"Irrevocable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neck, to the quivering lips and great, defiant eyes, she seemed to him once more a being of another clay from himself—beyond any criticism his audacity could form. He dared hardly touch her, and in his heart there swelled the first irrevocable wave of young passion. She raised her hand impetuously and began to paint again. But suddenly a tear dropped on to her knee. She brushed it away, and her wild ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with perplexity. The killing of his employer was already crystallizing in his thoughts into an irrevocable thing, for the butler had lifted aside the dead man's coat and waistcoat, and this had shown him the ghastly evidences of a wound which must have been instantly fatal. Now, a shrewd if narrow intelligence was concentrated on the one tremendous question, "Who hath done this thing?" He looked ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... a young lady of too much resolution and energy of character to permit herself much useless and unseemly sorrow for the irrevocable past; so, having devoted only the proper portion of regret to it, she wisely turned her whole attention towards the future, which was now vastly more important to her. And she surveyed her position, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brings in the supernatural, the miraculous, or the Gospel. Each has its proper place; and neither must be dwelt on to the exclusion of the other. We are all under the hard exactitude of the law, with its irrevocable condemnation, until the Gospel intervenes, and not only pardons the past, but enables us to fulfil the law's requirements for the future. The reign of second causes alone would take away man's moral responsibility, making us all mere creatures of our environment, the victims of a merciless ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... was one of great thankfulness that I had never breathed this last baffled hope to Joe. How often, while he was with me in my illness, had it risen to my lips! How irrevocable would have been his knowledge of it, if he had remained ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... moment either the captain or the mate might wake up and discover them. To show an example that there was no danger Paul grasped the rope and slipped silently into the sea. He was followed by one of the sailors, but the other could not overcome his fear and decided to remain. His decision was irrevocable for he cast ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... hot air. There came at times broad lightning flashes; then the darkness increased; and she could only see Matho's eyeballs like two coals in the night. However, she felt that a fatality was surrounding her, that she had reached a supreme and irrevocable moment, and making an effort she went up again towards the zaimph and raised her hands ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... at once delighted and terrified. "There is no further doubt; it is irrevocable," he said, and he went at once in haste to St. Severin, having less need of prayer than of going near to Our Lady; of showing himself to her, paying her, as it were, a visit of thankfulness, and expressing his gratitude ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... for weeks, and the more he thought, the more he felt himself driven to the direct course—to see Madeleine, put the problem to her, ask her to marry him and come out of it all. But there were terrible objections to this plan, not the least of which was that if he made a blunder it might be irrevocable. She might not hear him at all. She might be displeased by his SUGGESTION that she and her father were in danger from such a cause. She might decide not to leave her father for the very reason that he was in danger. And all these possibilities ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... Aphrodite, who all at once stood in the way before him. She stopped him, took him by the hand, urged him to restrain his useless anger, and calmed and quieted him with soothing words. "It is not Helen," said she, "that has caused the destruction of Troy. It is through the irresistible and irrevocable decrees of the gods that the city has fallen. It is useless for you to struggle against inevitable destiny, or to attempt to take vengeance on mere human means and instrumentalities. Think no more of Helen. Think of your family. Your aged father, your helpless wife, your little son,—where are ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... planets influence the movements of those within the sphere of vision. No man knows how much he knows,—how many ideas he has,—any more than he knows how many blood-globules roll in his veins. Sometimes accident brings back here and there one, but the mind is full of irrevocable remembrances and unthinkable thoughts, which take a part in all its judgments as indestructible forces. Some of you must feel your scientific deficiencies painfully after your best efforts. But every one can acquire what is most essential. A man of very moderate ability ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a groan, Troy is no more, and Ilium was a town. The fatal day, the appointed hour is come When wrathful Jove's irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan state to Grecian hands. The fire consumes the town, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the most important, most sacred, and tender of human relations, and deeming it irrevocable, save by death, it seems to me essential that woman should be proffered such a range of employments, with such adequate recompense, as to enable her at all times to support herself in honored and virtuous independence, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... thereby undone. For this Tiberius had brought a vast number of miseries on the best families of the Romans, since he was easily inflamed with passion in all cases, and was of such a temper as rendered his anger irrevocable, till he had executed the same, although he had taken a hatred against men without reason; for he was by nature fierce in all the sentences he gave, and made death the penalty for the lightest offenses; ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... appears to have established, as a principle of national jurisprudence, that he could never lose the property, which he had once acquired, in the persons who had yielded either a voluntary, or reluctant, submission to his authority. From this principle he concluded, and the conclusions of Attila were irrevocable laws, that the Huns, who had been taken prisoner in war, should be released without delay, and without ransom; that every Roman captive, who had presumed to escape, should purchase his right to freedom at the price of twelve pieces of gold; and that all the Barbarians, who ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... his inquiring gaze, "and was there utter desolation? Then do you appreciate fully all that I would say to you of my own sorrow when bereft of the only mortal whom my heart had ever cared to cherish. I ask you not to bind yourself to me in an irrevocable vow, but to think of me as your truest friend until you have seen more of the world and of men. If then you can turn away from all to the heart that will never beat for another, and call me husband, God be praised—my only earthly ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... us. It is the things you do that prove to us we are not forgotten, and rejoice our manes; and this without your knowing it, without any necessity that you should turn towards us. Each time that our pale image saddens your ardour, we feel ourselves die anew, and it is a more perceptible, irrevocable death than was our other; bending too often over our tombs, you rob us of the life, the courage and love that ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... imagination, which could make such understanding possible. But she saw in his look that he loved her, that he was unhappy. She knew that Reckage had never shown so much feeling. Yet had she not given her word to Reckage? Was it not irrevocable? Was Rennes behaving well in speaking out—too late? Was it too late? A torrent of questions poured into her mind. She dragged off her gloves, and spread out her hands, which were slim and white, and stared ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the risk with his eyes wide open. He had done the best he could do, and now he had lost. True, he had not received the final, irrevocable word that he had been expelled from the medical service of Hospital Earth, but he was certain now that it was waiting for him when he arrived at Hospital Seattle ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... by his sister, his only legal {72} wife, or Coya—the irrevocable Peruvian method of providing for the Inca succession—was named Huascar. Huayna on his deathbed, after a glorious reign of forty years, made the fatal mistake of dividing his dominion between Huascar, ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the Samaneans, i.e. the Buddhists (I, 24), and to have represented these as better accredited than those of the Jews. We see anew what treasures were stored up in Alexandria, and we feel all the more deeply their irrevocable loss. The desire and the hope of recovering the work of Celsus were therefore quite natural for any who wished to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual atmosphere of the second and third centuries, and especially for such as strove to understand clearly how ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... from Fontainebleau to the Louvre. They have accused the Huguenots of treating the king as a prisoner, because these desire that the decree drawn up by the advice of the three estates of the realm should be made irrevocable until the majority of Charles the Ninth; but how was it when three persons, of whom one is a foreigner and the other two are servants of the crown, dictate a new edict, and wish that edict to be absolutely irrevocable? There is no need of lugging the Roman ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... accompany me to the altar without a name—in short to suspend her curiosity (that is all) till the moment the priest shall pronounce the irrevocable charm, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... across my face and downward to my heart. This courtyard, these small chambers beyond it, that last doorway framing a lovely darkness, soothe me even more than the terra-cotta hermitages of the Certosa of Pavia. And all the statues here are calm with an irrevocable calmness, faithful through passing years with a very sober faithfulness to the temple they adorn. In no other place, one feels it, could they be thus at peace, with hands crossed for ever upon their breasts, ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... the humanization of prostitution may be less pronounced. But it certainly exists. In the middle of the last century Lecky wrote (History of European Morals, vol. ii, p. 285) that habitual prostitution "is in no other European country so hopelessly vicious or so irrevocable." That statement, which was also made by Parent-Duchatelet and other foreign observers, is fully confirmed by the evidence on record. But it is a statement which would hardly be made to-day, except perhaps, in reference to special confined areas of our cities. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... never go back, none of them, to the old smug, complacent, luxurious days. They could no more go back than Joey could return to life again. War was the irrevocable step, as final as death itself. And he remembered something Nolan had ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... far admitted no change of heart. He had met Neale with rough cordiality, but he had stated his intention as irrevocable that he would take the ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... of the moment, the solemnity of the ceremony, the sacred glooms which surrounded me, and the chilling silence that prevailed when I uttered the irrevocable vow—all conspired to impress my imagination, and to raise my views to heaven. When I knelt at the altar, the sacred flame of pure devotion glowed in my heart, and elevated my soul to sublimity. The world and all its recollections faded from my mind, and left it to the influence of a serene and, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and irrevocable, step was actually accomplished. ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... relation to the other might in no way have been termed receptive. So far as Dan was concerned, he felt that, whether unwisely or not, he had made quite clear to her the terms upon which their friendship could continue; she had expressed her views no less clearly. The stand of both was irrevocable. ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... the one to which Wagner made allusion: Jupiter has given his love to Semele. Wickedly prompted by the jealous Juno, Semele asks her august lover to grant her a wish. He promises that she shall have her desire, and confirms his words with the irrevocable oath, swearing by the Stygian flood. Semele asks him then to appear to her in all his celestial splendor. The god would have stopped her when he realized her purpose, but it was too late. Sorrowfully he returned ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "all is over." Yet, saved from death by the poison in which he had hoped to find the spring of endless life, his fate appears admirably fitting. There is no picture of Mephisto hurrying him off to an apparently irrevocable doom. The wrongs he has committed against himself, his friends, humanity,—these, indeed, remain, and are remembered. He has undoubtedly fallen from his first purity and earnestness, and must hereafter ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... shall I feel the same exultation, the same pleasure mingled with bitter sadness, the same perception of the irrevocable passing of beautiful things, and the equally inexorable coming on of care and trouble, as filled my heart that night. Whether any of the other members of my class vibrated with similar emotion or not I cannot say, but I do recall ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... me, his face white as a sheet, and held out to me, with tremulous hands, a tiny sheet, pointing with his finger to one particular notice. It was not much, apparently, but it was the verdict, final and irrevocable, of insolvency and bankruptcy. It was a list of judgments, marked in the Superior Courts, against those who are unable to meet their demands; and this ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... battle with Paul's determination, but he found it irrevocable, and it was justified by so many cogent reasons that the old man finally ceased his ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... the Princess Mathilde, and I know thoroughly the story of their break, which seems to me irrevocable. Sainte- Beuve was outraged against Dalloz and has gone to le Temps. The princess begged him not to do anything about it. He did not listen to her. That is all. My opinion on it, if you wish to know it, is this. The first wrong was done by the princess, who was hasty; but the second and the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Tom," said the old doctor, as they left the lawyer's office together. "You have now taken an irrevocable step in life, my boy. The world is before you. You belong to a first-class firm and you have every chance. May you ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... acts of resistance taken in common by the colonies, and is thus, in a sense, older than the state governments, which were not formed until after the Declaration of Independence. Also, that when the States gave in 1788 their consent to the constitution, their consent was irrevocable. Two quotations from decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States will make clear the arguments and theory ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby
... When she read it, she would see the reasonableness of his hope, and might be willing to wait, at least a little while. Any delay would be a point gained. He shuddered to think that he might lose her, and then, the day after the irrevocable vows had been taken, the treasure might come to light, and all their life be spent in vain regrets. Graciella was skeptical about the lost money. Even Mrs. Treadwell, whose faith had been firm for years, had ceased to encourage his hope; while ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... nature and training a conservative and he had sympathy for the genial vanities of life. It was Ford's final summary, the unconscious patronage, the quiet, assured insolence of his words, which gave Starratt his irrevocable cue. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... sprung from a nobler race than that of any of his magnates, and that he was outside the pale of ordinary humanity. The greater part of his time was passed in privacy, where he was attended only by the eunuchs appointed to receive his orders; and these orders, once issued, were irrevocable, as was also the king's word, however much he might desire to recall a promise once made. His meals were, as a rule, served to him alone; he might not walk on foot beyond the precincts of the palace, and he never ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... prohibited by the Censor when in rehearsal by Madame Bernhardt at the Palace Theatre in 1892. On its publication in 1893 it was greeted with greater abuse than any other of Wilde's works, and was consigned to the usual irrevocable oblivion. The accuracy of the French was freely canvassed, and of course it is obvious that the French is not that of a Frenchman. The play was passed for press, however, by no less a writer than Marcel Schwob whose letter to the Paris publisher, returning the proofs ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... cast no blame. Perhaps some other woman would have called out a different side of you, or would have minded things less. It is enough that we do not belong together, because we are we and cannot change. We are not only ruining each other's happiness—that is already irrevocable,—we are ruining each other, and the children, and their futures. It is a question of the least wrong. And I am ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... President. Never! Never! Other and better counsels will yet prevail. The hours are long in the life of a great people. The irrevocable ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... "All that may well be," he replies, to whatever may be said in praise of him,[1260] "but he does not belong to me as I would like." It is devotion which he exacts, and, by devotion, he means the irrevocable and complete surrender "of the entire person, in all his sentiments and opinions." According to him, writes a witness, "one must abandon every old habit, even the most trifling, and be governed by one thought alone, that of his will and interests."[1261] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... forgot his plighted vow: He thinks not of the breaking of the heart he late was seeking, He but listens to her speaking, and but gazes on her brow; And his heart has all consented, and his lips are ready now With the awful and irrevocable vow. ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... oppressed by miseries foreign to normal men. For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an anchorite, at one hour reembracing aestheticism, at another fleeing back to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense reproach. Too complex for an irrevocable decision, too weak to stand firm against the pressure either of pantheism or an absolutely spiritual idea, he was an insignificant creature worried and torn between two ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... however, useless to murmur against fate. What was irrevocable had to be accepted, and welcome made to the daughter, who, instead of the expected heir, would now lay claim to the rights of primogeniture. As an inheritance reserved for him who had not come, the daughter received the name ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... course he didn't mean to—and you very properly resented it and withered him with contempt. He never understood, till I made him see it, that what he did next was worse than this, as emphasizing the wrong and making it—for a while—irrevocable." ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... analytical chemist, whose practice in connection with the coroner was of a flourishing and increasing kind, owing to the growing taste for suicide, and the preference given to poisons over any other means for accomplishing that irrevocable wrong. In this chamber of horrors,—a court of which the tests were the stern, incorruptible ordinances of Nature,—he had already gone steadily through a course which gave him a mastery over the secrets of the relative poisons, with which he laughed secretly now, and played ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... near Baldassare, with his short legs crossed, and his thumbs stuck into the arm-holes of his coat, is Count Orsetti, smiling, fat, and innocuous. His mother has not yet decided when he is to speak the irrevocable words to Teresa Ottolini. Orsetti is far too dutiful a son to do so before she gives him permission. His mother might change her mind at the last moment; then Orsetti would change his mind, too, and burn incense on other altars. Orsetti ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... propositions were made on the condition that the convention of the State should provide by an ordinance, irrevocable without the consent of the United States, that every tract of land sold by Congress after the 30th of June ensuing should remain for the term of five years after sale exempt from every ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... could resuscitate the dead, restore the sick to health, discern the future, impart invulnerability and other wondrous qualities, and in the moment of final dissolution rescue their faithful worshipers from the irrevocable vengeance of the ancient tribal divinities. Many and many a Manbo told me, when I suggested to him the possibility of error or of deception in the whole system, that it was better to be sure than sorry, and that it was well worth the loss of the worldly goods ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the Thunderer, by his oath engaged; Stung to the soul, he sorrowed and he raged. From his ambrosial head, where perched she sate, He snatched the fury-goddess of debate: The dread, the irrevocable oath he swore, The immortal seats should ne'er behold her more; And whirled her headlong down, forever driven From bright Olympus and the starry heaven: Thence on the nether world the fury fell, Ordained with man's contentious ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... long before the storms of war swept across the plains of Manchuria, come into conflict with the imperialistic policy of the United States, although invisibly at first. Prior to that time the Asiatic races had looked upon the dominion of the white man as a kind of fate, as an irrevocable universal law, but the fall of Port Arthur had shattered this idol once and for all. And after the days of Mukden and Tsushima had destroyed the belief in the invincibility of the European arms, the Japanese agents found fertile soil everywhere ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... for a few seconds, and I was still dreaming of it when once more I felt an icy, irrevocable shadow falling upon me—the hostile glance of ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... Steinitz and Lasker, it is Bird we love. His victories glitter, his errors are magnificent. The true sweetness of chess, if it ever can be sweet, is to see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence, out of the shadow of apparently irrevocable disaster. And talking of cheerfulness reminds me of Lowson's historical game of chess. Lowson said he had been cheerful sometimes—but, drunk! Perish the thought! Challenged, he would have proved it by some petty tests of pronunciation, some Good Templar's shibboleths. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... the national ideal may be, its demands are in one respect inflexible. It is the strenuous and irrevocable enemy of the policy of drift. It can counsel patience; but it cannot abide collective indifference or irresponsibility. A constructive national ideal must at least seek humbly to be constructive. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose, not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."[955] ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... practice in his court: these gentlemen had somewhat more legal knowledge than the judge, and often exasperated his antipathies by its ostentation. They would dwell on the dignity of his court: his decision was irrevocable; even the lord chancellor of England, they would say, was subject to the revision of a still higher court than his own, but the deputy judge advocate decided the cause for ever. Trusted with such ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... downstairs and left poor Maggie to that bitter sense of the irrevocable which was almost an everyday experience of her small soul. She could see clearly enough, now the thing was done, that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... The Rubicon was crossed. The bridges were burnt. The irrevocable step was taken. Dr. Murdoch turned up the next morning with his prescription for physical training. And then Doggie trained assiduously, monotonously, wearily. He grew appalled by the senselessness of this ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... this let me say, that, with the record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of your character in my deeper consciousness as among the few things that time has left as it found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful forever to that grand idea of an irrevocable Union, which, as you once told me, was the earliest that your brave father taught you. For other men there may be a choice of paths,—for you, but one; and it rests among my certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... importunate thought, of which he had till now refused to see more than the shadow as it dogged his footsteps, at last rushed upon him and grasped him: he was obliged to pause and decide whether he would surrender and obey, or whether he would give the refusal that must carry irrevocable consequences. It was in the room above Nello's shop, which Tito had now hired as a lodging, that the elder Cennini handed him the last quota of the sum on behalf of Bernardo Rucellai, the purchaser of the two ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... they were beyond Hove. It was not a request to be ignored. The carriage turned. She felt relief. The sensation of being alive had been too acute to be borne, and it was now a little eased. She knew that her destiny was irrevocable, that nothing could prevent her from being George Cannon's. Whether the destiny was evil or good did not paramountly interest her. But she wanted to rush forward into the arms of fate and know her fate. She dreamed only of ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... were terrible to her. She knew she had taken an irrevocable step, and her free instinct clamoured loudly against it. It amounted almost to ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... name's Daubrecq. My whole life has been one desperate battle, one long series of catastrophes and routs in which I spent all my energies until victory came: complete, decisive, crushing, irrevocable victory. I have against me the police, the government, France, the world. What difference do you expect it to make to me if I have M. Arsene Lupin against me into the bargain? I will go further: the more numerous and skilful ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... boys throbbed high with hope when they found themselves outside the enclosure which had served them as a prison, and they knew the irrevocable step had been taken; they must now go forward at ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... everybody in British South Africa, and nearly everybody in England, supposed the annexation to be irrevocable. Leading members of the parliamentary Opposition had condemned it. But when that Opposition, victorious in the general election of 1880, took office in April of that year, the officials in South Africa, whose guidance they sought, made ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... four million dollars more, and to shed the blood of my brave and excellent soldiers without obtaining, perhaps, even the slightest advantage for Prussia. Hasten, general, to communicate my fixed and irrevocable resolution to Count Haugwitz. Prussia remains neutral, and takes no part whatever in the war ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... remained for him to give of his regard for their welfare, and the sole means to attain his object, consisted in a full and entire assent on his part to the conditions of separation which the courts of Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia, had declared to be unalterable and irrevocable." His majesty, therefore, declared his readiness to accept the twenty-four articles which had been agreed upon in the year 1831. Belgium, however, now refused to accede to the arrangement, by resolving not to cede Luxembourg. But the conference insisted peremptorily on its cession; and it was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... right to cherish an evident vocation,—a right to reclaim her from the embrace of an excommunicated infidel, and present her as a chaste bride at the altar of the Lord? Perhaps, when that was done, when an irrevocable barrier should separate her from all possibility of earthly love, when the awful marriage-vow should have been spoken which should seal her heart for heaven alone, he might recover some of the blessed calm ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... as the general interest of the whole novel. Thus, however desirable in the development of the story, he dared not risk a comparatively tame and uneventful number. Moreover, any portion once issued was unalterable and irrevocable. If, as sometimes happened, any modification seemed desirable as the book progressed, there was no possibility of changing anything in the chapters already in the hands of the public, and so making them harmonize better ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... yet an additional security. I did not enter Prague a solitary individual; and there are tongues without that will speak for me, although I should even share the fate of Stralenheim! Let your deliberation be short.—Sieg. My promise is solemn—sacred—irrevocable: it extends not, however, beyond my own walls."—Canterbury Tales, 1838, ii. 268; see, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... three days at the Great Hospital, three days of the most delightful converse. At first, Lorrimer had rebelled, not realising that Ideala's last decision was irrevocable. ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... Prinz-Regenten Theatre at Munich is an improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly the same ampitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisible orchestra and vast stage. Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there are even the three "fanfaren" at the doors, with the same punctual and irrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of each act. As at Bayreuth, the solemnity of the whole thing makes one almost nervous, for the first few minutes of each act; but, after that, how near one is, in this perfectly darkened, perfectly quiet theatre, in which the music surges up out ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... was no good. She is deeply engaged just now in driving batches of stuffy relatives in a stuffy brougham—luckily there's no room for me in it—to still stuffier garden parties. And, besides, I don't feel that I can take any desperate step of that kind until the Irrevocable has been written in ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... entrusted with the command of such an important expedition, and envious of the least token of favour which had been accorded to Magellan and Rey Faleiro, who had been named commanders of the order of St. James. But Charles V. had given his consent by a public act, which seemed to be irrevocable. They tried, however, to make the Emperor alter his decision by organizing, on the 22nd of October, 1518, a disturbance paid for with Portuguese gold. It broke out on the pretext that Magellan, who had ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... is a sure, a firm, and an irrevocable act. When you have such an all this, (and such you have) as is here concentrated in the text, to lay into, or for the foundation of a covenant, the superstruction is aeternitati sacrum, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... of its own actions generally, should be submitted to another convention, which was summoned to meet at the same place in August of the same year. The people of the district were as yet by no means a unit in favor of separation, and this made the convention hesitate to take any irrevocable step. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the matter of association make more prominent than ever the truth which we announced at the beginning: THERE IS NOTHING IN SOCIALISM WHICH IS NOT FOUND IN POLITICAL ECONOMY; and this perpetual plagiarism is the irrevocable condemnation of both. Nowhere is to be seen the dawn of that mother-idea, which springs with so much eclat from the generation of the economic categories,—that the superior formula of association has nothing to do with capital, a matter for individual accounts, but must bear solely upon ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... destiny was shaping itself with a rapidity that plunged him suddenly into decisive and irrevocable action. It is of the greatest moment to ascertain precisely what his feelings were during this summer with regard to Harriet. Hogg has printed two letters in immediate juxtaposition: the first without date, the second with the post-mark of Rhayader. Shelley ends the first epistle thus: "Your jokes ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... to feel the tug waiting on the river, the sword-stick and the revolver, waiting on the table. The instant the election was ended and irrevocable, and Syme had received the paper proving his election, they all sprang to their feet, and the fiery groups moved and mixed in the room. Syme found himself, somehow or other, face to face with Gregory, who still regarded him with a stare ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... upon the innocent shoulders of fellow-men, or on the hazy outlines of that clouded form which ancient schools and modern plagiarists call sometimes "Circumstance," sometimes "Chance," sometimes "Fate," all the guilt due to his own wilful abuse of irrevocable hours. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... recording words that are the author's means. And others again would have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in Jane Eyre, are both memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase is an experience; both have their place in the reader's irrevocable past. "Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved." "Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughs of ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by bodily austerities, instead of by the simple way of faith. At this time, in the fervour of her devotion, she resolved to enter a convent and become a nun. Her father, however, believed that his daughter, whom he tenderly loved, might be truly religious without taking such an irrevocable step. But soon—whether through some juvenile attachment or not we cannot tell—her good desires and resolves grew faint, she left off prayer, and lost such comfort and blessing as had been granted her from ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... had been sent, when she knew that her lover had received it, and that her decision was irrevocable, she was seized with trembling faintness, with the oppression of conscious guilt; and it seemed to her as if a new spring of love had suddenly burst forth in her heart, and as if she had never loved her father so sincerely, so devotedly, so tenderly, as now that she was on the point ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... finally found that this principle could be reduced to the form of a demonstration. He undertook therefore to prove that there is no cause of all things other than a nature which exists necessarily, and which acts according to an immutable, inevitable and irrevocable necessity. He examined the whole system of the geometricians, and after having constructed his demonstration he scrutinized it from every imaginable angle, he endeavoured to find its weak spot and was never able to discover any means of destroying it, or even of weakening it. That ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... that not only sagacious individuals but extensive communities should persevere in an attempt which, in the nature of things, can lead only to disappointment; for, the sincerity of that species of conversion which is supposed to be final, of that grace which is said to be irrevocable, can never be decided until the Judge of all has pronounced his verdict. In the meantime, the terms of communion must agree in some measure with the actual state of man; and when the matter is quietly examined, it appears that even in Calvinistic ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... a poet — for a beacon bright To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray; To spirit back the Muses, long astray, And flush Parnassus with a newer light; To put these little sonnet-men to flight Who fashion, in a shrewd, mechanic way, Songs without souls, that flicker for a day, To vanish in irrevocable night. ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... consideration, to say nothing of the doubts which had just arisen. A pause had ensued, however, for the Duke, busied with his own feelings, had suffered his thoughts to run back into the past; and, as is the case with every human being whose mind dwells upon the acts that are irrevocable, he found matter for sorrow and regret. After about five minutes' silence, during which they both continued to gaze thoughtfully into the fire, the Duke returned to the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... repent of the good He had planned for it. For this refractory people of Judah He is already framing or moulding evil—the verb used is that of which the Hebrew name for potter is the participle. Though chosen of God and shaped by His hands for high service Israel's destiny is not irrevocable; nay, their doom is already being shaped. Yet He makes still another appeal to them to repent and amend their ways. To this they answer: No use! we will walk after our own devices and carry out every one the stubbornness of his evil heart. At least that is how Jeremiah ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... agglomerations, than permanent products of cosmical manufacture, appeared to be demonstrated by the division and disappearance of one amongst their number, as well as by the singular and rapid changes in appearance undergone by many, and the seemingly irrevocable diffusion of their substance visible in nearly all. They might then be defined, according to the ideas respecting them prevalent fifty years ago, as bodies unconnected by origin with the solar system, but encountered, and to some extent appropriated, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... triumphant account; and it would be admirable as a means of pre-engaging the good opinion as well as the sympathies of the public in behalf of the prisoner. But, for its final effect—my conviction remained, not to be shaken, that all would be useless; that our doom had gone forth, and was irrevocable. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... be nothing less than uxorious. But his wife recompensed his devotion but shabbily; her position had not fulfilled her anticipations, she was angry at the loss of her money, and upon the whole she repented having taken an irrevocable step too hastily. She felt herself to be the intellectual equal of her husband, and she was not long in improving the advantage she possessed of not caring anything about him. In a word, she bullied the unfortunate gentleman unmercifully, ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... government abroad; and it was a happy morning for me when, after efforts many and long continued, I received at the Berlin Foreign Office the assurance that Germany would not consider the earlier conditions presented by the powers to the Chinese Government as "irrevocable." My constant contention, during interviews at the Foreign Office, had been that the United States desired as anxiously to see the main miscreants punished as did any other nation, but that it was of no use to demand, upon members of the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the harassing realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that constitute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential progress ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... in which his excited imagination saw a devine warning to forsake the "world." In a fright he vowed to St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In 1507 he was ordained priest. In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of the capital of Christendom. Having started, in 1508, to teach Aristotle ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... situation she had accepted, was growing more impatient and unhappy every day, as she realised all that her marriage with San Miniato would mean during the rest of her natural life. She had quite changed her mind about him, and with natures like hers such sudden changes are often irrevocable. She could not now understand how she could have ever liked him, or found pleasure in his society, and when she thought of the few words she had spoken and which had decided her fate, she could not comprehend ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... between the two layers of imitation Saxony flannel of which it was made. Then with the help of Mr. Butteridge's small shaving mirror and his folding canvas basin he readjusted his costume with the gravity of a man who has taken an irrevocable step in life, buttoned up his jacket, cast the white sheet of the Desert Dervish on one side, washed temperately, shaved, resumed the big cap and the fur overcoat, and, much refreshed by these exercises, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... find who would have persuaded herself that she might overlook "all that," reclaim her lover, and be an Earl's wife. Miss O'Neill rejoined her family at Calais, wrote to Lord F——'s father, the Earl of E——, her final and irrevocable rejection of his son's suit, fell ill of love and sorrow, and lay for some space between life and death for the sake of her unworthy lover; rallied bravely, recovered, resumed her work,—her sway over thousands of human hearts,—and, after lapse ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... all emotions by—it made this new passion of the imagination a thing of flesh and blood. No wonder that she would not announce her engagement. At the best of times her fluent nature shrank from everything that was fixed and irrevocable—above all from the act of will that trammelled her wandering fancy, the finality that limited her outlook upon life. And now it was impossible. The three weeks in which she had known Wyndham had shown her that, compared with that complex character, that ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... l'Auteur.—C'est mon intention irrevocable de finir ma vingtaine de romans sur la famille OGWASH, et je compte avec plasir offrir les dix-neuf a suivre ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many years, until it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of the word "France" awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... That this should have been so means, in my present opinion, a lamentable waste of young life and of unique powers. I consider that our young lives were sterilised rather than developed, and that such sterilisation must have meant permanent and irrevocable loss for every one ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... material punishment of the souls in Purgatory. Unlike the retributive penalties inflicted in Hell, this punishment is reformative, confirming the penitent in good habits of thought and deed. The proud here realize the irrevocable sentence "everyone who exalteth himself shall be humbled." They creep round with huge burdens of stone bowing them down to the very dust and so abased their ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery |
