"Conceivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... numerous distinct centres of subsequent activity, all these phenomena demonstrate the intense and complex character of the initial disturbances, as well as the widespread bodily displacement of the earth's crust within the epicentral area. There may, it is conceivable, have been a number of foci, nearly or quite detached from one another, and giving rise to a group of nearly concurrent shocks. Or—and this is a far more probable supposition—there may have been one vast deep-seated centre, from which off-shoots ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... on, nearing the bend that would shut them out from the sight of the great crowds gathered on either bank near the judges' boat. If the cheering diminished in volume at that point, it was taken up above, until one long wave of sound arose, every conceivable noise being used to create an uproar, from horns and whistles to megaphones, and class yells from ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... running, and leaping, and wrestling, and pursuing each other, and pushing each other, and climbing up to high places, and standing on their heads, and walking on the tops of fences, and performing all other possible or conceivable feats, which may give them the pleasure of working, in new and untried ways, their muscular machinery, and feeling its increasing power, and in producing new effects by means of it. They get themselves ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... Island of Ceram), Suluk, Burnei, Tanasari, Martavan, etc. That accidents in the history of marine affairs in those seas should have led to the adoption of the Malay and Javanese names in the case of Ceylon also is at least conceivable. But Dr. Caldwell has pointed out to me that the Pali form of Sinhala was Sihalan, and that this must have been colloquially shortened to Silan, for it appears in old Tamul inscriptions as Ilam.[1] Hence there ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of expedients and the treacherous deceptions employed to attain that object. It involved the wholesale seduction of one section of that nation into sedition and rebellion against a most beneficent and just Government under which they prospered and enjoyed the highest conceivable degree of liberty and even special privileges, and of pitting the other section into hostility and war against a Power which meant nothing else than peace and amity towards them, thus placing both into a position ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... their simple souls desired. Arab workmen, who believe that Allah wills all things, that whatsoever happens, it is his purpose, will flock round any soothsayer who professes to see into the future and do the most absurd things conceivable to keep off the evil eye. The eye of Horus is still ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... handle. M. Mortillet, of France, who has had excellent opportunities of studying this question very thoroughly, thinks that the hatchet was the only type of implement they possessed, and that it was used for every conceivable purpose—but that their weapon was a club, all traces of which have, of ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... than on accumulation would have another important result—more important, in a sense, than any of those named. It would establish a feeling of self-respect among those who work by giving them the only conceivable economic basis for self-respect—the ownership and control ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... all had been storm and gloom; now, all around was calm, beautiful, and bright. Before the sun rose, the whole eastern sky was glowing with an orange tinge; while every fleecy cloud around was tinted with gold and red, orange, or pink, and every conceivable intermediate hue; while the clear portions of the sky itself were of the purest and most ethereal blue—the whole sea glowing with the same varied and beautiful colours. But still more beautiful and wonderful seemed the vast mountain of ice on which we floated, as in every fantastic form it appeared, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... obtain a better view of the awaited personage. In the silence he caught a rustle of silk. A flowered petticoat appeared—as much of it as may be seen from the knee downwards—and from beneath this the daintiest foot conceivable was seen to grope an instant for the step. Another second and ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... her arm. "It is horrible—shall we go?" a voice suggested; and, "Yes, yes, let us go," she whispered, feeling, with a great throb of relief, that to be the only possible, the only conceivable, solution. To sit and listen to her husband now—how could she ever have thought she could survive it? Luckily, under the lingering hubbub from below, his opening words were inaudible, and she had only to run the gauntlet of sympathetic ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... get that boy out of your head, Osgod," Wulf laughed. "There is no conceivable way by which three men could recapture this castle. There is nothing for them to learn. They know its strength and everything connected with it, and they can see for themselves that we have destroyed the bridge. I shall be glad to hear what they have to say. Llewellyn himself is, most likely, ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... fellow-clerks during those two days I was the most cross-grained and obnoxious comrade conceivable. My only relief seemed to be in quarrelling with somebody, and as they all laid themselves out to bait and tease me one way or another I had a pretty lively time ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... house-building on which I would add a few words. The difficulty of procuring and keeping good servants, which must long be one of our chief domestic troubles, warns us so to arrange our houses that we shall need as few as possible. There is the greatest conceivable difference in the planning and building of houses as to the amount of work which will be necessary to keep them in respectable condition. Some houses require a perfect staff of house-maids;—there are plated hinges ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... that life; the rare and subtle gifts which she herself possessed were daily exercised to their full in the suggestion of vitality; the most elaborate inventions of skilled mechanicians were employed in reducing the labour of living to the lowest conceivable degree of effort. The great experiment was being tried. What Keyork Arabian described as the embalming of a man still alive was being attempted. And he lived. For years they had watched him and tended him, and looked critically for ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... conceivable that life might have assumed a totally different outward appearance and designed forms very different from those we know. With another chemical substratum, in other physical conditions, the impulsion would have remained the same, but it would have split ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the species question. The more he studied the material collected on his long tour, the more confident he became that the animals of the present are the altered descendants of the animals of the past. He tried patiently to work out every conceivable hypothesis to see whether he could account for the alteration. He felt quite sure animals changed, but how they changed, and why, he could not for a long time conceive. He knew that gardeners were constantly ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... Hesiod possessed of an original and authentic "divine tradition". Others may find in Homer's comparative purity a proof of the later date of his epics in their present form, or may even proclaim that Homer was a kind of Cervantes, who wished to laugh the gods away. There is no conceivable or inconceivable theory about Homer that has not its advocates. For ourselves, we hold that the divine genius of Homer, though working in an age distant rather than "early," selected instinctively the purer mythical materials, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... a Radical all these changes have no terrors for me, but is it conceivable that such a clean sweep of existing institutions could be made in order to justify the Irish demand for Home Rule? Yet this is the only form of federal government which offers any prospect of permanence or ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... desire of sleep—sleep in which no one walks, restorer of childhood to men—dreams, not like Galahad's or Guenevere's, but full of happy, childish wonder as in the earlier world. It is a world in which the centaur and the ram with the fleece of gold are conceivable. The song sung always claims to be sung for the first time. There are hints at a language common to birds and beasts and men. Everywhere there is an impression of surprise, as of people first waking from the golden age, at fire, snow, wine, the touch ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... blew may produce a very deep purple. But when anon we come to the more strict examination of these Phaenomena, and to inquire into the causes and reasons of these productions, we shall, I hope, make it more conceivable how they are produced, and shew them to be no other then the natural and necessary effects arising from the peculiar union ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... hotel, and by the dim light which came from a smoky fire on the hearth, I saw it contained about a hundred people, who, wrapped in blankets, bed-quilts and traveling-shawls, and disposed in all conceivable attitudes, were scattered about on the hard floor and tables, sleeping soundly. The room was a long, low apartment—extending across the whole front of the house—and had a wretched, squalid look. The fire, which was tended by the negro-woman, (she had spread a blanket ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... of the government, the genius of the citizens, the degree of information they possess, the state of commerce, of arts, of industry, these circumstances and many more, too complex, minute, or adventitious to admit of a particular specification, occasion differences hardly conceivable in the relative opulence and riches of different countries. The consequence clearly is that there can be no common measure of national wealth, and, of course, no general or stationary rule by which the ability of a state ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... fine instrument, sensitive to a touch, and, considering the way she was handled, it would have been a wonder if discordant effects had not been constantly produced upon her. Hers was a nature with a wide range. It is probable that every conceivable impulse was latent in her, every possibility of good or evil. Exactly which would predominate depended upon the influences of these early years; and almost all the influences she came under were haphazard. There was no intelligent direction of her thoughts, no systematic training to form good ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... English tastes, that of art was the most alluring and treacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small chance of escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no beginning, middle, or end, no origin, no object, and no conceivable result as education. In London one met no corrective. The only American who came by, capable of teaching, was William Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the Minister which now completes the family series at Harvard College. Hunt talked constantly, and was, or afterwards became, a famous ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Agrippina's actions, of which he now began to become aware, and sought to find his son Britannicus. The boy, however, was purposely kept out of his sight by the empress most of the time, for she was doing everything conceivable to secure the right of succession for Nero, since he was her own son by her former husband Domitius. Claudius, who displayed his affection whenever he met Britannicus, was not disposed to endure her behavior and made preparations ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... undeniable that the dominie sent his daughter to Thrums, but remained at home himself. Possibly, therefore, the dominie sometimes went to church, because he did not want to give Little Tilly and the Established minister the satisfaction of knowing that he was not devout to-day, and it is even conceivable that had Little Tilly had a telescope and an intellect as well as his neighbour, he would have spied on the dominie in return. He sent the teacher a load of potatoes every year, and the recipient rated him soundly if they did not turn out as well as the ones he had ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... entreating Conscience to take no step until he arrived, it seemed better now that he should remain absent. He added assurances that he had never received any letter from her and mentioned the one he had written at the time of their parting. He wished her every conceivable happiness. As for himself, he would be indefinitely in the Orient where life was colorful ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... said he, "have been fought; there will be no more wars of magnitude. The great principles of the law have all been announced and applied to every conceivable form of human rights and controversy. For example, in our own country there will be no more new and great constitutional arguments. Everything, from now on, will be only an application of what has already ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... entirely unconscious of the great hit he had made by his tumble; plump into the arms of this heroine! There were fellows extant who would have suffered any imaginable amputation, any conceivable mauling, any fling from the apex of anything into the lowest deeps of anywhere, for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... existence is shown by the fact that without it all demonstration would be a mere circulus in probando or verbal exercise, because the existence of separate things implies some one thing which includes and explains them. (4) The Absolute both exists and is conceivable. It is argued that we do in fact conceive it in as much as we do conceive Unity, Being, Truth. The conception is so clear that its inexplicability (admitted) is of no account. Further, since the unity of our thought implies the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... between Belfast and Glasgow, and Dublin and Liverpool—does any one suppose, that if no artificial obstacles be thrown in the way of emigration, or if no efforts be made to provide an outlet in some other quarter for the pauper population of Ireland, we shall escape being overrun by it? It is not conceivable that, with the existing means of intercourse, wages should continue to be, at an average, 20d. per day in England, and only 4d. or 5d. in Ireland. So long as the Irish paupers find that they can improve their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... could not do any thing or give any thing to the poor. I began to visit the poor, and I beheld what I had not in the least expected. On the one hand, I beheld in those dens, as I called them, people whom it was not conceivable that I should help, because they were working people, accustomed to labor and privation, and therefore standing much higher and having a much firmer foothold in life than myself; on the other hand, I saw unfortunate people whom I could not aid because they were exactly like myself. The majority ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... words, "Prakriti, Swabhavat, or Akasa, is SPACE, as the Tibetans have it; Space filled with whatsoever substance or no substance at all—i.e., with substance so imperceptible as to be only metaphysically conceivable. Brahman, then, would be the germ thrown into the soil of that field, and Sakti, that mysterious energy or force which develops it, and which is called by the Buddhist Arahat of Tibet, FOHAT. That which ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... procured all available books, maps, and charts, and he made himself master of every conceivable detail. From manufacturing establishments he secured models of railways, telegraphic lines, and other interesting industrial equipments. He realized the necessity of taking with him such a naval force that its appearance in Japanese waters would produce a profound impression upon ...
— Japan • David Murray
... the contents of every known romance—high-souled works which Foy bluntly declared were rubbish and refused even to open? Was he not a poet? But remembering a certain sonnet he did not follow this comparison. In short, how was it conceivable that a woman looking upon himself, a very type of the chivalry of Spain, silver-tongued, a follower—nay, a companion of the Muses, one to whom in every previous adventure of the heart to love had been to conquer, could still prefer that broad-faced, painfully commonplace, if worthy, young ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... of so kindly and candid a nature that it is hardly conceivable that this remark should have been framed to make Bernard commit himself by putting him on his mettle. Such a view would imply indeed on Gordon's part a greater familiarity with the uses of irony than he had ever possessed, as well as a livelier ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... principles or observances by themselves constitute only the outward expression of Judaism. The mathematical formula which states the law of gravitation is not the same as the force of gravitation itself. It is conceivable that further experimentation might make it necessary to qualify the mathematical formula. But the force of gravitation will ever be the same as it has been. The change from looking upon Judaism as a form of truth to that of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... it was said that the Emperor Charles V had a share in bringing it about, and this is very conceivable; for what result could be more displeasing to this sovereign than that Protestantism, which he was putting down in Germany, should have gained at the same moment a strong position in England: it is certain that the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... granite, of which we have many specimens in America, is of two kinds, one being gray, the other of a reddish hue. It seems to differ from other granite in the fineness and closeness of its grain, which enables it to receive the most brilliant conceivable polish. I saw some superb columns of the red species, which were preparing to go over the Baltic to Riga, for an Exchange; and a sepulchral monument, which was going to New York. All was busy here, sawing, chipping, polishing; as different ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... hours; and from the grossly and crudely real the thing fades and changes into an unreal image of the senses. The gaudy flies and beetles that hum round one, whose noise is so much louder and nearer than the crash of shells, they fill the foreground of reality; it is not conceivable that the man with the pleasant face and kindly eye who is directing a battery should be attempting the lives of his fellows on so large a scale. Yet it is the scale that makes the difference: a man who would abhor to kill another will with a smile ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... garrison is the most lingering of all conceivable things, except time in a prison. I had it, loaded with the double weight. There was no resource to be found in the fractured and bandaged portion of human nature round me. The Austrians were brave boors, who spoke nothing but Styrian or Carinthian, or some border ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... would fit a man to undergo great fatigue for days together, or to go through a walking tour in Switzerland. A tumbler of one-third milk and two-thirds good grit gruel taken three times a day will have greater influence in increasing the quantity of milk than any conceivable amount ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... me," I went on, "but to wait for the First Consul to finish his bath; but, unfortunately for me, he is fonder of his bath than most men, and I stood in that dark closet in an agony of suspense, and revolving in my mind every conceivable plan of escape, for what seemed to me many long hours. All might still have been well,—for in the nature of things even the First Consul's bath must come to an end sometime,—had I not made a slight noise which the quick ears of the Consul and the Mameluke ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... water, were drawn up to allow the sunset breeze to pass right through the long two-storeyed building which, the essence of coolness, comfort, and beauty, in the past months by the efforts of countless skilled workmen, hailing from every conceivable corner of Asia and Egypt, and regardless of expense and labour, had been built for one beautiful English girl, who, in a moment of ever regretted contrariness, had refused to participate in the planning and devising of the work, thereby shutting herself off from that most fascinating ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... admiration; just at the spot where we had landed, the shore was thickly strewn, in a manner which I had never before seen equalled, with varieties of the most curious and beautiful shells. They were of all sizes, and of every conceivable shape and colour. The surfaces of some were smooth and highly polished; others were scolloped, or fluted, or marked with wave-like undulations. There were little rice and cowrie shells; mottled tiger shells; spider shells, with their ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... pressed pipes always put the thickest part of your pipe at the back. Lead, in a good plumber's hands, may be twisted into every conceivable shape; but, as in all other trades, there is a right and a wrong way of doing everything, and there are many different methods, each having a right and wrong way, which I shall describe. I shall be pleased if my readers will adopt the style most suitable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... the decision had been made to evacuate the whole salient, serves for them to increase the meaning of the victory as it increases the real extent of the French exploit. But this is a detail. The Germans openly, deliberately, after long preparation, announced their purpose, used every conceivable bit of strength they could bring to bear to take Verdun, and told their own people not merely that Verdun would fall, but at one moment that it had fallen. They did this with the firm conviction that it ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... degrees of power (Intensity). And although the modern schools of composition for the voice do not encourage the display of florid execution, a singer would be ill-advised indeed to neglect this factor, on the plea that it has no longer any practical application. No greater error is conceivable. Should an instrumental virtuoso fail to acquire mastery of transcendental difficulties, his performance of any piece would not be perfect: the greater includes the less. A singer would be very short-sighted who did not adopt an analogous line of reasoning. Without ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... from time to time reproached me for making jokes about religion; and they have almost always invoked the authority of that very sensible commandment which says, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." Of course, I pointed out that I was not in any conceivable sense taking the name in vain. To take a thing and make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain. It is, on the contrary, to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object. To use a thing in vain means to use it without use. But a joke may be exceedingly useful; it may ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... unmingled happiness. Now, it is the very nature of joy to give utterance to its emotions. Happiness must have its expression. And thus it may well be supposed that man in his primal felicity would seek to express, by every conceivable mode, the love, gratitude, and joy which absorbed every affection of ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... lick the ears: the arms reach to the knees in an ordinary upright position: the skin has a golden tinge: there is a protuberance on the skull and a smaller one, like a ball, between the eyebrows. The long arms may be compared with the Persian title rendered in Latin by Longimanus[744] and it is conceivable that the protuberances on the head may have been personal peculiarities of Gotama. For though the thirty-two marks are mentioned in the Pitakas as well-known signs establishing his claims to eminence, no description of them has been found in any pre-Buddhist ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... make any certainly successful plan to deal with a future possible chance unless you cultivate your power of imagination by working out in advance every conceivable situation that may ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... not actually created till 1540; the way in which Henry VIII. sought statutory authority for every conceivable thing is very extraordinary. There seems no reason why he could not have created these bishoprics without ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... have gone quite far in this direction, but have not perfected the system as they have on the other side. I have been making after-dinner speeches for sixty years to all sorts and conditions of people, and on almost every conceivable subject. I have found these occasions of great value because under the good-fellowship of the occasion an unpopular truth can be sugar-coated with humor and received with applause, while in the processes of digestion the next day it is working with the audience and through ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... And what of all the other "revelations", which all the other peoples of the world accepted? And then again, if Jesus had been God, could he really have been tempted? To be God and man at the same time—did that not mean both to know and not to know? And was there any way conceivable for anything to be God, in which everything ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... what had happened. She considered Bideabout's action as calmly as possible. Was it conceivable that he should seek the life of his own child? He had shown it no love, but it was a far cry from lack of parental affection ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... name by which the hill is known in seven of the cave-inscriptions, and is held by the learned Pundit who wrote the Gazetter account to refer to its pyramidal or triple fire-tongue shape. But is it not conceivable that the hand which carved the earliest of those priceless inscriptions desired to designate the triad of contiguous hills as "the tripla ray," and not the eastern hill alone in which the caves ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... a few gaseous at normal temperatures. Some were weak and some were highly potent. Some were relatively innocuous, and quite a few were as deadly as any of the more common poisons. They could be administered by mouth, by injection, by spray, as drops, grains, whiffs or in any other way conceivable to medical science. But they all had one thing in common. They affected the mental functioning—what seemed to be the personality itself—of the person dosed ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... take it, young man, that I am versed in the elements of my business. This is not a conceivable bone either of a tapir or of any other creature known to zoology. It belongs to a very large, a very strong, and, by all analogy, a very fierce animal which exists upon the face of the earth, but has not yet come under the notice of science. You are ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... people to and fro to Aston House: Men who were a power in the world; men who would be so, and men who had been, as well as many of no note at all. They came to consult Charles Aston on every conceivable thing under the sun, from questions of high politics to the management of a refractory son. They did not always take his advice, nor did he always offer it, but they invariably came away with a more definite sense of their own meaning and aims, and somehow such aims ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... I'll take a chair." She took a chair. "Whatever—whatever's this?" As she read the letter the varying expressions which passed across her face were, in themselves, a study in psychology. "Is it possible that you can imagine that, under any conceivable circumstances, I could have written such a letter ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... conceivable that by some who cheered it the speech may have been misunderstood. Yet it is not probable that many who heard Redmond believed that in order to serve England he was flinging away Ireland's national claim, to the successful furtherance of which his whole life had ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... young King assumed the management of affairs. The policy pursued by Louis XIII. and his Cardinal seemed to him an advantageous one, also; he lured to his capital M. de Lorraine, who was still young and a widower, and by every conceivable pretext he was prevented from marrying again. Lorraine had a nephew,—[Prince Charles.]—a young man of great promise, to whom the uncle there and then offered to make over all his property and rights, if the King would honour him with his protection and marry him to whomsoever ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to all this delight, I become an object of terror and loathing even before I die, and something that must be hidden out of sight as soon as possible after, what conceivable fate could be worse? That such a thing is possible proves this to be a dreadful and defective world, with all its sources of pleasure. Surely if there were a God he would banish such ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... future smiting. I have heard men preach passive resistance, but this teaches actual invitation of injury, a course degrading in the extreme ... the poverty of spirit principle is enforced to the fullest conceivable extent—'Him that taketh away thy cloak, forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee, and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again' (Luke vi. 29, 30). Poverty of person is the only possible sequence to this extraordinary ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... clash, and neatly equal the commentators in number. Yet possibly each one of these unriddlings, with no doubt a host of others, is conceivable: so that wisdom will dwell upon none of ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... himself, God could not be Love. God was Justice, Order, Unity, Perfection; He could not be human and imperfect, nor could the Son or the Holy Ghost be other than the Father. The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; she alone was Favour, Duality, Diversity. Under any conceivable form of religion, this duality must find embodiment somewhere, and the Middle Ages logically insisted that, as it could not be in the Trinity, either separately or together, it must be in the Mother. If the Trinity was in its essence Unity, the Mother alone ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... that she was twelve, she had been the mistress of every fellow in the village. She had corrupted boys of her own age in every conceivable manner and place. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... himself against the Northern Jingoes, and though his motives may have been sectional, his arguments were really unanswerable. He pointed out that to fight England for Oregon at that moment would be to fight her under every conceivable disadvantage. An English army from India could be landed in Oregon in a few weeks. An American army sent to meet it must either round Cape Horn and traverse the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the face of the most powerful navy in the world or march through what was still an unmapped wilderness ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... that ladies were on board—ladies from the court of France, come to enjoy the delights of this tropical paradise. The sister of Bonaparte, Madame Leclerc, the wife of the commander of the expedition, was there. It seemed scarcely conceivable that she and her train of ladies could have come with any expectation of witnessing such a warfare as, ten years before, had shown how much more savage than the beasts of the forest men may be. It was as little conceivable that ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... "You see Dr. Herrick had prepared everything. And much of what we are about to do is merely symbolical, of course. Most people undervalue symbols. They do not seem to understand that there could never have been any conceivable need of inventing a periphrasis ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... our senses; it is also necessary we should preserve the idea of their colour or tangibility in order to comprehend them by our imagination. There is nothing but the idea of their colour or tangibility, which can render them conceivable by the mind. Upon the removal of the ideas of these sensible qualities, they are utterly annihilated ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... slow in replying. He was doubting his own ears. It was not conceivable that an ordinary—or even an extraordinary—lady's maid could have possessed the exquisite voice and manner of his chance acquaintance of the day before, or the temerity to order that sour- faced chauffeur ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... impossibility or contradiction in either supposition. The idea of cause is a necessary idea. An event being given, the idea of cause is necessarily implied. An uncaused event is an impossible conception. The idea of cause is also a universal idea extending to all events, actual or conceivable, and affirmed by all minds. It is a rational fact, attested by universal consciousness, that we can not think of an event transpiring without a cause; of a thing being the author of its own existence; of something generated by and out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil is a universal law of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... for every conceivable emergency. "To a Young Man who has quarrelled with his Master," "Dismissing a Teacher," "Inquiry for Lost Baggage," "With a Basket of Fruit to an Invalid," and "To a Gentleman elected to Congress." Rare indeed, in our ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... 20,000,000 tons of pig iron is itself sufficiently startling, and without attempting to present to you the statistics of all its various uses—for which, in fact, we do not possess the necessary materials—the increased consumption of more than 9,000,000 tons since 1869 becomes conceivable when we consider how some of the great works in which it is employed have been extending during that or even a shorter interval. And of these I need only speak of the world's railways, of which there were in 1872 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... Gassendi maintains, with great ingenuity, that the human teeth were not made for flesh. He does not evade any of the facts in the case, but meets them all fairly and discusses them freely. And after having gone through with all parts of the argument, and answered every other conceivable ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... connecting the thermal junctions in different sections to the galvanometer makes possible a more accurate control of the temperatures in the various parts, and while the algebraic sum of the temperature differences of the parts may equal zero, it is conceivable that there may be a condition in the calorimeter when there is a considerable amount of heat passing out through the top, for example, compensated exactly by the heat which passes in at the bottom, and while with the top section ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... communicate to others the Immaterial, Intangible, Eternal Thought. The fact that Thought continues to exist an instant, after it makes its appearance in the soul, proves it immortal: for there is nothing conceivable that can destroy it. The spoken words, being mere sounds, may vanish into thin air, and the written ones, mere marks, be burned, erased, destroyed: but the THOUGHT itself lives still, and must ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the slight ruffle of the breeze upon it; every spot of dry land, large or small, within sight of us, was completely hidden by the luxuriant tropical vegetation which flourished upon it, the foliage being of every conceivable shade of green, from the lightest to the darkest, and thickly besprinkled with flowers and blossoms of all the hues of the rainbow. Nor was animate life wanting to add its charm to the scene; for aquatic birds of various kinds were to be seen stalking solemnly about the shallows ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... 214 he will have it that the ordinary man rejects, "without hesitation," the interference of will with material causes. In other words, he asserts that the ordinary man is a fatalist—for Froude knew very well that between the fatalist and the believer in a possibility of miracle there is no conceivable position. He will have it (on p. 216) that a modern doctor always regards a "vision" as an hallucination. On p. 217 he denies by implication the stigmata of St. Francis—and so forth—one might multiply the instances indefinitely. All Froude's works are full of them, they are ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... battle present a scene well calculated to move the most callous. Men shot and lacerated in every conceivable manner; some are expressionless; some just as they appeared in life; while others are pinched and drawn and otherwise distorted, portraying agony in her most distressful state. Of the wounded, in their anguish, some are perfectly quiet; others are heard praying; some are calling ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... that if he breathes it in long enough he will satisfy his hunger therewith. Everything in the whole place was as white as snow; everything so clean; great bins full of flour; huge vessels full of swelling dough, from which six white-dressed, white-aproned assistants were forming every conceivable kind of cake and bun; piled upon the shelves of the gigantic white oven the first supply was gradually baking, filling the whole room with ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... comprehensive, far-reaching scheme, which seemed to assure a future of ample profits and great public usefulness. Inconsiderable as this work may appear compared with the modern achievements of engineering, it was, for the times, a gigantic undertaking, beset with difficulties scarcely conceivable to-day. Boston was a small town of about twenty thousand inhabitants; Medford, Woburn, and Chelmsford were insignificant villages; and Lowell was as yet unborn, while the valley of the Merrimac, northward into New Hampshire, supported a sparse agricultural ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... Mrs. Chirrup are the nice little couple in question. Mr. Chirrup has the smartness, and something of the brisk, quick manner of a small bird. Mrs. Chirrup is the prettiest of all little women, and has the prettiest little figure conceivable. She has the neatest little foot, and the softest little voice, and the pleasantest little smile, and the tidiest little curls, and the brightest little eyes, and the quietest little manner, and is, in short, altogether one of the most engaging of all little women, dead or alive. She is ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... but final: His personal sympathies and his political opinions, he said, were on the Kaiser's side. But alas! that which the Kaiser asked him to do was completely out of the question. Greece could not under any conceivable circumstances side against the Entente: the Mediterranean was at the mercy of the united French and British fleets, which could destroy the Greek marine, both royal and mercantile, take the Greek islands, and wipe Greece off ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... opinion they allowed scope to was that the masters were the natural enemies of the boys. There was war between them, and every stratagem was permissible. They were fooled, misled, and plagued in every conceivable manner. Or they were feared ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... never allowed to penetrate the inner shrine of the boat,—and yet we have often returned from a long cruise because our food was coming to an end. Every available corner and space is filled with provisions. The cook—a sailor specially trained for the job—must hunt below in every conceivable place for his vegetables and meats. The latter are stored in the coolest quarters, next to the munitions. The sausages are put close to the red grenades, the butter lies beneath one of the sailor's bunks, and the salt and spice have been known to stray into ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... Caucasian in exactly those respects which when exaggerated produce the negro. They were darker, had thicker lips, lower foreheads, larger heads, more advancing jaws, a flatter foot, and a more attenuated frame. It is quite conceivable that the negro type was produced by a gradual degeneration from that which we find in Egypt. It is even conceivable that the Egyptian type was produced by gradual advance and amelioration ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... former; for this order explained Aramis's presence with the king, and that Aramis, in order to have obtained Fouquet's pardon, must have made considerable progress in the royal favor, and that this favor explained, in its tenor, the hardly conceivable assurance with which M. d'Herblay issued the order in the king's name. For D'Artagnan it was quite sufficient to have understood something of the matter in hand to order to understand the rest. ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was, why did he run down the trail? It was inconceivable, if he had committed the murder, that he should, without dressing or preparation for escape, run towards the other cabins. It was, however, easily conceivable that he should take up the pursuit of the real murderers, and in the darkness—exhausted, breathless, and certainly somewhat excited—run blindly ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Congress' was simultaneously held on purpose to arrest the dreaded disruption, and attended by able Delegations from all the Border Slave and most of the Free States, many of the former now fighting in the Rebel ranks; but no one suggested that any conceivable legislation on any subject but Slavery was desired or would be of the least avail. Mr. Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, and, perhaps, the ablest man in it, who resisted Secession until overborne and carried away by the swelling ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... military commanders were statesmen as well, and the class of professional generals, for conducting external campaigns, did not then exist. It was not until the period of the "Six States" [27] that this custom changed. Now although Wu was an uncivilized State, it is conceivable that Tso should have left unrecorded the fact that Sun Wu was a great general and yet held no civil office? What we are told, therefore, about Jang-chu [28] and Sun Wu, is not authentic matter, but the reckless fabrication ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... account both of its fulness and extreme antiquity, should have perished, and have been superseded by four later and utterly unauthentic productions, one its junior by at least 120 years, and each one of these deriving from it only a part of its teaching; the first three, for no conceivable reason, rejecting all that peculiar doctrine now called Johannean, and the fourth confining itself to reproducing this so-called Johannean element and this alone? It is only necessary to state this to show the utter absurdity of ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... know," said Rose, with a smile, "I believe it's conceivable that it is in the box, but that she has never opened the box at all! I believe a girl might shrink so much from reading that woman's papers that she might not even ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... the prior sequence of events, would know at a glance it was no parsnip we beheld, but Mr. Algernon Leary, now suddenly enveloped, through no fault of his own, in one of the most overpowering predicaments conceivable to involve a rising lawyer and a member of at least two good clubs; and had we but been there to watch him, knowing, as we would know, the developments leading up to this present situation, we might have guessed what was the truth: ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... and I fully understand it. One talks politics while talking of literature, of morals, of the fine arts, and of every conceivable thing! If your mother were in Paris, her latest bon mots and phrases would be recited to me daily; perhaps they would be only invented; but I tell you I will have nothing of the kind in the city in which I reside! It would be best for ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... treated this little tribe with kindness; and in a very short time we each had three or four of these brats on our shoulders, as many on our laps, and the rest between our knees. Those who could speak kept repeating "Sllvertu," in every conceivable tone; those that could not speak made up for that ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... happens) from their nominal leaders, the trained part of the senate, instinctively in the secret, is sure to follow them: provided the leaders, sensible of their situation, do not of themselves recede in time from their most declared opinions. This latter is generally the case. It will not be conceivable to any one who has not seen it, what pleasure is taken by the cabal in rendering these heads of office thoroughly contemptible and ridiculous. And when they are become so, they have then the best chance for ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... found him. It seemed totally improbable. Bors instantly thought of Talents, Incorporated. The Talents on the ship had spread rebellion on worlds unthinkable distances apart. It was conceivable that in some way they'd ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... very lightly laden, and with harness, pack-saddles, and loads looking ragged, patched, sun-bleached, and repaired in every conceivable way, moved slowly along through the rich greenery, led and followed by its sun-tanned escort, three before and three behind. The ponies looked in admirable condition save that a change of diet seemed necessary to do away with a swollen-out ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... held "a foremost place in his thoughts and plans"?[7] True, out of its place, he will but allow that "playing musical instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle."[8] Music and "stuffing birds"[9] were no conceivable substitutes for education properly so called, any more than a "Tamworth Reading-Room" system could be the panacea for every ill; but so long as an art in any given case did not tend to displace the more serious business of life; should it become for such an ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... On the other hand, salvation appeared to be given in the truth, that is, in the complete and certain knowledge of God, as contrasted with the error of heathendom and the night of sin, and this truth included the certainty of the gift of eternal life, and all conceivable spiritual blessings.[202] Of these the community, so far as it is a community of saints, that is, so far as it is ruled by the Spirit of God, already possesses forgiveness of sins and righteousness. But, as a rule, neither ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... benefited. The United States Army affords the largest field for gaining practical knowledge concerning the diseases, especially of the feet, with which horses and mules are afflicted. During the late war, when so little care was given to animals in the field, when they were injured in every conceivable manner, and by all sorts of accidents, the veterinary found a field for study such as ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... if she ever uttered it, and it is quite possible that she did, must have been the first to forget it. Moreover, Saint John's Day was a term commonly cited in leases, fairs, contracts, hirings, etc., and it is quite conceivable that the calendar of a prophetess may have been the same as ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... reflection that I have never seen in print, though it is so obvious that it must have occurred to each one of my readers. I said that every man is an immortal to himself: he only dies as far as others are concerned; to himself he cannot, by any conceivable possibility, do so. For how can he know that he is dead until he IS dead? And when he IS dead, how can he know that he is dead? If he does, it is an abuse of terms to say that he is dead. A man can know no more about the end of his life than he did about the beginning. The most horrible and loathed ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... growth, and less decisive in features; Delaware, a modest appendage of Pennsylvania; wild and rude North Carolina; and, farther on, South Carolina and Georgia, too remote from the seat of war to take a noteworthy part in it. The attitude of these various colonies towards each other is hardly conceivable to an American of the present time. They had no political tie except a common allegiance to the British Crown. Communication between them was difficult and slow, by rough roads traced often through ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... high spirits—while his wife was one of the most cross-grained and cantankerous bodies that ever man was blessed with—and yet, to hear the sweet diminutives which they both employed in their dialogues, the world would have concluded that they were upon the best terms conceivable. ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... "cotton rock" in the bluff is flint in great quantities, and in every conceivable shape, that these people could have resorted to had they been so disposed, and why they used the softer material I will leave to some archaeologist to determine. The tools themselves are made after no pattern, but selected for their cutting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... Now, the man who is a gentleman by birth and culture—by which I mean a man of good family, who has not only gone through the curriculum of a university, but has graduated, so to speak, in society—such a one has every advantage in any conceivable situation. The records of military enterprise, exploration, pioneering, and so forth, furnish abundant evidence of this very obvious fact. You will find, I think, that high breeding and training are conditions of superiority in the human ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... said he, nervously flourishing his maul-stick. "The picture represents two people exchanging souls"—Audrey raised her eyebrows: "those are the souls, and these are the people—do be quiet, Katherine! It's a perfectly conceivable transaction, though I own it might be a very bad bargain for some. I wouldn't like to swop souls with my sister, for ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... life as it was in his; but there was on her part no reason why she should not yield to it. There was every reason in her nature and in her theory why she should, for, bounded as her vision of life was by this existence, love was the highest conceivable good in life. It had been with a great shout of joy that the consciousness had come to her that she loved and was loved. Though she might never see him again, this supreme experience for man or woman, this unsealing of the sacred fountain of life, would ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner |
