"Invariable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... much ill-usage and robbery at the custom- house, I proceeded in quest of a lodging, and at last found one, but dirty and expensive. The next day I hired a servant, a Portuguese, it being my invariable custom on arriving in a country to avail myself of the services of a native; chiefly with the view of perfecting myself in the language; and being already acquainted with most of the principal languages and dialects of the east and the west, I am soon able to make ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... it an invariable rule never to play for stakes that it will be inconvenient to lose. The neglect of this rule has been responsible for more "bad losers" than anything else, and needless to say a bad loser is about as welcome at a card table as ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... their first voyage in the Half Moon, sailing into New York Bay, prohibited by Hudson "from wearing more than five jackets and six pair of breeches." We see the scrupulously "honest" Dutch traders buying furs from the Indians, using an invariable scale of avoirdupois weights, a Dutchman's hand in the scale opposite the furs weighing one pound, his foot two pounds. We watch the puzzled Indians trying to account for the fact that the largest bundle of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... stopped at his room the next morning, as was their invariable custom, and received no answer to repeated summons, ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... either side of the stern, and skilfully the vessel was manoeuvred through the narrow passage into the calm lagoon whose depths were crystal clear. Here before coming to rest, Sakr-el-Bahr followed the invariable corsair practice of going about, so as to be ready to leave his moorings and make for the open again ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Germaine Necker listened eagerly to the discourses of the great men of her day. Listening was not destined to be her role in later years; but to pace up and down the long drawing room at Coppet, with the invariable green branch in her beautiful hands, uttering words that charmed such guests as Schlegel, Sismondi, Bonstetten of Geneva and Chateaubriand. It was Chateaubriand who said that the two magical charms of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... magistracy should only be obtained by the votes of others. Nevertheless, I venture to think that the latter plan does not always ensure to us a good master. I believe it was by election that we Greeks have given to ourselves a generalissimo, not contented, it is said, to prove the invariable wisdom of that mode of government; wherefore this seems an occasion to revive the good custom of tyranny. And I propose to do so in my person by proclaiming myself Symposiarch and absolute commander in the Commonwealth here assembled. But if ye prefer the ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... lindens, and horse-chestnuts.... Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the square brown tower of the church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... pompous-looking personage, flushed in the face, with a moth-eaten grey beard and shifty grey eyes, clothed in a flannel shirt, tweed knickerbockers, brown stockings, white spats and shoes. Such was the Commissioner's invariable get-up, save that in winter he wore a cap instead of a panama. He was smoking a briar pipe and looking blatantly British, as if he had just spent an unwashed night in a third-class carriage between King's Cross and Aberdeen. The magistrate, on the other hand—the red-haired man—was ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not invariable, with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition—to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But, indeed, I might as well have essayed to strike fire with ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... fancy how feeble will be all efforts of wit or pleasantry to season a mass of such incapables! Think, I say, think of this. It is a peril that has been long threatening—even from that time when old Lord Hertford, baffled and discouraged by the invariable reply, "I regret, my Lord, that I cannot play Whist," exclaimed, "I really believe that the day is not distant when no gentleman can have a vice that requires more than ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... there are no races going on, the Flemington Racecourse is a 'lion' of the largest dimensions. There are four theatres, only one of which is well-fitted up. The visitor will notice that drinking bars are invariable and very disagreeable accompaniments of every theatre. One bar is generally just opposite the entrance to the dress circle, an arrangement which is ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... breath occasionally in the course of their heavy work of organizing, raising money, gathering equipment, securing transport, passports, and attending to the other innumerable secretarial affairs connected with so big a task, she showed no weakening pity; the one invariable goad applied was ever, 'it is war-time.' No one must pause, no one must waver; things must simply be done, whether possible or not, and somehow by her inspiration they generally were done. In these days of agonizing stress she appeared ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... Cairnes,(161) political economy is a science just as is any recognized physical science—astronomy, chemistry, physiology. The economic "facts we find existing are the results of causes, between which and them the connection is constant and invariable. It is, then, the constant relations exhibited in economic phenomena that we have in view when we speak of the laws of the phenomena of wealth; and in the exposition of these laws consists the science of political economy." It is to be remembered ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... he was, the haughty self-esteem of the new statesman breathed in every movement of his tall, spare figure, in the hard lines of a countenance which none but his closer friends saw lighted by a smile, in his cold and repulsive address, his invariable gravity of demeanour, and his habitual air of command. But none knew how great the qualities were which lay beneath this haughty exterior; nor had any one guessed how soon this "boy," as his rivals mockingly styled him, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... may be changed, and all the powers of all persons under it revoked, at the will of the society itself, by which and for which all government is established. Laws, to be just, must have for their invariable end the general interests of society; they must procure for the greatest number of citizens the advantages for which those citizens have combined. A society whose chiefs and whose laws do not benefit ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... to be pointed out how very improbable it is that, had Colin Fitzgerald been really the progenitor of the Mackenzies, his name would have been so completely ignored as a family name for more than three hundred years in face of the invariable custom among all other notable Highland houses of honouring their direct ancestors by continuing their names as the leading names in the ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... von Bernstorff, 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 ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... It had now become a second nature. I suppose she was always like that; even in the very hour of elopement with Fyne. That transaction when one remembered it in her presence acquired a quaintly marvellous aspect to one's imagination. But somehow her self-possession matched very well little Fyne's invariable solemnity. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... characteristic feature of what we have yet seen of this coast, thickly studded with timber of a much finer growth than the stunted productions of Roebuck Bay. Behind the cliffy parts of the coast the land assumed a more fertile appearance; and this seemed an almost invariable law in the natural history of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... man on earth who fully comprehends your wonderful worth and matchless virtues; and who is pursuing the fixed purpose of his soul, that of finally deserving you, from the conviction that he through life will be invariable in that admiration, that tenderness, and that unceasing love without which the life of Olivia might perhaps be miserable. These may be the dreams of vanity, and folly: yet, if I do not mistake, they are the dreams of all lovers. They are indeed the aliment or ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... perseverance, so increases the power of the church. At present Catholicism is, comparatively speaking, weak in America, and the objects of that church is, to become strong; they do not, therefore, frighten or alarm their converts by any present show of the invariable results; but are content to bide their time, until they shall find themselves strong enough to exert their power with triumphant success. The Protestant cause in America is weak, from the evil effects of the voluntary system, particularly from its division into so many ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... did not trouble them much; they kept a strict watch, which was not difficult, as all the prisoners were partially disabled; and then considered their duty discharged by bringing twice a day the invariable meal of soup and bread. No one liked to speculate on what had gone to the making of the soup; it was a pale, greasy liquid, with strange lumps in it, and tasted as dish-water may be supposed to taste. Jim learned ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... and Mary had no steerage way, the captain stopped his engines for a few minutes, and then went ahead again at half-speed. This brought the vessels close together, and, as is the invariable custom in such circumstances, the two crews stared stonily at each other. On the deck were one or two passengers enjoying the morning air after a cramped and uncomfortable night. Among these was an old man with a singularly benign expression; he was standing near the ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... went on Jim Tracy, "following the invariable policy of the Sampson Brothers' Circus, we are going to keep our word again, and give you just what we advertised we would—a wonderful under-water act, full of thrills, and interesting in the extreme. But I must crave your slight indulgence, and I feel sure that, under ...
— Joe Strong, the Boy Fish - or Marvelous Doings in a Big Tank • Vance Barnum
... with study and pain, his form of grace and his voice of sonorous eloquence and solemn music (in compass, variety, and sweetness one of the few great voices of the current dramatic generation), his tremendous earnestness, his superb bearing, and his invariable authority and distinction—all those attributes united to announce a ruler and leader in the realm of the intellect. The exceeding tumult of his spirit enhanced the effect of this mordant personality. The same sleepless energy that inspired Loyola and Lanfranc burned in the bosom of this ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... compositions called Fabulae Atellanae, the only original and national form of the Roman drama, in respect of plan, were not perhaps more perfect than the so-called Commedia dell' Arte, in which, the parts being fixed and invariable, the dialogue is extemporised by masked actors. In the ancient Saturnalia we have probably the germ of the present carnival, which is entirely an Italian invention. The Opera and the Ballet were also the invention of the Italians: two species of theatrical amusement, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... 