"Incurably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the titles of "Radial Paralysis" and "Brachial Paralysis," there is to be found in veterinary literature a discussion of conditions which vary in character from the almost insignificant form of paresis to the incurably affected conditions wherein the whole shoulder is ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... but it is said that it is a frequent attempt of the prisoners to sham madness, in order to get to Bedlam, from which they can get out when cured. One woman deceived all the medical people, clergyman, jailer, and turnkeys, was removed to Bedlam as incurably mad, and from Bedlam made her escape. I saw a girl of about eighteen, who had been educated at Miss Hesketh's school, and had been put to service in a friend's family. She was in love with a footman who was turned away: the old housekeeper refused ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... of solitary musing upon certain waste places known best to outlanders, walked up Saint James's Street at six o'clock in the morning, talking lightly and fiercely to himself. A long life of loneliness had given him that habit incurably. Discovering the hour by a clock in Piccadilly, he realised that it was too early to wait upon Mrs. Germain in Albemarle Street, so continued his way up the empty hill, entered the Park, and flung himself upon the turf under the elms. Other guests ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... compromise. Lucilla, quite overlooked among the rector's rapidly-increasing second family, was allowed to visit her maternal uncle and aunt at stated periods in every year. Born, to all appearance with the full possession of her sight, the poor child had become incurably blind before she was a year old. In all other respects, she presented a striking resemblance to her mother. Bachelor uncle Batchford, and his old maiden sister, both conceived the strongest affection ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... patriot against the schemes and usurpations of its accidental occupant. Mr. Stanton entered on his great trust in the fullest prime of manhood, equal, seemingly, to any possible toil and strain. He left his department incurably shorn of health. He entered upon it in affluence, with a large and remunerative practice. He left it without a stain on his hands, but with his fortune lessened and insufficient. Yet, when it was contemplated by some of his friends, after his retirement, to tender him a handsome gift of ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... would grow more moderate when "with us." Cavour accepted the offered post of Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, but not without making terms. He exacted the retirement of a minister whom he considered incurably timorous, especially in ecclesiastical legislation. The point was yielded, but D'Azeglio said to La Marmora, "We are beginning badly with your buon diavolo." The good Massimo got no comfort from the king: "Don't you see that this man will turn you all out?" Victor ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... this station had never been really and entirely clean. Judged by American standards Continental railway stations are rarely ever clean, even when conditions are normal. Now that conditions were anything but normal, this Maubeuge station was incredibly and incurably filthy. No doubt the German nursing sisters who were brought here tried at first, with their German love for orderliness, to keep the interior reasonably tidy; but they had been swamped by more ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Emperor William died. He was ninety years of age, having been born in 1797. He was succeeded by his son Frederick, then incurably ill from a cancerous affection of the throat, which carried him to the grave after a reign of ninety-nine days. His oldest son, William, succeeded on June 15, ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... empire cannot be sound when an important, a vital part of its political frame is incurably sore. Let that sore be healed by justice, large, generous, and complete; let Ireland be truly and really represented, in whatever manner her representation may be carried out, and the sudden rise of the little western isle in wealth, contentment, true prosperity, and happiness, will redound to ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator between these two agencies, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... his admirer; but he was in no danger of retort; his jests were endured without resistance or resentment. But the sneer of jocularity was not the worst. Steele, whose imprudence of generosity, or vanity of profusion, kept him always incurably necessitous, upon some pressing exigence, in an evil hour, borrowed a hundred pounds of his friend probably without much purpose of repayment; but Addison, who seems to have had other notions of a hundred pounds, grew impatient of delay, and ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... another it grew in my mind. Each day my accumulating impressions were added to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones; they fused inseparably with others that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself with a certain comprehensive perception of London, complete indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way a whole that began with my first visit and is still ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... signaled with at the Opera. "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort" was in high popularity with his comrades; and had said but the truth when he averred that he had never been so happy as under the tricolor. The officers pronounced him an incurably audacious "pratique"; he was always in mischief, and the regimental rules he broke through like a terrier through a gauze net; but they knew that when once the trumpets sounded Boot and Saddle, this yellow-haired dare-devil of an English fellow would be worth a score ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... was supported by Lord Fitzgerald and Vesci, who contended that the operations of the bill would be mischievous; but it was not carried. On the 31st the latter noble lord moved another amendment, empowering the guardians to relieve in poor-houses "all destitute persons who are either incurably lame, or blind, or sick, or labouring under permanent bodily infirmity;" also all orphan children left in a state of destitution. Ministers, however, succeeded in carrying the original clause of the bill by a majority ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... charge of a Dr. Meyer, at Anspach. He had a curator, and a guardian, and escaped from the Commentaries of Julius Caesar into the genial society of Feuerbach. That jurist died in May 1833 (poisoned, say the Kasparites), a new guardian was appointed, and Kaspar lived with Dr. Meyer. Finding him incurably untruthful, the doctor ceased to provoke him by comments on his inaccuracies, and Kaspar got a small clerkly place. With this he was much dissatisfied, for he, like Feuerbach, had expected Lord Stanhope to take him to England. Feuerbach, in the dedication to Lord Stanhope of his book (1832), ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the institution of a regency necessary. In one word, the purpose of the measure was to prevent such a situation from arising in Prussia as prevails now in Bavaria, where, since 1886 the throne has been occupied by a lunatic prince, who was incurably insane for many years before his accession to the crown, and whose dementia takes that peculiar form, which is described in the Bible as having overtaken Nebuchadnezzar. King Otto of Bavaria imagines himself to be alternately a quadruped or ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... repeated his antinomistic teaching, though not in the original defiant manner. Little wonder, then, that despite the formal settlement, cordial relations were not restored between Luther and Agricola. When the latter visited Wittenberg in 1545, Luther refused to see the man whom he regarded incurably dishonest. "Grickel," said he, "will remain Grickel to all eternity, Grickel wird in alle Ewigkeit ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... accompaniment of the lugubrious cantilena of Julia at the end of the second act, he would not put up with the way in which the violas played the horribly sentimental accompaniment. Suddenly turning towards them he called in a sepulchral tone, 'Are the violas dying?' The two pale and incurably melancholy old men who held on tenaciously to their posts in the orchestra, notwithstanding their right to a pension, stared at Spontini with real fright, reading a threat in his words, and I had to explain Spontini's wish in sober ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... for Parliament as a candidate for the Market Malford division, where the influence of Fontenoy's family was considerable. Since the general election, which had taken place in June, and had returned a moderate Conservative Government to power, the member for Market Malford had become incurably ill. The seat might be vacant at any moment. Fontenoy asked for a telegram, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exhausted the resources of his craft. Yet without possessing, in a certain degree, the qualities we have named, no man ever did, and no man ever will, become a gentleman. Where they do not bear sway, society may be brilliant in garniture, high in pretension, but it is intrinsically and incurably vulgar!" ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... the opium-eater might be finished within Coleridge's time, and with Coleridge's romantic ease. But mark the contradictions of this extraordinary man. Not long ago we were domesticated with a venerable rustic, strong-headed, but incurably obstinate in his prejudices, who treated the whole body of medical men as ignorant pretenders, knowing absolutely nothing of the system which they professed to superintend. This, you will remark, is no very singular case. No; nor, as we believe, is the antagonist case of ascribing ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... never find you out in this world? And, still better, do you ever weep in secret places not for sin, but for sinfulness—which is a very different matter? Do you ever weep to yourself and to God alone over your incurably wicked heart? If not, then weep for that with all your might, night and day. No mortal man has so much cause to weep as you have. Go to God on the spot, on every spot, and say with Bishop Andrewes, who is both Mr. Desires-awake and Mr. Wet- eyes in one, say with that deep ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... girl working at paleography, in the Ambrosian Library, while Lord Risborough, occupying a villa in the neighbourhood of the Torre San Gallo, was giving himself to the artistic researches and the cosmopolitan society which suited his health and his tastes. He was a dilettante of the old sort, incurably in love with living, in spite of the loss of his wife, and his only son; in spite also of an impaired heart—in the physical sense—and various other drawbacks. He came across the bright girl student, discovered that she could talk very creditably ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... extraordinary letter. Are all parents incurably mad? What do you make of it?" said the Head, handing a closely written eight pages to the ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... of the contents of this chapter will prepare the way for the next. The movements of higher thought in the West have been dominated, nominally by the professional thinker, really by the average man. As a thinker, the average man is incurably dualistic. Enslaved as he is to the requirements of his instrument, language, he instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil, the Creator to the Creation, God to Man; and in each case he fixes a great gulf ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... know too much," replied Fisher, with his eye on the river. "I know that, and I know a great many other things. I know the atmosphere and the way the whole thing works. I know this fellow has succeeded in making himself something incurably commonplace and comic. I know you can't get up a persecution of old Toole or Little Tich. If I were to tell Hoggs or Halkett that old Jink was an assassin, they would almost die of laughter before my eyes. Oh, I don't say their laughter's quite innocent, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... to resist the influence of these darkening ideas. He tried to keep it up that everything was going well and that most of these shadows and complaints were the mischief of a few incurably restless personalities. He tried to keep it up that to belong to the working class was a thoroughly jolly thing—for those who were used to it. He declared that all who wanted to alter our laws or our ideas about property ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ambition always to be calm, oracular, weighty; always to be sure of himself; but his temperament was incurably nervous, restless, and impulsive. He could not be still, he could not wait. Instinct drove him to action for the sake of action, instinct made him seek continually for notice, prominence, comment. These fundamental appetites had urged him into public life—to the Borough ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... that we have by no means forgotten it, but that we have been dealing solely with those primary tendencies out of which all of the compound emotions are made. Man has been described as instinctively and incurably religious, but there seems no doubt that religion is a compound reaction, made up of love,—sympathetic response to the parental love of God,—fear, negative self-feeling, and positive self-feeling in the shape of aspiration for the desired ideal of character; all woven into several compound emotions ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... the deaf and the dumb who suddenly heard and spoke; such as Aurelie Bruneau, who was incurably deaf, with the drums of both ears broken, and yet was suddenly enraptured by the celestial music of a harmonium; such also as Louise Pourchet, who on her side had been dumb for five-and-twenty years, and yet, whilst praying in the Grotto, suddenly exclaimed, "Hail, Mary, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... suggests for these "marks of degraded status," we find in the forefront of them that the worker must be secured "payment as a human being, and not merely as a mortal tenement of so much labour power for which an efficient demand exists." This, especially to an incurably lazy person like myself, is an extremely attractive programme. To be paid, and paid well, merely in return for having "taken the trouble to be born," is an ideal towards which my happiest dreams have ever struggled in vain. But would ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... companion; he liked women who could, frankly, amuse him better. She was too dim, too delicate, too modest; she had too few arts, too little coquetry, too much charity. Lighting a cigar some day while he summed up his situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid. It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... frenzy of breeding,—smoke and flame Of lives burning up from agoniz'd loam! Those monstrous sappy jungles of clutcht growth, Enormous weed hugging enormous weed, What can such fearful increase have to do With prospering bounty? A rage works in the ground, Incurably, like frantic lechery, Pouring its passion out in crops and spawns. 'Tis as the mighty spirit of life, that here Walketh beautifully praising, glad of God, Should, stepping on the poison'd Indian shore, Breathing the Indian air of fire and steams, Fling ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous part demanded of him by President Sunday. And, indeed, when Syme came in the President, with that daring disregard of public suspicion which was his policy, was actually chaffing ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... concerned that there was no sign of bad temper among the officers of the battalion. The colonel lived a good deal by himself in his tent, but was always quietly good-humoured. Lieutenant Dalton, an incurably merry boy, kept the other subalterns cheerful. Only Captain Maitland was inclined to complain a little, and he had a special grievance, an excuse which justified a certain amount of grumbling. He slept badly at night, ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... impotent, an outcast as well as his son,[216] a cripple, a madman, an idiot, one blind, one incurably diseased, and such like,[217] are to be maintained, but do not share ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... that they are keenly interested in preventing the settlement from degenerating into a deal in points of vantage for any further aggressions in any direction. Both the United States of America and China are traditionally and incurably pacific powers, professing and practicing an unaggressive policy, and the chief outstanding minor States are equally concerned in securing ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of those writers whose hap it generally is to be overpraised by friendly reviewers, and unduly castigated by those who appreciate their short-comings. Incurably limited to a certain range of ideas, totally incapable of mastering the great circle of thought, unpleasantly egotistical, jaunty, and priggish, he is any thing but attractive to the large-hearted cosmopolite and scholar of broad views, while even to many more general readers, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to me while we were passing an incurably ugly house, "The man who built that must have had a very good excuse for it!" It was a profound remark, but if that particular building were the only one needing apology for its ugliness, or if there were no common faults of construction and interior arrangement, I ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... memorial of tradition within a century or two of our aera. To suppose, even for the sake of answering, the case of a forgery, is too gross and shocking: though a very common practice amongst writers miscalled religious, but in fact radically, incurably unspiritual. This might be shown to be abominable even in an intellectual sense; because no adequate, no rational purpose could be answered by such a labour. The sole conceivable case would be, that from the eldest days the Jews had been governed by all the Mosaic ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... of this immortal great genius and incurably indolent painter; it was a Knight of Malta, a Templar kneeling in prayer. The picture was painted on slate, and in its unfaded color and its finish was immeasurably finer than ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... his employees grew up like that. The oligarch can be unemployable, because he will not be employed. Thus the practical and popular exponent of Eugenics has his face always turned towards the slums, and instinctively thinks in terms of them. If he talks of segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort, he is thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes. He is not thinking of a millionaire like White, the victim of Thaw. If he speaks of the hopelessness of feeble-mindedness, he is thinking of some stunted creature gaping at hopeless lessons in a poor ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Tacitus in fragments is still the colossal torso of history. Velleius Paterculas, of whom a fragment only has reached us, we owe to a single copy: no other having ever been discovered, and which has occasioned the text of this historian to remain incurably corrupt. Taste and criticism have certainly incurred an irreparable loss in that Treatise on the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence, by Quintilian; which he has himself noticed with so much satisfaction in his "Institutes." Petrarch declares, that in his youth he had seen ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... "All of them. Close-mouthed, anti-social, fiercely independent, incurably romantic, always convinced that the big strike is just a piece of rock away. McCann, now, he was a bit more realistic than most. He'd be the one I'd expect to take out a retirement policy. A real pence-pincher, that one, though I shouldn't say it as he's dead. But that's the way he was. Brighter ...
— The Risk Profession • Donald Edwin Westlake
... authors, still less read all of their works, but these were the works of which portions were read. It is not prodigious. I myself, according to my class-master, was "a bad and careless little boy" at thirteen, incurably idle, but I well remember reading in Ovid and Caesar, and Sallust, while the rest of my time was devoted to the total neglect of the mathematics, English "as she was taught," History, and whatsoever else was expected from me. ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... very remarkable; that he already had achieved a poem like the Pharsalia, would make us think he might have gone to incredible heights, were it not that the mistake of the Pharsalia seems to belong incurably ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... the horse's back would become incurably sore if I rode him with his back in the condition it was, I suggested that the horse had better be led. Wilson therefore ordered me into the wagon to drive the team, and required Havely, my fellow-slave, to walk,—intending we should take turns. After awhile Havely ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... said of Stevenson that he was 'incurably literary;' the phrase is a good one, being both humorous and true. There is comfort in the thought that such efforts as may have been made to keep him in the path of virtuous respectability failed. Rather ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... in different countries. In England, when a man dies without making a will, his property goes to his eldest son. Mr. Glanville, who lived in the days of Charles II., had an eldest son, who was incurably vicious; and seeing no hope of reforming him, the father gave his property to his second son. When Mr. Sergeant Glanville died, and his eldest son learned what was done, he became greatly dejected, and in a short time his character underwent an entire change. When ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... competition is never that of goods produced at low wages-cost. It is that of superior goods; and if foreign textiles have the aid of better dyes than are available to our manufacturers our industry will be wounded incurably. It appears in fact to be the superior quality of German fabric gloves, and not their cheapness, that has hitherto defeated the competition of the native product. To protect inferior production is simply the road to ruin for a British industry. ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... here. I know one case only too well of a man who learnt his Arabic numerals prematurely, before he had acquired any sound experimental knowledge of numerical quantity, and, as a consequence, his numerical ideas are incurably associated with the peculiarities of the figures. When he hears the word seven he does not really think of seven or seven-ness at all, even now, he thinks of a number rather like four and very unlike six. Then again, six and nine are mysteriously and unreasonably ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... than the effect of the discovery upon the nation, in whom horror of the action itself absorbed every other feeling. Murder of this kind was new in England. Ready as the people ever were with sword or lance—incurably given as they were to fighting in the best ordered times—an Englishman was accustomed to face his enemy, man to man, in the open day; and the Italian crime (as it was called) of poisoning had not till recent years been heard of.[300] Even revenge and ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... going, too, and they think Libbie will come down from Vermont. Dear old Libbie—I wonder if she is as incurably ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... Cumbria type commonly held to be of Scandinavian origin. His eye was a little wandering and absent, and the ragged gray whiskers which surrounded his countenance emphasized the slight incoherence of its expression. Quiet he was and looked. But his wife knew him for one of the most incurably obstinate of men; the inveterate critic moreover of everything and every one about him, beginning with herself. This trait of his led her unconsciously to throw most of her remarks to him into the form of questions, as offering ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... praiseworthy in itself—is the act of eating and drinking! The social virtues center in the stomach. A man who is not a better husband, father, and brother after dinner than before is, digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man. What hidden charms of character disclose themselves, what dormant amiabilities awaken, when our common humanity gathers together to pour out the gastric juice! At the opening of the hampers from Thorpe Ambrose, sweet ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... conclusion. The French and Americans can laugh at our aeroplanes, the Germans are ten years ahead of our poor navigables. We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either we are a people essentially and incurably inferior, or there is something wrong in our training, something benumbing in our atmosphere and circumstances. That is the first and gravest intimation in ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Even when a boy he was forced to labor for his bread. In the first opening of manhood a terrible calamity fell upon him, in magnitude fit to form the mystery or centre of an antique drama. He had to dwell, all his days, with a person incurably mad. From poverty he passed at once to unpleasant toil and perpetual fear. These were the sole changes in his fortune. Yet he gained friends, respect, a position, and great sympathy from all; showing what one poor man of genius, under grievous ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... interest. George Odger was one of the ablest of all the working-class leaders I have ever met. He came from my own county, Devonshire, being born at Horrabridge, on the road between Plymouth and Tavistock. He was honest to the heart's core, as well as very able, but he was incurably indolent. You never could be sure of him at a public meeting. He had to be looked up beforehand, or he might forget the engagement and spend his time more agreeably. He was passionately fond of the theatre, and could talk by the hour on famous performances of old actors and actresses. During ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... incurably romantic, Hugh," she said laughingly, when the men had left the room. "Here you are, what they call a paragon of success, a future senator, Ambassador to England. I hear of those remarkable things you have done—even in New York the other day a man was asking me if I knew Mr. Paret, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... there is a point at which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to procreate ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... even stop to protect his son; and this not because any harm had been done to any of them, for from the first, wherever I went and got speech with them, I gave them of all that I had, such as cloth and many other things, without receiving anything in return; but they are, as I have described, incurably timid. It is true that when they are reassured and thrown off this fear they are guileless, and so liberal of all they have that no one would believe it who had not seen it. They never refuse anything that they possess when it is asked of them; on the contrary, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... and ocean were incurably disintegrated into a mess of coloured cardboard, linen, ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... o'clock we had crossed the bridge to the safe, or Greenhay side; then we paused, and waited for the enemy. Sooner or later a bell rang, and from the smoky hive issued the hornets that night and day stung incurably my peace of mind. The order and procession of the incidents after this were odiously monotonous. My brother occupied the main high road, precisely at the point where a very gentle rise of the ground attained its summit; for the bridge lay in a slight valley, and the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... threatened Horner with that old, cold stare of challenge, and frequently Horner had to drive him off in order to save his share of the feast from the rapacity of the eaglet. But as for the female, she remained incurably suspicious and protesting. From the upper ledge, where she devoted her care to the other nestling, she would yelp down her threats and execrations, but she never ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... life,—to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages, jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but the passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, it became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain—that Dolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position, adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the essentially aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired people because they were rich, because ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... was possible, he said. That's the awful part of it. Incurably ruined for life—by my own heedlessness! All that I meant to have done in the world—I never dare think of it again—I'm not able to think of it. Oh! if I could only live over again, and undo all I have done! [He buries his face ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... complacency, we may assume they are favourable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas. Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional they may show, they are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was the rising popularity of Lope ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of "Praying Indians," estimated in 1675 at about four thousand individuals. In contact with the white man the Indian tended to deteriorate. He frequented the settlements often to the annoyance of the men and the dread of the women and children; he got into debt, was incurably slothful and idle, and developed an uncontrollable desire to drink and steal. Where the Indians were not a menace, they were a nuisance, and the colonies passed many laws concerning the Indians which were designed to meet the one condition as ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... for him ever to emerge from their influence into a perfectly free boyhood and manhood. Had they been continued long enough, they would have ruined him. Once he had been entirely in the power of adverse circumstances and a brutal will, and he was almost incurably wounded. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... English literature of the ancient and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical facts. First, that England ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton |
