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Invariable   /ɪnvˈɛriəbəl/   Listen
Invariable

noun
1.
A quantity that does not vary.  Synonyms: constant, constant quantity.



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"Invariable" Quotes from Famous Books



... contradiction. This is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral significance there may be in certain ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... it does not take a very sharp farmer to see that although hot winds, or murrain, or hog cholera increase the leanness of his pocket-book, these things do not explain that irresistible and invariable current which bears such a large portion of what he does earn into the plethoric pocket-books of the few rich. The farmer has become, perforce, a student of economics; and, although we may laugh at some of the vagaries ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... shrubbery, whose splendor is always the greatest on the borders of ponds and water-courses, and frequently surpasses that of the trees. As the plain rises into the hill-side, the Ash-trees may be distinguished by their peculiar shades of salmon, mulberry, and purple, and the Hickories by their invariable yellows. The Elm, the Lime, and the Buttonwood are always blemished and rusty: they add no brilliancy to the spectacle, serving only to sober and relieve other parts of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... remember the Long Valley as an Arcadian dell. Veterans of the Soudan recall the black sand-storms with regretful sighs. The thin, red dust comes everywhere, and never stops. It blinds your eyes, it stops your nose, it scorches your throat till the invariable shilling for a little glass of any liquid seems cheap as dirt. It turns the whitest shirt brown in half an hour, it creeps into the works of your watch and your bowels. It lies in a layer mixed with flies on the top of your rations. The white ants eat away the flaps of the tents, and the men wake ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... scoundrel's haunt, the man's scheme became hideously evident to him. Feeling himself hunted down, lost, an object of hatred and terror to Florence, whose eyes were now opened to the true state of things, what plan could he have in mind except his invariable ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc

... have drunk of it would testify, if they could come back. And if they could file along this road again, what a procession there would be riding down the valley!—antiquated vehicles, rusty wagons adorned with the invariable buffalo-robe even in the hottest days, lean and long-favored horses, frisky colts, drawing, generation after generation, the sober and pious saints, that passed this way to meeting ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... stairs. He was impatiently searching for his cloak in the back parlour, when a voice behind said: "Let me assist you, sir—do:" and turning round with petulant quickness, he beheld again Mr. Adolphus Poole. It requires an habitual intercourse with equals to give perfect and invariable control of temper to a man of irritable nerves and frank character; and though, where Daxrell really liked, he had much sweet forbearance, and where he was indifferent much stately courtesy, yet, when he was offended, he could be extremely uncivil. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... life, and on the invariable ultimate triumph of the insignificant and small over the important and vast, illustrated in this instance by the easy substitution in the arbour of slugs for grandfathers, I went slowly round the next bend of the path, and came to the broad walk along the south side of the high wall dividing ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp

... sat motionless, sometimes with mouth partly open, letting the flies crawl over her face, gazing in one direction, soiling, wetting, resisting moderately or markedly any interference, and had to be tube-fed. But this was not the invariable state. The most constant feature was her mutism, but even that was a few times interrupted. Thus, when after a visit from her uncle (towards the end of July, 1902) she tried to get out of the window and was prevented, she swore at the nurse. Or in August, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... directed to meet the scientific objection to the doctrine that prayer is answered in the physical region, by showing that this objection consists in an argument from the known to the unknown, i.e. from the known sphere of invariable physical laws to the unknown sphere of God's relation to all such laws; and is, therefore, weak in proportion as the unknown sphere is remote from possible experience of a scientific kind, and admits of an indefinite number of possibilities, more or less conceivable to our imagination, which would ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... it was an invariable sign of lunacy in America to take your breakfast in bed. Lucy couldn't say. All she knew was that nobody ever took it so in Greyridge, Vermont, unless they were on the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to experience the invariable troubles of African travellers. His two horses died within a few hours of each other, both, however, from disease of long standing, and not ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... some one dear to him a small object, be it an apple, a nut, or a piece of coin. The archer always provides himself with a second arrow, and, when questioned as to the use he intended to make of his extra weapon, the invariable reply is, "To kill thee, tyrant, had I slain my son." Now, when a marvellous occurrence is said to have happened everywhere, we may feel sure that it never happened anywhere. Popular fancies propagate themselves indefinitely, but historical events, especially the striking and dramatic ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... boarding-house routine she detested, and was always abjectly ready to do as she was told. She saw nothing she was not meant to see, and she could be shaken off at a moment's notice. For the rest, she came of a stock of gentlefolk; and her invariable black dress, her bits of carefully treasured lace, the weak refinement of her face, and her timid manner did no discredit to ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... he was well-calculated to retain the authority intrusted to him by such men. He was, in fact, an epitome of all the physical qualities which distinguished the rugged people of the west: and between these and the moral and intellectual, there is an invariable correspondence—as if the spirit within had moulded its material encasement to the planes and angles of its own ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... the quantity and quality of the effect vary with the quantity and quality of the cause. In the second, neither quality nor quantity of the effect varies with quality and quantity of the cause: the effect is invariable. In the third, the quantity of the effect depends on the quantity of the cause, but the cause does not influence the quality of the effect: the longer the cylinder turns by the action of the spring, the more of the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... to the usual custom, placed the treizain—that is to say, thirteen pieces of silver—in his fiancee's hand. He placed on her finger a silver ring of a shape that remained invariable for centuries, but has since been replaced by the band of gold. As they left the church, Marie whispered: "Is it the ring I wanted? the one I asked ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand

... could of the circumstances to any of the officials who would hear me,—pouring forth torrents of broken and hardly intelligible French, now shrieking to make myself understood, and now groaning with despair,—questioning, cursing, imploring,—and receiving the invariable, the inexorable reply, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... and Germanic races, than in that of the Latin Occident. Such a dissertation, it appeared to me, would have been an ingenious method of thanking the lady for having thus appeared to an old scholar, contrary to the invariable custom of her kindred, who never show themselves but to innocent children ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... greatest understanding of the Italians. He had travelled in Italy in peace-time and had studied Italian history. He fully appreciated the difficulties against which the Italian Army had to contend, and its military achievements in spite of them. He enjoyed social intercourse with Italians, and his invariable and slightly elaborate courtesy was, in an Englishman, remarkable. For, as Mazzini once said, an Englishman's friendship, when once secured, holds very firm, but it is manifested more by deeds than by words. But Colonel Raven had the gift of sympathetic imagination, ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... to the spiritual a marked superiority over the secular courts. The proceedings in the former were guided by fixed and invariable principles, the result of the wisdom of ages; the latter were compelled to follow a system of jurisprudence confused and uncertain, partly of Anglo-Saxon, partly of Norman origin, and depending on precedents, of which some were furnished by memory, others had been transmitted by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... the innermost corner, where Dowson would sit with that singularly sweet and singularly pathetic smile on his lips (a smile which seemed afraid of its right to be there, as if always dreading a rebuff), playing his invariable after-dinner game of cards. Friends would come in during the hour before closing time; and the girl, her game of cards finished, would quietly disappear, leaving him with hardly more than the desire to kill another ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al

... men, and had many wounded, who, according to the invariable usage of the Indians, were immediately borne ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley

... saw surprised me. Is such a thing possible? The pointing of a lashing is a thing a sailor is very careful about. He knows that if the end is badly pointed, it does not matter how well the lashing is put on; therefore it is an invariable rule that lashings must be pointed as carefully as possible. When I looked at this one, what do you think I saw? Why, the end of the lashing was nailed down with a little tack, such as one would use to fasten labels. "That would be a nice thing to take to the Pole!" ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... his invariable good luck,—scarcely has he started this little shack than the bridge upon the highway burns down and the obscure country road becomes a thoroughway for automobiles. Pee-wee reaps a large profit from his business during the balance ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... soon as I had dined, I resumed my medical paraphernalia and took the field once more. I visited several patients on the list, and treated their several complaints in one invariable routine. Hitherto things had gone well, and no one, thank Heaven, had risen up in rebellion against my prescriptions. But let a physician's cures be as extraordinary as they will, some quack or other is always ready to rip up ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... place our ball of wire, A, in a cylindrical hat-box, B, that exactly fits it, so that it touches the side all round and exactly touches the top and bottom, as shown in the illustration. Then, by an invariable law that should be known by everybody, that box contains exactly half as much again as the ball. Therefore, as the ball is 24 in. in diameter, a hat-box of the same circumference but two-thirds of ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... Osborne. In this respect Harley was commonplace; to his mind the villain always had to be the rival of the hero, just as in opera the tenor is always virtuous at heart if not otherwise, and the baritone a scoundrel, which in real life is not an invariable rule by any means. Indeed, there have been many instances in real life where the villain and the hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews—the ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs

... wife, in her whole intercourse with her husband, try the efficacy of gentleness, purity, sincerity, scrupulous truth, meek and patient forbearance, an invariable tone and manner of deference, and, if he is not a brute, he cannot help respecting her and treating her kindly; and in nearly all instances he will end by loving her and ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... provinces and cities all over the Netherlands from the time of the abjuration of Spain down to that moment. Through the whole period of independence in the time of Anjou, Matthias, Leicester, as well as under the actual government, it had been the invariable custom thus to provide both by land and sea and on the rivers against robbers, rebels, pirates, mischief-makers, assailing thieves, domestic or foreign. It had been done by the immortal William the Silent on many memorable occasions, and in fact the custom was so notorious that soldiers so enlisted ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... had every opportunity of investigating the question, and able interpreters wherever I wintered; but I never could learn that any such tradition existed. Even in their tales and legends there is never any reference to a distant land; when questioned in regard to this, their invariable answer is, "Our fathers and our fathers' fathers have hunted on these lands ever since the flood, and we never heard of any other country till the whites came among us." These tribes have the same tradition in regard to the ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean

... clearly all had been prepared for a revolt. And I would remark that by the 'young men' of Rehoboam are undoubtedly meant the soldiers—the body-guards whom the Jewish kings now retained as an element of royal pomp. This is the invariable use of the term in the East. Even in Josephus the term for the military by profession is generally 'the young men'; whilst 'the elders' mean the councilors of state. David saw enough of the popular spirit to be satisfied ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... go up now from the region of facts that seem casual, to those facts that are invariable, by us unchangeable, which therefore involve what we call law. It will be seen at once that the fact here is of more dignity, and the truth or falsehood of a statement in this region of more consequence ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... totally unlike the six days which followed it. Even the stupidest girl could scarcely complain of the severity of Sunday lessons—even the merriest girl could scarcely speak of the day as dull. Mrs. Willis made an invariable rule of spending all Sunday with her pupils. On this day she really unbent—on this day she was all during the long hours what she was during the short half-hour on each evening in the week. On Sunday she neither reproved nor corrected. ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade

... given. Nature says that all matter gravitates, not in words, but in the swing of planets around the sun, and in the leap of the avalanche. And men have devised ingenious machines through which Nature may tell us the invariable laws of gravitation, and give some hint as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... he will feel that chemistry deals with certain very definite, characteristic, and fundamental changes of matter in which new substances are formed, and that these processes always go on in accordance with fixed and invariable laws, though they are influenced by conditions of temperature, pressure, light, electricity, and the presence of other substances in larger or smaller amounts. The theory and formulation when properly ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... his invariable answer to the question when put to him. Now for once he elaborated ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... sentiments and hypotheses of men, so had his almost intuitive discrimination stripped them of their deceptive appendages, and separated fallacies from truth, marshalling their arguments, so as to elucidate or detect each other. But in all his disputations, it was an invariable maxim with him never to interrupt the most tedious or confused opponents, though, from his pithy questions, he made it evident, that, from the first, he anticipated the train and consequences ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... observation. I have addressed hundreds of audiences in Great Britain and America on the subject of recent solar discoveries, and I have conversed with many hundreds of persons of various capacity and education, from men almost uncultured to men of the highest intellectual power; and my invariable experience has been that solar research derives its chief interest when viewed in relation to the sun's position as the mighty ruler, the steadfast sustainer, the beneficent almoner of the system of worlds to which our earth belongs. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... of the boat was the absence of a covering boat. The invariable custom of the larger recruiting vessels was to send two boats on any shore errand. While one landed on the beach, the other lay off a short distance to cover the retreat of the shore party, if trouble broke out. Too small to carry one boat on deck, the Arangi could ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... irregularities. You may learn of this from themselves, for they take no pains to hide it, except that they cover their human and political prudence with the pretence of a divine and Christian prudence. They act as if the faith and the tradition which maintains it were not for ever invariable at all times and in all places, and as if nothing more were required, in order to remove the stains of guilt, than to corrupt the law of the Lord, instead of regarding that stainless and holy law as itself the instrument of conversion, and conforming human souls ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... "Ah! My invariable reply to Beauvayse—you know my junior A.D.C., who daily clamours for an introduction to Miss Mildare—is, that I have not yet had one myself, though at the outset of affairs I encountered the young lady under rather trying circumstances, in which she showed plenty ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... Section i. The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction; and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the same and as invariable as the right of the ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... the substances entering into combination as their atomic weights. Solid ground for this expectation lies in the dynamic theory of heat. A body of water at a given height is competent by its fall to produce a definite and invariable quantity of heat or work, and in the same way two substances falling together in chemical union acquire a definite amount of kinetic energy, which, if not expended in the work of molecular changes, may also by suitable arrangements be made ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... the upper dormitories of the building; whilst the hundred and twenty horses were stalled in the spacious stables; and beds provided for the officers in the dormitories. But what was better still, after the men had been attended to (and this is the invariable rule, men first) we regaled ourselves upon tea and bread and butter in the bakehouse, where, in front of the huge fire, we toasted our benumbed extremities and dried our sodden clothing. After such a night's rest, as only comes to fagged-out men, we awoke to a golden-tinted autumn ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester

... never married, though, such is the mercenary nature of man, the rumor of her inheritance brought to her feet several suitors. But Miss Hetty had resolved never to marry—at least, this was her invariable answer to matrimonial offers, and so after a time it came to be understood that she was fixed for life—an old maid. What reasons impelled her to this course were not known, but possibly the reader will be furnished with a clue before ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray

... year, in spite of Madame Graslin's assumption of strength, her friends began to notice symptoms which foreshadowed her coming death. To all the doctor's remarks, and to the inquiries of the most clear-sighted of her friends, Veronique made the invariable answer that she was perfectly well. But when the spring opened she went round to visit her forests, farms, and beautiful meadows with a childlike joy and delight which betrayed to those who knew her best a ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... time in her life she forgot her grandchildren, and the invariable good luck of the family, and thought mostly about herself. Toward morning she fell into a troubled doze, but she had scarcely seemed to drop asleep before a great bell sounded, which summoned her to rise. It was just six o'clock, and, at this time of the ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade

... Hallett and Gay Liscannon. It was quite unavoidable that she and Gay should meet, however averse they might be to one another, and each accepted the fact with an outward calm that gave no indication of inward fires. Mrs. Hading was charming to Gay, as was her invariable practice while searching for chinks in the opponent's armour. Her hands blessed, even while her fingers were busy feeling for the soft spots in the victim's skull. Gay, on her side, was pleasant, polite, and interested, while guarding her heart behind a barrier ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... phenomena of matter taken by themselves, so far from warranting any inference to the existence of a god, would on the contrary ground even an argument to his negation. The phenomena of a material world are subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same invariable succession, and manifest only the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... property of both air and water to expand, become lighter and rise, just in proportion as they are heated; and therefore it is the invariable law that cool air sinks, thus replacing the warmer air below. Thus, whenever cool air enters a warm room, it sinks downward and takes the place of an equal amount of the warmer air, which is constantly tending upward and outward. This principle of all fluids is illustrated by ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... whereof the grounds cannot now be fully investigated or ascertained. Neither the natural nor artificial qualities or uses of the things named, nor the form of the names given them, furnish any invariable rule by which the gender of nouns may be known. It ought to be remembered, however, that the Gaelic is far from being singular in this respect. The oldest language with which we are acquainted, as well as some of the most polished modern tongues, ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart

... that the literal first step meant putting my bare foot upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches wide, but lying straight in my path. I would finally reach my father's bedside perfectly breathless and having panted out the history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if he "had a little girl who told lies," he was very glad that she "felt too bad to go to sleep afterward." No absolution was asked for or received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of my wickedness was shared, or an obscure understanding ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... so much what Mrs. Boyd has to tell as the invariable good humour and brightness with which she records even the most familiar things that makes the charm of ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... mud-dauber,—which sometimes builds its cell with great labor, then seals it up without laying its egg and storing it with the accustomed spiders. Intelligence never makes that kind of a mistake, but instinct does. Instinct acts more in the invariable way of a machine. Certain of the solitary wasps bring their game—spider, or bug, or grasshopper—and place it just at the entrance of their hole, and then go into their den apparently to see that all is right ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... about six hundred of the traders' people at Gondokoro, whose time was passed in drinking, quarrelling, and ill-treating the slaves. The greater number were in a constant state of intoxication, and when in such a state, it was their invariable custom to fire off their guns in the first direction prompted by their drunken instincts; thus, from morning till night, guns were popping in all quarters, and the bullets humming through the air sometimes close to our ears, and on more than one occasion they struck up the dust at ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... a lamp beside the open window, he read aloud from The Times the evening post had brought, such fragments as he thought might interest her. The custom was invariable, except on Sundays, when, to please his wife, he dozed over Tennyson or Farrar as their mood might be. She knitted while he read, asked gentle questions, told him his voice was a "lovely reading voice," and enjoyed the little discussions that occasions prompted ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... timidity, which overcomes the effort, while it increases the desire, to shine, that the union of love and timidity has been called inseparable, in the hackneyed language of every love-tale. But this is no invariable rule, as Shakspeare has shown us in the artless Miranda, in the eloquent Juliet, in the frank and healthful Rosalind;—and the love of Sibyll was no common girl's spring-fever of sighs and blushes. It lay in the mind, the imagination, the intelligence, as ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... thought was for the rope which worked over a pulley through a hole in the wall of her cell, enabling her from, within to ring the great bell in the passage, thus rousing the entire community. It had been her invariable habit to do this herself. She liked the nuns to feel that the call to begin a new day came to them from the hand of their Prioress. Realising the difficulty of early rising, especially after night vigils, it pleased her that her nuns should know that the fact of the bell ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... impersonate, Charles Dickens so completely held his judgment the while in equipoise, as master of his twofold craft—that is, both as creator and as elocutionist, as author and as reader—that, as an invariable rule, he betrayed neither of those signs of insincerity, by the inadvertent revelation of which all sense of illusion is ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... upon your hand? And when I spoke to you of the ladies of this country, my talk did not interest you overmuch as at your age it had done were you heart-whole. Surely also the lady is fair and tall? Ah! I thought so. I have noticed that men and women love their opposite in colour, no invariable rule indeed, ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... had seemed to wake to life. No call had sounded on the trumpet. No voice had been raised, save the invariable call of the sentries, passing from post to post the half hours of the night; but the stir at the guard-house, the bustle over at the barracks, the swift footsteps of sergeants or orderlies on the plank walk or resounding wooden galleries, speedily roused first one sleeper, then another, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... water at night, to drink the sailors' favourite toast of 'Wives and Sweethearts.' It was customary, upon these occasions, for the seamen and artificers to collect in the galley, when the musical instruments were put in requisition: for, according to invariable practice, every man must play a tune, sing a song, ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... invariable, and I fear it must be said, almost invariably idle controversy about priority in literary styles has been stimulated, in the case of English satire, by a boast of Joseph Hall's made ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... wrote to him in consequence, by the order of the Prince Royal, a severe reprimand. This act of political justice is, however, denied by him, under pretence that the Cabinet of Copenhagen has laid it down as an invariable rule, never to reprimand, but always to displace those of its agents with whom it has reason to be discontented. Should this be the case, no Sovereign in Europe is better served by his representatives than his Danish Majesty, because no one ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... given in all confinements that are not normal. To make this [113] statement more plain it may be said, that, when it is necessary to use instruments, or to perform any operation of a painful character, it is the invariable rule to give anesthetics. As to the wisdom of giving an anesthetic when labor is progressing in a normal and satisfactory manner, there is a difference of opinion. Much depends upon the disposition of the patient and the viewpoint of the physician ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.

... manifestation as any of the physical laws connected with the material world.") will serve as example, for I quite agree that the spiral arrangement of a certain number of whorls of leaves (however that may have primordially arisen, and whether quite as invariable as you state), governs the limits of variability, and therefore governs what Natural Selection can do. Let me explain how it arose that I laid so much stress on Natural Selection, and I still think justly. I came ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... for a moment at the ordinary application of the doctrine. The theologian agrees with the man of science in admitting that we are governed by unalterable laws, or, as the man of science prefers to say, that the world shows nothing but a series of invariable sequences and co-existences. The difference is, in other words, that the theologian puts a legislator behind the laws, whilst the man of science sees nothing behind them but impenetrable mystery. The difference, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... intrigue. The Comte was happy to hear of this resolve, but he was far from being sure about the Duc de Guise. He earnestly warned the Princess of the danger of a return to the previous situation should she have any change of heart, though when he spoke of his devotion she adopted her invariable attitude of looking on him as her closest friend but in no ...
— The Princess of Montpensier • Madame de La Fayette

... of value, as the fundamental condition of social order and progress, was dimly seen by Adam Smith, when, to use the words of M. Blanqui, "he showed that labor is the universal and invariable measure of values, and proved that everything has its natural price, toward which it continually gravitates amid the fluctuations of the market, occasioned by ACCIDENTAL CIRCUMSTANCES foreign to the venal value of ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... their noxious haunts. Some found a congenial haven in the State prison, a few reformed, and many died in want. The plague being temporarily stayed, and popular indignation a matter of record, New York, as is its invariable custom, permitted its vigilance to go quietly to sleep, with a fair prospect of it being rudely awakened to find history repeating itself. That this awakening cannot safely be much longer deferred, it is partly the mission of the present chapter to ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... were most excellent barometers, and their reaction to passing showers was invariable. The clay surface held water, and after each downfall the pools would be higher, and the contour of the little region altered. At the first few drops, all the ants would hasten, the throbbing corpuscles speeding up. Then, as the rain came down heavier, the column melted ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... no part of the life of ranch and country town. He was an alien, a vagabond, a strange fellow who came and went in mysterious fashion, making no friends, keeping to himself. Why did he never wear a hat, why indulge in a fine, black, pointed beard, when either a round beard or a mustache was the invariable custom? Why did he not cut his hair? Above all, why did he prowl about so much at night? As the two passed each other, Dyke, for all his good-nature, was a little blunt in his greeting and looked back at the ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... after their own dogs. From the sleds sufficient fish were taken to give to each dog two good whitefish. These were the daily rations of the dogs. The invariable rule is when travelling to give them but one meal a day, and that is given at the evening camp. So severe is the frost that these fish are frozen as hard as rocks, and so the drivers have to knock them off the sticks where in tens they were ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... honor to inform you that from about the fourth to the tenth of March there is always a week of fine weather, which takes everybody by surprise, except me. It does not astonish me, because I observe it is invariable. Now, what would you say if I gave you a week at Herne Bay, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... Indeed there appears no reason to fear but that the Wool of this Country may by care and judicious Management be placed on an equality with the very best that is grown in Spain. It has been Mr. MacArthur's invariable practice to keep the Spanish Breed apart from all others, and as fast as Spanish Rams have been reared they have been put among the coarse-woolled Ewes. The result of this system has proved extremely satisfactory, his Flocks now consist of more than Five Thousand, ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne

... that, having learned of the world's evil by libidinous living, he can only do evil by exposing his knowledge. He replies, finely expressing Shakespeare's invariable artistic practice, that his aim will be at sin, not ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield

... on board. At Amoy, as in most other ports in China, the customs are under the direction of a single mandarin, called the Hoppo, or Hoppou. The Chinese are justly reputed the craftiest people in the world; and it is their invariable maxim to appoint the cunningest man they can find to the office of hoppo. It may be added, that the people of Amoy are reputed to be less nice in the principles of honour and honesty even than any others in China. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... replied the mystic; "they who do so excite, and have so raised the diviner faculty, can alone possess the certain and invariable power over dreams, even without charms and talismans; but the most dull or idle may hope to do so with just confidence (though not certainty) by help of skill, and by directing the full force of their half-roused ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... crotalus is rapidly being exterminated. Yet, considering the recklessness which characterizes the cow boy in his treatment of this reptile, it is astonishing that this class of injury is not more common. Thus it is the invariable custom among the cattlemen to dismount and destroy these snakes whenever they are seen. This is readily accomplished, since a slight blow will break the back. This blow is, however, generally delivered by means of the quirt, a whip not over two and a half feet long, and hence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... Horace wandered up and down the streets, going into scores of buildings and asking if they wanted "a hand;" but "no" was the invariable reply. His quaint appearance led many to think he was an escaped apprentice. One Sunday at his boarding-place he heard that printers were wanted at "West's Printing-office." He was at the door at five o'clock Monday morning, and asked the foreman for a job at ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... armed with a sort of ivory sword, or lance, as certain naturalists have expressed it. It's a king-sized tooth as hard as steel. Some of these teeth have been found buried in the bodies of baleen whales, which the narwhale attacks with invariable success. Others have been wrenched, not without difficulty, from the undersides of vessels that narwhales have pierced clean through, as a gimlet pierces a wine barrel. The museum at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris owns one of these tusks with a length of 2.25 meters and a width ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... contrary, is a Being of all possible and infinite Perfections; an exact Knowledge of what we call Right and Wrong, Just and Unjust, ever hath, and always will exit in the Divine Mind, and be to him a perfect, constant, and invariable Rule of Action, in relation to his Creatures. He that is infinite in Knowledge, cannot but know, at all Times, and under the most (to us) difficult and perplex'd Circumstances of Things, what in its own Nature is best, ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch

... This was the invariable suggestion that he made to his wealthy patients when he saw no immediate results from his treatment. It could do no harm, Europe, and most of his patients liked the prescription. They returned, to be sure, in many ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... The great hall was crowded with knights and equerries, and those who would supped, saying nothing meanwhile. Mostly game seemed to be the favorite viand, and the legs and wings only of fowl were eaten. Music and chants were the invariable accompaniment and the company remained at table until after two in the morning. Little or nothing ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... go just contrary to the other, and gave the appearance of attempting something more difficult than it was capable of performing. Indeed, this was almost the invariable result, as its accomplishments in this line were so exceedingly few; besides, it was always out of time, was clumsy and awkward, and was such a foot as is familiarly described among boys ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey

... positivist, on the other hand, escapes the difficulty by an opposite course. He declines all inquiry into reality and causation, and maintains that the only office of philosophy is to observe and register the invariable relations of succession and similitude in phenomena. He does not necessarily deny the existence of God; but his personal belief, be it what it may, is a matter of utter indifference to his system. Religion and philosophy may perhaps go on side by side; but their provinces are wholly distinct, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... these movements occur in a constant and invariable manner upon the surface of water, and especially upon mercury, it is necessary to take precautions in regard to cleanliness, this being something that we have purposely neglected to mention to our readers. For we wished, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various

... it said that the invariable result of an untutored Chinaman's effort to pronounce any word containing an "r" produced the sound of "l" instead, we thought little of that error in the attempt of this one to say "Very," but believed that his substitution for the initial letter ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell

... wise, very just king. And when this very wise, very just king has taken their virginity from them, and seeks other loves, he will probably bestow them (I have forgotten the end of this particular story, but it is the invariable destiny of all the heroines of these marvellous legends) on his viziers. And these viziers will give them away in exchange for a vase of perfume or a belt studded with jewels; or perhaps despatch them to a distant country, there to conciliate a powerful ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... in yon shepherd and his faithful dog—Arcades ambo—the shepherd muffled against the searching wind in hood and cloak, under his arm a veritable crook, while his sheep and goats are browsing about wherever a blade of grass or a green leaf can be found. His invariable companion is—I was about to say a tamed wolf; but in reality, an untamed animal of wolfish aspect and disposition, always eager to make your acquaintance. These creatures are the torment of the traveler throughout Greece, and most of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... five o'clock in the afternoon for their supper. They are given a hearty breakfast as soon as the kitchen fire is started in the morning. This theoretically lasts them until five. I say theoretically, because if they wake from their invariable naps at one, and smell lunch, they individually wheedle some one into feeding them. But this is only individually. Collectively ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow

... either in the facts or in De Quincey's emotion at the sight of them. The novice fails in such writing as this because he becomes enamored of his beautiful images and forgets what he is trying to illustrate. The relation between reality and image should be as invariable as mathematics. If such startling images cannot be used with perfect clearness and vivid perception of their usefulness and value, they should not be used at all. De Quincey is so successful because his ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... burst into tears, her invariable practise in any crisis. Albert Potter's face relaxed ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill

... "She knows Mamma contemplates making a grand entertainment of all the Jews, as soon as she is gone. What does mamma mean by that, Fleda? I observe you comprehend her with most invariable quickness." ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell

... at the time my good fortune in arriving here in daylight. It seems that it is the invariable habit of all coastal steamers to reach here at night, and dump the dumbly resenting passengers in the darkness into the tiny punts which cluster around the ship's side. Since my arrival every single boat has appeared shortly before midnight, or shortly ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... taking a few hours' rest, Jules entered his wife's room, obeying mechanically his invariable custom of not leaving the house without a word to her. Clemence was sleeping. A ray of light passing through a chink in the upper blind of a window fell across the face of the dejected woman. Already suffering had impaired her forehead and the freshness of her lips. A ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... expanded by modern composers. Witness the glorious climactic effect in Cesar Franck's Symphony and in Brahms's D major Symphony of the closing themes in the Expositions of the first movements. For many years it was the invariable custom to repeat the Exposition, and in Classic Symphonies we always find a double bar with marks of repeat and two endings. This practice was not an integral part of the form but was adopted so that the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... the gang planks into the foul-smelling hold, where there was no light but the invariable reddish glow of electric bulbs. They had hardly reached their bunks when ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... I was at that moment talking. The next shell was into the police camp, where it burst with destructive force, completely wrecking Colonel Dartnell's tent with all its contents, but injuring nobody. Had that genial and most popular officer followed the almost invariable practice of his everyday life, there would have been an end of the man to whom more than to anybody else we owe the timely retirement from Dundee. He it was who told General Yule, "You must go to-night or you will not be able to go at all," and whose advice, ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse



Words linked to "Invariable" :   quantity, unvarying, changeless, parametric quantity, invariant, variable, strict, invariability, parameter, hard-and-fast, constant, consistent, invariableness, constant quantity



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