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, so far as any practical conclusions are concerned, is obviously nothing. The laws ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... there for me in documentary vividness, bristles with Van Burens, Van Winkles, De Peysters, Costers, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last composing round a stone-throwing "Eugene,") Wards, Hunts and tutti quanti—to whose ranks I must add our invariable Albert, before-mentioned, and who swarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have formed a rich and various society. Our salon, it is true, was mainly the street, loose and rude and crude in those days at best—though with a ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... sugar and hot water," I explained blandly. "It won't hurt you—longer than five minutes. It is Hephzy's invariable prescription." ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... always more interesting than one inside the ropes. A blow ripped open Thomas' shirt. It became a slam-bang affair. Thomas knocked his man down just as a burly policeman arrived. Naturally, he caught hold of Thomas and called for assistance. The wrong man first is the invariable rule ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... asked me to write a sketch of my life and more especially of my adventures in the North-West. At first I hesitated before promising to comply with the request. There is a certain class of orators who, invariable, commence their public address by stating that they are "unaccustomed to public speaking." It may be true in many cases, but most certainly no public speaker was ever less accustomed to address an audience, than I am to write a book. Outside my limited correspondence, ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... is mere baseness not to pay toward the common burden; the supreme worth of the teacher's vocation;—these, even if they had been eloquently preached to her, could have been no more than faintly apprehended doctrines: the fact which wrought upon her was her invariable observation that for a lady to become a governess—to "take a situation"—was to descend in life and to be treated at best with a compassionate patronage. And poor Gwendolen had never dissociated happiness from personal ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... earnest entreaties that F—— would come over on Sunday sometimes and hold a service there, but I tried to show them this could not be managed. The tears actually came into their eyes when I talked of the happiness it would be to see a little church and school in their midst; and the almost invariable remark was, "Ah, but it'll be a far day first." And so I fear it will—a very far day; but I have often heard it said, that if you propose one definite object to yourself as the serious purpose of your ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... believe Mr. Enuma, the advantages are very numerous, to wit: (1) The cables have no need of being of large size; (2) the intensity is the same through the entire extent of the primary circuit, secondary one, etc.; (3) the resistance is invariable in all portions of the line; (4) the apparatus are independent of each other, and consequently there may be a disturbance in one or several of them without the others suffering therefrom; (5) either a strong or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... his personal popularity among all classes, combined with the unexceptionable record he made in the Council, overcoming all opposition. At the organization of the new Council for 1869, he was unanimously re-elected president, a fact as complimentary as it is rare, it being the almost invariable custom for each party to vote for its own candidate, even where the result of the election is a foregone conclusion. He was in the same year suggested as the Republican candidate for Mayor, and would undoubtedly have been chosen to that office had he not considered it incompatible ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... only one of us with whom he ever had any business, would pull the string that unhooked the latch of the gate to her section of the room and say, without looking up: "Come into the garden, Maud." To which he made invariable reply: "Oh, Miss Larrabee, don't be so sarcastic! I have ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... You can't help but notice the food, because there's nothing to soften the effect of it upon your nerves, as it were. There are usually four courses, with chicken or ducks for the main dish, accompanied by potatoes cut in balls, the invariable rubber stamp of a party at Lucy's. Afterward there's coffee in the living-room, and you feel fearfully discouraged when you look at the clock and find it's only eight-thirty. You're surprised after the guests have gone to find that ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... to him in the park was not destined to stand alone. Between such women as Folly and their victims exists an almost invariable camaraderie that forbids the spoiling of sport. The inculcation of this questionable loyalty is considered by some the last attribute of the finished adventuress, and by others it is said to be due to the fact that such women draw and are ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... immense sheet-almanack hung over that, a screen, three or four chairs, and a faded Turkey carpet, formed the rest of the furniture of this remarkable room—which I have described thus particularly, because in the course of a long official life, I have remarked that such is the invariable decoration ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... impress them with the conviction to which G——, in fact, did finally arrive—the conviction that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought, which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable principle of political action in searches for articles concealed—I felt that this whole train of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister. It would imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I reflected, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... the most recent times. They are characterized by the rapidity of their early conquests, by the immense extent of the dominions comprised in them, by the establishment of a satrap or pashaw system of governing the provinces, by an invariable and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate nurslings of the seraglio succeeding to the warrior sovereigns reared in the camp, and by the internal anarchy and insurrections which indicate and accelerate the decline and fall of these unwieldy and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier. The family is still more variable, because the number of ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... portentously marvellous an escape as the one just related, the unlucky couple might be allowed a short respite at least from the persecutions of adverse fortune. But perils in love succeed without an interval to perils in war. It is the invariable rule of all Greek romances, as we have remarked in a previous number, that the attractions both of the hero and heroine, should be perfectly irresistible by those of the other sex; and accordingly, the Egyptian officer Charmides no sooner beholds Leucippe, than he falls in love ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... perceive that all the arrangements and motions of the planetary bodies, their satellites and atmospheres are subservient. The spiritual natures therefore that pass from system to system in progression towards power and knowledge preserve at least this one invariable character, and their intellectual life may be said to depend more or less upon the influence of light. As far as my knowledge extends, even in other parts of the universe the more perfect organised systems still possess this source ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... & Company had given "Mrs. Stanton" a place in the repair shop, her wages being equal to her own and Dalton's board. This had continued all through the summer, her earnings keeping the roof over their heads, Dalton leaving her for days at a time, his invariable excuse for his absence being that he was "trying ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... narwhale is 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 ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... greater than those obtainable in all the modes of life. I shall now mention to thee the indications of those persons who prize self-restraint highly.[829] They are nobility, calmness of disposition, contentment, faith, forgiveness, invariable simplicity, the absence of garrulity, humility, reverence for superiors, benevolence, compassion for all creatures, frankness, abstention from talk upon kings and men in authority, from all false and useless discourses, and from applause and censure of others. The self-restrained ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... fundamental problems. To mention only a few of those that have helped to establish Michelson's fame, we may recall that our exact knowledge of the length of the international metre at Sevres, the world's standard of measurement, was obtained by him with an interferometer in terms of the invariable length of light-waves. A different form of interferometer has more recently enabled him to measure the minute tides within the solid body of the earth—not the great tides of the ocean, but the slight deformations ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... despondency. On a final review of his own generous labours, he is supposed to have questioned the very existence of Virtue, though he had made it the idol of his life; a striking proof, that the temperate and invariable energy of soul, which alone perhaps deserves the name of true Courage, can only proceed from a fuller knowledge and love of GOD; from the animating assurance, that, however we may prosper or fail in the earthly success of our endeavours to do good, the merit of the ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... 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 ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... rather to 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 utterly and ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... sympathy, if I may so call it, of distant parts; Instinct, which is crystallized intelligence,—an absolute law with its invariable planes and angles introduced into the sphere of consciousness, as raphides are inclosed in the living cells of plants; Intellect,—the operation of the thinking principle through material organs, with an appreciable ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... greater or less solidarity between the cause and the effect. In the first, 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 ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... circumstances are not always and everywhere as invariable as the primitive wants which first set them in motion. Enlargement of knowledge, of political and human relations, of the tenure of the earth, increases the number and variety of circumstances, and combines them so unexpectedly that it is a science ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... stamped himself upon the memories of all who ever met him. And these last were not few, for Dan had travelled widely and had gathered multitudes of friends. Then, again, he possessed those two almost indispensable adjuncts of popularity—delightful manners and a beautiful face. It was his invariable custom to get up when any one came into a room; and when he advanced to meet them, it might certainly have been said that, in his case, the tail literally wagged the dog, for his hind-quarters were moved ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... daughter," 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 fancy towards the person or object they wish to see ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... history of our race as a constant climb, from brute or near-brute beginnings, to ever higher forms of civilization, until the heights which our race has reached in the present century were attained. In reality, the reverse process, a constant and invariable process of degeneration characterizes the history of nations and peoples. Where Christianity entered as a factor, as in the history of Western Europe and in the results of Christian missions in heathen lands, we can indeed observe a rise out of barbaric or ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... kindliness. If you are kind to them, they think you are a fool. If you are gentle with them they think you are afraid. And when they think you are afraid, watch out, for they will get you. Just to show you, let me state the one invariable process in a black man's brain when, on his native heath, he encounters a stranger. His first thought is one of fear. Will the stranger kill him? His next thought, seeing that he is not killed, is: Can he kill the stranger? There was Packard, ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... fuss. Besides, how was I to be sure that my own personal dread of the return journey hadn't something to do with my intention of tackling Pethel? I rather thought it had. What this woman would dare daily because she was a mother could not I dare once? I reminded myself of this man's reputation for invariable luck. I reminded myself that he was an extraordinarily skilful driver. To that skill and luck I would pin ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... and the Campanile, or bell-tower, are in theory invariable adjuncts to the Lombard cathedral, although detached from it. The Lombards seem to have built them with peculiar zest, and to have had a keen eye for the picturesque in grouping them with ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... dream. In the deep feeling which he arouses in me, I have to bow before the impenetrable decrees of Providence, which, after inspiring this wonderful instrument of its plans, tore him from his uncompleted work. Possibly God did not wish him to anticipate the time He had established by an invariable order. Possibly He did not wish a mortal to exceed ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... the corner of his plaid a black bottle, and we all drank and pledged each other. I found these gentlemen followed upon such occasions an invariable etiquette, which you may be certain I made haste to imitate. Each wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand, held up the bottle in his right, remarked with emphasis, 'Here's to ye!' and swallowed as much of the spirit as his fancy prompted. This little ceremony, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy (flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o'clock table d'hote they took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city. Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall beautifully old, with knots ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Dutch traders. In this position they have now, for the most part, been succeeded by merchants, who in some instances are tacksmen (or [Page 5 rpt.] 'tacksmasters,'-, principal lessees or middle-men, having sub-tenants), and in others are merely lessees of a fishing station, with its invariable appendage, a retail shop or store for goods of every kind. There is a regular season for the haaf fishing, lasting from about the 20th of May till the 12th of August. It is carried on chiefly from ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... fish, in fact, must have died immediately after swallowing the toad. The country people in South America believe that the milky secretion exuded by the toad possesses wonderful curative properties; it is their invariable specific for shingles—a painful, dangerous malady common amongst them, and to cure it living toads are applied to the inflamed parb. I dare say learned physicians would laugh at this cure, but then, if I mistake not, the learned have in past times laughed at ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... have lived long, and in the course of my life I have received much advice. My invariable rule has always been to thank for it, expressing my gratitude with some warmth and every appearance of sincerity. This is all that the adviser requires. It gives him, or her, complete satisfaction. ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... intellect as a thing of God, a part of His nature, given to us as a law, a rule of action, which we can accept or not, taking upon ourselves the consequences of its rejection. There can be no standard of absolute right other than the law of God; there can be no other invariable and eternal rule ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that there is here some flaw at variance with a rightly constituted nature. Nevertheless, for an object to be declared beautiful it is not enough that it answer to its own nature; it must also be congruent with ours. For our nature, being invariable both in the soul and in the body endowed with senses, has definite inclinations and aversions by which it is either attracted or estranged. Thus our eye is moved with pleasure by certain colors, our ear is drawn by a certain ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... in the Casa del Mare, threw a thin cloak over her, and ran down to the edge of the sea, where Gaspare was waiting with the boat. Hermione did not bathe. It did not suit her now. And Gaspare was Vere's invariable companion. He had superintended her bathing when she was little. He had taught her to swim. And with no one else would he ever trust his Padroncina when she gave herself to the sea. Sometimes he would row her out to a reef of rocks ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... which flowered every three months, and looked like a flight of white butterflies on the wing. The great mountain of Matang stood in the distance, and when the sun sank behind it, which it always did in that invariable latitude about six o'clock, I sat in the porch to watch the glory of earth and sky. How dear a mountain becomes to you, is only known to those who live in hilly countries. One gets to think of it as a friend. It seems to carry a protest against the little ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... And note this peculiarity: I have rarely beheld a neater, more legible handwriting than was possessed by this unmethodical man. The style of his letters also was very regular, and slightly florid. The invariable appeals for assistance alternated with promises of amendment, with honourable words and with oaths.... All this appeared to be—and perhaps was—sincere. Misha's signature at the end of his letters was always accompanied ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... performed in vacuo: he owed much to the preconceptions of his contemporaries. His invariable quest, as students of his opinions are soon aware, was for the axiomatic, for absolute principles, and in this inquiry he met the intellectual demands of a period whose first minds still owned the ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... no suggestion of the leg or wing. You may loathe the leg of a bird as food, but at a black fellow's feast, if convention ordains that as your portion, have it you must; just as each rank in society had its invariable joint in early ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... of a topping goldsmith on the Bridge, who prided himself on being the mirror of Amphitryons, and accounted for his success by stating that it was his invariable custom to set his own stomach at ease, by a beefsteak and a pint of port in his back-shop, half an hour before the arrival of his guests. But the host of Castle Street had no occasion to imitate this prudent arrangement, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... clear enough. "Why did you stop him then?" asked my uncle; "we have lost more than ten lines by this interruption of yours." Even so parsimonious was he of every moment of time! In summer he always rose from dinner by daylight, and in winter as soon as it was dark; this was an invariable law with him. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... only effect was, when one came more than usually close to the house, to make Oscar raise his head, growl, listen awhile, and then lie down to sleep again. Oscar became very fond of the girls, and was their invariable companion whenever they left the house. Alfred, Martin and Henry went out almost daily on hunting excursions; indeed, as there were no crops in the barn, they had little else to do. Mr. Campbell remained ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... among the Aztecs is likewise a symbol of parturition. In view of these variations in the pictures of the Dresden Codex, it is very striking that in the Codex Tro.-Cortesianus, there is only one invariable type of ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... 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 ...
— 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
... Maida said, smiling faintly. This was the answer she gave most often to her father's questions. "Is there anything you want, Posie?" he was sure to ask every morning, or, "What would you like me to get you to-day, little daughter?" The answer was invariable, given always in the same soft, thin little voice: "Nothing, ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... Understand then, obstinate little girl, that not a single deviation from the invariable laws which govern the universe has ever been scientifically proved. Up to this day there has been no proof of the existence of any intelligence other than the human. I defy you to find any real will, any reasoning force, outside of life. And everything ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... pleasure, the invariable flower garden attached to each. Some pansies in one of them attracted my attention by their peculiar beauty, so very large and richly colored. On being introduced to the owner of them, she, with cheerful alacrity, offered me some of ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... she heard him, and she took it to mean that she had guessed rightly. She turned to Narayan Singh; and because in that land, as an almost invariable rule, no business with a chief can be accomplished without bribing his minions, she worked off a little spite and offered largesse ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... rather lack of system, was that he kept no record of the order of standing in the classes; and so, when the class in geography, for instance, was called to recite, the boys would come tumbling pell-mell out of their seats, and crowd tumultuously to the space in front of the desk, with the invariable result that the smaller boys would be sent to the bottom of the class, whether they deserved to be there or not. Then as to the hearing of the lesson, there was absolutely no rule about it. Sometimes the questions would be divided impartially among the whole ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... be noted, was not limited to the megalithic peoples. It was the invariable practice of the pre-dynastic Egyptians and has been found further east in Persia. It occurs in the neolithic period in Crete and the AEgean, in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and other parts of Europe, and it is one of the facts which go to show that the builders of the megaliths were ethnologically ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... he made quite frequent trips backwards and forwards to the trenches, the donkey always carrying a wounded man. Simpson was frequently warned of the danger he ran, for he never stopped, no matter how heavy the firing was. His invariable reply was "My troubles!" The brave chap was killed in the end. His donkey was afterwards taken over by Johnstone, one of our men, who improvised stirrups out of the stretcher-slings, and conveyed many wounded ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... people. When the destruction of the monastery had reduced the inmates to utter destitution, her parents employed every argument to induce her to return to France. The Mothers at Tours joined in the request, but her invariable answer was, that she would rather share the coarse, scanty fare of the savages to the end of her life, or even die a thousand deaths, if that could be, than prove herself thus unfaithful to her vocation and ungenerous to ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... either cleared or partly cleared, and the settler is able to put in a crop right away, providing he obtains possession at a seasonable time. The ploughing and sowing period is mainly in April and May, and running to June, harvesting taking place in November and December. The almost invariable practice in Australia is to combine wheatgrowing and sheepfarming. Sheep are especially profitable in Australia. This is an excellent combination, as the busy periods do not clash, and the sheep ...
— Wheat Growing in Australia • Australia Department of External Affairs
... with an excellent example of Seneca's invariable method of improving every occasion and circumstance into an opportunity for ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... by the order of S. Gregory himself, concluded this part of the service, which came to be known as the Canon, the invariable part of the Mass. In the Roman rite the kiss of peace followed, the faithful kissing each other according to the ancient custom. Then the priest broke the bread, and said the Lord's Prayer alone till the last clause. Then he placed a piece of the bread in the cup, and ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... crimson one, worn by the girls in Savoia, to the Piedmontese plait round the bodkin at Turin, and the odd kind of white wrapper used in the exterior provinces of the Genoese dominions. Uniformity of almost any sort gives a certain pleasure to the eye, and it seems an invariable rule in these countries that all the women of every district should dress just alike. It is the best way of making the men's task easy in judging which is handsomest; for taste so varies the human figure in France and England, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... like that of Great Britain, is assessed upon each district according to a certain invariable canon, though it should be equal at the time of its first establishment, necessarily becomes unequal in process of time, according to the unequal degrees of improvement or neglect in the cultivation of the different parts of the country. In England, the valuation, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Spiritualism. I thought I was defending Spiritualism; but I am rather used to being accused of mocking the thing that I set out to justify. My fate in most controversies is rather pathetic. It is an almost invariable rule that the man with whom I don't agree thinks I am making a fool of myself, and the man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him. There seems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... invariable practice to speak affably to his enemy in passing, mainly because it so angered the latter; this time he insisted upon stopping. He was debonair and smiling, as always, but there was more than a trace of mockery in his tone ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... hitherto faithful servant is remonstrated with for having committed a crime, he not unfrequently accounts for the fact by saying, "Senor, my head was hot." When caught in the act on his first start on highway robbery or murder, his invariable excuse is that he is not a scoundrel himself, but that he was "invited" by a relation or compadre to ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... valiant, the intrepidity with which they attacked in the glare of noonday would demonstrate; that they were numerous, the many robberies carried on in the different parts of the Caliph's dominions would indicate; and that they were bloody, their invariable practice of killing their victim before they plundered him would argue. They had sworn by their Prophet never to betray one another, and by the Angel of Death to shed their blood in each other's defence. No wonder, then, that they were so difficult to be captured; and when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... the deepest black; but in the cuttle-fish it is a chamber hung with velvet, not of a black, but of a dark purple hue—the pigmentum nigrum is of a purplish red colour. There is something interesting in marking this first departure from an invariable condition of eyes of the more perfect structure, and in then tracing the peculiarity downwards through almost every shade of colour, to the emerald-like eye-specks of the pecten, and the still more ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... himself. My intention in writing Falk was not to shock anybody. As in most of my writings I insist not on the events but on their effect upon the persons in the tale. But in everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... of this period was to bathe in the Canal while the transports were passing with newly trained drafts for Mesopotamia or India. "Who are you?" was the invariable cry from the banks. Our war-worn men received usually the answering taunt: "Garrison duty only! When are you going to do your bit?" To the call: "Who are you?" from a transport, a ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... of the continuity of the germ-plasm and the consequent non-heredity of acquired characters, while in perfect harmony with all the well-ascertained facts of heredity and development, adds greatly to the importance of natural selection as the one invariable and ever-present factor in all organic change, and that which can alone have produced the temporary fixity combined with the secular modification of species. While admitting, as Darwin always admitted, the co-operation of the fundamental laws of growth and variation, of correlation ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... who have failing and recreant teeth, that the dentist and his magnetiser might be one and indivisible? Surgery in all its branches would be benefitted by the same connection; but this strange physical condition is not an invariable concomitant of the mesmeric state; so that valor, such as that to which we have already alluded, cannot go completely out of use, even if all could be subjected to the nervous influence ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... on the wall of game, fruit and flowers, or "still life" studies of vegetables and kitchen utensils. Indeed, these have become so expected that a change is quite a relief to a guest, who would welcome even the death's head that was the invariable ornament of the Egyptian feasts. Any pictures which are lively and cheerful in suggestion are suitable. Those that have a story to tell or a lesson to point are never out of place in a room ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... idea of cause is simply that of invariable sequence suggested by the observation of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... to loan France five millions of dollars, in order to secure her good will and active alliance. But his proposition met with no favor at home, except among the ultra partisans of the French republic; and he was officially reminded that it had been, and still was, the invariable policy of the president to have his country as independent as possible of every nation upon the face of the earth—a policy which he had pursued from the beginning; "not assumed now for the first time, but wise at all times, and certain, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Dalehams' sake most of the men in the district received Chunerbutty with courtesy. But his manager, a rough Welshman of the bad old school, who openly declared that he "loathed all niggers," treated him with invariable rudeness. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... of these essays illustrates Sir Thomas's peculiar mysticism. The external world was not to him the embodiment of invariable forces, and therefore capable of revealing a general law in a special instance; but rather a system of symbols, signatures of the Plastic Nature, to which mysterious truths were arbitrarily annexed. A Pythagorean doctrine of numbers was therefore ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... is never invariable in a species, but is rare, common or prevalent. This condition prevents its employment for grouping species. For Pines are not sharply divided into multinodal and uninodal species, and no exact segregation of them, based on this difference, is possible. In fact the character ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... 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 ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... boor named Cowderoy, was sworn and gave his evidence clearly. Hugh and James knew him well. They had no lawyer to defend them, and when the Crown Prosecutor sat down, there seemed no loophole left for the escape of the accused, and I mentally sentenced them to seven years on the roads, the invariable penalty for ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... instead of following M. de Conde in his rebellion, the vicomte had followed M. de Turenne, fighting for the king. Then when M. de Turenne, in his turn, had appeared to abandon the royal cause, he had quitted M. de Turenne, as he had quitted M. de Conde. It resulted from this invariable line of conduct that, as Conde and Turenne had never been conquerors of each other but under the standard of the king, Raoul, however young, had ten victories inscribed on his list of services, and not one defeat from which his bravery or conscience ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... about the part taken by her people, not less in the life of the Saxon 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 ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... fruit conserves, particularly to that of the Seville Orange. In France the Quince is made into a compote which is highly praised for increasing the digestive powers of weakly persons. According to Plutarch Solon made a law that the Quince should form the invariable feast of the bridegroom (and some add likewise of the bride) before retiring to the nuptial couch. Columella said: "Quinces yield not only pleasure but health." The Greeks named the Quince "Chrysomelon," or the Golden Apple; so it is asserted that the golden fruit ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... I was so emphatic in declaring that the fresh air and motion of the boat induced the sleep I could not woo in bed, that they grew to believe me, and carefully covering me from mosquitoes, it became invariable that at a certain distance on our homeward way the rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its occupants tasted ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... near the invariable stream of water, were a group of Indians, some stretched lazily on the ground, some squatted like tailors, two busy cooking something over the fire, and nearly every one smoking long-stemmed, stone pipes. They were a sturdy set of warriors, who were likely ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis |
