods as the work of an inscrutable necessity. A passable explanation: we may be content with it until we can get a better. Again, Ormuzd and Ahriman are rival powers, continually at war. That is not bad. But that a God like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... has to tell us about Mary Blandy; but what do we really know of that sombre soul that sinned and suffered and passed to its appointed place so long ago? A few "facts," some "circumstances"—which, if we may believe the dictum of Mr. Baron Legge, cannot lie; and yet she remains for us dark and inscrutable as in her portrait, where she sits calmly in her cell, preparing her false Account for the misleading of future generations. Like her French "parallel," Marie-Madeleine de Brinvilliers, like that other Madeleine of Scottish ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... firmly, lifting his head, and looking at her. The inscrutable expression in his dark gray eyes was stronger than before, and all his features were more clearly drawn. He reminded her of a picture of Adam which she had once seen: there was the same rather low forehead, straight, even brows, full yet strong mouth, and that broader form of chin which repeats ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... in another retained for the defence. The mere thought that in this clever man's mind were two lines, equally strong and opposite, was in itself so consoling as to neutralise my anxiety as to a new attack. As he began to speak, the Doctor's face wore an inscrutable smile; this, however, gave place to a ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... opposite the ruins of Fort Gibraltar? What tempts the fly into the spider's web and the fish with a wide ocean for play-ground into one small net? I know there is a consoling fashion of ascribing our blunders to the inscrutable wisdom of a long-suffering Providence; but common-sense forbids I should call evil good, deify my errors, and give thanks for what befalls me ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... had had on the main stream. In this narrow channel, hemmed in between lofty forest walls of closely woven vines and foliage, it seemed to Jose that they had entered a flaming inferno. The two boatmen sat silent and inscrutable, plying their paddles ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... course of human events. I trust that we shall at least meet it with more firmness than our neighbours, but even in order to do this, we ought not to blind ourselves at the moment of its approach. It seems too probable that it is decreed by Providence that a stop should be put (for reasons probably inscrutable to us) to the progress of arts and civilization among us. It is a melancholy reflection to be born to the commencement of such a scene, and to be called to bear a principal share in it, but I trust we may hope that our strength may be ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... consciousness of growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... that the will of God is inscrutable and hard to know, is the protest that to speak of Him as at work in the world to bring in His kingdom, is remote from the actualities of daily life. As I have walked about in Flanders, turning over thoughts about the onward movement of God's purposes in the world, I have met those matchless monuments ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... in a chair and looked fearfully pale and ill, and had an inscrutable expression on his face. Fancy a man so old-looking, and ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... Loggia de' Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus with Medusa's head, has it not in truth turned the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil Rhodes of Canada—gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher, he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a saw-mill. Three things come ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... lather of sweat. A number of cowboys lounged, indolently, in the shade of the bunk-house, smoking cigarettes and contentedly enjoying the hour of rest after the noon-day dinner. Another, lean-built, slender, boyish in appearance and with strangely black, inscrutable eyes, stepped from around the corner of the house as Skinny jerked Old ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... manner of speaking and a certain austerity of manner, I used to think that Sir John was in a measure inscrutable. He had such a curt way of summoning a reporter, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... herself; whereupon the ground opened, and she sunk over head, March 23, and being found dead, she was buried, March 25.' Thus fully confirming the facts, as stated by Bunyan. Solemn providences, intended, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, for wise purposes, must not be always called 'divine judgments.' A ship is lost, and the good with the bad, sink together; a missionary is murdered; a pious Malay is martyred; still no one can suppose that these are instances ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... inscrutable turn of affairs, lady Feng begins to feel the pangs of jealousy. Pao-y experiences joy, beyond all his expectations, when P'ing Erh (receives a slap from lady Feng) and has ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... face of a woman has this element of mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... his inscrutable face revealing nothing as to how the story impressed him. When Bert had finished, he turned to Graham and ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... hundred lasts of malt at one strike. The ship takes him to the king's palace, on arriving at which he puts his vessel in his pocket, when he summons his craft to his aid, and gets a place in the king's kitchen to carry wood and water for the maid. The king's daughter has for some inscrutable reason been promised to three ogres, who come successively to fetch her; and a certain Ritter Red professes to be man enough to rescue her, but on the approach of the first ogre proves to be a coward and climbs a tree. But Shortshanks slips off from his scullery; and having a weapon which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Might he not share, in the desolate Cathedral, La Messe des Morts, when all the lost souls of true lovers are allowed to meet once a year. Here be they who were too fond when Culdees ruled, or who loved young monks of the Priory; here be ladies of Queen Mary's Court, and the fair inscrutable Queen herself, with Chastelard, that died at St. Andrews for desire of her; and poor lassies and lads who were over gay for Andrew Melville and Mr. Blair; and Miss Pett, who tended young Montrose, and ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... which he chose to direct his attention. Animal spirits themselves are too often but a counterbalance to the most thoughtful melancholy; and one fit of jaundice or hypochondria might have enabled the poet to see more visions of the unknown and the inscrutable in a single day, than perhaps ever entered the imagination of the elegant Latin scholar, or even the disciple ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... disreputable conduct followed, but no corroborating word from her could be adduced. She attended to her business, accepted orders with thanks and smiles, talked about the weather and the accident to the coach, was punctual in her attendance at church, calm and inscrutable as the Sphinx. The attendance at church was, of course, set down to "business considerations," and was held to be quite consistent with the scepticism and loose morality deducible from the French book ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... and handsome and distinguished-looking—dark, melancholy, inscrutable eyes—melting, musical, sympathetic voice—yes, the very hero of her dreams stood before her in the flesh. He could not have more closely resembled her ideal if he had been made ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... seal upon them. Here she shows me what can be done with ferns and mosses and lichens. The soil is marrowy and full of innumerable forests. Standing in these fragrant aisles, I feel the strength of the vegetable kingdom and am awed by the deep and inscrutable processes of life going ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... her. It would have frightened her to have thought of herself as yielding easily, and yet there was not a detail of his personality that was not now burned in her brain. His light, thick, always smoothly parted hair, his wide, clear, inscrutable eyes, his carefully manicured hands, so full and firm, his fresh clothing of delicate, intricate patterns—how these fascinated her! He seemed always remote except just at the moment of doing something, when, curiously enough, he seemed ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... valleys would never grow old for him; that he could wander on for all time, passing from one into another, and that each would possess its own charm, its own secrets to be solved, its own life to be learned. To him they were largely inscrutable; they were cryptic, as enigmatical as life itself, hiding their treasures as they droned through the centuries, giving birth to multitudes of the living, demanding in return other multitudes of the dead. As he looked off through the sunlit space he ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... from evil," by stopping inquiry with the "inscrutability of God's ways!" But we should not suffer ourselves to be deceived by such imaginary irreverence; for, in God's ways, there is nothing less inscrutable than his law of right. That law is never qualified in this world. It moves with the irresistible certainty of organized nature, and, while it makes man free, in order that his responsibility may be unquestionable, it leaves mercy, even, for the judgment hereafter. ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... to sting us to death. Thus, Heaven ordained it should be, and its ways are dark and intricate, beyond my comprehension, for surely it is against all the rules one can conceive of justice that a virtuous action should be thus rewarded. Perhaps you will say that His ways are inscrutable, and, that as we have neither the power, nor have we the right to attempt to read them, so we should not venture to cavil at His ordinances, but humbly believe that the ultimate result will be for our benefit. I believe it is so, lady; or it may ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... she had suddenly been shown the real Silas—or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... expressing herself by anonymous letters, and bent on assassinating a financial Holofernes who kept a bank? What account had she to give of herself? How came she to be alone in a desolate field on a rainy night? Instead of answering these questions, the inscrutable stranger preferred a bold and brief request. "Take me to Sir Giles"—was all ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... culture, and stated that there never had been greater freedom, security of property, humanity, and better times in general, than since the fifteenth century; further, that there was a mysterious concatenation in all terrestrial events, that every thing was directed by the inscrutable dispensations of an invisible hand, and that the emperor himself had become great by the very actions of his enemies. We referred to the great confederation of nations, an idea that had already been entertained by Henry IV.; to the sources and necessity of religion; we said that ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... and inclinations, and, as they may fancy, doing no great harm, are in reality carrying out his objects. He blinds their eyes, and they are thus easily led captive by his emissaries, just as you were led away, as I have since discovered, by that unhappy man, Max Inkster. God's ways are inscrutable. He has been allowed to perish, I fear, in his sins, while your life has been preserved. Then, again I say, my boy, 'Pray without ceasing,' that God's Holy Spirit may strengthen and support you to walk in His ways, and to obey His ...
— Archibald Hughson - An Arctic Story • W.H.G. Kingston
... an honest, earnest Wight; so true and simple, that the secret operations of thy soul were more inscrutable than the subtle workings ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... bald analysis thus far, not for pleasure merely, but to show the miracle of that portraiture the traits of which can bear examination one by one. So far Cleopatra is, as Enobarbus calls her, "a wonderful piece of work," a woman of women, inscrutable, cunning, deceitful, prodigal, with a good memory for injuries, yet as quick to forgiveness as to anger, a minion of the moon, fleeting as water yet loving-true withal, a sumptuous bubble, whose perpetual vagaries are but perfect ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... peopled by tiny folk, living out their timid, inscrutable lives around him. A water-rat, passing bright-eyed upon his lawful occasion, paused on the border of the stream to consider the stranger, and was lost to view. A stagnant pool among some reeds caught the reflection of the sunset and changed ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... know of, darling." But it does cross the speaker's mind that the context of circumstances might make this an opportunity for getting at some information she wants. For Sally has remained perfectly inscrutable about Conrad Vereker, and Rosalind has been asking herself whether it is possible that, after all, there is nothing. She doesn't know how to set about it, though. Perhaps the best thing would be to take a leaf out of Sally's own ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Farrell also was mad, I glanced toward her, but her expression was inscrutable. The face of ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... angels in heaven never rejoiced more greatly over the one repentant sinner than the tired shepherdesses over their one poor ewe lamb, as she stood there with quivering hands and wet eyes, the first sense of conscious victory written on her inscrutable brow, and within the turbid, clouded brain the memory of a long struggle, and a hint, at least, of the glory ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities, we must remember that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who vindicated the insulted majesty ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wine merchants and a statement of his account with his outfitter were consigned in turns into the fire. The last envelope, in the unknown hand, he scrutinised for a moment before opening. The postmark was local, the caligraphy illiterate. He opened the letter and read it with an inscrutable face. Then, with a quick movement as of disgust, he crumpled it up and threw it into the flames. It was anonymous, and was a threat, couched in lurid and ensanguined ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Nothing is more inscrutable than the working of the human will; argument does not reach it, nor does persuasion overcome it. It holds out against reason, against interest, against passion; no sufficient motive can be found with which to control it. On the other hand, it sometimes stoops in a way that defies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... she must have been content with the thoughts that were in my mind as I looked down at her lying in death's inscrutable calm. I had one of my secretaries hunt out the man she had loved—a sad, stranded wreck of a man he had become; but since that day he has been sheltered at least from the worst of the bufferings to which his incapacity ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... Sundays I found Roman boys playing an inscrutable game among the busts of their storied compatriots, a sort of "I spy" or "Hide and go whoop," counting who should be "It" in an Italian version of "Oneary, ory, ickory, an," and then scattering in ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... the inscrutable design? Blessed be He who took and gave: Why should your mother, Charles, not mine, Be weeping at her darling's grave?* We bow to heaven that will'd it so, That darkly rules the fate of all, That sends the respite or the blow, That's free to ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the inscrutable calm for which Macchiavelli was presently to find him so remarkable. Aware as he was of the French protection which Florence enjoyed and could invoke, he perceived how vain must ultimately prove Vitelli's efforts, saw, perhaps, in all this the grave danger of ultimate ruin which ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Kew, By the river old and gray, Where in the Long Ago We laughed and loitered so, I met a ghost to-day, A ghost that told of you - A ghost of low replies And sweet, inscrutable eyes Coming up from Richmond As you ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... in Turkish, did not arrive until the last minute, and with them came the chief, the great Bedri Bey himself— a strong man and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark, brooding eyes and velvety manners, calculated to envelop even a cup of coffee and a couple of boiled eggs in an air ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... in others they are necessary,—but the duties are all compulsive. When we marry, the choice is voluntary, but the duties are not matter of choice: they are dictated by the nature of the situation. Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stood on the gravel walk, winking a little in the draughts; it threw inconstant sparkles on the clumped holly, struck the light and darkness to and fro like a veil on Alan's features, and sent his shadow hovering behind him. All beyond was inscrutable; and John's dizzy brain rocked with the shadow. Yet even so, it struck him that Alan was pale, and his voice, when ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... obviously desirable I can well imagine Broadly speaking An admirable idea In a literal sense By sheer force of genius You can imagine his chagrin I hazard a guess It challenges belief He has an inscrutable face Very fertile in resource I am loath to believe It is essentially undignified Example is so contagious I am not in her confidence Taken in the aggregate It is a reproof to shallowness There is a misconception here I strongly suspect ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... if by the expression in hers he divined why she had made that expedition, moved by what expectation, by what curiosity. She could tell nothing by his face, which was calm and inscrutable. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... trial showed some prejudice; made some minor overstatements of his case; used many intemperances; and suffered himself to be provoked into expressions of heat and impatience by the cabals of the defendant and his party, and the intolerable incompetence of the tribunal. It is one of the inscrutable perplexities of human affairs, that in the logic of practical [v.04 p.0831] life, in order to reach conclusions that cover enough for truth, we are constantly driven to premises that cover too much, and that in order to secure their right weight to justice and reason good men ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 'correct' must be 'morally wrong'; and 'when the world is at an end', what moral or warning purpose 'can' eternal tortures answer? Human passions have probably disfigured the divine doctrines here;—but the whole thing is inscrutable." ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... fortune was earned by their own puny brains and thews, and was no gift from the Gods above; and presently the cult of these Gods became neglected, and Their temples were barren of gifts and worshippers. Followed a punishment. The Gods in Their inscrutable way decreed that a wife of one of the Priests (that was a governor of no inconsiderable province) should see a woman child by the wayside, and take it for adoption. That child the Gods in their infinite wisdom fashioned into a scourge for Atlantis, ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them, as antecedent and consequent, are termed laws. The laws of phenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature and their ultimate causes, efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us.[247] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... trembled as I gazed at those unwinking eyes. What did they see in the sphere? What was passing in that inscrutable brain? Could it, too, reconstruct the past, read the mysteries ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... himself down to die, and his frozen body was not found until after fourteen days of diligent search. After my dear wife and I had read the story, and talked and wept about his death, so sad, so mysterious, so inscrutable, she said to me, "Where were you during that week?" The journal was searched, and we were not a little startled at finding that the race for life we have in this chapter described was in all probability on the same day as that on which ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Lords and very King of Kings, He sits within the desert, carved in stone; Inscrutable, colossal, and alone, And ancienter than memory of things. Graved on his front the sacred beetle clings; Disdain sits on his lips; and in a frown Scorn lives upon his forehead for a crown. The affrighted ostrich dare not dust her wings Anear this Presence. The long ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... place in the middle of the road, and Almira reentered the room with the expression of one who had penetrated the inscrutable and solved the riddle of the Sphinx. She had been vouch-safed one of those gleams of light in darkness which almost ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... answer her that. I only thanked her, or tried to thank her, I dare say in such surly fashion that it was more like a rebuff; then I was off, but I felt her standing there close to the white-blooming hedge, staring after me with that inscrutable look of an immature girl who questions doubly all she sees, ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... for the last time, they crossed the threshold of his chamber. More silent than ever, more benignly silent, did the hush about him seem to Dion; more profound were his peace and serenity. He and the child had surely withdrawn a little farther from all that was not intended, but that, for some inscrutable reason, had come to be. His winged sandals had carried him still farther away. As Dion looked at him he seemed to ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of Kant's education and character can make intelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural postulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a God to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been Puritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to other cherished imaginations: there is no superstition which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... like most embryo reformers, she had a poor taste in dress. She wore her tail at an aimless angle, without chic; her markings were all lopsided. But her soul was ardent, and her life was always directed by some rather inscrutable theory or other. As a puppy she had been an inspired optimist, with legs like strips of elastic clumsily attached to a winged spirit. Later she had adopted a vigorous anarchist policy, and had inaugurated what was probably known in her set ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to do with the general tenour of the poem. The human world ends off, as it were, precipitously; and beyond there is an endless, impracticable abyss in which dwells the secret governance of things, an unknowable and implacable fate—"Wyrd"—neither malign nor benevolent, but simply inscrutable. The peculiar cast of noble and desolate courage which this bleak conception gives to the poem is ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... was doing that melancholy Dane, and that the woman was a Jewess, and the Jewess a French Jewess. These three removes put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and the impassioned irresolution of that inscrutable Northern nature which is in nothing so masculine as its feminine reluctances and hesitations, or so little French as in those obscure emotions which the English poetry expressed with more than Gallic clearness, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Bell, with deep lines of anxiety scoring his face, Jess, troubled and anxious looking, and old Peter Bell, the former hermit, bearing an expression of mild bewilderment. Last of all came Alverado, the Mexican flotsam of the desert. His inscrutable countenance bore no sign of the suffering he had gone through at the thought that harm had come to his worshipped senorita, but in his heart the Mexican had suffered as much as the rest. He had arrived in camp with the stock the evening ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... for an instant, then it was gone, and his expression was as inscrutable as ever. Yet he took her hands in his and looked down ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... and that holds in the depths of its placidity secrets that none can discern. He was always near nowadays, on the fringe of their lives, just beyond the radius of their preoccupations, the silent witness of this strange love affair, in the humble station that Allah, for some inscrutable ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... confusion those critics who, beginning first to take any notice of his work after the issue of these volumes of 1855, discovered therein poems they praised chiefly by means of contrasting them with foregoing work they found unnoticeable and later work they declared inscrutable. Their bland discrimination, at any rate, in favor of "Men and Women" became henceforth inapplicable, since the poet not only cast out from the division they elected to honor the little lyrical pieces that caught their eye, but also brought ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... his arms round her, and bent her head back, studying her French and rather inscrutable eyes, her dark lashes, her mobile mouth, her long white throat. He put his hand caressingly upon it, and slid his fingers beneath the loose lace that the open wrap exposed. "Dear," he ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... writers. Thomas Nelson Page, in "The Old South," draws a beautiful and tender picture of the ante-bellum matron and her influence over her husband. "What she was," he says, "only her husband knew, and even he stood before her in dumb, half-amazed admiration, as he might before the inscrutable vision of a superior being. What she really was, was known only to God. Her life was one long act of devotion—devotion to God, devotion to her husband, devotion to her children, ... devotion to all humanity. ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... features became inscrutable in a moment, and her eyes turned as it were indifferently to the window. A week ago she might have replied that Denis was obviously "smitten"; but four days of almost total neglect and really formidable rivalry are hard to forgive, even when one flatters oneself ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... very reprehensible bargain, and Lincoln has been zealously defended against the reproach of having entered into it. Why, if indeed it ever was made, it had this objectionable complexion is a point in the inscrutable moralities of politics which is not plain to those uninitiated ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... substitutes an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, then leaves us in the presence of the avowedly inexplicable. The truth must grow ever clearer—the truth that there is an inscrutable existence everywhere manifested to which the man of science can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... auguries, and mutual congratulations, in health and spirits, panting for their dearest friends,—one going to a princedom, and a throne, and a brilliant career of victories, the other to disease and death,—without being impressed with the wonderful acts of an inscrutable Providence, with the ignorance and weakness of man, and with the resistless will (p. 050) of the merciful Ruler of man's destinies. Even had young Humphrey foreseen his dissolution, then so nigh at hand, as the gates of Trym Castle opened ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... further learnt, that on the tolling of the midnight bell at my own gate, or at the citadel, a chosen minister of vengeance passed to pilot the accused, I went, and you, through paths most dangerous and inscrutable, have brought me to the spot where justice reigns; if so, give the first proof of justice, trial. By that I am prepared to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... was certainly one of the most splendid spectacles the city had seen for many a day. The papers all spoke highly of the qualities of the dead manufacturer, whose growth had been typical of the growth of the city. The eloquent minister spoke of the inscrutable ways of Providence in cutting off a man in his prime, and in the very height of ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... was besides this a natural leaning toward the mysterious,—the mysterious, I mean, as depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which excites gloom or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable as moving in darkness. Take, for example, the idea of a grand combination of human energies mustered together in secret, and operating through invisible agencies for the downfall of Christianity,—an idea which was conveyed to De Quincey in his childhood through the Abbe Baruel's book ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote: Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... his ear, but he could see no sign of guile or satire on the face of the Secretary of War. On the contrary, it bore every appearance of earnestness, and he became convinced that the appearance was just. Then he cast one swift glance at the inscrutable Mr. Sefton, who still sat in the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the King. But it was a wasted effort, for Ludwig insisted that his relations with the conscience-stricken postulant were "nothing more than platonic." Thereupon, "the superior clergy announced that the designs of Providence were indeed inscrutable to mere mortals, but they trusted that His Majesty would at any rate change his mistress." Ludwig, however, brooking no interference with his amours, refused to do anything ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... remarkable divine judgment, for at the last day of the world it will be made quite clear to us."[608] If such judgments were more often visited upon the right persons, perhaps the ways of Providence would not have so generally come to be regarded as inscrutable. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... smallest ones gave me a panic when I went over them. I could hit any kind of a stone, no matter how small, if I tried to miss it; and of course at first I couldn't help trying to do that. It is but natural. It is part of the ass that is put in us all, for some inscrutable reason. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... shrinking from the sight of men in the recesses of his palace, and controlling the complicated affairs of his Duchy by means of correspondents and intelligencers, this last scion of the Milanese despots lived like a spider in an inscrutable network of suspicion and intrigue. His policy was one of endless plot and counterplot. He trusted no man; his servants were paid to act as spies on one another; his bodyguard consisted of mutually hostile mercenaries; his captains in the field were watched and thwarted ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... needs only a due admixture of pride, ambition, and selfishness, to be a perfect ideal of the devil. Amongst men of such stamp are found the greatest scourges and devastators of the world—those elect scoundrels whom Providence, in its inscrutable designs, permits to fulfil their mission of destruction upon ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... loomed in the doorway. He was serene and calm as ever. Neither the discovery of the plot by the abstraction of the messenger's letter, nor Ruth's strange conduct—of which he had heard from Lord Gervase—had sufficed to ruffle, outwardly at least, the inscrutable serenity of his air and manner. He paused to make his bow, then advanced into the room, with a passing glance at Richard still spurred and ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... feel well enough to undergo some twenty or thirty hours' sea-sickness in the packet that offered the Saturday after my arrival,) I took a morbid and eager pleasure in awaiting the visits and observing the motions of those inscrutable beings. Sainsbury and his son were amused, but not surprised, at the anxiety I evinced to obtain a nearer insight into Maunsell's history. My curiosity and vigilance were, however, fruitless. The Pair performed their revolutions with a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... natural investigation ought to follow faith, and not precede it nor impair it. For faith and love excel here most of all, and work in hidden ways in, this most holy and transcendent sacrament. The eternal and immeasurable God of infinite power does great and inscrutable things in heaven and in earth, and there is no finding out of His wonderful works. If the works of God were such that they could easily be seized by human reason, they would not deserve to be called wonderful ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Dark! thou secret and inscrutable Dark! In thy silent depths, the springs whereof man hath not fathomed, God wrought the soul of man. O Dark! compassionate, all-knowing Dark! Tenderly, as shadows to the evening, comes thy message to man. Softly thou layest thy hand on his tired eyelids, And his soul, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... leave you forever alone, and there is much selfishness and stubborness of will. Saturn and Scorpio are not good marital allies." He gave her a searching glance, for the seventh of January was Leonora's birthday, but her face was quite inscrutable. ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... it,— These great black barges float like apparitions, Loom in the silver of it, beat upon it, Moving upon it as dragons move on air." "Thus always," then I answered,—looking never Toward her face, so beautiful and strange It grew, with feeding on the evening light,— "The gross is given, by inscrutable God, Power to beat wide wings upon the subtle. Thus we ourselves, so fleshly, fallible, mortal, Stand here, for all our foolishness, transfigured: Hung over nothing in an arch of light While one more evening like a wave of silence Gathers the ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... broad, with precipitous banks. We all prepared ourselves for a bloody and even disastrous rearguard action. But now, I repeat, when things had come to this pass, Buller took personal command. He arrived on the field calm, cheerful, inscrutable as ever, rode hither and thither with a weary staff and a huge notebook, gripped the whole business in his strong hands, and so shook it into shape that we crossed the river in safety, comfort, and good order, with most remarkable mechanical ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... out, but only acted with double prudence after each victory, and with double courage after each defeat. His cheek grew pale with joy; when he hated most, he smiled; in all the emotions of his life, however strong, he was inscrutable. He had sworn to sit on the throne of Naples, and long had believed himself the rightful heir, as being nearest of kin to Robert of all his nephews. To him the hand of Joan would have been given, had not the old king in his latter days conceived the plan of bringing Andre from Hungary and re-establishing ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... hand up the stationary rope, helped by the second one: his face, appearing over the edge of the gap, was grave and at first inscrutable. He shook himself when he stepped above ground, as if he wanted to shake off an impression: then he turned and spoke ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... must be infinitely more complex in his organization than the individuals of which he is composed. While between the educator of the one and of the other, there is simply the difference between a man and God. How much more complex then must his education be! how all-inscrutable to human minds much in it!—often as inscrutable as would our training of our children seem to the bird brooding over her young ones in the nest. The parental relations in all three cases may be—the ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... things—so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... that poor wretch.... I, who have surely the right, beg you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny? For there is no other way to think of it. None. I have the right to say it, since for years he was my wife's lover, since he killed her, since he broke up all the pleasantnesses that there ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... the electric lamp at his elbow and took a letter out of his pocket. The circle of shaded light fell on his face as he read—the thin, grave face, with the steady, inscrutable eyes. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... or whether our words of praise may win us the kind regards of a 'gentle ladye,' we can only conjecture. Our process must be in rem, not in personam. 'It'—for thus perforce we must speak of our Unknown—weareth an iron mask of inscrutable mystery, as complete as that of the all-baffling Junius. The field, however, of speculation is open to our wandering reflection. Herein we guide ourselves by natural signs, the configurations of the stars and the marks of the soil. We judge ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... this conversation had revolved had been sitting in the window gazing at the view over the lake. She now turned her head sharply, with an inscrutable expression in her dark grey eyes, and, walking across to her father, linked her arm in his. He bent down and whispered a few rapid words into her ear. Her mother patted her ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... without a kingdom and without an army, was nevertheless more powerful than the king. Like him, he had been a disciple of Charles V., and had learned the art of elevating thrones and hurling them down; like him, he was cunning and inscrutable, and yet he divined the future with keener intellectual vision than Philip. Like his enemy, he had the power of reading men's souls, but he also had the ability to win their hearts. He had a good ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... nowadays in the name of artistic writing; but every modification of the value of a word by the place it fills must be distinguished with extreme clearness. Give us fewer nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with almost inscrutable shades of meaning, and let us have a greater variety of phrases, more variously constructed, ingeniously divided, full of sonority and learned rhythm. Let us strive to be admirable in style, rather than curious in collecting ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... The touch of my lips on her sweet, smooth flesh made me tremble, and I knew the madness was creeping over me, but I gritted my teeth, and our eyes met again. The blush had gone, but not the smile. It was not now, however, the smile of a frank maiden but of an inscrutable and dominating woman. I knew the difference, for instinct is more than experience, and I chilled into the yokel again ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... anything his still glance seemed to pass through it, into its essence. An inscrutable Fate had willed that his eyes should not rest ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... an hour after their prisoners had been removed La Boulaye paced the narrow limits of the kitchen with face inscrutable and busy mind. He recalled what Suzanne had said touching her betrothal to Ombreval, whom she looked to meet at Treves. This miserable individual, then, was the man for whose sake she had duped him. But Ombreval at least was in Caron's power, and it came to him now that by virtue of that circumstance ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... blessedness, and an endless growth of all our powers and capacities; but why should Hinduism urge the cultivation of that whose real destiny is "effacement?" Hinduism finds the explanation of life's mysteries and inscrutable trials in the theory of sins committed in a previous existence. Christianity, while recognizing the same trials, relieves them with the hope of solutions in a future life of compensating joy. The one turns to that which is past, unchangeable ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... house parlors were decorated with all the laughing or smiling pictures that could be found by the committee in charge. "Mona Lisa" was there with her inscrutable smile, "The Laughing Cavalier," as well as less famous characters, such as smiling girls on calendars and magazine covers. An amusing display of newspaper cartoons also filled one portion of the wall space. Smilax was appropriately enough used ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... Paris by the Orleans gate last evening alone?' he answered, fitting together the ends of his fingers, and looking at me over them with inscrutable eyes. 'Yes, I knew all that last night. And now, of your business. You have been faithful and diligent, I am sure. ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman |
